Duke Street Alley

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Something I fervently wish existed is a standard “unsubscribe” method for mailing lists - both discussion and broadcast. Something that an email client could hook into, in order to display a great big “unsubscribe” button in the interface.

I’ve been cleaning up a few mailboxes during the early part of the new year, and looking at email tactics for our own marketing efforts. It’s becoming clear that the plethora of unsub methods is not a good thing. Some systems just want you to click on a link. Others want you to click on a link, then fill in an email address and hit submit. Some want one of the above, and then they send you an email which you reply to, or further still, click on another link in to fully opt-out. Some have a range of tickboxes about remaining on their alert list rather than their newsletter list, and so on, and so forth.

An awful lot of people resort to hitting the “report spam” button instead of making their way through the maze, and that doesn’t help anyone. The trouble is that with at least one major newsletter out there, I tried for months to unsubscribe - and eventually had to mark the thing as spam to stop it appearing.

I assume there are technical issues with introducing an unsubscribe standard - so what are they? Is there a way to get around them?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve had this conversation a few times recently with various people, and I figured I’d get it written down. I don’t like podcasts. This is not because I have some concealed Luddite tendencies, nor because I’m looking for something popular to dislike and be controversial over.

Putting it simply, podcasts are slow, irritating, and inconvenient - a step backward from the efficiency of text. No, I don’t like radio either.

Slow: I can read way faster than anyone can talk. I can read the transcript of a podcast in less than a quarter of the time it takes to listen to it, and that assumes the speakers aren’t stopping to hem, haw and um their way through a conversation. My time is valuable to me - give me the transcript.

Irritating: With at least one podcast I listened to a while back - and this was a twenty-something Irish male - if you removed the word “like” from the stream, it would have been about half as long. Other accents can be difficult to understand, or just plain unpleasant, and people who are perfectly well able to express themselves in text end up incomprehensible in speech. Sound quality isn’t always what it might be, and having to listen very carefully to make out what someone is saying is, well, an irritation.

Inconvenient: First, I have to get the podcasts onto some piece of equipment where I can hear them. Since listening to voice takes a huge amount of my attention, I can’t do that in work, and I usually have better things to do at home, so it has to be something portable. I have a small MP3 player, but the rigmarole of downloading the file and transferring it to the player and so on is tiresome. Then, unless I actually am concentrating all the time, I miss bits. I can’t just look back up the page; I have to rewind a bit, and hope I got the right spot. Neither can I easily flick forward through the bits I’m not interested in. “45 minutes in” is no use unless I can see a timer, and my MP3 player doesn’t have one. For that matter, finding 45 minutes in on Winamp involves messing with a slider.

So, in essence: give me writing, dammit. Sound is for conversation and music.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a lot of talk across the ‘net in the last couple of weeks concerning Facebook. An article from Read/WriteWeb, Is Facebook worth the hype? queries, well, just that.

I’ve been using Facebook for about a week now. I’ve made contact with people I hadn’t heard from in over ten years. Some of my less technically-minded older friends are using it with as much enthusiasm as the kids who can’t remember not having email.

The Read/WriteWeb article essentially questions two things; the stickiness of Facebook and the monetisation.  It notes that (according to the people who run MySpace) MySpace handily beats all comers in nearly every metric: visitors, page views, stickiness, etc.

What’s stickiness? AdServer Solutions says it’s “A performance metric based on the ability of a web site to hold a visitor’s attention. A web site’s stickiness is average duration per user session or per unique visitor.”

MySpace is “sticky” in those terms precisely because it’s badly designed, badly put together, and hard to navigate. Most MySpace profiles look like they were ripped directly from GeoCities around 1997. You have to spend a long time on MySpace because getting to the information you want takes time. On Facebook, by contrast, the information you want is there on the homepage, and a few clicks gets you pretty much everything else necessary. Facebook’s design is better, cleaner, and more usable, and over time, that is going to make a difference.

As for monetisation, well… Facebook’s ad placement is, putting it kindly, sub-optimal. They’re currently using untargetted ads, placed low on the left-hand side of pages. Once they start to target ads based on what’s in user’s profiles (and why they’re not doing this already is a mystery to me), and place the things a bit better, their advertising benefits are going to rocket.

In my opinion, MySpace’s days are numbered, and Facebook will win out - at least until the next big thing.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

It fascinates me when people that I’ve known, respected - and in this case, worked for - start doing such a prosaic thing as blogging. Nevertheless, Chris Horn, the CEO of Iona Technologies, where my working life got off to a running start, now has a blog. Anyone who has encountered him knows he’s pretty articulate, and that comes across very well in his writing. He’s dealing mostly with issues in the software industry, and also with aspects of travel, books, and Iona’s business dealings. Well worth reading.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So I posted an article on dukestreet.org this morning, and stuck it on digg.com for purposes of experimentantion. The very first response is from some guy who buried it, with the comment “Buried because I don’t want competition.” How peculiar. I assume he’s talking about competition on the auction house, rather than on his website.
If any of you use digg, feel free to push this one up. If it looks useful, I’m considering putting “digg this” links on the site.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Jaron Lanier wrote a piece in last week’s Edge, titled Digital Maoism, bemoaning the state of authority of collective works on the internet. He’s provoked quite a response.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Somewhere over the weekend, the concept of an ambient novel arrived in my mental lexicon. However, I’m not sure who mentioned it. I’ve checked the usual suspects - Cybermind, some of the more brilliant thinkers on my LJ friends list (two of whom are brother and sister, come to think of it), and so on, and I ain’t finding it. Web searches bring up only references to Digital Leatherette. Own up, who brought this to my attention? It’s following me around, nipping at my mental heels.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I created a bebo.com account this afternoon, more for curiousity than interest - gothwalk.bebo.com, if anyone’s interested - it’s a livejournal/myspace clone, pretty much. I was amused to find that there was a community on it for alumni of my secondary school, and stunned by the number of people in it. And then I started looking for people I know, and while I found a few, I’m seeing a definite pattern by graduation years. From 1995, three people. From 1996, two. 1997, five. 1998, twelve. 1999, seventeen. And then it explodes; from 2000 on, there’re more than forty per year. I’m guessing that’s when the internet took off in rural Ireland, then…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

A most excellent set of tips for Google Calendar. I hadn’t realised that you could add national holidays to the calendar, and I’m even more pleased by the fact that I can add, say, Indian holidays as easily as Irish.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Wired magazine really seems to have dropped to tabloid levels. The latest thing that’s popped in my incoming feeds from them is the 10 Wackiest E-Commerce Sites. Being honest, they’re not even all that wacky, it’s just a round-up of sites selling stuff on the web.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve spent the day doing stuff for inranelagh.com, and I’m very pleased with the results. I talked to a wide variety of people up along the village this morning, got listings down for many of them, and left introductory letters for lots more. And then I came home and coded like a maniac for a few hours, resulting in a neatly categorised set of listings up and running on the site. Oh, and the RSS feed for the site is now available as .

It’s a great buzz when a project starts to pick up momentum!