Maybe it’s just me but it seems that creating attributes or some classification meta data on an ecommerce site is only a good idea IF YOU CORRECTLY TAG the items. Else, it produces some head scratching.

Example this morning: I follow a link on facebook to “winter dresses” (I rarely do that but it caught my eyes and I do need more dresses with long sleeves). It puts me on the “short day dresses” category:

So far so good, right, but these are kind of boring so I decide to look at the “long day dresses” category:

I must lack the subtle understanding of the difference…

On a more serious note, it does undermine my trust both in the site itself (not that I had a lot, I don’t know that business since I just followed a random ad) and its ability to help me find what would best suit me…

First, as I have said here and elsewhere before, I love blipfoto.

It is a very simple but beautifully done photoblog, or photo diary. You can only post 1 image a day (but no pressure to do it every day). The community is friendly, encouraging, and creative. If you are looking for a way to encourage yourself to take more pictures more regularly, you really owe it to yourself to check blip out. It certainly did that for me, to incredible degrees at times. I lost it over December but fully expecting to go back.

The site has been free for 2 years. But like every site out there, they have costs, and need to start covering those costs.

They are not adding ads, they are adding premium memberships, with improved features and additional bonuses (I suspect these will be special discounts, perhaps also ways to show/export your blog but probably a lot of premium information, courses etc. But I am just guessing). But they are doing something else that is very much in the spirit of the community created around the site: they are creating special supporting founder memberships:

(from the blog
you’re going to have a never-to-be-repeated opportunity to show your appreciation for everything Blipfoto has done so far, give us a kick-start for 2009 and stake your place in history with an exclusive Blipfoto Founding Membership.

For £40, you’ll receive:

- 18 months full membership, starting when we introduce our membership option
- an exclusive founding member’s icon, which will stay with you forever
- a specially produced founding member’s enamel badge
- 10% discount on all future Blipfoto purchases, including membership fees

As if that wasn’t enough, when you take out your Founding Membership, you’ll have an opportunity to pay a little extra and lay your hands on a set of 200 personalised Founding Member Blipcards. Again, this is an exclusive, one-off print run which will never be available again.

Why do I think this is so clever? Note that apart from a few token trinkets, you have no idea what the membership features will be. They are not selling the premium features, they will have plenty of time to do this later. No, they are appealing to their core users, the ones who love the service and would pay for it as it is (even though the service as it is will always remain free). They are saying “if you like us, trust us, and fund the time we are spending creating the next level”. I think this is an extremely open and modern way to fund an application, and a very courageous approach.

It works for me.

Even though I have no income at the moment I will become a founding member of blipfoto, because I have received real value from the site and want to support its team to do more of the same. I am not doing it for the badge or pin, I am doing it to support the site. I want to see what it can become, and am willing to chip in to make sure it gets the chance to get there (note that this is the same reason I paid for lwa, 72photos, aviary and others, and I would do the same for a site like bookmooch or friendfeed).

I’m probably not alone in having spent time sketching ideas out only to never do anything about it - not because research showed it wouldn’t be a success, but because I never got the courage or focus together to even get that far. In my case it has often been “don’t feel like doing it alone and cannot quite justify trying to lure one of my friends to waste their free time on it”. Others do just that, though, and succeed.

Some would not have worked, others certainly would have with the right partner, but I never even really looked. I need to get some of those to rest, so I stop feeling bad about not following up on them.

I’m sure many of you know that feeling.

The stealth PC silent pc shop

In 2002-2003 I considered starting something about silent PCs, because I hate background noise and couldnt find much in the UK. I bought domains, I played with platforms, I contacted manufacturers, I got a plan together. But since I was running a web agency at the time that took me 10 hours a day already, I couldn’t do it without harming that business, so I didn’t. Others did it, but now silent is mainstream and most of these stores don’t exist. I think there is still potential though, as many products are still hard to find.

This was revived in 2004 around tiny form factor PCs, again because they were so hard to find. Rinse, repeat.

Smartguilds.com

At some point I also considered writing an online guild management tool for online gaming guilds. Being a gamer I had ended up in guilds or playing communities more than once, and being the person I am I always ended up an officer/leader… So I thought there was a potential for a service offering a neat forum/roster/calendar/loot manager/wiki/chat server etc. Again I got domains (12 or so), sketched it all out, played with the platform. Then did nothing, I didn’t have a designer that I could call on at the time, and then I got a lucrative job offer. Others did it, but I can’t tell how well they are doing.

Cooklink.net

Another idea I worked on about 2-3 years ago was social networking around recipes - there wasn’t that much of that around, just the normal sites where you could submit recipes. We had the idea to create a much more agile, web2.0 way of entering recipes, and using simple semantic analysis to allow recipe exchange across languages - so for example Bruno in Berlin could enter a recipe in German and metric units, but then Sam in Colorado could see the recipe in english and with US measures and temperatures, and perhaps even some altitude notes. Played with a drag-and-drop recipe builder, and then with text analysis. Then I took a job with a media and semantic search company and left this idea behind. It would have needed a few smarter people around I think.

The multi-language and international connection is a hard thing to achieve in text based online communities (come to think of it it is hard to architect right even on a simple content site), but I think this would have been an interesting thing to pull off.  Content that is formulaic, for example recipes or craft patterns, or code is a great way to start, because it uses a limited, structured vocabulary and grammar which can be mapped across the language boundaries, allowing for some experiments in cross-boundary community building.

But the challenge is not just technical. Advertising and affiliate deals are usually limited to one language and territory. I have worked on sites in the UK where only 30% of the audience could be monetized (apart from automated network or adsense style ads). It takes a significant operation to deal with agencies in multiple countries, and I am always amazed how outdated this feels. Also, affiliate deals are again very narrow. Even amazon will only give you widgets for one country at a time. If you want something that shows the same books on a site but with the UK link to a British visitor and the German link to an austrian visitor, you have to build it yourself. And it is a pain.

I do hope this changes one day, I like a diverse world and being able to share without forcing everyone into one language. but this turning into a topic of its own.

news it ain’t

I am known for ranting quite often as to how much of the news we are given is not news. PR statements, discussion of what other media are doing, reports on studies, non events, curiosities, opinions - but not news. Not real information, and many real events left unsaid.

I thought it might be interesting to actually show how much white noise and fluff we are getting and rattle my cage every morning about what I saw and heard on the web instead of to my poor colleagues.

The world was spared.

Historyslices

That one I still haven’t given up already, although I cannot help thinking it is already out there and I haven’t found it, or could be built combining existing services in a large part. It would build on things like flickr notes and visual search and concepts from image recognition and genealogy sites and mapping - with a dollop of social networking to tie it all up.

This starts with your garden variety history buff. I know several, and I know most of those have accumulated boxes and boxes of images and articles. Some could almost build a museum. Most of them have a rather narrow niche of interest - the local train line, or their family, or a business, a town. They have done their research, and often can talk through stories, showing you old photographs and maps, connecting them together. And most have blanks - they have identified some of the buildings, vehicles, words on the images but not all. And for these blanks there might be another history buff perhaps 5 or 100 miles away, focusing on something different but who could recognize the unknown element, because it is familiar to them.

These people are not online much. They use ebay, know their way around a scanner, and know how to search for information online some. But they don’t publish. If they are very clued up they might be on a genealogy site or upload some scans to flickr.

What these people won’t do is spend hours and hours messing about with a fancy webapp. They won’t get the idea or time to put it all up on a site, even though they probably have enough to fill a site and a few books. But if there is a site where they can add things gradually and easily, which builds them a site and then connects with others (squidoo with semantics?),
upload just one image, register what you know, and what you don’t, in 3 or 4 minutes, then send it out there to see what it connects with (leveraging the commons, possibly?),

Because these stories will be lost if they aren’t moved into the digital age.

I really want this one, please tell me someone’s built it. Or, if you too have some history buffs in your family circle and have thought “there should be something online for them”, get in touch. I haven’t given up on or thought this one through yet. Since I first discussed that one Flickr has started the commons, and that is a step in the right direction, a building block. But there still is no connection or structured annotations or the ability for normal people to tie into it…

blumphster.com

A site to poke fun at all the ridiculous web2.0 ideas out there, which were surfing on the new bubble and hoping to print money. Was going to be a fake such site, but everytime I came up with what I thought was a silly web app idea that would work as a fake, I found a real one too similar.
Not particularly topical now that there is no bubble.

There’s actually a few more but I think that’s enough ghosts for today.