Tag Archives: geek

Love is the Seventh Wave

26 Oct

I’ve been using Google Wave for a few weeks now and while I’m aware I’m still very much a novice, I’m confident that this is a fair appraisal of its potential and the limitations of the current iteration.

Attending #GWSUG gladdened my heart somewhat as it quickly became apparent that despite being possibly one of the least geeky of those present – and I lean heavily towards the pointy end of the bell curve in geek terms – I was by no means alone in my experience of the Wave.

Helpful and entertaining presentations by Brett Morgan and Pamela Fox certainly deepened my knowledge and understanding but it’s clear that this is a tool very much at the development stage.

My initial impressions haven’t altered substantially three weeks in: in short, it often feels as though one is drowning not waving.

I’ve seen a number of people make the comment that Wave feels very much like IRC: the format is such that it can be inchoate, messy and confusing. The ability to comment on replies, edit existing messages and delete posts at any point in the timeline means that without repeatedly re-playing the wave, it’s nigh on impossible to fathom what’s going on.

However, to dwell on this is to miss the actual purpose of Wave, which is – as Daniel Tenner suggests in his excellent review – for working, not shirking.

The real strength of Wave is all about collaboration in real time. Watching a document or piece of content come to life through a cooperative enables you to see the rationale behind changes as they’re made in an intuitive fashion, make notes, discuss alterations and agree on a final cut. Even for people who aren’t working together in the same time zone, playing back the wave gives a truer understanding and deeper insight into the process and decisions made to date.

Rather than the stilted to-ing and fro-ing of email – potentially dropping people and files along the way – or even the clever but structurally rigid Basecamp from 37 Signals, Wave gives users a fluid conversational tool that keeps everyone, from stakeholder to implementer, involved, clued-up and empowered. Being able to drag and drop files into a conversation feels smooth and logical.

The true hallmark of great design or innovation is when something feels so seamless and obvious that you can’t imagine why it didn’t already exist, and Wave has this in spades.
It won’t be long before we’ll be amazed we ever managed to work before Wave.

Photo by silverxraven

Key drawbacks

Of course Wave is buggy – it’s in a private test environment being battered around and monkey-tested by nerds for this reason. However, there are a few massive holes that will need to be addressed by the developers at the Googleplex fairly promptly.

Firstly, there are currently huge confidentiality and privacy issues: while you can branch off from a group into a private conversation, there’s no ability for users to approve or vet who is added to a Wave. Any user can invite anyone else. That’s great for transparency and accountability, but human nature being what it is, this could be the source of some of the most awkward office gaffes and breaches of commercial confidence ever to exist. Those awkward accidental ‘reply all’ emails pale into insignificance in comparison.

Without some radical re-thinking and added security settings, @ replying a DM on Twitter will come to seem like as quaint an act of indecorousness as using the wrong fork at a dinner party is to Gen KFC, when set against the risks of inappropriate Wave sharing.

Further massive usability failures include the monumental amount of RAM eaten by Wave, the fact the iPhone app is slow and creaky and Chrome is the preferred Wave browser as FireFox “doesn’t like waves with more than 100 blips in them…” more than a little irksome for Mac users.

Version control is also tricky: in order to find the original version, one has to replay the wave, pause when you reach the virgin document and paste it into a new Wave, meanwhile hoping someone else doesn’t alter it subsequently. Perhaps a ‘freeze edit’ function may assist here.

An invaluable – and presumably simple tool that I very much hope is in the pipeline is a desktop app to notify you of updates, new Wave invites and contacts. It would assist in streamlining the process and avoiding situations like the one I found myself in recently: IM-ing my team mate to ask why I still hadn’t received his email containing an urgently needed document, then discovering it had been sitting neglected in Wave for several hours*.

I’d estimate that we’re easily a year away from the release of a robust consumer-friendly version of Wave.

That said, it’s a pleasure and a privilege to be one of the lucky few getting to play in the sandpit and even at this stage the enormous potential of the tool is evident.

Catch you in the tubes….cathie.mcginn@googlewave.com.

Thanks to Warlach,  Commuter_Dirge, Fridley, mUmBRELLA and all on the GWSUG wave for your user experience input and help.

*Full disclosure: we were sitting next to each other at the time. IRL interaction is so passé.

SEO for n00bs: linking (part one of many)

9 May

My friend asked me this question recently, and because I am ridiculously lazy but with an inflated idea of my own worth, and because it made me realise that even very clever people can be dumb in the world of search, I thought I’d share my answer here.

SEO query: does it help to link to other sites? Or does it only help
when they link to you?

Essentially, it’s all all about having other sites link to you. Google et al view an incoming link (—> your site) as a vote of confidence, and the better the quality of that site, the more weight it carries. Google uses a metric called Page Rank, which is a value out of a maximum of ten, and denotes the authority and relevance of each site (you can view this by downloading the google toolbar, http://tools.google.com/ if you want to see this data for every site you visit, or by using a web tool like http://www.prchecker.info) and this is based on the number and calibre of incoming links (so a link from a site with PR [pagerank] of six is worth more than a link from a site with zero PR).

It is also the case that having outgoing links is the best way to generate incoming links; one of the reasons I love SEO is that it really promotes a sort of idealised online neighbourly-ness.
Generosity (giving a link to a site you like) is generally rewarded / reciprocated. It also makes a difference what link anchor text you use, and the relevance of the site you link to, but I wouldn’t worry too much about that.  Just be confident that linking directly to an relevant article is helpful – think about your user – and linking to some bullshit irrelevant site about viagra is not.
It’s all about keywords, so a web page about ‘three masted schooner’ (for example) linking to another page containing those words = good! Google knows that that relevancy in linking is more likely to improve user experience, ensure the user continues to trust Google’s search results and therefore keep bringing in Google’s revenue. WIN!
If a site links to you with keyword targeted anchor text – the text that shows up in the hyperlink – that’s even better. So linking to Steffan – Classic Boat will help you rank for the keywords ‘steffan classic boat’

Links are good not just for boosting your PageRank, but also getting indexed (encouraging the googlebot to ‘crawl’ your site and make sure it is added to the database) and getting traffic to your site.
Online property works similarly to real life real estate; so the more avenues you have leading to your house (a very big house in the country), the more easily people can visit it. If there’s only a shitty dirt track, no one will bother.

Love C x

Addendum.

My friend Steffan is bloody marvellous, and if you wanted to support his attempt to sail around London to raise money for cancer research, you should click here: Steffan: sailing towards a cure.

He’ll be utterly mortified about that link, but my blog, my rules. ha!

On #followerfail (in which I get mediæval on your arse)

4 Mar

At idle moments, I wish there was the equivalent of an online leper’s bell that one could ring to notify people in advance as you wend your way through the hills and dales of the interweb.  “Unclean, unclean!”  it would announce to all the citizens of the town.

Or rather, “pure, pure” (in this instance at least) to alert the market sellers that you are not in the least interested in being pestered with offers for snake oil, cheap stuff, wealth creation seminars or other spammy click here now to WIN deals.

I mention this not only because I rather like the image, but also because I’m increasingly finding the sweaty attentions of the grubbiest gurus, mendacious mentors, one-night-only overnight successes and so on, a bit of a pain in the arse.

It’s right and correct to say that Twitter is only as good or interesting as the people you follow, and to ensure this, I personally vet every single person I do follow.  I don’t use auto-follow tools, because I have highfalutin notions of cyber-utopianism. And that means using the following process (pun unintentional but acknowledged):

I must

  • visit every single new follower’s page,
  • Read their bio
  • check their follower/follower ratio
  • read their recent tweets
  • View link vs. @ replies vs. interesting material ratio
  • Make a fairly arbitrary call…

As a result of this, I believe I now have relationships (of varying depth, naturally) with some of Twitter’s sparkiest, most inspiring and charming inhabitants.  But since I haven’t ‘capped’ my total following figure (tools like Tweetdeck and PeopleBrowsr mean I don’t have to) and because I still want to offer followers the same courtesy they have extended me, I waste time checking new followers when I’d be better off doing almost anything else…

Despite the inconvenience of telemarketers, I still have a telephone.  I’m ex-directory and I complain vociferously when I’m disturbed at home (admittedly not usually to anyone who can uphold my complaint…) But it bums me out; it brings unnecessary irritation to both ends of that interaction.   It wastes my time, it wastes the time for the telemarketer.  Even if the call / follow is automated, it leads nowhere for the seller.  Isn’t that poor ROI, or something?

So for the record, if you’re trying to flog me something I certainly don’t want, could you do us both a favour and not even start the conversation? Do me the same courtesy I offer you and check out what I’m into before you start to hit on me….

Five reasons why Twitter is not a gateway drug

25 Feb

If you’re reading this, there’s a high probability that you are already very connected to social media.  Working in this space means it’s sometimes my task to get those people who are not hooked on the social media goodness to at least try it, just once, maybe at a party… Of a number of different strategies, candidly, adoption of Twitter has been the least successful.

Here are my five reasons Twitter is not the social media gateway drug:

1) instant gratification
On Twitter, you get out what you put in. At the beginning of your twitter journey, you have to make a commitment of time and energy to find the people who will go on to enrich, entertain and delight you – as you will them – but there’s no instant hit. Twitter, to put it bluntly, doesn’t put out on the first date.

2) the law of diminishing returns
For Twitter to qualify as a gateway drug, it would need to be less satisfying every time you try it.  Conversely, the hit gets bigger and better.  The conversations deepen and the number of truly fascinating individuals you encounter increases.  There may come a point where your twitter account reaches critical mass, but by that point you’re at social media maven status (and are probably going to retire and keep bees rather than spend any more time on the internet where you’ve lived for the past seven years anyway).

3) soft option
Twitter is one of the most hardcore social networks around. It’s riddled with incomprehensible naming conventions, in-jokes and freaky memes that serve no recognisable purpose to the uninitiated. All the cool kids with their hashtags, retweets and thousands of followers are deeply intimidating to the social media newbie. If you’re unaware of the generally helpful and positive vibe, you’re probably going to lurk around trying not to embarrass yourself, and thus never attain that elusive Twitter high.

4) peer pressure
Are all your friends doing it? If they don’t work in the digital space, aren’t gamers or geeks, the chances are that they are only just starting to hear about Twitter.  Your parents are now just about hip to Facebook; around 346,000,000 people read blogs; everyone has seenYoutube content; you’ve probably read news via Digg.  These sites have a clearly defined purpose and value proposition, whereas Twitter is a little geekier and a little more confrontational.  Answering the question “what are you doing?” for an unknown audience subverts notions of public/ private space – you’ve probably found that extolling the benefits of twitter to your offline peers is met with some bewilderment or an arched eyebrow.    

5) are you feeling this?
Since the Twitter experience is clearly as varied as the number of people using it, as individual as its users, it’s rather difficult to know what you should be expecting.  If you can’t be sure you’re doing it right, rather than going on to seek that elusive social media rush elsewhere, the likelihood is that you may simply decide that the whole business is not for you and go on to seek alternative forms of recreation.  Table tennis, say, or cocaine.

caveat lector
I’m primarily talking about Twitter for the individual, not for commercialisation, branding, monetisation etc.. And for the record, I’m not advocating a sinister pusherman approach to evangelising social media practices or the digital world; quite the reverse, but I rather enjoyed my analogy and I hope you did as well. Yes, I may have got a little carried away. I also think that the ‘gateway drug’ is a ridiculous concept.

Stay tuned for the route into social media adoption that does work in the personal and professional context alike…

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