Category Archives: technology

Mike Arrington Moves to Seattle here are some people to meet

Image representing TechCrunch as depicted in C...
Image via CrunchBase

Today Mike Arrington from Techcrunch has posted that he is moving to Seattle, I would like to welcome him to one of the coolest places on Earth for startups. Being the new kid in town, and given that there will be coverage on Techflash and Xeconomy, as well as Seattle 2.0, they will probably be talking about the influence that having Mike in the area will have.

Of course we all hope that there will be more coverage of Seattle based companies on Techcrunch, but that is a long shot, Techcrunch is an unusual blog and you seriously have to grab their attention. The influence of Techcrunch will most likely remain globally centric even with Mike in town. Mike is going to have a pile of people, good, bad, and shyster vie for his attention, but here are some people Mike really wants to meet.

Starting with Seattle 2.0, this is the center point of all things entrepreneurial here in the Seattle area. Mike needs to start reading this site and if possible hook up with Marcello for an afternoon of Tapas’ and Beer. Marcello is the driving socialite of the area that is widely recognized. While he is there, he also needs to hook up with Buzz, Buzz is one of the biggest connectors here in the Seattle area, if he does not know them, they don’t exist in the Seattle Startup Scene.

He also needs to hook up with John Cook from Techflash – the best local blog news site run by the Business Journal. John is a phenomenal person, and can introduce Mike to a large number of very good people to meet.

Mike also needs to hook up with Lunch 2.0 run by Josh Maher. While he is at lunch he also might like a cup of coffee and every Wednesday morning he can trot on over to Louise’s Coffee house on Eastlake and meet up with people that are deeply involved in their own visions. The Wednesday morning coffee is not something to be missed.

Mike will want to hook up with STS, The Seattle Technical Startups Listserv that provides a way to communicate with many other startups. This is almost a rite of passage, if you are on the list, even as a lurker you sort of belong to the whole startup process that we have here.

Of course MIT Venture Lab is good, along with many of the Angel and VC companies in the local area. Not to be missed is the North West Entrepreneurial Network – an amazing network of people who can help advise and support people who are doing startups. Additionally while Mike is being the new kid in town, he might also want to visit two colleges. The University of Washington Technology exchange program and City University of Seattle are two colleges that are very active in the technology exchange or support for startups processes here. Both colleges have members that belong to many of the groups above, including me, who is a member of most of the groups above, or reads many of the blogs and lists above.

Welcome to Seattle Mike, we are glad you are here.

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Promiscuous online culture changing social interactions

Panopticon
Image by andygates via Flickr

If you do not read O’Reilly Radar – you might want to subscribe. This morning O’Reilly Radar was bringing up the idea of how social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed and others are changing not just how we hire, but how we determine credibility and trustworthiness in the communities we interact with.

What is interesting in the O’Reilly article this morning was the discussion around security clearances for the military and for contractors. The security clearance routine is almost a rite of passage, if you want to work in government or the military as anything you have to be deemed trustworthy by a series of investigations. The more secret squirrel information you are going to see, the higher the clearance level, and the deeper the investigation into your past, your activities, and your beliefs. Anyone who as sat through the “lifestyles” polygraph test can attest to some very interesting questions that are designed to elicit a reaction from the person taking the polygraph. It was one of my more unique experiences that I can never talk about.

What was very cool about my military experience is that I was literally living with anywhere from 7 to 175 of my closest newest friends depending on where I was and what team I was with. The military attempts to foster a deep sense of loyalty to not just the people you will fight and die alongside, but a sense of trust throughout the entire community from your immediate supervisor all the way through the President. But it was all based on “trust but verify”. Your clearance was the “verify” part of the process.

The military experience is one with a very small town feeling, we all know our neighbors, we all live in a fish barrel, and if you have a clearance, in many ways you are living in a fishbowl. Everyone knows everything about you that you have publicly and in many cases privately stated. It is the old TV Show “Cheers, where everyone knows your name”. Cheers monetized alcoholism, Facebook wants to monetize conformity into a social norm based on a person’s stated friends, likes, and interests. Either way there is a monitization component to the process that might offend folks, and indeed does raise worries about what web sites are doing and how people are tracked across the internet.

Facebook is offering a “panopticon” into your life, the more you share the more you are part of the “group”. This is the same kind of social pressure to conform that happens in high school or in other groups where norms can be enforced publicly. Military people, especially military people with high level clearances will get this concept immediately. Kids in High School will get this immediately, the pressure to conform and be like anyone or everyone else is what Facebook is offering, under the gentle guidance of having what you do so immediately public that deviation from the societal norm could result in losing a job, or a clearance, or friends.

The panopticon can be many things, but as we move deeper into social networking we are going to learn things about each other that will homogenize us into the populations that we deal with on a daily basis. Those that fall outside the norm behaviorally or socially within that small group of people will quickly be drummed out of the group. Internet consumers already have a long experience with this by combating trolls from the early days of the internet. Facebook simply provides us a one stop shop, are they really all that they seem; are they socially and culturally going to fit into the culture/society of the work place? Are they who they state they are?

Clearances aside, we have plunged head first into this world without a safety net, without guidelines, and without any recourse under law that is firmly established to protect people or keep companies from building the “walled garden” panopticon that social networking can represent. When the CEO of the major social network states they do not believe in privacy, that organization will implement the fishbowl process that we see with government and security clearances. We all know everything about each other, and we know how startlingly similar we really are, regardless of where we are in the world.

The thing we need to remember, and the thing that we seem to continually forget is that anything we post on the internet is public. If we are going to understand this we need to start hammering this message home as much as we hammered home the message “don’t click on that attachment in email”. While education will not solve all problems, there are still people who click on those enticing email attachments, it is at least a start. The public debate we are having now is good, but it is time to start reminding people that what they post is public, open to public interpretation, and societal pressures to conform to societies determination of what is right and appropriate behavior. We see this in military communities around the world, including those with security clearances. This small town fishbowl is starting to be incorporated into everyday lives, how we live, what we do, where we go, what movies we watch, what music we listen to, and even to what we had for dinner.

The good thing about the internet is you can find a support group for just about anything, the question is how much do you want to post about yourself, and how much do you want people to really know about you?

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Why Ebooks rock from an artist and a publisher viewpoint

Trade paperback of Will Eisner's A Contract wi...
Image via Wikipedia

We are not going to talk about the consumer here, but with the modern state of lock in on the Sony, Barnes and Noble reader, Kindle, and the IPAD, ebooks are going to rock for publishers and artists. The reason – no secondary market, you cannot resell an ebook, you cannot trade it, you cannot loan it, and you simply cannot do much with it at all other than read it. If you lose it, then you have to go buy another copy new rather than try to pick up a cheaper copy on the secondary market where no one in the food chain, publisher/artist/distribution network makes a dime off the book.

Robot 6 and Forbes wrote a great review on the priorities of the Apple Book store, and honestly, comics and graphic novels make sense, this is a high priority product and one that will make a huge difference with ebooks. I have said for years that ebooks need to have a color screen, and with Ipads hitting the consumer on April 3rd, 2010, the game is on. The kindle while not dead and the Sony reader is not dead either, they are in for a huge run right now, the Ipad is simply a black and white screen killer.

Citing findings by the Busted Loop mobile media research firm, the website states that Apple’s iBookstore will designate about 20 main categories, including “Fiction & Literature,” “Reference” and “Cookbooks.” Below those will be more than 150 sub-categories; “Manga” will fall under the comics section. Source: Robot 6

This is one of the biggest reasons for the recent pivot that we have made as a company; we need to start publishing ebooks because realistically we see the comic book market changing. The comic book market is going to fall into two tiers, which we describe here. This is the reason for Dead Tree Comics, and why we need to start getting the smaller comic book artists into these systems now, this is the future of comics. The color screen changes all, add to that the lock in on specific devices means someone who owns a kindle and an Ipad will have to purchase two copies of the book. For some it might look like a never ending gravy train, for others it might be the only income after the fall from popularity and mega sales.

While the problem is going to be in the secondary market and a lot of second hand comic book sellers are going to go out of business over the next 30 years as back catalogs get digitized, there is an opportunity for smaller publishers to truly crack open this market. The entry right now before all the larger publishers get into the game, the Marvel’s, DC’s, VIZ and Tokyo Pop is phenomenal for a company that is willing and able to get licensed copies of brand new authors into the system. We have a sweet spot right now in the market because these companies are so huge they cannot move fast. Smaller printers who are more agile stand a chance of having a market segment to themselves for a while, meaning new authors and authors that are willing to license their works have an opportunity for readers to discover or rediscover them again.

If you are interested in being published, Dead Tree Comics is simply for you, if you are interested in waiting for the larger publishers to get on board, then enjoy the wait. In the mean time, the competition for comic book artists just got hot after a decade of the same old thing. In the longer run

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Ars Technica goes all whiny about ad blocking

Ars Technica
Image via Wikipedia

There is a lot to be said about advertising on your favorite sites, it has become the defacto page real estate sucking exercise as many people try to monetize their sites using advertising. There was a very real reason why I turned off advertising across all the sites I run, it was the lack of clicks because that is what my sites needed to make any money. Then there was the page load factor, some advertising networks could take as long as 10 seconds to load up an ad, meaning that impatient people got a poor experience on the web sites I run because of long page loads. My situation is far from Ars Technica in terms of running and making money off of ads, but similar, we are both trying to write things that are interesting enough for people to want to read, and bring in page views that make for a popular site.

It seems though that Ars Technica over the weekend ran an interesting experiment where people who are using ad blockers in their browsers were showed no content. If you used an ad blocker and went to Ars during the experiment, then you saw a blank page. Of course, this would mean that there would be a flood of email either supporting or not supporting the movement. What makes this all the more interesting is that some people understood, and in the reporting by Ars Technica, there was at least one show of support from a person for the experiment.

Advertising can be controversial, with some sites you are looking at almost 50% of the page that is devoted to Ads, MySpace in its halcyon days had upwards of 15 ads per page, and even I carried ads and saw a modest return on those ads. The problem lately though from multiple viewpoints is that the number of ads per page has become abusive; we are there for content, not to have advertising thrown in your face with interstitials, music ads, voice ads, auto-playing movie ads, ½ the web page devoted to ads, or many of the other egregious uses of advertising on a web page. While Ars Technica has few ads on their pages, the root cause of ad blockers was the egregious overuse of advertising on the pages. Along with the random danger of a malware ad making it into the advertising system to compromise computers. People voted and they started using ad blockers.

For web sites that need or rely on advertising to help pay the bills, ad blocking can be devastating as Ars Technica points out. For sites who could care less about monetizing and are busy building out their writing skills and working on the blogging craft, ad blockers cause little to no damage. The whine that Ars Technica brings up though is that Ad Blockers are devastating to the sites you love is just one view on what has been a rocky road of the whole process of ad blocking. Sure, for some it can be devastating, but the 73 Million people who have downloaded Adblock Plus for Firefox have a very different opinion of what is and what is not devastating to the user experience. I think that this is something we forget, ads are ok in many respects, and with the two ads on Ars Technica is it not that big a deal to let the ads show. The problem comes in with sites that have 10’s of ads on the site that flash, blink, and play noise. That is what ad blocking is all about, the user experience.

We need more web sites to remember that it is the readers, when they come to the site they want a nice clean experience, not an audio/visual assault that some ads and web advertising agencies throw at readers. Ars Technica has the right number of ads that are nice and low key, but the idea of blocking content for people who are using ad-blocking software is only going to cause problems down the road. If Ars Technica is doing this, you can absolutely bet that the NY Times, and other troubled newspapers are thinking about the same thing. Blocking content from people who do not want to see ½ of the page devoted to ads.

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How to make a graphically rich web site search engine friendly

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Some folks might know that we started our own ebook publishing company and the big announcement will be at Emerald City Comic Con on the 13th of March 2010. What has been interesting though is as we have been busy building the web site, we are working a lot with Google Web Master tools, guidelines, and the Web Master Checklist in building the site because it is graphically rich.

About 80% of the web site is going to be images, as we are offering a free cover browser, free to read online comics that are copyright expired or have moved into the public domain as a way to show our work and the things that can be done with Amazon DTP, PDF’s, and then just skimming through the comic books online. When dealing with a graphically rich web site, having enough text for the search engines to bite into so that they can spider the site is very important. According to Google, these are the types of files that Google can scan:

• Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (.ps)
• Atom and RSS feeds (.atom, .rss)
• Autodesk Design Web Format (.dwf)
• Google Earth (.kml, .kmz)
• Lotus 1-2-3 (.wk1, .wk2, .wk3, .wk4, .wk5, .wki, .wks, .wku)
• Lotus WordPro (.lwp)
• MacWrite (.mw)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt)
• Microsoft Word (.doc)
• Microsoft Works (.wks, .wps, .wdb)
• Microsoft Write (.wri)
• Open Document Format (.odt)
• Rich Text Format (.rtf)
• Shockwave Flash (.swf)
• Text (.ans, .txt)
• Wireless Markup Language (.wml, .wap)
Source: Google

Nowhere in there is JPG, PNG, or GIF files that we are using. Therefore, this has required a liberal use of the tag to describe the image. While we are not interested in “keyword stuffing” because of its negative effects, what we are interested in is describing the picture. So our alt tag looks something like this and that seems to be in line with the expectations of Google, meaning it will work with just about any search engine. The other part of this was to make sure each page has a title, and that the title was SEO friendly. We are also using a lot of meta tags throughout the site to help search engines spider the site better.

This is one of the more interesting aspects of designing and developing a graphically rich web site, in that the use of with good descriptors, and the use of Meta Tags are about the only real way of giving search engines enough information to spider, without distracting the reader from the content on the page, which is a scanned image of a comic book page. If there are other ways of doing this, drop a note below, it would be interesting to hear other people’s experiences in designing a graphically rich web site that is search engine friendly.

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