Closer To The Ideal

Meaning is the hard work of the mind:

“The Internet,” writes Mayer, “can facilitate an incredible persistence and availability of information, but given the Internet’s adolescence, all of the information simply isn’t there yet. I find that in some ways my mind has evolved to this new way of thinking, relying on the information’s existence and availability, so much so that it’s almost impossible to conclude that the information isn’t findable because it just isn’t online.” When Mayer says her “mind has evolved” to the point that it can only recognize and process information that has been digitized and uploaded, she is confessing to undergoing an intellectual dehumanization. She is confessing to being computerized.

Poirier:

[Frost] insists on our acknowledging in each and every poem, however slight, that poetry is a “made” thing. So, too, is truth. Thus, the quality which allows the poetry to seem familiar and recognizable as such, that makes it “beautiful,” is derivative of a larger conviction he shares with the William James of Pragmatism. “Truth,” James insisted, “is not a stagnant property … Truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.”

It’s not what you can find out, Frost and James and Poirier told us; it’s what you know. Truth is self-created through labor, through the hard, inefficient, unscripted work of the mind, through the indirection of dream and reverie. What matters is what cannot be rendered as code. Google can give you everything but meaning.

I notice Scott Meves linking to this great post which is critical of SEO:

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

First came the web, and it was a mess. Servers went up everywhere, the net connected them all, pages bloomed like flowers, and no one could find a damn thing.

Then came the search engines. First primitive indexes of dumb keywords, then Google with its rankings of most-linked pages, we were finally able to find the pages we needed, mostly.

The ascendency of Google has meant that, if your goal is to get the most eyeballs possible (as any ad-supported media business’ goal is), then prominent placement in the search engine results became a top priority.

And so, like the goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen before them, a new breed of con man was born, the Search Engine Optimizer. These scammers claim that they can dance the magic dance that will please the Google Gods and make eyeballs rain down upon you.

Do. Not. Trust. Them.

A look at some common searches on Google. Small changes lead to big differences.

Earlier I complained that Apple had not yet ported AppleScript to the iPhone. I am very pleased to see that Google is now supporting scripting on Android:

Scripts can be run interactively in a terminal, started as a long running service, or started via Locale. Python, Lua and BeanShell are currently supported, and we’re planning to add Ruby and JavaScript support, as well.

Google is doing everything right to win the hearts of developers. Will this matter in the long run? Apple has a big head-start with the iPhone. But then, once upon a time, Apple was the only company selling a personal computer that supported a GUI interface. It’s possible cell phones will see a shake-out like what happened in the 1980s – Apple is there first, but alienates its developers, a competitor arrives late, but woos developers and in the end wins more market share.

Reputable news sources on the tech industry, such as Techcrunch, seem very positive about the future growth of the Twitter eco-system:

Twitter is quickly turning into the media sharing platform of choice for many people, despite the fact that it, uh, doesn’t have any actual media sharing functionality. But a variety of services are popping up to fill the need, including countless Twitter-specific sites for sharing images, music, and video.

Twitter seems to be taking off the way weblogs and RSS feeds took off during the last recession. But weblogs and RSS feeds were open platforms, with dozens of companies competing to offer tools. The openness and the competition helped drive the tools forward, which helped the practice of blogging to move forward. There was never a single company that could say “Weblogging will no longer be allowed unless you start paying a fee for our tools” (SixApart tried this and immediately lost market share).

Twitter is just one company. It is only as open as it wants to be. Right now, it is synonymous with micro-messaging (micro-blogging?). But I am doubtful that a single company can come to represent the whole of some online activity. I suppose the nearest analogy would be Google and search, but that seems like an imperfect fit. The highest estimate of Google’s market share is 72%. Whereas Twitter owns 100% market share of Twittering.

For much of the last 3 weeks I’ve used Windows laptop running XP (instead of my usual Ubuntu Linux machine) which gave me a chance to try out some of the browsers that have no Linux version.   One of the greatest aspects of the current web development scene is that most of the surviving browser projects are competing on how well they can implement web standards and HTML5 (contrast the current scene with 1996, when Microsoft set out to break the web, with its “embrace, extend and exterminate” strategy).

I’ve already noted that FireFox seems to have surpassed Internet Explorer, in terms of usage. Microsoft will hopefully soon kill Internet Explorer and replace it with something else.

I admire much of what Brendan Eich has done. And for the last several years, FireFox has been my web browser of choice. But FireFox drives me crazy with its demand for resources. Compared to any other browser I’ve tried, it demands more RAM. With just one window open, it will grab 60 to 90 megs of RAM (compared to, say, 14 for Chrome). With several pages open, which is normal for me, FireFox will grab 200 to 250 megs of RAM. Chrome might grab a 3rd of that. (These statements are true for FireFox 2 and 3, and Chrome 1.)

FireFox allows plugins, which is the main reason I use FireFox. The Firebug and Session Manager plugins are essential tools for me. However, FireFox doesn’t police the resource usage of these plugins. They can crash any machine: Macs, Linux, Windows. (Those of you who want to claim “Linux never crashes”, please note that a process can use up most of the memory on the machine, and then the machine becomes unresponsive. For the user, this is the same as a crash, even if in some hair-splitting way it avoids the technical definition of a crash.)

Chrome has the kind of plain, minimalist design that is a signature of most of Google’s products.  I like it a lot, though it has many annoyances. Yahoo Mail normally auto-suggests email addresses as I start to type them, but this doesn’t happen when I use Chrome. Also, when using WordPress, Chrome embeds inline styling, whereas other browsers do not. Also, again with WordPress, Chrome erases all line breaks every time I update a post, so that the text is reduced to one giant paragraph. Basically, most of the Javascript that is out there was not written with Chrome in mind, and Chrome has some kind of conflict with it. Also, surprisingly, I’m not able to log into some of my favorite forums with Chrome.  I get no error message, but I am not treated as logged in, even after giving the correct username and password (I have the same problem in Safari, but not in FireFox).

Scrolling a web page, using the arrow keys on the keyboard, is important to me. I read a great deal online, and for me it seems natural to want to use the arrow keys to move down the page as I read. Here is one area where Chrome is especially good. It scrolls smoothly. FireFox is usually broken in this regard – it tries to move the cursor down the page, but if the HTML is laid out in a way that allows the cursor to skip the main text of the page, then FireFox simply drops to the bottom of the page. This drives me crazy.

Safari 4 seems to be in between Chrome and FireFox in terms of resource use. It is wonderfully standards compliant and leads the way in supporting HTML5. I admire it for that, though until more browsers support HTML5, I can’t imagine using any of the new tags on a commercial web site.

Right now I can see using FireFox when I want to use my favorite plugins, and I can see using Chrome when I want a fast web browser, but I’m not sure what would cause me to use Safari.

I’m comfortable making this prediction: IE will continue to fade, and Microsoft will continue to fade, and FireFox, Safari and Chrome will all have more browser share a year from now than they currently do. So it is time for designer to start checking their designs in all of these browsers.

These are the ads that Google thinks belong grouped together:

Seen over at Naked Capitalism.

A very interesting post by I Am El Gringo:

For the time-constrained, I submit to you the results of my highly scientific research:

• Yahoo: Minimal Use of tables. I found a picture of Hugh Downs horizontally aligned with it’s caption in a table
• Google Home Page: Not only does Google use tables for it’s iconic home page, it embeds styling in the <td> tags. The horror.
• YouTube: Uses tables for of layout of videos
• Windows Live: Uses tables for footer layout
• MSN: There is one table, but it’s only for stockquotes which is tabular data
• MySpace Semantically pure. MySpace. Whoda thunk it
• Facebook: Does form layout with tables
• Blogger: No tables anywhere on the front page
• Orkut All tables all the time
• Rapidshare: A table with a single <td> for header placement. And again a single <td> table for the central “browse” section. Tsk tsk
• Microsoft: Navigation bar is a table. What did you expect? Unicorns and rainbows?
• Google India: It’s the same Google layout. I wonder if they used copy and paste for the template?
• Ebay: Tables, tables every where
• Hi5: Tables for every thing, pretty much. BTW, I didn’t even know this site existed until last week. Alexa rank 14!?
• Photobucket: Tables for photo gallery layout
• AOL: AOL’s layout is semantically pure! Friggin AOL?
• Google UK: Same GOOG layout. I’m now sure the copied an pasted their html
• Amazon: Now that’s just silly
• IMDB: They used tables for their 3 column layout. What! No CSS framework?
• Imageshack: Semantically pure as the driven snow.
• Finally, even though it’s not on Alexa’s top 20, log in to your Gmail account and look at
  the use of tables

My Hypothesis: Pure CSS design == overcompensation

So, the five companies that use CSS are the web powerhouses–MSN, MySpace, Blogger, AOL and Imageshack. MSN, MySpace and AOL have been maligned for years throughout the web savvy community. My hypothesis is that these companies are overcompensating for the crap that they’ve taken thoughtout the years by designing their site in pure CSS.

Other companies that have more web street-cred like Google and Facebook don’t really have to worry about how the web design community sees them. This leads to things like Google making extensive use of inline styling on their homepage instead of putting it in their stylesheet. I’ve never heard anyone claim that the Google folks are slouches at the web design/development thing. Why is that?

I had an idea for a new business I’d like to launch, based around results from the Google database, fetched using their Search API. After downloading their sample code and reading their documentation, I wrote a simple script and looked at the results. What I realized, after awhile, was that there was no way to get back more than 64 results. My idea needed thousands of results. I asked about this on the official Google Search API forum and was told that, yes, there was no way to get more than 64 results. I then responded:

You’ll forgive me, I hope, for being confused. Over the last 4 or 5 years I’ve read hundreds of articles at Slashdot and Techcrunch and Businessweek and FastCompany, all talking about new businesses being built around Google’s API. In fact, I just did a quick search for “google mashups” and saw some “best of” articles, such as this one:

http://mashable.com/

Are all the Google mashups using small result sets to build their businesses?

Jeremy R. Geerdes offered this exhaustive reply:

I can’t blame you for being confused. There is a lot of seemingly contradictory information out there! For instance, Google’s initial search API offering came in the form of a SOAP API which delivered up to 1,000 results. While this API offered a number of interesting features, it also had a fairly low rate restriction which limited the number of times you could query it over a 24-hour period. Even though this API was deprecated in December 2006, the service to my knowledge has not yet been discontinued for persons who obtained an API key before that cutoff, so you’ll still find a number of sites and applications out there that use it, not to mention articles that refer to it as the greatest thing since sliced bread.

…
Speaking of the Group, though, even that contains a multiple of different numbers. For instance, when the AJAX Search API was originally released, you could not retrieve more than 8 results at all. So there are a number of posts stating a result limit of 8. Then the number jumped, for most searchers, to 32. So you have posts talking about that limit. Then to 64. Local and blog results were left at 8, and then Local results were increased to a total of 32. Blog result limits remain at 8 to this day, and if you’re not confused yet by all those numbers, you’re a smarter person than I!

All of that said, here is where things stand today. As mentioned in my previous post on this thread, you can retrieve up to 64 results, across 8 pages of 8 results each, with most searchers. The exceptions are Local, which can retrieve up to 32, across 4 pages of 8 results each; and Blog, which can retrieve only one set of up to 8 results. At first glance, this all may seem rather restricting, but I think that, for most purposes, the result limits as they stand now are generally adequate. Does that mean I wouldn’t like to see more? No, I would love to see more, especially local results. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that the AJAX Search API was designed to provide basic search functionality to an application. It is not intended for deep searching, data mining, or SEO operations. And I think most people will agree that, when just running a search for something on the internet, the vast majority of the time, we’ll click on something long before we get to the 64th result OR we’ll refine our search.

It should also be noted that the Search API is NOT intended to be the central emphasis of a website or the core of a business model. The TOU are explicit in this in a number of locations. For example:

“You will not, and will not permit your end users or other third parties to incorporate Google Search Results as the primary content on your Property or any page on your Property [or] display business listings Search Results from the Google Maps service on any Property which has the primary purpose of making available residential or business address listings or telephone directory listings” (excerpted from section 1.3)

“In using Google Brand Features, you may not have the Google logo as the largest logo on your Property (except as displayed in the Google Search Results itself) [or] display a Google Brand Feature as the mostprominent element on any page of your Property” (excerpted from
section 2.2)

So, to answer your question – Are all the Google mashups using small result sets to build their businesses? – directly: no, the Google AJAX Search API merely augments their current businesses and application functionality.

In the case of the mashups that you’ve seen at mashable.com and elsewhere, there are a number of sites out there that combine the Google Maps API with proprietary data sources other than the Google Search API. For example, one site that I work with ( http://www.scrantondirections.com ) has its own database of businesses, etc., that it pushes to a Google Map. These results may be augmented by Google LocalSearch results, but the primary focus is on the proprietary data. Other sites will combine the Maps and Search APIs with some other data to provide unique information. For instance, http://www.walkscore.com
uses a number of LocalSearch instances, filters their results through metric that calculates your ability to survive without a car at a given address, and then shows you all of the results using the Maps API. So it is absolutely possible to leverage even the “small result set” of the Search API to develop effective applications.

Saw this on the Google Ajax API blog, all about adding Flash to a page using Javascript:

If you’re a Flash nut then you probably know about the SWFObject Javascript library. I’m not, so I didn’t. However, since I promised myself I would play with Flex soon I am very happy that a “Flasher” suggested that we add it to our AJAX Libraries API. I took a look at it and found out that it’s a great little must-have library!

See, embedding a Flash video on a page is actually more complicated than it should be. You can’t just throw a tag on the page with some attributes and expect it to work. In fact, to embed a Flash file there are different methods for different browsers such as using an <embed> vs. <object> as well as setting the parameters for the file.

The SWFObject library simplifies the process so that all you need to worry about is including their Javascript library and using a single method to embed your Flash on the page in a safe, cross-browser manner. It also has a few extra utility functions, such as setting a load event for the Flash object and detecting the user’s Flash version.

It is impossible to keep up with all the new technologies that came out over the last year, especially one’s that I probably won’t ever use. I admit, I was confused, till now, regarding Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, JavaFX. Apparently these were all aimed at the same basic market, the same one that Google Gears aims at: ????????building applications that have a front-end that lives and runs as a desktop app, but pulls data from the web. I’m pleased to now at least understand what all these are about. I can’t see myself building this kind of software in the near future, so I guess I can ignore these technologies. If I do end up doing this kind of software, I’m sure I’ll use Google Gears, simply because I already have some slight introduction to the Google API.

The often interesting robert hoekman, jr:

Our Stories should be an experience rich site. It should offer an engaging environment that compels users to explore and connect emotionally to the storytellers. But it doesn’t offer this at all. Instead, it offers what looks like any other Google design. It’s plain, minimalist, and it’s focused entirely around the information and not the experience.

Google apparently thinks it has hit upon the secret formula to all successful websites – simple, minimalist designs that offer information in a concentrated form. In reality, this formula only works for certain classes of sites, of which the original Google website was the par exemplar. Google fails when it attempts to build a site that needs a philosophically different approach. As Hoekman explains:

 If Google’s goal here was to create emotional connections, they should definitely have considered something other than the business-as-usual, sterile design work that has become Google’s signature. Granted, some of the site’s pages are geared towards showing people how to conduct interviews for the site, and those pages are probably best left alone, but the main attraction here is an environment of storytelling, not another Google search results system.

…Design is meant to communicate content. With the right design, you can always meet your goals much more effectively. If you want emotional connections, design something that encourages them. If you want people to take action, design to encourage action. Don’t let your usual design style get in the way of doing something great.