Category Archives: Business

Making use of Web 2.0

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Today when a client asks me to build a web site containing:

  • Blogs, mem­bers need to be able to blog
  • Mar­ket­place, like eBay
  • Photo gallery
  • Forum
  • Cal­en­der
  • Edi­to­r­ial space (for arti­cles and fluffies)

my advice to them is always the same.

“You don’t need to. Let’s use what’s already out there”

Our roles as web devel­op­ers/ web strate­gists is shift­ing within this new era when most of the base func­tion­al­ity such as blogs, social net­works, cal­en­ders, project col­lab­o­ra­tion and even video edi­tors are actu­ally avail­able for free already! In this vast space of ter­abytes there is more then enough apps to meet the cus­tomers need. Why rein­vent the wheel?

Most of the traffic/market/people/users are already on Face­book for exam­ple. How do we reach them through that spe­cific chan­nel? Within Face­book there are room for groups, events, mes­sages and even com­mu­nity based games. It’s perfect!

So, insted of forc­ing the users to join yet another social net­work / sign up for a cam­paign, let’s make it easy for them. That should be our main goal, I think. To make it easy for the user.

ps. If any cus­tomer feels tar­geted by this, don’t. I get requests like these all the time, and there is noth­ing wrong with it. It’s just up to us web // whatever  (we’ve got LOTS of dif­fer­ent titles, but mostly we are the same) to get you on the right track. It’s our respon­si­bil­ity as experts to lead the field and to make the best out of your ini­tial idea.

Tips for junior developers

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One year ago I got an employ­ment as a junior devel­oper. Since then I’ve learned quite much, espe­cially things about work­ing as a junior developer.

Things that might be useful:

  • If you have some­one more expe­ri­enced on the office who could review your code before launch, insist on that they do it. She or he can tell you how they would have done stuff (and things you have missed), you’ll learn tons from it. If you’re lucky you might even get a mentor you’ll be able to ask ques­tions, and who’ll be glad to review your code.
  • Just because you just got hired doesn’t mean that you should stop read­ing. Con­tinue to read, write and eval­u­ate your meth­ods. This is a way to keep the work funny and inter­est­ing as well. Never stop learning.
  • Take ini­tia­tives, ask around. Take the chances you get to get to know your team mates better.
  • Ask your team mates what they are doing, and why they are doing it that way. Ques­tion everything.
  • Write down the stuff that you learn and share with others who are, or will be in the same position.

And then we have a few optional things that I per­son­ally do:

  • I keep my desk clut­ter free. At my work­place, it’s not a require­ment or any­thing, but I just like to be able to focus on the screen and the tasks ahead of me.
  • Always show up early, or at least in time. This is not a solid require­ment at my work place either, but I like to show up early, and then leave early. I tend to do the heavy tasks in the morn­ing, and more light weight tasks in the afternoon.
  • Be polite and gen­er­ous with com­pli­ments, remem­ber peo­ples names and details about their per­sonal life. But don’t pre­tend to be inter­ested if you’re not. False­hood always shines through.
  • Do your work. You might find this point very obvi­ous, but I’ve seen enough people show­ing up at work to just spend the time procrastinating.

Most of these things are common sense, but you’ll be sur­prised of how many who wouldn’t agree with them. The impor­tant point is that you deliver what you promised, and that you do it on time. When you work in teams of more expe­ri­enced people and you get to work with dif­fer­ent projects (both fresh and uh-oh-so-old-and-completely-idiotic) you learn the most impor­tant things. The small things that no one ever seem to cover in those books that you read, or that tuto­r­ial that you walked. You learn things that could only be learned through hard earned experience.

Fairtunes

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“Fair­tunes is a free, vol­un­tary, dig­i­tal music pay­ment system that allows music fans to vol­un­tar­ily send money to, com­pen­sate or tip, any artist for their work. Fair­tunes empow­ers any artist to receive money online in the form of a vol­un­tary pay­ment. “

Fair­tunes was a com­pany formed in the year 2000 that then got bought up and renamed to Musi­clink in 2002. In the Musi­clink ver­sion, the “sending-money-to-music-creator”-feature was dis­abled. The founders got weblogs where you can find related infor­ma­tion: Matt Goyer and John Cormie.

The idea, was to enable users to send money to music creators.

It soon got quite exten­sive press coverage:

Remem­ber, this was back in 2000/2001.

Matt Rigaux com­mented on the arti­cle Moving the goal recently this year (2008):

“During the first bubble, a friend of mine had a site in 2000 called Fair​tunes.com, which was a “tipping service”. If you wanted the labels out of the way in order to pay the artist directly for their work, you could send money to Fair­tunes and they would remit cheques to the man­agers of what­ever artist you chose. In the begin­ning they were send­ing $2.00 cheques to people like David Bowie, but it was early, and it was more of a signal of what was pos­si­ble than any­thing else.

Their model relied on the honor system, in that of course not every­one was going to vol­un­tar­ily pay artists for songs they down­load for free, but some would, and the theory was that this would approx­i­mately equal what the artist would get from higher volume sales – LESS the labels’ cut. Great idea, and they got national atten­tion due to the Nap­ster craze, but to Fred’s point, there was too much fric­tion in the process of get­ting money to them that most didn’t adopt it and it fiz­zled out.

For me per­son­ally, the most fric­tion­less way to get this done would be if a ser­vice pen­nies just got added to my monthly inter­net or cell phone bill, and I got to make one pay­ment a month for all my music. My part of the process would be com­plete and it would be out of my hands, and the ser­vice would just remit trans­ac­tion fees back to the car­ri­ers, artists, man­agers, labels, etc.

Would love to see a Fair­tunes model re-​emerge, but to make it fric­tion­less, the pay­ments have to be dig­i­tal, added on to exist­ing things I’m locked into paying for reg­u­larly, and divis­i­ble fairly amongst the stake­hold­ers that cre­ated the con­tent and enabled that fric­tion­less payment.”

I second that. That is an excit­ing solu­tion to a unprac­ti­cal problem.

Why havn’t anyone tried since then?

An album for 4$

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“Because the eco­nom­ics of the music busi­ness is so bad for musi­cians, you don’t have to send more than a dollar before you have com­pen­sated them fairly for down­load­ing an entire album.” – TIMES

What they seem to forget is the writ­ers, pro­duc­ers and other essen­tials who don’t get com­pen­sated. But the thought of fair com­pen­sa­tion with­out record com­pa­nies, pub­lish­ers and retail­ers are with­out any doubt interesting.

The dis­tri­b­u­tion is there: MySpace, Last.fm, The Pirate Bay and Spo­tify (and others).

Jazzy wedge

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Morning
During my morn­ing, I got hooked by this air­plane painted cross on an oth­er­wise clear sky.

Today I’ve been going through Django’s tuto­ri­als, and I’ve set up my local envi­ron­ment.
To me, it is a pretty steep learn­ing curve just to fully under­stand all of the stuff that I’m learn­ing through the tutorials.

After the tuto­ri­als I installed sup­port for OpenID, using django_​openidconsumer. Prob­lem was, that it didn’t work as expected. After I searched a while, I rec­og­nized that it used maxlength instead of max_​lenght. Then I read the dis­cus­sions on django_​openidconsumer, and of course, some­one had already posted a patch to fix it. Sweet :)

Tomor­row I’m head­ing towards Got­land together with Sanna. I’m look­ing for­ward to it, but I prob­a­bly won’t be able to work upon TLW until next Wednesday.