The blue in the image above is actually a deep red!

Accordingly, while the colours are totally out of whack, there are no other artifacts in the image. Normally this just looks weird — sometimes, in the case of logo variants, it looks plausible but utterly incorrect! My guess is they’re using an older version of PIL (we all know how much Google loves Python) prior to this March 2009 patch. Sounds like the same phenomenon.

Still, those people emailing CMYK JPGs has to be a little bit niche, so I’m not heaps hopeful of this getting fixed too soon! The main reason I care is because web interfaces are so much faster than retrieving large attachments from IMAP stores.

Three minutes of national mourning for earthquake victims. Taken seriously and moving in a way that is a little difficult to imagine an analogue for in Australia — tongue-in-cheek about re:cessation of Google-ing… but intended as a broader comment on national displays of stuff in all seriousness. Perhaps unfair as Australia hasn’t really had any disaster of this magnitude in recent times, I know.

Everyone was outside as traffic stopped to remember and share in the grief of millions. Some things are more important than search.

[Google post via]

“Shocking Piano Lessons — Piano Teachers Want us Banned Controversial Site Exposes All”

It was one of those zero-relevance Gmail index page ads, which can be a bit quirky… even so. Seriously bizarre.

Anyway — OpenID is still around 10 months later (though the spec was last updated around the time I last wrote on the matter), WordPress.com have announced they are now an IdP for it, and it seems everyone wants to be a provider, not a consumer (in OID spec parlance, consumer means the website requesting verification of an Identity — “end user” is the term given to an actual human user).

In fact, Ma.gnolia.com is the only OpenID consuming site of consequence that I’ve encountered thus far in my travels. Which is, to say the least, slightly perplexing.

I’m aware the whole point of OpenID is that it’s a vastly decentralised spec that enables myriad providers to exist, but it seems somewhat redundant (in the sense in which that means “pointless, without purpose”, not failover-type redundancy) if there does not exist a single consumer of consequence!

And, let’s face it, why should being a consumer be attractive? You know less about your customers, they can bail on you more quickly, and… all of a sudden, advertising is the only way of monetising a website. JanRain operate “MyOpenID: Your first (and last) identity provider”, as well as a couple of services that use OpenID, and have (to my eyes, at least) no conceivable way of generating revenue at present.

Which is potentially fine, but completely stupid if that’s happening on a wider scale. As a concept, OpenID has much to offer — I just wouldn’t use it in CYIADA. I might consider it for smaller projects (commercial clients), but, really, I think it’d have a better chance if Myspace were an OpenID provider. And we all know what they’re like when it comes to web standards (and general usability issues)!

Plus, of course, there’s the issue of the popularity of up-stream providers if you want to verify against something other than OpenID (like, for example, someone’s Google account — which you can do quite easily using various API tools they provide). With anything youth targeted, there’s a special impetus that we don’t really see in other places. I read this absolutely hilarious comment on a great analysis of an article about Myspace:

It’s easy to imagine teenagers as a pack of wildebeests on a grassy plain, simply running with wild abandon.

Why yes, yes it is. They’re not (article has more on this), but the bottom line is if you’re using external verification services, you’re dependent on the existence and longevity of these services for the existence and longevity of your services, not the least in user profiling and building up meaningful market data so you can adjust your mix to a known audience.

OpenID feels like a wonderful technology in a chicken-egg situation. It’s still just too bloody geeky for your average LJ user to get on board with. And they’ve got it easy. For anyone else, it’s completely impossible.

Here in Sydney, we could probably get away setting up verification against Windows Live simply because that’s what people use here, as I have noted before (about halfway down the post linked). But developing different authorisation schemes as a matter of localisation is most definitely not in my book of best practices (if I were ever to write one :P) — so, instead, fragmented Internet identities persist.

That bugs me.

If you have any answers or thoughts… let me know. Blog about it and send a pingback/trackback. That’s one of the few open standards that’s worked well on the web, albeit with plenty of spam abuse, but there’s of course the problem that not enough people are socially blogging aside from software developers and design geeks and… whatever category I fit into (“web strategist” is still what I’m calling myself… we’ll see how much longer that sticks) — so, of course, there’s no instinct to reply in this manner.

In the same way, developer and business instinct is to build your own authentication and profiling platform. Is it worth resisting?

So enjoy commenting again without a horribly blank screen greeting you!

Which, I’ve decided, is fine, because I’ve got a web and email address on the piece of paper, and for the number of contacts this so-called “survey” seeds I’m praying it’ll be completely worth it, even if no-one bothers filling in the survey properly. Really, $40 (or however much actual cost per page is here) is pretty good if I only get 10 quality leads on people who are desparately keen to use something like this… and can wait a few months.

I mention that as trouble appears to be brewing on the home front re: the waiting part… :| People are enthusiastic but in a “let’s grab a generic CMS and mix it up with Blogger and Google Groups and it’ll rock” kind of way. Which is fine for all of about six months, then you’ve gotta do it all over again because 1 of 3 stops working for whatever reason. And scalability issues. Grr… anyway. I thought we’d been through all this already with our abortive Yahoo! Calendar attempts of 18 months ago. Apparently not.

So… please be praying for wisdom and patience around that particular issue. And especially that I’d be loving, because right now I’m in a position where I could clobber people with technical ramblings until they agree with me (read: relent), or simply go and change it as I think it should be… but doing either of those things is obviously unproductive. Again, prayer for wisdom is very welcome!

Prayer is also sought for tomorrow — for the Youth for Christ programme running at St Andrews all day, and then for me at the Connecting in a world of change conference as I present in my little 2.20 to 2.30 timeslot. Which is plenty of time for a geek like me — I actually do enjoy public speaking, but that doesn’t mean I’m much good at it!

I’ve also got to get a site up for CYIADA, because I decided that if I stuck it on print materials and did 130 copies of it, then the potential for embarrasment should be sufficient motivator to make me move quickly! Hehe. Really must get one of the IT guys here to setup hosting first thing tomorrow… I figure it’s okay if it’s not working straight away, because I can say it’s just been put up and there’ll be something there in the next couple of days.

In other domain-related news I also picked up josh.st. So you should be able to get to this site via that funky URL in a few hours once DNS pushes through (the nameservers have switched, finally — .st’s NIC took forever with that — but obviously it’s still got to propagate). I know I’m always saying this but there’s a new design on its way. I’ve got three sites in the works at the minute, so if it doesn’t come in a hurry don’t be too surprised. I doubt anyone is anymore, though!

One thing we’ve noticed (“we” is myself and a handful of others with an interest in the web) over the past twelve months is an uptake in web usage by youth ministries — for obvious reasons: that’s where kids are spending their time, and it’s a great communication tool, and everyone else is doing it.

When I say everyone else is doing it, I actually mean everyone else is trying to do it. Everyone has, for the last six to twelve months, been writing the same applications, integrating the same software, paying for the same software, attempting to train the same people, and generally doing a lot of the same stuff, separately. With no point of intersection or sharing or intelligent resource management.

This is understandable: afterall, the web presents a relatively new front for churches in general, and whilst kids have been wasting time online for years, only with the relatively recent advent of social networking websites (I refer to it as ‘SocNet’ in these parts — no-one else seems to, but I like it, so whatever) have the less computer-inclined began spending significant amounts of time in front of a keyboard.

There’s also a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to building these things. People ask, what are the benefits? We’ve never had someone come along to youth group because of our website! — well, no, you’re right. But you also don’t have a website, so that’s hardly fair, is it? Nine times out of ten people will not come along to church (generically) because they’ve searched for a church in a particular suburb in Google (though, speaking of that, I’ve got to do a bit of SEO work on the Matthias site — it’s not on the first page for a “Church in Paddington” query. Changed the title, it’ll be a while til that kicks in. We’ll see.)

They’ll come because a friend asked if they wanted to, or they were walking past and heard people inside, saw them going in, and wondered what it was all about.

But this is hardly exclusive to having a website. If they have those points of contact, a website is a great way to invisibly investigate further without needing to make themselves uncomfortable. It’s easy to find these sorts of websites through search engines — you walked past a church and noted its name, you remember the name of your friend’s church, etc.

The same goes for youth groups, obviously.

People have just been starting to realise this, or at least think of it at all and decide “yeah, we could do that”. So, there’s the rationale for it all. Most people with decent websites already may not have considered rationale in any great depth — they’ve got a good website because they know someone who makes them, and volunteered their time (maybe they’re a leader), throwing something together with Xoops in an afternoon. It’s quick and dirty, but effective.

We’re trying to spend a small but not insignificant amount of money to equip people to do these sorts of thing, so it’s only sensible that some more time is spent considering what on earth we’re trying to achieve. Hence the lengthy prelude to what it actually does.

Now, the features. We have too many target audiences for it to be an altogether comfortable project, but that’s half the fun of it. The product is being marketed to churches (who pay for it) through leaders (who want to use it) and for youth (who actually aren’t the centre of the universe on this one, but we need to give them UX that says they are). Outside of these three, there are also the friends of the youth already in the application who are just checking out the youth group page.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. We’re also marketing this to camps, high school scripture groups/lunchtime bible groups, and maybe bands/events. Which is great and technically only a small step, but it does pretty horrible things when you try and explain who’s paying for what in a concise business-like fashion. If you’ve read this far, chances are you’re well aware that concise-ness has never been my strong point.

So, with these targets in mind, we are (firstly) going to equip them with websites. Big woop. WordPress.com and Blogger eat your heart out. Cue yawns.

No, seriously. We’re going to give them (‘them’ being the various entities described above, not individuals so much — there’s no way I’m positioning this against other SocNet sites because I reckon it’s too fragmented to last… Facebook or Myspace or Bebo or.… yes.) web pages. Welcome to 1999.

They’re going to have web pages with calendars they can chock full of the schedule for the term, though. So that’s exciting.

And everyone’s going to have their own username, so they can leave comments on the inevitable blogging element with identity — this is wonderful for comment– and generic form-spam. Incidentally, I read a few blogs that Wild St people are writing and was really excited to see they’re actually enthusiastic about doing it. There’s quite the bunch of them on Blogger these days, and it’s all completely autonomous — so far as I know, no-one has pushed them to start doing it. I was so proud of their keenness and innovation for building up community and spreading the gospel! Another aside, my copy hasn’t arrived yet but I believe there’s something about blogging in The Briefing for December (it’s not on their website yet, either). My copy arrived today, and I discovered the current issue is in their webstore, just not on the main site. It’s The Briefing #339, if you’d care to read it.

Anyway. Blogs will feature. Calendars will feature. All the stuff you’d reasonably expect to be able to do with a CMS tool these days will feature. Blogs, calendars, galleries, contact forms, static pages. Yay. So that’s the boring stuff that we’ve just got to do the grunt-work for at some point (I’m sure it can be fun, but, just between you and me, I’m not really looking forward to the couple of weeks we have to spend on that bit).

Now, for interesting and innovative features — because, let’s face it, the above is hardly enough to convince anyone to switch their existing website (if indeed they have one) across to a hosted platform for a nominal (to be determined, but probably only payable by church groups, and not for camps/events on account of these being once-off) monthly fee.

Contact tools. Yummy. We’re going to give them mailers that make it easy to send a message to, say, all the kids in year 10. Or just guys. Or girls in year 8. Or only to your co-leaders (we’ll have a resource area where they can share files — Word documents, PDFs, slide shows — on the site, too: that’s some of the fun CMS stuff). But email’s been done before. Everyone’s used email. Admittedly, sometimes you just wish there’s a better way to store and manage lists of people, and this tool will certainly do that, but it’s a little boring still.

So we decided it’d be a good idea to throw SMS into the mix. It’s not just a gimmick: again, this is in response to what people are already doing. The only difference is it’s paid on a shared account (used by the leaders — the youth kids won’t have access to these tools, for fairly obvious reasons) and integrates the same contact management features as the mailer app. We’re hoping convenience will draw people across to this tool. Use scenarios are basically just that you’d use this tool to inform people of what’s going on this week at youth group, or reminding them that the group is on bringing supper this month, etcetera. The originating number will be that of a single leader, or it could even be that of that person’s own leader.

For example, one message is sent to all kids by the group co-ordinator, but that message is altered depending on who the individual recipient’s bible study leader is, so that it appears to originate from them. Obviously common sense would say that you wouldn’t do that without consultation, so we’d probably have a check box in the leader’s “my account” page that would say “Allow messages from other senders to originate from my mobile number”, or something to that affect.

Beyond contact tools, we want to take advantage of the fact that this is a service-based product and entirely a hosted solution. Part of the reason we’re strongly pursuing that is it gives an opportunity to equip and direct in a way that decentralised sites can’t be. So, a few things we’re thinking of doing are centralised offerings like weekly newsletters (sent to leaders two days in advance so they’ve got an opportunity to see it first) and global blog properties that give reviews, current affairs commentary, etc.

That’s the end of the universal features that are great for kids and leaders alike, but there’s lots more for leaders. As I’ve already said, we want this to be self-funding. Part of this is selling electronic versions of dead-tree products, as DRM’d PDFs, or as unencumbered PDFs with watermarks/obviously time-sensitive advertising (so violation of copyright is glaringly obvious). The other part is (for me at least) far more exciting, and that’s reselling user generated/contributed content (UGC) under an iStockPhoto-esque model (Basically, profit sharing).

This isn’t just about words on a page — I want to get plenty of video stuff happening, too, because (especially in reformed evangelical Anglican/Baptist/Presbyterian, etc. churches) that doesn’t get nearly enough of a work out as is. It’s a really effective tool for supporting preaching/bible studies, and it’s been largely overlooked until probably early this year (I had my first conversation with someone about video resources for small group bible studies as late as July or August this year, I think! They had used a Matthias Media resource which I haven’t encountered, and thought it really helpful).

Pricing models for all that are still a little up in the air, but, from a consumer’s point of view, it’s definitely going to be affordable. The project will ultimately sit on a server maintained gratis and depend largely on volunteer labour to administer content. The only “costs” are those to the established Youthworks publishing division, but hopefully we can transition the way they do their high-school level content effectively, so they’re commissioning content for the web and selling it there. Something that’s really exciting is the possibility that, instead of commissioning content, it’s possible to purchase it directly and already created from a pool of resources on the website.

There’s definitely a workable model here, somewhere.

Prayer is greatly welcomed for:

• wisdom trying to figure that model out
• energy and resources to make it happen (in whatever form)
• adoption and enthusiasm from youth leaders and kids
• effectiveness in web strategy as we attempt to use it as an evangelistic outreach tool, and a tool for the growth of existing ministry
• and, hand-in-hand with that last point, that God’s will be done and if He wills it, that growth would be given!

Sessions about architecture to creative strategies to the theology of “promotion” (which we don’t call marketing for fear of stirring the controversy pot) to a rather helpful copyright session (albeit one raising more questions than it answered), as well as great food, a comfortable venue, and generally excellent organisation, etc.

Go along next year.

And, now that positive recommendation is cemented firmly without mention of the web…

I did, however, take great exception to the web strategy speaker, who I am tempted to pour out all manner of vitriolic utterances against but will attempt to refrain. He essentially said that footer keyword-stuffing was fine, as was spamming meta tags (though, thankfully, he acknowledged search engines pay “less attention” to them these days — I would put that closer to “insignificant attention and not worth the markup bloat they so often are”). Everything he had to say about content for the web could be surmised in the keyword, “keywords”, paying no attention to the different copy-writing demands of web media and the flow-on effects of organic keyword enhancement. Further, he managed to suggest online games for youth and prize competitions as legitimate marketing tactics, which, to me, seems brain-dead — perhaps I should just say “an unproductive use of time”. The entire presentation appeared to have been repurposed from a very basic web 1001 presentation to small businesses, without much (or any) regard for audience feedback.

For example, he asked questions at the beginning to get an indication of where the audience was at in terms of web presence (I would say well over 90% had a website, with probably half of that being maintained in some capacity — yes, our website is getting touched up soon… heh, in all my free time) and then proceeded to completely ignore that (although he did act very surprised at the number of hands that went up) and tell everyone about how to get online in the first place. Complete with the worst in Powerpoint presentation technique.

Definitely not a highlight of the day!

Anyway, that aside, I went home feeling pretty motivated to GetStuffDone™ and started on the three gazillion changes pending for the Matthias site… then gave up when Budd called saying Borat was on. I’ve generally had a great evening, though — a few hours with a glass of red wine and a sense of accomplishment as content takes shape, then a conversation about using Google Maps to plot some 2,100 retail outlets effectively (no consensus as to how to achieve this yet, because that’s 2,100 points to be rendered client-side as an overlay, which would probably crash some browsers, if not make them run hideously slowly — but the brain is churning over), then watching that crazy movie. Yeah, you’ve got to laugh at it, but… gosh. Really hope they went back and explained it was satire to some of those people, if not apologising outright. Having said that, I think he’s reached the limits of the persona; it really got a bit repetitive and predictable (but still evoking laughter for shock value) in parts. I still laughed loudly.

Anyway. More to come soon.

It’s also on Google Video if you’re not Flash-friendly (they offer MP4 downloads as well as the in-site Flash and proprietary GVP (Google video player) rubbish).

Alluded to in the video, “myspace audience” are located at myspace.com/morbelli. Not up at time of writing.

Yet, increasingly, our surfing habits are defined by this bizarre social concept that seems to be shaping certainly acquisitions and web-two-point-oh-bubblism, wherein websites serve users by connecting them with one another, not on the basis of them knowing what they wanted, but rather in a bizarre a priori manner whereby degrees-of-separation (MySpace) or user-supplied-already-knowns (LiveJournal, Xanga, etc.) define connectedness and displayed content.

Search is no longer the macro-inter killer app, but an intra-site facility applied to microcosm — often based on “transparent” technology that has, on the basis of known knowns (in the words of a certain Rumsfeld), already done some of the hard work for users (I should say people, but don’t out of habit: it is an industry hazard) without actually asking them anything. This is where location– and organisation-based matching (cf. MySpace, Facebook, etc.) come in.

But none of this data is intelligently searchable by generic engines.

None of this data (in the case of Myspace especially, horribly marked-up doing-everything-wrong-with-the-web technically entity that it is) is available for indexing by search engines because it’s not abiding by any defined semantics. There is not, for example, any overwhelming use of microformats — hCard, etc. — for defining contact details in any common sense. Yet these things are searchable within a given website.

And, what’s more, these things are searchable with great precision within (social networking) sites. This is because of a very well defined internal semantic (not the “semantic web”, but internal data structures) and an enforced obedience to these structures that was never a part of pre-SocNet sites.

SocNet platforms are radically different from web 1.0 systems in that they are (ironically) vastly more constricting. As “web 1.0″ I would cite Geocities and free web hosting services, portals, and all-things-to-all-people content networks. Now, we’ve got blogs (precisely defined websites), MySpace (chiefly SocNet profiles with bits on the fringes common to the users, and now with enough impetus to appear unstoppable), Flickr (free — and fee-for-service that people actually pay for — web hosting, precisely defined as photo hosting), and, strangely, a portal (Yahoo!) still on top of Alexa 500 rankings. A portal that owns both Flickr and Geocities, but has changed the model of the latter to place greater emphasis on fee-for-service hosting. But I digress into strategy — the point is not that, but rather in the way social data is stored.

Flickr is meta-data rich. It uses a well defined system based on EXIF, intrinsic semantics (title, description, tags — tags that get used properly, unlike Facebook which doesn’t bother to make such things clear — I want Facebook to flop, by the way, because it annoys me, so don’t expect nice things to be said about it. It’s a poor closed-system imitator, albeit with a stupidly effective advertising model everyone else should be wishing they came up with first but haven’t seen in order to copy… because it’s a closed system (or used to be) exclusive in scope. Which makes it very effective SocNet/Web 2.0, by my own definition, so I don’t really have a basis for complaint.) and extrinsic semantics (groups, pools, etc.).

Profiles, unlike ‘pure’ SocNet (Myspace, Facebook), permit anonymity, but allow disclosure of as much as is desired: at any rate, that is not the purpose of the site. Myspace/Facebook’s raison d’etre is profiles. (Well, and that and cash-cow-marketing-tool of the *R**IA’s of the world) Accordingly, its profiles have very definite semantics even whilst the rest of the site may not (I speak of Myspace more, here). Myspace gives core “Details” profile info individual fields, whilst allowing a diverse “Interests & Personality” information in freeform textareas that are designed to entice users into participation (and, possibly, aiding more fuzzy searches — but mostly I think it’s just compelling content, as there is no immediately obvious way to search that data).

“Interests & Personality”, along with blog content, seems to be the only freeform contributed material available on the site. Want music or a video with your profile? You’ve got to browse to the band’s site, load the player (no go in Opera with Flash at the minute, it seems), and then select “Add” on the track. They (yeah, it’s kinda big-brotherish) know exactly what song you chose, what band it’s from, what genre, etc. — that is to say, unambiguously and certainly beyond a probably-common song title. This isn’t an upload-yourself-and-we’ll-manage-rights kind of thing. The officiality gives that internal data structure that much more depth: but, again, the point is that the data is internal and not open.

This, it seems, is the defining quality of SocNet. That’s what makes the ideas of open federation advocated by Google Talk earlier this year so bizarre for the rest of us. We don’t particularly care, because closed systems mean innovation (because we can define new data for ourselves to work with) and/or extensibility that isn’t possible in an open platform (if, for example, not all federated partners agree to a spec extension — take, for example, Google Talk’s own Jabber base and proprietary VoIP on top of that). Openness is in Google’s interests, because it’s so dependent on things being open for its core business (search). But real people want services that work, not services that push them to another site. I’ve never trusted sites that bounce me off to Google for their site’s search, even if it’s one of those crappy co-branded things. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you make someone inspect your website from an inferior perspective when all the information is stored in a database, with the possibility of more semantically meaningful search open internally only?

Google won’t deal with your internal search needs. It’s not designed to. It does a great job of dealing with publicly indexed materials completely aside from SocNet services. SocNet sites thrive on and are empowered by strong intrinsic semantics that make clever profile-based (or UGC–based) search possible, which builds loyalty etcetera in a way foreign to informational websites. SocNet is experiential and (surprise surprise) social — it doesn’t have to be about anything.

Content was deposed as king sometime in the middle of the first decade of the twenty first century, and with that regime change his deputy, Search, was also shuffled to a somewhat less prominent position. Somewhere out of sight, Search’s identical twin, Query, is the real power behind the throne: it uses unindexed data and makes clever links to bring people closer together in a way that traditional search engines had never even envisaged.

I could have even hit I’m feeling lucky. I’M FEELING FREAKIN’ UNLUCKY! Number 1 match for “adolescent emotional development” (entered not out of desparation but simply on a whim this evening to see what it turned up! I’ll confess I was expecting angsty blog entries from some more-erudite teenagers rather than actual research.) unveils a brilliant overview page from an Assoc. Prof. at Queen’s Uni (Canada)‘s developmental psychology department, which is incredibly well supported with citations, etc.

I should quit this whole uni/vocational dealing-with-people-and-books gig right now and go back to my little geek world in which Google knows all and Wikipedia can be read without fear of violent reprisals from the faculty thought-police. The two are converging! It’s like those cheesy rooms in movies with spikes on the walls that couldn’t realistically kill you properly because of the ridiculously large space between spikes that makes scaling the wall possible! And now I’ve stopped whining and am just procrastinating.

So here are two photos.

Note the easter-egg in this image. If you go to Sydney and need to show someone what one looks like, there are about four on the front lawns.

Feel free to steal these images, etc./link to this page. Deep link images and die a horrible death. I’ve refrained from doing BadThings to a couple of MySpace users thus far, but if anyone with slightly more brains tries it then the images will probably turn into things you’d rather they didn’t. Here ends the warning that also applies to every image published here.