Javaun’s Ramblings

Lance’s Comeback to Cycling in 2009 — powered by http://www.livestrong.com

I’ve now had a full 24 hours to play with Chrome and my initial reaction has only been reinforced: game-changing. Like others, I’ve noticed a few quirks — Chrome is temperamental in Facebook, for example — but otherwise it’s fast, clean, intuitive. I won’t abandon Firefox because of all the plugins I use (and frankly I want to continue to support Mozilla). But especially for complex applications such as mail and web analytics, I’ve never seen them run faster or more smoothly than on Chrome.

In all the reading I’ve done since Sunday, I hadn’t seen this NPR story on Chrome. We cover tech stories that have general newsworthiness; sometimes this means that we speak to public officials or pundits rather than the tech visionaries who can break things down. In this case though, we actually interviewed an analyst (don’t ask me what I think of analysts) *

We quote Sheri McLeash (and misspell her name) of Forrester as saying that the general web user is going to stick with what they know (i.e. MSIE)

“The general user population uses what they’re comfortable with and what they know,” says Sheri McLeash, an analyst with Forrester Research. “If you look at the e-mail example, most people keep e-mail accounts that they’ve had for years because they’re familiar with it.”

I’m calling BS on Sheri’s creds as an analyst. (15 years of publishing experience? Come on…)

She and many others are missing the boat on this one. That’s like saying on the launch of the iPod, “well, people really don’t want iPods. They want Walkman Cassette players, because people want what they know…”

It’s not about grabbing browser share (thought that may happen), it’s about upping the ante significantly. It’s about owning the cloud, and Google just wrote the next gen browser and the most powerful JS VM to date (they’re claiming benchmarks of 10x Mozilla/Tamarin and over 50x MSIE 7). They’re making the next generation of web apps possible. People stick with what they know when nothing revolutionary is happening. They don’t always know what they want until the see it.  This new browser is like someone just walked up to a bunch of cavemen playing with stone tools and not only did they throw them a few iron tools, they even gave them a couple of blacksmiths….

I liked this Wired piece, Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web.

 * Javaun’s general take on industry “analysts”: they are people often outside an industry, often without direct work experience in the area of coverage, whose job is to explain something complex to neophytes. If they were superstars in their area of coverage, they’d be entrepreneurs — not analysts.

I rode my bike to work today, so had I not run an errand in China Town, I wouldn’t have noticed that SmartBike DC launched today.

Ironically, I was coming back from the camera shop and had a real camera this time.

According to SmartBike’s website, 10 locations opened today, and the one I visited (Gallery Place) had about 12-15 slots for bikes. This is a far cry from the 750 lockup stations and 10,000 bikes that Paris launched on its opening day (they’ve since doubled both numbers), but still infinitely more than have ever existed anywhere in this country. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, the NPR online team launched the NPR API, or Application Programming Interface, to make NPR content freely and publicly available.

So what is an API and why should you care? From a technology perspective, an API is a channel that allows one application (such as a website) to share information and procedures with another website or application. A perfect example is a Google Map mashup. Any website or blog can embed a Google Map and plot their own data on top of it; for example, Trulia plots homes for sale in DC on a Google Map.

From the larger perspective of freedom of information, an API is a much bigger idea. It means that our content can appear anywhere, in almost any format. Anyone with an idea and some basic web skills can select, repurpose, and embed our content on the web, on a desktop computer, or even on a handheld device. Fans of David Sedaris, NPR Election coverage, or Ketzel Levine’s Talking Plants no longer have to search all over our website to find their favorite content. Audio, text, and photos can now come to them now as an embeddable blog widget, a Facebook application, or any other format they can imagine. I should mention that only a few of these widgets exist so far, but the API is out there, so it’s only a matter of time before people start building them.

The UK Guardian and BBC have experimented with very limited APIs. The BBC makes available feeds of short program descriptions and its program schedule, but it does not make its full content available. Back in May, the New York Times announced that it would be making all of its content publicly available via an API. As far as I know, NPR is the first major media organization to launch an API to make all of its content available.

NPR’s Zach Brand and Daniel Jacobson were the leaders of the project, and here are the full credits :

There were a ton of contributors to this new API with the primary technical architect being Harold Neal. Other major contributors include Joanne Garlow, Jason Grosman, Tony Yan, Ivan Lazarte, Stephanie Oura, Ben Hands, Shain Miley, Lindsay Mangum, Sugirtha Solai, Todd Welstein and Vida Logan, and others.

I’d noticed something different about the NY Times search over the last few weeks, but just realized today that it’s because they’re split testing a new interface. I have to say I really like it.

Google launched a new hosted site search solution on June 11. Though aimed mostly at SMBs, it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of large enterprises give Google’s Site Search a serious look.

NYTimes.com is splitting traffic, so to see the beta search you’re going to need to click the links below. In addition to the differences mentioned below, the algorithm is tuned differently in the new search. There is a different result set returned, possibly with less emphasis on AP stories, and I notice a lot more photos in the new results.

Old Search:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=afghanistan&st=fromcse

1. No multimedia included in results. Toggle result to match on “Closest Match”, “Newest First” or “Oldest first”
2. Date range radio buttons are difficult to discern and include a “custom date range” function
3. Complicated search filters and link to advanced search
4. Numbered results set
5. Separate blog results included in a right hand box
6. Refine results by NY Times section (Arts, Books, Business, etc). Pagination suggests an overwhelming results set.

(Click to Enlarge)

(Click to Enlarge)

Read the rest of this entry »

Jen’s friend Christine alerted us to a fascinating and highly-addictive website called brand tags. The concept is simple: the site shows you a familiar brand logo and you type the single word or short phrase that comes to mind when you see the logo.

The site is a social tagging experiment, and it aggregates all of the phrases for each brand into a tag cloud. (For those unfamiliar with a tag cloud, it’s a way of visually showing the prevalence of a certain tag. The more often a brand phrase is tagged by users, the larger it appears in the cloud.) The site is a side-project of a marketer, and in his blog he reports that he received over 600,000 tags in the first 2 weeks.

NPR: Awesome AND Boring

What first comes to mind when the masses think of NPR? Fox News? Taco Bell?

NPR’s brand tag cloud.
High recognition and a lot of favorable brand attributes, such as “intelligent”, “smart”, “honest”, “good”. We also have some negatives: “boring”, “stodgy”, “old”, “who?”. There are some misperceptions to overcome, such as “liberal”. And let’s not forget “schwetty balls”, the legacy of a very memorable Alec Baldwin SNL skit.

Fox News’ brand tag cloud.
Ouch! The wisdom of crowds has spoken. No need to pile it on here.

Taco Bell brand tag cloud.
As khopper said on Twitter:

The largest brand associations with Taco Bell, after CHEAP FAST MEXICAN FOOD appear to be CHIHUAHUA and DIARRHEA - yikes!

Comments? What did the masses say about some of your favorite brands?

Just when it looked like my writing was becoming a habit, life got in the way. For the past 2 months, most of my off-work hours have been spent on the bike in preparation for this weekend’s race.

I have a few that I’ve put on the back burner. More immediately, I’ll probably throw out a lot of mountain biking related posts, since that’s preoccupying my thoughts.

Each morning, Alessandra Olanow chooses an NPR radio story to illustrate in tongue-in-cheek fashion.

as a morning practice I listen to npr and do a little sketch on one of the stories

It’s a really simple and unique idea, and she does it extremely well. Alessandra already has a following who listens to the radio and tries to guess which story she’ll choose.

You can also receive her illustrations as a daily email newsletter through feedblitz.

Here’s one from April 14: “too many boys: demographic crisis looms in china”

Illustration by Alessandra Olanow

That’s right! We absolutely love it here and we’re building our dream home in the outlying Washington DC suburbs. We can’t even believe our luck! Someone just stalled construction and left a half-finished home, and we’re going to take it over and finish it to our ideal specifications. Jen and I constantly complain that we don’t have enough room to buy more stuff. That won’t be a problem anymore.

The lot is situated on several acres of old growth Virginia forest, which we’re clearing to make room for an extended garage, concrete patio, and tetherball court. Not counting the 3 story deck, the home will be about 12,000 square feet. It overlooks the highway and is just minutes from a mall that has a Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant and the largest indoor Laser Tag in the DC beltway.

Honestly, we never thought we could afford a home like this, but it’s amazing what you can do with financing. Jen and I got a 5 year ARM with a 1.5% introductory rate that won’t adjust for at least 6 months. Because home prices always go up, they’re also extending us an equity line of credit for an additional $80,000.

Our new neighbors are awesome! They’re helping us pick out molded falcon sculptures and bronze torches for our front gate.

One downside is that we can’t ride our bikes to work anymore. Our commute is increasing from 30 minutes one-way to about 4.5 hours roundtrip. But I think we’ll be really comfortable in our new rides, thanks to the home equity advance. Jen and I are each buying one, since she gets up 20 minutes earlier than me and it’s therefore impractical for us to carpool.

We’re going to have 16 guest bedrooms and are really excited to host all of our old friends. Come and see us!

My friend Forrest is getting married this weekend, and I just gave him my standard advice on getting married. Keep in mind that I’ve only been married 2 years (all happy, I might add), so I don’t have any pearls on growing your marriage such as “don’t go to bed mad” or “every new day is a blessing” or anything like that. Sorry, I can’t help you there. This stuff is the solid fundamentals to survive the day and give yourself a fighting chance as a married man.

1. Show up on time. This no-brainer bears repeating, even if your family, friends, and would-be spouse normally tolerate your lack of punctuality.

2. Show up sober. If you’re not responsible enough to do the math, get someone else to be your teetotaler. Probably not the Best Man.

3. Don’t lock your knees. When you’re standing up at the ceremony, keep a slight bend in your knees. Locking your knees out for a sustained period of time cuts off the blood supply to your brain, causing you to faint. They actually teach you this in the Army, where soldiers are required to stand at attention for hours during certain ceremonies. One friend in the 82nd Airborne told me about a time when his company was standing at attention with bayonets affixed to their rifles. Someone locked his knees, passed out, and gored the soldier in front of him.

Three points is a nice litany and easy to remember. As a corollary though, I should probably warn people to watch out for wedding pranks, such as friends who kidnap the bride between the reception and honeymoon.