RSS“I hate Mozilla”
Put together on October 26, 2009 3:56 pm by Dimitris
Well, perhaps ‘hate’ is a bit too strong a word but just as I was taking a break from work today I bumped on this.
Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.
Mozilla Raindrop aims to become a ‘unified inbox’ for all your online activity. Now that’s hardly a new idea and way too many attempts have been made to address the issue of information overload from the constantly increasing number of sources these days.
But here’s the thing with this particular announcement. My instinctive reaction was ‘Ok, where do I download it?’ – I never do that. After having played around with many applications that proclaim to manage this and achieve that, I just don’t bother any more. Why? Because I know that in the online world it’s very difficult to deliver – especially with startups offering early versions. I’ll usually wait for the early-adopters to weed out the wheat from the chaff. So, unless it’s a friend asking me to test his product or idea, ‘uh-oh, not for me, thanks’.
But not today. Raindrop got me.
Why? Is it the excellent description of Next Web? No, you read stuff like that all the time. Is it the list of features? No, they’re worthless without a good implementation behind them. Is it the video demo? Hardly impressive (but seems on the right track). So, it must be that at least unconsciously I trust Mozilla and Mozilla Labs. From Firefox (ok, leaving its memory usage aside) to it being open-source and from experimental projects like Ubiquity to Jetpack, Mozilla is (or is expected to be) there to come up with the right ideas and deliver – and I’m happy for this. And although I’m all up for, for example, Chrome and Opera when it comes to browsers, and Gmail when it comes to email, I have to admit that Mozilla has me in its stranglehold.
- Image via Wikipedia
And that’s why I hate it.
Oh, and also because Raindrop is only at version 0.1.
tags: product
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Enabling content shortening
Put together on October 23, 2009 11:38 am by Dimitris
![[ TALL & short ]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2239/3534127274_80a443c068_m.jpg "[ TALL & short ]")
- Image by CCiYn via Flickr
In my previous post I wrote about how information can be broken down to its components. Following that, these components can be summarised and the summaries combined again to create a shorter and perhaps easier to digest and spread piece of information.
So, if this ‘analysis, summary and combination’ approach is a good idea, what would be the best way to implement it on existing bodies of information – e.g. blog posts, news articles and other passages on the web?
Most probably a number of methods can be combined. For example, the author of the text can do this at the time of writing to produce a shorter version of it. In some cases it’s already happening in some way or another: Wordpress blogs allow for filling in an ‘Excerpt’ field – ‘optional hand-crafted summaries of your content that can be used in your theme’, CNN articles have 3-5 bullet points summary of the facts of some articles and I bet there are other examples out there.
In addition to this, this process can be crowdsourced. Technically, this is as simple as enabling your site to receive comments – only instead of comments users would leave summaries. And instead of writing them e.g. at the end of a blog post, an icon at the start of the paragraph can be clicked to leave a summary of the paragraph that follows. The summary could then appear as a permanent addition to the post (after it has been moderated, of course).
In a sense that’s an even better approach than letting authors do it themselves since the ‘crowds’ will introduce a selection criterion: only the most worthy texts will be provided with a more concise version. (Of course, there’s nothing stopping the actual author from providing a summary himself at a later time).
Such crowdsourcing is already happening using various web-annotation services (mostly for commenting or editing purposes e.g. GooseGrade) or can be achieved by adapting online translation services (e.g. Transifex). The list of similar services is quite long if one looks into it.
Such services however are not made specifically for the purpose of shortening, promoting and adding meaning in this way to an existing passage, so perhaps a more specific service could be created to cover this particular niche (especially as the business of providing meaning becomes more relevant as Semantic Web technologies mature).
tags: analysis, idea, product |
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Information building blocks
Put together on October 20, 2009 11:48 am by Dimitris
- Image by luc legay via Flickr
While code is compiling I thought I’d do some maintenance work here and (after upgrading to Wordpress v2.8.4) I stumbled upon a draft post which I had started ages ago but never finished. It was inspired by an article by Jeff Jarvis whom I deeply respect as a blogger. The article was about how the hyperlink and the topic are becoming the new most important building blocks in news. (Ironically, I haven’t kept the particular link…) Considering information in general, the idea is of considerable relevance now that a lot of information spreads via one sentence (its title) and an accompanying link – whether in the Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed news feeds.
Perhaps then information can be thought of to be a bit like language and its components where you have a large piece of text, split into paragraphs, sentences, words and finally their roots. Similarly, a blog post or a news article – or even a podcast or a video since they too can nowadays be ‘converted’ to text – can be broken down to its constituents going from larger to smaller parts.
So, for example, in the same way that a word can be broken down to 2-3 parts that indicate different things (e.g. un-forget-able) and in the same way that a blog post has paragraphs with distinct information in them maybe information in general can also be broken down to its constituents – the main building blocks it’s made up of: its topics and its subtopics, the facts building up to an argument, a list of arguments towards a thesis, etc.
Take a closer look at the next article you’ll read – can you break it down to its constituents? These components may be concentrated in the first sentence from each paragraph taken verbatim (works well in some news sites) – or a title/summary of the paragraph written explicitly to contain its core idea. Some blog posts in particular – especially if they are really short – may be ’summarised’ to a single sentence or two.
I think the main idea of an article’s paragraph can be summarised with minimal loss of content using a simple sentence (hence the invention of titles). So if you could collapse e.g. a 5-paragraph post in 5 relatively simple sentences – that’s a huge step towards limiting information overload.
The question remains however how you can go from the expanded idea to its summary (e.g. from a paragraph to a sentence) but let’s leave this for another post.
tags: analysis |
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Websource.it: Business Development person wanted!
Put together on July 22, 2009 9:51 am by Dimitris
Now that other projects (among which the OpenFund) are under way, it’s time to see what’s become of previous projects. Case in point websource.it, a simple website that allows you to compare the number of Google results for up to five searches simultaneously, a side project started about a year back. But it is time it has been taken to the next stage.
So what does this mean? From its official blog:
We are willing to pay 50% of the revenue for the next 3 months to anyone who is willing to take on the business development aspect of the project. The person we choose will be responsible for detailing a business plan (no need to actually write it, just formulate it), promote the service, handle marketing and SEO services, manage the community, use social and new media and generally be creative about expanding it. And at the end of the 3-month period we discuss the collaboration anew.
That’s it. Send us your best shot and we’ll see what’s the best that can come out of a project we believe can still yield good results (and revenue).
tags: idea, project, report |
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The OpenFund is here!
Put together on July 19, 2009 9:07 pm by Dimitris
Most of our readers will probably know that I’m involved in the local tech and entrepreneurship community as one of the co-organisers of the OpenCoffee events. These are monthly meetings which have been happening for the past two years approximately in cities all over Greece bringing together everyone interested in tech innovation from a number of perspectives: developers, graphic artists, marketeers, business people and investors have all been provided with a focal point where they can meet, network and listen to success (as well as failure) stories, exchange ideas and find collaborators. The main Athens meetings are by now gathering more than 200 people while also sub-events with more specialised themes have also attracted significant crowds.
It would seem that the community, the brainpower as well as the interest is in place for a full ecosystem to blossom – apart from a couple of ingredients which can be basically summed up in two words: advice and funding. This is where a new project comes in: enter the OpenFund!
The OpenFund is a project which will run in four month cycles and which will allow entrepreneurs to form teams of 2 to 4 people in order to make that team’s idea go from conception to creation and then to a full product and business. In order to get there, a team of advisors is in place to provide support in all issues that may arise and in which the team’s skills are not sufficient. This includes but is not limited to legal, tax, technical, marketing, business development, promotion and any other challenges that would otherwise deter the entrepreneurs from fulfilling their and their idea’s potential. But the OpenFund is also about providing monetary support: 20-30K euros will be given to the team to make their idea come true.
In exchange for this offer the teams will transfer 20% of their company: 12% to the investors and 8% to the OpenFund itself. The teams are also required to work full-time for the four month duration. The teams will be chosen by means of a competition: teams are called to submit a description of their idea as well as their member’s skills and the top 5 will be selected in each cycle. The criteria are pretty broad – the idea can be pretty much anything involving high-tech (i.e. software, the internet, mobiles etc), have a significant amount of innovation (me-too ideas are discouraged) and aim for the global market (the OpenFund may be based in Greece but the internet has no borders).
So, if you think you have the next Facebook or Google all planned out in your mind or on your whiteboard, head over to the OpenFund’s website and submit it in the application form. Proposals are open and the deadline is the end of September 2009.
tags: project |
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