Several years ago my limited brain, such as it is, became a little too tired of HTML and CSS coding to the point where I could do neither unless a pair of headphones were able to invoke noise into my ear canals. That sounds harsher than it probably was at the time but listening to podcasts grew on me… and I pretty well never code HTML or CSS anymore unless my life depends on the outcome.

This year I’ve also evolved into loading these podcasts onto my mp3 player for trips on public transport, pet walking and domestic chores like washing and drying the dishes. So I consume a great deal of podcasts over the week… I thought it worth sharing the main ones.

General Information, Facts & Brain Entertainment

My favourite podcasts tend to offer up unique content for my ever-active brain to digest. This ranges from the diversity of Radio Lab looking at scientific and cultural phenomenon; Tank Riot are some crazy arsed media and douchebag outing guys from Wisconsin; The Memory Palace simply has awesome five minute obscure morsels about American history; the Moth podcast are stories told live by real people; Snap Judgement are stories by people of decisions made at a critical moment; and, A History of the World in 100 Objects are 100 episodes about objects of art, design and cultural significance and their historic context.

• Radio Lab
• Tank Riot
• The Memory Palace
• Moth Podcast
• Snap Judgement
• A History of the World in 100 Objects

Marketing and Social Context

If you aren’t aware, marketing is everything from product or service creation to after the goods are sold or consumed. It’s not just about advertising. The Age of Persuasion goes in-depth into issues about brand and discusses current strategic marketing moves; The Beancast is another great marketing podcast that offers up a similar discusson; and, 99% Invisible picks a different subject to discuss every episode including design (it could have been included under the General Information listing).

• The Age of Persuasion
• The BeanCast
• 99% Invisible

Design

Debbie Millman has one of the most seductive voices and I always enjoy hearing her introduction monologues on Design Matters. Each episode she interviews a leading designer. Yes, I probably need more design exposure but this has been a long-time favourite show.

• Design Matters with Debbie Millman

Photography

Another area where I’d like to find more high quality podcasts would be photography… but by that stage I’ve already listened to The Candid Frame and Camera Dojo and feel more like running around taking photographs than listening to more podcasts about taking photographs. We all need some inspiration in our lives… these are great and they interview interesting professionals and discuss helpful topics.

• The Candid Frame
• Camera Dojo
• Tips from the Top Floor

Web Professional Must-Subscribe Podcasts

Say no more… practically anything coming out of Dan Rubin’s 5by5 Network, Boagworld, Think Vitamin or the Spoolcast are professional must-subscribe podcasts. This is an area where there are really no limits to the number of podcast shows and conference downloads that you can get involved in so choose to your own tastes and politics. This podcast diet includes general industry information, web business news and discussion, usability research and a little bit of humour. It’s my all-bran way of staying in touch with the contemporary web industry.

• The Big Web Show
• Boagworld
• Think Vitamin Radio
• Spoolcast
• The Pipeline
• Briefly Awesome
• The Dev Show
• Internet Superhero

Science

There are some interesting science research papers out there and although I struggled with being interested as a high school student I found it grew on me as I got older. I’ve developed a need to make sense of the world around me… how people interact… where our place is in the universe and the environment.

• NPR Science Friday
• All in the Mind
• Ockham’s Razor
• Dr Karl
• Dr Karl’s Science on Mornings – Triple J

The listed podcasts are those that I listen to every episode of during my week’s ambulation and domestic drudgery. It really does sound like a lot but you’d be surprised how easy it is to push some audio books into that regime and push in the daily wheelbarrow of presentations. If you really want to be science-eager then sit in front of your computer and watch Sixty Symbols: Videos about the Symbols of Physics and Astronomy.

I can’t over-emphasise the amount of information you can absorb in a podcast diet over a month. But be warned, you can get caught up in listening to the same old preaching to the converted and waste the opportunity. Follow your nose and enjoy the information stream.

If you don’t get that, you may have a website with large blocks of colour and text which reads Advertise Here. You may even have a fancy page of terms and conditions where you sound officiously experienced in the Internet Marketing industry. You may even try to make demands and set conditions that further dissuade people.

Don’t bullshit yourself – because business is not about bullshitting anybody – there is no lack of screen real-estate on the World Wide Web that makes advertisers desperate for the attention of your little blog, one of billions of URLs hocking its arse on the information highway.

OK that sounds negative. But there is an upside to knowing your own limitations and those of your business resources and capabilities. The upside is you can stop wasting time chasing the wrong business model and discover the right one.

You can visualise your blog as the wall of your living room – how many people see that living room? That’s your entire profit pool in regards to the advertiser’s market. Out of those eyeballs that see your living room wall, how many would convert to purchasing customers and repeat customers? That’s your actual value to advertisers.

It sounds ominous. What it’s telling you is that unless you have a HUGE number of eyeballs and unless you can quantify who they are, what they REALLY buy, and how they REALISTICALLY convert to sales, then you are pushing shit uphill (an Australian term) to convince a profit-oriented business to invest in your screen real estate.

So what do you do? The first step is to pull down the signs of desperation from your sidebar – yep those Advertise Here GIFs that tell the world you’re a virgin.

The second step is you need to quantify your readership – your eyeballs. If you don’t have enough eyeballs then appreciate your weakness. If you really do have 100,000 people every day spending half an hour reading your content then you might be in business.

The third and most difficult step is to rethink your value proposition in the eyes of the website visitor. Are there 10 places they can get similar content or 10,000 or 10,000,000… it makes a huge difference. If you want to pursue the advertising business model you need a reason for those eyeballs to come to your living room.

It might just be that you need another business model. Advertising isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of revenue streams.

First there’s the increasingly slower browsing experience, as Matt noted in Is Firefox Losing its Focus?… which makes me wonder what ever happened to the idea that a faster browser was a better browser?

Second, Firefox has been crashing at ten minute intervals all week on my system. As a user I don’t really give a damn why its doing that… its doing that because its not the best browser anymore. I reinstalled Firefox but it continues to crash.

Third, after reading Matt’s post where he mentioned the speed improvements offered by the latest Firefox update – well, I got ahead of myself. The update has somehow taken over the stylesheets of this website and practically every piece of text except for the first paragraph of articles and pages is now bold. Oh thanks, Mr Firefox. Spec-fucking-tacular.

Which begs the bastard point of this bastard situation (and I’ll bold it for everybody not just Firefox 3.6 users) – Is Firefox now my Internet Explorer?

I ask that question because time is money and Firefox costing me money (and time) is no different than Microsoft’s inherent bugs. No, none of the other sites I’ve worked on have this issue… what can I say? I had a persona enabled for a little while after the update and that may have done something askew… but as its disabled and the bolding remains then there is an issue… right? And even if this was somehow partly related to the persona – why the fuck have personas? Either way its Firefox’s intrusion onto my work day.

So spec-fucking-tacular. Thank you. Oh joy. Another Microsoft. All hail Fire-fucked.

I’m sure there’s a gamut of idiots and trolls that you can think of – probably one of those is going to comment here saying that I’m an idiot or a troll – or a trolliot or an idiroll. Whatever float’s their boat, I guess. Unfortunately neither idiocy or trolling are inherently criminal so we just have to live with their opinion. Don’t laugh, I noticed in Zeldman’s recent A Zing too Far that at least one techno-troll in his comment list has trolled this website in a previous iteration.

Here’s a tip: this afternoon I heard a great little rule to print out and put on your office wall which explains succinctly why you should never argue with idiots (or trolls, for that matter. The reason not to argue with them is simple:

Never argue with an idiot (or a troll)… they’ll just drag you down to their level and beat you to a pulp with their experience.

The moment I heard it there was a little Amen to the little light in the back of my trolled-to-the-cows-came-home blogger head. After all, who hasn’t had that experience at sometime on the Internet? Seriously, fuck ‘em.

I’m one of those people who sadly miss the slow world before ubiquitous computing and the World Wide Web. Even though I work with these technologies I remember a slower, more relaxed time where the expectation of always on and plugged in weren’t on the radar. You sent a letter to England and it took about three weeks. If you phoned someone it was a special event, never casually undertaken. But, given the changing face of the world over the last 30 or so years it’s been more than a technological change. Professor Clay Shirky asserts just as the printing press changed our society to a different society than that which preceded it (giving wide access to literacy, for example), so too the world of computers has changed our society to be an entirely different one than the world which I referred to at the beginning of that paragraph. The cost of ad hoc group forming and social interaction have fallen close to zero. It is entirely unlike anything preceding it in the history of human kind.

Having finally read Professor Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, it’s a book I’d highly recommend to a wide range of professionals. It’s not really enough to intuitively realise these technologies are out there. Yes, they’re useful tools. But once we start understanding why they’re useful tools and thinking about they way they enable interaction, then we can begin the path of harnessing the power in an intelligent way. From flashmobbing a crowd of political ice cream eaters and bringing down a dictatorship, to simply creating an ad-hoc group of like minded individuals (whether it’s for Buffyism or to develop Linux) – these social tools enable a human need that can now go way beyond anything we would have previously been able to envision. We could simply not have done a Wikipedia before these technologies enabled it.

If you weren’t around before the time of cheaply available computers plugged into a global distributed network, it’s probably not that obvious. But to someone who predates Web, for example, there’s an obviousness about the difference to how we get things done and the expectations on our personal attention and space. Someone without an email address and a mobile phone may not even be employable! Imagine, in the 1980′s, if you wanted to contact 10 people and arrange a picnic. Imagine. Now you had to do a whole bunch of expensive steps to make that happen that in most cases dissuaded you from beginning. You had to contact them individually and negotiate a time and place (easier said than done with different availabilities). However, nowdays, you can form groups on a global scale and dismantle them as quickly. We are constantly working on better and more sophisticated tools (and worse ones) to help us achieve ridiculously easy and cheap group management.

There’s a lot in this book so I’m not going to just offer up a synopsis, you actually have to read it to get the jellybeans. But it’s worth it. If only to realise how the cost of doing business dropping through the floor offers us opportunities to develop and build things that would have otherwise been uneconomical. The world changed. While we were asking ourselve if the 20th century was going to be defined as the Space Age or the Nuclear Age, we failed to grasp that it was defined by a more humble technology – the transistor. The advent of information sharing, mass data storage, and a global always on distributed network are far more defining than the mere invention of bombs and rockets. It’s reshaped the world we live in.

The short answer: photoblogging is fun and relatively fast to do once you’ve got a large number of shots kicking around the hard drive. It’s led me to be a lot more organised with my image library than usual. It’s not about throwing up the best shots or even the most technically proficient. Photoblogging for me is about sharing glimpses of the life I live, the objects that come into contact with my life, and the journey that carries me through from conception to decay. Life is such a fleeting dream that we pass many of these objects and fail to see them. Photography allows me to stop the moment and pause. It’s like taking a breath.

So if you’re interested then hook over to Walk a Mile in my Shoes to share that adventure. I’d describe myself as an art photographer rather than a professional technically efficient one. It’s about enjoying the experience.

If we really want to get passionate about web standards and producing quality products in the web environment the conversation has to be initiated about internationalisation and ways we might overcome these global audience limitations.

In Henny’s post she points out some huge barriers to the adoption of web standards in China including 95 per cent usage of Internet Explorer 6, most ecommerce sites rely on Active X, and the Chinese have a lack of high quality translated resources for web standards developers to reference. All valid. Another large part of that issue is the cultural and semantic differences between the language and people, which means not only literal translations of websites and resources but also some low level repurposing. And, when you really think of it, these are also subject to political oversight – consider John Oxton’s Joshuaink a few years ago. Web standards resources may not all be smiles and culturally polite cafe conversation.

An interesting facet of how we can deal with Chinese web standards is through the expatriate Chinese communities. In Australia, for example, Chinese is the second most spoken language (in general terms). Do these communities develop websites? Are we already working with them? Do they blog in English, Chinese or both? As a catalyst this would be my considered focus for promoting web standards development in China.

Rather than simply interpreting Zeldman or Celik or Shea.

These communities understand dialect, culture and share family bonds to a degree we could never offer. The multicultural societies we exist in, recognised for the resource they offer, can provide much of the answer to Henry’s post. We have to stop looking past other cultures within our society and embrace the idea that internationalisation and localisation are a part of the web right here. The world isn’t out there anymore. A combination of multiculturalism and the World Wide Web have brought everyone to everyone’s doorstep.

Please, pull off your culture-blinkers and look around the streets of whatever city or town you live in. Look at the people you work with and the faces in elevators. Drop the boxed idea that we’re all Anglo, or European. Many are African, Asian, South American. So if our own societies are multicultural then why do we keep ignoriing internationalisation in our everyday work? The 2001 Australian Census [PDF 19KB] identified that 66% of people in Sydney spoke only English at home. Leaving 34% of the city primarily speaking non-English or at least being bilingual in their own comfort zone.

So the issue of promoting web standards in China has a wider question attached to it. How, as web standardistas, do we promote this idea that the websites we build for a local audience also need to serve an internally international audience? And how do we interconnect that internally international audience with their own cultures to spread those methodologies they’re adopting? Because, as I mentioned, simple literal translations are difficult. We have different business cases and value systems. Authentic Chinese / Indian / international writers need to be pushing the information out.

Richard Ishida’s @media 2007 presentation Designing for International Users: Practical Tips (available for download as audio and with accompanying slides) presses a few of the complexities that translation involves. But, and this is just my opinion, this shouldn’t be about us translating for them. Translation? Our immigrant populations need to be included in our heterogenous social networks. I say it again, we need to step out of this box we inhabit that insists that society is like us… that paradigm is letting us down.

For web standards to push resources into China, and elsewhere, we need to utilise the natural bridges of information scent within our reach. Long journeys start with small steps.

The camera I’m currently working with is a Nikon D90 with a NIKKOR 18-105 VR (Vibration Reduction) lens, although I had an 18-135 without the VR for a few weeks but handed that one back. My 18-105 lens is quite versatile and meets 90 percent of my needs out of the box. I’m scouring the after-Christmas pennies for what may be a decent quality macro lens early to the middle months of the new year. Scrimp and save.

One thing I haven’t done with Walk a Mile in my Shoes is to enable the commenting functionality. Would there be a point? Probably not. But it’s just too time consuming dealing with moderation. I guess if anyone has anything to add they can email me directly or use the contact form on this site.

While I retain the copyright on the images feel free to contact me if you’d like to purchase (or simply use) any of the work on the site. I can also arrange for prints. So enjoy the ride.

[Note: The image of the D90 is lifted straight from the Nikon website and they retain copyright of that image. This is not mine to give and my borrowing it is in that grey area of free advertising and promotion, so I guess they won't mind.]

WordPress 2.7 is coming out and it’s smoking hot by all accounts with some sweet under the hood changes, a new Dashboard, and a brand new administration interface that will make it more usable. Did they say more usable? What area of usability research has ever said changing a content management administration area’s interface several times in a year will equal greater usability? Most users I deal with struggle with their email applications – small to medium businesses and smaller Not for Profit organisations.

In fact, as someone who has to deal with client education I’m going to have to field a number of business related client calls that are going to ask me WTF happened to the buttons? Where the hell did that feature move to? Is this the same program? What have I done to them while they were asleep? To many of them there will be an attribution of fault laid on my professional doorstep.

There are a number of problems that can be identified here:

• WordPress is getting feature creep – I’d like a pool if you could add that? And a horse?
• WordPress has mixed up usability and change – one makes my life easier and the second Makes Me Think! Makes My Clients Think! The usability for existing non-technical users might not be so hot.
• WordPress is listening to a developer an academic community not all of whom are delivering their product commercially to clients.
• WordPress have forgotten most clients aren’t developers – most clients struggle at the email level. Most clients are definately not us.

In a bright new world where everyone is a technical expert I’d have to smile and say I welcome the redesigned redesign of the WordPress administration section. But I don’t, especially in the name of usability. It is never good for software to keep moving things dramatically around. The trick is to improve features and improve code without impacting the user at all. True, the new interfaces may aid usability for someone opening it for the first time in 2009, although it has only been claimed not proven although testing at Ball State University’s Center for Media Design appears to say I am wrong on that score. But, in my opinion, for the real world – usability will negatively be impacted because of the change.

From a business perspective I now have to ask myself whether I need to change my preferred platform for small to medium business because WordPress doesn’t offer my non-tech-savvy client base the stability. Training manuals need to be rewritten from the ground up, as well.

I can only say that usability is a little more complicated than listening to ten thousand people with a wishlist in your developer forums and making a pretty design with some fancy new spangled widgets in the wild might not necessarily match the testing results that have been conducted at Ball State. So, please, tell me that the WordPress 2.7 administration interface redesigned redesign is prettier and more efficient. But don’t tell me it’s more usable. Usable to who? And when?

This should have been discussed, thought out and executed when they were dealing with Happy Cog on the last iteration. Seriously, altered interfaces are going to impact the end users. These end users are mom and pop everybody, not the developer community. The developer community will keep asking you for everything. Everything! Users will only ask you for consistency and understandability so they can change content.

Any time you significantly change the user experience you are going to put cognitive barriers in front of your real world users (not developers, users). But yes, the new interfaces are very pretty. Unfortunately they will cost me commercial hours explaining, retraining and redocumenting them for my existing clients (again).

OK all the WordPress fanboys can unblock their ears and blow their snotty handkerchiefs that not everyone is elated. There, don’t you feel better? Now say it after me – usability improvement my arse! Please show me the metrics of that study for existing users.

So back to the story. This mental model was interesting from a client perspective because it involved blogs. You have to understand that we were going to use blogging software to create a low level content management system that would then be hooked into some server side processing of an online assessment. The client enters articles, tags them appropriately, and then these are used contextually at the other end of the assessment process. If that makes any sense. So, basically, they have an information section and we’re using blogging software to get a whole bunch of stuff for free.

And back to our clients mental model. One mockup used the term Information on the global navigation while another, quickly sketched on the bus to the meeting, used the term Blog. They are in many ways exactly the same thing but for some reason the client had enough time to put information into the system but not enough to enter blog content – the exact same content. Seriously. In a show / hide experience I watched an instant smile / frown response similar to showing a small child the lollies behind my back. And this was because to my client the software and her perception of blogging were synonymous. WordPress, for example, and blogging are the same thing boxed into the one mental model.

This is interesting from not only in the worldview of the client but also of any website user. Mental models they bring with them to a web interface affect how they interact and perceive affordances.

After coming back to this about five or six times with the client it became apparent that she still couldn’t separate the two concepts. And how could she? Seriously? Because when you think of it I was asking her to believe she was wrong about the world, a much greater challenge than to insist she just enter some information. One was a mountain and the other was achievable. Show / hide.

I’m not really sure how someone can have half an hour to type in a piece of information but no time to type in a blog but that’s my worldview. A divide by zero problem. Ultimately, what we use a piece of software for might be outside the accepted paradigm of writing to tell friends what we did on the holidays. To us its just a piece of software and not a black box.