London's mobile industry now has a monthly get-together, thanks to Mobile Monday London, aka momo london. I went to the first meeting Monday evening, which I enjoyed.

A show of hands showed the turnout to be roughly half and half techie/biz-marketing, with a fair chunk of designers (maybe 10%). Speakers were encouraged not to make a product pitch, instead there was a theme ("bridging the digital and physical worlds"), and the speakers oriented their talks towards their experiences and learnings that relate to the theme. Naturally they did mostly talk about their own products and used bits of what were obviously their standard presentations, but I think they did a decent job of not just coming in and pitching us.

There was a good bit of general discussion between speakers and audience. A common concern of the group that emerged was the difficulties of getting customers "into" a mobile product, in terms of the way platform incompatibilities, awkwardness of user experience, and legal and other obstacles that make barriers for users to register with and start using a mobile product and service. Since this is something that affects and requires all three of the types of mobile animals that came to this event to work together to solve, Mobile Monday has the potential to be quite interesting.

The organizer was Dan Appelquist, a technical manager of some sort for Vodafone. Russ Beattie also came in from Silicon Valley to attend. I was chuffed to meet him, since we've corresponded by blog years ago, and both still keep up with each others' blog. He prodded me to post more to my site, so here ya go Russ! I also met some other people, but I'm shit at remembering names, which is why I'm not a sales guy.

There were three speakers at the event, so I'll give a capsule review of each.

Dennis Hettema from OP3/Shotcode

Shotcode is one of those schemes where a visual code is put on a print advertisement, which users can point their mobile phone camera at to link directly to the advertiser's site. Hettema was the best speaker at the event, he was obviously more experienced at pitching than the others and so was more polished.

I have to say I'm not convinced that this kind of scheme is really likely to succeed. Hettema positioned this as a way to get around some of the limitations of the mobile platform, in particular the awkwardness for a user having to type a URL into their phone when they see an interesting advertisement. In reality though, this isn't how mobile advertising works, at least in the UK. Ads for mobile services ask people to send a text message with a simple keyword to a shortcode, a 5 digit phone number. When they do this, the advertiser can send a WAP push message, which is essentially a text message with an automatic link to whatever they like. This is a very widely used technique, and works on TV and other media where a visual code like shotcode would be difficult to use. Plus it doesn't need special software to be installed.

It was notable that when Hettema gave his stories of shotcode campaigns, talking about how successful they were, he didn't mention the total number of people that used it, which he would have if they'd had impressive results. Instead he mentioned how many times each user who did try it used the service. The one time he did mention how many people used it was a case where they handed out phones with their software preinstalled at a convention so exhibitors could scan shotcodes on attendees' badges to get their contact details.

Also, the speaker from the BBC gave figures for a campaign they did which used a shotcode-like scheme along with other ways for users to use their service, and the shotcode-like scheme got spanked.

Richard Jelbert from mTrack/KidsOK

KidsOK is a location-based service for parents to track their kids whereabouts. One tidbit I hadn't known is that there are location service aggregators that you can use instead of going to each operator. However, each operator still has to approve of every location based product, and they have different requirements, so it still sounds very painful. Jelbert is involved in a committee which is trying to come up with a standard Code Of Practice (COP) across operators. But it sounds like even with this, the requirements put up huge barriers to converting users.

KidsOK actually sell a product in retail stores, which is a registration kit. This involves getting a form by post, and
then going through a rigamarole with SMS messages to opt in. Jelbert says of the people who buy the kit and start the registration, 42% don't activate their account, and of those who do, 48% don't complete the opt-in.

The possibility of using a J2ME application to make this process smoother was raised, but Jelbert said this would make approval by operators more difficult. Basically, the standard Code of Practice outlines opt-in procedures using SMS, so if you follow that approval is easier, but doing something unusual means a lot of work to get the operators to sign off.

Location based services sound interesting, but very difficult to do in a way that is going to bring in the user. I think it's probably not worth doing unless you have a service that is killer.

Chris Yanda, BBC

Chris was a very non-marketing guy, but obviously into what he does. His story was about a project called "Coast", where they put up a series of signs at several hiking trails on the coast. These signs offered users several different ways to get information about their location via mobile, e.g. directions to other locations, trivia about the location, etc.

The signs were quite busy, crammed with various ways to access the service. The ways to access the information, and what I could gather about their level of useage, were:

• 4,000 Data code (a barcode type scheme like shotcode)
• 3,700 Audio calls (call up for a recorded message)
• 4,800 Web download (the same recorded messages, but d/l from web page, theoretically to load onto your phone and listen to on the hike)
• 137,000 WAP
• ? Text shortcode was the most popular, but no numbers given.

Interesting stuff!

This site has been down for a couple of weeks, thanks to a problem with the hardware I have been running it on for years. Unfortunately I don't really have much in the way of spare hardware for my personal use, so I couldn't just whack it onto another box. Also, I had my server at the offices of a company I used to work for, which meant that working on the box required me to ask one of my old work pals to hang around with me for a few hours after work while I tinkered with it, which I wasn't comfortable with. So I ended up just taking the box home.

I thought I would host it at home at the end of my DSL line - although it's only 256K up, which is peanuts for a real internet server, for my dinky personal site I thought it would be OK. But I kept having problems with the hardware, even though I do have another, similar server, it was having the same problem, which I think came down in the end to some bad RAM that I inadvertently swapped between boxes.

But never mind, although I could have gotten the thing working, I realized I just don't need to be spending that much time on the hardware issues. I do that sort of thing at work, so it's not a learning experience for me, it's just a chore. In the end I decided to sign up for a virtual hosting service.

This is something I never wanted to do, as someone who builds, runs, and develops Internet servers and software for a living, using a crappy ol' virtual host would be a serious comedown. But I didn't get a crappy service, I signed up with verio, who I've used before for the (since sold and neglected) Web Developers Journal. They've always been technically excellent, they give a real virtual server, with root access, onto which I can install anything I want, run multiple sites, etc. The last point was the key selling point for me, I didn't want to just host kief.com somewhere, I have a handful of other sites I run for myself, family, and friends, and the new server has room for everything and new projects I'd like to be doing.

The last point is the key thing, I'd rather be spending what little spare time I have working on the interesting bits of my own projects, rather than wrangling the hardware.

Welcome back to kief.com!

Check how to start a startup out, it's by Paul Graham, who also wrote about what makes a great hacker. I've also recently read The Art of the Start, a great book for anyone thinking about starting a business, especially a tech one.

Most bloggers have missed the most useful points of the recent eyetrack study. I've seen a number of blog items on the eyetrack study recently published by Poynter. But checking it out this morning, I've found much more interesting things in it than the "people look at the top left of the page first" angle that most people are talking up. Granted, that's the angle mentioned at the top of the story.

Reading the article and looking at kief.com, I realize my new design is an atrocity of unreadability. Some key points:

• Headline sizes affect whether people actually read what's on the page, or skim it. Big page headlines, and article headlines significantly larger than the blurbs, encourage people to scan the page rather than read the details.
• My biggest crime is the groovy lines I put around the headline of each article. Even underlining headlines discourages people from reading the text beneath. Looking at it, the way I have the header and footer blocks of each post indented, although I find the look pleasing, is jarring for reading through the stuff on the page. This is the nastiest effect of my new design, I think.
• The first few words of the blurb are critical; they determine if someone is going to read the whole blurb. Of course it's no news that the lede needs to have a hook, but on the web it looks like the hook needs a sharper barb than in print.
• Shorter paragraphs are better. We're talking one or two sentences each
• Summary paragraphs at the beginning of an article are a winnder
• Interesting words or phrases can draw a reader's attention to areas of the page that wouldn't normally get looked at:

We observed a high number of eye fixations on a headline about clothing maker FCUK, which was placed far down on a page with a long list of headlines and blurbs

People do scroll down a page looking for interesting bits, but need something special that hooks them. One point is that although many people would probably try visual tricks to highlight things they want people to look at, like changing the color, using a big font size, or underlining it, but the other findings of the study suggest that would actually be counter-productive. The key is to make the actual words used compelling enough that people will read them.

Some other things I want to think about:

• Right side navigation actually gets people to spend more time looking at it
• Ads work better on the left side than the left
• Ads in the middle of the text work best (this is for attention, I don't know if they affect click-throughs)
• Separating ads with lines or even whitespace decreases the chance people will look at them. Not sure how you would do this without confusing people about what's advertising and what's editorial, this sounds like a false "win".
• People look at text ads much more than banners

So I need to take a stab at making my design more readable. I probably won't get around to it soon, since my plate is overflowing both at work and home, and we've got a trip to Turkey next week.

When I have more time, I need to check out this tutorial by Jaza on how to modify Drupal to make a nice organization system.

This is a familiar story:

Even the best working environments can become unhealthy if the corporate culture sickens and dies after repeated attacks from within. If management does not realize what a treasure they have in their corporate culture, they may stand idly by while new executives uproot and destroy it. Some executives may not even recognize the power of the corporate culture, perhaps because they had little part in creating it.

It's not always a clear cut thing. Sometimes new management, with fresher viewpoints, is a good thing. Growing companies go through phases. It's rare for a company of 30 people to have the same feel as it did when it had 10, and even moreso when it becomes 150. Usually the phases have semi-violent transition periods where a series of "old hands" move on, often muttering about how things have gone downhill. Things might really be going bad, or it might just be that the changes that come with growth make the company less appealing to the people who thrived being part of a tightly knit startup.

I've joined several companies shortly after a wave of people had left, and have so far been pretty lucky. In one case the exodus was triggered by an investment which changed the nature of the company's business to a more corporate clientele than it had before. I've since seen a posting on a wiki which described this as the end of the glory days for the company, but those of us in the new guard had a great time and formed strong bonds.

Of course, this isn't to say discontent and hemoraging staff is always a healthy thing; I've avoided joining several companies which smelled of decay or disaster. And one of the companies I've worked for has since gone through exactly what David describes in the post I linked to above; new senior management who came from larger companies and had no idea how to manage a small, dynamic team. Unfortunately they snowed the managers who had been around, at least long enough to lose 90% of the top talent in the team in question.

That's not to say that the company won't recover, and replenish its ranks with an enthusiastic and bright new guard, but this time around it wasn't a case of constructive growth turning out the people who aren't at home in a larger, more professionalized company. The difference is in understanding and nurturing a positive culture.

I've rebuilt kief.com using new software, a PHP-based content management system called Drupal. I didn't have any particular problem with my old software, Movable Type, I changed because I wanted to learn how Drupal works. Movable Type is designed for use in a weblog format, with backwards-chronological list of posts, which is fine for kief.com. But I've been wanting to create a new website which will have a more complicated format which I think Drupal is well-suited for.

The choice of Drupal is significant for me in that it is written using a language/technology I haven't worked with before, PHP. This isn't out of any desire to learn PHP, I would actually prefer to use Java, which is what I work with professionally. However, I've been farting around with Java-based content management for years, and it's actually been a big obstacle for me starting the kind of website I would like to have, for several reasons.

Part of the reason I haven't been able to get a Java-based, content/community-oriented website going is exactly because I am a Java programmer. Whenever I have started on one of these projects in the past, I inevitably get bogged down fiddling with the software, and usually end up wanting to write big chunks of the system myself. The software is never quite done the way I want it, so I spend all my time coding. Since I don't have gobs of free time for this kind of project, I never get anywhere with it. Since the projects I want to do are usually building websites rather than writing software, this is counter-productive.

This problem is exacerbated by the state of Java content management systems. There are plenty of frameworks out there that can be used to build a content-oriented site, but nothing that you can just drop into place and start using. I particularly like JPublish, and also Daisy, but either one (or both) would take a lot of work to get going with.

The reason I've started playing with Drupal is that it's oriented towards the type of site I would like to start - mixing community (blogs, forums, comments), and old-style traditional content. It has some fairly large gaps - it doesn't handle images very nicely yet, and it seems awkward to create pages that collect different types of content in useful ways, such as section hubs and monthly archives. But it's technical architecture looks very clean, solid, and extensible, and there is plenty of activity with modules that can do the kinds of things I'm interested in.

Of course none of this actually guarantees I will get a new site underway any time soon, there is still plenty of work to do.

When we were in the US over the holidays, the Mrs. and I were perplexed by the car ribbon fad. Most cars in the US have magnetic ribbons on the back, most of which seem to be based on the traditional yellow "support the troops" motif, although there are a variety of colors and occasionally different messages. I didn't realize they were magnetic at first, I thought they were painted or stuck on like dealership logos and similar crap that most cars have these days - which made me wonder whether people had decided we were in for the long haul.

There is something warped about this. The classic tradition was to tie a piece of yellow ribbon around a tree in your yard, and later around the antenna of your car, when you had a family member off at war. Partly it was for luck, hoping that your son would return safely, partly it was a reminder for others to keep the soldiers in their thoughts and prayers.

The yellow ribbon tradition has changed over the years. Nowadays it's appropriate for anyone who wants to show that they're thinking of the welfare of American troops in danger's way to put up a ribbon, not just those with a family member at war. An important point is that
it doesn't (or shouldn't) matter what you felt about the war itself. A yellow ribbon is not a statement for or against the war, it's about the men and women who might not return from it.

But what I saw in the US this last time is that the yellow ribbin tradition has been perverted, in a distinctly modern American way. First of all, it's apparently not good enough to display a simple, cheap yellow ribbon, instead you must buy a manufactured product. The genuine cloth ribbon is pushed aside by an artificial, manufactured facsimile.

Of course, in America you don't sell a single, simple product, you must offer many different variations. So there are different colors of magnetic ribbons, and different slogans for them. Now it's possible to show more than your support of the troops, you can use the ribbon to show your support or contempt for people who don't share your view of the war and the world. There are even anti-war ribbons - "Support our troops, send them home" - so everyone can play, and pay. Many of the different colored ribbons are even for non-troop related things, so they're now a generic way to advertise your political views, they're the new bumper sticker.

This profusion of ribbons leads to the second perversion of the original tradition, which is to show everyone else that you support the troops more than they do, by having a larger collection of ribbons plastered on the rear of your car than they do. Most of the cars we saw had at least 3, and often as many as 5 or 6, different colored ribbons. Build your collection, show the Jones next door that they're not as patriotic as you are! I wonder how long it will be before there are limited edition collectable magnetic ribbons being sold on ebay for hundreds of dollars.

So the yellow ribbon is being trivialized, it's now become a joke. You can have them custom made with funny slogans to lampoon the original trend.

Oh, baby!

Dear Customer,

Thank you for choosing Dell.

Your order is being custom-built to your requirements at our factory.

As we custom build each order to your exact specification, it can take up to ten working days to build and deliver your order.

I've been suffering on a four year old laptop. It was a decent machine at the time, but 192 megs is unusable for development work. It was a tough choice between a desktop and a laptop, I really like the portability of a laptop, but the bang:buck ratio of the desktop won me over. 2 Gigs of RAM, piles of hard drive space, and a 19" flat panel. Man, I can't wait!

Hell. Handbasket.

Fooled us once, shame on him. Fooled us twice ....