Blog Book Hybrid – Navigation Changes

Those who follow have noticed daily changes on The Book of W. I took the final step and overhauled the navigation on that tumblr based site.

The site is now a good mixture of a blog and a book. The starting page displays recent updates like in a blog, and navigation at the top opens pages like in a book.

Main thing was to add page tags to each post. Now I can control which blog post belongs to which book page. In a way, this is a misuse of tags but…

With tags, users can link and refer to a certain page easily and intuitively, like in a book. As you probably know, blog pages are something one can not link to because they change dynamically.

I removed timestamp of the posts: books don’t have dates under their chapter titles. I like to think the contents are not glued to a certain time period, they are valid also in years to come.

Some things to prepare for are:

• Sooner or later, as the page count increases, I will notice that the page numbering at the top will need some changes.
• The cover page contains a water related photo from Flickr;  for some reason it doesn’t load 100% of the time and displays only some white space. Then it doesn’t look that good. Anyway, it’s great to have a dynamic cover page. Although, sometimes, the photo is not that close to the subject matter.
• One of the worries is that users find themselves lost caused by the duplicate page concept: there are book page numbers and blog page numbers. This is something that needs to be addressed.

I’m pretty satisfied with the end result. Next task is to fill the blog book with top content.

The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from The Tree

Funny thing happened. My 11-year-old daughter just came to me and said: “I want the new Banjo game for Christmas. I want all the games made by Rare, because they make Viva Piñata and it’s so good.”

The funny part is this: when I was a young boy in the mid-eighties and playing with my friend’s Sinclair Spectrum, all the Ultimate games were must-haves. Ultimate was a company created by Stamper brothers – later they started Rare.

The Guy Working At The Top of The Tallest Building

Have you heard about the guy working at the top of the tallest building?

On his office wall, he has a map of the world. There’s a knob on top of each country. On the spur of the moment, he turns knobs left and right. Rain pushes into the windows. Lights of the city low around him flicker as he slowly moves his gaze to another knob.

His telephone doesn’t ring.

As he turns the knobs, commands are sent down to the stories below for an army of his minions to execute. This country goes in the red, this into black. Rates of the currencies change. He releases a knob, goes to sit on his chair. Looks outside.

His companies have many names, his products are made from iron and binary digits. You wouldn’t recognize him on the street. An inverse Domino effect gathering all the money from the world, from your pockets, ends to where he stands.

He doesn’t play golf, he plays the world. After the deeds of the day are done, he enters the elevator, goes down, crosses the street, grabs the evening paper and silently goes into a taxi. Arrives to his home where his two kids and wife are already sleeping deep. In the night, his dreams are like the dreams of any other person.

The Book of W: A Book or a Blog or a Blog Book?

As you have probably noticed, I’ve partially moved my act to thebookofw.com.

On that site, I’ll create an experience which takes all the good parts of books and blogging. Furthermore, the site should be readable with mobile devices also.

One of the simple, minor, mundane things that bug me is how the pages are numbered. In blogs, the most recent page is the page number 1, by default. In books, page number 1 is the beginning. In my view, the best solution would be to number the oldest (i.e. first) blog post with the page number 1, and increase from there on. I haven’t yet found a way to accomplish this feature with Tumblr technology without relatively heavy scripting, or manual tagging (using tags like “page1″, “page2″). Yeah, I could code it using Tumblr API, but we’ll see.

Anyway, The Book of W is an interesting experiment. You wouldn’t believe how much, how long, how dearly I kept the contents and the subject hidden. Only my wife knew something about the unpublished, unprinted, unagented book. My face blushed and hands started to shake on those rare moments when the discussion reared it. And now, I’m on the other extreme as I publish the chapters to the web for you all to read.

When I was younger, I hided all my creative works (music, writings, …) from others. The rationale – if you can call it that – was that the works felt too personal, they gave out too much of me and made me vulnerable. Now I’ve learned that life’s too short for that. So, if you have something to present, just pour it out. Thanks for the web, it’s easy, fast, inexpensive and leads to an uncharted territory…

Something Wet Is Out! Really Wet…

It’s quite natural for a guy nicknamed raindropper to create a book covering all aspects of water, don’t you think?

So, point your browser to The Book of W and start exploring. There will chapters and postings about science, business, arts, cultures and religions – all of course water-related.

It looks like a mish-mash of blog postings and book chapters. But there’s a simple, common theme underlining all of those – and it’s clear as water.

Ponzi Scam in Finland

The pyramid scheme named Wincapita made a few happy people and thousands of angry ones. According to some news, the happy ones are in Thailand. Angry ones are reporting to the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, or silently cursing their losses. 

Here’s a good wrap-up of the issue. The scheme started in 2005 with the prop of Forex trading; the high interests for investments (400%) would come from currency exchanges. The Wincapita website went offline in March, company vanished and damage assessment began. Details are scarce as usually, but in essence top 50 or so got huge gains, 10000 or so lost packs of money. Estimated 50 million euros were invested to the company.

Interestingly, the brochure of Wincapita clearly stated that “Invest only the amount of money you are capable of losing.”

Internet has made the spreading of Nigerian letters and building of Ponzi companies easy. Nowadays, one can easily hire a person who under different fake names hoax the Ponzi company in newsgroups and message boards etc.

Why do people fall in to these traps, time and again? I’d see that at least some of the persons who give their money to these kinds of games know the odds, know the risks, and have a thought: what if I’m one of the inner circle winners, let’s try this, I might make a huge profit! 

As the pyramid scheme mechanism works, latecomers’ money goes to the top members’ – early adopters’ – pockets. Could the same happen in stock markets – in real estate business? Is the role of a latecomer always to make a loss?

[Update 12.12.2008] Yes, it can happen on stock markets also. WSJ article: Top Broker Accused of $50 Billion Fraud – His Investment-Advisory Business for the Wealthy Was ‘Giant Ponzi Scheme’

Radiohead – …

… Learnings from The “On How The Brain Functions” Experiment.

You, the web wanderer, are perhaps aware that a bit over one year ago I posted my research paper about theory of how the brain functions. I also built a blog around it so that you, the brain researcher, can comment it with witty references to tin-foil hats.

The current gain is zero remarks to tin-foil hats.

Seriously, though, I still stand behind the theory and see several strenghts in it. The question is: why I’m not building a working prototype as it only takes a few diodes, capacitors and coils to make it. Maybe it’s because I do not want to disturb the local neighbourhood with electromagnetic noise.  

And: I’d like to thank Joni Tuoreniemi and Paul Tudsbury for commenting it and creating conversation. Thank you!

Google Search Works in Mysterious Ways

The moment I saw the first prototype – my drawings in flesh – of the Deomo TV/HIFI unit (“tv-taso” in Finnish), I realized its potential and began marketing it. You can call it passion hitting when you least expect it – I’ve never been inclined in designing or selling furniture.

How do people find the great product (if you pardon these plugs)? Via searching the web, of course. So, the marketing plan is currently a simple one - it’s a start and one can build from there. Later on, the product will be on the shops at display and advertising moves on, the usual.

Selected a perfect name for the product. I chose the word “Deomo” because of its visual properties; it looks good and dynamic, and yet stands firmly. Say it out loud: the word starts sharply and ends landing softly giving nice contrast to it. And Deomo.com domain was available.

Then, I designed and built the Deomo.com website. Simple, once again. (I use Microsoft’s free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition.)

The point (gripe) of this post is: the whole site is based around one product “tv-taso” – and yet, currently, it only appears on the distant page 13 of Google search results for that word. Some sites on the results prior www.deomo.com are not that relevant, e.g. they contain random, one-off “I’m selling my piece of furniture” ads.

The other day, it was on the first page for a while, then it dropped back to depths. My guess is that the site had an overload of the term “tv-taso”, and Google punished it for that reason and gave a meagre PageRank. An additional factor is that Google servers are not all in the same state, data-wise, and this inconsistency generates irregular search result ups and downs, high rankings and low rankings making the analysis more difficult. 

Well, I’d guess that after GoogleBot comes and scrapes the contents of this WordPress post, the Deomo site will go higher. Or not, or get even blacklisted – hmm… not really. Who knows – The Google Algorithm, are you listening? Deomo.com is not a typo.

In mysterious ways, indeed. The mystery recipe of The Algorithm keeps us website creators/marketers humble and not capable of tinkering the machine, righteously so I might add. In the past, one of the main trade secrets was Coca-Cola formula, now among the secrets hides also the Google one.

I Am Legend – And I’m Driving a Ford

Just came back from watching “I Am Legend” movie with my wife. If you liked Spielberg’s ”War of The Worlds”, you’ll probably like this movie also. They both decipit a ruthless, dismal and dark world with people turned to violent animals.

Will Smith does a marvellous job in portraying a man in the brink of insanity.

My wife’s reaction? Well, she almost puked. Too much exploding low frequencies and too little steadicam. Don’t go to this movie with your girlfriend. It takes all the fun out of your evening.

Product placement thanks go to Apple and Ford.

Thoughts on OpenSocial API and Social Applications

This week, Google introduced OpenSocial API. It is a set of common interfaces for building social applications. Scobleizer’s blog post led me to more information about the OpenSocial API, here:

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

I watched the Campfire One video – almost from beginning to end - and browsed through some Developer’s Guide docs. I appreciate Google’s simple and straightforward, hands-on approach. They have not created a “Meta-Reference Application Framework for Interfaces of Social Network Applications” and dozens of new acronyms. Instead, they show working code and the classic “Hello World!”, written with a vanilla text editor.

Why are Google and other companies allocating resources to social media? The way I see it, that is because their main revenue streams come from advertisers. Social applications are filled with data of people’s activities, interests, daily patterns, schedules, locations, networks etc. This data provides juice for building highly targeted marketing systems, which in turn generate happy advertisers.

The more data people put into the system, the better the system will serve the people. It’s a win-win for us all, don’t you think?