In the Arms of Strangers

Two items ticked off the “things to ride” list completed this weekend, I rode the London to Paris and took on some of the cobbles along the Paris-Roubaix.

L2P was a fantastic event, 363 miles from Hampton Court to the Eiffel Tower completed in three ten hour in the saddle days. Considering there were riders ranging from Stephen Roche at one end to weekend enthusiasts at the other, the organisiation required to coordinate over 250 riders, numerous motorbike outriders and crew to arrive at the right feed, ferry and hotel stops was an impressive feat. I cannot fault the organisation of the event.

Tragically a rider was injured, and sadly died, during the event and our thoughts are with his family and friends.

Last weekend I mounted my trusty bicycle and took on the 2008 edition of The Dragon Ride. Starting in Penacoed it winds through 120 (or 180 for the full distance) kilometers of beautiful Welsh countryside. The route takes in two category 1 climbs as used in the past on the Tour of Britain and the Milk Race as well as a cheeky little one near the end (Llangeinor) that pushed my tired calves towards cramp.

Although not the ‘killer’ it’s talked up to be, The Dragon Ride is a little difficult if you aren’t used to riding hills so take care if you’re a fair weather cyclist. The climbs are long and drawn out rather than the short, sharp climbs of Southern England. Everyone riding seemed reasonably accomplished (if a little tight in their lyrca, like myself) but the event is definitely a sportif and if taken as such–rather than as a race–it’s a good five or six hour ride.

The route was clearly signed and well-stocked feed stops (with free bananas, cakes and hi-five drink) came at pretty much the right times (which I understand was an issue in previous years). Can’t knock it to be honest.

We stayed at Court Colman Manor the previous evening to avoid a crazy o’clock start, and I’d recommend their curry restaurant if you’re in the area. Add The Dragon Ride to your ‘must ride in 2009′ list.

I’m six months into a experiment/pledge to not buy (or even read) a printed book for a whole year. The idea is to consume all my previously printed material in an electronic format. This went really badly when I went to Italy and forgot an electronic travel guide. Imagine telling your girlfriend that you ‘can’t’ read the guidebook…

Progress has been slow, so far I’ve completed 21 titles (two audio books and nineteen ebooks) in a variety of formats (pdfs, Mobipocket and HTML) and the overwhelming experience has been frustration. Not frustration from the devices, Sony Reader is great for traditional reading, Mobipocket reader on the Nokia N95 is excellent for convience and mobility and ipods can’t be beaten for audio books. The frustration has come with access to content.

Unless you have a penchant for romance, self-help or fan fiction, there simply aren’t enough electronic format titles available in the UK. Peter Collingridge recently undertook a survey of the top 10 best sellers in the UK and found that none of them were available as ebooks. Not a sausage. If you live in the US however, 60% were available on Mobipocket.

So what is available in ebook format? I took a look at six ebook sites and perused their virtual shelves to determine how many titles they offer and the distribution of subject matter.

I looked at Mobipocket, ebooks.com, Amazon’s Kindle store, Manybooks.net, Free Ebooks.net and elibrary.net. The top 6 results when searching for ebooks. The combined sites contain 155,543 fiction and 332,597 non-fiction titles, blimey, that’s more than I expected.

Fiction

What a shocker, 15% of all the titles available are romance, if you include the 4% erotica in there too, the lion’s share of ebooks are ‘adult’ content. Too embarrassed to have them on your shelves? Historical fiction and classics come out pretty high, as does sci-fi. The gaping hole, as identified by Peter, is best sellers or ‘new fiction’. publisher simply don’t (or won’t) supply ebook versions of the titles until well past the printed version has gone stale. Perhaps because they don’t know what’s involved, or that they don’t realise how simple the process really is. The vast majority of titles are either pulp romance, out of copyright classics, or sci-fi.

Non-Fiction

There was a far wider spread of non-fiction titles than I expected, but it isn’t a big surprise to see business, science and religion filling the top categories. Just as romance seems to be on the front of every fiction section, it’s religion and old business books that fill the non-fiction. Write yourself a self-help guide for Christians in business and you’ll top the ebook best sellers!

Amazon has a great spread of titles with coverage from law (2,345 titles) to archaeology (444 titles) roll on the kindle launch in the UK. Oh, hang on, these titles are only available in the Kindle format so it won’t do you much good unless you buy a Kindle.

Seriously, what’s the point…

This little survey hopefully will help to show what is available in ebook formats. If you’re after the latest best seller, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. If you want a classic, a romance, or a guide to Buddhism, you’re in luck.

Click the pie-charts for bigger versions, if you want the all the gory detail in the Excel spreadsheet, let me know.

Peter Cervieri from Scribemedia.org hosts a really interesting panel discussion on video consumption habits online.

Notes of interest

1. Kids watching Youtube with others is an interesting social experience
2. They watch almost three quaters of all their video on the web
3. No one watches on mobile devices. The ipod owners would download music videos, but only watch them on long trips. Commuting is an audio experience
4. For longform content, video quality is important. Shortform (30 secs to a minute) the quality isn’t a factor, but for full shows the panelists were playing it out through TVs.
5. Strong use of NBCs online service (among others) rather than getting longform content from torrents/pirate sites. They would, however, use Acquisition/Limewire to download music. One kid even knew someone who’d been ‘caught’ downloading pirate movies and was therefore cautious
6. Some kids message/chat during broadcast content when they know their friends are watching the same show (but rarely). But mainly they still use phones to talk one on one after the show has finished
7. Panelists were more attached to their computers than TV. They’d “drop it in a second” if they were on a budget, TV “isn’t a necessity” whereas the internet is
8. Every kid had (or wanted) a mac
9. Plug-ins are bad. Windows Media/Real Player downloads mentioned as too much of a barrier to consume content
10. iFilm mentioned as too ad heavy. Buffering the advert video is delaying access to the content. Pre-rolls mentioned as especially bad. Non obtrusive ads (banners) weren’t seen as a problem. TV ads much more memorable and if online campaigns matched the broadcast, then they are more clickable

In order to extract the maxiumum $2300 donation from your election campaign supporters, the traditional method was to court community leaders and followers with extensive social reach. These key fundraisers would gather their rich friends together at barbecues and cocktail parites and illicit the maximum fee from each member. Clinton has raised around $6m of campaign funds using this tried and tested model.

Obama however employs a different tactic. Rather then approach the rich few, his team contacts all those who attend an event via email (you can’t attend without suppling an email) and encourage them to donate however much they can afford online.

Last month’s $31m haul – almost all of it accrued online – is all the more impressive when you discover that 94% of it came in sums of $200 or less. A million little donors became the model

An interesting case study in the power of crowds. Read the full article at the Times online

The first “Geeks on Bikes” event is complete. Five of us rode out from Hackney, up into Epping forest for tea and a bacon sandwich before looping through Chigwell and returning over the beast which is Buckhurst Hill. Back in the bosom of London we talked geekery, wine and books at the Pub on the Park before going our separate ways.

This will undoubtably be the first of many “Geeks on Bikes” events (many thanks to Brad, Amanda, James and Lindsey for being in the beta group), if you want to be involved in future rides, just get in touch.

My ex-colleague Luke Wroblewski has published his latest book entitled Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks this month. It’s full of useful advice and up-to-date case studies on improving structure, visual design and flow. Less than a tenner for the ebook version, it’s worth picking up.

We’re using Django increasingly here at Gcap so to help mock up admin UI’s quickly, I knocked up an Omnigraffle Stencil of the admin UI elements that Django provides out of the box. If it’s of use, feel free to use it. Download the .zip.

Unzip the file and put it in your “~/Library/Application Support/Omnigraffle/Stencils/” folder.

In order to create a good website (or any product for that matter) you need two things; an audience and a vision. Your your audience determines who you are aiming at, and your vision determines where you are going with them. Put these two together and you can define both a visual and interaction approach.

We have useful tools in defining who the audience could be (market research, focus groups, persona creation) and what they do (ethnographic studies, web metrics) but without knowing where you’re trying to go with your audience these outputs aren’t much use.

Businesses are often pretty good at setting company-wide visions; “a personal computer in every home running Microsoft software” is Microsoft’s. But these company-wide visions are often too high-level when it comes to specific product development.

6 Steps to a Good Vision

A vision must be measurable

“To Reach, Educate, Inspire, Grow, and Nurture today’s Generation” is a fantastic example of a crap vision. How can you measure ‘inspire’? Who are ‘today’s generation’? Any vision littered with fluffy buzz-words is a waste of time (I once had a site vision which included the gem “to super-serve our customers”…). You can set whatever metric is important to you or your business (sales, clicks, views, complaint emails, phone calls, whatever) the important part is that it must be measurable.

A vision must be achievable

“Shoot for the moon, because if you miss you end in the stars” is retarded. You don’t end in the stars, you burn up on re-entry. By setting a vision which is ludicrously high you’ll inevitably fail and team morale will fall through the floor. If you aren’t sure what is and isn’t achievable, set a short-term vision and evaluate progress along the way. You’ll get better at defining vision statements the more you do them.

A vision must include the audience

By putting the audience into the vision you are able to focus both your visual treatment and interaction design on a specific usergroup. Patterns are easy to develop in isolation (as are excellent visual designs) but a pattern could be appropriate to a particular audience or a specific situation. A audience focussed vision (in conjunction with persona work) is a good sanity check of visual work. Double check how a proposed treatment relates to the audience and vision before development. If you’re designing website in isolation of your audience, then you’re designing websites for yourself. Good luck with that.

A vision must have time-frame

By setting a time-frame you’ve immediately introduced the scope of the work. A vision we had for Eurosport was “To be in the top 10 Google searches for any Premiership football team name on the first day of the season”. This vision defined the audience (Google users), the content focus (premiership football), the time frame (start of the season) and the measure of success (be in the top 10). We were able to sit down on a specific date and test whether we succeeded or failed.

A vision must have team buy-in

The vision must come from people across the business, everyone from advertising teams, PR people to engineers and designers should be involved in the discussion and definition process. If the vision came out of nowhere they won’t feel part of it. However, although everyone must buy into the vision process, it is important to realise that not everyone needs to agree on the vision.

If your vision is to “display 30,000 more viagra adverts to our email base by the end of June” doesn’t mean it’s a bad vision, it just means that you might not want to continue working for your company. It’s better to know that sooner rather than later.

A vision isn’t the end

Once a time frame has been set, the team can evaluate their progress but once the end is reached and the champagne has flowed, they must set a new vision. Resting on your laurels is stagnation. If your vision will take a year to come to fruition then break it into smaller measurable visions which make up the path to the bigger goal. I’ll put money down that after a few releases you’ll probably re-factor your bigger picture anyway. By setting smaller visions you’re able to plan and refocus.

In Conclusion

Having a vision is a prerequisite to development. Visions music be measurable, achievable, include an audience, a time-frame be created by the team. Without a vision you’re either shooting wildly in the dark or your making a website for an audience of one: yourself.

I’ve put together a Flickr group called Agile in Action. Agile is a project management methodology which I’ve used both at Yahoo and Gcap but the execution has been very different. Hopefully this group will gather some different ideas in how to execute Agile in the wild.