The Holistic Web

Well, I’m surprised. I was surfing around the Sydney Morning Herald site early this week. I noticed a mistake - something rather minor (they had a photo of the Polyphonic Spree concert in Sydney, they attributed them as a UK band when in fact they are from Texas. Awesome gig, highly recommend seeing them if you get the chance). I saw that and thought “I couldn’t be bothered reporting it, they’ll never listen anyway”. Having worked for a large company I know how hard it is for customer complaints to get to the right people. Getting slightly off the track… when I worked at Microsoft Australia I once anonymously submitted a complaint which I knew I was the only one who could fix, just to see what would happen. I never saw it

Anyway, so I thought “hang on, let’s give them a chance”. I went to their website, clicked on the contact link, found an appropriate form, filled in the details and pressed submit, expecting it to go into the ether. However, I got a steady stream of emails tracking the progress of my complain through their systems. They seem to have a fairly sophisticated internal workflow tool for managing such things.

I went back to the site tonight to check it and indeed it was fixed. I never got a final email telling me it was actually fixed, but even so, they did it in reasonable time (a few days) and had mostly good communication throughout the process. 1 point for Sydney Morning Herald.

So, I was actually doing some programming tonight (shhh! I still do that sometimes, but don’t tell). I was trying to take a short cut, working out how to do something to save a lot of time. Searched for it, found an article in Google that sounded perfect. Got taken to the site - it’s a site by developers for developers. It asked me to register to read this article. No problems, I really wanted this content.

I then get taken to a blank, completely unformatted page which says absolutely nothing except:
You do not have access to the content you requested.

No reason why. No explanation. No link to get access. No explanantion of access levels. Nothing. It turns out I really wanted this content so I hunted around the site (http://www.devx.com/) to try and find these answers. I never did find them. I did work out they have a premium section that costs money. If I knew for sure that joining would give me access to the content I wanted, I would have been tempted to pay. But no, their poor UI cost them an easy sale.

However, I’m sure that “You do not have access to the content you requested” is the technically correct answer.

Techies, keep your eye on the end goal. The site is there to achieve something, help the user achieve it. And devx.com, think how much money your technically-driven site is costing you.

I normally try not to geek-out on my blog, and keep it a bit more business focussed. But I do have an inner geek, and it’s gotta get out sometime. Business/marketing people: please put your fingers in your ears and go “lalalala” for the next minute.

For quite a while, I’ve been really interested in meta data. I’ve also got my head kinda deep inside the tagging space at the moment due to a very interesting and potentially revolutionary project I’m working on at the moment (but more on that another day). Meta data seems to have two sides to it. On one hand, it enables all sorts of cool applications. On the other hand, people simple hate creating it. People don’t like making meta data, full stop. I don’t like making meta data. So I’ve always been interested in how you can extract meta data from the world around you.

Google’s genius, the thing that made them so good, is they saw inbound links as metadata to help define the quality of a search engine. Blindingly obvious in hindsight, but hey, I didn’t come up with it. So how do you tag arbitrary content? Without doing some sort of keyword analysis which is pretty hit and miss, you can’t, right? Well, maybe you can. I was reading about auto tagging on Stephan Spencer’s blog (one of my favourite blogs), and they have kinda solved it. Incoming search referrals as a form of meta data. I am fairly obsessed with search data, monitoring my sites for incoming search referrals to know what people are looking for. But I’d never thought of that as a source of metadata.

It would probably only work on a site/page with at least a moderate amount of search traffic (a few dozen searches/day would be nice - eg. not most blogs), but for those who met that fairly simple criteria, instant meta data.

Ok, geek fest is over. Remove your fingers from your ears now. Interested in meta data…. sheesh… I need more hobbies.

Ok, so I promise that this blog won’t become a shallow way to plug my wifes ecommerce shop. Having said that, I’m gonna plug.

She got in some stock this morning. You gotta understand here, I now know far more about makeup than I’d be prepared to admit in public. And I find it rather… boring.

However, some stock came in this morning, I saw it and said “wow, that would make a GREAT present”. I dunno about you but I hate buying Christmas presents for girls. I’ve already sorted my female Christmas shopping for the year, but for those of you who haven’t and want to really impress your girls, honestly, check this out:
http://www.smartpoppy.com.au/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=366
It’s the sort of thing I wish someone would tell me about before Christmas.

So, if you want to spend a not huge sum of money, don’t want to go to the shops, and want ti impress your wife/sister/mum/whoever, go for it. The shop even takes direct deposit if you don’t want it showing up on your credit card statement.

And she made me add this: http://www.smartpoppy.com.au/index.php?act=viewCat&catId=13
It’s the gifts section. Mostly I just glaze over and think “girly stuff” but I guess there’s a few things in there that look good.