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John Allspaw put together some great slides about his experiences in an organization where Ops and Engineering work well together. John describes a dream environment -- flashes of which I experienced during peak periods of fun at Kodak and Meez, but never became as institutionalized as it seems to be at Flickr.

Here are the slides from his talk: "10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr" (video of the whole talk is coming soon):

More Velocity Conf action on Twitter. Some good stuff going on there! Worth checking out John Adams' talk about scaling Twitter too.

More vids and docs on the O'Reilly site.

Following on the microsyndication theme I mentioned earlier, I decided to map out the events that take place when I put a new post onto this blog.

Here are the basics:

1. I publish an article on greacen.com. The article appears on the site as well as a (private) url of an RSS feed which...
2. is polled regularly by feedburner.com which republishes the feed and gives me some basic analytics for how the feed is used and...
3. is polled by twitterfeed.com. It reads the feed and gets twitter-friendly shorturls for each feed item and updates...
4. twitter.com with each new article which...
5. updates my status on facebook.com.

The nice part about this setup is that it's all automatic: the only action I take is posting my idea onto my site. The feeds take it the rest of the way.

Analytics are pretty crude at this point. Any clicks on the feedburner-based feed should offer some basic analytics. If I really wanted details, I think I'd need to generate a separate feed for each microsyndication destination if I wanted to measure twitter clickthroughs vs. facebook clickthroughs (though google analytics should offer a hint about the source of clicks to greacen.com)

Here's the Graphviz drawing of the flow I described above. digraph BlogPost {
size="5,6";
ratio = fill;
node [style="rounded,filled,bold" shape="box" fillcolor="skyblue"];

/* Set up specific shapes */
"RSS Aggregators" [style="rounded" shape="box3d"];
"URL Shortener" [style="" shape="invisible" label="URL Shortener"];
"Analytics" [style="" shape="invisible"];
"greacen.com" [label="greacen.com\nPublish\nblog\narticle"];
"feedburner.com" [label="feedburner.com\nAnalytics\nand\nscaling"];

/* Box in those 3rd party things */
subgraph cluster_c1 {"Analytics"; "URL Shortener";
label="Other Parties"; style= "dashed";}

/* Show and label relationships */
"greacen.com" -> "feedburner.com" [label="GET RSS" dir="back"];
"feedburner.com" -> "twitterfeed.com" [label="GET RSS" dir="back"];
"feedburner.com" -> "Analytics" [];
"twitterfeed.com" -> "URL Shortener" [label="GET URL" ];
"URL Shortener" -> "twitterfeed.com" [];
"twitterfeed.com" -> "twitter.com" [label="POST\ntwitter\napi"];
"twitter.com" -> "facebook.com" [label="facebook/twitter\nbridge"];
"feedburner.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
"twitter.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
"facebook.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
}


Here's what those instructions become with a click:

This is different from my surf report post. The surf report is the content, whereas with a blog post, my site holds the real content. The RSS feeds publish a pointer to the original content.

Make sense?

I've been mucking around with Twitter and Facebook lately. There are a few folks who have been using these services to post info about how the surf is. I don't live close to the beach (yet), so I like to see what's happening before I jump into the car and make the trip.

I sent a message from my phone this morning. Even though the surf was lame. The message was published all over the place (microsyndication). Here's how it worked:

1. I emailed a photo to twitpic.com which...
2. updates my status on Twitter which...
3. the @StokeReport user follows. If my tweet contains "SMLM", stokereport will publish my tweet on stokereport.com (and even pull the image off twitpic it seems, nice!).
4. also, http://greacen.com has that little widgety thing over there on the left. Your browser will pull the image from twitpic and put it onto this page.
5. also, Twitter will pass my status update on to Facebook.com

Guess what? Most of these nodes along the way have their own RSS feeds for others (services or people) to slurp & read.

• Stokereport
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Twitpic

Thinking about this plinko-esque publishing flow is a little dizzying. I've been working on web site flows for a few weeks now. It's often helpful to map out a flow to see what's really going on. Graphviz is an open source tool for producing network diagrams and flow charts that I've been using for mapping high-level flows. Here's what a map looks like for the publishing flow I described earlier:

digraph TwitterSurf {
size="6,6";
ratio = fill;
node [style="rounded,filled,bold" shape="box" fillcolor="skyblue"];

/* Set up specific shapes */
Phone [style="rounded,filled" shape="oval" fillcolor="grey"];
"RSS Aggregators" [style="rounded" shape="box3d"];

/* relationships */
Phone -> "twitpic.com" [label="Email with attachment"];
"twitpic.com" -> "twitter.com" [label="twitter api"];
"twitter.com" -> "facebook.com" [label="facebook/twitter bridge"];
"twitter.com" -> "stokereport.com" [label="if post contains 'SMLM'" style="dotted"] ;
"twitpic.com" -> "greacen.com" [label="widget/embed" color="red"] ;
"twitter.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
"facebook.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
"stokereport.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
}


If you ignore the []s, it looks like a terse version of our list up above. Here's the flowchart those instructions produce:

Kinda neat, huh? I find the way this goes from text to sitemap really intriguing. This -> that; that -> next; other -> next; makes sense to me. Graphviz does a great job of putting this all together in an easy-to-digest graphic.

There are a few rails front ends to graphviz (demo) that might make a web tool for this possible. I could see this becoming a handy planning tool for our organization.

Questions:

• Anyone ever use a tool like this for making sitemaps or high-level flows? What tools work well for modeling these interactions?
• What other publishing tools are you using to propel your tweets? (where's my linkedin hook?)
• Has anyone run into ownership issues with this plink-esque publishing?
• Does this have a name? Let's call it microsyndication.
• What's the best way to get metrics for this kind of publishing? Is there a way to measure in this distributed/microsyndicated system? How many people read my surf report?

Thanks for reading.

Top 10 things to do now that Song-A-Day is done:

1. Give my ears a rest. between the late-nite sessions in my garage and my morning listening, I clocked many hours in headphones. I'll be happy to give that a rest.
2. Give my arms a rest. Between the day-job in front of a computer and the drumming, bassing (needs strong hands and fingers!), and guitar shredding (usually 3 tracks per song), I'm starting to feel it in my wrists and forearms.
3. Surf. The rest of the body needs some exercise too. Now if only the weather would cooperate.
4. Give my liver a rest. I wouldn't necessarily say that I've been drinking too much wine for the past month. But getting out of a nightly routine that involves a glass of whine can only help. Right?
5. Family-time: who are these people I love with anyway? Time to get to know them again. No, I don't mean my family on http://www.quakelive.com.
6. House-time: I was literally shoveling caca out of my garage last weekend. Time to get the place in order.
7. Cook. I enjoy working in the kitchen. As we get closer to summer, it's time to get this rolling again.
8. Plan. What did we learn from Song-A-Day that would make Song-A-Week more successful? How are we even defining success at this point? Song-A-Day is as fun for me as a listener as a player. If people are interested in continuing this, I think we can turn it into something really cool.
9. Sleep. Need a short break from the late nights.
10. Get outta Dodge. March is a perfect time for a quick weekend getaway: Tahoe, Healdsburg, Mendo, Santa Barbara. Here we go.

We did it. Congrats to everyone who put their songs onto the site. Thanks for all your hard work; I had a great time listening to all of your songs.

I got about 28 songs up there, a few are even keepers. Of my stuff, I feel good about these:

• 2/03: Istanbul
• 2/06: Put Down That Bag Of Rocks
• 2/17: Up In The Attic
• 2/19: Special Sauce
• 2/25: Put A Burrito In Your Mouth

This URL will take you to all my songs.

This player has everything that was uploaded. Steal the embed code if you want this on your site.

Here are some of the most listened-to songs from the month: 247 0203_bruce_2nd_time.mp3
196 0204_bruce_3rdwave.mp3
192 0201_derek_a_song_a_day.mp3
190 0205_bruce_shouldabeenalespaul_.mp3
176 0201_greacen_oh_hell_oh.mp3
173 0203_greacen_istanbul.mp3
163 0202_derek_jury_duty.mp3
163 0202_bruce_timesup.mp3
160 0204_greacen_trouble_sleeping.mp3
159 0215_bruce_base.mp3
158 0203_derek_where_is_walt.mp3
158 0201_peter_all_that_i_can_feel.mp3
157 0206_bruce_thank_you.mp3
152 0204_bruce_whatthe.mp3
149 0202_greacen_2wo.mp3
147 0204_derek_disneyland.mp3
146 0203_ryan_in_to_the_night.mp3
146 0201_seth_the_best_place_in_the_world.mp3
145 0131_seth_the_day_before_song.mp3
143 0209_greacen_master_of_the_mall.mp3
142 0203_peter_twothreeohnine.mp3
140 0213_derek_hawaii.mp3
140 0205_greacen_bring_it_back.mp3
139 0216_greacen_watching_all_the_good_ones_go.mp3
139 0202_peter_all_of_them.mp3
136 0212_bruce_alone.mp3
132 0208_greacen_wafflepalooza.mp3
129 0212_derek_taxonomy.mp3


Pretty evenly distributed. I remember Bruce's stuff got a lot of attention last year too, but it seems like the earlier songs are still getting plenty of play. \

We're almost to 13000 song streams at this point and if the traffic followed last year's pattern, people will still be listening for a few more days.

Starting to think about Song-A-Week for the rest of the year. Email me if you want in on this.

Seth and Derek (among others) asked for some details on how I recorded a few songs this year. I've been pretty happy with the guitar sounds overall. The big improvement from last year seems to be the mic. I'll tell you everything about what I do. Maybe it'll help you find that killer something.

This is my recipe for rock guitars:

Ingredients:

• Guitar: Fender Lead II (1980) with a really kooky humbucker pickup (I think it's a Bill Lawrence, but possibly a dimebucker?) in the bridge position. Someone really took a lot of time modding this guitar before I bought it. This pickup is special though, haven't found many that sound like it.
• Amp: ZVex Nano Amp. A .5 (!) watt tube head which should get most of the credit for the sound. It's really an amazing piece of gear that produces controlled overdriven mayhem at a reasonable volume. Zack, my wife, children, and neighbors thank you.
• Cabinet: Closed-back Mesa 4x12 (with celestions, I think) (yes, the cab for the dual rectifier)
• Mic: Pacific Pro Audio LD2ube Large Capsule Condenser (multipattern)
• A->D: Aardvark Q10 a really handy piece of gear. I'm using its built-in preamps. Aardvark went out of business a few years back unfortunately. This thing is still going strong for me.
• Multitracking: I have an old version of Nuendo 1.53 (the latest is 4) as my main multi-tracking application.
• Several effects: Waves RCL is the main compressor I'll use. I set up some really simple, standard reverb as a sendd effect too.
• 1 Dirty Secret Ingredient: That Evil Multiband thing that comes with Nuendo. This may be the thing that takes a decent sound from the guitar/amp/speaker and makes it really sing on a recording (perverting it and possibly ruining it at the same time).

For the basic "loud" sound here's what I'll do:

The Performance

Set the guitar to use the humbucker pickup only. Volume and tone wide open (11). Believe it or not, someone fitted my guitar with an XLR output. I don't use it, just the regular 1/4" jack.

Set the ZVEX amp to brighness: middle, thickness: normal. Volume knob is about 3/4s+. There's only 1 knob on this amp I get it into the distortion space, but not all the way up. The amp is relatively quiet, the sound is a little mid-rangey, but it sounds good in the room.

Mic the guitars pretty close. About 4-6 inches away from the cabinet's grill. I'm using a large cap condenser for this. I've been leaving the mic in the omni position lately. The sound is a little more open. That proximity effect wasn't doing anything to help the sound IMO.

At this volume, I trim the Aardvark's preamp to "6.5" (not sure if this is a db level or something specific to the Q10) so there's a strong signal and still a fair amount of headroom.

Play with heart and desire -- and fat fingers. I'm not a great guitarrist, but I think pick technique plays a small part here. I'm working toward my ideal guitar sound which is distorted, but clear, with lots of bright overtones. Most of my favorite punk albums had some combination of this. I've learned to get some of those overtones by sticking my finger onto the vibrating strings as I pick. Do you really want to know about this? Just ask and I'll ramble on and on about it...

I'll usually double the main part of the song, then add one more color track, often with a different distortion and pickup setting.

The Mix

2 main (heavy) guitars panned hard right/left. Usually with no EQ.

1 guitar up the middle, usually cleaner (distortion-wise). Might use a little EQ to fill a gap in the wall of sound. Posssibly with a bit more of the send-verb too.

Group all the guitars. Use light compression with the RCL on the group. Might shelf the bass a little (I'm monitoring with NS-10s and I've found that if I can hear the bass at all there will likely be a problem on other systems.). I'll usually add a touch of room verb as a send effect.

Here are the compressor specifics:

• RCL's 'electro' setting
• attack: 20.0
• release: 20.0
• threshold -11.9
• ratio: 2.57
• gain: 4.0

The overall mix is important too of course. The drum sounds are reasonably loud, but offer some space. The bass has a few EQ notches (where? I'll check) to carve out space. I haven't been too happy about the vocal sounds on the full-band songs this year, so no help in this dept.

Here's the Dirty Little Secret: Bus compression is the evil Multiband thing. Yeah, there it is. It's out. What are the settings here? Hard to tell what all these mean. I'm basically choosing the "FM" preset and trying to dial it back just a bit.

Actually, now that I look closely to a randomly picked mix, it looks like I'm just using the default 'FM Radio' setting for 'Trouble Sleeping'.

That's about it. Here's a guitar-only mix for Trouble Sleeping: http://greacen.com/media/greacenzone/20090222_guitar_mix.mp3

You can hear slight variations on this on a bunch of this year's songs:

• Up In The Attic
• Drive North
• Even in Winter (I used the less-distorted guitars in the panned position on this one, reversed the model)
• Master of the Mall
• Wafflepalooza
• Put Down That Bag Of Rocks
• Bring it Back
• Trouble Sleeping
• Istanbul
• 2wo

Plus a few more that will likely come before we cross the finish line.

Go Listen!

We're trucking along with Song-A-Day. This is the point in the month where the daily contributors cross the 'album-length' line. For me, an album doesn't really need more than 10-14-ish songs. So if the well wasn't so damn dry I'd say that the rest of the month is gravy.

For me, it's time to turn to other instruments, other family members, more wine, plagarism... you get the idea.

I have a few comments in no particular order.

Seth

• I'll tune into http://www.xanga.com/sethrocker a bit more. Somehow this fell out of my RSS reader.
• Totally understand the schedule crunch. Toss in whatever half-baked ideas you want to share. This follows the 'every idea is a good idea' principle.
• badaba works! It's a mostly-baked idea. More of these please.
• adding the drum + background vox for Derek's song was a great idea. I think we've all heard another part that would fit in with the stuff we've heard from each other.

Bruce

• You are so prolific, it's always fun to hear your stuff.
• I like the acoustic versions you're putting up there. Both versions of 'Thank You' are nice. The acoustic version is a treat. Did you get a microphone?
• "Not Much" I like much.
• "Acou" I like a bunch too.
• I like instrumentals. Would be fun to add vox or more to one of your tracks (like Seth added to Dereks).
• There are a few other instrumentalists this year. Can you out-Tom Tom? or out-Ryan Ryan?

Derek

• http://bringbackcardwalker.blogspot.com/ has fallen out of my RSS reader too. I'll tune in there.
• I'm glad to hear that you've roped the family into songs.
• I disagree with your thesis presented in 'Monkeys and Clowns'. Songs that mention Monkeys can be turned cool by the mere mention of robots.
• "Jury Selection" really works for me. Quietly angry. Totally pissed in fact. Dangerous. That's how you come across.
• I find "Second Life" pretty damn cool.
• "Me and the Pope" is a triumph. I'll be watching Meet the Press for the story.
• All your recordings sound very natural and high-fi. They work well on every speaker I've used to torture my family.

Peter

• I haven't read http://midgaardsormen.blogspot.com/ much lately (also fell out fo my RSS reader), but I'll add it.
• Short and sweet works for me.
• "twothreeohnine" is a highlight for me for some reason. I love the mood. I think it's also because of the sound... I can hear the room.
• I like the confessional-style of the recent lyrics.
• I need more please. Get back to work.

Ryan

• I'm so psyched that you're doing this.
• You are totally jamtastic
• There's a moment in the beginning of Twilight that reminds me of a song by Rodan, but you take it in a totally different direction.
• There are a few other instrumentalists this year. Can you out-Tom Tom? or out-Bruce Bruce?

Tom

• Great to have your music up here this year. Vocal and guitar chops are coming through loud and clear.
• Is Bigsby a person or a vibrato? (or a cat?) I like this one.
• Is "Annalime" using an open tuning? Neat.
• Are you using an amp modeler or a microphone. I like the dirty guitar sounds.
• There are a few other instrumentalists this year. Can you out-Bruce Bruce? or out-Ryan Ryan?

If you know anyone else interested in playing along for the rest of the month, invite them over.

Finally, I made a few changes to the RSS feeds on the site. There are actually 4 feeds worth knowing about. Here's the skinny:

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/songaday is a daily wrapup of songs. This feed has 1 item each day that mentions the songs/notes that have been uploaded.
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/songadaymedia is a MRSS feed. Each song that is uploaded will get a mention in this feed.
• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/songadayitunes is suitable for tossing into itunes or another podcast reader that will slurp up itunes-specific feeds.
• http://js-kit.com/rss/songaday.netscrap.com/songs/ is a feed of all the comments on the site.

What sort of nefarious things can one do with feeds (nefeedarious?) like this? Well, that MRSS feed will now work with more flashy mp3 players that take RSS feeds as playlists. Like this:

<embed src="http://songaday.netscrap.com/29/mediaplayer.swf" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="400" width="500" flashvars="height=400&width=500&&callback=urchin&frontcolor=0x666666&lightcolor=0xCCCCCC&displaywidth=0&usefullscreen=false&autoscroll=false&showeq=true&autostart=false&repeat=list&file=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds2.feedburner.com%2Fsongadaymedia%3Fformat%3Dxml" />

There are songs. A bunch of them, in fact! And good ones! I'm loving it. You are all very brave and generous for being part of this. Also: It's not too late to get going. If you know anyone else interested, email me and I'll get them set up.

A few things for folks using the website:

• I'll get the 'edit song' thing together soon. Just holler if you made a typo or mistake and I'll fixy.
• There are two RSS feeds:
  • the daily summary which links to a given day's songs: links to a url that looks like this: http://songaday.netscrap.com/songs/?scrap_date=02%2F03%2F2009
  • The media feed is handy to use if you have an mp3 player that takes an rss feed.
• Has anyone tried the itunes podcast feed/link yet?
• If you want to show off your own songs, you can link to a list of your own tunes: http://songaday.netscrap.com/songs/?scrap_owner=greacen just click your name in the (poorly placed) list on the right part of the screen.
• Don't hesitate to backdate if you want! Or if you prefer, upload a song tonight and date it for next week. There are no rules around this.
• The "notes/lyrics" go into the daily summary feed.
• Yes, the list of "Tags" goes into the RSS feed.
• In the 'All About You' section... if you set an image url for yourself, it'll soon start to appear in the itunes and podcast feeds.
• In your Bio, use html if you want to spiff-up your 411.

Also, the facebook page was a great idea (thanks Seth!). There's an audience slowly but steadily growing there. People listening out there. I've been able to measure ~1700 streams during the first week. Not too shabby! Here's the breakdown:

156 20090203_bruce_2nd_time.mp3
106 20090201_derek_a_song_a_day.mp3
100 20090204_bruce_3rdwave.mp3
95 20090205_bruce_shouldabeenalespaul_.mp3
85 20090201_greacen_oh_hell_oh.mp3
81 20090202_derek_jury_duty.mp3
80 20090201_peter_all_that_i_can_feel.mp3
77 20090202_bruce_timesup.mp3
73 20090131_seth_the_day_before_song.mp3
72 20090203_derek_where_is_walt.mp3
72 20090203_greacen_istanbul.mp3
71 20090203_ryan_in_to_the_night.mp3
70 20090201_seth_the_best_place_in_the_world.mp3
65 20090202_greacen_2wo.mp3
65 20090203_peter_twothreeohnine.mp3
62 20090204_bruce_whatthe.mp3
60 20090202_peter_all_of_them.mp3
60 20090204_greacen_trouble_sleeping.mp3
53 20090203_ryan_sleepy_slap.mp3
51 20090203_ryan_bonsai.mp3
51 20090204_derek_disneyland.mp3
43 20090206_bruce_thank_you.mp3
41 ryan_sick_jam_as_in_seriously_not_feeling_well_today_jam.mp3
35 20090205_greacen_bring_it_back.mp3
27 20090205_derek_jury_selection.mp3
16 20090205_bruce_shouldabeenalespaul.mp3
7 20090206_greacen_put_down_that_bag_of_rocks.mp3
6 20090201_greacen_testing.mp3


Thanks for reading. I need to go mix.

We did pretty well last year. I want to do it again this year. I want you to participate. Here's a repost from the way things started. Check in with the blog to read more about what happened last year.

Back in the old days, when I was motivated, somewhat creative, and had gobs of freetime I decided I'd challenge myself by writing and recording a song every day for a month. I chose February, the shortest month because I'm not an overachiever. I want to try it again this year.

Clicking around the net, it turns out that my '29 songs in February' idea isn't too original. The RPM challenge is slightly different in that it's more about delivering a full album at the end of the month.

Sure I did this back in 1996 (or was it '95?). The one thing that pleases me is learning that there's something universally musicianly about choosing the shortest month in the year for this kind of effort.

Here's the goal:

• write and record 1 (or more) song(s) every day for a month.
• upload our work in some place
• share & listen with each other at the end
• put together a best-of for others

Fine print:

• fragments, grooves, hooks, choruses... it's all good. Just record it.
• starting early, ending late.... it's all good. Let your guilt be your guide.
• taking 2 days to finish recording a song... great. Just end up with 29 at the end of the month.
• ending up with 28 songs at the end of the month... great. Just end up with as many as you can. They don't necessarily have to be good. You might not know they're good until a few months later.

This seems like an unlikely time to get involved with an activity like this: blert is in deep hibernation, Little john is buried, we're up to eyeballs in work and family.

Why:

• it's a way of getting the cobwebs out
• time pressure will force you to stay out of creative rat-holes
• it's good practice to let go. good enough is ok, move on.
• because then you have 11 months to revise, refine, and record a pile of work (and think like a producer).
• it's good practice of your engineering skills: get your workflow in shape.
• it's a good excuse to fly mics in your livingroom (or at the breakfast table)
• does this really need more elaboration?

In the spirit of just-in-time development, a website will materialize at some point around February 1 to host this thing. Should be simple but fun to use. Should also be hooked into the facebook/twitter/rss piping that makes the web so much fun to use these days.

GoFish just morphed to betawave. Links in the twitterfountain below:

Just a few weeks left before we start the 2009 Song-A-Day festivities (a.k.a. 29 Songs). Looks like I really need to clean out the garage and the website before this gets going.

Maybe I can pick up a few things to help things along this year too. Here's a shopping list I jotted-down on the BART one night this week:

• batteries! Mostly for the tuner, but I'll play around with different sounds a bit more this year.
• strings for the acoustic guitar.
• sm57: snare sounds have been lame. Maybe this'll help? Maybe properly tuning my snare will help more.
• midi controller: I'd love to play with one of these.
• Another samson mic to record in stereo (from the road).
• a proper mic stand for the kick drum. I lost mine somewhere along the way.
• A piano. I meant to get one at some point in '08, mostly for the girls. I used to play a little, would love to have one in the family.

What am I forgetting?

If you have any interest at all in joining the fray, please shoot me a note. As you can see this is a great excuse to go out and buy some gear. Your spouse will surely agree.

I got a kick out of this blatant product placement. I think the editor mis-cut the milk foaming shot...

I hope you are happy and healthy this holiday season. This year we went back east to my parents' home for the holidays. Highlights:

• Great seats on the flight. Thanks Granny.
• Snow. immediately.
• Bethelehem was beautiful.
• A great (though chilly) day in NYC
• Quality cousin time.
• A quick trip to weyerbacher.
• Happy girls on a fun Christmas morning.
• Wintery-mix-gate: a tin found under Jon's pillow. All the chocolate chips gone.
• Introducing the concept of 'Anti-Santa' who comes to steal presents from under your tree. That's why Santa will occasionally wrap presents using the same wrapping paper as gifts from family members.
• The hot water situation.
• This year's Christmas Crusaders production.
• The Ham-bandit.
• Good (great) news of baby Schulman's safe arrival.
• Good (great) news of Malone's progress.
• cafe from cosmic.
• E's tearful (but happy) nite-nite call from auntie L's.
• JM's idea about picking up girls at a bar by making racy cats-cradle shapes.
• More to come... I'll add it as we do it .

To all our bay area family and friends, we miss you and kwill see you soon.

You've probably seen this already, but I meant to toss this up here when I saw it a few days ago... here they are!

Edit: These notes are pretty old, but heck, I'll toss them out. Also, a note of fair disclosure: I own no stock in any of these companies.

Upon the discovery and study of Malagasy orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale) a beautiful flower with a preposterously specialized shape, Charles Darwin hypothesized that a moth with a tongue of equally preposterous specialization must exist in order for the plant to pollinate and reproduce. Darwin's hypothesis was confirmed much later when the Hawk Moth (Xanthopan morganii) was filmed doing its business.

It's a close, cause-effect relationship between the players. Imagine what would have happened if Darwin found the moth first: would he have predicted the orchid? The flower needs the moth, does the moth need the flower?

The web site parallels are clear: your site is a beautiful flower, its sweet content is the nectar attracting/enticing visitors. You study your users, learn what they want or need. You add a new feature, determine its success by the number of people that use it. If it's good, the people will come, even if you need to lead people to the good place.

This story is worth keeping in mind when examining the approach taken by behavioral targeting systems currently on the market. Their methodologies seem to fall into one of two categories: one group studies the pages on a site to make assumptions about the visitors to that page. The assumption is that you can generalize something about a visitor if you understand the content on a given page.

The other group studies users clicks and trends to make generalizations about groups clustered within a user population. To me, it seems like this group is studying the elusive, hard-to-capture moth. I recently had the privilege of reviewing some of the BT services. Our needs are pretty typical: we want to extend premium ad inventory by targeting ads based on user behavior. Content-targeting (non-ad) would be more of a nice-to-have. Our requirements are similar to most partner-integrations:

1. Ease of implementation
2. Ease of segment (moth) definition
3. Forecasting segment size
4. Targeting accuracy
5. Dart integration
6. A/B testing for auditing effectiveness
7. COPPA compliance (we want this to be clean!)

Here's a brief survey of the top behavioral targeting services (email me if you think I should add another).

baynote - study the moth

• http://www.baynote.com
• 2 step implementation: first add an observer tag (dead simple), then add the content piece (slightly trickier)
• groups users based on search terms and click paths
• doesn't care as much about what's on a page
• Baynote doesn't seem to have a dart integration, however it seems possible that baynote could serve a dart tag targeted to a user (which won't be too easy to manage in the long run).
• proven track record with targeting content (think merchandising 'related items' on ecommerce sites)
• cost: no idear. They have no model for an ad-targeting engagement, but they seem interested in exploring this. We would run a test with them if there's no up-front $$$.
• Here's something they seem to do well: constant testing to evaluate performance.

Personifi - study the flower (and the moth a little)

• http://www.personifi.com
• simple integration: serve their tracking tag through dart. This is a great way of dealing with the integration. Let the ad operations folks manage the whole thing.
• Personifi spiders the page and maps the content to Personifi's own taxonomy. To me, this is the really cool part: they'll classify your site's content for you.
• DART integration! passes name/value pairs to dart. Target campaigns to behavioral segments
• cost: cpm or revshare

LOTAME - study the flower

• http://www.lotame.com/
• implementation is 2 steps: add their tracking tag to collect information, then manually identify the clusters of users their system identifies. The manual cluster-identification seems like a lot of work. We need to learn more about this.
• you can manually upload their classification results to dart for ad targeting, but they're working on automating this piece.
• cost: cpm or revshare

DART boomerang - study the flower

Edit: This one may have disappeared already. Did it ever really exist?

• No url. Not a lot of info on boomerang on the dart site. Sounds like they're gearing up for a 2.0 release sometime in '08 which will have a proper admin-interface.
• Implementation: Drop a pixel or 'boom tag' on a page, associate pages with a 'boom list' or segment name, target ads to 'boom lists'. We need to know what pages (or conversion events) belong to each 'boom list'.
• Interesting factoid: we could deliver a targeted ad to a user even if the 'boom tag' is not on the page.
• cost: fee structure based on the number of 'cookies' or 'users' in 'lists'. We'll see what this really means.
• Interesting factoid: Boomerang will work closely with ad exchange to provide some interesting off-site revenue opportunities.

I noticed that the wikipedia page features a bunch of european BT companies. WunderLoop and nugg.ad look interesting! I'll check them out at some point. Tacoda doesn't seem to be licensing their technology right now, so let's skip them altogether.

If I get some time over the weekend, I'll put together some really sketchy notes on what's really happening under the hood with some of these behavioral targeting systems.

I love that netscrap.com is popular with the folks who use stumbleupon. People have had a fun time reading through the scraps and often email me about it.

Every once and a while everyone converges on a piece of scrap almost all at once.

Kinda cool how easy google analytics makes it to see the piece of content that's performing and then get a quick breakdown of all the referrers. Just a few clicks helped me peg stumbleupon as the source. There's not enough detail to tell me exactly what page is driving traffic to netscrap.com. Was it from the homepage or some other highlight? Who knows. It's probably over now anyway.

FWIW- NetScrap.com is hosted on a single shared server on http://www.intermedia.net/, which has been pretty good about these spiky traffic events. NetScrap is also running on zombie technology for over 10 years (though CF may have briefly been not-zombie) with minimal down-time (and fortunately minimal features).

I like the 'sunset raga'.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

I saw this on facebook the other day:

Which reminds me of one of my favorite scenes of all time...

Enjoy it before the copyright police take it down.

I should have seen it coming. I should have known that a sport that depends on the behavior of the moon, sea monsters, and energy that flows from way over the horizon would be dripping with it. Heck, I'm basically walking on water. But still, I'm surprised at how much magic I've found in surfing.

First there's the magic of place... Of course, the secret spots up and down the coast come to mind. Places with shark lore, epic waves, tragedies. There are smaller miracles too. For example: I bought most of my surfboards through Craigslist. Every place I've met someone to buy a board has become a magic spot for me.

I highly recommend you try meeting someone on your commute route next time you buy a surfboard. I bought my last board from a guy I arranged to meet at the BART station parking lot near my house. Now every time I come home, the magic reminds me that there might be waves tomorrow morning.

Then there's the magic of time, which seems extremely elastic when riding a wave. Everything slows down. Why? Because my heart and CNS is on overdrive? Or so I can enjoy the ride? Who knows? Also, photographers talk about a magic hour or golden hour when the sun is just right. Surfers know that the early AM hours are often best for waves because wind tends to stop.

Magic things... magic surfboards. I'm lucky enough to have one. It catches waves in all conditions. Board shapers love to discuss the magicness they've encountered over the years.

It's all true. Every last bit.

I caught a few minutes of Darjeeling Limited again the other night. I love it.

Wes Anderson projects usually rock a pretty decent soundtrack. Even the traditional Indian tracks are a lot of fun. Here's an (incomplete) sample...

SeeqPod - Playable Search

Go buy the movie or the soundtrack.

One of the things I like about watching facebook and twitter statuses is how conversations seem to occasionally overlap. At the risk of looking like a chat-and-tell blogger, I offer you another brief chat transcript. In this case, a friend told me that his last blert shirt recently reached the threadbare stage.

A few friends from way back decided to get a big batch of these shirts to promote a really cool magazine they were planning. The shirts proudly declare, "blert a zeen." The magazine didn't stick around too long, the band resurrected the name for a while, but these shirts have made their way all around my circle of friends and family.

I passed kudos back to the graphic designer who designed the shirt and was half of the genius duo behind this early incarnation of the blert lifestyle.

CG: welp, I just wanted to pass that tidbit along in case your ears were ringing a few days back. about the blert shirts.

JM: i don't think they were. do you need the artwork?

CG: you still have anything from that? Maybe this is a job for cafepress...

JM: (i still am not entirely sure what this thread is about.) lol. i doubt i've ever thrown a design away in my life

CG: well that's your design, right? yeah.

JM: yeah. i'm a designer, you never throw away artwork

CG: So it's a classic by now... 15 years on or something? still relevant. people are still talking about it.

JM: it's sacrilege, you just get a bigger hard drive and pray the formats are backward compatible

CG: lol. well if you dig something up, ping me, transfer and I'll put it up on cafepress.

JM: it's a classic design. actually, it doesn't feel dated. except a zeen is kinda an irrelevant concept now.

CG: totally. blert, a blog

JM: lol

CG: blert a tweet. A tumblertog

JM: i'll have to wear one of my shirts tomorrow. just cause now

CG: I'll do it too and snap a pic.

One of my day-to-day responsibilities involves troubleshooting problems with banner ads. You might not realize what goes on when your browser loads a page full of ads; most of our brains have been trained to ignore these things. But wow, take a peek under the hood sometime. You'll find some of the hairiest stuff around.

A few folks know what to do: create clean, compatible, polite javascript that degrades nicely. Most create abominations that well... make me reach for my revolver... Today I found something spit out of the 'industry standard' adserver that I had to share with a dood I know. Chat transcript follows...

ME: dood?

DOOD: yo

ME: I think I'm surrounded by the worst technology in the world

ME: ever get that feeling?

DOOD: yes

ME: I get that when I come across this kind of thing:

ME: document.write('<noscript><a\nhref=\"http://ad.doubleclick.net/click%3Bh=v8/378a/3/0/%2a/d%3B209144603%3B0-0%3B1%3B23113405%3B3454-728/90%3B29241525/29259404/1%3B%3B%7Eokv%3D%3Bkw%3Dgamechannel%3Bgame%3Dgamechannel%3Bgenre%3Dstrategryrpg_game%3Btile%3D2%3Bdcopt%3Dist%3Bsz%3D728x90%3B%7Eaopt%3D2/1/7b/0%3B%7Esscs%3D%3fhttp://clk.atdmt.com/TGM/go/125488438/direct/01/\"\ntarget=\"_blank\"><img border=\"0\"\nsrc=\"http://view.atdmt.com/TGM/view/125488438/direct/01/5298130\"\n/></a></noscript></iframe>');

DOOD: !

ME: does that juse blow your mind

ME: OR WHAT?

DOOD: who wrote that? Someone on our team or a 3rd party?

DOOD: I mean your team

ME: some 3rd party

DOOD: amazing

DOOD: they don't get anything

ME: some 3rd party WHICH IS AN INTERNET STANDARD. THE CADILLAC OF AD SERVING

DOOD: wow

ME: we're doomed

ME: as a species

DOOD: totally

ME: just thought you'd like to know.

ME: enjoy life. the end is near.

DOOD: I just spent 2 months working with one of the the world's worst engineers. They canned his ass last week

DOOD: this guy was an imbecile, yet he commanded a huge salary and concessions because we thought he was an 'expert'

DOOD: I spent all of my time re-writing and debugging his crap code

DOOD: some of the worst programming I've ever seen

DOOD: and it made me doubt the future of mandkind, as we are all brothers.

ME: I'm there.

ME: document.write('<noscript...

DOOD: that gives me an idea for a netscrap feature. Have a contest where people submit real source code that can never execute

DOOD: this is a plum example

DOOD: there are others

ME: that's a good one.

DOOD: but they have to be real, culled from real source.

I guess the reason this gets my goat is that I face this question every day: does it matter if software is 'done right'? Ultimately it seems that the true measure of 'rightness' is whether the business is succeeding, not the correctness of the minutiae. For a guy whose background is QA, this is a tough pill to swallow.

Anyway, Dood -- good thinking about the netscrap feature. So toss a few things onto the scrap heap (put in the Tech category) and I'll put them up.

PS- For those of you not in the know, one way javascript puts things on the page is through document.write. In this case, the code is using javascript to put a <noscript> tag -- which usually contains something for the browser to show if it doesn't support javascript. Use javascript to deliver the payload to use if you don't use javascript. Boom!

I love where this goes:

Here's the whole thing for your listening pleasures.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

It's Kid Koala's Scratchscratchscratch.

A chilly sunrise greeted us this morning, it's the second of the Bay Area's three winters. Like the first one in August, this is a false winter (we'll likely have a brief summer in early November when the Santa Anna winds stoke the wildfires (and the surfers)). Still, the chill reminded me of impending bumpercrop of pomegranates, figs, and of course the harvest up in the valley,

This particular false winter also makes me think about the new crop of TV programming, specifically food shows popping up with the new season.

'Spain... On The Road Again' is Spanish road trip that has more in common with soap operas on daytime TV than Kerouac. Just look at this synopsis:

"Mark's moods swings and insatiable appetite have the road trippers stopping often as they head north to Galicia. While in Ribera del Duero wine country, Mario grills milk-fed lamb in a vineyard. While staying at a traditional county inn, Mario's competitive edge emerges and he and Gwyneth race Mark and Claudia on the Camino de Santiago, a historic pilgrimage route. Back at the inn, Mario and Gwyneth cook dinner while waiting for Mark and Claudia to get back."

What works:

• The Bittman/Batali combination is always fun.
• Claudia Basoles: she's lovely.
• The foods: they get to eat off the beaten trail.
• Batali reminiscing about his childhood experiences in Europe.

What doesn't work:

• The gang is going to seem way out of touch if they don't switch to motoring around Spain in hybrids. They swing a little too far down the bonvivant scale at times.
• The soundtrack: an ibericized-version of Willie Nelson's on the road again. Again and again.
• GP's food conflicts: won't eat meat but is still hungry all the time.

I like Alton Brown's Feasting On Waves for a bunch of reasons. Back in my youth I had my own Caribbean experience, so this show brings back a few memories.

What works:

• Alton's always good for some foodie fun.
• getting way off the beaten trail and connecting with people
• The way the show seems like one giant boondoggle. I imagine the pitch: "yeah, we're taking the whole crew down to the Caribbean to tool around on a few sailboats. We'll film the whole thing and you can edit it together for a few episodes. Oh yeah -- you'll need to pay us too."

What doesn't:

• The hand held camera-action is a little nuts. Are they trying to share the seasickness experience?
• They kinda seem rushed. Relax mon! Take it Island speed.
• The relentless soundtrack just won't, well... relent.
• The color and haze of the picture. Did the salt ruin all the gear? Why does it seem like we're watching this through gauze?
• Lay off the lat-lon stuff, ok? Seems Alton's penchant for gadgetry extends to the handheld GPS too.

Let's see if I can borrow a scene (sorry about the autoPlay, can't seem to stop it)

Gourmet's Diary Of A Foodie has turned out to be my favorite show of the moment. Another Zero Point Zero production. ZPZ produces Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations show. D.O.A.F. uses some of the same 'local experts' that have helped No Reservations get the inside scoop on foodie goodies.

What works:

• Awesome variety
• good in-depth kitchen time with some amazing chefs (Grant Achatz, José Andrés, many others)
• great insiders! Gourmet's connections have really opened up some interesting doors in these episodes
• Local connections: Plenty of action in the bay area, plus I've come across s(e.g. Saw an episode about Jersey Cow butter that looked so fresh and good, then came across fresh jersey cow butter at the ferry plaza farmers market).
• The demonstration sections: they bring technique and flavor into reach.

What doesn't work:

• those disembodied hands wailing on a computer keyboard to into each episode are a little freaky.
• Need more episodes! Looks like there are only two seasons.

Maybe I can borrow an episode for a bit:

I'm missing shows too of course. I haven't seen this Bourdain thing called At The Table. Yet. We're probably due for another excellent Top Chef series any month. Can't wait to read along with the amuse-biatch blog (often as entertaining as the episodes it covers). Of course, there hasn't been another installment of Daniel Boulud's After Hours (one of my all-time favs.). Chef Boulud, please return soon, we miss you!

Edit: Uh, so I stupidly forgot to mention on more great show that's started a new season. Stupid because this is probably my motivation for putting this post together.

Check, Please! Bay Area dished out a few new episodes to start its thrid season. This locally produced show's winning combination involves inviting 3 people to introduce and compare their favorite restaurants. The discussion and food porn are usually a lot of fun.

What works:

• Love the local focus. We watch and cheer for our favorite restaurants, debate where we'd take people, and add new destinations to our list.
• Leslie Sabracco keeps the conversation lite and fun. She's an expert with wines and drinks and usually brings an interesting factoid about a restaurant's wine list.
• The series has a bunch of good stuff online. In addition to each broadcast there are blogs, restaurant profiles, flickr streams, embeddable videos.
• Broadcasts are in true HD.

What doesn't work:

• The DVR ends up recording everything because they never signal when an episode is new.

Hey look, they've moved all their videos onto YouTube.

I suspect someone will export this formula to the other restaurant-rich markets.

What restaurant would you bring to the show?

Just what I'm in the mood for today.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

I want change. You do too. Stand behind a candidate you can really stand behind. I will too.

I met Seth Freeman in Boston just before I moved out to California. We eventually reformed recorded and played as Little John in San Francisco for a few years. Seth's most recent move was to LA to pursue a career as a soundtrack composer. Seth was also a big contributor to the 29 Songs project we banged out in February.

Seth just tossed a pile of acoustic recordings onto snocap. Some of these turned up on Little John records. Take a peek in the Songs, Volume 1 section:

The Snocap service (founded by Napster's founder Shawn Fanning among others) connects musicians with the marketplace. Seth's store is a perfect example of how an artist can market, distribute, and sell work directly to consumers.

Check out Seth's site: http://sethfreemanmusic.com/ and the obligatory Myspace page.

I was never that much of a skater, but I wore enough road-rash on my knees to appreciate these vids that I ran across this week. The skate through a warzone aesthetic is the common theme.

Where'd they film this first one? It's good to see that the youths of todays are capable of using their dynamites for a skate movie instead of the jihad. It's from a skate vid called Fully Flared. The explosions make a lot more sense when you read that Spike Jonze is involved in the production. He gives good boom.

I thought this one was interesting too. I thought I'd see if I could steal the player from the time.com video pages since I'm working on a really fun video project right now.

I admit it. Upon hearing Goog's announcement about Chrome's public beta, I threw up in my mouth (just a little bit). My learned-reaction comes from too many years wearing the QA hat at consumer-facing websites. The last thing the world needs is another browser floating around... another platform to support... another frigging pile of test-cases to down-prioritize and never get around to running.

I got over it. I spent a day surfing with Chrome, Goog's new browser. Here are a few first impressions.

Starts with a 475k downloadable setup program.

Once it's in, you can import Firefox or IE settings (including cookies) then it starts GoogleUpdate in the background (not surprised).

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Wow! It's nearly Safari for windows. It's using webkit, already in Safari and sounds like it's going to be used in android. Kinda makes sense to steer users toward a platform that's capable of making the leap to mobile devices.

As software goes, Chrome is handsome. In fact, Chrome is a pretty clever name since there is practically no chrome to the browser. Screen real estate isn't wasted on the borders, status bars, or any of the chrome-y bits that are likely ruining your browsing experience.

Under the hood, Chrome boasts separate process space for different operations. It's trying to get around the single-threaded way most browsers work (without clever webdev hackery). There's also a revved-up JavaScript interpreter... or virtual machine... or something. Need to learn a little more about V8.

The task manager is a nifty idea: show all the processes that are running: tabs, plugins. Kill a process if it's out of control. Be sure to hit the 'Stats for nerds' link on the Task Manager. Is that actually showing memory usage for IE (which also happens to be running on my system at the moment). Yes. Kinda neat. It'll show FireFox too (but not seamonkey!). Helps you 'place the blame where blame belongs' if/when things go wrong.

Are you on Chrome right now? Here are a few interesting views under the hood:

• about:version The official version and build info.
• about:plugins all the plugins currently installed.
• about:memory lists stats for Chrome and other browsers.
• about:network some debug info about the networking.
• about:crash no idear what this is.
• about:stats some secret page about specific performance stats.
• about:cache view all the elements in the cache.

My day with Chrome has been a surprisingly upsell-free experience. I see the Google Gears integration, but nothing compelled me to use it. I expected to be directed toward Google Docs... it never happened.

Goog probably gets all of your usage data. Chrome logs everything in your browsing history unless you're in incognito mode. The Google docs describe a scenario where a user might want incognito-mode to order a surprise birthday gift, but I think they meant to say 'download porn'.

"To browse the web without keeping a record on your computer..." I love that. You'll clearly be keeping records on other computers.

Lots more info in the comic book. Allegedly, Goog printed up a bunch of these things and mailed them out. Anyone have one?

Overall I'm impressed. It's snappy, handsome, seems to handle all the torturous pages I drag my browsers across. No heavy upsells. Seems to have a lot of open-sourced projects under the hood. I'll check back in a few weeks.

October 15th, 2008: Blog Action Day, a great idea. Here's the deal: motivate a bunch of bloggists to write about a social issue (this year, poverty). Then, here's the kicker -- donate the earnings from that day's ad revenues.

The Greacen Zone falls on one extreme (ly small) end of the audience size spectrum. But since all of netscrap.com is involved in this ad-revenue experiment, I'll donate all of the netscrap platform's revenue. Might even beat the minimum for a microloan on Kiva

What will I write about? At this point: no idear. Really. I've lived in cities. I've taken enough human geography, heard stories from peace corps veterans, and travelled enough to know at least a little about the average state of humanity in the world. But poverty -- specifically. Dunno.

I'll come up with something good.

Really. It will.

Digsby is a multi-im client along the lines of Trillian, Pidgin, and the Meebo. Use Digsby to organize your IM chatter. Through a single application/interface, you can ping all your friends on the big IM services (AIM, YIM, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber). They kick it up a few notches by supporting Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace social services. They kick it up another notch by supporting email as well: gmail, ymail, msnmail, pop, imap accounts.

Updates and notifications from all these services arrive on the desktop in bubbly status messages that appear even if Digsby is minimized. You can even reply to a message by typing in the status bubble.

I love the way this blurs the boundaries between all these communication channels. A message could arrive from a person (who cares how it got here), my reply bounces back through the same channel.

Here's another way Digsby is pushing envelopes with their service. A few clicks will let you set up a widget that you can embed in your various web-hangouts, blogs, facebook account, etc.

Digsby does a stellar job of running their project with transparency and input from their users. They've managed to build a close relationship with an active user community by using all the social resources available. They go far beyond the requisite blog (even if they brag about the strange bugs that turn up in their public testing cycles). Users have a channel to reach Digsby via twitter, to get involved with an active developer community (also on twitter incidentally). The steady drumbeat of prioritization from regular public roadmap polls has kept Digsby on track to satisfy users. On top of all this, they've built in a great alert/warning system that lets folks at digsbyhq push status message out to all users ('twitter is having trouble today').

Kudos to their team involved with support and outreach. If I were running a customer-facing service, I'd likely use Digsby to manage the customer contacts. I wonder if they're eating their own dogfood over there at digsbyhq?

There are a few caveats of course. Because what software is perfect? Digsby does not yet support IRC or Skype chats. As far as I can see, the multi or 'room' chat features aren't supported on any of the IM services. All of these features are on their roadmap.

Digsby is ready for primetime and worth a try.

A friend passed on a link to this trailer today. Take a peek only if you're really brave:

This reminded me of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco's attempt to rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to the "George W Bush Sewage Plant."

Don't you think both of these efforts will backfire in about 10 years? Stone's film will end-up glorifying W., his life becomes a redemption story blazing a path for future presidents to follow. The renaming scheme will seal W's legacy as an environmental crusader who dealt with the tough problems of sewage treatment and toxic waste.

Also, where's Will Ferrel when you really need him?

In my occasional experimentation with twitter I recently stumbled upon