March 2013 - Sam Harrelson

Skycons and HTML 5

Pretty awesome…

Forecast: “Eventually, it dawned on us that, given the animations we had elsewhere in the app, the Climacons simply felt too flat, too static; we therefore set about making our own set of animated weather icons that felt more alive—but not so much so that they distract—which are the icons you now see on Forecast.

We are calling them Skycons, and they are now open source on GitHub.”

Nifty to see HTML 5 implementations really gaining traction in all sorts of ways that wasn’t possible just a few years ago. This and things like WebRTC, the future is bright for the web outside walled gardens of Facebook et al.

BTW, if you haven’t checked out Forecast.io you really should.

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

Zoinks…

Andrew Weissmann: FBI wants real-time Gmail, Dropbox spying power.: “Weissmann said that the FBI wants the power to mandate real-time surveillance of everything from Dropbox and online games (‘the chat feature in Scrabble’) to Gmail and Google Voice. ‘Those communications are being used for criminal conversations,’ he said.”

Forecast for the Web

Dark Sky is one of my favorite iOS apps and a recommendation I always make for people to check out when they ask what to put on their iPhone.

However, now that I’ve made the move over to Android, I’ve been missing the beauty and simplicity of the great weather app. So, I was excited to see that the makers of Dark Sky went to the web and developed Forecast.

It’s pretty stunning and best of all it works on the web. Which means it works fine on my Nexus 4, my Nexus 7, my Chromebook or my Macbook.

Between that and sites like Feedbin for RSS reading (currently testing out), I’m excited to see developers moving back to platform-agnostic development of great platforms on the web.

What’s Next For Me

This about sums it up…

StudiesLab Lauch | Indiegogo

Would love your help if you’re able.

Find out more on the StudiesLab site.

Rush’s Favorite Apple RSS Feeds

Sounds like someone likes their RSS reader. Based on his RSS subscriptions, it looks like Limbaugh and I are at least reading a number of the same Apple-related feeds.

Never thought I’d have more in common with Rush than Google.

El Rushbo’s Favorite Apple Tech Blogs – The Rush Limbaugh Show: “Rosie in Lake Havasu, I went to my RSS reader and this is really tough because I’ve never mentioned any of these before. I can’t mention them all, but since you said Apple, that helps narrow it down. In no particular order, here they are: iMore.com. That’s run by a guy named Rene Ritchie. I think he’s out of Canada, but this site, in addition to keeping you up-to-speed on everything happening with Apple, will offer you excellent tips on using Apple products, both the mobile and desktop. MacDailyNews.com is also fabulous. AppleInsider.com is great. World of Apple is okay. There are a couple of others that are not specifically Apple, but they are Apple centric. They cover a lot more than that. One of them is called loopinsight.com and the other’s daringfireball.com. We’ll link to all of these at RushLimbaugh.com on our website. Rosie, if you weren’t able to write them all down, they will be on our website. You’ll be able to find them all. But there are tons of them. I mean, they’re all over the place out there. One of them, cultofmac.com, they’ve got people on that one, very snarky who rip Apple to shreds at the same time. So if you’re interested in that, if you want people who do that too, then that’s a site that you might want to check out now and then.”

Spoken like a true web geek.

Moving On From Carolina Day

In early June I’ll wish my 7th graders godspeed and wrap up my time at Carolina Day School. It will be a bittersweet day (and next few months) but I’m excited about the remaining time I have with my students and colleagues to learn and grow in the halls (and on the many stairs) of Stephens.

I have so much love for my two years of students there. Both my current 7th graders and the now 8th grade group have taught me more than they’ll ever know about life and I’ll be eternally thankful to have spent a couple of rotations around our closest star learning about the universe with them.

Similarly, my colleagues are amazing people and teachers. I love our Middle School team and am so thankful to have been in their presence the last two years (smelly “workhole” and all). Our 7th grade team is the best group of folks I’ve ever worked with and their daily inspiration and talent is beyond words. It’s hard to think of leaving at this point because we’re firing on all cylinders and really hitting harmonies and resonant frequencies as a team. I’ll never forget the real excitement that they make me feel for teaching and especially learning.

However, it is the time for me to move on professionally. As I told Peggy Daniels, our Middle School Head, today, “I’m really good at working with people but not so good at working for people”.

My views and philosophy on education necessitate that I follow a different path. I’m not exactly sure what that looks like (“the woods are lovely dark and deep”). Yet I know that drive will take me and my career down a road that is still covered in snow because I have miles to go before I sleep (beg pardon of Robert Frost there).

So what’s next? I have a couple of interviews at exciting local schools but I also have the nagging persistence of StudiesLab.

It’s a business plan and educational model I’ve had written for years in my head (and on paper) of decentralized, cooperative and authentic education based not on 19th century content delivery for Victorian factory workers but on current research aimed at producing world changers. A place for round pegs in a world of square holes. A prayer for hope and humility and learning.

Or something like that.

Regardless, it’s time to plant sequoias.

Chrome Over Android

This is the main impetus of Google’s recent moves with Android and Chrome… it’s not about user experience or trying to slim down.

It’s about control. Google has lost control of Android to Samsung, Amazon etc and knows its future is with ChromeOS (especially given that Windows 8 is a flop and Apple is stumbling in the cloud region):

Is Android Vs. Chrome A Metaphor For Apps Vs. Mobile Web?: “If Wilcox is right, and Chrome is a stand-in for the browser and Internet, while Android represents an app-centric mobile experience, then it makes sense Google would favor and promote Chrome over Android in the longer term. That’s their bias.”

Changing Platforms Like Socks

Sounds like something I would write…

Change platforms: “Windows Phone 8 is my personal favourite smartphone operating system, as it fits my usage patterns and visual preferences perfectly. Yet, I will still move to an entirely new, unproven, and untested platform later this year (if Sailfish is out by then). The reason is simple: always try to broaden your horizon. Never get stuck in one place. Never become lazy. Never settle. Never let the same set of neurons fire. Never come to rely on any one company.”

Better yet, I try to be platform agnostic and focus as much as I can on using web-based utilities that work on any platform. It’s not always easy or pretty but it works.

Google Reader Sharing Replaced by Feedly

It’s insanely interesting to me how quickly people are replacing the “sharing cred” feature that once made Google Reader very valuable with Feedly…

Tips for Google Reader users migrating to feedly | Building Feedly: “When you hover on an article or inline it, you should see a bookmark icon. We call it the save for later icon. It functions similarly to the Google Reader star mechanism.”

When Google Reader was in its prime, one of the most fascinating features was seeing how many times an article had been shared or favorited etc… now Feedly is picking up that slack and it’s really going to take off as a result.

Google missed a huge opportunity by shutting down Reader.

Paradox of Power

Really fascinating…

Flush With Oil, Abu Dhabi Opens World’s Largest Solar Plant : NPR: “Abu Dhabi, the most oil-rich of the United Arab Emirates, is now home to the world’s single-largest concentrated solar power plant.”

Top Typefaces of 2012

Fun and fascinating post on Typographica on fonts from last year…

Our Favorite Typefaces of 2012 | Typeface Reviews | Typographica: “Some years are stronger than others. 2012 was a strong year. The rich diversity in new type design has never been so evident.”

Going to have to use a few of these myself.

Post Dog Park Bliss

There’s really nothing like seeing a pup in post dog park bliss. It literally takes years off of your life to see such happiness (notice Willie’s missing two bottom teeth… we’re getting close to puppy adolescence).

Updates to My RSS Feed and Feed Reading

NewImage

Now that Google has officially killed Google Reader, I’ve decided to make sure my feed here doesn’t get borked in a similar fashion when Google decides to kill Feedburner.

So, my RSS feed is back home at http://samharrelson.com/feed. I’ve got about 800 people who are subscribed to the RSS feed, so if you’re seeing that through the old link, you’ll need to resubscribe to get updates. Sorry. Pull the band-aid and all.

It’s only a matter of time before Google kills Feedburner now that it has officially divorced RSS.

Some folks on Twitter have asked what RSS reader I’m going to be switching to now that Reader is dead (dying quickly) and if I’m using Feedly.

I’m not using Feedly although it looks pretty nice. I’ve actually switched back to Fever. I’ve been an on-again-off-again user of the service for years since it launched and have it installed on this service. It’s fantastic and all but definitely not something for everyone (or most). For one, it’s a server side install and for two it’s not something that looks anything like Google Reader or a snappy web app in 2013 and for three it’s not being heavily developed.

That being said, it’s located on my server, does a great job and delivers an awesome experience whether I’m on my Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Chromebook or Macbook. So, for those things and more, it’s perfect for me. If you’re geeky, go try it out.

All that to say, RSS is insanely important to me. Google Reader has been the hub of my web experience over the past six or so years since I decided to invest myself in it as my main feed-reading platform over the likes of Bloglines or NetNewsWire or Netvibes. I’m sad to see it go and I fear the worst for the once-beloved and under-developed Feedburner platform as well.

I need a solid and reliable RSS reader to navigate the 256 sites I currently subscribe to and try to religiously read through each day. It’s something I do that is evidently old fashioned and antiquated now, but oh so incredibly valuable nonetheless.

Search for Affiliates via Geolocation on AvantLink

Now we just need to get this narrowed down to states (and eventually zips):

AvantLink Launches Geolocation Affiliate Tool – Affiliate Marketing Blog: “AvantLink has announced an update to their affiliate recruitment and application management tools.
Merchants can now search for affiliates based on the originating country for the majority of an affiliates traffic.”

Twitter and Facebook Are Not Google Reader Replacements

I have to solidly disagree with this:

Yes, creative curation is the new Google Reader! RT @heatherrocco: "Social media is now your news aggregator." @rkiker #nynjgs13

— Rich Kiker (@rkiker) March 15, 2013

RSS still matters a great deal.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ (even Tumblr)…these social gardens with their nice walls are fantastic but social “curation” isn’t the right path ahead for establishing a real presence on the web because you’re always serving a master that could go away.

There’s nothing like having a namespace that identifies and/or reflects you.

It’s something I try to get through to students, clients, friends and family.

That’s why I like the idea of dogfooding the open web and encouraging others to do so. Eventually after the social web bubble pops, we’ll get back to the realization that having yourname.com or some iteration thereof is insanely powerful and needed.

Now that Google Reader is dead, I’m switching back to Fever for my RSS reading. I literally live in my RSS reader and it’s a beyond-valuable piece of technology that drives everything from my business to my research to my studies to my obsessions to my love of history etc. Having a reliable, synced and powerful RSS reader capable of handling the 500 or so feeds I (try to) read on a daily basis is important.

Yes, Fever is a pesky self-installed piece of software that is definitely not for everyone. I’d suggest something like Feedly or Pulse or Flipboard for 99% of people.

However, for those of us who were there when blogging was The Social Network and RSS feed reading was the Newsfeed back in 2004, something like Flipboard just doesn’t cut it.

Fever is fantastic for my needs. Again, it’s a self-install and has minimal amounts of developer involvement, but it’s a fantastic program. The fact that it is self-hosted on my server that I pay for and have to keep up makes me like it even more for some Google-Reader-backlash-lizard-brain reason.

Since I’m mostly on my Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 these days when I’m not using my Chromebook or this Macbook Pro Retina, I’ve been testing out Meltdown app as my mobile interface for Fever. It seems to be doing the job just fine at the moment and is a great Android experience for Fever. It’s a no-frills and minimalistic take on feed reading, but that’s exactly what I was looking for.

Maybe Marco is right and it is excellent news for the RSS reader industry (and RSS in general) that Google Reader is shutting down.

Regardless, this is just painful to watch now.

Worst Product Release Ever

For once, I’m glad that I wasn’t at a major tech product release and could watch the debacle unfold via a YouTube livestream from the comfort of home:

Robert Scoble – Google+ – Samsung really screwed up with its Galaxy S4 presentation.…

Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Google Reader

It’s inevitable, but still sad that Google is shutting down Google Reader rather than letting it (and its valuable API that allows so many services to use it for a syncing backend) die a long and gentle death.

The “social web” is a fascinating beast. When I first started blogging in 2002, I was enamored with the idea of having a domain name that reflected who I was and a place to put my ideas, pictures, scraps, polished pieces and serve as my home base of a digital footprint.

Geeks and folks on the web needed a way to stay in touch with updates from friends and people they were interested in. I experimented with Newsgator, FeedDemon, Liferea (LInux FEed REAder during my time using Ubuntu as my OS from 2006-2009) but finally settled with Google Reader as my hub of consuming online content.

In many ways, Google Reader was the first Facebook NewsFeed for nerds, geeks, web heads and those of us who cared about the web.

When 2006 – 2007 came and birthed Twitter and Facebook’s rapid growth, things changed quickly. The idea of having your own webspace was traded for the ability to leverage something like Twitter or Facebook’s growing user base for exposure. You didn’t have to explain feeds, that ugly orange RSS button or readers to your friends and family and you could just point them to your name. The walled gardens won.

Here’s a great post from Tantek laying out similar themes of loss-yet-optimism for a new hope:

On Silos vs an Open Social Web [#indieweb] – Tantek: “The answer is not to not ‘only [be] relevant to geeks’, but rather, reframe it as a positive, and be relevant to yourself. That is, design, architect, create, and build for yourself first, others second. If you’re not willing to run your design/code on your own site, for your primary identity on the web, day-in and day-out, why should anyone else? If you started something that way but no longer embrace it as such, start over. Go Selfdogfood or go home.”

This can easily be dismissed as one of those “first world problems” for geeks who care too much about whatever the open web happens to be. However, many many people still use the backend plumbing of RSS to do great things and change the world. You use RSS more than you realize anytime you do most anything on the web (outside and inside of walled gardens).

I’ll admit, this has definitely caused me to re-ponder my own web existence. This is a self-hosted WordPress blog, but my personal blog with my name on it at samharrelson.com is hosted through the awesome Shareist service that I love. Should I move that back to self-hosting so that I can self-dogfood?

One of the many things I’ll be pondering in the coming days as I think about the way the web is heading the next few years.

The Joy of Working For You

Whether it’s this blog or Thinking.FM or StudiesLab or Harrelson Agency (and even more soon), I can’t agree more with Daniel here…

An Indie State Of Mind – Bitsplitting.org: “Like Marco, I derive a great amount of satisfaction from doing things for myself. Also like Marco, it can sometimes be a fault. No doubt I would benefit in many ways from working for a company or from joining a podcasting network. The resources and reach of these institutions could help me build greater things and get them in the hands of more people. On the other hand, they could force me to build things that suck. Folks like us, we with an indie state of mind, tend to face a far simpler choice: be dissatisfied working for somebody else, or gratified by the thrill of trying our own thing.”

Maybe it’s just my only-child mindset, but I’ve always found it’s a lot more enjoyable to work with people rather than for people.

And that’s the beauty of something like affiliate marketing.

Pinterest Gets Analytics

Pinterest has announced their iteration of web analytics for bloggers, businesses and groups with a verified website in the profile of the popular sharing service:

Introducing Pinterest Web Analytics – Pinterest Blog: “Bloggers, businesses, and organizations often ask us, “what are people pinning from my websites?” These website owners help create the content on Pinterest and we wanted to help them understand which pieces of content people find most interesting. Today, we’re pleased to announce Pinterest Web Analytics, a first step towards doing just that. Web Analytics gives site owners insights into how people are interacting with pins that originate from their websites.”

Getting your website verified by Pinterest is a pretty painless and straightforward process involving dropping some code into the header of your site.

Most interesting is the ability to see stats on not just your pins but also repins as well as impressions and clicks. This should make many of the marketers and businesses that have been eyeing Pinterest but not sold on the platform because lack of analytics happy.

This isn’t a good thing for sites such as PinReach that have sprung up to fulfill the need for analytics and insight into Pinterest trends. However, much like Twitter’s once flourishing API coral reef (still a great post six years later), these sites can become interesting platforms to dig deeper or look at other types of social engagement outside of what Pinterest itself offers.

Pinterest is definitely upping the social media involvement ante with businesses as it continues to scale its user base and explore areas of monetization and ad serving in a different path than either Twitter or Facebook.

Instead, look to LinkedIn and Twitter for further innovation in the social networking monetization space.

When Marketers Stare Back at You

Hot on the heels of Samsung’s new flagship phone being released with “eye scroll tracking” as a feature comes this interesting piece from TechCrunch on what we might be in store for when marketers can stare back at mobile users…

The Implications of the Interface That Watches You – TechCrunch: “It’s no secret that companies and advertisers have been looking for a way to boost the ROI of mobile ads, Google included. Gathering facial feedback data could act like a cheat code to help marketing get to the next level – provided it isn’t wielded like a heavy, blunt club. The possibility for abuse is tremendous here: imagine ads that periodically migrate to occupy the places where you find the choicest content in an app, or autoplaying video ads that wait until you’re paying close attention before launching into a sales barrage.”

The Web Has Been Acquihired by AOL

Fantastic post:

The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL! – Brian Bailey: “An update from the Founder and CEO of World Wide Web, Inc.

October 1, 1998

I know this blog has been quiet lately. It’s been a crazy few months of meetings and negotiation here at WWW HQ, but we’re finally ready to share our big news: World Wide Web is joining the America Online team next month! We couldn’t be more excited.”

Go read the full post, especially the postscript.

Thankfully, the www was born in 1991 and not 2011.

Handy Google Spreadsheet Keyword Generator

I keep track of all our keyword bids, ideas, brainstorms and lists in Google Drive via Spreadsheets.

I had no idea this was possible but will be using the heck out of this feature now…

A Glimpse Into Google’s Brain, Hidden In A Spreadsheet App: “Yesterday TechCrunch reported that if you make a spreadsheet in Google Drive (Google Docs, formerly), enter and highlight the names of two beers, and pull down on the corner of the spreadsheet cell while holding Option or Control, the app will automatically fill the following cells with the names of other beers. The information is pulled, seemingly, from nowhere.”

And a few examples here.

And no, it’s not just for beer. I made a few quick tries with keyword lists for specific specialty clients and was impressed with the nature of the returns.

It’s not a replacement for keyword-specific tools, but a nice way to brainstorm from time to time.

Google Sets have been around for a while and I was always impressed with what was possible (and bewildered they “shut down” the service a few years back). Nice to see Sets having a long life ahead as a part of Google Drive.

Plunk for Mobile Site Testing

Plunk is a nifty and easy-to-use utility that allows you to upload a mobile screen image of a site you might be testing or designing, share it with others and get a report 48 hours later of where people touched their screen.

It’s totally for mobile sites and I think it’s an ingenious idea given the analytics you get:

Plunk – An easy way to test clicks on a mobile phone…

“Here are 5 ways Plunk will help:
1. User intuition. See where touch screen testers want to click on your page.
2. Improve functionality. Visually review where users are expecting to find that new button.
3. Retain interaction and engagement. Test where mobile users are getting lost due to either navigation or design and keep their attention locked.
4. Mobile conversion. Feedback for creating a great design will encourage more mobile activity.
5. Bob for those apples. Stuck deciding between new mobile designs? Send them out and dive into your results to find the best one!time and money. Plunk lets you test your mobile users’ clicks to figure out what works and what doesn’t.”

You can share the image to get results to your own social networking followers or to an email beta list etc.

Very cool and handy, especially for performance marketers using mobile (as you should be).

Twitter’s Essential Value to Marketers

It’s amazing to me that Twitter has grown from a (perceived) questionable platform of democratized reporting of breakfasts and cat activity around the world to a full blown news stream.

Well, not amazing… we saw it coming and we knew that Twitter or something like it, would eventually fill the place that RSS started carving out in the early 2000’s.

This is pretty solid testimony for what Twitter means to the news business:

How Twitter won the social media battle for journalism | The Wall Blog: “More telling is the comment from Joanna Carr, editor of BBC Radio 4′s news programme ‘PM’, who said she ‘wouldn’t hire anybody who doesn’t know how to use Twitter’.

From that you get all you need to know. Twitter has quickly made itself an essential modern journalism tool for news journalists.”

(Via Matthew Ingram on Twitter)

So what does this mean for marketers?

The same thing Twitter meant for marketers in 2007 when I wrote this on CostPerNews:

It really is amazing to see how these conversations have started to sprout up as more and more people in our sphere get involved with these micro-platforms. I took a great deal of heat for being a Twitter fan boy late last year, but those same people who gave the heat are now (for the most part) realizing the potential that these programs have for their marketing efforts.

After all, marketing is just the spread of information about an idea, service, program, theology, ideology, offer or emotion… what better way to do spread that information in an attention deficit world than through micro-chunks?

I still stand by that.

Just as it is no longer an option or convenience for press professionals to not use Twitter, it is not an option for performance marketers to continue to either ignore or just use Twitter as a broadcasting medium in 2013 (or 2007).

Importance of Marketing Plans

Whether you’re doing search marketing, affiliate marketing, SEO, social media, PPC or some combination of those it’s always important to at least have a framework plan set out.

Here’s a quick and easy post that helps spur some thoughts about marketing plans and what you could be doing to improve your campaigns…

Writing Marketing Plans – SEO Book: “Writing forces an analytic approach. The act of writing something down often brings about new ideas because it gets us out of the routine of ‘just doing’. Secondly, writing plans helps us write better proposals. A marketing plan is about both an analysis and a form of communication. It’s a means to get across your ideas to clients and other partners and convince them of the merits of what we’re doing.”