Blogging 2010 in Review (Stats Generated by WordPress)

Apologies, the below is automatically created by WordPress. It is mainly interesting for me, myself and I…

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 29 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 103 posts. There were 50 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 3mb. That’s about 4 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was December 6th with 282 views. The most popular post that day was So what did I learn at Online Educa 2010?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, hansdezwart.info, moodle.org, siloinsiproche.com, and dommel-valley.org.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for imdb api, teaching, moodle 2.0, segway, and elgg.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

So what did I learn at Online Educa 2010? December 2010
10 comments

Did You Know Moodle 2.0 Will….? (Online Educa 2009) December 2009
34 comments

Where is IMDB’s API? May 2009
4 comments

Moodle Books from Packt Publishing January 2009
12 comments

The Future of Moodle and How Not To Stop It (iMoot 2010) February 2010
11 comments

Authenticity: There Ain’t No Party Like a Leela James Party

Ever since I attended a conference in a Disney World resort in Orlando I have been meaning to write a very cynical post about how authenticity is disappearing from our society (think Epcot: I visited Germany, Japan and Coronado Springs in twenty minutes total). In the post I would lament on how nothing is real anymore and that everything is fake. Have you looked at any ad in Wired recently? 100% photoshopped. Have you been to the great wall of China? No part of it is really old, it has all been “renovated”. Whenever I go anywhere or look at anything the experience that is delivered to me seems over-engineered.

I have decided not to write that post. I experienced some authenticity tonight: Leela James in the Melkweg in Amsterdam. This is the best concert I have ever attended. It was better than John Legend in Bruxelles, better than Postmen in the Melkweg. Even better than Zap Mama in the Westergasfabriek. Leela rocked the house for over two hours and showed that we still have artists that can express true feelings on the stage (shame on you Maxwell). The intensity of her show was incredible and her voice is truly exceptional.

Thank you Leela for keeping it real.

Where is IMDB’s API?

I really like the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). It is the largest freely available database of movie related data. I use it mainly for two things:

Whenever I see an actor or actress in a movie and cannot remember in which movie I have seen that person before. IMDB list all the actors/actresses in the movie and allows you to click on the name of each person. On the page of the person it will then show you all the movies in which they played a role.
Whenever I am in video store and need to know whether the movie that I am about to rent is any good. IMDB has a ratings systems that can give you a good general idea of the quality of the movie.

This post will be about the second use case. In the video store I use the Internet connection of my mobile phone. This is a tedious and often infuriating process, especially when you want to look up multiple titles. IMDB’s pages are huge (they have many images and ads), and this makes them load very slowly. In case of an ambiguous title two pages need to load before you can see the rating. Let’s look at an example. If I search for “pulp fiction” I get the following page:

I then have to click on the “Pulp Fiction” link to see the IMDB page which has the rating:

After another angry session at the video store, I decided to do something about it. First I looked for a mobile version of the IMDB website. There are some available options (see here and here), but they are geared towards iPhones and don’t really work well.

Next I decided to write my own small web application and tried to find the IMDB API. It doesn’t exist! Unfortunately there is no way to easily use and re-purpose IMDB’s data. I don’t understand why some web companies (in this case Amazon) still don’t realise that this actually inhibits the building of their brands.

Luckily there is always one last option: screen scraping. I was actually willing to try and write my own parser for this (would be great practise), but found Izzysoft‘s IMDBPHP class which makes this easy work. This class allows you to get a lot of data about each movie.

After about two hours of programming I now have the following result. I call it Rent it?:

I tried to design it to be as fast as possible and made it fit for purpose using the following design considerations:

I used a big input field at the top of the screen, with a big button underneath. This input field is also shown on the results pages, so that it is always easy to start a new query. The field gets automatic focus as soon as the page finishes loading.
Only relevant information about each movie is shown: rating, title, year, director, run time in minutes and a user generated plot outline. The title links to the original IMDB page which will open in a new window.
The standard IMDB score is converted to a percentage and gets a background colour on the basis of the height of the rating. Red has a rating of less than 60% (not worth watching), whereas movies with green ratings are above 70% and could be interesting.
The pages are very light: no ads or images. All the processing is done on the server. If a search has many results, then this processing can still take a while. That is why the number of results are capped at five and results are cached for a week (also on the server to benefit everybody).

I hope you are willing to try it out and look forward to any of your feedback!

Try “Rent it?“

Rent it? is also accessible through my mobile start page.

The Height of a Payment as an Indicator of the Value of the Service

A former colleague of mine recently read a Dutch article about Martijn Aslander and the new economy. Whenever Aslander does a presentation or talk, he lets the members of the audience decide what the value of the talk was and pay him accordingly. My ex-colleague was fascinated with the concept and is now wondering whether he should do something similar. He especially likes the idea of having a more direct way of getting feedback about what he does. He has asked me what I think of it as a business model. I will try and outline my thoughts in this post.

Aslander is inspired by Radiohead’s In Rainbows album and probably by authors like Cory Doctorow who gives away electronic versions of his book under a Creative Commons license. The reason why this can work as a business model for music and literature is twofold:

The costs for the production and delivery of digital goods is so marginal that it can be considered as being zero. Once the CD is finished there are no real costs to Radiohead for delivering an extra copy to someone.
The problem of content creators is not that everybody pirates their content, it is that nobody knows about their content. Giving away your content can help build an audience, who then might be willing to pay for others things that you do or have (e.g. go to your speech or concert). Currently this is an usual model, which by itself also generates interest (this is why it can work for Aslander). Usually the money isn’t made with the content that is given away on a voluntary donation basis, it is made with the other opportunities that become available when you have a larger audience.

I personally have reached a stage where I expect digital information to be free. If there is no marginal costs to something, then I don’t really see why I would have to pay for it. This is why I like free software so much: it enables me to use software freely and legally. It is my belief that this is the future of music too, as more and more people find it absurd to pay about a dollar for something that costs absolutely nothing to deliver.

This begs the question of how content creators can make a living for themselves. Kevin Kelly (who has been thinking about the new economy for over a decade now) has written an fascinating manifesto about the things that people will always be willing to pay for, even in a digital economy with abundant and free copies: Better Than Free. One of those things is embodiment. People will pay to see you in person.

Back to my former colleague. Should he try a business model in which he asks the participants of a workshop to pay him what they think it was worth? I don’t think he should, unless he wants to use it as a marketing gimmick. What he does has a very real value. When he does a workshop he needs to be physically present to make it a success. His time is worth something. Also, there is an optimum amount of participants for a workshop. If you get any more participants, you negatively impact the quality of the workshop: an extra space has a real and tangible cost. You cannot say the same for a song download…

This leaves open the question about how to get more direct feedback. I will have to address that in another post.

Beautiful Functional Design: The Strida Folding Bike

As regular readers of this blog might have noticed: I love great technology. When I talk about technology, I push the concept slightly further than most web aficionados might do. It is not just gadgets that I like, but any well designed tool that can make my life easier is much appreciated. A great blog to see examples of what I am talking about is Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools blog.

I have a many pieces of technology that I really like and use often. Some examples: a Leatherman Juice Cs4 multitool, a Brabantia bin ,a Samsung NC-10 netbook running Ubuntu, a Solis Citrus Press, a Victorinox Trevi 17 briefcase or a Microplane Grater). All of these products have one thing in common: they have been extremely carefully designed for the task at hand. Every element has been consciously put in place and considered. This is refreshing in a world of more and more crap. One of my favourite books on the topic of design is Donald Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things. He outlines some design principles that many products violate which consequently makes them hard to use. What he does not address is the creative inspiration that is needed for truly great products.

My latest technology acquisition does have this creative inspiration. It is a Strida folding bike. This brilliant piece of engineering will help me get to and from the train station every day. The Strida was featured on Cool tools a little while ago and I completely agree with everything the reviewer writes there.

The bike is very low maintenance. It uses a Kevlar belt instead of a chain, so no grease to get on your clothes. It rides a bit like a sports car drives: the handling is very direct. You sit up straight while riding the bike, giving you a good overview of traffic. As you can see on the Youtube video below, the (un)folding process is incredibly fast:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/fRmfMszDbWo]

The joy is in the details: little loops allow you to lock the brakes, so that the bike can’t roll away when standing up and the carrier on the back doubles as a stand when lying down. Even the marketing people did a good job (in general I am not fond of marketeers). They know that people will ask you about the bike in wonderment, so they have provided a case of Strida business cards underneath the saddle that you can hand out.