Changing Way

We recently got Maddie, our 4yo daughter, her first bike. We got a good bike at a good price from Craigslist. My wife then embarked on the project to turn the black bike into less of a boy’s bike, but not too girly a bike. She found a lot of the stuff she wanted on the web, but couldn’t find any stickers that were just right.

I suggested that she use her graphics skills to design her own, and have Zazzle make them. She did. We are very pleased with the result.

Maddie is very pleased with her bike, although she gets a little nervous sometimes. Her little brother is rather jealous, even though the trike is now his.

I’m looking forward to SummerMash Boston on August 5. See some of you there!

The people at Mashable are of course using social media in all sorts of ways for the event. For example, here’s my profile at the EventVue site.

Looking at my blog stats, one of the surprisingly successful posts continues to be the one featuring Ork Posters’ Map of Boston Neighborhoods. The traffic keeps on trickling in, most as a result of searches.

Many of the people who read the post click on through to Ork. I don’t know how many of those people buy a poster. Ork doesn’t have an affiliate program. But if anyone at Ork knows, and feels grateful, I’ll take a red screenprint of Boston, thank you!

No, I’m not trying to mess with your head or eyes by using the green version for this post. I didn’t want to repeat my earlier use of the red one, and it’s a little nod to the NBA champion Celtics.

I got my first Threadless t-shirt back in 2005. It was a while before I saw anyone else wearing one. As time went by, I saw more and more people wearing them: usually people in their teens or 20s.

Recently, I’ve started to see Threadless shirts on people like me: parents, and not always particularly young parents. The photo is of a people who’s very much like me, wearing his favorite t-shirt: Patchwork. By the way, I ensured that I am not the oldest wearer of Threadless shirts by buying some for my dad.

Well done if you guessed from the image that my favorite Twitter feature is the Fail Whale. It’s the work of Yiying Lu. She’s not a one-hit wonder; as pointed out on Drawn!, she has an impressive portfolio. Here are some of the spades from her playing card set, Natural Symphony.

I don’t see a link to buy a set of these cards. If I did, they’d get strong consideration as presents for my card-playing parents.

Sarah Perez recently told The Story of the Fail Whale.

The Fail Whale story is one that shows the value of open content. By making the art available [for free], Yiying is now going to profit in more ways than if she had simply made the art available for purchase. She will be earning profits from merchandise at both shops and from the sale of her prints and she will certainly win some future design work from this as well. Of course, her successes come from more than just the work itself, but also from the power of the community who embraced it.

Yes, the Fail Whale is my favorite feature of Twitter. I tried to tweet to that effect, but of course, when I tried to, I saw… this time you get no congratulations for guessing what.

What’s Dr. Horrible? “A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.” It’s currently streaming, free of charge and free of ads.

But Joss has a master plan to make money from it. I was thinking of wisecracks along the lines of “Joss the big media business model slayer” but Joss’s plan is not going to slay that old, tired model (although other things might).

Dr. Horrible is packaged into three episodes, each about 15 minutes long. Thus it’s about as long as a one-hour episode of a TV show. No ads, remember? Currently free, remember. But I shouldn’t forget to add that it’s free only until midnight tomorrow (July 20, I assume that’s midnight Hollywood time).

One of the barriers to adoption of the Amazon Kindle is its price. One of the things that makes it seem expensive is surely the price of books. For example, I usually buy paperbacks at $10 or less, so >$300 seems huge. But the Kindle might be particularly attractive to people who spend a lot on books.

College students certainly spend a lot of books. Textbooks for a single semester often cost more than a Kindle. Hence I think that Mike Arrington and others are right on the money when they identify college students as natural Kindle users.

The trouble is, college students don’t have much choice when it comes to textbooks. The professor usually chooses the textbook for the course from what the publishing firms offer. The incentives to the prof and the firms don’t always align with the best interests of the students.

I hear that this mobile web thing is going to be big. Of course, there is a conflict between mobile and web: the first implies a small device, the second implies a wealth of content, mostly developed with larger devices in mind.

One way to address this conflict is to take web content and make it mobile-ready. This is the approach taken by MoFuse.

MoFuse is best illustrated with an example, and this blog provides such an example. MoFuse reads the RSS feed and generates from it a “mobilized” blog. That blog has its own URI: http://changingway.mofuse.mobi/. WordPlay, the blog where I play around with WordPress classic (i.e. WordPress but not WordPress.com), also has a mobilized version.

There’s more to MoFuse, but that’s the basic idea. A basic design decision is to take the content in feed form. A basic business decision is use the freemium model. The free component just got bigger, in that MoFuse has done away with its Professional account level and moved the Professional features into the free version. It was Mashable Adam’s post about this change that prompted me to try MoFuse.

It seems that MoFuse is looking more toward ad revenue than publisher payments. It allows you to use one of two mobile ad programs: AdMob (recommended) and Google AdSense. You and MoFuse split the revenue 50/50. If you want all the revenue, you can upgrade to a Professional account… hang on, didn’t they just do away with that?

It seems that mofuse.com has yet to catch up with the changes in account types. Perhaps the account types and price points themselves have yet to be (re)defined. But that’s probably a transient issue, and it’s not my biggest concern with MoFuse.

That concern is: how usable is the result of MoFuse’s “mobilize the feed” technology? Consider WordPlay, its use of the Yahoo Media Player, and this post, which relies on said player. It doesn’t work, because the javascript that invokes YMP didn’t make it into the mobilized blog. I suspect that there are many examples of this sort of thing. In fact, I’m sure that there are better examples of the mobile version not reflecting the web version. My blogs are relatively low on multimedia.

Elaborating on the concern, and on approaches to the mobile web, would overflow this post. The post has already flowed over into tomorrow. More on the mobile web, and probably on MoFuse, soon.

WordPress 2.6 is out. Why is this relevant here, at WordPress.com? First, because this particular corner of WordPress.com is mine, and WordPress itself is one of the things I blog about. Second, because we’re pretty much running 2.6 here, without having to do our own upgrades. If you also blog at WordPress.com and haven’t noticed a difference, don’t worry: 2.6, unlike 2.5, does not bring major changes to the admin interface.

The third reason for mentioning the new version is that I’ve upgraded my WordPlay test blog to 2.6. I’m following the upgrade with a few other changes, blogging as I go. No problems so far…

When I got back on the web after a week pretty much away from it, I had a little fewer than a thousand unread items in my feed reader. I like to think that shows that my appetite for feeds is healthy, but that it stops short of gluttony.

I looked back over those items, read probably a couple of dozen, and then marked the rest read. I categorize those ~900 as follows:

• Those I will go back and read. For example, I’ll visit Drawn!, being especially careful not to miss the post about the Totoro Forest Project.
• Those I’m very slightly regretful about having missed. This accounts for probably 600 or 700 of the 900.
• Those I’m relieved to have missed. Top, or bottom, of this list are the posts about Microsoft’s latest play for Yahoo. I probably shouldn’t admit it, but I’m also glad to have missed the iPhone 2.0 launch/hype/fiasco. There will be no shortage of posts about MicroHoo, iPhone, gPhone, etc., this week.