When the Node Knockout competition was announced several months ago, I signed up immediately; it sounded like a helluvalotta fun and lit a fire for me to learn the ins and outs of Node as quickly as possible.  I recruited a couple of my buddies and the contest slipped off my radar and out of my mind.

Days before, though, I was reminded that it was fast approaching! Long story short, I had somehow screwed up our registration, but the gracious folks running the show set up a random-team-name account at the last minute, “Zenith-Workloom“.  We set to work right away.

I was the only participant who had experience with Node, but the guys were excited to try.  We even had a few geek friends show up when we started, just to see what we were doing and how we were going to do it.

All told, I stayed up for a 36 hour period, crushing against the GitHub, Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare APIs, fussing with relative dates, wrestling with MongoDB… really a lot of work.  We found ourselves cutting back on our features list with every passing hour, desperate to get things stable before time expired. There is quite a bit to discuss here, but I’ll save that for a blog post I plan to write later this week.

The Results

In the end, we ended up exhausted with relatively solid services and 20% of our desired feature set in the front-end.  I emphasize this because there is quite a bit of code running in Node that didn’t “bubble up” to our front-end effectively… for example, I couldn’t get GitHub check-ins to sort nicely with other events before “last call”.  This is merely a side-effect of a deadline fast-approaching.

There are some amazing entries in the Node Knockout contest… I mean, incredibly awesome.  Here are a few of my favorites:

• Simulchart – http://awesometown.no.de/ – Real-time, embeddable data charting.
• Drop Note – http://done-js.no.de/ – Drop a file into your browser and share it instantly.
• Scrabb.ly – http://scrabb.ly/ – Real-time, addictive Scrabble game, (WOW!)
• CloudQ – http://nko-team-discovery-channel.heroku.com/ – Sandboxed Unit Test runner for GitHub projects.
• Serrano – http://starcraft2destroyedmymarrage.no.de/ – Share DOM events and other information with other users simultaneously.

These guys kicked our ass.  But here’s the thing that I take away: I watched folks from these teams on IRC, struggling through issues, getting help, providing it… I mean, the community was so f’ing powerful.

Halfway through I realized I was going to learn 1000% more just looking at winning teams’ source code than I was in the contest.  I got excited, and have remained so… and I’m still proud of what my team managed to accomplish, even though we’re not realistically in the running.

Along Comes John Resig

I took issue with the following tweet by Mr. Resig:

Disappointed in the entries to the Node.js Knockout; only a handful of the entries work in non-Chrome/Safari browsers.

Wow… really?  It prompted my reply:

Was jQuery coded in 2 days? RT @jresigDisappointed in the entries to the Node.js Knockout; few work in non-Chrome/Safari browsers. #nodeko

My point was fairly straightforward:  this wasn’t for production, this was for fun.  This was to test the limits of Node.js with stunning, whimsical or powerful ideas. Take away the pressure of “selling something” and just “do something”.

After some retweeting in the node.js hashtag, this reply from Mr. Resig crossed my TweetDeck:

@clintandrewhall Teams that made working, fully-functional, cross-browser applications in 48 hours deserve to win – and get my vote.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more upset his statements have made me.

In Defense of Node Knockout Teams

The Twitter medium is the worst place to debate these kinds of points; I mean, Mr. Resig certainly has more to say that 140 characters allows.  And his interpretation of a complete application is probably different than others.  But I have to take issue with his tweets on their face…

Look, my team’s entry is cross-browser compatible… but that was by the grace of a limited feature-set.  Mr. Resig was actually a judge for our entry, and leveled a very fair, honest critique of our missing features… points of view I share.  But I’m going to protest on behalf of those other teams who only supported a limited set.

There were people attempting very complicated, near-impossible feats under a very tight timeframe… and several succeeded!  For a judge to focus on the browser when the teams had been focusing on Node just seems so argumentative.

It’s one thing if the knockout had been for a week, or maybe if server code had been locked down early with additional time for front-end.  But we’re talking 48 hours here, starting from scratch.

But more importantly, Node Knockout entries are graded as follows, (from http://nodeknockout.com/judging):

Entries will be judged on a 1-5 scale across 4 dimensions:

• Utility – Is the site offering a service you’d use again and again?
• Design – How good does it look and feel to use?
• Innovation – How original is the idea and execution?
• Completeness – How “fully baked” is the site? Are there bugs or dead ends?

First, I concede that judges have every right to pet peeves, sticking points, etc… and we were told to keep the judges in mind when we were working. Still, I would hope that an entry would still be judged on its merits more so than those irritations.  And to be fair, where in the criteria above is browser compatibility even mentioned?

Perhaps “completeness” could include cross-browser compatibility… but in this context… should it?

Based on Mr. Resig’s logic from his tweet, had my team completed our feature set in our present level of compatibility, we’d have garnered a 5-star vote from him.  That’s great!  But is he saying that, of the entries I mentioned above, none deserve five star ratings simply because they don’t work in all browsers?  Is my team’s simple effort, to compile data feeds chronologically on one page, full orders of magnitude “better” than those ideas simply because our CSS happens to be cross-browser compatible?  I certainly don’t think so… my team didn’t even have JS in the front-end…

Look, I’m well-known for being a progressive-enhancement nazi, swinging the “gotta work everywhere” sword in wide archs… but I make an exception here.

This contest was about doing freakishly cool things in Node in 48 hours, not a browser.  Having participated first-hand, and seeing the absolutely amazing things that were done, I am in awe.  That’s not even to mention the inspiring, multi-continent community that was flash-created in a 48 hour period.  Even better, most teams have pledged to open source their code for all to see.

Absolutely incredible.

Yet… that someone, let alone one of the judges, would publicly minimize a team’s accomplishments by focusing on the tiniest, almost out-of-context point saddens me.

I don’t think anyone should be “disappointed” by these entries.

Go Explore and Vote

I encourage all of you reading this, if you haven’t yet, visit the Node Knockout entries page and comment and vote for your favorites.  Go and see for yourself what amazing things can be done with 48 hours, an idea and a ton of people willing to help.

Tweet from Smashing Magazine

I took a look at the form, and I must say I was impressed too.  Unfortunately, I was using TweetDeck on my iPhone… as a result, I didn’t see the contact form at all because the background image didn’t load very fast.  That prompted me to post this reply:

My reply on Twitter

Being a social media junkie, this tweet was then cross-posted to my Facebook, prompting this reply from a web developer friend of mine:

...the resulting Facebook conversation.

As you can well imagine, I could not let this stand.  So I decided I would refactor the form to prove that, with a few tweaks to the CSS and markup, this form could avoid the problems I pointed out.

First, let me preface by saying that I am not saying the code is bad… on the contrary, I really like the concept.  I just want to:

1. Dispel my friend’s poor logic, and
2. Raise awareness about accessibility.

That said, I tried to minimize my changes to the original code as much as possible; there are certainly improvements that can be made to the CSS and to the markup, but that was not my goal.

For reference, here are the before and the after demo pages.  I’d load them in separate tabs; you’ll see they are identical, almost to the pixel.  I’ve also added a scripted link to allow you to hide the background image.

The Accessibility Problem

First, let’s define the problem. In the existing CSS, the labels are completely hidden and the background is applied to the form.  As a result, here are screen shots of the contact form, with and without its background image, (notice the dotted lines for each form field):

The contact form with images on and fully loaded

The contact form without the image loaded

Without the image, the form becomes unusable.  So how can we edit the HTML and style the form to avoid this?

The Approach

In short, we need to add labels to each field and have the image hide them if present.  This can be accomplished with z-indexing:

A diagram of the layout

The Solution

First, I refactored the original form into something a bit more manageable, such as adding a fieldset element to the phone number, adding a header element and consolidating the label and input fields, (and thus removing the pesky “for” attribute):

...
<h3><span>Contact Form</span></h3>
...
<fieldset id="phone-el">
    <legend><span>Phone</span></legend>
    <p id="phone-ac-el">
        <label>
            <span>Area Code</span>
            <input id="phone-ac" class="text" maxlength="3"
                name="phone-ac" size="3" type="text" />
        </label>
    </p>
...

Since the legend for the phone fieldset wasn’t being displayed, I decided I would forgo the addition of any empty element and just use it for the contact form.  A bit of positioning based on existing CSS and some negative text-indent and we were in business:

body#contact #form legend span {
    background: url(res/contact-content.png) center top no-repeat;
    position: absolute;
    top: -199px;
    left: -180px;
    width: 750px;
    height: 786px;
    display: block;
    text-align: left;
    text-indent: -1000px;
    overflow: hidden;
    z-index: 50;
}

The Result

Now, when the page loads and no images are present, the form looks like this:

My refactor of the contact form without the image

With a few simple changes, the form is completely usable… bulletproof… regardless of the user’s situation.

A Few Closing Remarks

I hate the oft-uttered mantra of, “those folks aren’t in my demographic.”  That is a dangerous and amateur view of an audience for your website.  You should always be looking to make your forms as simple but as accessible as possible, because, frankly… your demographic is anyone with a web browser.  Discounting any percentage is not only a disadvantage for your business, but a disservice to all users.

What a pain in the ass.

I was directed to a CSSZenGarden design created by Outline2Design that is rather beautiful… I was really impressed, so I looked at their homepage.

Their designs are extremely artistic, and valid XHTML, so I was even more impressed; I wanted to know more about their work and where they manage an office, (mostly to determine if they were a small shop, a front for a larger shop or just “a person.”)  I noticed a copyright link to Zertle, LLC.  Clicking that, I saw that Zertle owns two shop fronts, Outline2Design and PSD2HTML.

That’s when I was absolutely disgusted by the pricing strategy at PSD2HTML.

Deciding How to Charge is Hard

I realize it’s difficult to decide how to price web work; I’ve had that problem before. You kind of have to divide the effort into the creative and the technical – creating HTML, (at least, in my opinion) is the easiest of the two. Creating a brand identity and graphical assets are far more subjective tasks, therefore requiring much more work.

Converting a design to HTML, however, is much easier. You can almost feel how the document flows. Sure, there are elegant and thought-provoking approaches to noodle through, and reusability and accessibility concerns… but the process goes very quickly. Oftentimes, you use tools from your toolbox, like Microformats or common libraries.

At Cerner, when I’m handed a design, it takes me roughly two hours per layout to complete, less if the following location follows a cohesive style, (and they do). So this company promises an 8 hour turnaround time, which I think is respectful, if not aggressive if they have a large workload.

What I find appalling is their package rates and “options.”

You Want to Charge Me For WHAT?!?

Here are a few examples, and an explanation as to why they are shady… I mean, “Used-car Salesman” shady. Throughout the following examples, I’m going to draw an analogy to someone coming to paint your house: you know what color you want, and how you want textures to look, but you don’t really have the time, nor the expertise, to paint it yourself.

How Good a Job are You Willing to Pay For?

Ok, we’re all set to start. Pick a package and price range for them to convert your image into a web page.

Screenshot from PSD2HTML.com

Figure 1 – So… do you want your page done professionally or not?

Asking someone to quantify exactly how professional they want their page is like asking if they’re willing to pay more to get things that a professional should already do. You’re telling me you won’t “pay special attention to Load Speed” if I don’t shell out the extra hundred?

The trouble is, someone who doesn’t really understand the web may not understand what they’re paying for… besides, the developer should do this anyway.

The painters show up with the crew, the paint and the brushes. They’re ready to paint your house, but before they start, they ask:

“Do you want us to tape off non-painted surfaces?  Then you’ll want our Professional Painter’s Package. Do you want us to avoid getting paint splatters on your concrete and bushes?  In that case, you’ll need to upgrade to our Hi-End Painter’s Package. You see, it’s all about what you’re willing to spend.”

These aren’t options: they’re the mark of a professional job.  Cross-browser compatibility, Search Engine Optimization, semantic code, prez-layer separation… these are professional, industry standards. You could get away with asking for more time, but more money?!? C’mon…

Flex Your CSS Muscles

This one, I kind of understand.

Flexible, or “fluid” layouts can be difficult, depending on the style.  You have to decide the widths of each column, how text wraps, and even when items start to drop.  Again, asking for more time is one thing, almost expected… charging more, I could almost condone.

But isn’t this on a case-by-case basis?  Don’t you have to ask some directed, consultative questions about intent and purpose?  And how did you arrive at $29?  It just seems nonsensical to me.

After shelling out more cash, your painting crew has another question:

“Would you like us to hand-paint your house, or can we go ahead and use our sprayers for the larger walls?  You see, when we got your address, we weren’t sure about the texture or composition of your walls, so we can’t tell you right now without looking which would be better, per-se… but we’ll knock $20 off if you let us spray.”

Maybe they’re encouraging a fixed width by offering a $29 discount?  At any rate, it’s a client call, and I just don’t think it can be programmatically determined.

Moving on… because the next one is my favorite.

Nickels and Dimes Add Up to Big Bucks

I’m curious about Advanced Markup Options.

“This option gives you the guarantee…”  Are you kidding me?

You know, in my office, hack-less cross-browser compatibility is a point of pride.  Sometimes, when we do a demo, we like to give the people in the room the choice of which browser we use to demo… no-holds-barred.  We also give the option of a JavaScript-disabled or CSS-disabled configuration.  It’s cool to be challenged, to be able to show our stakeholders that no mainstream browser was ignored, no detail was overlooked.

“I’m sorry, but which side of your house faces the most people?  I mean, people who live next door to the east can’t really see the house wall… their window on that side is pretty tiny.  And most people don’t drive east on the street, so most wouldn’t see the east side.”

“Oh… and should we avoid painting the exterior window fixtures?”

To ask a client to pay more for cross-browser compatibility, or to offer a discount to let it slide, encourages the very attitudes web professionals hate: that only the majority matters… that it’s too hard to code (and test) for 99.9%.  That attitude is what allows Microsoft to continue including proprietary features, (and oftentimes, tolerating omissions): they’re the majority, make your site work in their browser.  It’s unacceptable for a professional web shop to not work in these browsers out-of-the-box.

And, I’m sorry… but $4 for rollovers?!?  Are CSS hover implementations been deemed hard enough that the code to create them is worth $4?  Are you telling me I have to pay you the equivalent of your morning Starbucks Latte for the effort?

The following, though… is unacceptable.  That’s all I’ll say:

What else can I say?

Damn, I’m Sorry, but…

I don’t mean to pick on these guys; I don’t know them from Adam.  They’ve obviously put some thought into how they’re to be paid for their work.  But the strategy is flawed: what they’re charging more for should just be included. They should just state the job will cost between $150 and $300, depending.  As I’ve pointed out, they have more questions to ask once they get the design anyway.

Will they change their pricing “menu” because of this post: probably of course not. But then again, I don’t know how much of a market there is here.  Most web professionals like to be in control of the design.

For someone like me, I’d love it if the client provided me the visual they want; I suck at drawing.  But even if they did, I would still consult with them and provide them with a quality product that another web professional would be able to edit…

… but more importantly, respect.

Then, the damn thing shut down.

I was really confused.  I messed around with it for a few minutes, then I jumped into a chat session with a Sony representative.  After suggesting the DVD was scratched or the wrong region, (uh huh, sure), he THEN recommended I reset the whole player.

Now, the thing is, this player requires you to manually type in the names of DVDs where it can’t read the standard demographic information.  I’ve got 300 discs in that player, I’d rather not lose that information.  So then he gave me a phone number to tech support and wished me luck.

But you’d better believe I started searching the Internet for any other reports of this nonsense.  It didn’t take long before I found this Amazon discussion and a blog post on erkkila.org.  A number of DVD players, a number of new DVDs… sounds fishy.

Here are the numbers I have so far:

Sony Pictures: (800) 860-2878
DVP-CX995V Support: (800) 222-7669

This does not bode well for Sony.  Is there some kind of write protection on these DVDs?

Yet for me, being a MySpace-r myself, there is an even larger issue: their insistence on perpetuating ignorance to avoid addressing not only the formerly mentioned issues, but also their own laziness and incompetence.  I’ve had it.  This blog is going out to all those people who have, at one point or another, had “weird things” happen on their account… let’s see if this will help.

The Shepherd Warns the Sheep…

Occasionally I’ll sign into MySpace and see some message from “Tom Anderson,” the “face of MySpace,” on my homepage.  For example, this past week MySpace has been pitching a “download this Quicktime patch, quick” message… so there Tom is, asking me to take 30 seconds to install it.

I politely ignore him.  I’ve heard about this patch, and I’ll wait for Apple to update me, not MySpace.  Besides, I don’t surf aimlessly on the ‘space.  I only visit my friends… I’m one of those guys who actually knows most people on his profile.   But I digress…

On occasion, Tom has insisted the following, (which I now paraphrase):

“Hey everybody… If you see or hear people tell you that you’ve been posting weird bulletins that you obviously didn’t post, it’s because someone has gotten ahold of your password and hacked into your account to send SPAM!  Change your password often and this should stop happening.”

Now, I realize that there is some truth to this… someone could indeed have brute-forced your password, or even phished it off a clone site.  I acknowledge it’s possible… it’s just not likely.

… but the Shepherd is Really the Wolf.

First, it’s important for you to know that MySpace was allegedly founded by professional Internet spammers as a network by which to attract, maintain and eventually advertise to users across the US.  Tom became the face of MySpace because he was the one employee, (then a copyeditor) who attracted the most people in the beginning.  Read about it here and here. 

MySpace was not designed for it’s eventual overwhelming popularity, and it’s frequent crashes are a clear indicator of this.  It’s also clear from both the incredibly annoying ads, their lack of common security features and their ridiculous lies about how the Internet works that they really don’t care that much if your account is a haphazard source of spam.

Tom’s answer is not the real reason unauthorized bulletins are being sent from the profile; it’s because:

1. The majority of it’s users don’t understand safe surfing techniques,
2. MySpace lacks any form of (reliable) security, and
3. Spammers are persistent creatures.

Let’s take each of these in turn, shall we?  There’s something here for everyone.

Dear MySpace: You Know You Can Do Better Than This

I’m going to make this short and sweet, because everything else has already been said.  Your lack of stability, your poor design, the code bloat, the haphazard patching… look, I can sympathize.  Your popularity exploded, you had trouble keeping up with demand, your system load challenged even Microsoft’s software.  The trouble is, by now, you should have overhauled the site three times over.

Dear Myspace: You know you can do better than this.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it’s free, but according to the CEO of News Corp, you guys are making a pretty penny of your users, too, so can it.  Here’s a quick list of (rather obvious) steps you could take to make things more secure.

• Captcha on signups, bulletins and messages.  I’m tired of the robots.
• Sitekeys on login pages.  Bank of America did it, so can you.  I know, I know, not foolproof, but it’s SOMETHING.
• Put the “Delete a Bulletin You’ve Posted” somewhere more conspicuous, for crying out loud.  It seems like no one knows they can just delete the damn thing!  It’s almost like you don’t want them deleting the spam… hey, wait a second…
• A redesign of your markup.  I realize you’ll alienate all of those wonderfully designed MySpace customization sites, but honestly, they’re contributing to your problem.  Phase this crappy design and code bloat out.  You’ve gotta be dumping millions on the load you’re pushing down the pipe.
• Download the spam software, analyze it and defeat it!  Are you telling me your staff, now bolstered by News Corp, is incapable of getting your hands on the robot software and stopping it?!?

Honestly, I can’t decide if you guys are inept or devious, ignorant or in collusion.  Which is it?  I’d love to know.

Dear MySpace Users: They Don’t Make a Condom for Your Keyboard

It’s not necessarily the users’ fault, I suppose.  No one really talks about safe ways to surf… they’d rather sell a firewall, install a popup blocker or an anti-phishing filter and lull you into a sense of security.  You’ll keep the tech support guy employed and the economy of the consumer IT world will keep on spinning. Yet a firewall won’t prevent you from typing your password into a field on “myyspace.com,” or perhaps into some DIV floating over a profile tricked out to look like a “log in to continue” page.

You liken email to postal mail, yet you don’t seem to grasp that, not unlike the postal mail, Bill Gates doesn’t know who forwards his email message on to their friends and certainly has no intention of paying you to do so.  Similarly, Tom doesn’t need you to repost that bulletin; have you not seen his global messages when something breaks?

You have no interest in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, yet you copy someone else’s code to your profile without thinking twice.  Afterward, you’ll wonder where those overlapping logos in the upper left came from.

You have no idea how documents and pictures are hosted and served on the web, but you’ll blindly implement a profile style that uses someone else’s image.  Later, you’ll think your profile was “hacked” when that image changes to some other colorful representation of the image owner’s disdain for you when they notice the bandwidth drain.  You might, in the depths of your ignorance, even send a panicked email to the owner to let them know their site was “hacked.”

You don’t think before you click, you’ll blindly install that plugin to get Nelly Furtado’s latest single “for free,” you don’t inspect the authenticity of the page you’re on, you don’t right click and view source… you don’t want to get it.

And you’re driving those of us who do get it crazy.

So. Dear MySpace Users…  there is an old saying that mirrors well in disciplines such as software engineering: Invent something idiot-proof and the world will invent a better idiot.  Instead of focusing on delivering feature functionality, we’re having to spend time and money grappling with the endless struggle between the user and what they use.  We can’t give you what you want if you don’t help us out.

Why not save that money and aggravation? You call the Geek Squad whenever your browser slows down from all the crap you’ve installed?  You realize these guys are laughing at you as they count the cash back at the office… let them help people with hardware failures, like when your 4 year old dumps his orange juice in the exhaust vent.

Why not protect yourself?  Hackers need your machine to attack popular websites.  Even worse, they need your hard drive to store materials that would earn years in prison if merely discovered on their own, such as child pornography.

It’s easy to do: LEARN about the tools you use.  Here, I’ll get you started:

Wikipedia: The World Wide Web

Don’t be scared… this page has terms like “Hypertext Transfer Protocol” and “Uniform Resource Identifier.” Guess what? You use these terms everyday without knowing it, (aren’t acronyms grand?) Take a second to read about what the hell you’re talking about.

Wikipedia: HTML

Little known fact: the Internet doesn’t function on CODE, but rather MARKUP. It’s a subtle difference that allows non-technical people to actually understand what they’re seeing, (or even writing). Your web browser can read it, so can you.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group

Committed to wiping out Internet scams and frauds.

US-CERT for Non-technical Users

Established in 2003 to protect the nation’s Internet infrastructure, US-CERT coordinates defense against and responses to cyber attacks across the nation.

TRUSTe for Consumers

TRUSTe® is an independent, nonprofit enabling trust based on privacy for personal information on the internet.

Dear Spammers: Get a Life and Get Out of Mine

Like it or not, spam is a business.  I understand the math of it all.  They send out a billion emails or MySpace messages… cost: $0, one person in 100,000 clicks: $$$$$$$$.  I get it.  Nigerian princes would be without their inheritances and Viagra would stay on pharmacists’ shelves if it didn’t work.

Dear Spammers: Honestly, I detest you.  I think most people do.  To quote the vernacular, die in a fire.

You insult my intelligence everytime some “innocent girl” who is just “looking for a nice guy” joins MySpace and asks me to “check out her webcam” on “this really cool site for FREE!”  Even better are the bulletins about free gift cards or ringtones, comments on ghost sites about cheap Cialis, or messages about from someone who “really liked what I said on my profile” and yet they seem to know nothing about me.

To quote Saul Bloom in Ocean’s 11, “I saw you [coming]… I saw you before you even got up this morning.”

I know nothing will prevent this stuff from going on; it’s impossible to police or enforce.  So, I’ll just repeat my internet curse under my breath (DIAF) on the occasions you pop in, mark your profile as spam and move on.

Comedy Central clips back up on YouTube
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061101-8126.html

Hopefully they’ll be smarter this time, (and next time, eh?)

;-D

Many are speculating on the latest request by Viacom (read: Comedy Central) that YouTube (read: Google) take down clips of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report and South Park. I’m not speculating on the business dealings… it’s typical copyright protection by a popular source. I’m just disappointed that such “hip, young sources of entertainment,” that are usually so clever and cutting edge with their business dealings, missed such a fantastic, progressive opportunity.

Blinded by the Status-Quo

I understand the concepts of intellectual property; my division at Cerner is named Intellectual Property. I also understand that the digital revolution, in all its many forms, frightens content providers. I also don’t believe these startled, reactionary tactics of lawsuits, actions and requests-that-aren’t-really-requests are going to end any time soon. I’m fully prepared to wait until the Gen-Y’ers reach the upper eschelons of management for a good compromise to be reached. In less time that it took me to wear out my first car, innovations such as the iPod, CD Ripping and media centric PCs prompted DRM, bulk lawsuits and ISP interrogations.

Business has never responded quickly to innovations in technology. Case-in-point: it was YEARS before my PC was able to detect that I was attempting the digital equivalent of VCR dubbing. (Ed. Note: Before someone decides to sue me, I was taking an excerpt from a DVD I owned for a presentation at work…) Business strategy has always been reactionary. So what’s my beef this time?

A Lost Library

From the New York Times:

“The situation is tricky for a network like Comedy Central, part of Viacom. Its audience is young and technologically sophisticated, and Comedy Central stars in the past have YouTube and clip services to interact with their audience.

“Stephen Colbert of ‘The Colbert Report,’ for example, gained great attention for his mocking speech before President Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner, which became one of the most-viewed clips at YouTube before C-Span, which broadcast the event, ordered it taken down.

“In an interview with Wired magazine in September 2005, Mr. Stewart explained his view: ‘We get an opportunity to produce tis stuff because they make enough money selling beer that it’s worth their while to do it… If they’re not making their money, we ain’t doing our show.’”

I’ll be the first to admit I had several clips marked as favorites in YouTube that are now most likely deleted:

• Colbert’s laughing fit while describing a Royal Family scandal;
• Stewart’s hilariously funny and biting commentary on the use of the question mark as a disarming tactic in major news networks;
• Cartman’s parody of “Dog: the Bounty Hunter” in the most recent episode of South Park.

I don’t watch TV… I rely on the likes of YouTube and SpikedHumor to supply me with clips of the few shows I like and have missed because I have no cable. But more importantly: I don’t want to wait for the these clips to come out on DVD, nor do I want to search through them for the short bit I want to see. The beauty of these online libraries is that they are as robust as their fanbase is large.

YouTube was the online expression of a Venn Diagram of YouTube and Comedy Central “users…” and that merged area was massive. These individuals posted their favorite clips of their favorite shows to an online repository, which happened to be shared with people of like interests. Now, all of those clips, many existing dozens of times over, are gone.

Are you starting to see where I’m headed here?

A Confusing Change in Policy

So why were these clips deleted? Well, it’s obvious it’s about the “lost” advertising dollars. Many point to the existence of Comedy Central’s MotherLoad, an online library of select clips of popular shows and comedians. Of extreme interest to me was the fact that before this announcement, only certain parts of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, carefully titled, existed in the MotherLoad. I know this because I used both YouTube and The MotherLoad to catch up on what I’m missing; frankly, The MotherLoad was often of a higher quality.

When I look at the RSS feed from Comedy Central today, however, it’s a totally different story. They’ve gone to dividing the show into parts… parts delimited by where the commercial breaks would normally be.

Wha? Are you insane? Didn’t you delete the YouTube clips because they cut in on your revenue? To be fair, they did show me some ridiculous advertisement about some dude living out of his Nissan Altima for a week… but, come on. That surely couldn’t cover the expense of keeping these clips online.

Frankly, it’s a piss-poor change. It smacks of an immature “hey, that’s mine” mentality prevalent in archaic approaches to IP. It has always turned people off. The whole point of the Internet is dissemination of information, not its stockpiling.

On the Internet, you can always find it somewhere else; the only currency that really matters is surfer loyalty. And YouTube was loaded.

Make Love, Not War

I don’t think Viacom thought entirely hard enough about how much this might piss people off. I don’t think Google/YouTube thought about how many users would stop visiting their site if they thought they couldn’t get Comedy Central clips, (you’re reading the blog of one of them).

So what would be my proposition?

For starters, Google has a proven indexing capability. Given a few months, I’d be willing to bet their wiz-kids could have come up with an algorithm that identified all of these clips and organized them. Then, it would be as simple as creating a channel. Professional clips could be uploaded by Viacom, amatuer clips could be tagged. Call it, The YouTube MotherLoad. They could have even gone as far as to earmark the category for Viacom’s advertising dollars. Hell, you could precede them with the 15-second, nonsense Nissan clips if you wanted. In other words, they could have used the offending technology to their advantage. Utilized YouTube’s bandwidth, their fans passion, and their IP to create a money making machine.

Now, all they’ve done is create yet another mash-up opportunity where some start up or whiz kid puts together some RSS-scanning feed to provide links to the clips everyone wants to see. Frankly, I’d just as soon Viacom and YouTube/Google come to some kind of arrangement where my favorite clips can be accessed as easily as they were before.

I think that’s all anyone (who isn’t trying to make or protect money off of it) wants.

Google Maps tells me that this is the best route, but knowing that bridge is out, shouldn’t I be able to tell Google that? I decided to ask them…

My letter to Google Maps went like this:

Recently, a bridge went out in Kansas City, which was on the best route to my office. Now the bridge will be out for 6-9 months.I think it would be awesome if you were able to allow someone to divert away from a certain turn in your directions due to a circumstance.

For example, map out directions from my office to my home:

(address removed) to (address removed)

Step 5 is impossible to take, because the bridge south of there is out. Notice that there are four other nearby bridges. Although there are many detours set up by the city, I’m sure there are better ways to go given my starting position.

It would be awesome if I could click on a step and click “Divert” and have the map shift to avoid that step or steps. No other map system in the world has such a feature.

What do you think?

Thanks,

Clint Hall

I’ll let you know what they say.