Puffbox

• PRWeb Pioneers TrackBacks Availability in Press Release Distribution
  A very interesting development: press releases beginning to adopt blogging technologies.
  (tags: ephemeral.work)

Steve Rubel has been talking about this for ages, and it looks like it’s coming together. He notes today that ‘Press releases became a bit more social yesterday as PRWeb added trackback functionality.’

What’s a trackback? Basically, it’s the flipside of a link. It tells you who is linking to a particular page, and in turn, lets you visit the linking page to see what’s being said about it. So in effect, trackbacks turn web pages into dialogue. (Meanwhile the inventors of the trackback, are trying to get it adopted as a web standard. This isn’t going away.)

At the moment, it’s a brave organisation which opens up its press releases like this. Imagine, letting anyone and everyone say whatever they want about your lovingly crafted press release – as a footnote on the same webpage? Not really – it’s just accepting the inevitable. The commenting will happen anyway. And you know what they say about urination and tents.

Inevitably, given its success, there is to be a second season of the Ricky Gervais Show podcasts. I confess, I have been known to stay up until midnight on a Sunday evening, to be able to listen to the show in bed, as soon as it was posted. The ‘goats as Christmas presents’ routine in episode 4 made me laugh out loud, and woke the rest of the family. If I’m honest, it was generally ‘amusing’ with the occasional ‘hysterical’ – and when there’s no money changing hands, that’s a good deal.

But charging for the product takes it into a whole new area. And you definitely sense that Ricky realises that. Look at the fascinating choice of words in that final free edition:

‘We may have to charge a small fee for it, ‘cos it’ll cost us money, and Karl is unemployed. But we mean a real, tiny little fee… I hope you continue to support us. Go on, continue to support us. I hope there’s no-one out there going ‘oh, look, they’re charging for it now.’ But you know, people forget, we gave 12 for free… We have got to charge a little bit for it, because it does cost money to host. Please, please keep listening. It is going to be very little, and you know, Karl needs your money.’

(I hope I’m not being too pedantic by pointing out that the 12 episodes weren’t ‘free’: don’t forget the advertising for Guardian Unlimited, Positive Internet and Channel Four’s Friday comedy strand. There’s surely some cash flowing around there somewhere.)

Will it work? Depends on your definition. The audience figure (261,670 downloads per episode in the first month) is going to drop dramatically, like a lead zeppelin. But if even a tiny, tiny fraction of those people are prepared to pay £3.75 for ‘at least four episodes – but it could be more’, they’ll be in profit, albeit not quite enough to retire on (or, indeed, to quit your job making promos for XFM). It’s not as if there are huge production costs, or a massive team of writers to pay. Most of the later episodes were just Karl’s stream-of-consciousness, sparking off listeners’ emails.

Someone with his profile trying to make podcasting into a business: yes, that’s certainly a story worth following, but it’s not a guarantee of success. Ricky Gervais has always been brave, prepared to give it a try. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The Office is already recognised as a classic alongside Fawlty Towers. The jury’s still out on Extras, which had flashes of brilliance, but buckets of mediocre. We don’t talk about Meet Ricky Gervais. Nobody knows about Seona Dancing, which is probably just as well (but do check out the pictures).

A list (apparently) detailing the different flavours of Windows Vista appears on the Microsoft website. The bloggers find it, and inevitably, it’s the hot topic of the day. Microsoft goes ‘whoops’ and publishes a pretty weak retraction – ‘prematurely… incomplete information… testing purposes only.’ Todd at the Seattle Post-Inquirer has the full story, from bolting horse to the closing of the stable door. It would be great to think this was an example of a deliberate ‘viral’ effort by Microsoft. But… 😉

A very nice piece on the Daily Telegraph web team’s blog, about the perils of maintaining old content. (And good on them for posting it, by the way.)

Our most recent case began at the beginning of this month when we noticed that a story from April 2005 was attracting an extraordinary number of hits online. The story, which reported that Queen Margrethe II of Denmark had called on her subjects to show their “opposition” to Islam, was clearly connected to the Danish cartoons row but it was not clear why so many of our readers had stumbled across it.

I’ve always hated the term ‘archive’: it implies a dusty old room in the basement where nobody ever goes… not a fair implication, as this tale proves. But with no better word springing to mind – anyone running a website with a large archive of content would do well to read this. You always know it’s a theoretical risk; and then suddenly, it happens for real.

• FAQ: Using msstyles for Windows XP – Neowin.net
  Would people love Windows more if it was more customisable? This looks like a neat little hack to let you apply different visual styles to XP. Although its main purpose seems to be to disguise XP as Vista. A little more imagination, guys, please!
  (tags: windows ephemeral.work)

I’m looking at my favourite freeware programs – Firefox, Winamp, Picajet, Desktop Sidebar – and I’m seeing a common thread. They all let you apply your own skins or themes. There’s no better way to show that, in designing your program, the user comes first. All are fabulous tools, with fabulous user focus.

It’s also a very easy way to generate some community around your product: sites like Wincustomize, ThemeXP and Deviantart are full of creative people eager to express themselves using someone else’s software as their canvas, and share the results. It also extends the life expectancy of your product. We all get bored of staring at the same old interface all day; this is a free way to delay that eventual boredom.

Which makes it all the more curious that Microsoft should force you to download a hacked version of the relevant DLL, before you can get creative with Windows XP themes. Would people love Microsoft more if they let the users take control, even in this small way?

Many thanks to Microsoftie Mark Harrison for pointing to these simple instructions on applying unofficial new themes to Windows XP. I’ve tried a few out over the course of the day, and most (if not all?) contain the odd bug. But life is definitely a lot prettier as a result. (I strongly recommend GuiAirB1, by the way.)

Mark’s a lucky man. Most employers would invite you into the boss’s office for a chat if you suggested downloading an unlocked (ie ‘hacked’) version of a software component.

I know from my own time at Microsoft that the company takes a very relaxed – or, perhaps more fairly, a very lax – attitude to blogging. Before I worked there, I assumed someone at executive level had taken an enlightened decision to back blogging. But having spoken to Betsy Aoki, one of the leading bloggers at Redmond, I discovered it was more of an organic thing which nobody bothered to stop. And now, it’s far too late to do so.

I was asked to write a short introductory text to explain why the addition of RSS feeds to my current employer’s website was such a big event. Something which described the technique rather than the technology, and put it in a context which a UK Civil Service manager would understand.

I’m taking the risk of offering my completed draft to the blogosphere, for anyone’s comments (which I reserve the right to ignore totally). Please note, this article will probably get published and forgotten, so I’ve avoided any references which might become outdated in the next year or so. Plus, I know I’ve skipped over some technicalities (eg. Gmail offers Atom feeds, not strictly RSS). But the article isn’t intended for people who know there’s a difference. 😉

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I’m having a crisis of confidence as regards corporate IT. Every time I hear a timeframe of six months, or a budget in six or even seven digits, I cringe. The words ‘functional spec’ send shivers up my spine. Even the smallest things seem to take days.

Conventional wisdom says CMS projects are inherently B-I-G deals. They just aren’t. What’s a blog, if not a Content Management System? Words go in, pages come out. Presentation is separated from content. Authors get a nice authoring interface. What more is there?

I can have a CMS / blog up and running at WordPress.com in a matter of minutes – and people are doing so in their hundreds, every day. If I was feeling really eager, I might download WordPress and install it on my own server, for extra control and reassurance. Still only a day’s work, and a fairly relaxed day at that. I’d be posting new material that very evening, and showing up on the search engines within a few days.

What more do I get from the project that takes six months on paper, almost certainly longer in reality, and costs an eyewatering amount? Granted, my blog site probably won’t do everything I want. But I’ve seen it too many times… you get to the end of the big project, and guess what? You still don’t get exactly what you wanted. But you’re six months older and significantly poorer.

If there’s a better example of the law of diminishing returns, I can’t think of it.