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blogging about blogging about

  • a perplexing paucity of PHP programmers

    My friend Abbas Ali, who is one of the lead programmers for the open-source Coppermine gallery project, writes with mild frustration about the seeming shortage of talented PHP programmers in India. He cites a number of reasons, one of which is a lack of good trainers:

    Unfortunately in India you need a trainer for learning programming languages. No one is willing to learn on his/her own. As soon as a student goes to university, (s)he starts to search for training institutes. There are very few training institutes offering PHP courses and I will say none of them are good (at least in Nagpur). The sole reason is that the trainer himself/herself is not adept at PHP.

    This is surprising to me. Certainly the vast majority of programmers in the US I know are self-taught, especially the web-centric ones who sling PHP and SQL code around all day. The availability of numerous and inexpensive training manuals (notably the O’Reilly series) seems to foster a DIY mentality towards picking up a new language, though neraly everyone has of ocurse had at least one programming ocurse in college even if they aren’t formal CS majors (and few are). Are there no such eequivalent resources available in the Indian market? Or is there a cultural difference at play here? Either way, it seems like there’s an opportunity of some sort to rectify this situation. There’s a vast amount of PHP and SQL based web application development going on, especially around the Twitter and WordPress ecosystems. Then again, James and crew over at WPMU.org are also always trying to recruit talent, too, so I wonder if the problem isn’t limited to India.

    In fact, looking at my own example, my own knowledge of these technologies is pretty basic. I have written two plugins, one of which makes some vey nominal SQL calls and the other which is just a few simple PHP functions strung together, leveraging the hooks and wordpress API. I doubt very much that I’d come close to a “talented” PHP programmer of the sort Abbas’ company and others are looking for. Perhaps the depth of PHP knowledge is shallow overall and deep in only a few places, in which case Abbas has hit upon an observation that is truly global. If the depth of PHP and SQL knowledge could be increased across a broader swath of the talent pool, would we see an explosion of even better apps?

    It certainly feels like there isn’t much technical innovation going on in the web right now. The only person out there in the tech punditsphere who actually gets his hands dirty and tinkers with code is Dave Winer, and he has built some really elegant things. Also I was really quite impressed with Joe Moreno’s URL-shortener solution. These sorts of things require broader knowledge than just PHP and SQL, such as DNS mapping. Most of the new sites that spring up covered by TechCrunch seem to be simple ideas implemented cleverly, but nothing really innovative seems to have come down the pike since, well, Twitter. Is the web industry stagnant for lack of talent overall?

  • Tags to Hashtags #wp

    I’ve written a new plugin for wordpress entitled “AHP Tags to Hashtags” for use with WordPress and WordPress MU. The plugin can be found for now at pastebin here, I will update when it’s been added to the official wordpress plugin repository.

    The plugin appends the tags for each post to the post title in the RSS feed. For example, for a post titled “Awesome post” which is tagged with “Amazing, Awesome, Super awesome”, the RSS feed will show the post titles as “Awesome post #Amazing #Awesome #Superawesome”. Note that spaces in a tag are removed, and hash symbols (#) are prepended to each.

    This plugin is useful primarily to bloggers who pipe their posts into Twitter. The post tags become Twitter hashtags. Since post tags and twitter hashtags are both a form of metadata, it is natural to simply and automatically reuse the one for the other.

    Consider a blog post on the Iran election. Normally youd tag the post Iran and then when you tweet it, youd have to manually insert the twitter hashtag #iranelection. Now, you can simply tag the post iranelection (no # symbol) and it will automatically be hashtagged. Combined with a service like Twitterfeed, this plugin can greatly automate the process of piping relevant posts into the twitterverse.

    Note that the plugin makes no attempt to check that the total length of the post title, including hashtags, falls within the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter.

    At present the plugin has no options. The feature roadmap includes the following:
    – add title character length checking
    – toggle using tags or categories for conversion to hashtags
    – let user decide whether to remove spaces in tags, or convert to underlines or other character

    this is a pretty simple plugin so other feature requests are appreciated.

    UPDATE: version 2.0 of the plugin is at pastebin here. This version no longer appends all tags, but only those already beginning with #. This way the blogger can selectively choose which tags they want converted into hashtags.

  • backups should be local, not to the cloud

    One of the lessons of Friendfeed’s buyout by Facebook is that the cloud is not a good place for backup. In an era of the sub-$100 terabyte, the idea that the best place for our data should be anywhere other than right at home is a strange one. Cloud backup is useful as a meta-backup – for example, using Jungledisk and Amazon’s S3 service to backup your local backups – to guard against catastrophe, but should never be your primary repository.

    For data like photos, this is pretty much a moot point, as everyone keeps their originals on their disk and uploads select photos to Flickr/Picasa etc (and at lower resolution than the originals). But for text, like blog posts and tweets, most people simply leave their content in the cloud – which includes leaving your wordpress database at your hosting provider rather than on your local disk. I haven’t yet found a good solution for local wordpress database backups but I have written previously about various backup strategies for twitter. Sarah Perez at RWW just did a piece on 10 ways to archive your tweets as well, but most of these are again cloud-based solutions. Marshall Kirkpatrick has a guide to using Google Reader along with Dave Winer’s new OPML tool to consolidate all your tweets and your friends’ tweets, but this isn’t a true backup solution either, as I point out in comments. The point however is as long as the data is in the cloud, it’s not really backed up – data wants to be imprisoned, not set free.

  • true blue: facebook friends friendfeed, whales on twitter

    Facebook is now in a relationship with Friendfeed. It's complicated.
    Facebook is now in a relationship with Friendfeed. It’s complicated.
    This is potentially huge – Facebook has acquired Friendfeed:

    Obviously Facebook has already built out some of FriendFeed’s functionality so there is some overlap, but there are still numerous ways FriendFeed beats out Facebook’s News Feed setup. One of these is the way stories are ‘floated’ to the top as new users comment on them. And FriendFeed’s system is truly real-time, unlike Facebook’s feed which users have to manually refresh.

    But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers.

    Still very much a breaking news story but I am sure the Techcrunch folks will update with more info as they get it.

    The obvious motivation here is to pound on Twitter’s “statusphere” market share. The big drawback of FF until now was that it was just a “better Twitter” – but without Twitter, 90% of the purpose of using Friendfeed was essentially rendered moot (as was the case with the DDOS attack over the weekend). But by folding in FF’s feedslurping uber-twitter capability, Facebook can create a one-stop shop, making all facebook users who are also on twitter stay within facebook for their twittering, which of course keeps them in control of the ad viewing. A souped-up Friendfeed application for Facebook seems likely; or even more likely, a new default Facebook tab (“Feeds” ?). This is technology that the Facebook people are going to want to put front and center.

    The adoption of FF-ish features like commenting on everything and “Likes” are also unique to the FB/FF ecosystem and these should be integrated. Even google got into the “Likes” act so I think Twitter is going to have to respond to this by introducing that feature at least (which would incidentally be useful in meta-twitter metrics of who to follow and whatnot). I also don’t see how Twitter can resist the inevitable “groups” feature to compete with Friendfeed’s Rooms. I actually use Rooms to power virtual groups on Twitter like @otakusphere.

    Twitter has serious catch-up to do, feature-wise, but until now they haven’t felt any real competitive pressure because no one else had the numbers to threaten them. With Facebook’s takeover of Friendfeed, however, the game has just changed dramatically.

    UPDATE: It’s confirmed: Facebook and Friendfeed are now in a relationship. It’s complicated.

  • Microsoft Bing: But It ‘s Not Google!

    I’ve been increasingly using Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing in lieu of Google for my casual searches. One of the things that appeals to me is how the search results are so much more organized and comprehensive than just a list of ten text items. Google’s spartan deisgn was cool and chic ten years ago but today it feels increasingly stale, and Bing is pulling from Apple’s playbook in tailoring the interface to users’ needs. Some examples: saved searches are essential for keeping track of what you’ve been researching, and the live preview of video thumbnails on mouseover saves you a click – and getting video and photos along with text links on the same search results page is a huge timesaver. I feel like I spend less time using Bing. Right now I stil have to manually decide to go to Bing but I intend to switch the default search engine on all my browsers for a few weeks – including Chrome – and see how that works out.

    Bing has been getting a lot of attention lately – there’s a piece on it in the New York Times, another in USA Today, and even a website, Bing Vs Google, that lets you see searches compared side-by-side. It’s good to shake things up – and Bing certainly has its rough spots, ut just like Google these should improve over time. The mere existence of Bing ensures that Google is forced to compete and innovate as well.

  • One Million Strong for @aplusk

    Ashton Kutcher has done it – he has amassed one million followers. He’s using this publicity to donate mosquito nets to African children, but that’s just scratching the surface of what is possible.

    Use your imagination.. what could he do, with his combination of celebrity and follower clout?

    – he could raise money for a politician or cause
    – he could single handedly launch a new brand or artist
    – he can function as a one-man Digg or Slashdot effect

    but more importantly, he can actually influence the public sphere. Consider that twitter users are the elite, early adopters and opinion makers. Ashton Kuther can now promote ideas to this elite. He’s a nexus of potential memes.

    This is a landmark day. We don’t know how yet, but we will.

  • The End of Twitter: You can stop tweeting now

    This is the Final Tweet to End All Tweets.

    lasttweet

    Twitter is Over. This is Twitter’s End. There are No More Tweets.

    (inspired by the eoti)

  • George W. Bush coming soon to Twitter and Facebook?

    The Politico interviewed former chief of staff for President Bush (43), Andy Card, and he mentioned this surprising tidbit:

    The nation has been so focused on the 44th president that we’ve nearly forgotten about the 43rd. What exactly has George W. Bush been up to since he left office on January 20? Is he just lounging around or has he been keeping busy?

    Who better to ask than Andrew Card, a Bush confidante who served as W.’s chief of staff from 2001 to 2006. We caught up with Card at the National Press Club Thursday after a panel discussion sponsored by Politico and Georgetown University.

    Card says that Bush has plenty on his plate and may even — gasp! — delve into the tech-savvy world of Twitter and Facebook.

    watch the video yourself:

  • monetizing WPMU

    There’s a great conversation at WPMU.org about how to make money using WordPress MU – James starts by noting that advertising doesn’t cover the hosting costs for a massively successful site, and goes into the various other ways in which they derive revenue, including selling extra features to paid users and selling custom plugins (that are not released under the GPL). In response, Jason acknowledges that WPMU is inherently costly to run and agrees that there must be a revenue tsream, and then goes on to argue that WPMU is really a service, not a product. Therefore to make money with WPMU, he reasons, you must provide a value-added service relative to the big free hosts like wordpress.com – such as custom themes. James replies with a lengthy argument defending the decision not to release plugins under the GPL.

    I don’t have much to add aside from noting that since themes have long been released without GPL, there’s no reason that plugins should be any different, especially with themes like Thesis which are “frameworks” that really blur the line between a theme and a plugin. The same can be argued for Prologue, which I use as the front end to my WPMU install at Talk Islam. The “core functions” of WP are never used in themes or plugins, so I don’t think that argument applies (think about it – why would you want to duplicate core WP functionality? why would you even need to?)

    Of course, part of the problem for monetization is that you are a victim of your own succcess. James’ monthly costs for the Edublogs network are assuredly far greater than mine for Talk Islam – I can only aspire to a fraction of his success (especially since I am not running Talk Islam as a business. not yet anyway). As such Talk Islam has only a handful of user blogs – most of the activity is on the front page (where the Prologue theme gives it a dynamic, Twitter-esque feel). My goal for Talk Islam is to incorporate the Buddypress functions and ultimately create a framework for a “community platform” that would be in a sense the successor to the Daily Kos style blog community, replicating many of the features but discarding things that are broken in my opinion (such as the way the recommended diaries list is dominated by a clique of the same voices and the same topics, with very rare original and fresh perspectives). It should be noted that Shai Sachs, a very talented Drupal hacker, is working on a drupal-based blog infrastructure project for the progressive political blogsphere, but I personally believe that wordpress MU is a better platform. With Talk Islam as a prototype, we can envision a package that already includes the buddypress integration and standard theme for frontpage and user blogs that an aspiring admin could simply download and have ready to go out of the box.

    The real question for monetization is the scale. How many WPMU installs are on the scale of Edublogs? Very few, I wager – but there are probably thousands like mine where the entire install can be run off a standard Dreamhost account. At that scale, Adsense ads can indeed cover hosting costs and even a modest profit on the side – not enough to pay rent, but maybe enough for cable television. Or a Starbucks addiction.

    I think therefore a model for monetization presents itself. Instead of trying to monetize a single WPMU install, you monetize a packaged installation that you distribute. That installation can have Adsense code sharing so that half the revenue from ads goes to the package developer (or all if the installer doesn’t have an adsense account, there would be a box for them to paste their adsense publisher ID if they have one). For any given WPMU install the revenue will be quite modest, probably on the order of a few dollars a month. But suppose that the package was installed a hundred times? a thousand? Especially since it isn’t you who are paying the hosting fees, its the person installing the package.

    Of course this means we have only punted the monetization issue downstream. But for a small WPMU site operator, recouping hosting costs is a lot easier than for a big operation like Edublogs. Users can be asked for donations, charged fees for extra features, etc just as James and Jason described in their posts. These revenue sources will be much more lucrative at the smaller scale.

    As a business model, none of the above really helps James out, unfortunately 🙂 But then again, what if individual schools ran their own WPMU microsites using Edublogs software? (actually, they do.) In a sense the strategy above can be leveraged regardless of your size. All things considered, I’d rather be in James’ position of being too big 🙂

  • should Google spin off it’s advertising business?

    This intriguing article for web entrepreneurs has a lot of useful information in it – particularly the interesting metric for assessing a companies value: 10 x (revenue – cost). However, in the course of the discussion he also makes an intriguing point about Google:

    Google has one incredibly amazing business – keyword advertising. It relies on its own search service and deals with other search services and content partners for the audience that drives the keyword business. If you stripped that business out of Google, you’d probably have a business that has gross revenues of $20bn, net revenues of $13bn, and operating profits of $8bn to $10bn. That business is worth the approximately $100bn of market value that Google has right now. Everything else is valued at zero because it has a lot of costs and no revenue. Could Google unlock a lot of value by giving up on everything else they are doing? Maybe not, but they probably wouldn’t lose much value either. I am not suggesting they do that, by the way. But again, I just want to make a point.

    That’s a fascinating point. It should be noted that everything Google does that isn’t directly related to search and advertising is essentially a distraction, and that shows: Feedburner has been moribund after it’s acquisition, YouTube can’t make a dime, and Gmail for all it’s wonderfulness is still labeled as beta. Even properties that are actively innovating, like Google Maps, Picasa, and Blogger, are still not earning any revenue for Google and are being actively competed against by Microsoft and open source software.

    Of course, what would happen to all those projects if they weren’t subsidized by the web advertising business? In some ways, their very presence forces the competition to innovate. But in the looming economic clouds ahead, maybe the golden era has ended and everyone, even Google, has to abide by the rule that cash flow is king.

    (via retweet of @TimOreilly from @JoeTrippi)