markhollands.com.au

Wow, how time flies when you’re crazy busy.  It’s been a bit over a year since my last post.  Not something I was intending.  The last year has just flown by that even when there was a brief respite, collecting my thoughts into some sort of ordered text seemed like a bit too much.

Anyways, for the last year working on the website for JUST Cars and JUST Bikes, a publication focused upon collectible motor vehicles.

After my experiences working in a large corporate IT company, switching to a small company with lofty ambitions was like a whole other world had opened up. In the last year I have learned what it takes to deliver a website like this. There was a lot of hard work but the end result is something that I am proud of. There are still a few issues to sort out and lot of improvements we would like to make, but it is an achievement.

Now that it is live, I’d like to return my blog to its somewhat irregular service.

Cool new technology for doing biometrics.

Finger vein authentication, introduced widely by Japanese banks in the last two years, is claimed to be the fastest and most secure biometric method. Developed by Hitachi, it verifies a person’s identity based on the lattice work of minute blood vessels under the skin.

They need to miniturise this stuff so they can get it into mobile devices. Seamless, difficult to fake authentication was one of the key features of the recent Adaptive Path mobile innovation video.

The pattern of blood vessels is captured by transmitting near-infrared light at different angles through the finger, usually the middle finger. This can be done in a small instrument attached to a wall or as part of an ATM machine. The light is partially absorbed by haemoglobin in the veins and the pattern is captured by a camera as a unique 3D finger vein profile. This is turned into a simple digital code which is then matched with a pre-registered profile to verify an individual’s identity. Even twins are said to have different finger vein patterns.

Hitachi claims that because the veins are inside the body, invisible to the eye, it is extremely difficult to forge and impossible to manipulate. While fingerprints can be “lifted” and retinas scanned without an individual realising it, it is extremely unlikely that people’s finger vein profiles can be taken without them being aware of it, the company says.

I wonder how complicated the profile input scanning process is, if they can be sure that someone’s finger vein profile cannot be taken without their awareness.

The gruesome possibility that criminals may hack off a finger has already been discounted by Hitachi’s scientists. Asked if authentication could be “forged” with a severed finger, the company says: “As blood would flow out of a disconnected finger, authentication would no longer be possible.”

There is one solid plus over fingerprint technology. Not losing a finger is always a good thing.

There are a whole raft of social networks that have sprung up in recent years based around wine. The general concept is that crowdsourcing is used to generate wine reviews and provide users with an integrated platform in which to discuss wine.

At face value it seems like a great idea. Wine is a product that has developed with an inherant culture of sharing throughout its long history. The standard 750ml bottle of wine is generally too much for one person to consume in one sitting without some ramifications the following morning. People that enjoy wine generally like to discuss it. Its a luxury good, with a demographic that is desirable to target for advertisers.

Here are a bunch of the most popular wine social networks and the various features that each of them exhibits :

Bottlenotes - Wine characteristic based profile creation. You specify what aspects/types of wine you enjoy and it matches your profile to others on the system with similar tastes. Strongly promotes shopping and gift buying. List creation for cellar, shopping. Seems to be very limited social interaction between users.

Bottletalk - Tag based wine classification (eg. fruity, pepper, berries), friend network. The primary conceptual model for browsing wines seems to be based around tags. Seems like an interesting concept but needs some more depth.

Cork’d - Very wine focused, with the ability to create wine reviews, cellar, drinking and shopping lists. Friend network but only seems to have the ability to look at other people’s profiles and some email and a simple public “cork board” message board.

Snooth - Quite a good social side of the site featuring forums, blogs, emails. These are quite well integrated, although i found the flash/ajax forum software a bit unwieldy and slow at times. The shop side of their site however, isn’t well integrated with the social side. The shop and the forums seem to be entirely seperate.

Tastoria - A British based wine network. Seems to be a good smattering of social content here such as blogging and mail, list creation, friend networks. The real feature of the this site is video. There is a lot of good content for tastings, grape varieties, etc. I wish they would stop their main page auto-loading a video however.

OpenBottles - Wine reviews, mail, groups and friend networks, list creation. Not much in the way of unique or engaging functionality.

After registering and using each of these social networks, while there were some good features here and there, I couldn’t see myself using any of them on a regular basis, which seems to be the core requirement of a successful social network.

Given the rather extreme fragmentation of this niche, it seems like none of these systems are particularly successful at this stage. There are standard forums on wine that are more popular that the various social communication options listed above.

I think there are a few reasons why none of these systems have been successful to date. Unfortunately for these systems, it isn’t something that can be addressed by more functionality.

There is a huge amount of variety within the wine market. Quality varies between country, region, winery, wine, vintage, bottle and possibly most importantly palate. Everyone has their own personal tastes about what wine they enjoy to drink from the somellier through to the average drinker.

There is also a lot of diversity in the types of people that drink wine and how they would potentially use a system like those listed above. Most of these sites seem to target the center of the bell curve of wine drinking experience. People that like wine enough to discuss it online, but most wine experts aren’t going to waste their time on it, given that there is already a well established traditional social networks and media for wine.

The reverse effect is going to skew the wine reviews that are posted to the site. People are only likely to review wines that they really like or really dislike. Is anyone going to review a wine which they thought was just average? Given that everyone has different preferences when it comes to wine this will make it very difficult to compare any numerical value given to the quality of wines.

People generally like to enjoy a glass of wine in the company of friends, doing so over the internet just doesn’t seem to generate the same experience. Sharing knowledge about wine with friends in person builds social capital, automating it and broadening the audience over the web and it doesn’t have the same effect.

There is a mix of technical and social issues that effect the potential success of these systems. The manner in which these types of problems are intertwined means they will be quite difficult to resolve. I will be interested to watch how they progress in the future and whether any of these systems can carve out a truly successful position within the global wine industry.

TAC - Keep the support alive

Last weekend I went to the Melbourne Victory game. There is a league wide policy that at every potentially controversial moment in the match, instead of showing the highlights on the stadium screen, it shows an advertisement. I presume this is to prevent the referees from being undermined should they make an incorrect decision and are subsequently shown up for it. This season the Melbourne Victory have a partnership with the Traffic Accident Commission (TAC), so that every time this happens a TAC ad is shown with the words “Keep the support alive”.

During the game, one of the players received a straight red card and instead of showing us the replay we are forced to watch the advert. Sitting in the stands, there had seemed to be minimal contact between the players and without any further information to go on, the home crowd soundly boo’ed the referee. Later in the game, the Victory keeper makes a fine save with the opposing striker bearing down on him. The two players collide slightly, instead of showing the replay we are once again treated to the ad, instead of a replay of some good play. It wasn’t until I got home later that I found out what the red card was given for. The combination of this policy and this advertisement makes the fans at the game resent the TAC instead of respecting them for supporting the team.

I know that effective advertising comes in a range of different forms from entertaining to infuriating and that repetition is one of the many tools often used by advertising executives. But particularly with this sort of message, trying to make people drive safely and not under the influence of alcohol, having it rammed down your throat repeatedly has a very negative effect upon how people will perceive the message.

On another football related topic, the cable sports channel Setanta, recently won the rights to show the away games of the English football team in their World Cup qualifying campaign. Something that would have been quite a coo over the domination that the Sky network holds in the UK.

They were running a tag line of “The Only Place You Will See England in Belarus in October”. While they were able to sell on the coverage in Wales and Northern Ireland, none of the free to air networks in England were willing to pay their asking price. Given the England sides fairly dismal performances of late, this might have not been a significant issue. But the game away to Croatia turned out to be one of their best performances in recent years. Setanta were actively trying to keep coverage of the game off youtube and the like. Proclaiming your exclusivity while large swathes of the nations fans are unable to watch a classic game isn’t a very good way to build your brand.

Several days after the match, Setanta released a 30 minute highlights package to the free to air networks as a means of trying to assuage the jilted fans. But by this stage the damage had already been done.

I found this post which outlines a much more sensible strategy that Setanta could have pursued.

Decline to sell the rights to the highlights to other channels, I agree with that.

Put the goals free-to-view streaming in high quality on the Setanta.com website as the only place to watch them. Make it a good experience, make the quality excellent and allow users to watch it as many times as they like and send to their friends

Put clickable pre-roll and post-roll adverts on the clips that promote Setanta subscription packages and allow the customer to click-through and order if they want to buy

Mobilise your media sales team to contact all your best sponsors and sell banner-advert space on the web page at an extreme premium, as the best and only place that the 60m residents of England can watch the clip. The revenue would be more that than you have ever made from a webpage

PR-the-arse off the fact that you are declining rights-sales and making the content free for fans. What nice guys you are.

I think that companies should be more careful when it comes to putting their brand in between a sports fan and their passion.

The gadget-lust I’ve been experiencing when I’ve been seeing iPhone 3G’s in the wild has been difficult to control, but the lack of any halfway reasonable data plan from any of the 3 networks has helped me to stop myself from committing to it for 24 months. I’ve been following the development of the OpenMoko open source handset movement for a while now. While the form factor isn’t quite as nice as the iPhone, its heavier and deeper than Apple’s release, the fact that all the hardware and software is open source is a significant selling point. I’ve been reading about the hoops that Apple has been making developers jump through in order to get their apps on the iPhone and it doesn’t sound appealing.

I just read about an effort by Techcrunch to create the OpenMoko equivalent of web tablet.

Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.

I like this trend towards open source hardware. While it might take a while to reach the mainstream, as it matures it should get hardware manufacturers to consider whether it is cheaper to design a gadget from scratch or comply with the open standards.

A blogger’s persona is primarily conveyed by the content they produce. However, influencing the reader’s first impression of the site by imparting the essence of the blogger’s persona can help turn someone who might quickly lose interest into a reader who will come back many times.

Using a mission statement and a picture of the author are the two simple ways to quickly impart some of the blogger’s persona. Both of the sites that I have chosen to feature below have very well developed persona. They both achieve the aim of reaching their audience in distinctly different ways.

joi.ito.com

Joi has been blogging since before the word was coined and as one the most influential bloggers in the IT realm, his writing persona has a very personal and connected feel which is well supported by the design of his blog’s UI.

Joi is heavily involved with Creative Commons and the UI of his site really tries to emphasize community and interaction. The photo blog contains the many talented people that he works with, but it is rare that you will see a picture solely of the man himself adorning the top of his page.

A picture of Joi is almost hidden away at the bottom of the page. This unassuming nature comes across in his writing and it provides the site with a very intimate feel.

TuckerMax.com

Tucker Max takes an almost opposite approach. His site is adorned with a picture of himself, showing off the big, bold and alpha male persona which has made his writing so popular.

The first line of his mission statement, “My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole.” is pure Tucker. His writing is often outrageous and he makes no apologies.

First post!

I’ve been pondering about how I was going to setup my own blog, having taken a look at a wide range of blog designs and how to become a better blogger guides. Much of the advice for bloggers on the web seems to include the mantra, “Write about what you know”.

The theme of this blog is going to be about user interface design and information architecture. As this will be documenting my learning experience and career transition, I thought, what better way to design my blog than to document the interface design choices I make along the way. Not only will it give some of my early content a sense of continuity, but it will allow me to have a plain design to begin with and then test out ideas along the way.

I found that there was a lot of quality material about different aspects of blog user interface design on the web already. Jacob Nielsen’s academic articles on his Alertbox site, analysing the different weblog usability design mistakes, amongst other things. At the other end of the scale, Smashing Magazine has a collection of 45 Excellent Blog Designs. This is a collection of very pretty designs, many by graphic designers, which I found useful for looking at things as an overview.

But I still was struggling to analyse what made up a good blog design and how the different components could be used to achieve different results. After much deliberation I thought that I should try and fill the middle ground between these two extremes and also use this as an opportunity to introduce my blogging persona. So I am going to present a series of blog posts analysing different aspects of the blog as a user interface and so it isn’t a dry slab of text, I will throw in some case studies featuring some of the blogs that I read.