Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future 28 Aug 2008 8:38 AM (16 years ago)
MakaluMedia is supporting the joint efforts of the National Writing Project and Google, to provide a platform for the nation’s young people to express their opinions on issues that concern them to the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates.
From the NWP site, a summary of the project follows:
Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is an online writing and publishing project that invites young people to write about the issues and concerns they would want the next president to address and, with the support of their teachers, to publish their writing for a national audience.
During the presidential campaign, U.S. high school teachers and mentors guide students through the process of writing a persuasive letter or essay to the presidential candidates. Students’ work should encourage the candidates to give attention to issues and concerns that students feel are central to their future. Topics are chosen by the students themselves to reflect their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests, and teachers will be able to support student writing and publishing in a way that most directly fits their local curricula and educational goals.
Through the Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website (which launches in mid-September) and Google Docs , a free online writing tool, participating teachers can work with students to publish their work online for their peers, teachers, and parents, and for the public. And who knows, the future president may read their letters too.
Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is open to U.S. teachers and mentors working with students ages 13–18. If you know a school teacher who may be interested in participating, please direct them to the following site.
NWP Letters to the Next President Information Page
The deadline for teacher registration is September 8, 2008.
Towards the Semantic Web 7 Mar 2008 1:58 AM (17 years ago)
Imagine a world where much of the data that’s flowing around the net takes on meaning, thereby becoming knowledge. Imagine a world where a system in Germany can infer that I’m the uncle of Wade, based on data from a system in the US indicating that my brother Page is the father of Wade. Imagine a world where an online product review from Steve is displayed for me ahead of the other 500 reviews, because of inferred trust derived from the knowledge that both Steve and I happen to share a common friend, you.
Although we’re still a long way off, recent events — in which MakaluMedia staff have played an important part — have brought us a few steps closer to such a world.
MakaluMedia hacker and researcher Arto Bendiken has long been interested in distributed systems, and “information about information”, and naturally developed an interest in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF, in short, is a technology that allows the representation of data as “knowledge”. If two independent systems store their data in RDF, and share common semantic “vocabularies”, then the two systems can effectively share their “knowledge”. What does RDF look like? A simple example has been taken from this Quick Introduction to RDF.
@prefix : <http://www.example.org/> . :john a :Person . :john :hasMother :susan . :john :hasFather :richard . :richard :hasBrother :luke .
As it happens, our Drupal team, led by Arto, has been working for a few years on a project with our colleagues at M.C. Dean and Raincity Studios in the development of a sophisticated collaboration and communication platforms for the US government, based on the Drupal platform. (Certainly it represents one of the largest and most complex Drupal instances in the world.) This platform presently supports more than 60 international clients servicing use cases ranging from policy definition collaboration, to natural crisis management, to school operations in the African continent.
This project represents a natural fit for RDF technology, given the value realized in sharing “knowledge”, not just “data”, between the various instances of the platform, as well as the growing number of other RDF-enabled systems around the world. Towards this end, the project team has been working intensively during the past months to design, develop and begin to integrate an RDF storage, management and access framework into Drupal. And since a primary objective of this project is to release the developed products as freely available open-source software, much of this RDF work can be tracked and accessed from the Drupal RDF project page.
Given that Drupal forms the core technology of the platform , the project team naturally maintains a close relationship with the its founder and leader, Dries Buytaert. In guiding the evolution of the Drupal platform, Dries has always demonstrated a willingness to take bold steps in the direction of progress, and this has been evidenced once again this week. In his keynote speech at the Drupalcon Boston 2008 conference, Dries made the big announcement that the future versions of Drupal (beginning with version seven), will be based on RDF.
Drupal presently dominates the market of open-source content management systems, and so this announcement represents a huge step forward to the building of a truly “Semantic Web”. If interested, you can read various reactions from the blogosphere at Network World and SitePoint.
We are tremendously proud to have been a part of this progress, and look forward to continuing work towards a world of networked knowledge.
Catalog Choice registers half a million users! 28 Jan 2008 8:47 AM (17 years ago)
Catalog Choice on the Today Show.
On January 24, Catalog Choice saw its biggest day yet, when it was covered in a fantastic piece on NBC’s “The Today Show”:
Over the course of the day, the catalogchoice.org website saw over two million page views, and registered 60,000 new user accounts, bringing the total number of registered users, three days later, to over 500,000!
In addition, “Catalog Choice” was the number one search term for the day on Google:
Coping with the traffic.
Coping with a sudden increase in traffic, orders of magnitude more than typical, was a challenge. The front-end web application servers quickly became overloaded, and later the back-end DB server became overloaded (we were servicing over 2,000 DB queries per second!) Since it’s still not possible (with our hosting providers, at least) to bring on additional servers on-demand, we quickly made several modifications to the application:
We made a number of layout modifications in the application that would allow us to cache content to a far greater extent.
These same modifications also targeted the reduction of DB queries.
With these modifications, we were able to cope well with the secondary traffic surge.
Lessons learned.
It’s quite possible that Catalog Choice is now one of the largest Ruby on Rails applications running on the internet, in terms of number of users. Over the past few months of operation, we’ve learned some lessons:
Although not related to Rails, we’ve learned that it’s a good idea, especially for a site with this broad of a user base, to be conservative on the use of client-side technology. When originally launched, we had implemented elegant page transitions, catalog finder live type-ahead, and other similar UI features — all done with JavaScript (AJAX) in a way that gave the site a desktop-application feel. We considered this acceptable practice, as we were designing for IE 6/7, Safari 2/3 and Firefox 2/3.
However, when you have 500,000 users, even 1% on older browsers represents quite a large crowd! So we’ve since modified the site to work in a far more traditional manner, relying very little on client-side JavaScript, and where necessary, degrading very gracefully.
For hosting, our infrastructure, like many these days, is based on virtual machines. We have N number of front-end web application servers, each practically maxed out in terms of CPU and memory. Based on the experience with the Today Show traffic, we’re thinking now that it might be better to have 2N front-end servers, each with half the CPU and memory, since it’s a lot easier to quickly add CPU and memory to an existing server (to meet demand), than it is to bring on additional VMs. (This is, assuming 2N front-end servers with half the memory are roughly comparable in cost to N servers with double the CPU and memory, which might not be the case.)
It has been a very exciting experience to watch the site grow, analyze the usage patterns, and adjust the application and its user interface to not only improve the usability and user experience, but to adapt to the changing user profiles (i.e. now that over 500,000 of our visitors are no longer first-timers, and that we have over 1,000 merchants in the system.)
How the site is doing.
When the site first launched, the consumer response was (and continues to be) nothing short of amazing. It is clear that this site is meeting a very big need in the United States; that is the reduction of unwanted paper catalogs. The industry’s response was, expectedly, lukewarm, especially after the Direct Marketers Association (the DMA) issued an email to all its members to “Just say no!” to Catalog Choice.
However, with half a million vocal consumers behind it, Catalog Choice has become an influential heavyweight. A website feature we launched last week alerts users to which specific merchants have refused to honor their opt-out requests, and provides the merchants customer support telephone number, just in case the consumer would like to give them a call. Within 24 hours, after being inundated with phone calls from angry customers, we had merchants changing their minds :-)
A misconception in the industry (promoted by the DMA) is that Catalog Choice seeks to do away with catalogs altogether. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Catalog Choice is about doing away with just those catalogs that are unsolicited and unwanted.
All in all, Catalog Choice has been a fantastic project for MakaluMedia. We’re fortunate to be one of very few companies having the opportunity to build and operate such a large-scale Rails site, and a site that serves such a meaningful social purpose!
Phenomenal response to Catalog Choice 6 Nov 2007 5:49 AM (17 years ago)
HARDLY A MONTH HAS PASSED since we announced the launch of Catalog Choice, a website that MakaluMedia was chosen to design and develop by an amazing team of funding and supporting organizations, and the response to the site has been extraordinary.
In less than 25 days, more than 100,000 users have registered, opting out of more than 800,000 catalogs. And for us, as user experience designers and product developers, one of the most exciting statistics is the near 50% conversion ratio, meaning that nearly one out of every two visitors to the site has registered.
Update November 21, 2007: We are about at the one month point now, and have over 180,000 users, opting out of nearly two million catalogs!.
Catalog Choice has also been featured on the national television networks CNN, NBC and ABC (see videos below), and has been well received in the press and blogosphere:
- The New York Times
- The Boston Herald
- The Chicago Tribune
- Guy Kawasaki
- Joel on Software
- Adam Engst at TidBITS
The success of the site has served to validate much of our beliefs regarding user experience design. Some of principles that stand out include:
- Simple is better. Less is more.
- A successful user experience derives from near obsessive attention to detail.
- Don’t outsource your user support. On the contrary, put your best people on it. People love getting a personal response from somebody that knows what they’re talking about. You’ll reap the benefits in trust, patience and tremendous value in terms of feedback to the process of continually improving the user experience.
We’ve also learned a wealth about effectively operating a high-volume Ruby on Rails application. (On one particular day, the ABC “Good Morning America” spot was the very top news article on Yahoo News, and we saw 20,000 new user registrations in a period of four hours.) Having a great hosting partner helps a lot!
Finally, this project is proof positive that talented and motivated people, supported by an effective agile process and paying a lot of attention to clear communications, can build a successful project, even if separated great distances geographically. Our Catalog Choice team includes MakaluMedia staff located in the United States, Germany, Spain and Ireland!
And with that, we bring this article to a close. Our next project milestones include one million catalog opt-outs, and hopefully down the road one millions users! And remember, if you’re located in the US, and ready to simplify your life while helping the environment, head on over to Catalog Choice and sign up for a free account:
Be sure to check out the following video clips.
- Catalog Choice on NBC
- Catalog Choice on CNN
- Catalog Choice on ABC Good Morning America
Stop those catalogs with Catalog Choice! 10 Oct 2007 2:58 AM (17 years ago)
The idea.
Growing up in the US, I remember how annoying it was to receive commercial sales calls on the telephone late in the evening, when the family was sitting around trying to enjoy some quality time together. This problem was later solved (mostly) through the introduction of the “Do Not Call,” registry — a legislated service which marketers must consult before they can call you. If your name is on the “Do Not Call” list, it’s illegal for them to call you.
A similar problem exists today with paper catalogs. American consumers are simply inundated with unsolicited, undesired paper catalogs from a multitude of merchants. While receiving these catalogs can be just as annoying as receiving the marketing phone calls, there’s a deeper, more concerning problem. The production of the 19 billion paper catalogs sent each year in the US takes a huge toll on the environment.
19 BILLION. We throw around terms daily like million, billion, trillion, without really having a feel for the magnitude of those numbers. Consider this, it takes 11 days for a million seconds to pass. It takes 32 years for a billion seconds to pass! So, 19 billion catalogs — that’s a lot of wasted paper!
Earlier this year, my company MakaluMedia was offered an opportunity to participate in a project backed by some of the US’ largest environmental and non-profit organizations to help address this project. Today represents the culmination of several months of hard work on this project, and I’m proud to announce the launch of Catalog Choice:
Catalog Choice is a free service, that allows people to find and opt-out of the undesired catalogs they receive. The concept is very simple; you sign up, search for a catalog you receive, and opt-out. We take care the rest, and in about six weeks’ time, you should no longer receive the catalog.
The application.
Given that the service targets all American consumers, including a large segment who may not be computer saavy, a major objective was making Catalog Choice simple, inviting and easy-to-use. (Well, in fact, those should be objectives of any product really.)
Making something simple is anything but simple :) It involves everything from the visual aesthetic, to the interaction workflows, to the choice of the wording on the site. (For example, we opted against using the term “Sign up”, as some people find that idea intimidating, and rather went for “Get started now”.) We hope we’ve succeeded, but we’ll be monitoring the visitor’s experiences closely to tune and adjust the application as needed.
Technically, the site was built using the Ruby on Rails application framework, which is simply fantastic.
The launch.
The big launch happened yesterday, and shortly thereafter we were mentioned on a couple of very popular websites:
That certainly got the traffic flowing, allowing the powerful Engine Yard servers to finally break a sweat. :)
And the day ended with the good news that next week we’re going to get some major national media coverage!
The team.
I almost feel guilty to be paid to do work that’s so enjoyable, and the biggest part of that satisfaction comes from being part of the tremendous team we have in MakaluMedia. In this Catalog Choice project, Mike Rohde, an “icon” in the logo design world (couldn’t help saying that ;), designed the logo, Alex Bendiken applied his wizardry to design the application’s user interface and user experience (Alex, by the way, is the guy that won the Slashdot redesign contest!), the Rails application development included Christian Kumpf (one of our crack engineers in Germany, who happened to build an ultra-stable satellite telemetry processing system last year!), Alex (yes, same one; he does Rails application development too!), Brian Cooke (maker of famous Mac OS X applications) and our latest additions, Alvaro Silva and Luke Brown, systems work by Irish legend Niall O Broin (who will never have a weblog, so don’t get your hopes up) and, finally, project management by Fausto “I dream in SQL” Roveda, and myself.
All in all the project has been a ton of fun, and hopefully it’ll be a big success.
We need your help.
This project has been especially satisfying as it represents something that could have a major positive impact on the environment. But for that to happen, it needs to be used on a very large scale. And in that respect, we could really use your help.
As a free service, and given the high costs of marketing, the team is hoping in a big way that the service will spread via word of mouth. If you’d be willing to link to the site from your own website or blog, we’ve got some hopefully nice looking badges available here:
http://www.catalogchoice.org/#about
And if you use the service, please consider using the “Invite a friend” feature. Thanks so much.
Miscellaneous updates.
- To handle all the customer service incoming emails, Catalog Choice are using a service that absolutely rocks, MailTank. It is fantastic.
ProBlogger Logo Design 27 Aug 2007 12:55 PM (17 years ago)
At the end of May, Darren Rowse contacted me, to redesign the ProBlogger logo.
Darren has one of the net’s most popular blogs, and is one of the founders of b5media. I was honored to have a chance at designing the new identity, so I agreed to come on board the design team with Darren’s site designer, Ben Bleikamp.
Darren’s story is interesting, not only because he turned blogging from a hobby into a full-time career and business, but because he freely shares what he’s learned from blogging. I quite like Darren’s attitude of helping others grow and succeed by sharing his knowledge.
In this post, I’ll share details and sketches on the new ProBlogger identity.
Initial Specs and Feedback
Darren answered my standard list of questions, and from his initial feedback I gathered several themes to embrace and portray with the new ProBlogger identity. He wanted ProBlogger to be:
• A welcoming community where bloggers can learn and grow
• A source of information on making income from a blog
• A site promoting professionalism in blogging
• An extensive blogging reference
• Keywords: income, professionalism, community, inspiration, credibility, encouraging
Darren wanted a clean, crisp, contemporary, professional logo, without superfical “Web 2.0″ stylings. He wanted a logo to represent himself and his blog, in a design that wouldn’t go out of style in 6 months.
Sketches v1
With all of this information in mind, I began sketching multiple concepts to get the project rolling (click the image to see the v1 sketches).
With all of my logo projects, I like to loosen up with pencil in my Miquelrius notebook, freeing my mind to explore ideas. Note the keywords on the upper right of the page, which help guide me in idea generation during this first sketch phase.
I focused on theProBlogger P, as it portrays the brand well, and would be a consistent element from the original design. I explored one other idea (8) which suggested community as a nucleus with network connections and multiple outer atoms.
In Darren’s feedback, I learned that he liked the emphasis on the P. He preferred the squarer P characters, as these leaned away from the “surf” look and feel he saw in ideas 17, 18 and 19. He also liked the community concept he saw in 8, so it was on to v2 sketches to explore those ideas a bit more.
Sketches v2
I this set, I explored the winning concepts and a few others, bringing in aspects of idea 8 and the community “atomic” ideas merged with the P character.
After review, Darren and his team of trusted advisers focused on two ideas from this v2 set: concepts 19 and 23. Next up was the black & white and color phase.
Black & White and Color Concepts
Because Darren was on a tight timeline, I changed my normal process, including both black & white and color logos on the same mockups. This way Darren could see the B&W ideas and some explorations of initial colors.
Concepts v1:
In the first set you’ll see I came up with ideas based on the v2 sketches (2, 3, 4 and 5), along with a new idea (1) which came out I worked with the logos. Sometimes this happens, and I’ve learned to go with the flow and include these as options:
Darren’s feedback from round 1 aimed us at the P within a nucleus circle with orbiting atoms around this central icon to embed the concept of comminity into the mark. While the more graphical representations of this community were interesting (1, 2 and 3), the clearer P emerged as Darren’s top choice.
Concepts v2:
Based on feedback from v1, I narrowed to the single P with orbiting atoms, exploring different ways the atoms could be positioned, the connection between atoms and the outer ring, a font option and variations on the provided color pallette:
Concepts v3:
Darren really liked the color combo in ideas 7 and 8 in this set, leaning toward 7 a bit more. He wanted to keep the “P” and “BLOGGER” in orange and do one final exploration on atom position and separation between the atom and the outer ring. So I did a final v3 to help Darren see the 3 final options:
In the final version, I felt the leading atom suggested forward movement, and the separation of the atoms from the circle provided focus to the 3 atoms. 7.1 was chosen as the final winner:
Conclusion
Darren was pleased with the final logo, which was subsequently included in Ben’s redesign of the site. It was great fun to see the logo announced on Darren’s blog, followed by the release of the new site design.
As one might expect, with a major change on a popular site, there were a few who liked the old design better. However, after reading comments on the site related to the new logo and design, a majority of Darren’s readers really loved the new site design and logo. Most importantly, Darren was pleased with the results.
Thanks Darren for choosing to work with me and MakaluMedia on the logo design. It was an honor and a pleasure working with Darren and Ben on this project.
Advanced Communications and Collaboration with Drupal 21 Jun 2007 3:18 AM (17 years ago)
MakaluMedia has been chosen to become one of a small number of companies participating in an ambitious project aiming to develop and evolve a communication and collaboration platform serving the needs of an international community of intergovernmental agencies and organizations.
The core of the platform is based on the Drupal open-source content and collaboration framework, extended to provide advanced collaborative services such a real-time natural language translation, distributed identification, embedded instant and store/forward messaging, and voice-over-IP (VOIP).
The system allows for technology profiles to be defined in such a way that context specific instances of the platform can be provisioned, tailored and deployed on short notice. Use cases would include instances providing support to educational efforts in Africa, or emergency disaster management support to tsunami relief efforts in Asia.
MakaluMedia’s efforts in the activity include definition and tailoring of the software development process, development in the area of advanced file management, research and development in the integration of instant messaging services, and design & development of the overall platform user experience and interface.
MakaluMedia was selected to become part of this international effort, due to its experience and capabilities in the areas of formal software development related to space ground systems, combined with its activities in the development and advancement of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS).
Zero to Launch in Two Weeks (Rock-am-Ring Photo Site) 14 Jun 2007 6:25 AM (17 years ago)
Last week, around Monday or Tuesday, we got an urgent request from our longtime German customer, Marek Lieberberg Konzertagentur:
We need a Rock-am-Ring photo upload and sharing site, ASAP!
So we hunkered down, conceived a rough concept, and Alex got to work from scratch designing and coding. About two weeks later, we just launched:
Rock-am-Ring Photo Sharing Site
This site is a good example of the productivity gains that can be realized (by great developers, of course!) with the Ruby on Rails web application framework.
Our new site features include:
User accounts, created from temporary accounts (i.e. every visitor instantly becomes a temporary user, which is migrated when they create their permanent account) with profiles. (This is an innovative technique that we’ll blog about soon.)
User uploading and management of images.
Probably the most advanced file upload interface on the web. You can select multiple files for upload (and we locally pre-filter by image size and type!), and they are sequentially uploaded and processed, with full interactive feedback to the user (You can literally upload hundreds of files at once.) We plan to publish this solution as Open Source.
Photo voting with AJAX (Digg-style, thumbs up/down). Notice we don’t display the count before voting, to avoid bias.
Photo commenting, with email notification, and 30 minute post-editing.
Community-based moderation. If three people mark an image as inappropriate, it’s no longer displayed, and we’re notified to consider suspending the user’s account.
Advanced slideshow viewer, with link emailing.
Photo tagging
AJAX implementation of carousel slider
Automatic creation of multiple sizes of uploaded files
Photo EXIF information display.
Lots of nice lightbox UI effects (signup, login, etc.)
Bilingual user interface (German/English)
Amazon S3 image storage and serving
Multi-tier server architecture
And lots and lots more…
There are still lots of features to add, but the main focus now is on database query optimization, to improve the page load times, and to support the large amount of traffic. (In the first 36 hours, we’ve got 900 images, and serviced 4 million database queries!)
All in all, this was a pretty amazing accomplishment, both in terms of what was produced and the time in which it was produced.
It was also a great (and fun!) team effort. Thanks to:
Alex, for working like a madman to get this designed, and coded in a week and a half.
Niall and Arto, for figuring out how to keep the servers handling the requests.
Christian, for being late to his movie, while providing the German translations.
Alvaro, Martin and Christian, for testing.
Nespresso, for creating the caffeine that kept us going.
Paul Stamatiou’s Logo Design Project 5 Jun 2007 11:40 AM (17 years ago)
I’ve just completed a logo design project with tech guru, and fellow 9rules blogger, Paul Stamatiou.
Paul writes commentary and reviews on varied topics with a focus on technology, and has very high visibility on the web. So as you can imagine, I found it a fun challenge to work with Paul.
Below are links to the set of mockups and final art at Paul’s Flickr account:
Paul Stamatiou Logo Design Set
Paul Stamatiou Final Logo Design Spec Sheet
It was fun, and different working with Paul, since he put all of the sketches, black and white and color mockups I did for him on Flickr — as they were delivered — and opened them up for public comments. I’ve not had that kind of in-progress, public critique done with my work before. Paul and the commenters liked the work and through the normal process, Paul selected a final winner.
One advantage to having your client post in-progress to final work posted on Flickr is, prospective clients can see the process, how it works and looks — which hopefully sends them to me and MakaluMedia for their identity design.
All in all, it was a blast working with Paul. I think we’ve found a clean, crisp and memorable mark for Paul to use as personal branding, on the blog and for other things, which makes me very happy.
Thanks for choosing to work with me Paul! :-) Kamagra
Panoramio (and logo) are acquired by Google 1 Jun 2007 7:08 AM (17 years ago)
Congratulations to my friends Eduardo, Joaquín and José of Panoramio, in the recent Google acquisition of their startup!
From the Panoramio blog post on May 31st:
The integration of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth has been so successful since John Hanke suggested it that we see the acquisition of Panoramio as a natural consequence. We have tightened our relationship with Google Earth more and more in recent months, and at the end we decided to walk one step further. After so much work together, honestly, we couldn’t imagine a better scenario than selling Panoramio to Google.
I was honored to work with “the boyz” back in October 2005, when we created the Panoramio identity (along with two other identities after it, including Cursoo).
I’m very excited for the Panoramio team, and just as excited that the identity work for the project had a small part in helping the team get to the next level.
Congratulations guys! :-)