TheWayoftheWeb

A fair number of tech luminaries have been writing about Blippy recently – a new service which tracks your on and offline card purchases and shares them with followers. Not surpising with investors including Sequoia Capital, Jason Calacanis and Evan Williams. And Louis Gray has been publishing his experiences with the site.

I’m not averse to sharing my purchases and recommendations, and I’m fairly realistic about online security. Despite taking precautions, I’m aware that all banks and ecommerce sites have to transmit data, and that phishing and scam sites will always be a part of online life, as much as card cloning and skimming is a part of offline life.

I’m also happy to share a lot of info on social networks, only drawing the line at things which reveal more about my family than they might wish. After all, I’m choosing to let people know where I am or what they’re doing, but my family should choose their own privacy levels for themselves.

But surely there’s a big security risk inherent in the way Blippy works, which noone seems to have highlighted?

If you phone your bank or credit card company, they’ll generally require security details. And if you’re unable to provide them, or in addition, they’ll ask for you to reference a couple of recent purchases…

What does Blippy show? Recent purchases…

While I believe banks and other financial organisations should be adjusting their security to the new online world (and at the moment many are a bit subpar), it seems like a pretty big element of a financial security check to be sharing right now. So in the same way I’d happily use a location service to share when I’m in the pub but wouldn’t check into my home address, I think I’ll be giving Blippy a wide berth.

I’ve often wondered, and indeed directly questioned, why traditional publishers pondering new markets haven’t tested the water by launching an incredibly cost effective online trial for a new idea?

I suggested it quite a lot in the past – especially using external hosting and services to launch something for a total cost that’s less than a day’s pay for the lowliest of staff writers. And don’t claim that your market doesn’t use the internet – there are more than enough people from any demographic to give you a better idea of what they’ll do than a lot of panel-based research surveys of what people might claim they’d do.

How much would it cost?

Well some web hosting would cost around $60 for a year from a mainstream hosting provider.

A domain from the same place bought at the same time would be as low as $1.99 at the moment.

And having removed the potential roadblock of an uncooperative IT department, you might come up against problems getting design help?

Well, you could install Wordpress and use a free theme.

Or, if you’re not happy and want something that comes with a more ‘professional’ look and guaranteed support, you can get a Premium, or Paid Wordpress Theme for a good price.

For instance, for Online Race Driver, I went with the great Metro Theme from Studiopress (disc – aff links). The cost for that theme is $59.95 – or you can buy access to all their themes for $199.95. My experience with them has been good enough I’m looking to upgrade my membership shortly.  One benefit is that although many free themes are supported by their developers and support forums etc, the paid option tends to provide a slightly better guarantee of service levels etc.

But anyway, the cost to test your next idea with a website that can be set up in about an hour or so?

About $121.

Add in free website analytics from Google, and even include your own advertising, or bung in some Adsense ads.

And that’s what I’d have suggested for anyone – there are cheaper options, such as hosted blogs, but they tend to lack a little flexibility, or the chance to test advertisers etc.

But then I found out about the Secret London Facebook Group. As reported on Techcrunch, it’s reached 182,010 members in a handful of weeks.

Started by a university graduate competing for an internship, it’s now becoming a startup with not only 180,000+ members, but already 5000 photos uploaded.

Total cost? $0.

I’m not saying that it will necessarily translate into business success, but it’s a pretty effective way of tracking interest – and Facebook Connect would allow most of those interested to also interact with any new website.

Whenever someone has an idea for a new publication, it might be worth pausing before you dismiss it – and instead investing some time and a tiny amount of cash to see if it might fly…

I’m finally able to do something to assuage my blog guilt, after a week of some great meetings and working hard on a lot of cool stuff which unfortunately I can’t share just quite yet…

But I can share a very nice testimonial from Julian Thorne, Managing Director of Dovetail after they kindly let me present at their client conference recently…

‘Dan is incredibly knowledgeable about the social networks in all their myriad guises. He also has that rare ability to enthusiastically inform the uninitiated without ever being patronising’

You might not have heard, but my blogging absence coincided with some small computer and phone company launching some kind of computing device. Hence a post about what it could mean on the One Golden Square blog. Which led to the pleasure of writing a bit of a follow up on the Music Week site. And I’m also flattered by the fact Michael Leis credited me with inspiring his latest post on the iPad. (Incidentally, Michael has been on a bit of a roll with his blog posts recently – some great writing about the usage of APIs for example. Well worth reading/subscribing to).

On balance all that good stuff, this was the week when my Xbox decided to encounter the dreaded ‘Error 74’ – which basically means it has self-destructed just out of the warranty Microsoft specifically extended to three years to counter the fault. That means a £68 repair bill or buying a new Xbox in the post-Christmas month notorious for sending people into debt anyway.

What’s been interesting is that I don’t actually miss playing video games during my enforced break (I have to admit to also owning a PS2, PS, Dreamcast, N64, Sega Saturn, SNES, NES, Megadrive, Master System and various other consoles and computers if needed – reverting to the geek stereotype).

But I really miss the social side of online gaming. Particularly as a core group of friends who I rarely see in real life have all been online every time I’ve logged onto Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It’s the fact I’m now barred from this interaction which is the stressful part, and the reason that I’m rebalancing the family budget to accommodate a solution asap.

It makes me wonder about the effect of a more complete disconnection – I’m still online and keeping up with my social life on Twitter, Facebook, forums etc – it’s purely the team-based adrenalin of online warfare I’m missing… But between work, commuting, writing for my personal projects and family life, it’s the one vicarious bit of entertainment in my life at the moment.

Still, it’s spurred me into arranging a couple of drinks with some friends, so I guess it’s not all bad…

I’ve been doing a bit of research into ebooks and e-readers recently. Partly as I was kindly invited to speak at a client conference for publishers (more on that in the future), and also to keep up with the technology on a professional and personal level.

I’ve heard two major criticisms about the format as a whole so far. The first is that the technology isn’t a direct equivalent replacement for paper – the feelings,sensations and effect of reading in print can’t be replicated by an electronic device, and that’s completely true. But at the same time, as noted author, publisher and general genius  Cory Doctorow has said for years, that’s not the point of e-readers, and that’s not where their success will come.

The second criticism I’ve heard several times is that initially you’re stuck with copyright-free material pre-loaded, and buying new content can be difficult, leaving a fairly unsatistfactory experience. And yet I regularly read great books in PDF format on my laptop – particularly when I’m on the train and the wifi fails.

In fact, during the past week or so I’ve been reading two absolutely brilliant and highly recommended books:

Bringing Nothing to the Party by Paul Carr – the sometimes rude, sometimes bizarre, often revealing and occasional insightful story of a not-entirely successful attempt to become an internet billionaire. Bringing Nothing To The Party: Paper Version.

Content by Cory Doctorow – selected essays on technology, creativity, copyright and the future of the future, which is essential reading for anyone in publishing or technology – and happens to have a lot of great insight into ebooks and e-readers. Content: Print Edition

What both books have in common is that they’ve been made available as free downloads under Creative Commons licence. That’s the legal framework for creators to allow others to legally share, remix and reuse their content as licensed – something worth knowing about if you want to avoid being a national newspaper stealing work without knowing the copyright rules involved.

There are some great works which are out of copyright – but I’d bet that actually Creative Commons works which are concurrently released commercially will be in a more accurate form, for example, as many authors are realising that releasing CC copies will help the sales of non-CC versions.

Which made me think about how it might be possible to create a library of Creative Commons material for ereaders etc – which could then be reviewed and rated in Amazon-type fashion. CC Licenced content should be of the same quality as the paid-for version if it’s to be effective.

So far a quick bit of research has brought up one decent list of Creative Commons books available, which describes itself as ‘woefully incomplete‘ – but also as a wiki doesn’t give any indication of whether the works are any good,  and the fact Google Books allows authors/publishers to mark their work with a Creative Commons licence (Although without being able to search for CC content, it’s a bit pointless).

An online and e-reader available library of CC-licenced content which is rated and reviewed by users would be a great benefit, both for e-reader manaufacturers and users, but also importantly to raise awareness of the Creative Commons licence itself, which means nothing to a huge number of people who aren’t creative digital people, and which gets confused by a large number of people who are creative digital people.

And I even suspect it wouldn’t be too hard to create – a simple multi-user review site on an open source platform, and enough people to spread the word would be a great start, run on a non-profit basis, and collating enough works to allow e-reader manufacturers to easily give users access to a huge number of brilliant works (which would also be a trackable mechanism for boosting sales of the paid versions, and thus giving another benefit for traditional book publishers).

It’s not an idea I could carry on my own, but if anyone’s interested, let me know in the comments or via email (On the About page)…