…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

His views are likely the foundation of what we refer to now as the attention economy.

If we agree with the notion (and I do) that attention is one of our scarcest resources, then it it’s interesting to observe where people ‘invest’ their attention. Which is why it puzzles – or perhaps bemuses – me when something like the recent Adam Orth tweets get so much attention. Of which so much is vitriol.

This post isn’t a discussion about what Adam said and whether he was joking/trolling or not, nor is it an analysis of whether there’s a good or bad xbox strategy in play (frankly, the market will sort that out, if or when it comes to pass). Rather it is an observation on the loss of social intent.

One of the problems with how people often use social, is that they don’t get the opportunity to understand the context or intent of the status updates they are so quick to consume. This isn’t surprising though, because in an attention scarcity, there’s not many spare cycles you can apply to verification. It’s quicker and easier to jump to conclusions, vent, express outrage and then move on to the next internet snack.

Intent is uncertain

Let’s say I tweet something like:

I could murder a steak #nomnom

There’s a pretty reasonable chance (I’d hope) that you’ll understand I’m hungry. ie I’m not contemplating breaking any laws. This is just common sense. You’ve understood my intent.

But let’s say it gets a little bit more awkward, and you see someone tweet the following:

I could murder that crying child #shutthatkidup

What are you thinking now? Well, if you know the person, and especially if they’re a parent, there’s a good chance you’ll know they’re joking (they’re frustrated yes, but they’re joking). Inappropriate tweet? Probably. Concerned that they are going to actually kill a person? Probably not. That’s context and intent in play.

But isn’t always that simple. What if they were really contemplating doing something bad? Should we perhaps preemptively act. You know, just in case… better to be safe than sorry right?

Depending on your outlook on life, you’ll act accordingly. Thus, if you (or your government) live in fear, you’ll likely completely overreact when someone tweets about ‘destroying’ you. Jokes it seems don’t always translate well.

Which also goes to show that it’s not just the well known who need to be careful. I used to think that only politicians, celebrities and the extremely wealthy needed to be worried about their comments being taken out of context and bandied about on the latest internet witch hunt. But that’s not the case. No matter who you are you need to be mindful. Or perhaps turn your Twitter account to be private before it’s too late…

Aside: Influence Scoring

By the way, I think there’s an opportunity for Klout and all the other silly social influence scoring platforms to include new signals here. Consider this: even though you might not have many followers, or not make many updates, or not be on many social networks, there’s really something to be said about your influence when you can create such massive fallout from just a few tweets.

There’s no such thing as social intent anyway

Sadly though, the bottom line is that there’s no such thing as social intent anymore. In an attention economy there’s simply not enough attention available to consider intent, think through, check and query comments people make. The correlation between your intent, and the way it is understood, can easily be zero.

And whilst there have been attempts to help with this – it’s one of the reasons hashtags have been so useful on twitter – they can only imply intent. What the reader infers is out of the creator’s control. It’s also why a hashtag of #dealwithit was so divisive.

But it’s actually worse than that.

Because the irony in all this is that we actually don’t have as much information as we’d like. In a world that is overflowing with too much ‘information’, we actually don’t have much ‘real’ information. Thus, when it comes to the Xbox 720 we actually don’t know much about it. We don’t know whether it will be ‘always on’. We don’t know the specs. We don’t know the games it will play. We don’t even know if it will be called the Xbox 720. We just don’t know. But we wish we did. We’ve invested so much of our attention into wanting to know more. And in the absence of real information, the frustration grows. Our attention is not giving us a return on investment, and we don’t like it. We need an outlet for that frustration. Thankfully we have the tech blogs, reddit and a smorgasbord of other social snacking options to ease that pain…

More ‘information’ + less attention = less real understanding. And it hurts.

The post Social Intent appeared first on Craig Bailey.net.

Which is why it’s pleasantly surprising, on this quiet Monday morning, to see the release of a new scripting language that actually improves the development experience. I’m talking of course about Binary Script – the new language paradigm aimed squarely at experienced developers, but being embraced quickly by assembler and microcontroller coders.

To get a quick look at how it works, head over to the binaryscript.net site, it has the initial overview and online compiler components available already:

How It Works

The concept is very simple. Put in your old-style code, click submit on the BS-inator, and you are immediately rewarded with 100% BS. You’ll be up and overflowing with BS in no time.

Benefits

Why another language? Do we really need yet another development environment. Turns out that yes, there are plenty of advantages. Here’s just a few:

Productivity

One of the main frustrations I’ve experienced as a developer, and I hear regularly from other developers, is the problem of non-standard keyboards. When I move from my machine to another machine, there’s a mental chunking that needs to take place as my hands adjust to the nuances of each keyboard. The Delete key spaced differently, the quotes key a little further inset than before, the capslock key just a little too big when I go to hit ‘a’, that kind of thing. It’s frustrating, and also a productivity killer. A recent study by bs-interactive suggested that changing keyboard accounts for an increase of 4% in keying errors, and a whopping decrease of 7% in productivity in the first 2 hours as the user got up to speed.

This is the key area that binaryscript targets. With it’s simple two key requirement – just a 0 and a 1 – it takes the pain out of keyboard adjustments.

Not only that but the new BS-inator web module UI features colour syntax highlighting, so at a glance you can see the code elements with the utmost clarity. That’s productivity for you:

Job Protection

But aside from all the productivity benefits, let’s focus on the main advantage for developers – career protection. Just like Assembler in the past, BinaryScript today produces a huge mess of output – completely incomprehensible to anyone but the most boring and geeky of coders. You thought those people speaking Klingon to each other were eye-rollingly pathetic – just wait until you see them sharing binaryscript snippets on bsbin.com (or via old-school sites such as this example).

Input Devices

Binary Script has also – finally! – opened up code development to a whole new range of input devices.

Mouse Coding

Whereas previously coding required a keyboard, now binaryscript coders can use a mouse to quickly write code. The new binaryscript mouse driver simply allows left and right mouse buttons to match 0 and 1 – or if you’re particularly inclined – 1 and 0, it’s very flexible. And already, developers are producing tutorials on how to use existing mouse infrastructure to drive their binaryscript projects:

Touch Coding that actually works

Not only that but consider the options for touch screens – no more fiddly on-screen keyboards, instead just two big touch areas. Writing code has never been this fast before.

Collaborative Binary Script Coding

Digital tables (eg the Samsung SUR40) promote collaborative coding experiences. Using the Multi-touch SDK, table top device makers can easily incorporate collaborative binary scripting applications in their offering.

Minority Report might actually become a reality

And then consider Kinect and motion controlled input devices – new, exciting ways of coding are instantly available to the masses. Wii Coder – a new game from Nintendo is already planned for a June beta release.

Security and Built In Obfuscation

One of the key advantages of a binaryscript implementation is the built in obfuscation and resultant security. And increased security is only another conversion away. For example, take a line of code and convert to binaryscript. Then take that resulting script and convert it again. You’ve got different binary script. And so. For extremely high security implementations an iterative process of 4 conversions effectively represents an equivalent of 2048 bit security (or 00110010001100000011010000111000 in bs terms).

BinaryScript art

Coding isn’t just about productivity and work, it’s also about culture, enjoyment and free expression. Which is why the rising movement in binaryscript art is so wonderful to see. Developers can not only “write beautiful code, they can write code that looks beautiful”. Consider this stunning binaryscript code snippet. As a a piece of code it powers the feed reader of a Reddit app, as a piece of art, well, you be the judge:

Keeping Up To Date with BinaryScript

Follow @binaryscript on Twitter and share your binary script experiences – every mention will feature on the Binary Script Twitter page:

The BS Roadmap

There’s plenty on the binaryscript roadmap, including the bs shortner service for sharing bs on Twitter and other bs enabled social sites.

There’s also bugs that need addressing, and the BS team have already prioritised the Binary Script Object Definition error that people often receive.

There’s even some open source projects underway to implement a de-BS-inator function.

Reactions

Perhaps the most surprising part of the binaryscript developer movement is how quickly it has been adopted by industry leaders. For instance, I thought Bill Gates’ recent bs comment was an excellent example of the kinds of pure bs we can expect:

“The industry takeup of binaryscript just goes to show that Assembler really is now a 2nd class citizen.”

Easter Eggs

Like most things these days (and this weekend actually) the binaryscript site has a few hidden gems – just for the true geeks. Here’s a tip, try converting the binary script for these exact phrases:

What would Maslow say?

What would Socrates say?

What is BinaryScript?

There’s others (I’m can reliably inform you) so rest assured any spare moments you have can be profitably applied to this endeavour.

Today is an exciting day for developers

It’s an exciting day to be a developer. And by ‘day’ I’m referring to today specifically. Because it seems (by complete coincidence I’m sure!) at this time exactly one year ago we witnessed the release of another new language – see thenextlanguage.net for details. Whereas last year we had Dflat, this year we have BS.

Yes, this is obviously an April Fools Day joke

If you’ve read this far, then (hopefully) it is because you are enjoying the gag. We don’t really expect anyone to be fooled. In fact I don’t think anyone who prepares an April Fools joke really expects anyone to be fooled anymore, the days of fooling people passed years ago. Instead they hope people are amused.

In our case, the whole site has basically a single, simple joke – we just wanted to ‘announce’ something with the initials BS. And it went from there. We hope you were amused. Or at the least it raised a corner of your mouth in the start of a smile.

So, instead of leaving a comment to the effect of ‘Good try’, ‘Didn’t fool me’, ‘Not funny’or some-such, instead leave a comment on how we could have made it funnier. Thanks.

BTW – since we’re all upfront about the joke, I want to make sure credit is given where it’s due: Andrew was the one who came up with the initial idea, and then most of the components, did the coding and organised the hosting, etc. I just basically laughed about it when he told me the idea. And I might have come up with the mouse input concept. The rest was all @coatsy.

The post BinaryScript.net – A new language for low-level coders appeared first on Craig Bailey.net.

The pain starts in early May and then turns to heartbreak as traffic declines over the following month. From almost 20K visits to under 2K visits daily. That’s a 90% drop in traffic. And for this site – where the business model revolves around referring visitors to suppliers and taking a commission – that’s a massive drop in income.

Here’s the similar trend in terms of their rankings (ie number of terms they rank for) drop:

So, what happened in early May? Well, that’s when they went live with a brand new site. New design, new CMS, new site layout and a new hope…

What caused the drop then? I’ll spare you the investigative process (was it the CMS, a site architecture issue, a Google algorithm change, a site content change, a penalty?) and simply cut to the chase – the main problem is they didn’t put in redirects from the old site pages to the new pages.

For a site like this one (with close to 5000 pages) it’s absolutely crucial that key technical SEO considerations such as redirects are implemented – they simply aren’t optional. I say key technical SEO consideration because SEO is a mix of technical configuration and art. Even if you are dubious about the ‘art’ side of SEO, don’t neglect the technical side – things like redirects, robots.txt files, sitemap.xml files, Title tags, proper caching and expiry settings – things that most web developers should understand.

Sadly though, it wasn’t until late July that someone realised the redirects were missing and started putting them in place (and only a subset at that):

But by then it was too late – the damage was done and any chance of getting the traffic back quickly is small.

Here’s why.

In an ideal world here’s how Googlebot would work:

Hmmm, I’m seeing a lot of 404s on the site, but I know the site is OK because the home page is fine, and the first level of links are all crawlable. Plus I’ve had a good history of crawling this site. I wonder if they’ve moved to a new system and are using a new URL structure. I’ll check. Yes, it looks as though they are. I’ll use some of my infinite crawling and indexing resource to go through the entire new site and intelligently update the old links I have in my index with the new ones.

Sadly though, that’s not how it works. Here’s a more accurate picture of how Googlebot works:

WTF? I’m getting lots of 404s on this site. I’ll check back tomorrow and see if the errors are still occurring. Yep, looks like there are still lots of errors. Well I’m not going to waste much of my finite crawling and indexing resource on this site. In fact I’m going to significantly reduce how much resource I allocate the site, and also drop the thousands of pages that are giving me 404s from my index. Ahh that’s better, I only have a few hundred pages to worry about now. And in the coming months I might (just might) spend a tiny bit of resource looking for new pages on the site.

Admittedly the above is greatly simplified – Googlebot is actually incredibly sophisticated (it does all sorts of cool things like indexing the content in lazy loading javascript comment plugins) – but on the crawling basics the above is what you can expect.

With a new site the redirects need to be in place from day one – they can’t just be added later. Redirects aren’t like a performance tune-up (‘ooops I forgot to add caching on the server – I’ll just add that now’) – once your URLs are out of Google’s index, they’re gone.

How to Setup 301 Redirects

Implementing 301 redirects is actually really easy (although preparing the actual mappings of old to new pages can be very time-consuming).

For bulk redirects (a new site going live), these are normally done at the server level.

IIS Redirects

On Windows/IIS hosting the easiest way to configure redirects is via rewritemaps.config files. These are simple text files placed in the same directory as the web.config file and an entry added to the web.config file that refers to it. Ruslan covers using rewritemaps.config files really well.

My usual process when engaging with larger companies who use IIS is to provide their IT team with a fully prepared rewritemaps.config file which they just need to place on the server. I never have to go near their servers or even be given FTP access to anything.

Apache Redirects

On Linux/Apache hosting (the majority of PHP and open source CMS hosting scenarios) redirects are implemented in a .htaccess file (also a simple text file). I won’t go through the details – there’s hundreds of posts on how to set up .htaccess files, but here’s a typical example of a redirect line in a .htaccess file (from this site), it’s super simple:

Redirect 301 /live/post/2004/06/27/Single-Malt-Scotch.aspx http://www.craigbailey.net/single-malt-scotch/

My site currently uses WordPress, before that it was BlogEngine, before that it was a custom rolled blog [hey, we've all been there ], and before that it was Blogger, so there’s been some changes over the years. Because of that my current .htaccess file has more that 1100 redirects from old URLs to current locations. These all sit in the .htaccess file at the domain root.

Both IIS and Apache redirects support cross domain redirects, and both support parameters as well.

Content Management System Redirects

Increasingly you can set up redirects within the CMS used as well.

For example, in WordPress I always install the Redirection plugin. This can help with bulk URL changes eg if you change the permalink structure – it will automatically catch the change and set up Redirects for all the old URLs to the new ones. (Make sure you have the plugin enabled before you make the permalink changes!) This plugin will also catch any ad hoc changes made (eg you create a new page, and then a few days later change it’s URL).

elcomCMS (a CMS I deal with a lot in enterprises) also has this as a standard feature. Any changes to pages have redirects automatically created for them, and you can easily add multiple redirects for any page. You’d be surprised at how rare this is in the enterprise CMSs.

How To Prepare Redirect Mappings

Preparing the mappings is actually the time consuming part. Most clients I work with these days have production and staging sites. In the weeks leading up to the cutover I request that the staging site be available externally (usually IP limited) so I can fully crawl it. I usually use ScreamingFrog to crawl the staging site and the current (production) site. There’s tons of other tools of course eg I also use this one from time to time.

Most CMS have an export tool as well, but I don’t typically use them unless I’m familiar with the export format. I’m really familiar with ScreamingFrog so it’s my usual go-to tool. I also prefer to use a tool that crawls the site (as opposed to exporting from an internal database) because the URLs discovered will more closely match what Google has likely found in the past (or will find in the future).

From there it’s a manual process of matching the old to the new URLs.

Excel is Your Friend

I do this in Excel, and depending on patterns in the before and after URLs you can often use sorting, formulas and lookups to help expedite the process. On big sites I usually need to engage with the subject matter experts and content authors to check on information architecture flows. I mention this because it’s important to understand any content strategy changes that may be being implemented as part of the new site.

Once my spreadsheet is ready I then simply format the mappings into either .htaccess or rewritemaps.config files and hand over to the client.

This will cover 95% of all the URL changes.

Bonus Redirects

Sometimes there are old links out there that give errors eg an external site might link to a page that no longer exists on your current site. I use backlink tools (eg ahrefs, Majestic, OpenSiteExplorer) to find all the backlinks from other external sites. I run these through a link checker and note any 404s. I then add redirects for these too. This can result in a little boost for the site when it goes live. Bonus!

A Guide To Effort Required

As mentioned, the time consuming part of setting up redirects is preparing the mappings between old URLs and new ones.

As an example, I was involved in a large-ish Federal Government site revamp last year – they had close to 2000 pages of content, plus hundreds of additional documents (remember Google indexes PDF files and other documents – you can often rank well for PDFs). In that case constructing the redirect mappings alone took me close to 4 whole days. And would have taken much longer if not for the help of the content authors who helped with specific sections of the site. At my hourly rates, that might seem a high price to pay for something that doesn’t actually add any additional value, but compared to the potential cost of not doing it, it’s a no-brainer.

This is worth highlighting – because the next time you’re preparing a large site go-live and the project manager gets a quote for $5K+ just to prepare the redirects, don’t be surprised. In the case of the site example at the start, they would have paid for this in a few hours of a typical day (pre traffic fall). Currently they are spending multiples of that working with an agency to incrementally build the traffic up again.

Summary

Sadly, not putting redirects in place is something I see far too often. It’s probably the biggest issue (in terms of impact) I encounter. And it’s totally avoidable. Please ensure you plan for and implement redirects in all your upcoming web projects.

The post This Is What Losing Money Looks Like appeared first on Craig Bailey.net.

The reason, I’m guessing, is that Apple doesn’t have much else to differentiate with.

“What makes iPhone 5 so unique is the way it feels in your hand.” - Jony Ive

Whereas a year ago Apple lead the smart phone market in terms of innovation, this year they seem to be playing catch up – especially in terms of increased screen size and reduced overall size. As phone sales figures clearly show, other makes (eg Samsung) are selling more devices. Not that Apple cares about overall numbers of course – they’re still milking out the majority of profit from the market – but it does make you wonder about future trends.

As many have noted, the iPhone 5 announcement has been underwhelming to say the least. And one can only imagine what tone journalists would have used if this device had come from another vendor. Sure refinement in design and overall quality is important, but in the case of Apple, that’s a given now. We expected more.

But perhaps Apple is happy to simply refine. As Thomas points out, the iPhone is the Porsche 911 of the smartphone world, so refinement, rather than evolution is likely where the focus is.

However, a Porsche mentality isn’t a natural match for a smartphone buyer. After the first week of unpackaging, the magic fades, and the iPhone gets chucked in pockets and bags just like any other device.  For all the talk of diamond finished casing and micron precision, the iPhone, in the end, is a disposable item.

Which is all to say that I don’t really think people equate a smartphone with an item of jewellery. iPhone purchases (of all things) are considered short-term – the upgrade cycle is what fuels much of the record sales. Once hooked, repeatedly upgraded. Appealing to minute quality considerations might give people a warm feeling afterwards (remember we buy emotionally, but then justify our purchases logically), but who is it really fooling? We wanted innovation. Not letterboxes.

Does the following (again from Jony) ring true for you:

“To build the iPhone 5 we began with a design we really loved. But to build it, to implement it, we had to look way beyond what we knew to be possible. It took all our learning, all of our best thinking, to realise something so simple, so clear, and yet so truly extraordinary.”

But I’m probably wrong. After all, what would I know?

The post Disposable Diamonds appeared first on Craig Bailey.net.

So, why do I feel the need to contribute more of the same?

Well, basically, I find that writing down my thoughts helps me clarify them. The final result might well still be flawed, but it’s a lot better than where I started. And perhaps, if I’m extremely lucky, there might be some snippet of an idea that could stimulate you, dear reader.

As always, comments are where the clarity is – let me know where I’m wrong, I’m keen to improve.

The post What Would I Know? appeared first on Craig Bailey.net.

It’s a sad day when Bing wastes money like this, especially when Michael Kordahi did the same thing so much better back in 2009, and RustyBrick did a similar thing back in 2005. Back then things like personalisation and location were much smaller influences on search engine results. These days, search experience is so personalised that different people see vastly different results for the same searches. Not only that, but the additional snippets that show in normal search engines are excluded (as Darren notes well here). When I was testing with it a few days back the results from searches (both Google and Bing) were all disappointing – I felt as though search technology had gone back in time… which of course it had, with its vanilla, limited results. Bing It On results did for search results what the Geocitiesizer does for web design. By the way here’s Bing after they’ve received the Geo treatment

Which makes this kind of blind search test such a useless exercise. The Bing team knows this of course, so you have to wonder why they bothered… One can only imagine it’s a combination of desperation and KPI madness – somewhere, someone is getting a nice KPI status report this month after the hungry tech sites lapped it up yet again. Every day is a slow news day it seems.

The only positive from this is that Microsoft is getting better at marketing and PR. They can take a tired, unoriginal idea, and manage to make a campaign out of it that gets traction in the tech press. Their contacts and timing are improving.

I’m looking forward to Microsoft doing something really inspiring with Bing one day and having that get the coverage it deserves. We live in hope.

The post Bing It On appeared first on Craig Bailey.net.

The release comes a day prior to the lang.next conference commencing in Seattle on Monday.

Dubbed as vNext.NET the language features a number of key enhancements including the new Ostinato Framework,  Morendo Garbage Collection systems and Cantando Installer.

Read more about Db on the Next Language site, including the overview, tools and history of it’s development.

The post Microsoft Announces new language: Db.NET appeared first on Craig Bailey.net.

Adam Cogan was able to shoot a quick video with the team whilst visiting them recently. There’s a short version and a long version (embedded below) based on his rules about daily stand-ups. It’s worth watching the full 12 minute long version. The interesting stuff starts around 1:46 (skip the guff with Adam at the start – he won’t like me saying that, but hey, he’s a good friend so I can get away with).

It’ll be interesting to see how people respond to this. Inevitably there will be discussion about what they do right and wrong – but I’d suggest avoiding that – instead, just find 1 or 2 points that can add value to your own process. Unfortunately discussions can descend into critiques of what’s correct – that’s fine, but while the ‘purests’ (as Adam refers to them) are yabbering on about the minutiae of scrum rules, hopefully the rest of us are actually getting on with doing something valuable.

Personally, I like the way they use a busy hallway to meet, and how they implement the ‘parking lot’. I also found the ‘schedule’ interesting (7:40) – I’ve not personally worked with multiple teams at once so it hasn’t been needed in my situations – but having a schedule means that the current team is forced to meet at the appointed time and be out of there before the next team. Not saying this is new, just that it is interesting to see in practice.

Gotta feel sorry for Greg though (see around 7:33 and 10:25) as Adam calls him out for a special rebuke and then lectures him on what he should have done. Good Lord! The slow-motion use of video is genius (cue Today Tonight evil sound effects!)

Ideally I’d like to have seen a week’s worth of stand-ups to see whether they incorporate any further items on other days (eg a Friday meeting).

The post Insight into how Microsoft do daily stand-ups (Scrum meetings) appeared first on Craig Bailey.net.

Marketing Infographic by SEO Book

The post Finding a Great SEO appeared first on Craig Bailey.net.

The bottom line: Uninstall Adobe Reader.

First, here’s an example of the error message:

WARNING: DW024: The payload: Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 Core {08EF22BC-43B2-4B4E-BA12-52B18F418F38} requires a UI parent with following specification:
Family: Photoshop
Product Name: Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 Core_x64
This parent relationship is not satisfied, because this payload is not present in this session.

There’s also DW033 and DW036 variations.

I had this error when attempting to install the Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard edition, and it took me a while to solve the issue, so I thought I’d share the process I went through. Here’s the full set of steps I went through. Some may not be needed, but I’ve included all the things I tried that I think helped:

1. Uninstall your failed install from the Control Panel:

(The Size you see may be different – depending on where your install got to before failing)

2. Download and run the Adobe Creative Suite Cleaner Tool – this will remove any registry entries from the failed install.

3. Install the latest version of Adobe Air

4. Install the latest version of Adobe Flash Player

5. Uninstall Adobe Reader (this was the big issue for me) from your Control Panel. In my case I had Adobe Reader X installed (the latest version even) but it was still causing a problem – possibly because the Creative Suite was trying to install Adobe Acrobat Pro.

6. Reboot your system. Yes, do this. Don’t skip it.

7. Try installing the Creative Suite again. 

I hope that helps – if so, please click ‘Like’ or leave a comment to let me know if it worked for you.

The post WARNING: DW024: The payload: Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 Core Error appeared first on Craig Bailey.net.