scriptedlife - not necessarily a bad thing

Some time ago FlightStats.com got the magical and much coveted Internet Cloak of Invincibility: Google decided to make her search results more R0X0r, and now lists FlightStats as #1 for every Flight Status search on Google.

Unfortunately, when searching for flight statuses from a modern mobile phone such as an Iphone or G1 Google Phone, the user experience goes out the window.

Try searching for a flight status on your mobile phone (the flight has to be in progress, so you may have to try a couple of times to get the special result), once you click through to FlightStats.com, how many pages of Ads do you have to go through? SEVEN. SEVEN PAGES OF ADS. Thanks to Scott’s quick response, the number of pages has now been reduced to 4-6 pages.

1. Mobile Homepage – You click the result and are redirected to the mobile homepage
2. “Choose how you want to check your flight” page
3. “Enter the Airline code and Flight #” page
4. “Didn’t know the obscure Airline code? No problem just read through some more ads and select one here” page
5. “Re-Enter the Airline Code and Flight #” page -FIXED!
6. “This flight has multiple segments! Choose which segment you are interested in while you read more ads” page
7. “Oh hey, here’s that flight status you searched for 5-7 pages ago!” page

This is not quite in keeping with Google’s “Send users right to the content” manifesto.

Google,  (I’m speaking to the living breathing entity, as he/she will be the first one to read this), please, I implore you, throw your weight around with these guys, and if they dont budge why not direct your firehose at another equally deserving site.

UPDATE 04-09-2009 – Scott, from Flightstats.com, was nice enough to include some feedback and insights on this mobile redirect problem, below in the comments.  Its always good to know a company is interested in user feedback on the web.

Google Chrome, Google’s quick and open foray into the browser world,  is quickly becoming more than just “the prettiest browser.” The Chrome team recently released a little program that allows anyone to pick the “channel” of Chrome they would like to use: Regular, Beta, or Developer. Developer has lots of subtle new features, one of which allows for rudimentary Extensions, helpful add-ons that many Firefox users say they cannot do without.

Given the internet’s recent love affair with bacon, I whipped fried up this crispy little extension that ADDS BACON TO GOOGLE!!! Most helpful was Matt Cutts’ Blog entry on Adding Extensions to Chrome. Then the helpful, albeit sparse official Chrome help page here got me through the rest of the way, with some additional javascript help here.

Step 1: Learn how to switch your installation of Chrome over to the Developer Channel

Step 2: Read through the official HowTo here.

Step 3: For the manifest.json file in your Extension’s folder, I just have this: Read the rest of this entry »

The following Example and video demonstrates a cool functionality that is possible when you combine Youtube's embeddable transcripts, and "Auto-Seek" capabilities. This is best described in the source article: Clickable Transcript of my Canonical Links Element Talk by Matt Cutts. The example below uses this javascript function here, and the Youtube Javascript API here, along with some frankensteined-together arrays of data made from Matt Cutt's data, to automatically seek to the point in the Youtube video that corresponds to the text you have highlighted.

Try highlighting some of the text below the video, it might take a second for the Youtube Video to load the first couple highlights you make, but it should speed up eventually.

note: you must highlight at least 10 characters of text to queue the video, if you are very careful, you might be able to confuse the page by highlighting text that occurs more than once in the transcript.

Hi everybody. Welcome back to another video. We’re doing this thing where when we speak at a conference and we talk about something substantial, not just questions and answers, we talk through our presentation later and put it up so people can follow along, watch the slides, and hopefully learn a little bit. So today I wanted to talk about the canonical link element. And that’s something that Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft all announced that they will support in the future at SMX West. So, the date that we had this announcement was February 12, 2009, and the funny thing about it is that Charles Darwin was born exactly 200 years ago that day.

Read the rest of this entry »

I started to gather up a bunch of data from the "Twitter for music" service Blip.fm. All the music in the micro column of this website comes from my blip.fm account here. Blip is a music service that allows you to create a live playlist of songs that are shared and saved. You can find other members with similar tastes and follow their music as well. [from Flickr]

username	props	blips	listeners
GR8FL	11915	8013	5337
adbert	11784	10366	7743
abarbosa	9425	3312	3841
ladypn	9246	8623	4381
by_starla	9245	9863	6984
Diordan	8430	6704	6391
threebears	8302	7860	9236
melodyofyourlife	7945	6648	9532
santamistura	7239	5437	4747
patita	7129	4799	3613
mammara	6882	10029	9194
gigia	6847	6749	7061
briangreene	6708	7700	11442
formalhaut	6623	8120	9194
evablue	6400	6997	8276
luiz_com_z	6327	6804	3808
tubilino	5893	4685	2616
daretoeatapeach	5829	5487	8691
davidwatts1978	5612	5940	8663
antenaweb	5206	5217	5446
sheryonstone	5131	3923	2621
bendrix	4969	2737	2920
Aluciel	4937	5670	3940
Aluciel	4937	5670	3940
calamari	4923	2837	9561
DownLow	4902	3248	5332
SevenTenths	4721	4327	2404
Figgywithit	4715	4276	3686
driczz	4580	3949	5755
clarkowitz	4440	4825	10940

Disclaimer: For anyone who doesn't regularly visit digg.com, this post will be meaningless, instead of reading it, go read digg.com, it's great. Digg users have a love affair with two particular "Newspapers", the Daily Telegraph, and the Daily Mail. This really bothers me. Here is some of the stellar "journalism" these "Newspapers" have featured recently:

• "Man pulls out 13 of his own teeth with pliers " - Daily Mail
• "How we became powerless to stop the huge growth in lap-dance" - Daily Mail
• "Woman fails driving test 771 times" - Daily Telegraph
• "3,000 Year Old Egyptian Vase Left in Garden For 20 Years" - Daily Telegraph

This crap is the journalistic equivalent of obnoxious banner ads, because they are created purely for the purpose of soliciting clicks, and inflating these tabloid's advertising revenue. Hmm, content created to attract dumb people and sell more ads, that reminds me of another publishing model, TABLOIDS. Digg users otherwise seem to pride themselves on being an enlightened, albeit homogenous demographic. How can we be supporting this tabloid crap?! I think, because the Telegraph and Daily Mail were designed to look like legit newspapers online, American Digg users don't understand that they are actually just crap tabloids. For definitive proof that these are tabloids, see below. In the next post I'll show you how you can rid your Digg.com of this scourge!

UPDATE: Its back up! Now Jack is even on twitter, looks like BK isnt the only fast food thats down with technology. Normally I am a huuuge fan of all things Jack in the Box, their delicious spicy Jalapenos, AKA "spicy-jals", are the stuff dreams are made of.  BUT, if they dont get their stuff together soon, their Superbowl ad may be all for nothing. They just aired one of those direct-response type "mystery-ad-story" campaigns titled  Hang in there Jack, where Jack gets smacked by a bus mid-commercial.  The problem is, they direct people to a website that doesnt work!! The commercial directs people to www.hangintherejack.com, which isn't loading!!!! Lets hope they change that soon, before our five minute attention spans are directed elsewhere!

The web is changing the way we live and interact, blah blah blah. The future is now, and holy *&$# it is awesome. The web really is changing and innovating at a breakneck pace, and often times it evolves faster than the cautious consumer is willing to change their habits. Below are a few examples of big changes to popular Web Services that were first hated, then accepted as the norm, and even loved! 1. Facebook Newsfeed When Facebook first previewed its new layout, including a revolutionary new "News Feed" that would alert you to changes and updates made by each of your friends, all in one place, it was HATED. Hundreds of thousands of facebook "traditionalists" showed their disdain by creating and joining "WTF I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK", and "GET RID OF TEH STALKER-FEED" groups in Facebook. But Facebook persisted, and now everything on Facebook revolves around this feature, and Facebook certainly hasn't lost any of its appeal. Today, the feature has sparked a new industry, and has become so ingrained in youth culture that people have used it as a form of storytelling. "Social Media Aggregators" such as Friendfeed, have made a business out of creating "News Feeds" for users activities across multiple sites. People have even recreated the Genesis Story as a Facebook News Feed. 2. Gmail Targeted Advertising Just the idea of an email client from the same wunder-company that indexed the web was enough to get most geeks excited. But, when word got out that Google would be "reading our emails" and serving us targeted ads based on what they say, privacy advocates and regular users alike were up in arms. Most of the anger came out of ignorance, as non-tech savvy people found it hard to understand that computer programs would be scanning the emails, and humans would never see it. But nevertheless, it generated a great deal of press and debate, and certainly kept concerned users away. But after the market had time to get comfortable with this new HAL-9000 advertising system, its unobtrusive display, frequent usefullness, and rare humor made it a welcome alternative to other email systems giant blinking banner ads. Gmail places targeted text ads that are often directly useful to a users immediate needs. (example below) Also, when you purchase an item online, and the retailer might include a UPS tracking number. Voila! A link to the UPS page tracking your package shows up in the sidebar! On the humor side, this author has a funny list of Ads that Gmail served over a year in his life. 3. Google Search-Wiki Google recently made a famously rare change to its search results by adding "all these #$(*@ing buttons" as some disgruntled users have described it. These #$%*ing buttons allow users to move search results around, comment on results, and even add and remove search results from a page. The changes users make are only shown when they are logged in, and they arent applied to other peoples results, but comments on results are shown publicly. So far comments are mostly just test comments and spam, or confused Iranians, as the SearchWiki for Yahoo Mail below illustrates: Many people are wondering: What is the point? Good question my friend, but to that, I answer: Be Patient, let it grow on you, see what happens. This has the potential to yet again change the way we use the web.

The FilmGalaxy displays data around Films, Actors, Writers, and Directors using a 3-Dimensional "Galaxy" layout.  This allows for users to quickly understand 4 dimensions of data, using color, 3-axis position,  and size. Explore the FilmGalaxy here. This was created using Processing, an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. The data for FilmGalaxy is coming from numerous sources on the web.

Here is the first, extremely buggy version of the movie visualization project I have been working on. Actor - Movie Visualizer You can click and drag to move around, scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in, and click on an actor to see his/her worst and best reviewed movies, biggest blockbuster, biggest flop, and most cult-ish movie.  The Cult-ishness is calculated by looking at the difference in scores between users and critics. KEY:

• Size of the Cube = Number of Film's Where the person has had a pivotal role (director/writer/main actor) Samuel L. Jackson and Robert DeNiro are both Hulking Giants, with ~40 movies under their belts
• Color of the Cube = Monetization value of the person (the greener the cube, the more green their movies make on average) Look at how Green Sam Raimi is in the directors image, thats cause Spideyman makes the big bucks
• Height of the Cube = Average Critic's score of all movies this person has been credited with. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is practically in the stratosphere compared to other actors.
• Distance of Cube from central Axis = This is a tough one, Amount of disagreement between Critics and casual reviewers. Critics seem to hate Christopher Walken's movies, but the people give him love, thats why he's so far towards the edge.
• Length and Direction of Arrow = Direction and amount of disagreement between critics and casual reviewers. Usually casual reviewers are nicer, but that niceness cant overpower critics' love for Richard Linklater, of 'Waking Life' Fame.

More progress on the movie visualization project, here are some still frames from the "Movie Galaxy" graph. Read the key at the bottom for explanation. Actors: Directors: Writers: These "galaxies" chart a number of statistics for each of the most prolific Actors, Writers, and Directors in Hollywood.

• Size of the Cube = Number of Film's Where the person has had a pivotal role (director/writer/main actor) Samuel L. Jackson and Robert DeNiro are both Hulking Giants, with ~40 movies under their belts
• Color of the Cube = Monetization value of the person (the greener the cube, the more green their movies make on average) Look at how Green Sam Raimi is in the directors image, thats cause Spideyman makes the big bucks
• Height of the Cube = Average Critic's score of all movies this person has been credited with. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is practically in the stratosphere compared to other actors.
• Distance of Cube from central Axis = This is a tough one, Amount of disagreement between Critics and casual reviewers. Critics seem to hate Christopher Walken's movies, but the people give him love, thats why he's so far towards the edge.
• Length and Direction of Arrow = Direction and amount of disagreement between critics and casual reviewers. Usually casual reviewers are nicer, but that niceness cant overpower critics' love for Richard Linklater, of 'Waking Life' Fame.

Stay tuned... More (including interactive graphs!!) to come soon.