Category: Business

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Today when a client asks me to build a web site containing:

  • Blogs, members need to be able to blog
  • Marketplace, like eBay
  • Photo gallery
  • Forum
  • Calender
  • Editorial space (for articles and fluffies)

my advice to them is always the same.

“You don’t need to. Let’s use what’s already out there”

Our roles as web developers/ web strategists is shifting within this new era when most of the base functionality such as blogs, social networks, calenders, project collaboration and even video editors are actually available for free already! In this vast space of terabytes there is more then enough apps to meet the customers need. Why reinvent the wheel?

Most of the traffic/market/people/users are already on Facebook for example. How do we reach them through that specific channel? Within Facebook there are room for groups, events, messages and even community based games. It’s perfect!

So, insted of forcing the users to join yet another social network / sign up for a campaign, let’s make it easy for them. That should be our main goal, I think. To make it easy for the user.

ps. If any customer feels targeted by this, don’t. I get requests like these all the time, and there is nothing wrong with it. It’s just up to us web // whatever  (we’ve got LOTS of different titles, but mostly we are the same) to get you on the right track. It’s our responsibility as experts to lead the field and to make the best out of your initial idea.

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One year ago I got an employment as a junior developer. Since then I’ve learned quite much, especially things about working as a junior developer.

Things that might be useful:

  • If you have someone more experienced on the office who could review your code before launch, insist on that they do it. She or he can tell you how they would have done stuff (and things you have missed), you’ll learn tons from it. If you’re lucky you might even get a mentor you’ll be able to ask questions, and who’ll be glad to review your code.
  • Just because you just got hired doesn’t mean that you should stop reading. Continue to read, write and evaluate your methods. This is a way to keep the work funny and interesting as well. Never stop learning.
  • Take initiatives, ask around. Take the chances you get to get to know your team mates better.
  • Ask your team mates what they are doing, and why they are doing it that way. Question everything.
  • Write down the stuff that you learn and share with others who are, or will be in the same position.

And then we have a few optional things that I personally do:

  • I keep my desk clutter free. At my workplace, it’s not a requirement or anything, but I just like to be able to focus on the screen and the tasks ahead of me.
  • Always show up early, or at least in time. This is not a solid requirement at my work place either, but I like to show up early, and then leave early. I tend to do the heavy tasks in the morning, and more light weight tasks in the afternoon.
  • Be polite and generous with compliments, remember peoples names and details about their personal life. But don’t pretend to be interested if you’re not. Falsehood always shines through.
  • Do your work. You might find this point very obvious, but I’ve seen enough people showing up at work to just spend the time procrastinating.

Most of these things are common sense, but you’ll be surprised of how many who wouldn’t agree with them. The important point is that you deliver what you promised, and that you do it on time. When you work in teams of more experienced people and you get to work with different projects (both fresh and uh-oh-so-old-and-completely-idiotic) you learn the most important things. The small things that no one ever seem to cover in those books that you read, or that tutorial that you walked. You learn things that could only be learned through hard earned experience.

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“Fairtunes is a free, voluntary, digital music payment system that allows music fans to voluntarily send money to, compensate or tip, any artist for their work. Fairtunes empowers any artist to receive money online in the form of a voluntary payment. “

Fairtunes was a company formed in the year 2000 that then got bought up and renamed to Musiclink in 2002. In the Musiclink version, the “sending-money-to-music-creator”-feature was disabled. The founders got weblogs where you can find related information: Matt Goyer and John Cormie.

The idea, was to enable users to send money to music creators.

It soon got quite extensive press coverage:

Remember, this was back in 2000/2001.

Matt Rigaux commented on the article Moving the goal recently this year (2008):

“During the first bubble, a friend of mine had a site in 2000 called Fairtunes.com, which was a “tipping service”. If you wanted the labels out of the way in order to pay the artist directly for their work, you could send money to Fairtunes and they would remit cheques to the managers of whatever artist you chose. In the beginning they were sending $2.00 cheques to people like David Bowie, but it was early, and it was more of a signal of what was possible than anything else.

Their model relied on the honor system, in that of course not everyone was going to voluntarily pay artists for songs they download for free, but some would, and the theory was that this would approximately equal what the artist would get from higher volume sales – LESS the labels’ cut. Great idea, and they got national attention due to the Napster craze, but to Fred’s point, there was too much friction in the process of getting money to them that most didn’t adopt it and it fizzled out.

For me personally, the most frictionless way to get this done would be if a service pennies just got added to my monthly internet or cell phone bill, and I got to make one payment a month for all my music. My part of the process would be complete and it would be out of my hands, and the service would just remit transaction fees back to the carriers, artists, managers, labels, etc.

Would love to see a Fairtunes model re-emerge, but to make it frictionless, the payments have to be digital, added on to existing things I’m locked into paying for regularly, and divisible fairly amongst the stakeholders that created the content and enabled that frictionless payment.”

I second that. That is an exciting solution to a unpractical problem.

Why havn’t anyone tried since then?

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“Because the economics of the music business is so bad for musicians, you don’t have to send more than a dollar before you have compensated them fairly for downloading an entire album.” – TIMES

What they seem to forget is the writers, producers and other essentials who don’t get compensated. But the thought of fair compensation without record companies, publishers and retailers are without any doubt interesting.

The distribution is there: MySpace, Last.fm, The Pirate Bay and Spotify (and others).

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Morning
During my morning, I got hooked by this airplane painted cross on an otherwise clear sky.

Today I’ve been going through Django’s tutorials, and I’ve set up my local environment.
To me, it is a pretty steep learning curve just to fully understand all of the stuff that I’m learning through the tutorials.

After the tutorials I installed support for OpenID, using django_openidconsumer. Problem was, that it didn’t work as expected. After I searched a while, I recognized that it used maxlength instead of max_lenght. Then I read the discussions on django_openidconsumer, and of course, someone had already posted a patch to fix it. Sweet 🙂

Tomorrow I’m heading towards Gotland together with Sanna. I’m looking forward to it, but I probably won’t be able to work upon TLW until next Wednesday.