Web work

Zoomii.com – The “Real” Online Bookstore

Via this CyberNet News post I got to Zoomii.com. There is a saying about all new being well forgotten old. And that’s exactly what Zoomii.com is about.

There is something magical about walking through a bookshop – touching books, flipping pages. Especially, when you don’t know exactly what are you looking for. Amazon has sort of taken it away. You get in, get your stuff, maybe grab something that is recommended nearby, and leave. Zoomii.com combines the best of both worlds. You can still get stuff from Amazon shop at Amazon prices, but instead of visiting a rather cumbersome interface of their site, you can browse through a familiar bookshelf area.

The combination of a good design with intuitive interface makes it almost a “Wow!” site fo me. It took me exactly three seconds to figure out how to use it. And even if I wasn’t tech savvy, there is a little friendly popup that appears when entering the site, which tells briefly how to navigate around. The control panel on the left is small, and has only the things that I care about – navigation, category selector, and information about my cart. Brilliant.

The only thing that I wish Zoomii.com had that it doesn’t have (or at least I couldn’t find) is the option of choosing which Amazon shop to buy from. If I could buy directly from Amazon.co.uk, it would be a 10 of 10 web site. Hope, they will add this option later.

Sites like this should be taught to web designers and developers. This is how the web should be – clean, simple, efficient, and intuitive.

Longer video? Maybe.

Scobleizer believes in longer videos:

Advertisers also will pay a lot higher rates for those long-form ads.

Why?

Because someone who’ll watch a 30-minute video is HIGHLY ENGAGED. They are far more likely to become a customer than someone who just watches a two-minute entertaining video.

I think that “video” is too broad for this topic. To consider only educational and entertainment videos, I see a huge difference. I don’t believe that entertainment videos will become longer. Entertainment is a sort of thing that doesn’t have to go either deep or long. Thus it doesn’t need large chunks of time. Educational video is a totally other story. While there are many “howto” type of videos, many topics require more than 5 minutes to explain. Take Google Tech Talks for example. They are pretty popular and each one takes about an hour.

There is also this factor of production costs. It’s much harder to create 60 minutes of high quality (and I don’t mean pixels or bytes) video material, than 10 minutes. Or 5. Filmmakers know that. And the audience knows that. While less and less filmmakers will risk it, and more and more of those who do risk it will produce crapy long videos, the audience will learn the benefit of a short video and will be more inclined into choosing shorter formats.

However, since I am not at all involved in any video production or distrubtion, I might be totally wrong on this. Judging purely from my own experience. And my own experience mostly comes from YouTube and Google Video.

Nuke the fridge

I’ve recently enjoyed the “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” movie. However there was one particular scene which sticks out. It was the moment when Indiana yet again avoided his certain death, this time by hiding in the kitchen fridge. He was supposed to die of a nuclear explosion, but the fridge saved his hat.

Impossible? Of course. But there was something more to this. Something that bothered me for the last few days. Something that I could not find the words to express.

It turns out, I am not the only one. There was a hot discussion at IMDB forums, and at other places that have crowds of movie watchers and reviews. And apparently, a new term was born – “nuke the fridge“.

This is also a nice example to illustrate how the world changes with the Internet. Lots and lots of people talk about lots and lots of things. 24×7. Non-stop. That generates lots of ideas, sub-cultures, products, and services. And, in tern, lots and lots of money for people who dig it. Nice.

Fixing Firefox with safe mode

Here is something useful I learned today. Until recently I’ve been using Firefox 3 beta 5. It was working fine for me after I found all replacements and upgrades for all the extensions that I need. One of those extensions was CompactMenu (not giving a link for now). This extension replaces the whole main menu (File, Edit, View, etc) with a single icon. You can place this icon anywhere on your toolbars and when you click it, you’ll get a drop down with your main menu items. Huge space saver.

Yesterday, I upgraded my Firefox to the latest and greatest stable version 3. The update came as an official package from Fedora updates. However, once I fired up the new Firefox, it notified me that CompactMenu was not compatible with this version and so it was disabled. Can you guess where I ended up?

Exactly. No menu and no way to get to the menu. I tried uninstalling the extension, intalling another version of it, unintalling it again, cleaning up options in about:config, customizing the toolbars, and so on and so forth. Nothing worked. And so I Googled.

It turns out that Firefox has something called a “safe mode“. All you need to do to get to it is start firefox with “–safe-mode” parameter. Once it comes up, you’ll see the window as on the screenshot above. One of the optios is “Reset toolbars and controls“. It works wonders. I got all the toolbars to their default state, and with View -> Toolbars -> Customize I could easily get them to the state I want.

Can you handle the popularity?

Looking around the blogosphere, I see more and more bloggers who work really hard on promoting their sites. They optimize their themes for Google, submit blog to all sorts of directories, share links to their best content via social networks, microblog, and comment all around the web.
Well, that’s all fine. But here is the questions – can they handle the popularity?

I’ve been thinking about it before, but it came all to me suddenly yesterday and today. One of my recent posts got submitted to reddit.com and it somehow it went through to the main page of the site, and from there got aggregated via RSS to a lot of other places. Within 24 hours, my blog received more than 20,000 views. Compared to an average day, which brings much under a thousand, that’s a lot.

This sounds like a dream come true for any blogger, no? Well, it is, sort of. But. Consider the other side of the story, which is not so obvious from the first glance:

My hosting company handled the spike really well – no complaints or disconnections. Not all hosting companies are created equal.
Commenting form on my blog was broken at the time of the spike. It was down the whole spike duration.
There were about 500 comments posted in the reddit.com thread.
I’ve received almost 100 emails.
When commenting form got fixed, I got another dozen or so comments, plus another SPAM wave along with it.

If you imagine for a moment all that coming upon you in the middle of the working week, you’ll see a problem. Who and how should respond to all that?

I’ve spent half a day today talking with my hoster about the commenting form. Gladly it got fixed (the problem was session misconfiguration on the hosting company side). Then I needed some time to respond to all those emails. In the meantime I quickly reviewed and approved all comments in the moderation queue. That pretty much ate my day, together with some things I managed to slide in at work.

Later in the evening, when my family went to sleep, I actually read all the comments and responded to a few. I also read through most comments at reddit.com . Can I reply to any of those? Nope. That’s out of my resources. I can’t handle all the traffic that came in.

Can you? What will happen to your server if you’ll get digged or slashdotted? How can you moderate all the comments? How can you handle replies? What about comments at other places – blogs, forums, and social networks that brought you in the traffic? Do you have any moderators on standby? Do you have any monitoring setup (Google Alerts, coComment, etc) for remote discussions about your content?

If you aren’t thinking about those things while promoting your blog, you are in for a big surprise…