Global Nerdy

Annalee “Techsploitation” Newitz, whom I met at the first CodeCon back in 2002, has written an article for Wired News about her successful attempt to buy Digg votes:

I spent several days creating a blog intended to be as random and boring as possible. Built from templates, My Pictures of Crowds exhibits all the worst aspects of blogging. There’s an obsessive theme — photographs of crowds — but no originality and absolutely no analysis. Each entry is simply an illogical, badly punctuated appreciation of a CC-licensed picture taken from Flickr. Also, there are a lot of unnecessary exclamation points!Once I had created a blog destined to be least popular in the ‘sphere, I opened a Digg account under a pseudonym. Then, at 8 Monday morning, I posted a story linking to the blog. My brilliant headline was, “Why Are People Fascinated By Photographs of Crowds?”

Four and a half hours later, I was the only person who had dugg my story. That’s when I hired a Digg-gaming service called User/Submitter, or U/S. This enterprise, run by one or more zealously anonymous individuals, advertises that it can help “submitters” get Digg stories noticed by paying “users” to digg them. There’s a $20 sign-up fee and each digg costs $1, which gets split evenly between the service and the digger. U/S refunds money paid for any diggs the submitter doesn’t get in a 48-hour period. I put down $450 for 430 diggs, but wound up getting refunded all but roughly $100 of that. (Wired News is owned by CondéNet, which also owns Digg competitor reddit.)

User/Submitter has a pretty customer-friendly service. Shortly after paying them, Analee received an email telling her that her story was likely to get “buried”; they offered her a refund. She decided to go on, and amassed 40 diggs in about 10 hours. That was the tipping point: soon came the “organic” diggs and comments. “Overnight, I’d been hammered with so many hits that the diggers had to set up a mirror,” she wrote. It seems that to get a popular article, you have to have a popular article.

Links

• I Bought Votes on Digg (Wired News)
• User/Submitter

Can’t Buy Me Love

Twenty years before he would be known as “McDreamy” on the hit television series Grey’s Anatomy, Patrick Dempsey starred in a better-than-average teen movie called Can’t Buy Me Love (produced under the unfortunate working title Boy Rents Girl). You can probably guess the plot from the title and poster: geeky guy attempts to become popular by paying the head cheerleader to pretend to be his girlfriend; hilarity (and later, a relationship) ensues.

FakeYourSpace

FakeYourSpace takes the Can’t Buy Me Love approach and applies it to social networking sites. Their service, which is supposed to become available today, lets you pick from their roster to “friends” with head-cheerleader-good-looks to pretend to be your friends on your MySpace, Facebook or Friendster page. For a mere 99 cents a month, these fake friends come with good looks (they’re photos of models) and will post comments on your pages.

Here’s some copy that was on their site earlier this week:

FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends on your friends list, but FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you on your comment wall.

They ran into a little trouble recently: iStockPhoto.com, the source of the “friends'” photos, objected to their use of their models photos. Apparently there’s an agreement in the iStockPhoto.com license that states that the photos cannot be used in such a way to make people “think that the model endorses” the product, Web site or person for which they are being used. This News.com report says that FakeYourSpace founder Brant Walker was looking for alternate sources of model photos.

As of this writing, FakeYourSpace isn’t up and running. Going to their URL currently takes you to a GoDaddy “coming soon” domain parking page.

Links

• FakeYourSpace.com
• FakeYourSpace.com Lets You Buy Hot-Looking Friends (TechShout)
• FakeYourSpace.com: The Web Gets More Like Real Life (InformationWeek Weblog)

I (briefly) installed a trial of Office 2007 on my work box, to get a glimpse of the future (since it appears that my business unit is in upgrade Siberia, it’ll be years before we see IT put it on our machines). While the wisdom of completely changing Office’s UI to the new “ribbon” device is debatable, I actually had no show stopping issues with Word, PowerPoint, or Excel.

Outlook, on the other hand, was a totally different issue.

I thought it might just be the poky Pentium M in my ThinkPad, but Outlook 2007 was significantly slower than its predecessor. So much so, I cracked about 30 days into the 90 day trial and uninstalled whole suite. It would appear I’m not alone in this experience:

The problem — which is absolutely inexcusable — is that Office 2007 (Outlook, specifically) crawls, even on this superfast machine. The hard-drive is also constantly in motion, slowing things down even more. I’m not alone in these observations. You can read other Office 2007 horror stories here and here. Despite a small .PST file — I reduced mine from close to a gig to less than 150 MB — my Intel Centrino Duo-driven notebook chugs along like a 386 trying to run an application originally written for a mainframe system. Even such tasks as composing a simple email are delayed by a few seconds before my typed words ultimately appear on the screen (and send / receives and related activities take an eternity).

The curious thing is that nothing very significant seems to have changed with Outlook 2007. Certainly nothing of the magnitude of the UI overhaul that the rest of the Office suite got, or the changes that Outlook 2003 delivered (such as the vertical right-hand reading pane). This makes the crummy performance particularly unacceptable.

I open Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to do specific things, but Outlook’s always open. Next to the browser and IM clients, it’s one of the indispensible tools of my workday. If Outlook 2007 really performs this badly for everyone else, Microsoft is going to have a big mess on their hands once customers start rolling this thing out in a big way.

Source: SpendMatters: Vista, Office and Outlook 2007 are a Nightmare

Click to see the comic on its original page.

A number of my (ahem) file sharing enthisiast friends tend to favour the RAR compression format over ZIP, since the “word on the street” is that it makes for smaller files. This is particularly handy for all sorts of uses, from creating archives of version-control repositories of your code to say, passing around copies of the leaked Arcade Fire album, Neon Bible.

Jeff Atwood, author of the “you must read this if you code” blog Coding Horror, has gone beyond accepting the prevailing wisdom and done the legwork. He took the data from a page benchmarking a large number of file compression tools, fed the data into Excel and produced some charts which make it easier to interpret. The practical upshot of all this is that your best bang-for-the-buck compression tools in terms of output size (smaller is better) and speed (faster is better) are WinRAR and SBC (which neither he nor I had heard of before). He writes:

RAR offers a nearly perfect blend of compression efficiency and speed across all modern compression formats. And WinRAR is an exemplary GUI implementation of RAR. It’s almost a no-brainer. Except in cases where backwards compatibility trumps all other concerns, we should abandon the archaic ZIP format– and switch to the power and flexibility of WinRAR.

(Before you start complaining that recipients won’t be able to uncompress RAR files: you can create self-extracting RAR file for Windows with a sub-100K overhead, StuffIt Expander does just fine uncompressing them on the Mac, and if you’re on Linux, you should have the chops to locate the RAR unarchiver for your particular distro.)

Don’t you think that the photo below screams “Caption contest!”?

More photos here.

(I was strongly tempted to reference the Pussycat Dolls song and give this post the title Don’t You Wish Your Mac Did Screencasts Like the PC?. That damned song seems to have crept into every movie or trailer I’ve seen in the past week.)

You’d think that with its serious “creative cred” that someone would’ve developed a killer screencasting application for the Mac, but I agree with the folks over at 37 Signals: there just isn’t one. The 37 Signals folk are pretty hard-core Mac fans — it’s reflected in both their design aesthetic as well as the preferred platform of Ruby on Rails developers (RoR was developed by 37 Signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson) — so it’s pretty safe to assume that they’ve hunted high and low for a reasonable scrrencasting app that runs on their platform of choice.

The closest candidate is Snapz Pro, written by Ambrosia Software, creator of some really great Mac games and utilities. I use Snapz, which is probably the best screen-grabbing utility I’ve ever used as well as WireTap Pro, which is equally excellent as an audio capture tool.

The pro version of Snapz does a decent job of capturing screen movies, but therein lies the problem: there’s a difference between “capturing movies of the screen” and “producing a screencast”. When it comes to producing a screencast, the editing process tends to take up far more time than the recording prcoess, and that’s where Snapz Pro falls short. To do editing, you’ve got to go to iMovie, and to produce title cards, you’ve got to fire up your favorite image-editing software, and so on. There’s a lot of “legwork” involved. As the 37 Signals people put it:

Here’s what I’d like to see. Basic screen video capture with a few simple compression options, audio recording, caption/graphic overlay support, simple video editing (cut, duplicate, slow down, just the basics), and export to Quicktime or Flash. All wrapped up in a nice UI too, of course. The biggest downfall of the current options is editing — there’s no way to preview the screencast you just created, overlay some captions, intro and outro text, and cut out some of the dead video).

Can I get an amen? Better yet, can I get a product?

I’ll agree that using separate tools is probably the better way to go if you’re producing a film, but if you’re trying to quickly produce a screencast (or several screencasts) demonstrating a UI for your customers with voice-over narration that also lets me do a little editing, make titles and throw in some transitions, I want a tool that’s a little more monolithic, a tool that — dare I say it? — takes a more “Microsoft Office-y” approach like the 37 Signals people suggest. That tool is Camtasia Studio.

Camtasia Studio supports all sorts of output formats, from QuickTime and Windows Media to what seems to be the preferred format these days — Flash video with an integrated player, a la YouTube. Adding titles, transisitons and text captioning is easy, and there’s a pretty decent edit suite in there too. For the videos you output in Flash, there’s the option of adding interactive “call-outs” (highlighted areas of the movie) and “hot spots” which when clicked take the user to a predetermined point in the movie or a web page. I’ve already used it to create a couple of screencasts for use by Tucows’ sales team, and they love the results. I’ve already committed to creating some screencast tutorials for end users for some of our Tucows services. And yes, they’ve got a version that runs under Vista — I run it on “The Taint”, the Acer laptop sent to me as part of a Vista promo. Call me a happy (and completely unsolicited) user of Camtasia Studio.

So c’mon, Mac developers — where’s the Mac equivalent of Camtasia?