Back in Decem­ber 2006 I sent in a reply to Google’s “Big Idea Cha­llenge”;

Goo­gle res­pon­ded with a phone call asking for details and they said they’d send me some infor­ma­tion via email, I never heard from them again. With Google’s latest spate of recom­men­da­tion gad­gets and their latest pro­duct change, “web his­tory” (something I have been wai­ting for for a while because I was fed up of never being able to search my his­tory — an offline ver­sion would be nice and more secure), it seems rele­vant to post what I submitted.

I called it Goo­gle Chan­nels, for lack of bet­ter words and to embrace Google’s bri­lliant naming tra­di­tion (see: Froogle’s death, one of my favou­rite play on words). This was my pitch:

PDF Sum­mary & Advert for Pro­duct

PDF Goo­gle Pro­po­sal

Goo­gle Chan­nels
A free, auto­ma­ted, user spe­ci­fic and edi­ta­ble chan­nel to faci­li­tate the dis­co­very of enter­tain­ment on the internet.

The Pro­blem

Fin­ding enter­tain­ment is very much a dif­fe­rent pro­cess to an infor­ma­tion search. For infor­ma­tion, a user, for the most part, knows what he or she is loo­king for and crea­tes an appro­priate search query to find what they need. For current enter­tain­ment search pro­ces­ses, a user must know what they want to read, watch or lis­ten to before begin­ning their search. This, in many res­pects, is con­trary to the act of dis­co­ve­ring fresh enter­tain­ment. In mature mediums there exist two paths — one for the acqui­re­ment of media and a second for its dis­co­very. Inter­net search acts pre­do­mi­nantly as the for­mer simi­lar to a cinema which shows a film you chose spe­ci­fi­cally to watch. Exam­ples of the lat­ter are tele­vi­sion, radio and libra­ries; each pro­vi­des a selec­tion of enter­tain­ment ser­vi­ces for the dis­co­very of new qua­lity con­tent.

The inter­net today offers a uni­que world­wide medium for text, video and audio; it has quickly become the ulti­mate enter­tain­ment, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and infor­ma­tion hub. Goo­gle, with aims to orga­nise the world’s infor­ma­tion, has made great stri­des in pro­vi­ding tools for fin­ding infor­ma­tion fast, and via Gmail and Goo­gle Talk (amongst others) online com­mu­ni­ca­tion is being made easier. With the emer­gence of flash strea­ming and legal movie and music down­loads it is now the enter­tain­ment aspects of the inter­net that must be addres­sed by Goo­gle. The first steps have already been taken with Goo­gle Video and You­Tube. I believe Google’s next big inno­va­tion should be to improve the acces­si­bi­lity and dis­co­very pro­ces­ses for the wealth of qua­lity con­tent avai­la­ble on the inter­net, to match the second ele­ment of Google’s aim: to make con­tent uni­ver­sally accessible.

The clo­sest the inter­net currently has to an enter­tain­ment dis­co­very ser­vice is “Stum­bleU­pon” a site that allows users to recom­mend web pages so that rea­ders may stum­ble through the inter­net fin­ding its hid­den sweet spots. Other under­ta­kings inc­lude; The “Venice Pro­ject”, from Niklas Zenns­trom and Janus Friis, crea­tors of Skype, which sees their focu­sed efforts in crea­ting a recom­men­da­tion dri­ven Broad­band TV ser­vice for qua­lity video con­tent deli­very and dis­co­very. Last​.fm, a Bri­tish based com­pany, colla­tes music lis­te­ned to and gene­ra­tes free cus­to­mi­sed radio sta­tions for dis­co­very of new music. I believe now is the time for Goo­gle to begin deve­lo­ping a ser­vice in this field, as inter­net con­tent begins to escape the con­fi­nes of the PC box. Last​.fm’s gro­wing popu­la­rity and suc­cess is proof that there is a demand.

The Solu­tion

For Goo­gle Chan­nels to solve these enter­tain­ment search issues it needs to offer two things; first it must deli­ver inte­res­ting con­tent and secondly this must suit the user’s tas­tes. Goo­gle already has a head-start with regards to con­tent deli­very; its exten­sive crawl index, video and book libra­ries pre­sent the essence of a solu­tion (though to my know­ledge no Goo­gle owned music or audio data­base currently exists). To show con­tent that is rele­vant, know­ledge of the users’ tas­tes must be known and items must be grou­ped by simi­la­rity. Goo­gle Sets is already the foun­da­tion of these grou­ping func­tions — searching for tele­vi­sion shows like “Family Guy” and “The Simp­sons” yields “South Park” as a top sug­ges­tion. Know­ledge of the user can be obtai­ned through exis­ting data or by user input.

Crea­ting the Chan­nel

Google’s per­so­na­li­zed search data can give an accu­rate por­tra­yal of a user’s tas­tes (e.g. top search terms), as does their rating trends, labe­lling actions and Goo­gle Talk’s music trends. Colla­ting this data with simi­lar neigh­bours and data from Goo­gle Sets, a selec­tion of mate­rials matching the user’s tas­tes is pro­du­ced without nee­ding search. Hence a user-specific recom­men­da­tions chan­nel is gene­ra­ted, crea­ting the basics for a dis­co­very dri­ven inter­net ser­vice (an exten­sion of the pre-existing per­so­nal home­page gad­get “Inte­res­ting things for you”). With refi­ne­ments through cate­go­ri­sa­tion this chan­nel can be split into genre spe­ci­fic bands.

The alter­na­tive approach is to ask the user for a few things they already enjoy — favou­rite music artists, web­si­tes, tele­vi­sion shows and books may be key poin­ters. Using a grou­ping struc­ture a list of recom­men­da­tions can be gene­ra­ted, allo­wing rele­vant con­tent from inde­xes (Books, Goo­gle Video, RSS feeds, etc) or esta­blished chan­nels to be com­bi­ned into a per­so­na­li­zed chan­nel. As Goo­gle Chan­nels evol­ves the accu­racy of recom­men­da­tions will improve.

Chan­nel Imple­men­ta­tion

Imple­men­ta­tion beco­mes the next ques­tion; chan­nels may be video, audio or writ­ten, or an amal­ga­ma­tion. Video chan­nels may be a gene­ra­ted stream of video not unlike tele­vi­sion chan­nels, with one recom­men­ded video con­ti­nuing directly on from the pre­vious — this stream may play live to mul­ti­ple par­ties, play from a cho­sen point (e.g. select first video from a list), be skip­ped through or down­loa­ded. Music chan­nels may act like those on Last​.fm, pla­ying music simi­lar to artists the user already knows, they could also be gea­red towards pod­cast dis­co­very or online radio which may then be pla­yed in-browser. Rea­ding lists would act much like exis­ting feed aggre­ga­tion ser­vi­ces, howe­ver could con­tain a degree of use­ful auto­ma­tion and Goo­gle Book recom­men­da­tions to inform users of lite­ra­ture, sites and news that inte­rests them yet lies outside of their con­fi­ned inter­net corner.

User Con­trol

User edi­ting adds sig­ni­fi­cant benefits:

·        Remove sub­jects that are uninteresting.

·        Actions when vie­wing chan­nels may include:

·        “add simi­lar items to my chan­nel”*,

·        “add this item to my channel”,

·        “add items in this label to my channel”,

·        “create new chan­nel based on”,

·        “label item/channel”,

·        “ban items in this category”,

·        “ban this item”,

·        “blog this item/channel”,

·        “share this item/channel”,

·        “com­bine channels”,

·        “recom­mend item/channel”

·        “invite user to chat”

·        “rate this item/channel”

·        Recom­men­da­tions can evolve using rating sys­tems that pro­mote good con­tent and ban bad content.

·       Com­plete con­trol of chan­nel could bring true “inter­net TV” to life.

* e.g. “add sites simi­lar to Slash​dot​.org”, let­ting users find domains that match their nor­mal rea­ding mate­rials without the trou­ble of buil­ding a spe­ci­fic search query to find them.

Once chan­nels are crea­ted the next logi­cal steps are sha­ring of chan­nels, chan­nel labels, recom­men­ded chan­nels, RSS chan­nel feeds, top chan­nels lists, searcha­ble chan­nels data­base, public and pri­vate chan­nels, embed­da­ble chan­nels, spon­so­red chan­nels, chan­nel colla­bo­ra­tion, Goo­gle Talk inte­gra­tion for chat whilst vie­wing, con­tent data­ba­ses allo­wing crea­tors to add their work directly to chan­nels (much like the exis­ting You­Tube chan­nels sys­tem), exc­lu­sive con­tent or subsc­rip­tion channels.

Tar­ge­ted Advertising

Reve­nue streams for Goo­gle and con­tent crea­tors are also ins­tantly appa­rent. Goo­gle would know the full spe­ci­fics of the ‘now pla­ying’ con­tent. Hence incor­po­ra­tion of Goo­gle Ads is only a stone’s throw away. Video chan­nel fea­tu­res can be inter­lin­ked by rele­vant video ads, and simi­larly for audio. For incen­ti­ves to create chan­nels owners may receive pay­ments from a pay per click or impres­sion ini­tia­tive. The cost of dis­pla­ying ads on a chan­nel may also be pro­por­tio­nal to the num­ber of regu­lar vie­wers or rea­ders a chan­nel has.

Crea­tors of con­tent (e.g. a tele­vi­sion net­work) may wish to receive more return and have grea­ter con­trol of pro­cee­dings; a cor­po­rate con­trol panel may be an option. Simi­larly an adver­ti­sing con­trol panel may be help­ful to large adver­ti­sing cor­po­ra­tions that want to spe­ci­fi­cally con­trol when and where their ads are shown.

Bene­fits Elsewhere

Other bene­fits to Goo­gle are the natu­ral cate­go­ri­sa­tion and sor­ting made by users of chan­nel con­tent, which will not only improve recom­men­da­tion qua­lity but also add to the use­ful­ness of Goo­gle search results; for ins­tance a fuzzy search that returns results matching the users search aims but not neces­sa­rily matching their query; par­ti­cu­larly help­ful for those having trou­ble refi­ning search terms. 

Terres­trial has done it again, this time it is his third com­po­nent, Panel­sUI . Until now, all foo­bar menus, tool­bars and panels were arran­ged using Column­sUI in any desi­red grid for­mat — these panels were dis­tin­guished by irre­mo­va­ble bor­ders that were defi­ned by Window’s visual style, much to the dis­tate of bud­ding user inter­face desig­ners everywhere. Panel­sUI offers a clean new approach — using scripts (in the fami­liar trac­kinfo mod for­mat) panels them­sel­ves can be abso­lu­tely posi­tio­ned and pla­yed with. New “per­sis­ting varia­bles” or PVARS allow these scripts to store and edit varia­bles in memory using but­tons (see func­tion: $but­ton). In com­bi­na­tion a slew of exci­ting new oppor­tu­ni­ties are pos­si­ble; tab­bed panels without the need for tabs_ui, clic­ka­ble pop-ups, scrip­ted inte­rac­tion bet­ween trackinfo’s, SCPL and Panel­sUI, amongst others. To explain in words the poten­tial is pro­ving dif­fi­cult, so I will show you some early design animations:

Pop-up play­list, this appears beneath when thin (as below) and to the side when wide.

A pop-up menu, but­tons and con­trol panel

Im sure I will think of some much more advan­ced uses of this inte­gra­tion in the near future. But for now I think this is exci­ting enough. For those inte­res­ted, to get going, the code for tab­bed panels in Panel­sUI is:

$select($add($getpvar(display.mode),1),
$panel(Option1,Track Display,0,20,%_width%,140,)
‚
$panel(Option2,Album list,0,20,%_width%,140,)
‚
$panel(Option3,Console,0,20,%_width%,140,)
)
$button2(0,160,0,0,14,14,button text,but­ton text,‘PVAR:SET:display.mode:0′,)
$button2(14,160,0,0,14,14,but­ton text, but­ton text,‘PVAR:SET:display.mode:1′,)
$button2(28,160,0,0,14,14, but­ton text,but­ton text ‚‘PVAR:SET:display.mode:2′,)

This sim­ple exam­ple (that needs the but­ton text repla­ced with a $font()text code) is the basis for tabs, clic­king the first but­ton shows the track dis­play, the second an album list, third a console.

In a num­ber of public pla­ces inc­lu­ding a cinema mul­ti­plex in Cam­bridge and Lei­ces­ter shop­ping cen­tre (UK) I have come across ter­mi­nals tou­ting, “Free Public Inter­net Access” or “Free Inter­net Zone”, these are owned by ope­ra­tor Red Moon Inte­rac­tive (that I do not has­ten to link to). At first sight you may think “fan­tas­tic, I can check my mail amidst my hec­tic Christ­mas shop­ping spree” or something just as simi­lar. Approaching the ter­mi­nal you will be pre­sen­ted with a list of cate­go­ries, “Auto­mo­tive”, “Com­pu­ters”, “Clothes” etc. and a search box. I wan­ted to check the release date for a cou­ple of video games not out yet so I typed in my que­ries and hit go on the touch sen­si­tive screen.

Red Moon sta­tes on its page,
“Red­moon Inte­rac­tive pro­vide free Inter­net access in Shop­ping Cen­tres and high foot­fall loca­tions across the UK through our net­work of inte­rac­tive touch screen ter­mi­nals. Using our ser­vice your cus­to­mers can search the Web or check their Email free of charge without lea­ving the com­fort of your pre­mi­ses.”

My results soon appea­red, alas I recog­nise this page struc­ture, it’s a “Made for Ads” or “MFA” site. All of the search results, which claim to be genuine, were irre­le­vant cost-per-click ads that somehow matched a key­word. Attemp­ting to gene­ra­lize my search in hopes of obtai­ning some form of rele­vance brought no luck and only the most gene­ral of terms such as “video game” brought any rele­vance wha­tsoe­ver. Hea­ding back to the main page I clic­ked the various cate­go­ries, a new list of ads per­tai­ning to a spe­ci­fic cate­gory appea­red in a dif­fe­rent colour. Every sin­gle link on the ter­mi­nal took you to an ad, in order that you may find any con­tent you had to click an ad. There is no address bar to con­firm the page you are on or to enter a new page. This makes the ter­mi­nal a poten­tial secu­rity risk and rife for phishing scan­dals that attack the non-savvy Inter­net users likely to use this “ser­vice”. Even the email links lead to ads for online email providers.

From my web sleuthing it appears the ads are pro­vi­ded by Over­ture which is now Yahoo! Search Mar­ke­ting , and they state: “The move opens up the oppor­tu­nity for adver­ti­sers to reach a more loca­li­sed audience in the run-up to the launch of Overture’s geo-targeted searches. For exam­ple, con­su­mers may use the ter­mi­nals to search for spe­ci­fic ser­vi­ces in their local area while out and about. […]  Overture’s spon­so­red links will be retur­ned whe­ne­ver a user con­ducts a search via the front screen on any INFO-NET ter­mi­nal. (2003)”

I won­der, do Yahoo adver­ti­sers know that their ads are being used in such a way? Would they wish to be asso­cia­ted with such a com­pany? Do they want peo­ple to view their sites in a public place where online purcha­ses are risky and unli­kely?  Obviously ads for shops within the mall will have some rele­vance and may lead the shop­per to their store, howe­ver the adver­ti­sers them­sel­ves will not see goals or direct purcha­ses online and the value of such ads can never be accu­ra­tely deter­mi­ned remo­tely by the adver­ti­ser. As for those ads that need web based returns, whether it be click-throughs or sales, any hope of achie­ving these through such a ser­vice is highly unlikely.

My expe­rience with the access points, a rough 20 minute test explo­ring dif­fe­rent ave­nues of search, as I wai­ted for a film scree­ning, conc­lu­ded that this is a com­mer­cial ven­ture (albeit a cle­ver one) that I could and would not clas­sify as a ser­vice. Fin­ding what I wan­ted pro­ved impos­si­ble and kno­wing that each click would gene­rate a tiny pro­fit for Red Moon with little to no return for the adver­ti­ser, as a web adver­ti­ser myself, was infu­ria­ting. If you add to the mix the non-savvy users that will igno­rantly click on all links in frus­tra­ted hopes of fin­ding something of impor­tance you get a highly pro­fi­ta­ble busi­ness that further deva­lues online adver­ti­sing. Indeed, the less of a ser­vice Red Moon pro­vi­des the more users will return to the search index or “results” to try another site, thusly buil­ding a tidy pile of cop­pers through cost-per-click ads.

If you are loo­king to ins­tall these ter­mi­nals please take note of this. The ina­de­qua­cies of the Red Moon ter­mi­nal to pro­vide a ser­vice to its users will be directly pro­por­tio­nal to its pro­fits — the lon­ger it takes to find infor­ma­tion, the more ads are clic­ked, the more money is made. Red Moon, as an anony­mous pro­vi­der, has no repu­ta­tion to main­tain with its users; it is those that host the kiosks that will ulti­ma­tely be faced with the dis­grunt­led sur­fers and dec­li­ning res­pect of its patrons. Once more, the secu­rity of this ser­vice is questionable.

So I haven’t yet used this space for my ran­dom ima­ges yet, as I had once plan­ned. Maybe I should start this trend with these ‘WTF’ beau­ties (I honestly have no idea):

Last night I finally had the oppor­tu­nity to change over to the new blog­ger sys­tem and it’s asso­cia­ted impro­ve­ments. My main rea­son for shif­ting was the inc­lu­sion of labels — finally I can cate­go­rize my posts and pro­vide easy access to cer­tain topics. The lack of labe­ling or cate­go­ri­za­tion had temp­ted me to migrate to Word­Press but alas I have stuck with Blog­ger and I may make it through this dif­fi­cult tran­si­tion period also. My first pro­cess lead me to check tem­pla­tes loa­ded OK and blogs could be fully published as usual. This lead me to a few discoveries:

• Upon migra­tion the URL for archi­ves was reset so all upda­ted archi­ves lin­ked to a 404. I quickly fixed this once my ser­ver, that has been up and down a bit lately, allo­wed me back into the FTP.
• Pre­vious Post links have stop­ped wor­king, the con­ven­tio­nal tag ins­tead of pro­vi­ding a list of the 10 posts prior to the post being vie­wed now shows only the ten most recent posts. This makes navi­ga­tion of the older pages less fluid and to find old posts you need to visit label pages or archive pages with the aim of fin­ding a spe­ci­fic post.
• The uploa­ding dia­lo­gue for blog­ger has also been twea­ked, it now shows the suc­cess­fully uploa­ded files in a list and when errors occurs it tells you them. A nice addi­tion to this would be a sug­ges­tion on whether or not to per­form a repu­blish based upon the seve­rity of FTP errors. When I see the errors I ask myself whether or not all the files uploa­ded ok — the last thing I need is a corrup­ted page that I don’t know about. One caveat of this new sys­tem is the remo­val of the per­cen­tage uploa­ded indi­ca­tor, I like to know how far through the pro­cess is and whether or not con­nec­ti­vity is good or bad, taking away the only indi­ca­tion seems wrong to me. Hope­fully it is just part of the ine­vi­ta­ble blog­ger beta ftp teething stages.

Moving onwards, once I had con­fir­med files could be uploa­ded and my tem­plate would not be utterly des­tro­yed I chose to add labels to my posts before publishing the blog again. It is now that I dis­co­ve­red the new tem­plate sys­tem blog­ger has deve­lo­ped and is imple­men­ting, one in which blog style edi­ting is made easy for those that do not know code, html or css etc. Sim­ple colour pic­king sche­mes etc. Howe­ver in doing this they seem to have com­ple­tely aban­do­ned the tem­plate tag tech­ni­que which I like to use to fully cus­to­mize my tem­plate design. Back­wards com­pa­ti­bi­lity remains yet under my exis­ting html tem­pla­tes I can­not add the new shiny fea­tu­res. Blog­ger also pro­vi­des no tem­plate tags for these fea­tu­res, ins­tead opting for defi­ned wid­gets and sec­tions. After publishing I also noti­ced that labels were auto­ma­ti­cally appen­ded to the post body in a sepa­rate div with the name “blogger-labels”. The text “Labels:” can­not be alte­red in any­way and I have had to use abso­lu­tely posi­tio­ned CSS to shift the labels into the com­ments bar where I want them and alter the hyper­link for­mat. Here are a few other pro­blems I noted:

• Labels with a gap in there name e.g. “My Life” would link to a labels page: “labels/My Life.php” without subs­ti­tu­ting the space for a ‘-’ cha­rac­ter or remo­ving capi­ta­li­za­tion (e.g. labels/my– life.php)
• The labels direc­tory is not cus­to­mi­za­ble and is fixed to the “/labels/” default.
• No pagi­na­tion occurs on the label pages, des­pite the num­ber of posts — one of my labels has 33 posts and they all load to create a mam­moth scro­lling fiasco.
• When labels have a gap in their name they do not show up in the labels sec­tion on the indi­vi­dual post page — I noti­ced this and tes­ted it to check it had uploa­ded correctly. All pages that I had applied the label “My Life” to did not show any labels, though others did. I have since chan­ged the label title but it is an issue that needs fixing.

Finally I deci­ded to post something new. The inc­lu­sion of a quick switch bet­ween html and rich for­mat­ting is an exce­llent addi­tion that is very handy. Pos­ting via a 1280x reso­lu­tion the blog­ger post box seems very small. I like a large area to play with and it would be nice if the box could expand to fill the whole screen, much like in Gmail.

The inter­face is all very fluid and fast, quickly pulling up 160 posts and labe­ling them was not a daun­ting task as I had expec­ted. The dash­board makeo­ver also impro­ves usa­bi­lity, I now only need one click to reach cer­tain regu­larly visi­ted sections.

I now have one plea: Please do not aban­don the tem­plate tags scheme. I love it and use it suc­cess­fully to create my blog exactly how I want it. Please main­tain these tags and add res­pec­tive ones so that us power users can con­ti­nue using blog­ger and its new fea­tu­res in the same way we always have done. We do not need to uti­lize sim­pli­fied tem­plate edi­ting tech­ni­ques and whilst two sepa­rate sche­mes never seem wise I don’t know why they cant run side by side — lea­ving the tem­pla­tes tag as an advan­ced yet main­tai­ned option for those with a little more knowhow.

This is still in beta so I can remain hope­ful for chan­ges, it is nice to finally see some chan­ges and I do feel that Blog­ger is moving in the right direction.