Ok, I don’t know much about the music industry, but there is such as huge disparity between what the record labels say and just about everyone else, it’s difficult not to comment. I think that’s probably because their business is over. I’m not even someone who participates in online music sites, these comments come from watching Internet businesses.

Historically, the major record labels have been the gatekeepers. People would listen to a few bands on a few radio stations, and the choice of music was finite. New bands come and go, but pretty much at the whim of the labels. Popular bands (Beatles, U2 etc.) would make the record labels huge amounts of money, and many other (no so popular) bands would benefit from record label support.

The record labels controlled the distribution (records, CDs etc) and generally kept rights to things, so they maintain control.

If you think about the general spending on different bands, it’s been something like this (please excuse my poor drawing skills):

Now, I don’t know the actual figures, but both of these must be logarithmic scales, as a few top ‘artists’ make mega bucks (Black Swan style), and there are many who do it for the love of music and gigging.

Changes

The main changes since the CD heyday have been:

• The digital format and MP3 players have changed how people listen to music, and how it’s collected & stored;
• The internet has made the distribution channel almost free;
• The web has made the long tail of interests supportable, allowing geographically disparate people of niche interests to communicate easily.

What hasn’t change is the record labels, especially in the US, where the RIAA prosecutes consumers: the music industry spent an estimated $1M to prosecute just one of the millions of individuals who use file-sharing software. The futility of this approach is obvious.

The future for record labels seems bleak, and I’m not convinced that even with radical change they would survive.

The future of music distribution

Looking ahead a few years, the role of the record label could be replaced by a marketing function with minimal infrastructure. Internet distribution, on-demand printing of t-shirts, books and even CDs means that scaling from 5 bands to 5,000 bands would be (relatively) easy.

Imagine a site similar to MySpace, but purely aimed at being a music community. A site where bands can sign up for free, create some pages, upload some tracks, upload some designs for t-shirts, and put in their gig dates. The site provides blogging for the musicians, for the end-users it provides forums, sharing of ratings and new music recommendations for end-users. (last.fm does this well.)

The band can select a few give-away tracks, and the others have pre-view clips with purchase buttons next to them. The purchase has to be super-easy, going straight into your music collection.

The people running the site keep an eye on the incoming bands, making sure the right people know about new bands, and taking a cut of all the outgoings. They concentrate on giving the bands a good platform, and the users a great way of finding the music and musical events they are interested in. At this point, the share of money going into music could be much more evenly distributed:

I wonder who will be the first to create this type of site? It could be the current labels, there are moves in that direction. It seems unlikely though, they are too entrenched in scarcity thinking.

The massive stumbling block for anyone else is all the artists who are currently signed up. I suspect that the copyright issues would prevent any currently signed band from moving to a completely online model. Sites like Last.fm and services like Spotify have made the listening and finding aspects much, much better. However, they still have to play by the label’s rules, and probably aren’t able to create the sort of music services I’m thinking of.

Another consideration is that ‘music’ is probably too wide for a reasonable online community, it might be that there are site(s) per genre, even if they are simply white-label style differences.

First of all, the award is for:

a site, individual or organisation promoting accessible design in 2008.

Accessible design, hmm. Well, the organisations don’t really promote accessible design really, so as nice as it is to be considered with the W3C and Mozilla, they wouldn’t get my vote.

Also, if the award were for standards champion of all time, or a lifetime award, then it would be very stiff competition between Zeldman, Shea, Molly, Meyer & Cederhome (in reverse alphabetical order). But I’m not sure any of them have been promoting accessible design this year?

.net is also a UK based magazine, and I’m hoping a little patriotism might bias people towards the UK based entries

So that leaves:

• Me
• Christian Heilmann
• Julie Howell

Julie Howell is very well known in the accessibility world, campaigning for over a decade whilst at the RNIB, technically authoring the PAS 78 standard and is still right in the thick of things on an upcoming British Accessibility standard. I would assume that, like me, a lot of Julie’s work is for clients, helping them create accessible sites.

Christian Heilmann, “International Developer Evangelist” at Yahoo!, is the creator of accessible versions of Flickr, Easy-Youtube, a method of captioning youtube videos, and even injecting lang attributes into twitter via google!

Perhaps most importantly of all, he has organised the scripting enabled conference, a day of understanding the issues, followed by a day of trying to fix them! (I will be there.)

I’m one of the founders of Nomensa, we’ve been creating accessible sites since 2001. I post here quite a bit, on quite a wide spread of accessibility topics, and in .net magazine. Not incredibly inspiring stuff, but there is one thing that I haven’t mentioned yet. Recently we created the web accessibility and development guidelines (based on WCAG 2) for a well known multi-national, who will be enforcing this with their development agencies for around 500 websites. That should see quite a sea change at that level, as it will be part of the contract for all their new sites to test against and commit to meeting WCAG 2.

Getting that sort of initiative going took not only buy-in at quite a high level in the organisation, but a lot of work to educate the people involved, and willingness to fit accessibility into their current processes and troubleshooting to get past initial problems.

In terms of putting practical tools for accessibility into the hands of developers, Christian wins hands down. However, please do make your own choice at the .net awards.

make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little… And to make a lot of silly jokes.

If that idea floats you’re boat (or you liked Buffy/Angel/Firefly/Serenity/Toy Story), have a look. It doesn’t seem to be available from the UK iTunes, so this might be you’re only (legal) chance, it disappears on Sunday.

Nathan Fillion plays the smug good-guy, our hero is the villain.

Anything that ends on the word “balls” is good for me.

PS. If you must think about something accessibility wise, what do you think of the WordPress 2.6 image/caption code? From the interface, the ‘title’ I entered started “Capture…”, the ‘alt’ started “Nathan…”.

Microsoft last week told former MSN Music customers that it would no longer support the DRM licenses for tracks bought through the failed music sales portal. The news meant customers would lose the ability to play the music they own once their existing computers ceased to function.

iTunes Plus, Play, Amazon (when it gets to the UK), fine. But with DRMed content, even from a popular service like iTunes, you never know what’s around the corner. The default state of the file is unreadable without their permission.

Mark Pilgrim walks you through the day the music died.

Yahoo have also pulled the plug.

I get over 100 email a day that I should read (i.e. not spam, which I get much more of). This is simply too much to read and do work. So how do you cope? I used to get interrupted all the time, checking lots of email. When I got annoyed with that, I’d miss email that I was supposed to respond to.

So I fell into a system that let me differentiate the ones that I should read soon, and those that were ‘FYI‘. Using this system can also help to enforce a little email best practice in other people as well.

Some people will probably think “well, that’s obvious”, but I know many people struggle with this, so perhaps a quick ‘how-to’ will help someone.

Folder structure

How you categorise things will depend on your email, but I split things into email about projects (folder per client) and internal email (non-project specific work email, folder per team). You might consider a folder per person, but if there are more than about 10 I would suggest grouping them by business function / team.

I’ve assumed the use of outlook, but most email clients should be able to do something similar. I’m also assuming each project has a group email list that you can use to filter those email.

That leads to a folder structure similar to this:

• Not to me
• Clients
  • client 1
  • client 2
• Teams
  • team 1
  • team 2
• Other folders

The ‘not to me’ folder I’ll explain below, and other folders could be any that don’t get that much email.

Rules

There are several layer of rules, most should ‘stop processing more rules’ once it has run:

1. Spam (move anything with “[SPAM” or equivalent into the junk folder).
2. From me (anything sent by me is marked as read. This applies before the other filters, so don’t set ‘stop processing more rules’.).
3. Client/Project emails (anything sent to list for “Client x” is moved into the Client x folder, except if my name is in the To or CC box, or it’s marked as high importance. Set ‘Stop processing more rules’).
4. Team emails, (anything sent to “team x” is moved into that folder, unless my name is in the To or CC. Set ‘Stop processing more rules’).
5. Internal people emails (anything sent by person in “team x” is moved into their team’s folder, unless my name is in the To or CC. Set ‘Stop processing more rules’).
6. Not to me (anything where my name is not in the To or CC, except if it’s high importance).

This has the effect of filtering anything that isn’t sent directly to me (also preventing the pop-up by the system tray in Outlook). Therefore anything that is sent to me, is worthy of looking at soon. Everything else can be left until I go through project or team emails.

Projects are dealt with before internal email simply because it’s more important to deal with. If you think about the filters, if colleague X sends you an email, it will go to a project list if it’s about that, their team folder if it’s not sent to you, or your inbox if it is.

This has also been quite helpful for getting others to think about how they address emails, as they quickly work out I will reply promptly if it’s sent to me rather than (or as well as) a list.

The ‘not to me’ folder gets any email that isn’t sent to a project list, from a team mate, and isn’t addressed to you directly. That catches a lot of miscellaneous email like discussion lists you haven’t dealt with, or spam that’s BCCed to you.

Favourite folders

Whilst emails are pre-sorted into the appropriate folders, it also really helps to read across many folders, like cross-section indexes on a website. I tend to have these ‘favourite’ folders:

• Inbox
• Today (a search folder that aggregates everything sent today)
• Unread email
• Sent items
• For follow up
• Junk email (so it’s always in view, and I can drag things into it easily).

These enable me to go through all the recent or unread email quickly if I’m using a block of time to deal with email. I’m sure there are many other ways and tricks, but this feels right for now.

So, "Go to the office and see john" becomes:

Are there any others who’ve been unstuck by this, or am I the only one?

Also, is there a way to change the dictionary? I’ve seen reports of it being in: c:\system\data\predic\10xxxxx.dat, but I don’t have that folder, at least browsing via bluetooth.

The background is that I’m visiting a friend (nickname Sooty) in Australia, this is an IM conversation in advance of that:

1. Sooty: g’day mate you busy?
2. alastc: Fairly, what’s up?
3. Sooty: nothing just did you know you land the same morning as the american president!!!! Thats gonna make you customs trip fantstic…
4. alastc: oh crap.
5. alastc: same airport?
6. Sooty: yer and i might tip off the customs people about keith!! you know how he loves the police and all that!!!
7. alastc: Yes, I seem to remember he had great treatment / customer service from them as a suspect
8. Sooty:
9. alastc: Do you know what time airforce 1 lands?
10. Sooty: nope i doubt many people do….. now we had beter not mention that and missiles otherwise the people reading this will flag it and you two can’t complete your mission while you are here!!!
11. alastc: Oh thanks. Well, I guess now we find out if there is a big brother for MSN…

I’ve had a product demo from the same people that work for the American military, and it seemed like pretty good technology for matching words and concepts, so I could be in trouble!

PS. This post was timed to publish at the time I land in Australia, staying only for three weeks.

Jesse James Garrett – Beyond AJAX

I didn’t take notes here, but it was an interesting story type of presentation, where the meat was “Here is why you should do user-centred-design”, without actually mentioning UCD by name. Perhaps that’s a little cynical, what he actually said was: design from the outside in (i.e. interface first, then functionality, then technology choice), with lots of online and offline examples.

Someone else’s notes on JJG’s presentation.

Molly Holzschlag – The Broken World: Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All

Again, no notes, but the thrust of the presentation was that there are real, human reasons why browsers are they way they are, as well as being hideously complex things to create. I’d love to have a close look at the ‘class diagram’ she took a snap of on a wall at Microsoft, it looked like a massive 3d cube of wires.

Someone else took notes on Molly’s presentation.

Nate Koechley – High Performance Web Pages

I’d been following the performance research by Yahoo for a while, but still wanted to see if there was anything new, and there was.

Starting with a premise that recent interfaces have to some extent reduced the performance impact of the using modern method and separated CSS and JavaScript, he noted that there are two types of performance when sending a page:

• Back-end: 5% of time
• Front-end: 95%

Most things to improve performance are on the front end.

Cache

I’ll skip the jokes as they won’t work written down, but they went down well

The difference between the first page load and a cached page load are quite dramatic due to assets being cached. The difference (I think for the Yahoo homepage) are:

168K 2.4 sec, to 28k and 0.9 sec.

They did some experiments by setting expiration in the past for an image compared to one that should be cached, the graph of the experiment goes from no-one having it cached, to 40-60%, but no further.

20% have a empty completely cache (presumably new visitors), and yet the images for 40-60% were not cached? Perhaps that was due to the homepage effect in IE they found, where IE doesn’t cache the browser’s homepage.

Cookies

Broad scope cookies also get sent to sub-domains, e.g. .yahoo.com gets sent to finance.yahoo.com, so it’s worth keeping those high level cookies to a minimum.

Parallel downloads

Browsers download several items (generally 2) in parallel, and you might expect that if they downloaded more items in parallel they would be quicker. However, the data didn’t back it up. Doing 2 in parallel is quicker than one, but no further benefit was found for 3 or more.

The main causes are likely to be things like CPU thrashing, DNS lookup times vary by geography, and DNS hostnames may not be cached.

Also, if you divide assets it over different severs, the time goes up dramatically.

12 Rules

The best aspect of the presentation was Nate’s consolidation of the research into 12 rules:

1. Make fewer HTTP requests. It’s the single best thing you can do.

   Combine scripts and CSS files, so you have one of each.

   Use things like CSS sprites (combining images then referencing by co-ordinates), the combined size is smaller, and less requests are made.

2. Use a CDN (Content distribution network)

   For example, Akamai, which is geographically closer to the users, and tend to be cached more (DNS). Start with static stuff, images, css and JavaScript.

3. Add an expires header

   It’s not just for images, if there is no expires header, files won’t be cached.

4. Gzip all your components

   You can really affect download times. 90%+ of browsers support it, and it’s negotiated with the server to check first. The usual methods are usually mod_gzip or deflate, mod_gzip seemed to perform better in their testing.

   It’s good for any text based content. Most large sites do HTML, not all do it for JS & CSS. It is not suitable for images or binary/compressed files (e.g. PDF)

   For the text based formats it always save over half of the file size.

   Use central servers for libraries, e.g. yahoo’s YUi.

5. Put CSS at the top of you’re docs
   • Style sheets block rendering in IE
   • Use link, not import. It seems to defer @import. Although it was the fastest loading time, it had the slowest perceived time. Sorry this one is a bit cryptic, there was a good diagram of it which hopefully will go on the blog soon.
6. Put scripts at bottom

   Scripts block the rendering of everything below them in the page.

   Scripts block parallel downloads… (I missed something here, not sure on the reasoning.)

   NB: ‘defer’ is not considered a solution, it’s doesn’t work well enough

7. Avoid CSS expressions

   Most execute many times, e.g. mouse move, hey press, resize, scroll etc. [I'm still inclined to use one for page max/min width.]

8. Use separate files for CSS & JS

   Whilst this seems obvious, there are actually occasions that you might consider not doing that. Variables include:

   • page views per session.
   • empty vs full cache.
   • Component re-use.

   NB: Home pages (as in browser ones) are an exception, and CSS/JS can be inline for greater performance.

   Post-onload download (not sure if that’s correct) is a method of pre-loading files which you know are going to be used. Such as sequential things like shopping baskets.

9. Reduce DNS lookups

   These can block parallel downloading, use a max of 2-4 hosts, use ‘keep-alive’, so it downloads multiple files in one go without new connections & lookups.

10. Minify

    Be careful with obfuscation, as the re-writing can introduce bugs.

11. Avoid re-directs
12. Turn off ETags

Web 2.0 apps

Client side CPU performance is more of an issue.
Nate showed some tests from a Yahoo mail case study. Using AJAX type methods increased initial time (from 6 to 12 secs), but massively reduced the read mail time (to under 2 secs)

The basic idea is to make sure you test time by task, not by page load.

Live analysis – Tools

• IBM page detailer.
• Fasterfox, measures time and allows you to tweak. (Do you need this when you have Firebug?)
• LiveHTTPheaders (FF ext)
• Firebug (obviously)

Nate also mentioned they will be releasing YSlow, a performance lint tool. From the screen shot, it looks like it integrates with Firebug.

Questions

Someone commented that Apache generates etags based on certain things, if you re-configure without imode, you can re-configure apache.

Question on DNS lookups, could you use IPs to speed things up?
Sounds like it would work, but you’d loose the DNS flexibility. Perhaps script it so that first time it looks up, then works out the IP for further requests?

Question asked about whether there are problems with gzipping content?
A very small percentage of edge case on IE where compression can sort of backfire, but it’s no a huge problem.

Someone found that minified JS isn’t needed if it’s gzipped.
Yahoo’s research is different, they found gzip reduced by another half on top of minimisation.

Someone uses SVG and VML to render complex images.
Yahoo have done some work on that, but not found something they are comfortable with yet.

Richard Ishida – Designing for International Users: Practical Tips

Everything I’ve read about Internationalisation seems to lead back to Richard Ishida of the W3C. I didn’t take notes, but he has published his presentaion.

Richard is an entertaining speaker, and even if you get the basics from the slides, he is well worth seeing in action.

Tantek Çelik, Microformats, Building Blocks, and You

As always, Tantek’s presentation is online, I just tried to keep up with the pace. Even if you’re completely upto date on Microformats, you’ll learn something at Tantek’s presentations, and I’ve moved Microformats up my list of things to do to this site.

Joe Clark – When Web Accessibility Is Not Your Problem

Again, Joe is good with putting his notes online, so I just sat back a listened, somewhat nervously it has to be said.

The reason for my nerves was the knowledge that he was going to launch the WCAG Samurai errata, and mention my review. Not that there is a problem with either, but the mystery surrounding it just made me nervous.

The main content of Joe’s presentation is a call to disregard some of the old WCAG 1 issues that are not (or in some cases should not) be relevant anymore. I hadn’t intended to write an article with similar content recently, but there wasn’t much overlap in any case. Joe had better examples to bolster the argument, I had looked at what people should have in their browsers/user-agents.

Jon Hicks - How to be a Creative Sponge

I have no talent for design, nor a particular desire to do design, but it was very interesting seeing the type of methods Jon uses, and it does parallel the more technical in some respects. For example, Jon was espousing the collection of lots of materials for inspiration, primarily non-web materials such as leaflets and t-shirts. I quite often snaffle away little bits of code for later examination.

Jon’s slides are online, linked in the heading above.

Hannah Donovan and Simon Willison – For Example…

Two quicker presentations here, from people involved with last.fm and lawrence.com respectively, both of which are sites worth investigating if you haven’t already.

Last.fm

Hannah was the first designer at last.fm, four years after the company had started, which caused some problems when they wanted to ‘skin’ something, and in web terms Hannah suggests that “Form ever follows function” (Design for the real world by Victor Papanek).

The whole talk was presented with a refreshing honesty, you really got the impression that you were getting the real, gritty story, rather than one through rose tinted glasses.

A point that confused me slightly was you should expose the functionality to users more and add steps into the process. I think in the specific case she was talking about (making apparent where recommendations come from) she is probably right, but I’m not sure it’s generalisable. It kind of goes against the keynote which showed fairly conclusively that users don’t care how things work in general.

Another useful point was they when using the ‘scrum’ methodology, the 5 minutes of forced interaction between different teams each day was very useful.

Doing local right – Lawrence.com

Simon’s talk was very MTV – quick and packs a lot in. Although someone asked him to do it again at normal speed, I liked the pace.

Simon started with two seemingly unconnected observations:

• Local search sucks.

  Compared to local knowledge, you can never tell if a search result is comprehensive, accurate, or even if the individual results still exist in the real world.

• The decline of traditional news

  This point hits home with me, as I’ve been on the receiving end of press-releases which don’t even include a link to the original article, and you just know that three other sites have published the same one. Searches on Google news tend to bring back many versions of the same thing. It’s very anti-web.

In many ways Lawrence.com tackles these well, it is a local entertainments portal, with events, movies, blogs of citizens, “best bets”, and all are subscribable.

The best thing is the number features, but the integration between them. For example, if an event is classified as an outdoor event, it links through to the forecast.

Lots of data is stored as well, such as the 51 restaurants kitchen hours and open hours.

It’s a good case study for a site with richly tagged and interlinked data.

Simon also showed some examples from the sister site LJworld.com, showing more of the same interconnected features.

So the question is: How do you do it?

• Have a small passionate team
• 5 people sitting within 5 m with a large whiteboard
• The gap between thinking of features and implementing them is measured in hours.
• Have someone else to think about money, just like the barrier between advertisements and journalism.
• Get free interns to do a lot of the legwork (e.g. phoning up all the bars every month to get the latest drinks deals.
• Treat your data with respect, make sure it is properly set up, as you never know how you’ll slice it up in future.

The plug: use Django, which was developed when at the newspaper.

It is optimised for constructing complex data models and creating the interfaces, for data rich sites. People can be inputing data whilst you are creating the front-end web site.

The questions asked (since he had buzzed through so quickly) were:

Q: Could you re-do it at normal speed?
No.

Q: Are they profitable?
The aim was to break even, the were investing heavily early on, but believes they are at least breaking even.

Q: Doable in the UK?
Yes, but no one has yet.

Q: How much did it cost?
No idea, but: The team has increased, and they now sell that CMS to other papers. Ellington is a product on top of Django.

Q: Do you have to start from scratch with Django?
It does tend to assume green-field development, but there is a tool for inspecting via SQL and translating.

Simon wrote up the presentation with links.

Shawn Lawton Henry – Advancing Web Accessibility

Having followed the WCAG & W3C process for a while now this wasn’t particularly new to me, but a couple of tit-bits emerged:

• WCAG 2.0 is unlikely to be fully ratified this year, but shouldn’t be too much later.
• ARIA is in second working draft, and may be out this year.
• Some best practice guidelines for ARIA are coming out soon.
• She has released a book.

Perhaps the most pertinent quote was actually from Joe Clark during the hot-topics panel: They seem to have taken all the comments seriously, even mine!

Dan Webb – The Mysteries Of JavaScript-Fu

Frustratingly this was up against Andy Clark’s presentation, and I was torn, but given my lack of design orientation, I plumped for JavaScript-fu. It was a very useful talk for getting a quick understanding of various JavaScript topics, with an entertaining martial arts (films) theme. Not just the what, but the why you would use something. I finally got how you would use event delegation.

Dan’s slides are up, so I’ll point out what appealed to me:

• DOM methods are like Ninjas, innerHTML is a sumo
• A faster loop method (for node type stuff)
• Get Javascript to build things (e.g. opening menus) when needed, rather than building everything at the start.
• Selenium sounds very useful for browser based testing.
• The Pro JavaScript techniques by John Resig includes a lot of stuff from jQuery.
• Dan’s likely to do a ‘how to spot a bad JavaScript resource’ article soon.

Hot-topics panel

Starring Richard Ishida, Dan Cederholm, Joe Clark and Drew McLellon, compared chaired by Jeremy Keith.

It started off with a few questions on the W3C, which thanks to Richard Ishida’s presence became basically ‘get involved’.

I guess the big news is that Joe Clark is retiring from active duty as a web accessibility advocate. Rather than read my mis-remembered version, I suggest you read Joe’s Trying not to pretend post.

I don’t particularly think that accessibility is ‘handled’ yet, although good progress is certainly being made. However, I’m in the privileged position of being able to continue working in the field thanks to being part of a great team, so I’ll not argue about it!

Other coverage

Other coverage sources:

• Blog mentions from Technorati
• Photos from Flickr, particularly Patrick’s stream, and this one.

One of my distance memories of history lessons is on why jury systems are good for society.

Whenever a law became too onerous or the penalty too severe, a jury would not convict. For example, if the penalty for stealing bread was cutting off you hands, and the jury thought your reason for doing so was reasonable, they would not convict. The upshot was that laws were changed because juries stopped convicting.

However, with thousands of Internet users now impudently breaking the law, Mr. Sprigman said that the entertainment and technology industries would have no realistic way to pursue a legal remedy. “It’s a gigantic can of worms they’ve opened, and now it will be awfully hard to do anything with lawsuits,” he said.

When Google can track over a million pages with the key, and Geek Goddess Cali Lewis does a music video of it, what can you do?

And have I just published it as part of the Google URL? Has Google published it many times?

Well, it wasn’t with no warning, checking the email on my server (not Gmail), I did receive something this morning saying we’ll be turning you off now, but I’ve never received a payment request.

Assuming it had not made it’s way to me, I had tried to renew last month anyway, to no avail.

I’m not sure why, but Gmail seems to drop any email from the .ac top level domain, well, mine and the registrar’s anyway.

Content transferability

Interestingly, it also brought up the point of transferability of sites and their content. I’ve moved WordPress’ homepage and default URL over to alastc.com, but the default WordPress image insertion includes the domain, so none of the images worked!

I would prefer it to use a local absolute path, e.g. /wp-content/images/image-name.gif. If is used a local URL, it would be much easier to transfer domain and also test a site locally.

I’ve just gone through the last 20 posts changing this, but there must be a way of getting this to be the default?

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