Kurt Jarchow's Blog

Who in Canada will not be watching this game today?  Go team Canada!

photo credit: TKOwned

photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

I’ve long had the opinion that consumer PC market is due for a major overhaul.  The problem: Normal people hate computers.  They do, it’s a fact, and I don’t blame them.  I hate computers myself sometimes.

Nobody likes having a desk in their house taking up space.  It’s uncomfortable, anti-social, and just play ugly.  We’ve modified people’s natural environment to accommodate for the PC.

PCs were developed by nerds, for nerds.  Windows was not developed for the consumer market, even though they may have marketed it that way.  The iPad was developed for people who don’t like computers, and they will love it.

This is the beginning of the end of computers for normal people.   I’m not saying the iPad will necessarily bulldoze Windows off the map, but it will be known as the product that started the ball rolling.

Unfortunately, Microsoft have painted themselves into a corner by chaining themselves to the desk.  Latching onto Windows is isolating Microsoft to enterprise software (even the Courier tablet is enterprise).  Windows, as it is currently, cannot be their consumer OS.

As hopefully Ballmer understands, Window OS market share is not the only thing that is at stake here for Microsoft.  Losing the consumer market OS also isolates the Xbox.  Make no mistake Apple’s eyes are getting bigger and bigger, and pretty soon they will attack that big screen in your living room.  Apple will offer media, games, and applications that will sync to all devices.  Why buy an Xbox when it can’t play my iTunes movies?  (Also, Mom and Dad would buy an Apple TV, but they wouldn’t buy an Xbox or a PS3.)

Can Microsoft fight back? Absolutely, and I really hope they do.  The worst thing that can happen is that Apple becomes a Monopoly for consumer devices.  (I also really hope Google digs into the consumer market more, but I’ll save that maybe for another post.)

In order for Microsoft to fight back they need media.  Media, media, media.  Music, video, games. How can you sell consumer devices without our precious media?  Invent a new form of media for all I care, just give us what we want.  Break me from my crappy internet media experience, and from my crappy TV viewing experience.  Make it simple and make it transferable to new devices.  Oh, and do it SOON.

That PC in the office is going to start collecting cobwebs in a lot of houses.  The only question is who will control your living room?

(Edit: I just read this post by Techcrunch which explain really well why the iPad will be a success.  I completely agree… but dammit I still want a camera on it)

The New York Times, not surprising anyone, has decided to enforce a “Metered Model” for their most loyal readers.  The New York Times, this time surprising me, has taken the aggressive timeline to enable this model…. no less than 12 months.

Why announce a year in advance?  Are they trying to build momentum with other publishers?

I’ve read some responses which seem to be horribly shortsighted, relying on math like “users x estimated price”.  I’m sure their accountants have crunched the numbers.  The New York Times is no doubt betting on a larger content strategy (one that isn’t free).  Why would someone pay to view their content on an iPad (etc.) when they could see it free on their website?

I haven’t made the decision myself whether this is a good move for them or not.  Quite frankly, it won’t concern me.   If I am linked to an article of theirs I usually regret not stopping at the title.  A harsh critique, but I just generally don’t have the time to get into a song-and-dance with content (mostly tech news).  Give me the goods quickly, and bonus if you make me laugh.  No disrespect.  Maybe I’m just not the target audience.

I will say though that it is always sad for everyone else.  I’m sure there are plenty of situations worldwide where their good writing is appreciated, but unfortunately the money isn’t available to purchase it.  But, of course, other sites will fill the gap, and the NYTimes would have lost an opportunity for increased readership.

What I really wish was that the NYTimes would have sucked it up and kept on probing for that hidden goldmine, that unknown business model that can only be found through sweat and tears.  But they didn’t, they picked the easy way, but it’s hard to blame them; they have employees to pay with families to feed.  I can’t help to think though that they’ll now sit on their heels and risk becoming part of the pack (instead of leading it).

They have other properties though that could be a little more adventurous.  Who knows!  Time will tell.  But… I just can’t help but feel that a slow-moving and popular publisher will be swallowed by bigger, nimbler, fish.

I had a real problem: my wife was stranded in Montreal because the remote for the alarm would not work.  The alarm killed the ignition and there was no way of starting the car.  Not being very handy with cars, I looked for the internet for answers.  In my search I came across this article, which I am almost certain was created by a content farm.

I defended this type of content creation of past posts, but after my real-life experience I’m very dubious.  Basically the video went on to waste a minute of my time by telling me to unplug the battery and call a tow-truck.  Thanks e-how, even someone as clueless with cars as me could have figured that out.

Even if this article didn’t help me, finding a video for this was really encouraging.  I really hope these companies will increase their quality, because there is a lot of promise here.

I’ve finally moved my blog to my own domain.  I’m a little hesitant about removing the old site from wordpress.com, but I’ll have to do that soon or else suffer from a Google content duplication backlash.

I haven’t posted in a while, but I plan to keep this site updated more frequently in the future (Ok, ok, I’ve said that before).  Some topics I’d like to cover off:

• Building trust networks and marketing smartly online
• A review of the new CNN.com (what were the thinking?)
• The White House moves to Drupal
• My first impressions of Google Wave
• Dealing with home builders (hell)

I also want to publish a recent short essay I completed for an e-business course I’ve been taking at the University of Toronto.

I don’t have a whole lot of interesting in journalism, but I am going to pay close attention to the current news industry crisis.   Why?  Hint: it’s about much more than the news.

The information revolution has had a dramatically different affect on various industries, but there is a similar theme to them all; the breaking of hierarchal (top down) control by empowering users was what really broke the system.  For the interest of the rest of my post, try picturing the companies as being big dots up above millions of little dots underneath.   If you “connected the dots” (draw the lines of distribution) you would have seen many vertical lines connected to the few big dots at the top.  Now consider today’s situation.   The little dots are connecting with each other- this is the age of the horizontal line.

So why should people pay attention to the new news?  It’s not just a discussion of saving the news, it’s the first time a crisis of industry disruption is being openly debated and (hopefully) rebooting.  I watched or listened to as much of the Aspen Institutes FOCUS 2009 conference as I could because it was a great meeting of minds, and I believe a lot of those concepts will leek into other industries when similar disruption situations occur.

I’ll share some interesting points I noted listening to the conference:

1. Jeff Jarvis talks of “layoffs with strings”.  When the Top needs to lay off an employee, the employee may be interested in starting their own site.  It would be beneficial for the an organization like the NYT to not only keep ties with a former employee, but to invest in them.
2. Focus on users.  I can’t stress this enough because if you don’t do it, someone else will.  Your business will suffer if you don’t make the sacrifices your users want to see.
3. Marissa Mayer had a great idea to include news into your “life stream”.  It would intelligently find news and filter your interests in the form of a Facebook-esque feed.  It’s just another great example for concentrating on user wants, not on your own tradition.
4. Hyper localization and niche is the key.  People love niches, and they love relevant content.
5. Many users want to participate, and if they’re shy they like to see other’s participate.  Getting people involved is the surest way to get users returning.
6. Trust.  Probably the most important point they hit on.  If they don’t trust your site, given an alternative, they will not use your site.  Building will mean being transparency, and transparency is the new objectivity.

Some of these are specific to the print industry, but I’d argue most are idealogical changes that any industry can use to stay relevant (unfortunately most won’t).  It’s about stripping the notion of a top-down control, and about actively being involved in the Middle (with all the little dots).  Stop “fighting the internet” as Dave Winer would say, because in the end your going to get beat.

I owe a lot of this thinking to Jay Rosen, a NYU journalism professor who has tirelessly “reported” on the new news (rebooting the news).

One of our site requires Japanese search capabilities which looked easy on paper, but after playing around for the better part of a day I realized it wasn’t. It doesn’t take much to get it going, but sifting through mailing lists is pretty much the only way to get the details.

If you do a search using Japanese characters you’ll notice that solr will find results out of the box. The problem is that it uses English methods of search. The main problems this creates is that is assumes spaces separate words, which is not true in Japanese. A “tokenizer” creates the words for lucene to use. So we need to use a tokenizer that will work with Japanese. The CJK Tokenizer does the trick.

SOLR will not handle multiple languages in a single field so we need to create a new field for each language. First though you need to create the type of field:

Now define the field:

I, for whatever reason, could not get this going without specifically identifying which field the search should use, so I added “qf=body_ja” to my query string. If you see other syntax for defining the field type don’t use it (at least with solr 1.3-1.4). It seems to break the words up correctly but you won’t be able to search.

This tokenizer will is not 100% however. It breaks the characters into pairs and solr does its best to find matches. I’m not sure for how much, but you can find a better tokenizer at basistech.com.

After you adjust your front end to save into the new fields you should be off to the race.

I wanted to write down some strange behavior I came across… hopefully it’ll help someone.

Firstly, SOLR 1.4 changed the date range query syntax.  Instead of “createddate[* to NOW]” try “createddate[* NOW]“.

Secondly running empty query with SOLR 1.4 and solrlocal has a funny syntax.  If  I’m doing a blank search without localsolr I’d just use a space (or %20) to select all.  But, when I include localsolr syntax, I have to use the old q=*:* syntax.

Hope this helps someone to not waste as much time as I did trying to figure it out.  If your developing in Drupal and want location-based search using solr, please check out http://drupal.org/node/347428