Is anyone else concerned that the Internet is becoming a walled garden on Facebook, encouraging people never to leave the facebook site? People are more likely to read the Guardian now it’s a Facebook app. No doubt this is due to having to install the app to read content “read” by others – frictionless sharing as they call it. It means a lot more traction gained for Facebook, and a less neutral web experience.

Net neutrality is already wishful thinking, now that Google & Facebook dominate so much – do you even have a separate Instant Messaging / email app outside of Outlook at work? Are you aware that most of what you listen to and read will be shared automatically with your friends?

‎”As well as increasing traffic, the app is making our journalism visible to new audiences. Over half of the app’s users are 24 and under – traditionally a very hard-to-reach demographic for news organisations. The Facebook app is one of a number of successful launches by the Guardian in recent months as our ‘digital first’ strategy gains momentum. We’re delighted with the results.”
– Andrew Miller, chief executive officer of Guardian Media Group

I must be an old grumpy git, since being on Facebook is frighteningly efficient at appealing to the younger demographic. I do get nostalgic about plain-text email with properly nested quoting wrapping at 74 characters, web pages that are visible anywhere on any device, and music that comes from analogue encoding on physical objects. Will appealing to the younger net users without embedding your content on Facebook be possible soon?

Happy New Year too!

Five years ago, I published an article for our fifth wedding anniversary. So if I have got my head on straight, that makes it our tin – 10 years – anniversary today.

How time flies. When we first got married our wedding site had a guestbook I cooked up in PHP. Five years on, a blog post was where a few friends gave their comments. Ten years on, and it’s Facebook where all the reactions have come from. So from DIY PHP/MySQL to WordPress (also PHP/MySQL) to Facebook (PHP too) things keep on changing.

Here’s to ten more! No doubt the next anniversary post will happen somewhere else entirely. Any predictions?

I love the series of sketch notes from Eva-Lotta Lamm, someone who attends a lot of conferences and makes notes with amazing visual impact.

I could have chosen one of many different images that she has uploaded, but this one is recent, colourful and contains perhaps a few things that are less technical – though you probably need to work in a company with an active website to really “get” the overall message. I’d love to know if you get anything out of reading them if you’re completely outside of web marketing / user experience / web project management.

They’re available as a book and there is a fantastic presentation on how sketch notes work

Do you sketch in meetings while taking notes? Did you realise that it’s a good thing to maintain your attention span? Or that it helps you to memorise what you hear?

User centred Design at XING @ UX Camp Europe
Originally uploaded by evalottchen

On the 1st of May (or the Sunday close to it usually) Argenteuil closes a stretch of road near the Seine and they remember the pre-war (pre WWI) era with old style dress, dances and activities. Argenteuil has a fine artistic history. Impressionists like Manet, Monet, Caillebotte, Sisley, Seurat and Braque (born there) all spent time there at one point or another. Flâneurs from Paris would catch a train to Argenteuil on Sunday to be in the “countryside” and wander by the Seine.

I think I’ve been every other year – on average – that I’ve lived in Argenteuil. A lot of people play the game and dress up for the occasion. There’s usually some jazz / musette playing live, dancing, traditional street food as well as typical international fare (beer, chips and BBQ sausages). It’s a shame that the very road they close for the occasion is the road that stops most people from being able to venture down onto the banks of the Seine. You can get there, but you have to go up on the bridge, down a set of stairs, and then walk over the grass verge with cars going past at 90 km/h (56 mph). There’s only a section – as far as I can tell – of grass and trees wide enough to get you far enough from the traffic to appreciate the river.

French Country Dancing
Originally uploaded by simon_music ]]> http://www.caperet.com/2011/05/french-country-dancing/feed/ 2 http://www.caperet.com/2011/03/3-parisian-things/ http://www.caperet.com/2011/03/3-parisian-things/#comments Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:45:12 +0000 fruey http://www.caperet.com/2011/03/3-parisian-things/ Sacré Coeur

The church (Basilique, in fact) of the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre. It’s quite a climb through streets aptly named things like Rue du Calvaire, roughly translated as “time of hardship street” in common parlance.

You can get a cog-wheeled railway which mounts a steep incline instead, called the funiculaire. Recommended if you want a bit of energy to check out the nearby square where artists paint caricatures or portraits and coffee is ridiculously expensive.

Maybe check out the Espace Dali if you’re into a small, hidden away museum with all things Dali.

The Eiffel Tower

Built for the Paris exhibition in 1889 it was originally intended to be taken down. Somehow the phallic tower remained – and is visible rising up into the sky, or hiding behind a skyscraper and suddenly leaping out again – from many places all over Paris and visible from a vantage point less than 5 minutes from where I live, especially on a clear day.

Nothing quite like it (except the copies in Vegas and the like) anywhere else. The Champ de Mars, the park upon which it stands on the north west edge, is a pleasant place to become a flâneur with a sandwich and a cool drink. Watch out for hawkers though, they’re everywhere.

Centre Pompidou

In a big square in the Beauborg area of Paris, not far from the Halles shopping centre with the Hotel de Ville not far in the other direction (though slightly more south) the Centre Pompidou is a good place to check out if only for the curious inside-out architecture, though the collections inside are good. Look out for special shows, seen a couple of cool ones there.

You can hang out in the many bars and cafés in the area, and don’t miss a curious bunch of colourful sculptures giving an endless loop of a water performance which can be watched from a terrace of the closest café.

3 Parisian Things: Sacré Coeur
3 Parisian Things: The Eiffel Tower
3 Parisian Things: Centre Pompidou
All originally uploaded by simon_music

I have been doing a bit of writing lately, and might even get an article or two published in an online technical publication. Which led me to thinking about the separation between technical stuff I write, often close to my profession, and the more personal items I write at other times. There are bits of photography and music in here too.

Many successful blogs stick to one subject, and treat it well. Some bloggers who want to scratch several itches therefore launch several blogs. I’ve always preferred one place to do everything, especially given that I don’t create anything like a useful volume of work to really get a following going anywhere in a given niche subject. I quite like the notion of an eclectic mix, and that has been my sub-heading ever since this blog was launched.

I may gain from better categorisation and taxonomy (tagging) though. Good categorisation allows a visitor to find related content easily. It may also allow separate blog entry points with navigation options per category. Perhaps I should code a top navigation with a few main category entry points (tech, photography, music & film…) which would allow different “views” of my blog based on different interests. I’m not exploiting that enough. Good tagging of each article creates little bridges between articles that share particular keywords. With WordPress you can assign multiple categories and tags to each article. Restricting the number of each you use makes all articles have tight interlinking which is good. Using lots of different tags and categories may cause the interlinking to be too spread out. This causes attrition on the usefulness of tag and category efforts in the first place.

In this blog’s case, after several years without any tags and a few set categories, I will have to go through all the old articles and reclassify them for any new taxonomy / categorisation to really work. What do you think about mixed-up blogs? Do you ever even look at blog navigation and try to find more content that is like the article you most liked on a blog?

Over a year ago now, I was in a band that got together for a gig in Paris which was a line-up of colleagues from work. I have been thinking about our vocalist recently, since she’s from Tunisia and has been very active on social networks following the revolution and helping people connect as regular digital communications were hampered.

This is a track from a time before that… a little bit of nostalgia for me recorded at rehearsal – the first run-through of the Jewel track Foolish Games for which I played the piano. The song itself is a story of unbalanced love, and the single was a big success which was nominated for best pop female vocal at the Grammy awards in 1998.

It was a wonderful moment of musical complicity – it starts off a little weak and sometimes slightly out of time, but somewhere in the middle it all comes together quite beautifully. Nothing like music to take you away from the anguish of existence and just let yourself relax for a few precious moments. Funny how this first run through was never matched afterwards, even though it has a couple of rough edges. Click the title or the “play” icon to hear it.

Foolish Games
V Special Club & Friends
Originally uploaded by simon_music

I surf around quite a lot of blogs, thanks mainly to blog exchanges like Expose Your Blog which are like StumbleUpon but based only on blogs, and have the added bonus of gaining you reciprocal traffic. I used to surf on other exchanges too, but they are all losing traffic and are poorly maintained. Expose Your Blog is relatively new and quite a small but vibrant community of those enthusiasts of personal blogging that haven’t defected to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and others.

I thought I’d share a few reasons why I might be put off by blogs, and tune out if I land on them again. If you can think of anything else, I’d be pleased to hear it in the comments. Feel free to share your pet peeves too .

Reading: If your blog is hard to read, then why read it?

• Don’t use busy backgrounds that interfere with the foreground text, especially if that foreground is not separate from the background because it’s semi transparent.
• Don’t use super-small text or change text size, colour or font mid posting. A different style for quotes, captions and other elements can work, but stick to one style per type of content and make your main text as simple and easy to read as possible.
• Don’t make adverts obscure the key content you’re trying to push. Your blog will not make you rich, get over it.
• Don’t have too many wacky widgets all over the place. Pick the ones that best represent your personality and stick with them if you must have a couple. Try to keep them aligned so that there aren’t loads of different widths of widget all higgledy-piggledy on the page.
• Don’t have so much fixed content at the top of your blog that it’s not obvious where the fresh, unread content starts. This last point is particularly important on blog rotation sites because someone who’s already read your blog wants to identify what’s new since last time!
• Do make sure there is good contrast between your foreground and background. Some people have awful screens; some people are not blessed with good eyesight.
• If you are going to use teasers, make sure I get a good idea of the article content before I click a link to read more.

Writing: that’s what your visitors are here for.

• Don’t apologise for the lack of posts, or make promises you might not keep like posting more often soon. It will only look worse as the most recent posting date recedes into the past.
• Do set a reasonable rhythm of posting and stick to it. No point being one post a day for a while then nothing for ages. Better to set a reasonable goal for yourself and stick to it. I try to make an update about every ten days, I can’t manage more. If I have a great idea for a post a couple of days in a row, I store them up as writing prompts for the next post.
• Commenters: they might want to write too. Don’t make life difficult for them by requiring them to have a specific website ID like Blogger or OpenID. Let them post anonymously, using either a CAPTCHA or moderation to stop spam. I’ve actually typed nice comments to people only to find that I can’t post them anonymously. The nice comment is thus wasted, and my time with it. Yes, I have a Google account but I don’t want it all over the blogosphere.
• Crazy punctuation, over-use of quotes, lots of exclamation and question marks. Tough one this, because some people can do it and it totally fits in with their character and works. Other times it just looks like filler and detracts from an otherwise interesting read.

I edit myself a lot and try to be as good as possible, but obviously I am guilty of some of these crimes. I’m happy to hear your suggestions if you have constructive criticism of this blog.

I’ve seen this doing the rounds : “The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.” In fact the list is from The Guardian (with thanks to research from Pro-Science). Most people would be expected to have read more than 6 because it’s a list of popular books… they were voted for by readers who probably submitted 10 books at least. I’m still going to do the exercise though. No doubt the meme is so successful because it makes you feel good about just how much literature (though some books on the list aren’t classics) you’ve read over the years!

Meme Instructions:
• Copy this list.
• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
• Italicise the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
• Tag other book nerds.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouak
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (in original French)
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (in original French)
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So I’ve read 29 and started or dipped into 3, and others I may have read bits of but don’t remember. How about you?

Image credit: Cindiann on Flickr

A Christmas break is great, but it’s soon over and after wishing you all a Happy New Year, it’s back to the grind of the routine. The roads were OK for the first Monday of the year, but the queues came back quickly and the routine soon pulled me in, not unlike gravity when you bounce on a trampoline.

One advantage of the days around the winter solstice is that I end up driving to work at dawn. This is not great leaving the house (when it’s pitch black) but quite lovely if the sun comes up as I’m waiting around the Argenteuil bridge (Pont d’Argenteuil). I snapped this photo at a red light, the quality isn’t great and you can never do justice to this kind of view anyway, especially not in the few seconds before it changes to green.

Hope your routine wasn’t too hard to get back into. Have a good start to 2011!

Sunrise, Orange Contrails
Originally uploaded by simon_music