Got Server Content?

May 20, 2008

You do? Where shall we put that then? No, I mean where shall we put it so people can actually see it?

There’s a ton of great stuff out there about Sun products, and it changes all the time. The trouble is, on sun.com, we sometimes don’t keep up with all the new and updated content out there. This is because we’ve often not really had a good place to surface it on our traditional product landing pages. Think servers, or storage, or software. Those product areas have their own discrete content areas on sun.com, where you might expect a reasonable refresh rate. In particular, the Overview pages in those product areas – the pages you hit at /servers, /storage, /software – should probably be the stickiest pages we can build, with constantly refreshed content. It’s always nice to see new content when you go back to a page. It gives the impression it might actually be current.

Up until very recently, the servers landing page on sun.com wasn’t really a landing page at all. You just landed quite unceremoniously at a server finder, where you were kind of expected to fend for yourself. Fine, of course, if you know what you’re looking for, or if you have some sense of the kind of product attributes that make up the ideal server for your particular business needs. Not so great if you don’t even know what a server is, or does. Or maybe you just want to know how Sun servers can help you, before you actually have to start choosing one. All the kind of stuff we loosely describe as content ‘which tells the product story’. You know, delivering key messages, addressing market sectors, providing system solutions, all that kind of stuff.

A few weeks ago, we put together a servers overview page, so that we could do that story telling, provide sensible paths into product areas, uplevel featured products, show off some great customer success stories, and, yes, tell you what our servers actually are. It’s a delicate balance on these pages between getting the story out there and providing a quick route to the products, but I think we managed it pretty well. I say ‘we’, but, of course, it was the good folks in the product marketing teams that pulled all the content together (kudos Carlos & Lisa), and our publishing team that managed the tricky icky problem of integrating the new content with the existing server finder (heroics from Jing). I just did the bit where I say ‘you’d be better of with a PC00 component there’.

While we were working that project, there was another altogether more dynamic project going on in the design room next door (there’s not a really a design room next door to me, but you know what I mean). A few months ago, the systems group here at Sun, that looks after the server product line, had an idea that they wanted to explore. It was really about addressing the problem I mentioned at the start – there’s great, current content out there, that has marketing dollars behind it, and a plan to develop it, but not a really great place to showcase it. Based on the kind of presentation we use for the product launch events on sun.com, they wanted to see what we could do to support their idea of ‘content channels’. A little bit launch, a little bit back story, a little bit promotion, a whole lot more interesting than a big top banner.

The result is what you now see on the top of the new servers overview page. A rather nice mix of videos, podcasts, product tours, white papers and other supercool server stories (those product tours are very nice. I took the PSU out of a Sun Fire X4140 just now). So now, when you come back to the servers section on sun.com, you can expect regular updates, announcements, product walkthroughs and all that jazz – all hand-picked by your server channel content owners. If you can’t hear it, that’s the sound of a gauntlet dropping to the floor of Menlo Park, by the way…

If its not immediately apparent, this is a product category landing page without right-hand navigation. Well, I’m excited.

Listening Post: Psychedelic Furs: All Of This and Nothing

itv.com

May 16, 2008

Watching TV on a computer is a bit like playing World of Warcraft on a phone – you probably can, but it’s a bit rubbish. There are some rather nice players out there right now, like the BBC iPlayer, but the main reservation I have is that I’m as likely to watch programmes, that have already been aired, via my computer in my office as I am to watch them via my hard disk recorder in the living room. Which is not very likely. Once a programme has gone, it’s pretty much gone, and I never seem to to find the time to go back and ‘watch again’. Unless it’s a Robyn Hitchcock documentary on BBC 4. I can always find time for one of those.

I’ve often listened to my friend John Murray commentating on a mid-week champions league match on Radio 5 via Real Player from the BBC site, as I’m supposed to be on a conference call about widgets or something, and that works pretty well. They sometimes even sync up graphic scoreboards to give you something to look at while you’re listening, but really, its still not like watching football on TV. I could probably find last Saturday’s Match of the Day and watch it again on Wednesday, but it’s not like watching it at the time and it’s not live football anyway.

So all hail ITV. Even though they have a reasonable offering in the way of recently aired items to pick and choose from and watch again, what really makes itv.com worth going to is the fact that I can watch ITV channels there. Live. Well, a few seconds delay, but it’s a live stream of the 4 ITV channels, not a stored, cut, archived and expired (usually) version of the ITV output. This is hugely significant, as it means that should, for instance, a UEFA Cup final happen to clash with a conference call about prototypes, then I am now able to have the full moving pictures of the game, as it happens, next to an InDesign document of web design components, while pretending to know what I’m talking about on the phone. I wouldn’t actually do that, of course, I’d be 100% committed to the conference call, but let’s just say that’s a plausible scenario. I did try an experiment with the itv.com pictures streaming and John commentating via bbc.co.uk, to see how they might sync up. It took a few minutes to work out who was lagging, and to my surprise, the Radio 5 audio stream is about 2 and a half minutes behind the ITV1 video stream, but even that was better than listening to Clive Tyldesley (that doesn’t translate well, but I expect Dave will understand).

Of course, the whole thing is pretty much ‘undefined’ as an experience if you’re using Firefox, as the player requires Silverlight, but frankly, there are times when I’ll just use Internet Explorer and be done with it.

Listening Post: The Roots: The Return to Innocence Lost

Sharing Your Opinion

May 14, 2008

I just had a call with Ben, Mr Usability, regarding some work we need to collaborate on as part of our web feedback program. We’ve been looking into the user experience across our feedback systems on various venues and trying to simplify and standardize a number of the interactions. This effort has been really quite specific in focus for sun.com, based on the nature of how we gather feedback there through our contact forms, but we really do a whole lot more than just ask you to point out broken links and typos.

You may have noticed that we’ve rolled out the ‘floating math’ feedback widget across sun.com. In fact, the widget, in various formats, is rolled out across a wide range of Sun web venues and is gathering mightily useful data from those sites. Well, aside from the comments about how we suck particular parts of primates anatomy, of course, but, in general, specific, constructive and informative.

The whole thing is powered by lovely people at OpinionLab, and I was lucky enough to have Ben walk me through the administration interface to give me a better understanding of the capabilities of their templated comment card system and the deployment of widgets and embedded components. There was a time when we would take a look at a system like this, kind of like it, and then build our own. On Solaris. Using vi. Thankfully, we’re much more ready these days to let folks who really know what they’re doing provide these services (yes, I know we have to pay), and work out how they interconnect and communicate with our own systems. In the case of OpinionLab, is seems this is an exercise that they are more than happy to work with us on to get right, which is good, because now they’ll have to work with me to try and get it right, which is a user experience I can’t possibly comment on.

Listening Post: Bloc Party: Atonement

NME new noise tour

May 7, 2008

blimey. I was at that courteeners thing a couple of weeks ago and by 8:30 there wasn’t even enough room to flick your lank hair around while postulating about morrissey and pretending to be from manchester like everyone in the waterfront who knew where it was was pretending to be although when he said fallowfield and sung something about students I did have a moment of I was thereism. honestly, if you’ve been feted by morrissey you might as well hang up you guitar now and get down the longsight jobcentre. remember the primitives. if you can listen to that insipid album all the way through without spiking yourself with pointy instruments then you should be ashamed as it is possibly the worst record in your collection and you can’t imagine how you ever liked it. that’s what you’ll think about the courteeners in 10 years time even though you might rather like them now. they do mean it, but its just not worth the effort.

strueth. then I were at the air traffic shenannigans a few days later where I was quite easily the way oldest person in the waterfront by a considerable margin and conspicuously male to go with it. they did rattle out their emoplay pianotastic hits-u-like with some gusto and he is a very nice man but really if you’re going to spend all night sitting at a piano then don’t be surprised if all the 4 foot tall 15 year olds get a bit bored and start trailing out to the cloakroom to avoid the rush. as far as I could tell, it was exactly the same set they played many months before at the arts centre when I was by far the oldest person there but strangely inconspicuously male. they must have been on telly or something since then.

christ on a bike. now its the nme not-as-good-as-the-used-to-be tour which consistently broke bands on the verge of greatness like bloc party kaiser chiefs franz ferdinand arctic monkey etc but now just kind of breaks wind with a flopping rollcall of new music top 5 guardian reader list voted for by you not me ones to watch artists which will never be seen again on a bill which includes less than 4 bands. having deliberately missed the first band because I was washing up or something I arrived at the waterfront to the last few number from team waterpolo and acres of space in which to wander around like it was a pub in the 80s and your mates band were playing in the function room and nobody gave a toss. it was so empty that I was able to ask for a pint of red stripe at a decibel level normally reserved for actor in films in leather bars where the music is apparently quiet enough to hear the person sat next to you talking but loud enough for assorted 90s bad hair losers to go mad ape crazy to like, the sisters of mercy or something. anyway, team waterpolo supported air traffic last week and I didn’t really need to see them again so I read email on my phone like an arse. following an agonizingly pedestrian gap, friendly fires take the stage and I quite like them in a sideways-on sensible shirt proper alternative kind of way even if it was borderline flock of seagulls at some points but just enough this side of gang of four to be respectable and he had a lovely voice. nice man.

sadly, the evening was rounded off by crystal castles, who are, in fact, republica. they tried to pretend they weren’t by lasering out our eyes with permastrobe lighting and ultra magnesium flares, but they were. suffice to say, all I heard after the few of us left filtered out into the street was ‘oh my god, they were so, like, amaaazing’, which proves I’m right.

4000 a minute

May 2, 2008

as david rightly points out you just can’t keep up these days. it used to be the case that cool site of the day was indeed picking from about 100 new sites that had appeared that day. worldwide. and they weren’t cool, except they were there which was cool. the coolest one I remember whcih I can’t find in the archive was someone who had posted pictures from a nuclear bunker and I thought how amazing it was that someone could post pictures of themselves inside a nuclear bunker and then just use an img tag and publish them and I could see them halfway round the world without leaving my seat and there might be something in this internet thing but as far as I could get at the time was to post scans from scooby-doo annuals.

fast forward about 10 years and remember when you first joined flickr and started uploading your photos worried about whether you should be posting candid shots or posed shots or landscape shots or artistic shots and whether you should submit to that rating group of which there was only 1. because when you joined all those years ago, everybody looked at everyone else’s photos. I mean, if you refreshed the explore page after having looked at them all, there might be one or two new ones which might or might not pique your interest. never mind, come back at the end of the day and look at all of them.

not so now. flickr users are now uploading more than 4000 photos/videos/things a minute. that’s (hang on, let me open the calctool), um, more than 60 a second. by the time I’ve refreshed the explore page, even if I just repeatedly do that and not look at anything, about 300 objects have passed me by. so I hope people are putting them in that rating group so I can pass some value judgement on them. what do you mean there’s about a million ratings groups? how can that be? what do you mean its an interestingness hype methodology? oh. and while I’m banging on about it, why do I never get any of those “Your photo has been selected for the SWORD OF DAMOCLES AWARD! (insert huge gif). Please tag your photo with SWORDOFDAMOCLES and bother 10 other strangers by blarting this message all over their photo pages! thx!” awards? everyone has those. I want one. not enough cat/sunset photos I expect.

We Sell Servers

May 1, 2008

You know that, of course, but how do you buy our servers? For as long as I can remember, and in line with how we structure our organization, we’ve presented our product lines on the web by the product categories by which we refer to them. This means that if you’re looking for our servers on sun.com, we think you might want to look for them by their parent category. Right now, we’d be in a great position to answer customer questions like “What CoolThreads servers have you got?”, or “Show me all your blades”, but, really, is that the kind of question you have in your head when you come to sun.com to look at servers?

Maybe you’d actually prefer to see our servers presented in terms of their attributes, so that you can begin your research by asking “What servers have you got that can run Linux?”, or maybe “I’ve got $5000 and I want a Sun server now. Show me what you’ve got”. In any case, you’d be hard pressed right now to complete a customer journey like that without going through a number of hoops. Backwards, probably.

So, at the moment, we’re looking at what’s important to our customers in terms of the way that they look for our products and how they might expect to see them grouped, or otherwise, so that a subset of products is a meaningful subset of products, that can support directed searching, categorization and a much more targeted presentation model. I mean, do you really need to know everything about why our products are so great when you’ve already come to sun.com to find the products? Is that product category landing page just telling you a bit more than you need to know, when all you really want to do is find the products? Perhaps, in actual fact, you don’t know what you’re looking for and you do need help in understanding just what Sun servers there are and how they are differentiated from the competition. Either way, we want to try and support those interactions as efficiently as possible and, from a user experience perspective, make it a pleasure to be engaging with us.

We have great people in the team conducting user evaluations and interviews and gathering as much data as we can in order to direct our designs, but, you know, you might have something to say about your experiences on sun.com and what you really want to be able to do when you’re researching our products. If you do, let me know, and we’ll feed it directly into the design process. If you don’t want to comment here, you can always email – my name is Tim Caynes and I work at sun.com, so the address isn’t difficult to fathom.

Listening Post: Future Radio Online

Second Life Emptiness

April 30, 2008

I had made a mental, not physical, note to myself to attend the online knees-up that was yesterday’s Sun employee event in Second Life. Of course, I was extraordinarily busy doing web prototype updates and determining the length of various pieces of data string yesterday, so I forgot all about it. In any case, being in the UK timezone meant that by the time Jonathan was speaking, I was already driving to a grotty venue down by the river to see a band nobody likes, and when Liz Matthews was taking to the stage I was probably lying in a pool of beer surrounded by students half my age screeching for an encore.

The fact that I missed it, however, and that various people have since recounted the experience, made me want to revisit Second Life and reconnect with the possibilities for syncing up some of our web experiences with the whole other-worldliness of planet Linden. I first signed into Second Life well over a year ago and we had a few meetings in there and talked about marketing opportunities, building experiences, what the engagement model was and all those kind of ethereal things that a new environment makes you think about. Lou was particularly visionary, of course, and was able to articulate just the kind of opportunities that Second Life could offer and how we might weave it seamlessly into our key customer journeys. Most of us, however, were just trying to pass the ‘you can now fly’ exam and wondering where you could buy those enormous body parts from.

Sun does have a rather lovely presence in Second Life these days and people like Fiona and Christy have obviously done an enormous amount to raise awareness, as the success of the events demonstrate, but there’s still that disconnect between how we’re engaging customers on the old rickety web and how we’re able to interact directly in Second Life. It was designed that way, of course, so what do I expect, but I’d like to do more than just copy-and-paste a slurl for an event. Perhaps there’s some neat Second Life Grid API in the pipeline that supports web-based collaboration via the platform or something, or maybe we’ll start pricing our products online in Linden dollars. However it manifests itself, it would hopefully be more than just jumping from one world to the other, either by a web-based slurl, or a SL-based web browser. That’s just like wearing your anorak inside out and calling it a new coat.

Anyway, to my reason for going to Second Life today, I thought I might do some of that social interaction thing and pretend to be someone worth chatting to and maybe catch the fallout of the employee event somehow. How wrong I was. I mean, I might not expect to see it thronging with hordes of flying groupies around the Sun Pavillion at lunchtime in the UK (2am Pacific), but there’s always a Java developer from Belgium or something, looking at the free Sun jackets, surely. Not today. No green dots. Just me.

I hung around for a while, taking screenshots of myself, like I was on holiday, and decided to take a sneak look at Club Java, just to make sure there’s were no swingers hanging around that had missed the last virtual bus home. There wasn’t, so really, there was nothing else to do…

Listening Post: The Mars Volta: The Bedlam In Goliath

sacrilege

April 24, 2008

having invested as much effort as I possibly could in actually liking foals and deciding I don’t it’s that time in the afternoon where I’m hankering after something dependable to get me through to teatime which today happens to be joy division but wait there’s something not right with that its not like I’m just listening to closer which I ripped from the cd I bought to backup the album I got back in 1980 oh no its something much worse. I’m listening to ‘the best of’ on napster. now, if I were for a moment to put aside any latent musical fascist tendencies and step down from the pedestal marked ‘I was was there the first time you can’t really understand joy division like I do’ which is populated with middle-class art school envy types who now work in IT or online media and write miserable little blogs about IT and online media or worse still, listening to joy division on napster, then I might think that actually listening to ‘the best of joy division’ released in the wake of control was a perfectly acceptable way to spend an hour in your home office. but no sooner have I written that last dribblesome sentence than I’m slapping myself with the wet fish of procrastination and I’m telling myself that, really, I should know better than to defile the mighty division by not listening to the albums as they were originally released and instead getting drawn into the out-of-sequence vaguely cashing-in less-than-tactile experience of online recycled nostalgia.

but I have, so never mind. I think actually that’s what I’ve really wanted to do for ages, but being a middle-aged joy division stalwart is a bit like being a member of some insane catholic sect where you’re expecting some laconic thunderbolt to strike you down at the merest suggestion that you might be taking the piss with the back catalogue. I mean, I’ll dig out my 12″ of ideal for living later and listen to the whole miserable thing on a proper record player by way of self-flagellation, so hopefully I’ll feel better about myself tomorrow and continue stroking my chins about the relative merits of interpol or editors and whether actually its alright for the wombats to be quite so blasphemously ironic about it all when they weren’t even born, dammit (always good to finish with that chestnut).

Bring Me A Taxonomy

April 23, 2008

Praise be for the sight of our erstwhile über data architect, pontificating on the nature of content engineering strategies and all things modelled. It’s been far too long since Kristen has regailed us with those neatly crafted unified product model things that she does, but I guess that’s what happens when they make you a director. You have to do all that director stuff instead. Thank goodness I’m at least 3 steps removed from that particular career move then, right?

In the web experience design team, we have a number of ongoing projects that really are all about how the data we’re using is architected (which is not a real word, surely), in order that they have any chance of success. In reference to Kristen’s latest entry, this is mostly to do with how we define the data sets for products, such that we are able to build efficient, manageable content management capabilities while also being able to easily organize the information across multiple venues and in multiple formats. But it’s also about understanding the key attributes of our products that really differentiate them in our customer’s minds, and how we design for interactions, based on those attributes as selection criteria, whether they be as filters for directed searching, or determining navigation hierarchies. I think I may have almost made some sense there. What I’m really saying is that if we don’t have people with large brains figuring out our data architecture, then the value of the systems we manage and render that data with approaches zero. There’s probably an appropriate reference to polishing waste product I could use here to labour the point, but I wouldn’t do that.

As well as enlightening those of us with smaller brains, of the things Kristen gets to do in her blog entries, which I’m kind of jealous of, is add all those code fragments and scary-looking class diagrams. I can do screenshots in the dark and post those, right-aligned, but I just don’t have any groovy code stuff to share, and I know people like that stuff. So I’ve taken to stealing some of hers and rolling my own.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<stolen-object>
  <label>Data Model Browser - CEDM 1.0</label>
  <explanation>
   <p>The CEDM Data Model Browser describes concepts and attributes that are 
      core to the <b>Tim Code Envy Data Model</b>. This 
      version [CEDM 1.0] covers Tim's pathetic code envy as it is represented 
      in <b>blogs.sun.com, timcaynes.com, and most other places</b>. Things 
      that describe tantrums, impotence, or just plain stupidity are not 
      included in CEDM, but they should be</p>
  </explanation>

  <concept id="envy">
    <label>Envy</label>
    <explanation>Actual thing to be envious about.  The core frustration 
                 to the model owner (e.g. "You've got loads of code about data
                 and stuff and I don't have any, boo hoo.").
    </explanation>

    <implementation-guideline>
      Use an idiot as a stand-in for the envy itself
    </implementation-guideline>
    <association ref="wetfish-id"/>
    <association ref="name">
      <constraint>Strictly syndicated through a wet fish</constraint>

    </association>
    <association ref="description"/>
    <association ref="image"/>
    <association>
  </concept>

</stolen-object>

There. I feel better already.

Listening Post: Supergrass: Sitting Up Straight

caught by the fuzz

April 22, 2008

its easy to get overexcited about things in norwich because when they actually happen nobody seems that bothered. such was the anticipation/apathy contradiction at the Lightly Crowded Room at the uea last night as the mighty supergrass found themselves in east anglia when they probably expected to be in the astoria where everyone would go mental and clap their hands and things like that. the last time I saw supergrass was in 1994 when they were supporting shed seven at the boardwalk in manchester which was a spectacularly upside-down night as clearly supergrass should have played after shed seven who were already the also-rans of 90s british alternative music that hailed from york and miserably underachieved except for dolphin or that one about rainbows which chris moyles probably likes because they’re from yorkshire and what else you might need to know about them I’m not sure. the boardwalk was also was also a canny little venue which crammed students and townies in all week and had, well, a boardwalk kind of thing in it from where you could pour red stripe onto teenagers on club nights but was the right size for the amount of people who actually went to gigs like that in those days before everything was sponsored by o2 or top man and you have to barter on ebay to pay double just to see the congolese nose-flute orchestra playing hex enduction hour backwards at the art centre.

so there was a little squeak of anticipation as I left the house after putting the bins out and filling the dishwasher and sorting out the recycling. 14 years later, supergrass and shed seven are still shuffling around the country peddling their indiewear but supergrass never went away and have popped out some super sparkly albums in the meantime and so are now touring to support their new album which I haven’t heard and don’t know what is called whereas the aforementioned shite seven have recently ‘done an abc’ and reformed because they apparently had nothing better to do and are hawking some kind of greatest hits tour which must be a pretty short affair and is undoubtedly rubbish. on arrival at the uea I parked the zafira under a street lamp in the hope that the wing mirrors would still be there on the way out and tritted down the hill to the concrete bastion of acoustic deconstruction which was by the time I got there a little bit kind of full but with gaps in the way that says its not sold out but the middle-class middle-aged have bagged all the steps round the edge and so you’ll have to push through them to mix with the teenage fanclubs and stoners who will undoubtedly lob their plastic pint over you at some point which they do. expecting the support to come on at any time I took my nasty-but-cold pint of 1664 and sorried and thankyoud my way through 5-deep of people even older than I and after nearly failing to negotiate the last step down to the pit arranged myself neatly in front of someone who was far too short to go to gigs at the uea anyway. I checked a couple of emails on my phone, like a w*nker, and then suddenly it went that kind of half-dark and on trolloped the other band from oxford (I’m not counting ride), and proceeded to rock out with a track from the new album. and another. and another, I think.

even though they had a rather splendid lcd backdrop (although not, unfortunately, an lcd soundsystem), by the time they’d rattled off some tracks from the new album and gaz had informed us that we’d probably be regailed with pretty much the whole of the new album, people were getting a bit twitchy and shuffling around and rather than taking pictures with their phones they were talking calls with their phones. but wait, salvation. deep enough to submerge dubai is the back catalogue and so we will be treated to a smattering of hits-u-like which will keep us amused enough not to leave and amuse they do. they obviously save caught by the fuzz right until the end, but in between the borderline prog-foo fighteriness of some of the new stuff they clasped our hands and walked us right into the 90s when the sun was always shining and I had hair. it was at its best when members 4 & 5 of the live band disappeared off stage or picked up a tamborine and gaz poked us with the whimsy stick with sublime renditions of late in the day and a soaring moving and you remembered why you came. they can rock out just fine but you don’t want to be doing that at the uea because it just sounds like a jet taking off without any wheels when it gets mashed unceremoniously through that arcane speaker stack although brecon beacons sounded nice until my eyes started bleeding with the sonic james bond laser attackness of the sound system even though some people were actually jumping up and down a bit which must have meant something.

I make it sound half-hearted but it wasn’t but it was. they did what they do very well which is crack open a song box and let it pop all over the stage like a looney tune. we did what we do very well in norwich which is gawp like goons and start a mock fight while one hand claps and a stoner bounces of everyone shouting oi! oi! I think I may have enjoyed the whole experience much more if I hadn’t had to know in quite so much detail who I was surrounded by. there is an unfortunate trend currently to arrange a large number of lights on the rig so that they shine directly into the audience and mostly directly into your retina. at far-too-frequent moments in any given set, those lights will cascade over those assembled, presumably so that we can somehow join in with the signing bit where we’re supposed to join in but really, for about half the night we were bathed in an effervescent glow which only served to highlight the fact that you’re surround by people you don’t want to be surrounded by. I am quite happy for all the lights to point at the bloody band like what it always used to so that I can remain comfortably numb of my immediate surroundings and focus on the action. they do it down the waterfront too, but I don’t mind it so much there because in general what you see is akin to what you would see if david lynch made teenage pop horror, which is often better than what’s on stage, but at the uea, well, its just unpleasant. its not as if we need help in norwich to kill the atmosphere, but turning all the lights on like its the end of the school disco doesn’t really help.

Things what I writ