About Me
I like to build websites. I currently work at Carrot Creative as Senior Web Producer. In my spare time, you might find me teaching myself Ruby on Rails - or watching The Wire.
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04 Mar 2009
Market Research
I am already doing what I promised myself I wouldn’t do. Another blog post relating to Twitter. I am often reluctant to give a second look to blogs who focus far too much time to Twitter, and not moving on to other topics. But here I am three posts into this, and another post relating to Twitter. To my defense, hopefully you will find that my thoughts don’t just relate to twitter but to the industry as a whole. Anyways…
As I am hoping to continue evolving as a professional, I seek new techniques to advance this progression. This means in instances where in the past I would normally rely on intuition and even instinct I resort to more industrial techniques. This does not mean I abandon instinctual methods, but I have been trying to adopt more professional techniques such as market research. But where does that leave me? Sifting through spreadsheets of stale data and speculation? This is what I envisioned when I initially thought about market research. But it is a new day isn’t it? Bleeding edge technologies rule our industry, each niche market is quenched and even something like market research has been reformed.
These communities are in place to offer accurate, unfiltered research answers. By leveraging your network, and the public, a professional is able to get valuable and more often then not, real-time results. When inquiring through Twitter whether ‘users with Javascript disabled still exist.’ I quickly received three valuable responses from zasadab, nicluciano, and bluestatus. Proof that this ‘new day’ is, in fact, upon us. These answers are not only spot on, although occasionally sarcasm filled, but straight from professionals working within the industry in question. How can one quantify the value and input of something so accessible and valuable as the market research I just participated in? The value is innumerable, and the possibilities are endless.
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27 Feb 2009
Version 1.5
Welcome to v1.5 of Kyle-Mac.com . Exciting isn’t it? After 1 blog post, I have already upgraded to version 1.5. To anyone familiar with version 1, you will notice absolutely 0 updates or upgrades. So how can I justify calling this v1.5? Well because now this website is completely run through Jekyll. From the documentation, “Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server.”
So what does this mean? Well essentially this system allows me to easily run this blog through GitHub and easily update my blog from command line. This exercise has been outstanding as practice in version control, specifically git. As well as acclimating me to GitHub very nicely. Essentially I am using this as an exercise to flex my programmer muscles, which at the moment are unimpressive. With a short learning curve, Jekyll has assimilated me to new development technologies such as Liquid and Textile.
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26 Feb 2009
Digestion
It is my belief that as the current wave of User-Generated Content begins to break, we will see the next wave to form around the digestion methods of this content. Many have already seen this coming, and more and more you see new ways of repurposing User Generated Content. This is probably most prevalent as it relates to Twitter. Twitter has become the de-facto destination for publishing and sharing information. This is an astounding feat due to it’s restrictions (140 Characters). Examples of digestion methods, built around Twitter are web-applications such as, Twitstocks which is an information exchange portal for investment, and Ginx which is a news sharing service, that wraps shared links on twitter in it’s application environment that promotes sharing and link-exchange.
Obvious as it may seem, digestion methods are a clear progression in the web development. While most recently, developers were looking for new forums for information creation to take place, things have begun shifting towards leveraging those forums. The Developers who are able focus the immense amount of content and deliver it to their users uniquely and easily will have the most success. And while this is not the only method to success, it is clearly a sector in demand. tbc….
