The New York Times has an article titled Nobody Likes Smart Machines.

Dr. Norman, who the story follows, highlights the problem of predictability that comes as a result of delegation through automating tasks to smart machines that still occasionally require human intervention. They give the example of window blinds that change to suit the weather, the side-effects and resultant feeling of loss of control when your computer screen in the office randomly glares annoyingly back at you. It’s an interesting article that really only covers half the picture.

The conclusion the professor comes to is one many people in the design space probably would. That of making the user experience better by making it more predictable, either by removing functionality or improving control. This is where intelligent design really comes into the fore, but not just intelligent design needs to be considered. Intelligent systems that behave and self-adapt can really shine in this area. The big problem is how to do that effectively so as to account for not one person’s vision of how the world works, but that of many peoples. This is where personalization comes in and what I call object profiles, personalised profiles for objects just like that of the seat in an up-market car that adapts to an individual upon entry.

The key here is context. Maintaining the context of the environment surrounding the intelligent system in order to teach it personal traits and habits.

You can’t explain to your car’s navigation system why you dislike its short, efficient route because the scenery is ugly. Your refrigerator may soon know exactly what food it contains, what you’ve already eaten today and what your calorie limit is, but it won’t be capable of an intelligent dialogue about your need for that piece of cheesecake.

What this fails to account for is Machine Learning, narrow AI and that of the power of context in deriving best outcomes.

By context I mean monitoring everything you do and building a current and future picture of the world based upon past history.

Say you own one of those new fangled fridges that automatically orders the food to be home delivered if you run out of anything. What happens if you decide the next week that you want to go on holiday? How can the fridge know you won’t be needing it’s services until say the day you get home?

By keeping a record of whatever context you find yourself in. For example the online travel site your entering you holiday bookings into… simply give your intelligent appliances access to that knowledge - that’s how.

Big Brother 2020 style.

There has been a lot of focus lately on attention aggregation. Twitter/Facebook activity feeds are a good example of unstructured partial-attention aggregation, yet that only gets you so far. Real augmentation will come when the systems we interact with can change and adapt to our whim. And that my friends, is the power of context tracking in the digital age. Maintaining a dynamic real-time context profile our surrounding can then use - all based on a list of likely probabilities - probabilities then used to predict what augmentation intelligent systems can assist with next.

Information overload is already here. In a world of never ending pop-up boxes, call marketers, Facebook requests, mail you just throw in the bin and systems asking if you want to allow this or disallow that - systems that learn what we want will be needed to manage the never ending pile of relationship management with others and with our surroundings. When your in giving a presentation somewhere you really don’t want your phone ringing or IM window popping up.

Another advantage of these kinds of systems is the automated feedback loop AFL they make possible. This means device interfaces can be improved through historical collection of context, and actual usage patterns based upon factors that include demographics. New market devices may even emerge as a result of how people used these devices rather than how a designer thinks it should be used. Imagine devices that build an interface reputation for ease of use or productivity in different areas. How much easier would shopping for a new device online become? Increasingly we’re purchasing items without ever seeing or using them and more often than not we’re less satisfied with the outcome. An AFL can help minimize that problem.

What’s needed is the ability to delegate intelligently those monotonous tasks and the user experience that was once a burden becomes a boon.

Now you may think this is years away, but it’s happening now. Google augments personalised search based upon search history and your location aka your context. Individual data silos are already using these techniques to serve advertisements. I read recently that Marissa Mayer stated they use the keywords 411GOOG users enter for machine learning and better translation and search results. Games have long personalised themselves to users, even now to the point of detecting when the gamer is getting bored in order to maximize the user experience (and revenue).

It’s cross-silo and ubiquitous networking of dynamic devices that will bring the next wave of personalisation. I look forward to what my future digital self has in store for me there.

On that note, I’m thinking this needs a name… so building on the great work of VRM, I bring you ARM.

Automated Relationship Management. CRM was already taken and everyone can always use another ARM or a leg.

Jon Udell discusses the idea that technical mastery requires social innovation. While I agree in general I don’t necessarily agree with his final statement that major innovation would require more social than technical. I just don’t believe you can separate the two cleanly yet. It’s still all about how you compose the data with the view(s) and technically I still see a lot of problems in information architecture today that needs solving.

Recent talk by Dave Winer and Tim Bray on what happens to your data and records when you die are the classic example. Data is spattered everywhere, yet there’s a technical solution to that, one that requires a social element as well. I say this as I’m attempting to create my own environment for historical data and innovation. So while the social hurdles are first and foremost in my mind - my user-facing API is defined by that - actually architecting what I consider important elements to achieve my goals, is trying technically. Sure if you have a lot of man hours of a big company it may well be simple to implement but conceptualizing how exactly to implement an entire environment with innovative paradigms, requires a lot of forethought. Usually by one BDFL slaving over that while guiding others to help implement that. eg. Tim Berners-Lee, Guido van Rossum. There’s an excellent talk Fred Brooks gave at OOSPLA07 that talks about innovation I’d highly recommend listening to.

Where Jon asks whether operations are beyond the capabilities of mainstream users I begin to envision a much simpler and more direct approach to how people interact with objects in a system. I always recall a mainstream user testing a web site I’d designed. The number one interaction she responded to - one that guided her into learning new capabilities - happen to be the direct object interactions. Popup’s on hovering menu’s, self-explanatory animated transitions on acting etc, all of these were at the point of object contact. It taught me how important it is to see and learn how to interact with each component and how those can effect others. More importantly how the system integrates and functions to get tasks done. Jon’s screencasts, the CoScripter example, they exemplify this.

I remember my first steps playing with the Self programming language desktop GUI. The ability to inspect objects was fantastic even though the overall user experience was awkward. I think we need more of this interaction if users are to learn new capabilities. Interfaces simply must be object accessible.

Applications today just aren’t built with this in mind and I think the problem is one of default functionality. By default 99% of systems don’t guide people as they use them. There is so little by way of best practices and the advantages they afford because more often than not it’s educated developers doing the implementation.

I think the only way to solve this is to give users the tools do the implementation and customization themselves by lowering the barrier to entry through an object accessible interface. Community driven applications modifiable at the object level comes to mind. Wikipedia is a good example at making information more accessible to the masses, Twine a level up. Why not do the same for application development? The Linden Labs guys also talked at OOPSLA07 that is worth listening to. A large number of scripts were developed by people with little previous programming skill because they could grasp basic constraints to the interface and architecture. If we can create an interface to do this and get tasks done while the hard technical aspects are hidden; great! But technically I don’t believe we’re there yet on a distributed level nor social. The two problems are just too similar.

It’s really one distributed problem over two different mediums.

I couldn’t leave without linking to an interactive application example The Neuron.

A quote by Sep Kamvar repeated by Greg Linden sparked some thoughts on personalization that I’ve managed to boil down to a simple old age adage:

It’s what people do, not what they say that matters when it comes to personalization.

This is why I believe contextual and personalized attention data is the most important personal information one can aggregate. I see this happening with services like Google’s Search History and Twitter/Facebook’s activity feeds at the very edges of this personalization movement.

It’s an area I believe the semantic web needs to work on in order to fill out the middle and become successfully adopted. Standardizing actions on the side of the developer and openly(with privacy in mind) recording these actions with dynamic ontologies. Associating the data with these actions. I say dynamic because meaning often changes over time and as Sep highlighted; checking every box and labeling someone as having a general interest doesn’t necessarily return useful results. It’s the history that matters (why dynamic ontologies) and personal information has to be personal to be effective.

Twine and other sites like it are interesting to me in capturing the data they do for a number reasons, however they all seem to be one shop shows, only capturing some attention from their own narrow usage patterns. This is where I see the real power to the people; aggregating attention cross-application and intelligently customizing usage for user experience. VRM is one area that comes to mind to manage all of this.

The way I see it, right now the only actions we have on users visiting sites are; entry, internal actions and exit. I think this is why only search history and location are returning results. I’m more likely to visit local business and services more if the ads are relevant to my location and search contexts. The closer something is, the more personal it often feels and closer to instant gratification you become.

Contexts include the who what where when how and why of a persons action. Who they are and their history of performing actions, what they’re looking for in relation to, where they are while seeking that. When they are seeking the what aka the time/day, how they’re attempting to obtain their goal and why being their motivation for doing so.

Who is the history - The records of a persons actions.
What is they seek - The goal aka resource aka search term
Where they are - Their location (IP address / wifi mesh / GPS location)
When they’re seeking - Is it after work? Middle of the day? Just after school?
How they’re seeking - What service or applications are they utilizing? Voice, Phone or Web?
Why they’re motivated - Is it research or are they in the mood to purchase something? History is telling.

If I’ve missed any, please leave a comment.

I believe this is why results always come back to context as Sep highlights with his statement that “recent searches are much more important.” It’s where they are and what people are doing right now.

Having said that, another area I see yet to be fully exploited is using time-varying attention information to predict what users may be motivated to do next or soon and return results(not necessarily all of them) that reflect that before the user even knows they want them. I call this the consumer cycle as most people are just patterns stuck in a cycle that evolves over time. I hear Microsoft Research are doing this with Visual Studio by tracking actions and customizing the interface. I know Werner Vogel’s of Amazon in a recent InfoQ video displayed a diagram Jeff Bezos drew that highlights their business growth cycle and the feedback loop. People are growth cycles too and if you can figure out those patterns then and you can pander to their every whim even before they know they have them. Targeted suggestion can really be a powerful form of persuasion. Friends do it to other friends all the time. This is why it’s important to also know a person’s friends and in what contexts they pay attention to them. A friend might buy a new phone and the person ask them about that purchase. Great time to personalize an experience and display the information from other sources(friends/known sites) the user can use.

What I find interesting is that all of this is related to a more fine-grain approach to handling users personal data in applications. The decision is then one of how dynamic to make an application such that collaboration and convenience are enhanced and not sacrificed in the overall user experience. One person might require a completely different experience to the next. So how best then to share those disparate world views? Links with history and session data that form historical views on data comes to mind. I’ve not seen much work on this regard but I haven’t really look that hard. Still, I believe this will be vital for the platforms of the future. Avi’s Seaside has been one of the few attempts I do know about, if you know any others I’d like to hear about them.

Now all of this dynamic data collection requires architecture to support it. I’m of the belief that a deterministic approach with history and session data stored for context recall may be the best approach to personalization across future contexts. Most of my research is focused in this area, so it better be.

With that, I’m off to revise my Combinatory Logic skills.

Put simply; the interface.

• Numbers on search results? Why do I care about that as an end user? They inhibit result scanning making me stop on them instead of the results!
• I'm lucky to get 5 search results on a page versus 9 on Google.
• Font colour contrast is weak when it comes to guiding my eye to important navigational/instructional content.
• No dates on links whatsoever to help guide my contextual searching.
• No local location context search results in default search.
• No killer feature to differentiate it from other search engines.

A nice killer feature I'd like my search engine to have is current news results in the right-hand column based on my search results.

The Office 2.0 Podcast Jam is alive and kicking

I have my own views on Office2.0. I can't see it taking off much until persistent storage is supported locally by all browsers and offline access and document synchronisation is done well. We'll see more Single Page Application's written entirely in Javascript utilising features like Firefox 2's persistent storage as it evolves to perform this task. Possibly in the form of bookmarklets that will allow applications to be run in browser while offline that store to persistent storage - synchronising online during reconnect. Mass usage will come down to when IE supports persistent storage other than this.

Synchronisation to people's favorite storage provider will become increasingly important too. As will APIs in the area that afford interoperability allowing Web Application developers to support one standard to allow many places of storage for users. Even multiple places(e.g. backup) for each piece of data. I can't help but think about Personal Identity Providers here.
I'm actually running RC2 of Firefox 2 at the moment and I have to say it's an improvement over beta 2. Seems quite slick and I finally learnt how to remove those silly close tab buttons. I still can't re-size my search box but in this version it's smaller and easier to manage for my preferred tool bar layout. I'm loving the spell check as I type though! Another Office2.0 feature goes mainstream. I can see this improving language skills exponentially. Unfortunately I chose to install the US version! Not British or Australian.

While I'm on Firefox. I'm still getting used to the scroll tabbing. I don't think I like that. I can't see all my tabs at a glance. Will figure out how to turn that one off as I tend to navigate by favicon when I have a lot of tabs open. Fading non-active tabs sucks as well… I wonder how long it is before I hack the theme.
Looking ahead, I see things really getting interesting when my browser begins to become my document manager. Tabbed browsing will become increasingly more important. One feature I'd like for tabs is the ability to open an existing tab in a new browser window instance. At the moment I have to open a new window and then drag the tab to it, refreshing the tab in the process. That sucks when I've downloaded a movie or screencast in it. Basically I want threaded tabs. A separate memory space so as to prevent one in-browser application crashing the lot as happens a lot now… Tab locking too. Preventing accidental closure. One reason why I HATE close buttons on all tabs!

This entry was prompted by Tim Bray and Dare and the discussion on comment updates.

Now I absolutely hate it when entries appear in my reader as updated when comments are added to them! Even with "Ignore Updates" in bloglines, I still get some showing. I don't have a problem with atom:updated etc, so long as it's not used to push comment additions as updates. Comments should be opt-in. I subscribe to specific authors with my reader, not every joe commenter.

Anyway, should a user opt-in to comments on an entry, here's how I'd like to see that happen:

Opting-in to comment updates opts-in for that entries updates if they've been set to ignore updates for that feed as default. This is because some people comment inside they're own entries and so the reader knows what comments are referring to. While I'm at it, entry updates should have the option to be highlighted in some way in readers so users can quickly distinguish changes.

Now, anytime a new comment comes in, a users reader would then display the entry with; changes highlighted, the number of comments listed, and how many new entries there are in that comment feed. Using the Atom Threading Extension to achieve all this, entries in the reader display something like this:

My Entry Title

My firstsecond entry content.

2 Comments (+Expand) | 1 New (+Expand) | Subscribe(d) to Comments

Entry Comments:

1. ( ) Julie
   Woot, I popped your comment cherry!
2. ( ) Joe
   Number 2 - this comment is new.

Select ( ): All, New
Mark these comments as: Ignore, Spam

Add Comment

• Clicking the total comment number jumps to the actual blog entry at the start of the comments.
• Clicking "1 New" jumps to the beginning of the new comment on the actual blog entry.
• Clicking Subscribe alerts a users reader to display this entry as updated when new comments come in or changes happen on the entry.
• Clicking (+expand) on total comments expands all comments in the area below the entry in the users reader. New comments are highlighted. After expanding, clicking on "1 New" could serve a dual purpose and take you to that new comment in your reader.
• Additionally/Alternatively clicking (+Expand) after the "1 New" only expands those new comment entries, not existing ones. The news reader could then have default settings for displaying results users subscribe to, only displaying those new comments beneath the entry by default.
• Users could opt to filter out specific users in comment updates. Don't like a commenter? Filter them by name and address(if they're consistant) on a per entry/per feed basis or globally using a drop down. Add "Report as Spam" and checkboxes next to items. Think "Askimet" for in reader comments. Nearly every comment feed I subscribe to has spam in it at the moment. I need a spam filter on top of their spam filters…
  I can see this same spam or splog marking happening for tag aggregators like technorati in the future.
• Last of all an "Add Comment" link or text area could then go after the comments to enter them at the site or in the reader.

The beauty of all this to me is that would allow reading and commenting inside of mobile devices easily all from the one interface. I don't know if there are any readers out there as of yet that will let me expand and read comments in my reader and optionally choose to subscribe to updates of those, but thats what I want. The Atom threading extension comes to mind to enable all of this.

While I'm on updated entries, another pet peeve of mine is occasionally when I also get updated entries appearing multiple times in my reader. Doc Searls (radio userland) feeds annoys the hell out of me for that reason the way bloglines handles it. Updates seem to be given new unique ID's and I get repeat but slightly varying updated entries one after the other. That totally bites. End whinge.

Once a week? Twice? Once a day? Or like me - every time you read your mail?

Does that little spam counter really bug you? You know, the one that says:

Spam (1 bazillion)

Are you forever selecting all spam and hitting delete? Again, and again, and again? 

Well I'm sick of it so I came up with some solutions to my problem.

Mark all spam as read! Then no annoying little counter to bug the clean freak in me. But then I figure I'm likely to let that get out of hand and potentially miss a useful message. So…

Introducting the "When spam hits XXX number, or after X days - display the spam counter again for that session." That way I'm reminded to check it.

Viola, I spend less time reading spam.

If only my mail client could do this… oh well. Will just have to finish writing one. If only I didn't feel like shit and want to off myself instead I would.

Increasingly I find myself discussing the future of where decentralised technologies are headed. Increasingly I find myself discussing User Experience - my loathe for it with many of the current technologies.

With layer upon layer being added to the technology front, and tools such as those for rapid development taking steps to easing the burden on web developers, user experience is emerging as increasingly important to me.

Applications and user interfaces are becoming increasingly complex, cramming feature after feature into smaller spaces, and now with mobile techology really taking flight, increasingly I see the need for seamless user experience development environments.

Creating a seamless layer between application developer and application designer will become evermore imporant.

I've been reading a lot about REST lately, REST being at the heart of how I see decentralised systems evolving. The first step in the process towards what Rohit Khare calls AR+REST+ED Development(PDF). Asychronous, Routed, Representational State Transfer, Estimated, Distribution. I can't help but mention the WAKA protocol Roy T. Fielding has published some thoughts on here. What a cool name for a protocol.

What has occurred to me is the connector based approach of such a system. As standards emerge and are pushed, asychronous technologies such as the Bayuex Protocol and Comet for ajax, XMPP for messaging. JCR170 & JCR283 for Content Repositories, XML, RDF, Atom and many others. It has occured to me how much of a pivotal role user interfaces will have in tieing all of these technologies together in a manner that becomes a seamless experience for application designers in rapid appication environments. The technolgy is increasingly becoming transparent, accessed through universal connectors allowing increased productivity and creativity, its the interfaces that can take these to the next level.
This for me is the future of the internet. Creating seamless User Experiences in aide of augmenting humans. A lot of pioneering work in the area being done by Doug Englebart. The mother of all demo's a must see. As is Hyperscope.

It's creating that layer of seperation that has me excited as to where things are headed for ease of use and wide-spread adoption of technologies that allow users to communicate their ideas with like-minded others effectively. Creating connections and meaning in the process.

I've been following Cameron Reilly's progress with ThePodcastNetwork for a while now. Listening to his current woes, hoping things pick up soon for him. His request for ideas had me thinking and I've decided to pitch some of my ideas in. Feel free to steal them, I have much bigger ones in the works. Anyway here are my suggestions and thought I'd publish them for all to see and debate.

I'll start by outlining the podcast hosting (or video log for that matter) business model as I see it. Advertising. With more and more services like Amazon's S3 our likely future, I see the bottom eventually falling out of mere hosting unless you make the hardware or maintain it. Still you can cream a little off the top using it if you like, but for me the future is all advertising and subscriptions with hosting a side dish unless your a data centre.

Now Cameron more than anyone knows that advertising for his medium will most likely come through embedded sponsorship in podcasts as well as targeted on his site. Thus the more listeners and distribution, the better exposure for all involved. In my mind therefore building brand reputation while building distribution channels are the key to this medium. So, first we build on those. I use Cameron's business as my case study here. So here are my suggestions:

1. Build a better distribution model.

Make it easy for anyone to access and share your data.

The first and easiest thing Cameron could do is make each and every podcast easily sharable on anyone's site with a custom and branded flash player(with fallback) they can drop in, ala Youtube.

Optionally, a player, that on mouse hover or excerpt button click, displays either a text excerpt or transcript of the cast. (I've heard anecdotal evidence that transcripts next to casts improve listens by up to 225%.) Note: I'd do it with display:none javascript, not ajax to help the search engines find it. Let's hope RSS readers of the future support display:none or some other safe means of embedding metadata, aye. (Comments on alternative methods welcome)

So for easy copying and pasting I see the implemenation best done through and interface something like Live Clipboard's.

Thus we display Live Clipboard scissors on objects considered sharable. With our podcast example, on hovering those scissors would display your options for that content. In this case clicking Copy simply copies a piece of HTML to the users clipboard containing an object element marked up. ie. the podcast player <object> with podcast uri and description.

Note: This example doesn't utilise the 'Live' of Live Clipboard, but you get the idea. BTW, to anyone looking to implement Live Clipboard, please, on selecting a method of an object the user should be presented with something like a tooltip instructing them what has just happened! eg. "Success! HTML Object copied to your operating system clipboard. Now, go paste it somewhere!" or "Success! Live Clipboard XML Object copied to your operating system clipboard. Perhaps on hovering objects the type of content to be copied is displayed. eg. replace Copy (CTRL-C) in the figure above with Copy HTML Object (CTRL-C) or Copy Live Clipboard Object (CTRL-C)

Now, back to distributing our podcasts.

I'd also suggest branded widgets of feeds copied and pasted in similar fashion.

Taking this further an open API service for database access to casts and their metadata as well as data processing services. This however requires infrastructure and one central content management and hosting system. So build one(if and when you can afford to!). And Cameron, I know I'd have a 2web widget on my blog if you had one.

Next for distribution, another interesting path I see this model taking is with distributed metadata creation services. Check out what the blip.tv guys are working on with mirrorplay (not up yet) and read about video vertigo (user and password are in the popup authentication) and where metadata sharing for distributed media is headed.

There's an opportunity here for someone to build an open API that lets developers build podcasting software into their own, have those podcasts hosted on the API providers servers and allow collaboration with advertisers through it. Or just a service that streams the process of adding ads to the media and then to the clients servers. It's complicated to explain but if your interested, have a look at the eventful aka EVDB model. I think it's kinda similar but in their case used for events and I hear purchasing tickets.

And BTW, while your at it creating widgets, don't forget to add digg and delicious buttons to each! And comments… You could even include an area in the widget for displaying tags and tagging that very podcast using AJAX! No need then for mirrorplay? Maybe. Maybe not. Something worth considering is that not everyone lets you embed scripts… alternative: flash… *grumble*

Additionally you should write or purchase rights or licensing to podcast aggregating software for downloading content locally and consumuing it and feeding the playlist back to your database. Don't forget to brand it all.

Don't forget to bundle your service with other hardware. Mobile devices especially are the media players of the future.

2. Build a solid brand image.

Produce quality content under your logo stamp. Seek out existing podcasters(or vloggers, whatever floats your boat) with a proven track record and bring em aboard your stamp. Podtech did this with Scoble, Scoble did this with GETV…

Make podcasts about the people. Interviews, exclusives… I love those. Encourage that in your producers. Everyone loves to hear from experts in their field. Experts market themselves, experts therefore market you if you can get em.

3. Design and marketing.

Now I'm basing this off Camerons site and his homepage is a little bland. Get a good designer Cam, make it fun and build upon the brand in the design. In Camerons case, get rid of the whitespace at the top and make the TPN logo stand out. Add some mr.sheen polish to it and develop a 'look & feel' synonymous with TPN. Make play buttons using the logo to use there and in widgets? Something with personality…

Add a "featured show(s)" section with clips and play buttons. Add a short playable promo clip for all the shows and latest shows on there so people can get a feel for the hosts quickly. We're all time poor so please don't make me listen through ads or fancy long intros on those promo clips. Make the search feature and categories more visible. Make the site fun and idiot proof.

Maybe add sound effects on hovering items. Make promo's automatically play on hovering… Grab people's attention. Just never play music on page loading! That's a heinous usability crime! I curse you myspace.

Also add features that will entice people back. Let people tag and mark casts as favorites for later referral. Capture that attention data on what each user plays/tags/does on your site. Create a social network of tags and "who tags like me", "who likes listening to what I do" network ala last.fm. Create widgets of this data for the users. Use the data to recommend other items, including advertising. Create widgets for those.
Ultimately, you'll be reaching your users through distribution channels. Get that right. Make it so that people can easily find your content on your site to help it go viral. Add feeds and widgets on everything. Even categories, peoples listening lists, top downloaded… basic SEO.
4. Education

Drive traffic through education. Create a podcasting tutorial blog(and cast) to educate people. Let the TPN producer crew write it, everyone has a howto podcast story right? Call it the Digital Podcasting School ala Darren Rowse and his Digital Photography School.

5. Advertising

First, create some. Your own! Build a service that can attach advertising automatically to media. Create your own advertising first for podcasts in your network to test the system and attract advertisers that listen. Add an advertise with us option to your widgets. Failing those, hire someone to find you advertisers. Or something. Advertising hurts my brain.

6. Product Affiliates

Create a "cool audio tool" directory using amazon and other affiliates who'd like to advertise their wares to podcasters/users through you. This would fit well on the education blog and next to podcasts. Include hardware/software recommendations, reviews, etc. Track it all with stats.

7. Service Affiliates

"Advertisment FREE" podcasts for paying clients or subscribers.

8. Statistics

Watch them and learn.

9. Brainstorm

Put all the content producers on a mailing list if they're not already. Bounce ideas in it with them all. Create a community wiki to document all those ideas. They'll want to help, they're making a cut of the money for producing the content…

10. Get good developers to build it all

So you can sit back, feet in the air and let someone else stress out. I should also talk about networking, blah, blah, but I'm no good at that. Just do it. You'll figure it out with all that traffic and attention you'll be getting from people.

In conclusion:

• Build an API
• Build your own service on top of that API
• Open your API and service to the Public

The future is in API's and widgets(smart widgets and apps that talk back to your server with attention data).