I’m currently carrying out some research into open-source e-commerce platforms. The research is at a pretty early stage and I’m still putting together the list of packages that we’ll then go on to assess in detail.

While putting this short-list together I’m visiting quite a lot of ‘showcase’ sites for each package on my long-list. And sheesh, some of them are bad.

I don’t mean “bad” in the sense of bad user experience design, even though it’s fair to say that many of them are guilty of that. I mean “bad” in that the products themselves are bad, some of them really bad.

It’s a consequence, I suppose, of the barriers to entry for e-commerce being so low these days. In fact, my preliminary exploration of open source e-commerce options has established that they’re even lower than I’d assumed them to be.

For example, I’ve come across an Australian site that sells t-shirts saying “The first rule about Kite Club is never talk about Kite Club”. Erk. It reminds me of a t-shirt I saw in Paris once, which I still think of as the worst t-shirt I’ve ever seen. It said, “the first rule about computer club is that you don’t talk about computer club”.

But aside from bad t-shirt slogans, of which there are plenty, the biggest culprits are the numerous arts’n’crafts retailers.

Before the internet, a lot of this stuff – the results of amateur pottery classes and the like – would have just been given to relatives or left to accumulate in cupboards and boxes. But now, the arguments against creating an online retail site for these efforts get weaker all the time as e-commerce gets easier. And it seems as though there’s a market out there for a lot of this twee, throwaway kind of stuff. That’s the “long tail” for you, I guess!

However critical I might sound in this post, though, I should point out that I’m not advocating the eradication of such sites from the internet. I’m just noting my vague fascination with this underbelly of online retail that I hadn’t really explored until today.

Yep, I’m a Windows Mobile user—although I may not be one for too much longer. It looks like there’s going to be a long wait for Windows Mobile 7 (I’m on version 6) and the new HTC/Google Android device has piqued my interest. But for the time being I’m stuck in WinMo world.

I was therefore glad to read that Skyfire, a Windows Mobile browser that’s been in private beta for several months, has now been released to the public. And although it’s still in beta, it’s pretty much complete.

Skyfire aims to provide a “real” web experience on a mobile handset. Rather than viewing (at best) mobile versions of sites or (at worst) the mangled results of mobile devices trying to display bad HTML/CSS code, Skyfire seeks to render sites in the same way as your desktop/laptop computer might. And from what I’ve been able to tell so far, it does this pretty well.

How does this work? Well, the rendering engine for Skyfire doesn’t actually reside on your mobile device itself – that would put way too much strain its CPU. Instead, your device only connects to one of Skyfire’s servers. That server then loads the web pages you request, renders them in full, and streams the rendered output down to your phone.

The server, of course, doesn’t have the same CPU limitations as your phone, and is therefore able to fully render web pages containing Flash and video. Even bad HTML & CSS code doesn’t cause it problems. It’s quite an interesting experience, seeing Flash and video run so well on a phone.

There is a downside, however. Server-side rendering takes a horrible strain on a phone’s battery life, and my HTC TyTN II is already struggling to last a whole day without charge. Also, if you’re not on an unlimited data plan, this could be a more expensive way to browse the web than simply using pocket IE.

So, although I’m pretty impressed by Skyfire, I think I’ll be restricting my use of it to when I’m on a wireless LAN and have my phone on charge.

• 310 – The World, Justified « Strange Maps
  From Strange Maps, cartography meets typography as a pair of Brazilian designers explore what the world would look like left- or right-aligned.
  (tags: visualisation maps)
• Very Small Array
  This site collects infographics of a slightly unusual or quirky nature, or with a particularly pleasing aesthetic. Recent posts include a graph charting the changing length of US #1 songs since 1950 and the sub-neighbourhoods of Greenpoint in Brooklyn.
  (tags: visualisation maps)

On Sunday my girlfriend and I were attempting to make it to BFI in time to watch Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but as a result of some Boris Johnson/Sky Sports-related event we became ensnarled in traffic and arrived ten minutes too late.

The BFI don’t show advertisements and don’t allow people in once a feature has started, so this put the kibosh on our plans. However, we took a look through the programme and noticed Love Letters and High Wires: Highlights from the GPO Film Unit.

Telecoms geeks will know what the GPO is—but not everyone is a telecoms geek. The GPO, or General Post Office, used to run both post and telecommunications in Britain, up until the creation of British Telecom in 1980. In the mid-1930s, the GPO set up its own film unit, and produced a series of public information films intended to educate the British population about its services.

This was a period when communications were being transformed in Britain – telephones were becoming near-ubiquitous and the postal service increasingly mechanised. A lot of people felt confused and uncertain about a lot of these technological advances and so there was a compelling motive for films of this nature to be produced.

The surprising thing about these public information films, though, isn’t the fact that they were made at all, but that they were of outstanding quality and originality. Among the eight short films we saw were examples of surrealist animation (Norman McLaren’s Love on the Wing), abstract use of found footage (Len Lye’s Trade Tattoo) and a fairy-tale approach to marketing Post Office savings accounts (Lotte Reiniger’s The Tocher).

Alongside these innovative pieces of work were some more traditional, but still fascinating, documentary films. Night Mail, the short film for which WH Auden’s poem was written, follows the Mail Special as it travels north from London to Glasgow. We see how nets sticking out from the side of the train are used to snatch up mailbags along the route without the train having to slow down (we were wondering, do they still do that? I hope so), and how the on-board sorters continually re-label the 48 pigeonholes they use with a different list of towns as they pass from region to region.

My two favourites, though, were both films with a more educational purpose. N or NW, a film by Len Lye, is the story of how a lovers’ tiff is nearly exacerbated by the incorrect application of a postcode (the guy thinks that Upper Street is in NW1 – shocking!) but ultimately resolved by the efficiency of the GPO. The Fairy of the Phone sees a spectral phone operator with crystal-clear diction provide advice and guidance on telephone usage to a number of confused characters. We are instructed on how to answer the phone, why it’s a bad idea to use outdated directories, how to dial ‘our friends on the continent’ and how long we should give someone else to answer our call. It’s not just informative, however, it’s extremely humorous, and I strongly recommend trying to track down a copy of it online.

That film got me thinking about how a modern equivalent might look. How would you personify the internet? What sort of advice would the personification would dish out? This made me think of AOL’s Connie (right), who would appear in television ads to sort out the (numerous) problems of AOL subscribers. She was the closest thing I could think of to the “Fairy of the Internet”, but to be honest she doesn’t really measure up to her predecessor.

• Star Polygon
  Slightly bizarre 3D shoot-em-up from Japan, quite similar to Space Harrier and so on. Built using Papervision, it runs in the browser and is pretty addictive
  (tags: games papervision)

This weekend everything here was moved from brelson.com/blog to brelson.com, and a couple of links summaries were missed as a result. So I’ve decided to post them manually instead…

Planet of the Lemur: 10 Beautiful Little-Known Species
Here are some excellent pictures of lemurs. My favourite is the crowned lemur.

They’ve opened up a Planet Organic on Essex Road. I went in there yesterday to see what was going on.

There was some free food on offer, a dry crumbly bread-like substance, but I’m too suspicious to comfortably take free stuff (“there must be a catch…”) so I gave it a miss.

While I was in the shop my boss called and I ended up having a phone conversation about quantitative user research while hanging around near some organically-farmed fish. What a cliché.

Modern retail design is science rather than an art, and companies like Planet Organic know what they’re doing. As predictable as one of Pavlov’s dogs, I ended up with a fairly full shopping basket.

While in the store the idea of making tacos had somehow entered my mind and this led to me fumbling for things like tortillas, tomato puree and crushed chillis. I even bought a yellow fin tuna steak. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with this.

When I got to the till I smiled wryly at a sign for the staff saying, “People are already trying to pay with counterfeit £50 notes – please look out”. Obviously the clash of cultures that became inevitable when Planet Organic decided to open a branch on Essex Road was already in full swing.

As my purchases were clocked up, the totals seemed a bit different from the prices on the items. Then I realised, they operate an American system of displaying prices without VAT, meaning that everything was in fact 17.5% more expensive than I’d originally thought. At that point I started wishing that I had some counterfeit £50 notes!

• Digital Nomads – Working Alone Sucks. Stop it!
  I only spend around 20-30% of my time working from home but can still sympathise with the sense of social alienation it would lead to if I did it much more. This article contains links to co-working initiatives for digital nomads who miss the social interactions of an office. I can see myself getting involved in such schemes if my working situation were to change and I was spending more time at home – my kitchen could serve as a comfortable office for three or four people, I reckon
  (tags: productivity coworking)
• Official Google Blog: The future of search
  Marissa Mayer of Google posts an insightful piece about where search might go in the next 10 years or more. Among the suggested directions are ideas coming from ubiquitous computing (the wearable device that continually runs searches for words it picks up in your conversations) as well as less far-fetched notions such as location-sensitive or rich media search. I get the feeling, however, that for a lot of these ideas, there's a pay-off between usefulness and privacy. For example, if Google knows where I am it can give me a much more useful answer to the query "sainsburys opening times". But do I want it to know where I am? Personally I anticipate that people will be less hung up on privacy than we might suspect – the recent past has shown that people are more than happy to surrender personal details as long as there's a tangible benefit for doing so…
  (tags: google search trends)
• Girl Turk: Mechanical Turk Meets Girl Talk's "Feed the Animals" – Waxy.org
  Interesting in-depth case study involving Amazon's Mechanical Turk. "Feed the Animals" is an album comprising samples from over 250 tracks. Andy Baio wanted to carry out some analysis on them and so went to Mechanical Turk. What follows is a fairly complex exercise in data aggregation and visualisation of data such as what years were most frequently sampled and how far through tracks samples were introduced. It makes me tempted to investigate Mechanical Turk further (and perhaps carry out a similar analysis on a mix I helped produce called All Cylinders).
  (tags: visualisation music mechanicalturk mashup)

• "This Changes Everything"
  A diatribe against lazy use of the phrase "this changes everything". Makes the accurate observation that this utterance often comes from people who are talking about things that their under-paid, under-30 interns and trainees have probably known about for ages. And they're wrong anyway, nothing really changes everything just as hardly anything changes nothing.
  (tags: futurism morans)

I don’t take issue with the broad thrust of Rawnet’s 2008 conversion report, which found that 78% of respondents had been put off companies or services by poor web usability. However, I do take issue with the quote from Adam Smith, their managing director:

“companies are losing out on a massive amount of potential business simply because their current web design agency has either focused too much on what looks great, or too much on non-essential technical features…”

This quote paints a misleading picture of web agencies working in isolation, free of input or direction from clients, who are in turn innocent victims who have unusable and design-heavy sites inflicted upon them. In practise, however, this very rarely happens. Clients tend to be deeply involved with the design process and must therefore assume ultimate responsibility for the successes and failures of their websites.

Why is this? Well, firstly, responsibility lies with the client because the client decides which agency to commission. The client decides scope, budget and timescales, and goes on to exercise power of sign-off on all major deliverables. And rightly so.

Why rightly so? Well, it’s not just due to the fact that they know their business and their customers more than the agency does. It’s also because it’s their business that will ultimately be impacted by the quality of the delivered site. If it’s successful, it will contribute to the growth of their business. If it fails, their business will suffer and customers will not express their dissatisfaction with the agency but instead with the company itself. So the fact that the client’s bottom line is at stake is a very compelling motivator for their wanting to be involved.

In my experience (although not on every project), agencies tend to put forward ideas for sites which are informed by an understanding of things like usability and accessibility. Clients approach web projects from various perspectives but chiefly from those of marketing and branding. With the DesignRush agency directory you can find the best help you need for your marketing strategy and branding service, you need to work with a professional as this is the first impression to make it memorable on the consumers and it allows them to know what to expect of your company and appeal them to come back. There are many areas that are used to develop a brand including advertising, customer service, promotional merchandise and all of them can be worked by a digital agency.

Most successful web projects result from a productive synthesis of these two sets of interests, and any implication that clients aren’t involved in the process—and therefore aren’t responsible when things go wrong—is highly inaccurate.