danliveshere.com

A Month With The iPad

Dan — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:15:00 +0000

So it’s been roughly a month since I’ve had the Apple iPad. Unlike the iPhone, I wasn’t anticipating this release. Well, that’s not true… when the rumors were swirling, I was extremely excited. When the announcement came, I was less excited. I, along with others, see this as a replacement for something. I was already mobile with my iPhone and this wasn’t going to be powerful enough to replace my MacBook Pro. So what was the tablet going to be used for? I decided it would be wise for the Trail Blazers if I got one to understand the hype and see how our business could apply to the use of the iPad, for both engagement with fans and for our own internal business purposes. Once getting the device, my eyes were opened up. A lot of people that haven’t used an iPad very much rightfully say “It’s just a big iPod touch”. The key word in there is BIG. The screen is amazing. The iPhone changed behavior, consuming/engaging with content and the full web, **ehem excuse me, the flashless web, wherever and whenever you wanted. It made some interactions possible that was difficult before or impossible (geo aware services, GPS, up to the second Twit Pics, mobile broadcasting). You could do some of these things, but you had to have a laptop strapped to your back at all times. The iPad is about changing the presentation of the content. You are now able to view multiple pieces of content (video and written word) in a presentation that doesn’t make you multitask in each one of the apps. I don’t think we’ve seen too many apps that have pushed the presentation yet (I like what the NPR app does, Popular Science app) and I’ll do another post with the apps that I’ve found to be good and bad, but that is on the software developers to create those experiences. The hardware that is there (especially the real estate) to make completely new experiences available. With being able to consume more content at once, the viewing of video is amazing. It is a completely different experience than what I’ve had before. We have a 46″ screen at home (great for communal viewing), I’ve been streaming shows to my laptop for a couple of years ago (anyone remember the Venice Project, aka Joost when it was in beta), and have watched many of episodes of The Wire and The Office on my iPhone. This experience is more intimate. I control where the screen is, what angle, how far to hold it from my face. I don’t have to have to concede watching Ugly Betty, there’s no keyboard to remind me I’m on a computer and the screen is a size where I’m not leaning in the whole time to block out the rest of my peripheral vision. The iPad makes this a unique experience that I can see a lot more solitary watching of movies/shows in the future. (Yeah, who knew we could find a way to NOT talk to each other more in the household when it comes to media). Side note, I would get a stand or something for the iPad on the lap if you are watching a lot of video on it as your arms might get tired after 3 hours. Reading books have actually been surprisingly good. I have a Kindle and love it. Or loved it. It felt like I was reading a book with the E Ink technology, so I was skeptical about iPad’s backlit screen. That’s actually been one of the strengths. With a Kindle you need a light to read at night. I can dim the screen on the iPad way down at night so it doesn’t bother anyone else, but I can still read the screen. I haven’t had any sort of eye strain after reading 5 hours straight and after 15 minutes I forgot I was reading on a computer. Between Kindle and the Apple Books app, that’ll be for another review, but most of my books are on Kindle and they have some nice features in that app that I enjoy. I also have made a concerted effort to use the iPad as a laptop replacement. I’m able to use a bluetooth keyboard seamlessly and great success, however, there isn’t a great way to navigate without touching the screen. I know that’s the point of the touch screen, but if you’re using a keyboard with it, it would be nice to have “Command+tab” to be able to cycle through things. (Side note about navigation, I’ve found myself about to touch my laptop screen as a way to navigation or close things out, it is just more natural). The rest of my experience using this as a laptop replacement is pretty good. Web Surfing has been solid. I haven’t run into too many sites that have been inaccessible due to flash. The speed is really good, however my iPad suffers from bad WiFi connectivity in places my laptop and iPhone don’t have issues. One of the components that I bought for the iPad was the External VGA Video Connection Kit. Don’t buy it. Wait. This only works with apps that have unlocked this feature. You can’t mirror your iPad display to a larger monitor (you should be able to do this). I currently run my MacBook Pro with an external monitor when I’m at work and love the extra space. Why not allow that for the iPad? You can’t play iTunes movies on your Flat Screen TV (DRM issues), or any other VGA monitor that I could get my hands on. The only apps that work so far: YouTube, Keynote (for presentations) and Image Slide Shows. That’s it. If you know of others, put them in the comments… I would love to check them out because the Connection Kit is useless right now. Word Processing is pretty good with Pages. I have yet to print something here at our office because navigating our network printers is a nightmare. I have cranked out several proposals using the blue tooth keyboard and haven’t missed MS Word at all on my MacBook Pro. Being able to export to Page Format, PDF or MS Word .doc has come in handy. And the new iwork.com has been easy to use, but there should be some Google Doc integration or plugin that you can export to. I know that this would be in direct competition, but would go a long way. I also would like to see some sort of file structure that I can save and open all sorts of file types. Right now there are a couple of apps out there that does this, but the cost is somewhat expensive. In fact, that has been a gripe. There wasn’t a lot of QA that went into apps that were released for iPad when it first came out. TONS of bugs and several html coding apps just didn’t work and were $9.99 (CodeMonkey and HTML Edit to name two). There needs to be a trial period for these apps if their price is going to be over $4.99. You can plunk down $30 on apps and still not have something that works. You have to rely on user reviews on the App Store and sometimes those aren’t the most reliable… I know, people lie on the internet, crazy… Being an early adopter it is understandable to run into glitches. Totally get it. But if the Apple Store is going to really scrutinize the apps that go up, let’s make sure they work. And please, add a trial version for software. The presentation of the hardware and what it can do is amazing. It will be up to the apps to determine how useful this will be now and in the future. In fact, my Facebook consumption has dropped off dramatically because there is no Facebook app. I have found myself engaging with Twitter more (TweetDeck looks great on iPad, freezes a ton though) because of so many more apps out there to try out. This just seems like a miss for Facebook. You have to remember “Oh yeah, I should check Facebook now”… and pull up Safari surf over to FB and login. As opposed to it being right there as an icon. The iPhone app ported over to iPad is a poor replacement. It doesn’t utilize the screen size that iPad brings. This is what kickstarts me again in getting us at the Trail Blazers to do at least one Trail Blazers mobile app (with an iPad specific version). In the future, this is how people will engage with your brand. There will still be an online component… but an app has the ability to be mobile, and a consistent experience that reminds people to engage with you. Our e-commerece will be done through the app, our community building, content creation and consumption because it provides a better experience. After a month I’ve learned for 90% of the populace, you can get an iPad and use that as your primary computer. You can surf, email, word process, blog, minor photo editing/sharing and other typical computer tasks. When I had to jump into coding and graphic creation I had to get on the MacBook Pro. I’m not the typical computer person though. I pound on my laptop pretty heavily, so if I was able to sparingly use my laptop, I think most will be really happy with the iPad. Check out apps, there are some amazing ones (BTW my EA Sports Madden Football for iPhone looks better for iPad than iPhone, I can’t wait for the next edition). Don’t get the connector kit, do get a bluetooth keyboard. The 1 millionth iPad was just sold (faster time period than the iPhone) so this is going to evolve. I think it will evolve quickly as more apps push the envelope on what you can do on it. I will do another post that includes what I think we can do with the iPad here at the Trail Blazers and would love to hear your input.

LL Cool J – Radio, My First Record (yes, record)

Dan — Tue, 04 May 2010 00:45:13 +0000

Artist: LL Cool J
Album: Radio
Release Date: 1985
Label: Def Jam

LL Cool J radio was the first record I owned. I was given it to me by an older friend of mine, Mike Linn when I was in the fourth grade. I didn't know that much about LL (knew about his label mates Run DMC and the Beastie Boys) but this was his debut album, and I was in the 4th grade. It was hard to find out about New York Hip-Hop in Sacramento in the mid-80's. Let alone for a 4th grader, but there I was, shiny new wax of "Radio".

The track listing is amazing. Truly a work of art from producer Rick Rubin. Sometimes this album is overshadowed by Raising Hell and License to Ill. But this album was about one guy, one DJ and a lot of samples.

My Video Interview on The Row Show

Dan — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:22:11 +0000

I was able to do an interview with the guys at Row27 on their VCasted show: The Row Show. This is their 5th episode and I’m really impressed with not only their content (Interactive Sports Marketing Tips) but the production is killer. Nice After Effects (I think) transitions and graphics. Just like websites, it isn’t all about the design, it’s about the content that goes in the design… but the design helps augment the content. This can be said about their show. We discuss Live Video Streaming, CoverItLive for live blogging during the playoffs, the relaunch of iamatrailblazersfan.com, passive engagement vs active engagement, how Toyota’s Hybrid Social Net (preview blog post) was an inspiration for a feature in the iama and more. After watching the interview, things I learned, I talk a lot. I think I need to work on having a dialogue. We used Skype and the audio got a little funky. Sometimes I looked like I was in a 70’s Kung Fu movie. I look tired. Man, that was right before Game 6 and we had been up consistently until 2am getting stuff done for the site. Big props to Jason and Jonathan for showing the intiative and starting this. Thanks for reaching out. Let me know anytime you would like a guy that talks a lot, looks tired and will try to throw his voice. I know a guy. Episode 005: Dan Harbison of the Portland Trail Blazers from Jonathan Dusing on Vimeo.

USA Today Article

Dan — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:46:37 +0000

danstwitter badge

This past weekend I did an interview via email with Arian Karimian for USA Today about Twitter. He created an article and posted it online, here’s a link. It was interesting to remember why we started using Twitter and seeing now where we’re at. We started using Twitter in 2007 right after we got the #1 pick in the NBA Draft. Immediately I knew we would be getting a TON of more traffic to the site. I wanted to create an extremely robust experience for new fans that were curious about the team. The big question that people would be coming to ask, Will it be Oden or Durant. I went to the guys at Substance and asked, how fast can we create a microsite for this subject. The guys at Substance rocked and created an amazing microsite that took about 14 days to create. One of the features was a Twitter Feed. I had heard about Twitter, but saw the application for us immediately when they framed it in the site. It totally makes sense as a way to pull back the curtain and let them know what is going on, especially during closed door events like draft workouts. Back in 2007, there wasn’t @replies, only broadcasting. But as soon as those became functional bringing in conversation into the application made sense. We had a period where we didn’t use it as much as we do now, but I would say 50% of our Tweets now are @ replies. Another feature that wasn’t around in 2k7 was Twitpics and the like. A picture tells 1,000 words, let alone 140 characters. If that was available during the draft, that would have gone a long way.

Our Twitter Badge

We plan on continuing Tweeting, during the playoffs we’re using it to keep the conversation going with fans and also promotion different pieces of engaging content on our site (like live game blogging, play-by-play modules, and post game live video stream). We’ve promoted the hashtag #uprise and you can see the Tweets from the people using it to showcase if they’re talking about Trail Blazers Playoffs 2009. I see us continue to use Twitter and integrating it more into the design of trailblazers.com and especially the new version of our social network iamatrailblazersfan.com. Being able to push content out of iama, or bring Tweets in is a project for the summer to get ready for the 09-10 season. Seeing such a mainstream influx of Twitter users (1,382% year over year in February) we’ll need to incorporate the ease of use of that platform into iama. Even for my own sake, I don’t want to have to update two or three different sites. I want to update one, Twitter, and have that update iama and Facebook. Or vice versa, update Iama and have that update Twitter and Facebook. I wonder about Twitter being such a mainstream phenomenon. I think that a lot of people are going to check it out, see their favorite celebrity Tweeting and leave about a couple of months. I’ve heard a lot of people that “don’t get it”. Not all people are content contributors. Even celebrities aren’t content contributors unless it is good content. Now you’ll be more engaged in the mundane content that they create (ate some cake for example) than a random person, but after awhile, that won’t become interesting. That’s why Shaq has been so successful. He’s an interesting person. He writes interesting content. Not all people can carry that… that’s why when people really really want our players to Tweet. If they can’t do it consistently or make it interesting, I don’t see why they would want to on either side. Here’s an old post from June 2007 about using Twitter.

This Fatboy is always good for presentations…

Dan — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:58:47 +0000

I’m sure some of you have watched this. It has been floating around for awhile, but I was reminded of it when I was on Pat Coyle’s blog today. You forget how many times this Fat Boy Slim song is used for things like this, but I still actually like it.

Not Big Into Tag Clouds – But I Do Like Wordle

Dan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:49:13 +0000

Wordle.net

I’ve never been into sloppy Tag Clouds. They always seem to be organized, but really not usable. They might look cool, but I never use them to actually navigate someones site. Really, that’s too bad as tagging is a great way to actually help your readers know what you’re talking about. Thanks to Pat Coyle for the heads up about this link. It is a site that creates a cloud or a visual representation based on indexing your site. It isn’t about tagging or having you organize anything. It is just a visual representation on what you talk about. That is what tag clouds are really. A display on what you talk about, not really a mode of navigation. I like this better as it is indexing and pulling out the topics you talk about on a regular basis, not just 10 tags or so that you use a lot. Go ahead, make your own Wordle. It’s a pretty cool Java app. If you’re on a Mac, use Safari instead of FireFox or Flock. Just a heads up. Leave me a comment with a link to your own Wordle, I would love to see them.

Innovative Approach/Design to Blogging

Dan — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:27:09 +0000

I’m always on the lookout for new and innovative designs for sites. I think that is one of the many things that always intrigues me about the web. When people combine art with functionality. I’ve seen plenty of sites that make you just go, ummm what? “What does this do?” “Why am I here?” or “How do I get this to do something… oh look something shiny!” I do really enjoy when I find a site that really shines in functionality and design. (This is why I dig the guys at Substance so much. They do a great job saddling the two concepts, design vs function). I found about a cool site through a ’round about way. @richjoslin posted a link to a design blog in a FriendFeed room “Web Design, The Good The Bad, The Ugly”. The design blog is called Cult Foo. They have a compliation of a bunch of different sites to check out. If you have 1/2 hour to kill, check it out (the tag cloud, literally, on the top with the fixed position and use of .png transparency is a nice touch). One of the site on there is what inspired me to write this post – Digiguru. Digiguru is the blog/portfolio site for Craig Jaimeson in South Africa, a flash and front end designer. The site that he created is a full flash one with a clean calendar interface. It has several nice touches including Full Screen, permalinks using SWFAdress and smooth transitions. The site functions well, and allows him to create large graphics to convey his message instead of typing a bunch of paragraphs. I like this approach because if he doesn’t want to write a large dissertation, he doesn’t have to. That is where I feel blogging is difficult, writing something that matters. This is a simple way to convey a message, and if you need to add some text so you understand what the message is, so be it. I would love to see is some sort of further organizing on the site. Either a tag cloud or even a stream of titles of posts so you know what some context the content is about. There aren’t any room for comments. This might be a tough thing to handle, but I think a timeline, or some way to inject two way communication would be spot on. I would love to see if this could be an open source project. Now that would be cool. Be able to distribute this as a blogging engine/presentation engine… hell, I would even pay some cash for it. Not a ton, under $50, but if he’s looking to recoup his investment. Let me know of other sites that have inspired you, as I’m always on the lookout.

Social Design Blog bokardo.com

Dan — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:15:33 +0000

I try to keep the number of RSS Feeds that I subscribe to a minimum. I have read about people like Robert Scoble that read some insane number of RSS Feeds a day, I just don’t have time. I find that if don’t read the RSS feed in over a month, I dump it. I look it almost like subscribing to someone’s email list. If I haven’t read their email in awhile, I should really unsubscribe… unless it is IMPOSSIBLE to unsubscribe (I’m looking in your direction eHarmony… subscribed for purely research purposes, I swear). A blog I have recently subscribed to their RSS feed and have been extremely happy with is the blog bokardo.com. Written by Joshua Porter/a>, author of Designing For the Social Web, the blog details examples of good and bad design throughout sites that are in the Social Web space (ie Web 2.0 sites). Below is an example of his review of the homepage of Freshbook’s homepage.

I still need to pick up his book which was recommended to me by David at Substance. This is a space that I continue to look at for inspiration. A lot of the social networks and social sites that have been built out have been built with development in mind, but the experience or UI is secondary. How will people use the cutting edge functionality that your company has invested in if your design and UI was the last thing that you looked at, and didn’t invest really any money or time in… that is a bridge that a lot of people like to cross after they have gone live with their site. I think this is a mistake. In this day in age, there are so many sites out there, first to market IS extremely important, but having your users understand how to use it is equally important. If you turn people off once they get there, you’ll have a hard time with them being a regular user. Then your competitive advantage is wasted because you will have to rehaul your design and relaunch. This approach is how we are looking at iamatrailblazersfan.com v2.0. We’re bringing in a lot of new features, so our UI and design needed to be really solid to support these features and to make it easy for people. The team at Substance has been amazing and I’m really excited to bring their designs to life over the summer. We will learn a lot once we get live, but if we just went with some generic skins, the Trail Blazers brand wouldn’t sing in the site and fans would become frustrated. We will of course need to change, evolve and learn once we go live, that is inevitable. BUT, because we took the extra time with the UI, I believe (and the focus groups we’ve held believe) that this will a design that will support the community.

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Tags: socialnetworks, iamatrailblazersfan.com, substance

Oh Where Is The New Music?

Dan — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:25:45 +0000

For those that have known me for some time, you know that I’m passionate about music. I used to work in radio for a number of years and even got to put my 2 cents in for the programming KNRK for a little while. The biggest chunk of programming came when I picked all the music, elements and interviews on my own show (the Warped Hours). I did a 2 hour punk/hip-hop show that got great ratings on Friday nights. I loved doing the show but found my life getting too hectic between my day job, building a family and eating… so I stopped doing the show. One site that I used to use a lot (sometimes even more than what the “labels” would send me) was 3hive.com. I was turned on to it by Sean Ziebarth from Nitro Records who used to write for it. Well, fast forward two years and I’ve found a void in my life – listening to NEW music. I find it really, really hard to find new music that I instantly like. I think it is really difficult to find music that you haven’t heard before, but have it relevant to you. The closest has been listening to Pandora and Last.FM. I LOVE Pandora, and I LIKE last.fm, however I still think that I find myself hearing a lot of music that either doesn’t hit the nail on the head, or hearing songs in which I like. But they’re songs I’ve heard. Re-enter 3hive.com. On a whim today I went to check out the site today. Wow, I miss going there on a regular basis. I listened to a hip-hop producer today that goes by Rench. Here is the write-up. Bluegrass vs Hip-Hop (the album is called Gangstagrass, download it here). There was a song awhile ago by Aesop Rock f. Slug called I’ll Be Ok that uses a bluegrass harmonica to help with the casual hip-hop beats. This takes it a step further. Heavy sampling of country, bluegrass with fiddles and hits it with some solid lyrics. Is it my new fave, perhaps. Probably not. But the fact that it is something NEW and I would never have heard about it if it weren’t for 3hive. Another Northern Cali group, Meanest Man Contest is on there as well. I’ve been listening to “I Was Only Kidding.” Great spring, summer chill song. This is why radio will die in the long run. They simply don’t have the flexible inventory to be tailored made for me. All the music stations currently in Portland get little to no listening by me. Why, 99% of their songs are irrelavant to me. I then listen to talk, NPR and talk radio. Seriously, I want to listen to new music on the radio and some side channel HD station isn’t going to cut it. It is still linear. It isn’t based on my preferences. Satelite radio has more options, but I find that to run into the same problem. Lack of flexibility to tailor make their product to you. And on the internet, that is what you get, exposure to new music that usually hits that nail. << I think that was a 2 Live Crew Song. If you have a favorite online site, let me know, I would love to hear about it. Maybe I’ve heard about it, but maybe it’ll help find bands like Rench, Meanest Man Contest, Loot Pack and others I’ve found thanks to 3hive.com.

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Tags: new, music, hip-hop, blogs

Mobile Social Networking?

Dan — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 06:54:54 +0000

Great post on TechCrunch today talking about the future of social networking (I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day) Mike Arrington talks about a company that he has seen that could be diving into waters that Facebook and MySpace have yet to fully embrace, Mobile Social Networking. Yes, there are mobile version of both of these sites, but neither harness the power of your mobile phone. The mobile phone is an amazing device that continues to get crazy cooler as the months go by. Not once have I ever regretted waiting in line and dropping cash on my iphone. There are few things these days that I at least don’t double guess myself from purchasing later (ahem, Netflix… at times). Back to my point… mobile phones are no longer your phone, they are your microcomputer. You can do a run a ton of apps on your smartphone that eliminate having to use your laptop. So this is quickly becoming a replacement in someways, and in others an augmentation to people’s digital experience (web, video, photos email). If you have this microcomputer everywhere, why not have your web experience be in relation to where you are at. You see more and more mobile phones tying in GPS (Boost does this, iPhones Google Maps has a triangulation feature). Having contextual information of the people that you are having online relationships while you are interacting physically. Arrington’s thoughts:

Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting – quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

So picture being in arena at a Trail Blazers game and you fire up your iPhone. You are able to do a multitude of things on your phone, watch instant replays from different angles than what was on the big screen, get coupons for the merch store, and firing up your social network to see who in the arena is there that night. A map comes up and shows all your friends’ thumbnails and where they’re sitting in relation to you… so you can say “hey”! You could also see in general others at the game that you might not have met yet, or the guy who sits next to you that you’ve become friends with is on iamatrailblazersfan.com, but you never knew. The game operations people can see use this to create a better experience based on the psychographics of the people in the arena that night. A snapshot of tonight’s crowd might say that 85% of the people sitting there that night are fans of Jay-Z, so they’ll play more Jay-Z that night. All of this could be possible. It sounds like Arrington saw a start-up that is harnessing the iPhone SDK to make this happen. I’m really excited to see what happens. I really think this could be an awesome addition to existing social networks for Facebook, LinkedIN, MySpace, Flickr and also niche sites like our iamatrailblazersfan.com or MyColts.net. Having something like this only available for one phone is a problem. It would need to be cross carrier/cross model. Alas, that is a problem with our system in the states, standardization is lousy on mobile phones. That’s for another post.