Quick entry, just to let everyone know what I’ve been doing. (Because clearly, you don’t get enough of that from my twittering.) June has been insufferably eventful, perhaps more so than previous months because I can’t seem to focus on any one thing and have been pirouetting ungracefully between Client Work, Company Work, Hobby Work and Beer for most of this period.

I brought back Highfiber.org two weeks ago, and earlier today I overhauled most of the layouts on Octales.com. Over the past two weeks, syndeo::media has bought a whole mess of new machines too – 2 Macbooks and 2 Macbook Pro’s – so there’s been a lot of installin’ and configurin’ going on. This is particularly impressive when you consider that I bought the 4 machines from 3 different dealers, each in a different city. We’ll probably be selling our old ones pretty soon, but at the moment the machines outnumber the humans two to one. Oh, and Tim joined us formally two weeks ago too, so we’re now 8 people total. Tim’s not a machine, btw. (I’ll resist the obvious introvert-programmer joke here.)

Earlier in the month, I spent some time learning how to deal with the effects of Tanduay Rhum, which is information that I hope to never use again. I also learned a little about Domain Keys, SPF, and ImageMagick, and captured and edited my very first videocast with ScreenFlow. None of those things had anything to do with rhum though. (The final screenflow video was posted on Youtube. I’m not linking to it formally because it was meant to be an Octales demo, and my recent layout changes have rendered it obsolete. Go, me.)

Saw The Incredible Hulk (good), The Happening (ugh) and Wanted (so-so), went to Mogwai twice (both times failing to do what we had set out to do there). Listened to the new Coldplay (great), the new Sigur Ros (really great) and the new Ladytron (good, but gay). Drove to Subic just to try out the new expressway, attended the first Philippine Pecha Kucha night, spent waaay too much money on comics at Fully Booked (3 weekends = over PhP8k worth of new reads), and spent way too many Saturday nights at the frickin’ Meatshop along Katipunan. June’s event highlight was last week’s visit to Fely J’s, GB5 though; good food and good company.

This is probably old news to many of you by now, but I got highfiber.org up and running again 5 days ago (version double-zero, for anyone keeping count), after receiving an unexpected number of comments about it on my previous entry. I made the decision to bring it back, appropriately, on Friday the 13th and proceeded to throw it together over the weekend. By Tuesday we were online, although issues with our hosting prevented me from stabilizing the app until mid-Wednesday.

I really missed these binges. Every version of highfiber was written in a literal fit of coding fury, and there’s nothing quite like the adrenaline high of building something you love. I used to lock myself up for days (sometimes weeks) at a time to design and build, confident in the fact that when I emerged I’d have a wicked new site that’d blow everyone’s mind. This new version is a little more humble I guess; I’ve gotten older and a lot more aware of my shortcomings. At the same time, I’ve come to appreciate certain truths about online community websites, which is what has been guiding most of the architectural decisions for this version.

Here’s a couple of them, for anyone interested in this sort of thing.

1. Graphic design isn’t important. Lots of social networks fall all over themselves to be really snazzy and flashy and noisy, and for the most part, they just completely miss the point. With social networks, the primary focus should be the user-interactions, and making sure they occur in the smoothest way possible. What it looks like basically matters fuck-all; if their friends are there, people will come. (If anything, the graphic design should be as understated and unassuming as possible, because you want people to concentrate on the content.)

2. Being unique is important. Although Highfiber is a forum at its core, it has a couple of flourishes that make the HF experience singular online. The patting/poking system has gone a long way towards embodying what this site is all about, and the rules of what a user can or cannot do based on his current score is almost like an ongoing experiment in micro-scale socio-economics.

3. Being stable isn’t important; communicating with your members is. To a certain extent, users will forgive downtime as long as you explain what’s going on. None of my sites have ever been known for their stability, so the broadcast bar is usually one of the first pieces of admin functionality I write.

4. You won’t get it right the first few times. One of the hardest things to accept for me back when I was just starting out was why some of my ideas worked and some didn’t. A lot of the time I would rationalize it by saying that people just “didn’t get it” — it was their loss, not mine. Now I know a little better. The truth is, your ideas are only as good as your audience’s acceptance of them. (The corollary to this rule is: “Choosing the right audience for the right idea is pretty frickin’ important too.”)

These days, my strategy is really simple. I release a build that represents my best guess at solving a particular problem, then pay lots of attention to how people react to it. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and people will be very vocal about their feelings; other times, you have to infer it from behavioral patterns. Either way, you need to be flexible enough to move on your learnings.

Case in point: my current experiment on double-zero involves adding a cost for every comment. Essentially, a user is charged one point (or more) every time they post a comment, which decreases their overall score. I won’t expound on the reasons for this particular solution just yet, but it’ll be interesting to see how people maneuver with the new rule in place.

Lastly: thanks to everyone who left comments on my last blog entry. I’m amazed, impressed, humbled and a little scared of your fervent devotion to this community, and I hope double-zero eventually meets all of your expectations. Here’s to another 7 years of highfiber!

Octales was in the news today, kind of:

After several failed attempts to create a compelling social networking service in the past, a co-founder of a Philippines-based software startup is finally attracting several local investors to bet on a relatively new idea: a real-time, collaborative storytelling social service.

Not exactly the most flattering portrayal (of what is invariably the truth, so it’s not like I’m denying it or anything), but I suppose beggars can’t be choosers, as they say. Interestingly, one of the old-school highfiber members took issue with the notion that highfiber.org was a failure. I suppose if it were possible to evaluate success solely on the rabid nature of a website’s visitors, then yeah, HF was pretty successful. On the other hand, its charm was mostly because of the fact that it felt really underground and obscure, so “unbridled success” just wasn’t in its DNA.

Also, I always find it strange when people refer to me by my last name, e.g.:

Buenaventura said Octales hopes to differentiate itself because it is more interactive than rival social networking services.

Maybe I should come up with a shorter, catchier name like “Bono” or “Cher.”

So I’m now on my 3rd summer movie from my list of 15, and thus far the only one I’ve really enjoyed is Iron Man. Speed Racer was total crap, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – the film I had such high hopes for – was only marginally better. The following is my attempt to itemize the various creative and conceptual issues I had with this fourth installment, and to build the case that this was overall the worst of the series. (If you haven’t seen Indy IV yet, you will probably want to skip the rest of this article, although to be very honest, I think I’d be doing you a favor if I spoiled it.)

1. The Whole Ancient Aliens Premise. Here’s the thing guys. We’re living in a post-X-Files world. We’ve seen Stargate and its various TV offspring. If you’re going to decide that you want to tell us a story about prehistoric alien settlers, you’re gonna have to get a writer who’s a lot less burned-out than George Lucas, and ideally, does a little bit more research on what other people have already said and done in this crowded sub-genre. For crying out loud, they used that ancient-aliens plot in AVP!
2. Shia, King of the Apes. Remember that sequence in Spider-man 3, where Tobey Maguire dons emo threads and struts like an epileptic? Well, Shia’s jungle-vine swinging sequence felt a lot like that. It was so jarringly unbelievable that, had this been a perfectly decent movie, it would have singlehandedly ruined the whole thing. (Of course, it turns out that Indy IV was positively riddled with issues, so it’s hardly unique in that regard.)
3. Warriors popping out of the temple walls. Wait … we saw this trick in The Mummy Returns 6 years ago, didn’t we? Lucas should know. His company created the visual effects for it.
4. Underground city of gold fills up with water. And I’m pretty sure we saw this exact same sequence in National Treasure 2 less than a year ago as well.
5. Our treasure is … knowledge! And believe it or not, we’ve seen this humdinger as well, 14 years ago in a made-for-TV movie called MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis. I’ve been hunting around for the precise quote, but it doesn’t appear to be anywhere online. A number of other reviewers have made the MacGyver-Indy connection here and here though.

Now, I’ve been a fan of Indiana Jones for as long as I can remember. I’ve often argued that these newer high-adventure movies – National Treasure, The Mummy, Sahara, Fool’s Gold, etc. – are just feeble attempts at recreating the magic of the original Indy trilogy. Nicholas Cage, Brendan Fraser and Matthew McConaughey’s characters in those movies are just facets of Harrison Ford’s, who still plays the reckless, intelligent, wry adventurer better than all of these other hacks put together.

The biggest disappointment to me is that this fourth installment saw what was once the pinnacle of the genre, cribbing notes from its lesser brethren. It’s interesting to note that the parts that made me smile or laugh or sigh were the bits that directly referenced the first three films, e.g., Shia chuckling at the end of a motorcycle chase, and Indy shaking his head disapprovingly – an allusion to a similar scene in The Last Crusade with Indy and his father. If you watch at Star Wars Episodes I through III, you’ll notice a very similar style of pseudo-parodical humor throughout that set of films as well. Lucas, it seems, has lost his ability to come up with anything new, and has fallen back on cheap, self-referential jokes to pander to the fans.

I wonder if he realizes that he is slowly ruining every movie I loved as a child? If Lucas announces a Willow 2, I am going to kill myself.

RottenTomatoes recently came out with a very nice feature on the upcoming feature films for the period of May to August 2008 (referred to as “summer” in other countries, although it’s decidedly a bit more wet than that here). The article linked above is a lot more comprehensive than this one, but I’m a busy guy and I’m assuming that the people that read this blog will not have the time to watch every single summer movie coming out this year. So below is my list of must- and will-probably-see movies over the next four months, compressed to suit my tastes and summarized to fit your available time:

Iron Man, May 2nd.

Not much to say about this one other than it was a high watermark for superhero movies, and kicked off the season with an arc-reactor-powered bang.

Speed Racer, May 9th.

The only reason why I even mention this movie is because I thought I’d give the Wachowskis another chance and saw Speedy on his opening night. This movie is about as bad as it gets — cliche-ridden (or I should say, driven) plot, seriously bizarre production design, camera work that tries to be funky and just ends up clunky … the list goes on. The races themselves are alright, but I can’t say they’re any more or less memorable than your average Fast and the Furious fare.

Prince Caspian, May 16th.

The sequel to Narnia has been thus far getting some pretty good reviews, and although I didn’t love the first picture, I’m willing to give this one a shot. (Note that the Philippines will be getting this movie a few weeks late; possibly after Indy IV.)

Indiana Jones IV, May 22nd.

I have already made up my mind that I will love Indy IV, and I am counting mostly on Steven Spielberg to bring this one home. (George Lucas, you better not screw me again.)

Postal, May 22nd (likely sometime in mid-June over here).

I’ll see this one if I can drag some friends along with me. I played the video game for all of 30 minutes before getting tired of the tongue-in-cheek political-incorrectness but maybe Uwe Boll can come up with something witty and compelling. Or, more likely, something totally insipid and obtuse, and I’ll laugh my ass off watching it.

The Happening, June 13th.

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest twist-fest should be interesting to see. Say what you will about his recent self-indulgences (The Village and Lady in the Water were twisty piles of crap), but all Shyamalan movies consistently have really great acting and really stellar cinematography. Sometimes, it’s enough.

Incredible Hulk, June 13th.

Please, oh please, Edward Norton, don’t let me down.

Wall-E, June 27th.Pixar makes a sci-fi. How can I not love this?

Wanted, June 27th.

Angelina Jolie as an evil Lara Croft. Well, not exactly, but she holds her guns exactly the same way. The comic this was based on was a brilliant piece of nihilist writing, but I don’t really expect any of that to translate to the movie. Mostly you’ll watch this for the stunts and some snarky dialogue between Jolie and James McAvoy.

Hellboy 2, July 11th (probably on the 16th or 23rd here).

Director del Toro has been churning out some real gems since the first Hellboy (he directed Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006 and produced The Orphanage in 2007) so I’m expecting this sequel to top the first. Mignola’s comic books have always been a bit of a strange brew and del Toro shouldn’t find himself bereft of weird story material to throw at us.

The Dark Knight, July 18th.

There are a couple of things I was hoping for with Chris Nolan’s sequel: 1) Better action sequences (you could tell that Nolan had never previously directed fight scenes in Batman Begins), and 2) No more Katie Holmes. I already got the latter.

X-Files 2, July 25th (probably in early August here).

I remember watching the pilot episode of X-Files on RPN 9 back when I was in grade school (this was in 1993), and it scared the living crap out of me. I followed the show for about 4 seasons before it started to really meander, but I dutifully watched the movie like any loyal fan when it came out in 1998. Now it’s 2008, a whole decade later, and Mulder and Scully have returned. I am awed more by the passage of time than anything else, which is why I’ll see this movie no matter what.

Midnight Meat Train, August 1st (probably on the 6th here, if this ever makes it past the MTRCB)

Clive Barker’s serial killer short story is brought to the screen by Ryuhei Kitamura (known to geekboys as the director of Versus). A match made in heaven? We’ll see. Personally, I’m happy to see this as an uncut, extended bittorrent edition if the local movie review board blocks it.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, August 15th.

There are a couple of reasons to watch this movie, and I’m going to completely avoid the obvious “Because It’s Star Wars, Stupid.” The first is that I seriously love Kilian Plunkett’s character design (I first noticed his work on the graphic novel Unknown Soldier back in 98, and again in Superman: Red Son in 2004).  The second reason is that the Clone Wars movie is essentially a 90-minute commercial for the animated TV series starting in October this year, which will be followed by a live-action TV series in 2010. Hey, and we like commercials right?

The International, August 15th (probably on the 20th or 27th here).

Clive Owen as an international secret agent. Naomi Watts as his damsel-in-distress. Seems like a winning combination to me. 

I had an interesting micro-debate with @digitalfilipino on twitter yesterday that got me thinking about blogs and their rather sordid relationship with mainstream media. At the heart of the discussion was this article involving writer Luis Teodoro’s comments about how journalists need to set an example for bloggers to follow. Specifically: many bloggers tend to be irresponsible with the way they write about news. Now, naturally this is the kind of statement that would invariably incense the blogging community, although I am of the opinion that Teodoro was mostly correct.

I will bet any amount of cash that upwards of 99% of all bloggers will never double-check any of their facts beyond looking at Google or Wikipedia for some external site to link to (preferably another blog, as there’s a greater chance of a linkback). “99%” sounds pretty close to “many” to me.

But this lack of proper, accurate reportage in the blogosphere is a subset of a much larger condition, i.e., the Internet itself. When people salivate about  how the Internet has “lowered the barriers” for everyone, they focus mostly on the good side of said barrier-lowering, which is that people now have (mostly) free access to copious amounts of information. There is a less good side though, in that people are now able to generate copious amounts of information as well. The Internet has lowered the barriers of information exchange to the point where everyone can participate. And when I say “everyone,” I actually mean “anyone.” Even those people whose work should never see the light of day are able to publish themselves online, and the overall level of quality is invariably decreased by the amount of unbridled crap that is generated. Mainstream media, on the other hand, has a much higher barrier to entry (e.g., you have to go to J-school, must be accepted by a large, established organization, must answer to several levels of editorship and an ombudsman, etc.). Because the quality control is more stringent, the product is almost always of a higher-grade.

We talk about this in relation with blogs because they’re an easy target, but generally speaking, everything the web touches experiences this phenomenon of Explosive Crap Growth. Think about web design, for instance, a personal pet peeve of mine. “Web design” as a profession has lost much of its gravitas because it’s so easy to get into. So easy that literally anyone can do it, and, as of this writing, it really does look as if everyone has. Look, I don’t care how many hundred Wordpress skins you’ve designed — if you can’t tell the difference between a DOM element that hasLayout turned off or on, then you’re not a web designer, capische?

But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is this: I do not begrudge anyone their grammatically-challenged, horribly-written detailing-my-last-shampoo-purchase train-wreck-of-a-blog. This is your God-given right as someone who (probably) pays for Internet access. However, we shouldn’t sell it like it’s the cure for cancer either. We need to accept the fact that the Internet - particularly the part of it that’s user-generated - is full of crap. It’s filled to the brim and everyday the container overflows and splashes everyone in the face with crap. And we shouldn’t wonder why people on the other side of the fence look at us and shake their heads, saying, “Wow, look at those people doing backflips into that giant pool of feces.”

But that doesn’t mean we should give up on it either. There are gems in that big pile of shit after all; the question is, how long are you willing to sit there and dig.

No updates recently, been pretty busy. Here’s why:

Once upon a time, there was young byte named 01.  It was a special day for him; match-maker X was finally going to introduce him to his bride-to-be, Aleph.  Unfortunately, he found out that she was infected. But that never stopped 01 before. He likes taking it slowly. The fact that she was infected was a challenge . The infection commonly known as love made her much stronger and anyway, “love” wasn’t the infection she had. It was “Loss Of Verbal Elucidation” or LOVE again , which was the more accurate terminology. Match maker X had to do something to help , as it was clear that this LOVE infection was an unknown phenomenon in the realm of Galdalland, south of Castle Lichtenstein where Aleph the prince lives. And by “the prince” we of course mean “the princess.” …

From “A Byte’s Tale,” our very first ongoing octale. Watch out, Morph. 

Over at WordPressPhilippines, Ia writes:

The New York Times reports that “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop“. Drop dead, that is. They consider professional blogging a “digital-era sweatshop”, referring to a factory where its workers are sorely underpaid and unprotected.

It’s an interesting analysis of how Filipino bloggers, unlike their American counterparts, are not getting proper benefits or even proper compensation. I like how this article tries to make a point to a very specific outsourcing niche, but I do think that it’s pretty much just describing the nature of outsourcing in any industry.

Let’s not forget that the Internet is a free market just like most other offline industries, and that the main reason why Filipinos are getting paid peanuts to blog professionally is because they accept peanuts. Let’s disassemble that notion briefly.

If Filipino bloggers are not getting paid enough, what will happen to the local professional blogging industry? The answer is really simple: either 1) blogging as a profession will cease to exist locally or 2) the market will readjust its prices to support a smaller number of higher-quality bloggers, essentially locking out the lower-end suppliers. Now because I don’t think people will ever stop trying to make bucks from blogging, let’s talk about option number 2.

Notice that I said the market will "readjust its prices," and not "the market will increase its prices." To illustrate, here’s a really simple economic thought experiment:

Sam in the US is paid $100 per post. Pedro in the Philippines is paid $20 per post. Using these numbers we can make the erroneous, simplistic comparison that Sam is 5 times more valued than Pedro, which is the mistake that most people make when they talk about outsourcing. We can, however, say that for every 1 Sam, a company hiring professional bloggers could alternatively look for 5 Pedros instead.

Now let’s say Pedro decides that he’s not getting paid enough, and starts charging $50 per post (a huge, earth-shaking increase in any industry). Now the company looks at the numbers and thinks, "Hmm, so we can either hire 1 Sam, or 2 Pedros. Which option should we go with?"

The answer will almost always be "Sam," and the reason for that is that there are issues intrinsic in outsourcing that make having two Pedros less appealing than just having one Sam. As a US company, outsourcing your writing to the Philippines carries with it many pitfalls: cultural differences are the biggest one, but you must also contend with incompatible work ethics, timezone differences, geographical costs, etc. The only way you can justifiably accept all of these problems is if you can get 5 Pedros for the price of your 1 Sam. At 2 Pedros for 1 Sam, however, that arrangement ceases to become cost-effective, and the correct thing to do is to either go back to Sam, or wait for China to start blogging in English and outsource your requirements there.

Now, this thought experiment kind of sounds like I’m saying that Pedro is forever stuck at $20/post, but that’s not necessarily true in practical terms. If Pedro’s overall quality and work ethic improved, you might only need 4 Pedros to accomplish the work of 5, meaning they can now all get $25 per post, a 25% increase. (What happens to the 5th Pedro however? Well, he loses his job most likely. Creative Destruction is a powerful force indeed.)

The lesson here is that you should never, ever forget that outsourcing is forever a price war, and will never be anything other than a price war. The reason why Filipino bloggers don’t have health benefits is because the added cost of health benefits will result in some Filipino bloggers losing their jobs, and at the moment, the market requires a certain number of available bloggers to fulfill the requirements of various businesses.

The other thing to consider here is that as we become more progressively globalized, the costs of maintaining Sams and Pedros will become more and more similar (so it is totally possible — although I personally think it’s unlikely — to have Pedro earning a very similar amount of cash as Sam). However, remember that the available funds have not changed in this scenario. If 1 Pedro is making $80-100 per post, that means that 4 other Pedros will no longer be able to find work, and will either switch industries, or try to undercut that 1 brilliant Pedro. The former action just shifts the burden to somebody else, and the latter restarts the whole price-war process.

Erwin Oliva at the Inquirer writes:

IMAGINE a large group of users who write stories together one phrase at a time. That is actually the simple and yet brilliant idea from a startup simply called Octales.

Unanimously, the panel of experts said Octales is a “refreshing” idea after an afternoon of elevator pitches.

Although it’s not immediately obvious from the writeup, that was syndeomedia’s pitch he was talking about. I twittered a little bit during the elevator pitch sessions yesterday, and one of the things I said was that I was beginning to feel like a rock guitarist at a jazz recital. The 14 other groups before us each had very revenue-focused business concepts, with copious amounts of market research to back up everything they said. We were the only group with a concept that was purely for entertainment, didn’t do any market research, had only the barest idea of a revenue model, and didn’t fall into any of the three general categories for the sessions (E-learning, E-Government or E-Health).

As it turned out, the fact that we stuck out like a sore thumb was a good thing, and the fact that we were the very last group to pitch helped make it really memorable. To be honest, it was really surprising (to me, at least) how easily everybody got it. I’d run the Octales idea by dozens of people prior to this presentation, and all I’ve ever gotten was polite nods. (Ok, maybe the fact that I’d been practicing the pitch over and over while driving to work everyday for the past week had something to do with the clarity of the message.)

After it was all over, I had quite a few people come up and congratulate me, saying that they thought the idea was really elegant and original, and that the presentation was the best one they’d seen that day. I honestly couldn’t have hoped for a better result. (Well, ok, that’s a lie; the best possible result would be if people started whipping out their checkbooks right then and there, the odds of which are probably slim to none, but you never know.)

All that’s left for us to do now is wait and see if this materializes into what I’m hoping for.

(Slight digression: I had a conversation with one of my friends earlier today about it and she asked if I was nervous. I was like, jesus, of course I was nervous. If I screwed this up, I wouldn’t just be letting myself down, I’d be letting the team down as well. So yeah, wow. I think I really lucked out there.)