jason pettus | The Heterotopia Report for January 10th.

Welcome to the Heterotopia Report for January 10, 2005, a semi-regular feature at this site, where I spend the day simply pointing people to other interesting things found elsewhere on the internet. It's worth remembering, by the way, that I do not accept compensation in return for favorable mentions here, and that I disclose any personal relationship I have with a person or company being mentioned, whenever appropriate.

--Here's an interesting statistic: According to Yahoo! (reprinted in this case by MarketingStudies.net), 27 percent of their members are now using RSS feeds, even though only 4 percent of them admit in surveys that they've knowingly used them. The disparity? All the people having headlines delivered to MyYahoo start pages, 360 front pages, Yahoo Mail accounts, and Yahoo Widgets sitting on people's hard drives, who don't realize that the headlines are coming in via RSS. And this actually kind of proves what I'm always saying is the main benefit of RSS, that it's a highly adaptable protocol that can be applied in a whole variety of situations, many times without the end user even realizing that it's the same technology fueling it all. The report also draws some other interesting conclusions: that even among the RSS-savvy, most like interacting with their feeds through an existing online portal, like MyYahoo, Google Customized or Bloglines; that MyYahoo is the most widely-used RSS tool on the planet; that even among the RSS-savvy, the average person only subscribes to 7 feeds; that half those people are receiving at least one feed of hard news (the most popular type of feed, in fact), 30 percent of them real-time weather information, and 10 percent real-time coupons and sales notices for eCommerce; that only 4 percent of all RSS users have actually used that annoying orange button so many people evangelize about, and 22 percent of those people clicked on it accidentally and then didn't realize what to do afterwards; and that only half of all RSS users have specifically added an outside feed to their account, with the other half subscribed only to the choices that service originally offered. Lots of food for thought! (And thanks to Steve Rubel for bringing this report to my attention.)

--And speaking of RSS-enabled desktop Widgets, MAKE magazine creates one of their own, for Mac Dashboard...then publishes a story about how they did it, in tutorial form. Jason Pettus Widget, here we come!

--Here's some interesting reading material for all you third-party software developers out there: Gus Mueller, inventor of the very popular Mac note-taking application "VoodooPad," details the story of how he went from a weekend software tinkerer with a corporate day job to a full-time independent programmer, in about a thousand days more or less. In his case, he started out with miniature goals, ones designed to reward the tinkerer in him; to make just enough money, that is, to keep buying updates to coding software. Then after winning an award at one of those corporate-sponsored amateur programming contests, sales jumped to the point where he could afford his next goal, a large-screen plasma television. Then, his first mistake - planning too many updates for version 2.0 and taking too long with it, instead of regularly releasing 1.1s, 1.2s and the like. Of course, it helped in his case that VoodooPad 1.0 was still being talked about and downloaded so much, because there was a huge spike in sales when v2.0 finally did come out. He was spooked enough, though, that he went ahead and started creating other software as well, which ended up being his financial saving grace; and that plus a stabilizing in the VoodooPad market has gotten him to where he is today. Anyway, very interesting reading, if you have a few extra minutes (it's a fairly long post). (Thanks to Lifehack.org for pointing this out, who it should be noticed is a different site than Gawker's Lifehacker.)

--An interesting if random article recently from the Associated Press, reprinted here by the online aggregator Happy News: how in the cutting-edge age of GPS cellphones and dashboard mapping systems we now live in, the ancient job of cartographer has suddenly become a hotly-in-demand profession again. (And some interesting trivia in that article as well - that one of the major services, for example, tracks approximately 6 million miles of roads in the United States; and that even as recently as six years ago, most software mapping companies were still designing all their maps by hand and then scanning them in, instead of creating them digitally from scratch.) The article made me laugh, actually, because this holiday season my dad got a new GPS device for his Windows laptop, and mapping software himself, so we took it out for a little spin to a Christmas party we were attending, which is the first time I've ever interacted with a live GPS mapping application. It is cool, man, and spooky, and like something out of a Tom Clancey thriller, the idea that some shadowy government agent could be watching your car blip along in real time on this onscreen computer map, just like you're watching it yourself in the car. And here's some interesting GPS trivia, according to my dad: that most commercial-level GPS mapping access given from military satellites has a 30-foot random discrepancy built into the system, so that terrorists cannot use commercial software to plan precise strikes on specific buildings. Hmm, interesting info from a retired top-secret military contractor! Always a great addition to the holidays.

--Ah, a subject that's fascinated me for a long time, and which fascinates the boys at Boing Boing as well, which is one of the reasons I read Boing Boing each day: bleeding-edge architectural philosophy applied to subjects like temporary refugee housing, portable shelter for the homeless, and other emergency situations. In this case, an article in the New York Times on a cutting-edge studio in poor rural Alabama for college students, where found objects are used in unusual ways for building material, collectively known in the architectural world as the "redneck Taliesian." Interesting reading!

--Okay, so for those who don't know, Hugh MacLeod is this interesting British marketing expert, who only takes on selective clients, and only creates fascinating cutting-edge campaigns for them, and then writes a blog about the lessons he learns with each. And I guess one of his clients, a small hipster winery in the UK called Stormhoek, has just authorized him to discuss their 2005 sales figures, where a surprising thing has become known - that the company has doubled their sales in less than twelve months, ever since starting MacLeod's newest marketing campaign. (No specific figures are given, but MacLeod claims it's "tens of thousands of cases.")

And the campaign in question? As simple as it gets - ship several hundred bottles of wine to bloggers, some with very popular blogs and some with only 20 or 30 readers, with no advance notice, and with no obligation or even plea for the blogger to write about the wine. And you can already see the outcome here, can't you, you little Web 2.0 smartypants - everyone talked about the wine, and the mere fact that everyone was talking about the wine also got the mainstream media to start talking about how everyone was talking about the wine. And even more interesting, MacLeod claims that this wasn't even the most valuable thing to happen that led to the increased sales; it was what the bloggers were actually saying, which led to Stormhoek changing the way they deal with their primary customers, which are liquor stores and other retailers that often buy hundreds of bottles at a time. Anyway, fascinating stuff for all you marketers and fellow amateur marketing buffs.

--Ahh, after a season full of meaningless end-of-year lists, finally one worth paying attention to: the top ten failed tech trends of 2005, via Extremtech magazine. Included are such subjects that sounded hot a year ago as Windows XP64, iPod's first serious competitor, the "digital home," and the possibility that companies might be able to add copy-protection software to their CDs without anyone noticing (oops, tee-hee).

--A nerdy milestone broken last week, for those who follow along: the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine became the first "open access" academic journal (one that charges no money, that is, and lets others freely distribute it) to be downloaded in excess of 100,000 times in a single month. Congratulations, JPM! (And thanks to Open Access News for originally pointing this out.)

--An open plea from popular Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble: Please, developers, better mobile versions of your site! Gee, sound like anyone we know?

--An interesting tertial use for those new gas/electric hybrid cars: How to use your Toyota Prius to power your home in the case of a blackout. (Thanks to MAKE magazine for originally pointing this out.)

--Just a reminder to those who may not be following along already: The cooperative organization Microformats has released a great report this week, detailing all the advances they made in their first six months of existence, including getting some of their recommended protocols adopted by Google, Yahoo, the makeup company Avon, Upcoming.org, and various universities around the world. Microformats, for those who don't know, is a volunteer, non-profit group of programmers, usability experts, bloggers and others, who are trying to develop a common set of shared standards for such common online information as mailing addresses, phone numbers, calendar events and the like, so that software can start exchanging this information directly instead of humans having to constantly retype it. You as a lone blogger, by the way, can already put something like a dozen Microformats-approved protocols in place at your site right now, some of them surprisingly easily; that report links to just about every protocol they've now detailed, so is a good starting place for those who are interested.

--Flash Player for mobile devices? Finally? Now that Adobe owns Macromedia, the original creators of Flash? CNET is reporting on a new Flash build that mobile companies can take advantage of while creating their firmware; it awaits to be seen, I guess, just how many of them actually are going to, including the burning question of whether Palm will or not (er, probably not).

--Michael Crichton releases new eBook with all this draconian DRM (digital rights management) software included. So what do fans do? Team up, scan the paper book, run it through OCR software, and create their own eBook instead. And then some Germans get ahold of it, start selling it, and apparently sell just thousands and thousands of copies before getting caught. TeleRead has a great entry up at their blog right now, detailing the debacle, and reminding us again of the irony of draconian DRM software: that it's only the most popular books that people want electronic copies of, and with enough paper copies of the book around to easily create pirated copies, if the company tries messing with the "official" version.

--Wow, how about this? For years now, the literary and rock worlds have been moved by the work of a reclusive young writer named JT Leroy, an underaged truck-stop prostitute in West Virginia who spent time as a homeless drug addict in San Francisco, before getting rescued by a prominent literary couple and penning several stark novels about his troubled youth. But oops, at a recent "disguised" public appearance by Leroy, it was discovered that the person on-stage was actually the literary husband's half-sister, which has suddenly leant a lot of new credence to a rumor that has been floating around for awhile - that Leroy was entirely made up by the couple, frustrated musicians who invented the edgy genius as a means to worm their way into artistic and celebrity circles. Hmm, hmm, hmm.

--And finally, from the "Way Too Little, Way Too Late" department, via Gizmodo: Kodak changes their logo for the first time in half a century. World collectively shrugs their shoulders, wonders how a company who used to be so successful could've made so many bad choices in a row when it came to the Digital Age.

(Got something you'd like to have mentioned in the Heterotopia Report? Drop me a line at ilikejason at hotmail dot com, although of course I can't guarantee that it will appear. Yes, I also do critical reviews of things like books, CDs and movies; please write to obtain my mailing address.)