Hi, hypernarrative is a blog by Wilbert Baan about Art, Media and Technology with a focus on interactive storytelling. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Google or Netvibes. I'll post a few messages a week. Thanks for visiting!

Since the record music can be played everywhere without actually having to transfer the musician. This changed how we consumed music. A complete industry was build around transferable music, the ‘record industry’.

The web is not just a network connecting computers anymore. The web is a virtual layer of information accessible almost everywhere, anytime via broadband, UMTS, wifi and cable. The availability of this network and its role as real-time meta information network will only grow.

The web is already changing how we consume music. The availability is like radio, but the tunes you can listen to are personal. Technically you could listen to any song you like at any time you like from any place you like.

The only thing we need is a library of music and a business model. This is where Google comes in. When a website grows as exponential as Google did you need a serious hardware model to support the demand. You need servers and broadband connections around the globe. The hardware structure and back-end Google has (in combination with YouTube) is probably one of the most advanced in the world. The amount of data they send up and down the lines of our network connections makes them a very import player in data exchange.

Amazon build a new model on top of their original business. With S3 and Ec2 Amazon started to sell hosting and computing, a smart move since they already developed an enormous infrastructure for amazon.com. This infrastructure equals a value that makes it a serious hosting competitor in price and service.

Why Google for music? Google has experience with indexing large amounts of information and they know how to retrieve meaning from information. Google has experience with web-players, mobile platforms, plug-ins, widgets, trust and a payment model. They sit on all the required knowledge. All they have to do is mixing the components together.

The future of music won’t be about files or discs, it will be about listening your favorites, your friends favorites or songs recommended by websites and smart collectives. Music still has value, it doesn’t have to be free. I think a subscription model could work. You pay $20,- to $50,- a month to a company (Google in this example) and you are allowed to listen any music you like. With this money Google pays artists based on listened percentages. It’s all about micro payments and since everyone is an artist nowadays, everyone should be able to upload its files to the Google Music directory.

On top of this Google could include its adwords system related to what you are listening. A system that has a proven effect in giving advertising power to the niche.

There is already a Google Music player. Just find someone to connect the dots.

In the book Massive Change, Bruce Mau and Jennifer Leonard focus on Urban sprawl and a so called tipping point. The year 2006 was the tipping point in how we live. From 2006 on half of the world population will live in cities. Cities grow together creating so called urban cores. This is a very interesting movement and will have effect on how we live and work.

The website 192021.org - a platform for research into the subject - tries to explain this phenomena by using a simple and beautiful animation. The makers have divided the information into small fragments. The story is still linear and doesn’t have a lot of interaction, but how they have cut up the information for digital storytelling is very good.

I love this subject. If you know media that explore this, please recommend me websites, movies, books or any other media.

Eclectro is a website about music. Having a calendar is a great service for such a website. It is often a popular service, but unfortunately also a very labour intensive one. When searching the web to find an easy way to solve this problem I noticed the solution could be found connecting different webservices.

from Last.fm
For promoters and venues Last.fm is the place to reach the right audience. It’s a music marketing sweetspot. Most websavvy promoters know they have to add their schedule to Last.fm, because here is where the fans are.

Unfortunately it would take a lot of time to collect all the data and copy it into an Eclectro agenda. Last.fm uses Audio Scrobbler to control all feeds in and out Last.fm. A lot of Last.fm data is public available.

to Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes is an online data-aggragator that enables drag and drop programming. You can add feeds from other services, group and remodel the data from the feeds into a new feed. It is a web-based visual programming interface.

Everything you make on Yahoo Pipes is open source. This means everyone can clone your code en learn from it or build upon it. I found some Last.fm examples and adapted it for 15 Dutch venues. The Yahoo Pipe I build scans those venues on Last.fm for events and combines the data into one large iCal (calendar format) feed.

Now we have a feed with a lot of information, interesting but it has a lot of events in it that are irrelevant to the Eclectro audience. They want to know about electronic music.

to Google
Next stop; Google. Google has a calendar function that let’s you share calendars in public or assign multiple owners to the same calendar. The Yahoo Pipes feed with Last.fm information is loaded into Google Calendar. There I’ve created a second calendar called Eclectro.

And here is where the ‘human’ selection and thus the added value comes in. An Eclectro editor filters Eclectro related events and we end up with a simple calendar with very good information. We will add other events to the calendar as well, but the information from Last.fm is a perfect base.

You can even subscribe to this ‘human’ filtered calendar with Google, Apple’s iCal or XML/RSS. Or use this information as a buildingblock for a better calendar.

Wwwww, dddddjjjjjjj duh?
I hope you’re still with me, it is a kind of geeky description for a simple solution. What it actually does is transferring information from one system to another. Making use of several open web applications. It shows what can happen when we use open standards and systems that can easily export and import data. You don’t need to have access to a web server or be a programmer to build something like this. This is the future of information. Free to move and easy to alter.

For a few months I’m using Gmail as my default e-mail client. It was actually the iMAP functionality that really convinced me to start using it. iMAP allows you to keep using your default e-mail application and at the same time you can also use your mobile phone or webmail. Once you have read or replied a message in one of the applications the other applications know what you have done with it. A centralized server, but different interfaces.

Make Gmail better
The unexpected thing happened that with my move to Gmail I also stopped using Mac Mail, the default mail application on Macintosh and one of my favorite applications. The Gmail web client just works very well.

The Gmail interface doesn’t look so great. It is clear, easy to use, the service is great, the mobile phone version is great, the spam filter is fantastic and it just does e-mail better.

Can Gmail be better? I think so, let me explain how after this example.

Wordpress
I love Wordpress. I’m sure it is one of the best blog publishing platforms in the world, if not the best. I don’t know all the other platforms, I have tried a few. What makes Wordpress unique is the back-end. The back-end of this platform is gone through a great evolution. The Wordpress back-end fits the needs of most users, is extendible and it can connect with an API to other applications.

A classic thing to forget when developing a content management system is to design a usable back-end. Often a system evolves around functionality and a (often narrow) view of what the users should be allowed to do, instead of freedom to experiment and usability. I think how Wordpress developed was very good for the back-end interface. Anyone can use it, advanced user or not.

Can Wordpress be better? I think so.

Custom interfaces
We are getting used to customizing web interfaces. We drag rearrange widgets and choose personal themes. For example I’m using Veerle’s theme to brighten my Netvibes and since this week I can change the lay-out of iGoogle as well.

Wouldn’t it be great if Wordpress and Gmail had easy to style interfaces?

There are hacks like Grease Monkey for Gmail and a plug-in for the Wordpress admin. The problem with these hacks is they are hacks. They’re not supported by the provider. They don’t return value to the application, for mail your hacks are bound to a computer and as soon as something changes your hack needs to be updated.

Learn from design
Think about what would change if you could use simple CSS to build themes for Gmail or the Wordpress admin. Designers would start playing with it because it is easy accessible and their design can reach a large group of users. Gmail and Wordpress can keep directories in order to see what’s the most popular interface, the highest rated and the newest.

If a service provider wants to learn from their users they should enable them to use stylesheets and templates that make it possible rearrange all the objects and buttons in the interface. Maybe Gmail just works better when the navigation is at the top, split up or in the middle. Who knows?

We are getting used to choosing templates for our blogs and rss readers. It would be wonderful if we could start using templates for admin screens and e-mail interfaces.

The most popular interfaces tell you a lot about what your users want from your interface, with this free knowledge a provider can adapt the default interface and make it even better.

The care for earth as our only habitat, source of food and storage for waste did get our attention over the last years. And as with every major cultural or political movement it had effect on visual culture as well. We look at the earth as a magic, fragile object. And when it comes to global warming we face universal problems.

Todays most widespread and popular outlet of visual culture is the user interface. I’m not a cultural expert, but I do think it’s rather funny we see representations of the earth and galaxy returning in todays most popular interfaces. Those images are carefully selected and could as well been renderings of little fish or exotic plants.

Below are popular interface examples. New media is making the world a smaller place ;)

1. The music-player in the Sony Playstation 3 shows moving images of the earth (video)
2. The new background-set in Apple Mac OSX Leopard has Earth images
3. And Earth is the Apple iPhone default screen
4. Google Earth turned around 180 degrees and now looks up the sky

Do you know other examples? Please share.

There is an interesting discussion going on about what’s the most effective design for a blog homepage. Is it a single page design or a homepage with excerpts? Blogs are moving to excerpts and there are some good reasons for this.

For example let’s take the statistics of the Eclectro website. Those are interesting because last month we changed the lay-out from a single page design into a magazine-style design with only excerpts on the frontpage.

The Eclectro weblog - a Dutch weblog about electronic music - started in July last year, it is written by volunteers and reaches around 15.000 visitors a month generating over 40.000 pageviews a month.

Why re-design
The reason for the Eclectro re-design came from the content. The high speed of new articles made some other (valuable articles) drop of the frontpage too fast. There was no visual difference between short posts, sometimes only containing news and the special posts containing unique content or special reviews.

This could all be solved by creating a magazine-like template for the frontpage, and so we did. The downside, you have to make an extra click on the homepage before you can read the article. And maybe there would be some resistance by the readers.

The effect is very good, not only are we able to show more posts on the homepage we can also show more headlines and excerpts in the first screen (before the scroll). Dropping the single-page website had actually has no negative effect at all and we haven’t got complaints about the change of homepage style.

Here are some statistics * of the Eclectro homepage (with 9,401 views in december and 8,373 in november; total visitor number (15.000) for the entire site is roughly the same for these 2 months)

(* thanks to Inge):

9,401 Pageviews on the homepage
Previous: 8,373 (+12.28%)
- good: with a similar total amount of visitors, the number of homepage visitors is higher than last month, which means that more people see all our content.

00:01:49 Time on Page
Previous: 00:02:14 (-18.62% )
- the lower number makes sense, since the real messages are on another page.

29.48% Bounce Rate
Previous: 42.02% (-29.85%)
- excellent! apparently, people stick longer and are better teased to click further and not leave at once.

25.05% % Exit
Previous: 33.49% (-25.21%)
- again, excellent! less people leaving, more people clicking through.

The image shows the average used connection speed of visitors on the Eclectro website over the past half year. High speed connections are mainstream.

The image shows the average used screen resolution used by visitors on the Eclectro website over the past half year. Average screen width is growing, although the height isn’t. Widescreen is very popular.

What does it mean?
The average viewer of the eclectro website has a pretty good connection and a reasonable screen width. A blog template was designed with scrolling in mind, one long page with the ten most recent posts on the homepage. Around the same time this single-page blog-design got popular we did see RSS become very popular as well. The design of a feed is often similar to a blog.

RSS is chronological the way the original blog design is. The magazine style is more based on the content itself. Making a selection in what is the best content. RSS is more valuable for the real heavy user of a website, is there something new I haven’t read? A magazine design is more useful for the average website visitor. The guy or girl who types the url a few times a week to see what’s new and more important what’s interesting enough to read.

Are RSS, widgets, Netvibes, iGoogle and e-mailsubscription accepted so broadly by heavy internet users that we can drop the single-page design? What do you think, and what do your statistics tell you (please share). Should all blogs with more than two posts a day seriously consider a design with only excerpts on the frontpage? Or is the single-page not dead at all?