Archive for March 3rd, 2009

Just passed a milestone: 1,000 registered members on SpokenWord.org. And we’ve got nearly 100,000 programs and book chapters in the database. And it’s stil working.

I haven’t tested it yet, but there’s a lot of buzz about SILK, a new high-quality voice codec for Skype. If it’s as good as the gossip suggests, it’s going to invalidate some of the information in our Skype for Interviews video.

A few weeks ago we started using an online service, Kampyle.com, for all The Conversations Network’s web sites including SpokenWord.org. Kampyle.com is one of those services like Google Analytics and ShareThis.com: They do one relatively small thing and they do it very well. In the case of Kampyle.com, it’s website or application-software feedback. On SpokenWord.org, for example, you’ll notice the yellow triangle that always floats in the lower-right corner of your browser. Click it, and you get a convenient form for sending us feedback, reporting a bug, etc. From the user’s perspective, it couldn’t be much easier. But the real magic is on our side. For example, here’s just some of the metadata we get from Kampyle.com when you report a problem:

For debugging a web site, this is invaluable. It typically saves us at least one complete email exchange with someone reporting a problem. No longer do we have to ask, “What OS and browser are you using?” Given that we’re still at the stage where we have a fair number of JavaScript and CSS problems, this alone has made deploying Kampyle.com worthwhile. In fact, I was initialy concerned that adding a floating widget to our pages would itself create CSS nightmares, but my fears have proven unfounded. We’re not getting ay complaints about it. And ever since we added the Kampyle.com widget, our website feedback has increased about 400%. I only wish we’d had it avaialble during our alpha-test. Very cool.