I was interviewed about PurposeGames and the story behind it by a Journalist from El Periódico which is a daily paper in Barcelona.

Today it got published. You can read it here. (only in Spanish)

I’ve been developing an End-Of-Day (EOD) quote updater for my charting program Trader’s Workbench. I have the basic update functionality available from within the workbench, but as I felt that this might be something that other people could use, I would like to hear from YOU. What do you think about it?

Are people using this kind of tool (end-of-day quote updating tool) anymore or does every charting application out there now, come with a more or less obligatory quote update service?  Is there anyone left doing their analysis on End-Of-Day data?

I do, and I need a reliable quote source so I developed Quotes Library.

I went with the development paradigm of less-is-more. I wanted a software that did one thing really good, and that had an interface that consisted of as few buttons as possible.  I’m pretty happy with the result. Let me tell you about the characteristics.

Quotes Library does the following:

• Update your MetaStock Formatted Quotes from any source
• Recalculates stock quote when split occurs
• Export/Import from Excel
• Ability to create new files from scratch, filling them with data from any source

That’s all. I think that the most important part is in the first bullet above. Ability to update from any source. This means that if you live in India and are interested in your local markets, you can use this tool just as well as someone in the States interested in Nasdaq quotes or in Sweden.

How’s that possible?

I’ve developed this tool with a plug-in architecture where the structure of any webpage can be described in order to get the tool to work with the web source YOU prefer. So for any new source I need, I just add the rules to read the quotes from that webpage, and apply it to the already existing application, without recompiling the main application. Just releasing a new .DLL for the source in question. Pretty neat I think.

For instance, I use Yahoo when I add a new stock to follow. But the daily update of Yahoo is usually a little slower than my local source that only keeps today’s quotes. Then I can use etrade, Avanza, Nordnet or whatever source keeps today’s quotes, to get fresh quotes right at the close of the market, instead of having to wait for Yahoo to get today’s quotes.

So, the brilliance here is that without having to re-distribute the whole application, it could be used for any market, anywhere using any provider. You don’t even have to have an account with that provider which means the cost of using the Quotes Library tool is zero.

I don’t think it’s an immoral thing to do either, since Yahoo is distributing their quotes for personal use for free, and the other sources out there does the same but for today’s quotes. Not historical. All this tool is doing, is to make the collection of the already free quote data more efficient and automatic, instead of manually having to collect it.

That’s it. I’d really like your impressions of such a tool, and if you think it could be of interest to you. I appreciate it. Thanks.

I’ve been following Joost for a while (who hasn’t?). If you are unfamiliar with it, it’s the new venture of Skype and Kazaa entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, where the latter of the two may just be the winner of this year’s weird-name-award.

They’re brilliant. Of course they are. I, like so many others, envy them for a gzillion reasons. They realized early on that if you get enough users of your product you can give it away for free and still make tons of money.

The ad revenues along with the 0,01 percent of users that pay for a premium version made eBay pay them the equivalent of a third world country’s GDP to let go of Skype. They did.

Enter Joost.

Where Kazaa and Skype fulfilled a need that, at the given point in time, was not available anywhere else, Joost comes up short. TV for everyone via the net. Sounds cool enough but here’s where they lose me.

1) Content is King. On TV more than anywhere else.
The content of Joost is near non-existent. The content you want on Joost is House MD, CSI, ER, Grey’s Anatomy etc. If you want user driven content, watching Joe Neighbor teaching his dog to yodel, you go to YouTube and the now endless piggy backers of the aforementioned pioneer site.

2) All TV-shows worth watching end up on the net’s torrent sites fast. Very fast.
Most of the time before they’re even aired in the US, mainly because the Australian schedule is ahead in time.

3) The technical issues are plentiful.
Streaming via peer-2-peer may be an excellent idea but so far it has yet to impress someone who’s used to 1080p on their TV/Computer.

Joost clearly has some terrain to cover still, to prove to us - the users - that it’s worthwhile downloading and browsing i.e. spending time with their product and the brands they want to push via it. Right now Joost isn’t there.

I think Joost need to figure out where they want to be in the market and what supply vacuum they should be filling. Perhaps producing their own content is the only way, because relying on users to do it for them won’t work. We got so many options that are easier and frankly better for that purpose.

Scene 1

JD, looking nervously at the janitor:

 - Hey man, how’s it going?

The Janitor, on a ladder fixing a light-bulb, looking down at JD:

 - I’m 37 years old. I’m a janitor. How do you think it’s going?

With many other TV-shows, they get really good season 2 and can last to maybe season 3-4, when all the characters have found their jargon. With Scrubs it’s almost the other way around. Season one is a total blast. I’m laughing out loud.

Whatever Internet once was, it is now an advertising arena where links have become a highly valued commodity.

Companies have been started around it (blogvertising etc.) and nowadays everyone and their dog knows that nothing is more valuable in terms of ending up at the top of your favourite search engine, than a link from a trustworthy source.

You can have all the H1, H2 and TITLE-tweaks you want, but nothing brings you faster to #1 SERP than a bunch of good links.

The more trustworthy the source, the more valuable the link. I don’t think that it has truly caught on for everyone in schools and other governmental or federal institutions exactly how valuable a link from them really are.

A link from an .EDU or even better a .GOV source, is today something that many would pay a lot of money for. For sure.

Ultimately, if you don’t watch out, it can start to change how you think as a publisher for the worse. You start writing about subjects you know contain high paying keywords, or worse, you write about a subject just to be able to link to someone who’s further down the food chain than you, and get paid for it. Reduced credibility inevitably follows.

Anyway, it’s not all bad. I like advertising, and I like the game it comes with. Trying to stay ahead of the herd. Internet is more business than ever, and the ways to monetize from it is really beginning to become clear.

Sooner than we think it will be clear to everyone, and that’s when the early adopters can begin to cash in big, and the followers need to think about what will be the next big thing.

Where are you going to be?

First of all, let me say that I like social communities and I’ve been a proponent of it for a long time. Back in the 80’s when I was around 12-14 years old I used to call Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) with my 300/300 baud modem - yes that’s correct 300 bits/s - connected to my Commodore 64 and doing basically the same thing that drives people to Facebook and other social networks; communicating with friends.

My problem is not with the idea of Facebook but with the implementation of it.

Facebook will crumble and be replaced by other communities in the future for a couple of reasons, one of which is spelled FBML. That’s the reason Textpattern was succeeded by Wordpress and if you don’t know what Textpattern is, you’ve more than proved my point.

Much like Textpattern - which had equal market share with Wordpress a little over a year ago - Facebook decided to go with its own Meta Language. That rarely sits well with developers. Spending time learning something that is likely to be a fad is not something that anyone likes to do. You do it because you have to. You do it because there’s no alternative.

Now there’s an alternative.

OpenSocial by Google is about to be launched, and if it has the hallmarks of any other Google product, it’s likely to be good. Very good.

OpenSocial is an API in standard code that hooks into a variety of social networks i.e. you will be able to re-use your already existing PHP code and not tweak it half as much as when writing your Facebook apps.

There are other reasons that Facebook eventually will fade away, such as the fact that it has no original idea behind it (easy to switch to another network more close to home, whenever such network becomes available), and that it’s gone totally overboard already with media coverage, which is usually the tell tale sign that something’s passed its peak.

No matter how many other reasons, I believe the main reason is the fact that grass roots will leave it whenever a viable option becomes available to spread cool apps and get to show the world how great you are using standard code languages. That time is approaching fast.

I’ve been developing a couple of websites now and thought I’d share some of the observations I made along the way. Feel free to state your opinion as well.

First of all, I’ve never ever seen the meta tag “keywords” ever matter. Never. The “Description” tag matters, in the sense that Google will pick it up to describe what the page or the website you have published is all about.

When you have a couple of ad-based websites, you can easily get obsessive over how to best drive quality traffic to them. By quality traffic I mean visits from people that was actually looking for what you had to say or the products you sell/services you offer. In pursuing this, we’ve all come to realize the importance of the <title> tag, the <h1> tag, and of course the off site elements; the quality back-links. The latter being the most important of all.

Anyways, in all of this I have played around with changing/tweaking the keyword meta tag but it has never given me any visible benefits. On the other hand, it has never given me any grief either so for most of the sites I manage, I keep them there. Nice and clean.

Except for this site. This site has no meta keywords, and if you got here via Google or some other search engine looking for information on what to do with your meta keyword tags, then all the better. It proves my point.

I’d be more than happy to hear from anyone who have had similar or opposite experiences in this area.

Ever since early spring I’ve been really lazy in updating my webspace. Sure, I’ve been working a lot and also keeping PurposeGames going, but still there was something else keeping me from doing it.

I’ve found - not surprisingly - that if I find something to not be completely to my liking, like the former look and layout of this website, I sort of just leave it be until I get the time to really do something about it.

Well, now is that time. I’m very pleased with the fact that I got my PurposeGame of the day-snippet to work. You should see it to the right of this text.

Let’s see if this will mean more frequent updates and posts to this website by me. I hope so because selfishly enough I feel I’m missing 5-10 good ideas per day just because I don’t write them down somewhere persistent. Like this place.

Someone said to me the other day that in order to keep your blog alive and interesting, you need to update it six times a day! Wow. How about that?
Obviously someone who does that is either paid to write or very new at blogging (when things are new and shiny, you tend to wanna spend more time with that than anything else).

Anyway, I updated PurposeGames the other night and I’m so far very happy with the result. Sure, some bugs here and there but all in all I think it adds to the fun of the site and I find myself spending more time there myself also, which is always a good sign in software - being your own most enthusiastic user.

Having tried out about 6-8 various trial versions of charting tools, there among Equis MetaStock and Wealth-Lab, which were both pretty good but lacking so many features that I want and also inherits the “where to get the quote data from”-problem. I decided to take the plunge and write my own tool. I call it the Trader’s Workbench.

Yeah, I know what it sounds like, but it has actually been rewarding on so many levels. I’ve learned a lot more about trading, charting, and programming altogether from having to go into the nitty gritty details of both the rules of the various standard indicators, as well as optimizing code for speed.

Some of the features I like the best - and partly those I found lacking from the other charting applications I’ve tried - are the following:

• automatic updates from free quote sources
• a text-based view of all charts I follow along with a quick view graph containing any charts I need to decide whether or not to open the big charts.
• custom set the trading date i.e. manipulate the date to be able to analyze choices made days back, and see what the charts looked like then.
• the ability to download broker transactions for all stocks I follow which comes in handy if you don’t believe in perfrect markets.

Finally, influenced by litterature, I created the possibility to add journal entries for my trades, containing a diary, equity balance, and current portfolio content. I use this application on a daily basis.

Screenshots

This first screenshot is of the main workbench area. The date set in the toolbar is red to indicate that you are looking at a scenario that has happened in the past. The quick view graph on the right gives me enough information to decide whether or not to go further in the analysis. The pane underneath the list of securities to the left holds data on volume averages; something I found interesting to judge the sustainability of a trend change etc.

The same pane also holds information about what the brokers acting in the markets has been doing with this stock over the last day, week, month and so on.

The charts you see are very customizable. From choosing whether or not to use anti-aliasing in the line charts to set a nice gradient color to give me the distinction possibilities just as I want it.

The second screen shot shows a detail view where I can add/subtract any indicators I like for this particular security. Here you can see that ERIC B is in trouble again, like so often nowadays. The Force Index giving us a tell tale sign of a shift in direction taking place. this time downwards. All in all there may be many features lacking for other ppl but for me it has most of the features I want - and it comes completly free which is also a very important aspect of it.

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