Advertising intelligently to Developers Advertising intelligently to Developers

What works?

• Innovation for short periods. - This is commonly known as new fangled advertising.
• Persistent visible relevant ads. - This is the model adopted by most modern news sites and google mail.

How can those ideas be used with Bugzilla?

Institute inline ads for Bugzilla users. Ideally these ads would be targetted, relevant, and not necessarily everpresent.

What should the default ad type be?

Related bugs based on a free text index of the current bug (if the current bug is closed, related bugs should include open bugs, if the current bug is open, it probably should exclude resolved bugs). This would be the default in general, and favored by people whose role is QA.

What other types of ads should be available?

For people with request queues, the ads could be a sampled from their queue.

For people without a request queue but who have bugs assigned to them, bugs can be selected to favor severity, target milestone, priority and possibly a bit of a quirkiness bonus.

For people without request queues and bugs, a somewhat random sampling of bugs should be made available, possibly favoring components which the person has touched (reportedby, or component|assignedto changedby), and possibly favoring at times old or new bugs.

How many ads should be shown at a time?

Probably three, this seems to be the number used by gmail and slashdot.

How could Bugzilla intelligently select a user's Role?

• QA - Users who report many bugs or who resolve many bugs as duplicates, or who don't fall into other categories.
• Requestees - Users who have many outstanding requests.
• Assignees - Users who own many open bugs.

How often should Roles be recalculated?

Probably not very often, perhaps weekly or monthly. Most of the time, people don't change their behavior, and if they do, hopefully they'll be willing to specify their behavior to Bugzilla directly.

How often should ads be displayed?

Probably the first quota bug views for the time interval and then perhaps every sqrt(quota) out of 10 bugs.

What controls would there be?

• Administrators could specify a quota of 0 (default to not showing users ads), or some larger number and a time interval (day, week, month).
• Users could specify a bigger quota (if the feature grows on them and they like the model), the role they'd like to play and if they're feeling really excited for a given period they could reset their quota to increase the number of ads they get without permanently volunteering for a higher load.

How could your reward users?

Obviously you could give scores to people who answer the most ads. But hopefully they system itself will be reward enough.

Just noticed that the official page for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet has been updated with new images and info. There is a new animated flash menu with more pictures and a “buy it” link which leads to a “coming soon” teaser.

maemo.org is the home of Maemo - an open source development platform to create applications for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. (and other future maemo compliant devices)

The Maemo SDK is meant for developers with personal or commercial interests in developing software for handhelds like Internet Tablets.

Nokia aims to use maemo as a development platform in subsequent products in this category. As maemo is fully open source, it means a whole new degree of possibilities for developers using Nokia products.

Here is a link to the online maemo tutorial documentation.

Here is source code for a number of maemo / Nokia 770 apps from OSMTC LABl including a maemo word processor. But how will you type?

There is also an early alpha version of Python and a couple games.

If you haven’t seen it already, there is a nice gallery of Nokia770 pics on Mobile Burn. The article “Hands on with Nokia’s 770 Internet Tablet” offers an up-close look at the 770.

A recent Nokia 770 story on engadget reports that some people who have had a hands on look at the 770 have seen noticible lag on rendering.

“They report a few seconds of lag time between input and command execution, and there’s no spinning cursor or other indication that the device is processing the command, which left them wondering whether or not they had missed the target with the stylus.”

I expect the production model to have taken care of these issues, because responsiveness is critical. I’m not as concerned about start-up times (within reason), but for me, the browsing experience needs to be snappy.