Tim Bennett’s blog – Electron Soup

Weather Watch Radar shows rainfall in your locality

Last Sunday the sky grew very grey at 4pm, but checking the Bureau of Meteorology for storm info was a hard task on my iPhone. So I created a better way to do it: Weather Watch Radar for iPhone.

This mobile-formatted website gives you the choice of 128km radar images from fifty locations around Australia. It even comes with a nice little icon when you add it to your iPhone’s “Home” screen.

If you have an iPhone, compare my site with the BoM’s Australian Weather Watch Radar Network page, and with the page recommended by the Bureau for viewing on a mobile phone. I hope you’ll find mine much easier to use, but if you don’t, please give me some feedback as to why.

I would like to incorporate animation (to show which direction weather is moving), but that’s a little harder to do; I have a method for grabbing recent images, but without an internal piece of Bureau code it only works for about 75% of locations. Moreover I don’t quite know how to render an animation even if I do have the images.

This whole process – including learning the basics of how to format a site for iPhones – took me just a couple of hours. Imagine what the Bureau of Meteorology could do if it turned its development resources towards building a mobile weather portal for Australians, and opening up access to its data via public APIs.

Update: BOMRadar, a native iPhone application which adds some more functionality than what’s in my page, can be downloaded here. I am darkly amused that this application should be released the day AFTER I invest some programming time into my own solution, instead of before I’d gone to the trouble, because it’s obviously been in development for some time.

uTag is an attempt to create a monetized link-shortening service along the lines of tinyurl, notlong and is.gd. The original idea of a link shortener was that many URLs are too long or unwieldy to share easily – for instance, Google Maps URLs.

Another recent driver of link shorteners are the short messaging services, such as Twitter, which restrict messages to 140 characters or less. Services like is.gd can compress a URL down to no more than 18 of those 140 characters, giving over more room for other text.

uTag takes the process one step further, by serving Google advertisements on top of shortened links. For instance, the URL http://ut.ag/00k5m redirects to this website, but with Google Adwords served on top (have a look, you really need to see it in action). Here’s the clever part: when generating a shortened URL, you can include your PayPal email to receive 70% of the revenue generated when people click your advertisement. So if you visited the link above and clicked a link, uTag and I would receive a 30:70 split of the pay-per-click revenue generated.

The idea, which emerged from the recent StartupCampOz, is a neat one. You can monetize any page on the internet when you link to it from any other page. The main problem is one of audience. If one of my Twitter friends insisted on using uTag URLs, I’d very quickly defriend them. They would be saying to me (or at least I would be hearing), “Your attention is only valuable to me insofar as I can benefit from it financially.” Perhaps people feel they deserve to be compensated for their efforts. As a reader, I have a right to reject that utterly.

But that’s probably just me (and a certain crowd on the internet). If there was a Greasemonkey or other Firefox plugin which could strip out the ads, I’d install it and maybe not get mad about uTag links. I hate a lot of advertising – not everybody does.

uTag may work very well to monetize off-site links. There may be money in becoming a uTag freelancer, who finds websites and hooks them up to those who are interested, taking a cut in the process. (If there is money in this, expect to see a new breed of comment spam very shortly.) The key will be finding audiences who won’t (or possibly can’t) block or reject you for sending uTag links their way. I would most certainly not send all my outbound links from this website through uTag, because there would be little to gain and much to lose.

I suppose only time will tell how much there is to be gained from uTag. In the mean time, maybe I should code up my own competitor and get back the final 30%!