Screengrab from soundcloud.com

I had a great online experience recently with Soundcloud. It provides a beautiful solution for quick and easy music distribution.

Problem: I’d asked my DJ friend Chris to spin some tunes at my birthday. We sort of discussed what I liked, and what he tended to play, but sharing a mixed playlist of tunes that he might play on the night was something that involved either burning discs, or using an FTP dropbox – and I couldn’t be bothered with either.

Solution: Soundcloud. Chris recorded an hour-long mix, and uploaded it to Soundcloud. He then invited me to listen and comment – not just a single comment on the whole thing, but multiple comments attached to different points in the music. I created an account on Soundcloud, so now I can follow other users’ uploads, and return to listen again whenever I like.

The whole site worked really well – it was a totally surprising and seamless 15 minutes on the internet.

About three months ago I embarked on one of 37signals’ workplace experiments: the 4-day work week. At London College of Fashion, I’m lucky enough to be able to take advantage of a flexible working scheme, whereby an employee can work his 40 weekly hours around the 5 available working days. I’ve been working 4-day weeks, 10-hour days, from 8.30am to 6.30pm.

It’s awesome, because it means:

• Your work becomes something you knuckle down to for a 4-day burst. You can approach it as a block of time and separate it from your 3 days off, and you start to think of your job less as something that basically dominates your life, and more as a temporary activity that you’re going to focus on and get satisfaction from. 
• Long weekends. Sundays are so much more spacious with a free Monday to follow; alternatively, they can be truly guilt-free if you used your Friday for domestic admin. 4-day weekend trips now don’t require taking annual leave.
• More time for freelance web projects – this may seem self-defeating if it means I’m doing more work, but really it’s about the ratio of focussed, proactive working vs wasted, bored time ‘at work’.
• More time for biking.

Well, great, but from LCF’s point of view, am I getting as much done? Yes, here’s why:

• Longer days mean more hours to really get your teeth into a project. My most productive work arises not from grazing on different bits of tasks but from focussing on a single task exclusively until completion.
• I’m on average fresher and more energised (or at least more committed) during 4 days than I am during 5. I can see the carrot of the weekend dangling clearer than the 5-dayers, I’m incentivised. 
• I get early nights during the work part of my week and save parties for the weekend – hey, I’ve got the time! 

Jason Fried makes a useful point though – that by adopting this schedule you’re not necessarily talking about cramming as much work into a shorter time. In fact, you’re looking for better, smarter, but shorter working.

My trip to Cornwall on Dopplr.

Not many of my friends have signed up on Dopplr, the ‘online service for intelligent business travellers’. This is a shame, because I think it’s a great website. Well, it certainly feels like a great website. The one thing Dopplr does really well is convince me that I should spend more time on the site, just doing… something. Only after spending hours exploring am I beginning to get the real value of the application.

Dopplr is beautifully designed, socially networked, functional. It appeals to me on the same level as Facebook, in the way it allows me to organise my travels, experiences and friends. Basically, you add trips, go on them, then write tips in your journal for fellow travellers. Photos you upload to Flickr that you took during the trip are automatically added to the trip page (as above). You can also connect with people travelling to the same places in advance, and then browse their trips and journals. Naturally, it’s better when you share trips with more people.

Personally, I’m not so keen on the ritzy ‘Mr and Mrs Smith‘ hotel recommendations – but then I guess the site is targeted at business. It never felt like a business site until I read the about page info though. I think Dopplr would link up perfectly with Lonely Planet. If you had a site that combined that tripadvisor Facebook app ‘Cities I’ve Visited’ with tips from the LP Thorn Tree forum with geotagged Flickr photos – well that would be a website.

I’m spending the longest day of the year in a darkened hall at Alexandra Palace. Mashed is an event for software and web developers. The general idea is to get together with like-minded coders and ‘hack’ or build some kind of application in 24 hours. We’ve had some presentations from the BBC, Yahoo, Lonely Planet (who are today releasing their API exclusively to Mashed attendees before it goes public in 48 hours) and others, and there are prizes on offer for the best hack that utilises some of the data or APIs on offer.

These people are serious. There are around 300 guests, lots of whom have come from across the country and brought sleeping bags. The BBC is here, and several film crews are roaming around. Microsoft is here, but everyone’s on a Mac. It’s a recipe for productivity: geeks have been left alone in a room with their machines (and free food and coffee). There’s even a soldering iron in one corner.

Personally, I’m a little confused, being a bit of a front-end fairy. But Si is having a good time. He’s planning an app that mashes the Lonely Planet image library with data from the Hadley Centre for climate research. I might go for a lie down in the ‘soft zone’.

The other reason for the switch is that I’m re-designing this website. It’s been over a year, and it needs a freshen up. More of which very soon.

‘I used to think I could put up with the Underground. It was only when I stopped using it that I realised how life-shortening it is… It wasn’t just the service… It was the crowds, the heat, the filthy air, the endless moronic announcements, the kids playing music on their mobile phones, the pushing and shoving, all of which delivered me to my destination in a low-level bad temper.’

‘Part of cycling’s appeal for me is that it is a last outpost of freedom in an authoritarian, CCTV city, essentially uncontrolled by anyone except the cyclist.

Happy biking AG.

Wilier Mortirolo Veloce 2007

The above is a new arrival to the strangerpixel cycle stable. Sweet, awesome – these don’t cover it. Compared to my Scott Expert (01?), this bike is like a rocket: quick, flickable, stiff under pressure, compliant over rough surfaces, sure on the descents. Classy. It turns heads.

When I test rode the Wilier about a fortnight ago, the unexpected feeling of power and speed on a climb were better than a year’s supply of Floyd Landis’s testosterone patches. It was so exciting I nearly burst a lung firing up Rosslyn Hill.

I pondered the Wilier’s rivals: efficient German engineering in the shape of the Focus Cayo on the one hand, on the other the undeniable quality of the US bike giant Trek. But I came back, remembering that first acceleration.

Surely, 90% of all property searches now begin online, usually at one of the aggregator sites like findaproperty.com, and thereafter on an estate agent’s website for the full and up-to-date information. Essentially big search engines, property websites need to offer the following core functionality:

1. A search engine that allows fine-grain filtering of search results. If I select flats, in a given region, in a given price range, I want to be able to further filter the results of this search by sub-region, number of bedrooms etc. without returning to an earlier list of options.
2. A unique URL for each property, so I can email links to friends or bookmark a page. ‘Email this page to a friend’ links are not as useful because you can only send one page at a time.
3. A method for saving both search parameters and particular properties to a personal profile. A neat feature on findaproperty.com is the option to save items permanently to an account (requiring registration) or simply saving items for the duration of a session – which allows comparison ‘on the fly’ without filling out another form.

While there are many other handy and clever features that appear on property websites – repayment advice, floor plans, interactive area maps, ‘properties you recently looked at’ – I reckon the above represent the big 3. Online property searches are often done in a hurry, so they need to be predictable, and they need to deliver. They don’t need to be complicated: witness the simple and excellent Gumtree website with its integrated Google maps.

Foxtons, perhaps not surprisingly, have for my money the best London property website. If you can handle the daily phone calls from chummy agents that result as soon as you make contact, looking for houses and flats on the Foxtons website is a pleasure: it’s clean, it’s clear, every property has a floor plan displayed with images and a ‘dashboard’ of tools including 360 degree Flash movie – even the emailshots are well put together.

Equally, some property sites aren’t so successful. Kinleigh, Folkard and Hayward have designed their site in Flash. The search works, and you can filter it via any number of variables – but at 760px wide the layout is cramped, the text too small, the buttons fiddly. Because the URL never changes, your only option is to use the email tool to save links. And even experienced web users might hit the browser’s ‘back’ button while browsing, and return to the home page with no search saved. Infuriating. I’d like to have been at the table when the site’s designers persuaded KFH that what they needed was a wizzy Flash site rather than a much simpler, more accessible design using HTML and CSS.

Another property site in need of a makeover is Benham & Reeves, who break all 3 of the above core rules thanks to their frameset-based design. I lasted about 30 seconds on this site before slamming the door behind me. In a sense though, B&R are in a better position than KFH: while KFH have already invested fairly recently, and probably quite heavily, in their website, B&R’s is an older site that can potentially be re-developed in line with the standard set by the better, more usable property sites on the web. With any luck they won’t use Flash.