frivolous motion

You’re Thinking Like A Marketer, Not A Customer

2008-06-05T22:49:00.010-04:00

If you’re running a site to promote something (a product, an event, a way-of-life), and you’re doing so not simply out of the goodness of your heart,* but for financial gain, chances are you’re doing it totally wrong.

And if you are doing it wrong (and you probably are, trust me), then you’re losing money, losing audience, and losing sight of what makes your product/event/philosophy remarkable.

Nine times out of ten, the big problem is that you’re thinking from the point of view of a Marketer rather than as a customer. It’s nothing new to say this, of course, but I wonder if you could recognize it when you see it.

This is one of the biggest signs, and it turns people away before they’ve even had time to figure out where they are:

A homepage that screams “Buy This Now!,” instead of posing a polite, quiet, “How can I help you find what you’re looking for?” or even, “Hi! How are you today? Please feel free to take a look around and let me know if you have any questions.”

There’s a reason that brick-and-mortar salespeople** and cashiers and waitstaff and receptionists and pretty much everyone else use polite language like that above. They are there to serve you and assist you in paying for what you want to buy, not shove the Bison Burger Special down your throat.

Consider this bit of analogy:

It is raining. Hard. You don’t have an umbrella, but need to walk another twenty blocks down Fifth Avenue to get to your job interview. Crossing 36th Street, you glimpse a rack of umbrellas inside a store you’ve never shopped in before, a place called Jerry’s Stuff On Fifth. Sweet. Salvation. You open the door. *Ringaling!* You step inside, casually scanning the room from side to side to locate the rack of umbrellas you had noticed through the window, as you shake off a little of the rainwater and try to calm your breath. Without warning, you are ambushed by sales associates on either side, yelling and arm-waving and shoving Plastic Thermoses in front of your face.

“$9.95! Two for $15!!! Tell A Friend!!! Buy Now! Buy Now! $9.95! Two for $15! Only today! Special Special!”

You try to speak: “But...but...I just want an um—”

“Thermos Special! Buy Today! $9.95! Two for $15!”

If you don’t go running back out into the thunderstorm after enduring that, then I’ll eat my shorts. (Oh wait, I already did that.)

Make sense yet?

Here’s a translation of my little allegory:

Rain = Google

Umbrella = Search Query

Jerry’s Stuff On Fifth = Your Website

Plastic Thermoses Salespeople Of Doom = Bullshit Links and Flashing Banners and Fancy Rollovers and Embedded Commercials and BUY NOW MOTHERFUCKER Buttons that have absolutely, positively, NOTHING to do with what your customers want because you haven’t even bothered to ask them.

Any questions?

----
*Of course, even people doing stuff out of the goodness of their hearts routinely make the same mistakes. But the stakes are frequently higher when money gets involved, and for some reason, folks working for-profit tend to approach things with a much higher dose of ego, self-deception, and propensity for outright lying and other unethical behaviors that basically define “Marketers.” (Sub-note: marketers are not intrinsically evil. Marketers (capital M) are.) Go Back Up

**I am aware that a lot of salespeople are assholes. These are not the ones I am referring to. Have you stopped to think that your site acts like the very worst of the worst Timeshare salespeople? Go Back Up

What CMS Do You Use?

2008-05-29T23:58:00.004-04:00

It might be one of the oldest questions on the web (surely the topic of some long-running flame wars), but I’m curious, so I’m asking: What Content Management System do you use?

Some backstory: I’ve recently begun working at a New York-based web design and Internet marketing firm as their all-around design/development guy, and a big part of what I’m bringing to the company is expertise outside of Flash-based development (which is really common in the industry for which my company does work), and some really old-school Dreamweaver-generated table-based designs.

I’m there to push CSS, standards-based stuff, flexibility, and implement solutions that push the industry forward in terms of accessibility, usability, and efficiency. It’s an uphill climb, to be sure (can you climb downwardly?), but one that is fulfilling, and for which noticeable progress is already being made. In a way, I’m as much a consultant as a site-builder, and that suits me just fine.

Now, one thing I’ve been trying to figure out is how best to approach issues of content management for our clients, particularly new ones.

The way I see it, there are several different possibilities:

Having the client (or content manager) purchase and use commercial CMS software like Adobe Contribute or Dreamweaver.
Purchasing and installing a web-based CMS (something PHP-y, ideally, since I’m capable with that).
Using Wordpress, Drupal, or similar open-source Content Management Systems.
Building a custom CMS from the ground up.
Implementing services like the new CushyCMS, which is a totally hosted content management service that now offers a premium version for designers that allows you to create a branded CMS and bill clients monthly, if desired.
Award all clients a complimentary copy of HTML For Dummies upon completion of their site and change the office phone numbers.

A few of my thoughts on the above possibilities, and then I’d love love love your input and suggestions:

I’m inclined to hate Dreamweaver and Contribute (I think they violate my religion, perhaps). And I think there’s a great deal to be said about the ability to update one’s site from anywhere with an internet connection - without having to install expensive software.
Non-free web-based CMSes: I know they exist, but I don’t know which ones are good. Why use these rather than their free counterparts?
I’ve used Wordpress in the (recent) past for client sites, and I like it enough, but it doesn’t seem meant to handle “real websites.” I don’t mean this as an attack on its particular technical merits (though the Digg crowd surely does), but merely as a comment on what I gather to be its “software worldview,” if I may coin a phrase with only 283 results in Google.
I have yet to use Drupal, though I’ve been researching it, and it seems viable.
We don’t have the capabilities in-house to develop custom Content Management Systems aside from very exceptional cases for which we can have a pretty cool Rails developer to put something together for us, so that’s pretty much out, and beyond the financial abilities of most of our clients, besides.
And CushyCMS intrigues me, and seems really great for smaller clients, but the idea of relying on third-party hosting scares me a little. How do you tell your clients, “There’s nothing we can do about it?”

Ultimately, I’m curious to hear what you use, what makes it awesome (or makes it suck), and what you know about the different options out there for folks looking to build some seriously cool sites, and spread some seriously decent standards-compliance at the same time.

Let me know in the comments!

The 2008 Gmail Appeal

2008-04-09T02:47:00.002-04:00

Email Standards Project - Gmail Grimaces from Mathew Patterson on Vimeo.

More on the Email Standards Project (from me).

Kentucky GRILLED Chicken?

2008-03-24T11:12:00.002-04:00

Are you kidding me?

This is Dunkin Donuts all over again

Poor Bunnies

2008-03-24T01:04:00.003-04:00

Don’t miss this beautiful video, perfect for moments of post-Easter reflection and solemnity.

5 Things To Think About

2008-03-24T00:32:00.004-04:00

1. Are there more days between today and your next birthday, or today and your last birthday? If the former, be happy, your birthday is coming up! (Like mine! Woo hoo!) If the latter, what the heck happened to all those awesome toys that you wanted so badly?

2. How many books are you in the middle of reading? If 0, get thee to Amazon! If 1-2, why are you spending so much time watching American Idol and enduring some excruciatingly awful mellismatic atrocities, when you could be enduring some excruciatingly bad examples of critical thought or science fiction writing? If 3 or more, take your bookmarks out of all three, go buy a John Grisham novel and read that this afternoon. Don’t stop reading until you know if it was the Assistant District Attorney or the 9th Circuit Judge.

3. When is the last time you made yourself your favorite dinner from childhood? If your answer is “more than a month,” you either need to go visit your parents, or stop ordering Chinese food every night. However, if your favorite meal consisted of 15 scoops of Neapolitan ice cream, hot fudge, nuts, whipped cream, and a cherry all piled on top of a “Big Foot” pizza from Little Caesars - go another 10 months, at least, before indulging in that awesome creation. (Let me know yours in the comments!).

4. Why do you spend the last hour of every night watching videos on YouTube instead of going to bed “early” for once? I don’t have much insight on this, as I am trying to figure it out for myself...

5. How long has it been since you last listened to the opinion of someone with whom you strongly disagree and didn’t attempt to argue back? Try listening without judging. Show the person that you respect him/her as a human being. That you care about what s/he has to say. This person probably already knows you disagree, but will be startled and shaken by your genuine attempt at understanding. You’ll probably learn something, too.

Fucked By Free

2008-03-21T21:21:00.001-04:00

Subtitled: Kicking Yourself Ain’t Worth The Knee Strain

Backstory: Back in November, “Web2.0 Blog of Blogs,” Mashable held a teensy little design contest to avoid paying a fair market price on a look for a t-shirt (snicker). The prize: An iPhone and some other boringish stuff. But mostly, the reward would come from the glory obtained by rising to the top of the community-generated content heap, and being deservedly recognized by the A-list crowd for one’s mad skillz. This was one of those half-assed design competitions that didn’t even include the usual “all intellectual property rights are hereby relinquished and exclusive commercial rights granted to [Company] upon submission of design work” disclaimer. Nope, just a super-casual, super-laid-back, “meh” of a contest.

And it ended up getting some pretty nice entries. The winning design - a cute little potato (get it? Mashable?) - is really polished, and a few of the others are remarkably wearable.

Naturally, I entered this contest (otherwise, why blog about it?). I couldn’t sleep, had read practically everything remotely interesting that had been posted to the internet that day, and decided - what the heck! - to fire up Adobe Illustrator to design a couple shirts.

This was 2:00 a.m., mind you.

At 3:00 (a mere 4 hours before I was to get ready for another grueling Monday at my former job), I submitted my designs. All 15 of them.

I went with a pretty tried-and-true form for all the designs: clever, slightly off-color slogan, centered on the shirt - and a simple, but cool giant M! on the back. Totally original, I know. Still - they felt appropriate to the Mashable brand, and I quite like a couple of the slogans I came up with (particularly the “Mashable is sexy in Helvetica, too.” shirt, which is the only one with a different layout, and not set in Myriad Pro.). But would I win? Nah. Never would’ve expected to. I contributed the designs partly as an embrace of the culture of free, partly out of boredom, and partly out of some insomniacical mania.

You see, growing up I had a lot of trouble falling asleep. And in my waking hours - especially those spent in high school and college - I found that I was drawn to extreme amounts of repetition and, in this, creativity. One night, I somehow managed to write 30 pages (single-spaced) of statements that began with the words “Staying up to...” Get the picture?

OK, now, fast-forward to today.

Mashable has opened a cool, new t-shirt shop using Zazzle.com (Zaz-what?!) that contains “40 different designs to choose from to show your love for all things Mashable, including submissions from our t-shirt design contest.”

“Sweet,” thought I, “Maybe they used one of mine.”

Well, yeah. Actually 12.

Twelve of the forty designs are mine. Take a look:

Oh, but wait!

These aren‘t my designs at all! What in God’s name is Arial Rounded doing in the place of Myriad Pro in some of them? I cry foul! Sure, Arial Rounded is oh-so-typically Web 2.0, but come on, guys. Eww. But yes, all of those corny slogans are mine.

OK, now what’s my point? Am I looking to be compensated for my grievances? No, no, no. Nor am I trying to bash Mashable for their behavior.

What I am doing is trying to provide a tiny bit of caveat emptor to folks who might decide to enter similar contests in the future. Rules are important. Rights are important. Your creative work is important and has value. And if you wish to give it up, you should do so willingly, knowingly, and with a clear understanding of what it means to relinquish control of your intellectual property without fair compensation.

In my case, this means I have to watch as Mashable launches an online store from which they stand to make thousands of dollars in profit doing little more than leveraging their (deservedly-strong) brand, with an inventory of products created at no cost to them. Brilliant for Mashable. Shitty for the ladies and gents who did the hard work designing the shirts. Shitty especially, for me, upon realizing that fully 30% of their catalog is work I produced, and for which I received not even a mere hyperlink to my blog. I was credited for my designs on the Flickr pool, but not linked. Meh.

Certainly, all of this would have been nice: a link, share of the revenue, free copies of my shirts, a free iPhone to supplement mine which is looking a little sad after doing some pavement surfing a couple months ago, fame and glory. But I’m not asking for any of that. And I am surely not asking that Mashable remove my designs from their store. A part of me thinks that it is seriously awesome that my work is being sold by one of the biggest blogs on the web.

All I want is for a few of you out there - in situations similar in some degree to mine - to be careful. Free is a business model. Which means thinking long and hard about how choosing it benefits you, benefits your intended market/audience and benefits the world.

Looking back, I still would’ve made the same choice, even if the moment of “sticker shock” was profoundly unsettling.

Oh, I nearly forgot: here is the store.

Racial Infographic Whimsy

2008-03-03T23:19:00.002-05:00

Or is it Infographical Racial Whimsy? Whimsical Infographic Racism?

Another stellar infographic from the New York Times, though this one scores major points for illustrating a concept (The Words We Use to Talk About Race), rather than empirical data.

Encyclopedia Of Life

2008-03-02T22:46:00.006-05:00

Easily one of the most exciting new sites to launch recently (along with 23 & Me, which I’ll get around to writing about one of these days) is Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org). Hold on, no cutesy Web 2.0-style name? Nope. This site is business. Beautiful, inspirational, important business.

In their own words:

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious, even audacious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth. At its heart lies a series of Web sites—one for each of the approximately 1.8 million known species—that provide the entry points to this vast array of knowledge. The entry-point for each site is a species page suitable for the general public, but with several linked pages aimed at more specialized users. The sites sparkle with text and images that are enticing to everyone, as well as providing deep links to specific data.
The EOL dynamically synthesizes biodiversity knowledge about all known species, including their taxonomy, geographic distribution, collections, genetics, evolutionary history, morphology, behavior, ecological relationships, and importance for human well being, and distribute this information through the Internet. It serves as a primary resource for a wide audience that includes scientists, natural resource managers, conservationists, teachers, and students around the world. We believe that the EOL's encompassing scope and innovation will have a major global impact in facilitating biodiversity research, conservation, and education.
The EOL staff is made up of scientists and non-scientists working from museums and research institutions around the world. We currently have 20 full time employees, but as this project grows, so will the EOL family.

In my own words:

Wow.

Here’s a screengrab of one of the species pages:

I truly love the web design work here. The site is clean and sophisticated without being boring or overly dense, like one might imagine an encyclopedia page to be (particularly if Wikipedia is used as an example). And the “Detail” slider, which lets you adjust the amount of information displayed about the species, is one of the coolest new interface elements I’ve seen on a site.

There’s way to much to say about the Encyclopedia of Life project, so I’ll leave it to the folks involved to do so in video form. Please do watch the two videos below, check out some of the exemplar pages, which show the fullness of the entries that will one day exist for all species on Earth, and imagine this resource 5, 10, or 25 years from now.

EOL Video 1

EOL Video 2

Free Barack Obama Desktop Wallpaper

2008-02-25T21:45:00.003-05:00

Download this free Barack Obama desktop wallpaper in all its 1920x1200 pixel glory and save the world with a single click!

Did You Buy HD-DVD? Sell! Sell! Sell!

2008-02-18T15:53:00.004-05:00

If you, like many in the early-adopter crowd, happened to shell out some hard-earned cash on an HD-DVD player and a small library of compatible movies, you probably feel a little down these days, knowing that your chosen side in the Video Format War 2.0 is dying a quick and painful death to Sony’s Blu-Ray format.

Never fear. I’m here with some soothing ointment and a Band-Aid for your boo-boo.

What’s a frugal techie to do now that she’s burnt a hole in her pockets with little to show other than a machine and some occasionally entertaining but semi-expensive coasters that will take up increasingly non-utilized space in the living room?

Well, she’ll get to eBay, that’s what she’ll do.

There’s still time to sell your HD-DVD player and HD-DVDs for only a slight loss, before the format plummets into the annals of “also ran,” joining such valiant competitors as Betamax, cardboard LPs, and Laser discs.

If you lack a conscience, you can take advantage of the dearth of information about High Definition video that the average eBay consumer has, and make a decent return on your investment. With each day, the value of your HD-DVD purchase decreases, so there’s no better day than today to start an auction, and set a decent “Buy It Now” price ever-so-slightly below the deal you got on Amazon this Christmas.

Sell that Toshiba and that Planet Earth boxed set. Close your eBay account. Leave the country. Save up for a PS3 or other Blu-Ray player. Cry just a little, perhaps.

And in the meantime, you might also try trading your HD-DVDs for a box of Girl Scout cookies, before the value drops below that of a single 75-calorie(!) Tagalong in all its crisp and creamy chocolate and peanut-buttery goodness.

Mmm...anybody know some Girl Scouts in NYC?

Hating Valentine’s Day

2008-02-14T09:01:00.004-05:00

Why does it seem that so many people so loathe Valentine’s Day? Is it only single people who hate this holiday? Doesn’t seem that way. So what explains it? And why is Valentine’s Day singled out among all holidays for such vitriol (especially evident on social networks and blogs)? Every explanation I can think of fails the smell test. So I’m bringing this to you to help answer.

Do you hate Valentine’s Day? If so, why? If not, why do you think other people have such a problem with it (and not other holidays)?

And just for kicks, if you will, what is the most romantic thing you’ve ever done (or experienced)?

iPhone Owners Really, Really Like iPhones

2008-02-13T09:10:00.004-05:00

That is a really, really high percentage of “very satisfied” iPhone owners, so high that I would estimate the overall satisfaction rate to be somewhere in the 90% range. I would love to see the raw numbers - especially the “very dissatisfied” percentages. There is a big difference between “not being very satisfied with Palm,” and “hating Palm with every last breath.”

What kind of phone do you have? And how satisfied are you?

From ChangeWave. Seen on Engadget.

Yahoo Says No.

2008-02-11T09:46:00.000-05:00

This morning, Yahoo officially rejected the proposed buyout by Microsoft, as was rumored last Friday. “Not enough money, Honey.” seems to be the reason, and I can’t help but think that this makes Microsoft look a little silly. The very public, very large, and seemingly hostile offer has exploded in their face. Yahoo plays Hardball. Who woulda thunk it?

Talk has been flying that Yahoo will go to Google for help, or even merge with AOL. The Times is saying that analysts predict Microsoft will scrounge up an additional $5 -12 billion (between seat-cushions) to match Yahoo’s wonderfully confident self-valuation, or take the bid directly to Yahoo shareholders, who will have a hard time turning down cold, hard, Monopoly money.

Interesting and interestinger.

Hulu Invites Up For Grabs

2008-02-08T11:55:00.001-05:00

Who wants one? Who needs one? Leave your email address in the comments (or send me a email) and I’ll hook you up.

Hulu's ambitious and never-ending mission is to help you find and enjoy the world's premium content when, where and how you want it. We hope to provide you with the web's most comprehensive selection of premium programming across all genres and formats – television shows, feature films, clips, and more. Additionally, we want to give you more choices of when and where you can enjoy your favorite programming, while creating innovative experiences that let you watch and participate in online video in new and exciting ways.

What Is Graphic Design?

2008-02-08T09:42:00.000-05:00

My entry in the “What is Graphic Design?” poster contest on Veerle’s blog.

The actual entry doesn’t have the fancy drop shadow.

View all of the entries here, on Flickr.

In Hartford? Go See This Play.

2008-02-07T09:11:00.000-05:00

If you’re in the Hartford area tonight or this weekend, you should take a trip to Trinity College to see a production of Eugène Ionesco’s “Frenzy For Two, Or More” directed by my beautiful and brilliant girlfriend, Tina Nikolova, as part of her senior thesis for the Theater & Dance major.

Showtimes:
Thurs, Feb 7th at 7:00
Friday, Feb 8th at 9:30
Saturday, Feb 9th at 4:30

Blurbyness:
The noise outside gets louder: the shouting and gunfire that could be heard vaguely in the distance have gotten nearer, and now can be heard beneath the window. HE, on the point of reacting violently to her insults, suddenly stops, and so does SHE. Featuring a massacre of 72 plastic Barbie dolls.

Sounds pretty sweet, no?

Oh yeah, and it’s totally free.

Here’s where it’s at:
Austin Arts Center at Trinity College
300 Summit Street
Hartford, CT 06106

Call (860) 297-5122 if you have questions, or you can shoot me an email.

Election 2008: Racism Still Exists

2008-02-06T09:11:00.000-05:00

This morning, two of my coworkers asked me who I voted for in last night’s primary. Upon hearing that my support went to Barack Obama, they responded with absolute horror. No, not just incredulity. Horror. Shock. Disgust. I’m serious.

“What do you think is going to happen to America if that guy...you know he’s black...you kids don’t know...you don’t know what it was like...when that black guy was Mayor of New York - Dinkins - do you think that was good...I’m telling you right now, white people are going to have a hard time...I would never vote for him...” and on and on.

Effectively what they were saying was that electing Barack Obama as President would turn the United States of America into the United States of African-America, a place where blacks hold uncompromising power over whites and other minorities.

To which I say, quite frankly, “What the fuck?!”

These women - one is from Russia and the other from Peru - both U.S. Citizens now (interesting, perhaps, though I’m sure that has less than nothing to do with their feelings) - just shook my faith in the American electorate. Not because they want someone other than Obama to win (one of them didn’t even vote, and hundreds of thousands of other people want someone else, too), but their (lack of) reasoning for it. I mean, I’m not asking other people to carefully consider the policies and qualifications of the candidates. I guess all I’m looking for is a shred of rationality - even merely a little excitement about one candidate in particular - a sense that the motivation is rooted in something other than being strongly against (and especially for racist, sexist, or related reasons) the others.

I tried to argue that just because they didn’t like New York City under Mayor Dinkins (and here my other coworker piped up to say that he liked Dinkins), that didn’t mean that America under Obama would be remotely similar. The assertion that not all black people are exactly the same, just as not all white people are exactly the same (duh) fell on deaf ears.

One of these women actually indicated that if Hillary Clinton did not win the Democratic race, she would, without a doubt, vote for “that other guy” - a politician on the “other side” whose name she didn’t even know.

I have never - never, not once, ever, in my entire life - personally experienced the expression of sentiments like those to which I was a witness this morning. Never.

How naive of me to think that we had somehow moved past this kind of hateful, hurtful stuff. The way they said to me, “You want a black man to be President?” with such disregard for the possibility that I might have black relatives or close friends - just an assumption that I was somehow betraying my “race” - really hurt. And it was really disappointing. I really hurt for them, too.

One thing I agreed with: “You kids don’t know what it’s like.”

Nothing could be more true.

And, given the taste I got this morning, nothing could be more welcome.

iPhone Earbuds: Important Information

2008-02-05T09:07:00.000-05:00

Let’s face it, the earbuds Apple ships with iPods and iPhones are kind of crappy. I don’t personally have a problem with them fitting in my ears like many seem to, but they inevitably give out on me after about six months. A couple weeks ago - right on schedule - the earbuds I got when I first bought my iPhone back at the end of June decided to take a rest. The left earbud stopped working entirely, and the overall volume was down dramatically. On top of that, the mic (which really is one of the best things about the iPhone) seemed to be having issues.

As I’ve done when my iPod earbuds have crapped out in the past, I started looking around for a replacement pair, and just as I was about to settle for the $29 Apple variety (mostly because of the mic, which in other models I’ve seen has been implemented poorly. Apple also seems to be the only company that knows how long to make the cord.), I had a brilliant thought:

What if these are covered under warranty?

Well, it turns out they are. A quick call to Apple and a replacement pair was on its way - overnight shipping, mind you - no questions asked, no hassle, and a perfectly pleasant customer service representative apologizing for the “long” wait (3 minutes on hold! Horror!).

They came yesterday, and I popped the old pair back in the postage-paid package, which I will drop off at DHL later today.

Good stuff. Make sure you take advantage of this before your warranty is up.

Microsoft Wants Yahoo

2008-02-01T09:21:00.000-05:00

Everyone is talking about the $44.6 billion that Microsoft has offered up to purchase Yahoo, so that means I’m obligated to add my two cents.

Stowe Boyd has a good take that I pretty much agree with:

Personally, I think the Microsoft and Yahoo matchup is like two tired swimmers who bump into each other and then wind up drowning each other in their scramble to survive. But Yahoo will be the first to go under in this embrace.
...
Just smells like this decades AOL/Time matchup. It will go through. Microsoft will remove one competitor, but it won't work. It won't be enough to stop the future.

The big question I have is, “What will happen to the many overlapping services like Mail and Search?” Will they be combined, will both continue to exist, or what? What I haven’t been able to figure out from what has been written about this merger is exactly what the nature of it will be. Both Microsoft and Yahoo (especially) have suffered from the inability to focus their online offerings - spreading themselves thin, and expanding their services with little rhyme or reason - in my opinion. What happens to stuff like Flickr and Del.icio.us when Microsoft buys Yahoo? That worries me a little. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Does Google have anything to fear if this deal goes through? A little bit, sure. They’ll lose some Search market share, have a harder time gaining traction for Google Apps (if MS Office Live ever happens), become slightly less of a de facto standard in online advertising. But it seems to me that they have their eyes on something else entirely, and are gradually moving into a new, uncharted space that no one has figured out just yet.

My impression is that Microsoft and Yahoo are competing with Google, but Google is looking elsewhere, competing only with “Possibility.”

And keep your eye on Amazon. They just doubled their profit, announced they are buying Audible, and their web services division is rapidly becoming hugely important to modern internet applications and services.

Man, 2008 is going to be fascinating. Welcome to February. Don’t get too comfortable.

Why I Don’t Care About A Recession

2008-01-31T09:40:00.000-05:00

Subtitled: Why I Should Probably Never Consult On The Economy

So, everyone and her mother is fretting about the American economy lately. It’s of the major issues influencing the Presidential Primaries, and was the main subject of President Bush’s State of the Union earlier this week.

But I guarantee - guarantee - that if you ask people what exactly is wrong with the economy, the median answer will be (verbatim), “It’s bad,” whatever the heck that means.

Well, what does that mean, anyway? Not much. In fact, if you’re like me and actually think about how this (here or not yet here) recession affects you, you’ll see this so-called recession as a positive thing.

Check this out:

The Fed is lowering interest rates, which means my student loans (all $500 Million of them) are decidedly more manageable. At last, I’m not being screwed into paying more in interest than the actual cost of the loan. Just barely, mind you, but lower interest means I can make a big payment on my loan and not have it all be meaningless. But where am I getting the money to make this big payment at a time when the economy is so “bad?” Well, that’s my next point.
The government is going to be sending me money. Free money. No strings attached money. Assuming Congress is able to pass an economic stimulus package (which, yes, is a big assumption), most of us will be receiving a substantial check on top of our tax rebates. How substantial? I’ve heard numbers around $500, which isn’t too shabby. That could buy you an iPhone. Or two Zunes. Or three bundles of Rock Band. Or four things that cost $125 each after sales tax. But don’t rush out and spend that money on any of the above (except maybe Rock Band, because it’s amazing, but only one copy and maybe an extra guitar controller if they are ever released). That’s just what they’re expecting you to do. That’s what they want you to do. They who caused this whole mess in the first place. Why in Xenu’s name would you play into their hand? Dumb. Instead, do this: keep the money. Horde as much as you can. Keep your tax rebate, too. And the money your grandmother gives you for your birthday. Put it all in secret locations around your house. Put it in a savings account. Or, take advantage of the low interest rates and use the money to pay down some debts. Whatever you do, don’t encourage businesses and government by giving them the money. That’d just be enormously foolish. Remember: It’s all their fault.
Everything I have any interest in buying still costs the same. I don’t know what other people are buying that is more expensive now. Maybe gas, but if you’re driving a car, I personally blame you for 95.7% of this country’s ills anyway, so I couldn’t care less about your transportation expenses. Apple computers still cost the same, iPods still cost the same, iPhones and the AppleTV are actually cheaper! I don’t usually buy food, so I can’t say anything about those prices, but I can tell you that the Chinese/Mexican restaurant that delivers to my apartment hasn’t raised their prices. And if they did, well, I guess I wouldn’t eat three nights out of the week. Whatever. A sacrifice during wartime for the greater good. Call me a hero. Call me John McCain.
I still have a job. And they still pay me the same amount of money. So, um, some math here - a word problem, in fact: Kevin’s boss pays him $500 a month, and his rent is $125 a month before the recession. Now that there is (allegedly) a recession, he earns and spends exactly the same amount. How little does he care? Please show your work and express your answer to 5 significant figures.
What about those Americans who are out of work, who can’t get hired because the job market is awful? Won’t they be devastated by a slumping economy? Well, yeah, but I have a very simple solution for them: Build up your credit rating by spending every last dime in your possession, and take out a $5,000 loan. Spend $2500 on a new MacBook Pro and a copy of Windows XP, which you’ll install and run using Boot Camp. Spend $100 a month on a Triple Play package (cable, internet, phone). With the remaining cash, buy every single O’Reilly book on Amazon, read them, and learn how to program. If you are artistically inclined, you can instead spend the money on a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3. If you are artistically inclined, but uncharacteristically financially intelligent, then spend the money on the programming books, and pirate a copy of CS3 via BitTorrent. Then call me. I will pay you to do my work. Whoever said nobody is hiring right now obviously only asked Yahoo.

See, things aren’t so bad, now are they?

State Of The Union Infographic

2008-01-29T09:14:00.000-05:00

The New York Times continues to include amazing infographics along with its online content. This morning, there is a great one - not interactive, like many are - detailing the linguistic content of President George W. Bush’s State of the Union addresses over the last 8 years. It provides an illuminating look at the administration’s perception of the American life and global landscape.

Also interesting is the accompanying graph that plots the percentage of people who “approve of the way Mr. Bush is handling his job” and “said the country is going in the right direction” since the President took office in 2001. Two guesses which direction the graph is heading, and the first one doesn’t count.

Last year’s look at the State of the Union is here.

iTunes Movie Rentals

2008-01-28T15:11:00.001-05:00

Thoughts after my first foray into the world of iTunes Movie Rentals:

It works really well.
Limited selection (but then, that kind of sums up my feelings about the list of movies I haven’t ever seen - especially when it comes to recent releases. There’s just not a whole lot of great stuff that I haven’t had the pleasure of watching. Disagree? I’d love a list of flicks to prove me wrong!).
Decent price. Cheap enough to cause me not to really think before clicking “Rent.” Good or bad thing? Depends how deep your checking account is.
It is very convenient.
I wish Netflix let me download the movies rather than stream, because it could be cheaper, but I don’t particularly love subscription models (this explains why I left EMusic after about 6 months), so maybe I would still prefer iTunes.
There ought to be a Rent-to-Own service - pay the difference and get the movie for keeps.
Superbad is better than I gave it credit for when I watched some bootleg copy streaming on some stupid site a few months ago. Still pretty stupid. But better.

New Google Reader Favicon

2008-01-25T08:57:00.000-05:00

Yes, I am aware this is the nerdiest thing ever.

But it’s cool. And a very nice icon. Bravo, Google Reader team.

And besides, I’m not the only geeky designer to notice this.

William Gibson on Cloverfield

2008-01-24T08:54:00.000-05:00

Writer William Gibson on Cloverfield:

I saw Cloverfield last night, and nothing about it bugged me more than those quotes around "Central Park" on the DoD evidence tag that opens the film. It immediately tells us that this film has not been made by native science fiction minds. If Central Park is no longer called Central Park, but is officially referred to as "the area formerly known as 'Central Park'", but the DoD still exists, we know that this is not a *far-future* evidence tag. So if Central Park is now known as "The Killing Fields", or "The Ghastly Black Glass Ocean", then *tell* us. Those quotes are extraordinarily clumsy (and the card itself is typographically unconvincing).

I think it’s obvious why the makers of the film did this. Simply put, Cloverfield is not a film made for a science fiction audience. Its audience is the general public ($41 million bucks opening weekend) - people by whom this subtlety is missed, and who benefit from the context provided by the name of a familiar location. While not entirely accurate, this little bit of information immediately says to an audience, “This place you know and which carries strong emotional connotations for you no longer exists,” while “The Killing Fields” just says, “Some place, somewhere on Earth, something bad or weird happened.”

Are the quotes clumsy? Yes. Is the card typographically unconvincing? Certainly. But no more so than *asterisks* around words meant to be emphasized and the use of dumb quotes (which I lovingly call stupid quotes).