Anil Dash

At Ten Years, I'm Taking Requests

2009-07-07T01:46:26Z

In two weeks, I'll be marking the 10 year anniversary of blogging on dashes.com. I'm celebrating by making a simple request: Tell me what you'd like to see me blog about. I can't guarantee I'll get to every request that's made, but I am going to try to cherry-pick the best ideas that fit into what this site is all about. (If you're curious what that means, check out my Best Of, or just view the Most Popular things I've written.)

To support the effort, I'm taking off the next few weeks to focus primarily on writing and researching. While it might seem like a weird way to spend a "vacation", running this site over the past 10 years has been among the most fulfilling and rewarding things I've done in my life. So it only seemed natural to me to dedicate even more time and energy to it.

And to that end, if you're in the NYC area and we haven't had the chance to meet up in person, or it's been too long since we've caught up, drop me a line to anil@dashes.com or give me a ring at (646) 833 8659 and if I've got time, I'm happy to grab coffee or a drink with anybody who's a reader of this site. (I'm also open to suggestions of things I should check out in NYC that I might have missed — the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel is already on my list, but I'm open to anything. And you know, parties and meetups are fun, too.)

Thanks to everybody for helping me celebrate my site's anniversary in style, and I look forward to getting even more ideas and inspiration from all of you!

Free Criticism, Science After Data, and Airport Books

2009-07-01T22:17:18Z

When I saw Malcolm Gladwell doggedly dissecting Chris Anderson's upcoming "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" (see Chris' response here) my first reaction was: Brilliant! Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired, and Malcolm Gladwell is a top brand name at The New Yorker, and as corporate cousins, clearly Condé Nast's publicity machine must have engineered this beef, trying to boost sales of both their titles through a completely manufactured rivalry.

Their past titles have been champions of what I call the "Airport Books" genre: The elite class of business titles that I see sold in airport newsstands next to the magazines and crappy romance novels. (I might have unknowingly stolen "airport books" from someone else, but I can't find a citation.)

Alas, I'm assured that this particular contretemps isn't a planned corporate PR stunt. (Though I know lots of nice folks at Condé, they don't seem to mimic street-level hip hop marketing as often as one might hope.) Instead, it seems the criticism and counter-argument are sincere.

The core of Gladwell's argument is simple: "Free" fails to provide data to support its claims about the future of pricing, using anecdote and confident assertion in place of actual evidence. In his objection to this methodology, Gladwell seems uncharacteristically strident, compared to his usual measured tones. Whenever I see somebody getting their dander up, I think of one of the first things I ever blogged about ten years ago: We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves. Ah hah!

Let's see what criticisms have been leveled at Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, the juggernauts of the airport book genre:

The IUP Skeptical Inquirer's Wesley Cecil has a review of Blink which offers this up: "Gladwell relies heavily on anecdotal evidence. The centerpiece of each chapter is a short story or series of stories that are supposed to illustrate some aspect of his theory of snap judgments. ... [I]ntuitive feeling triumphs over careful study. ... [O]ne case does not an argument make."
Slate's Jack Shafer on Gladwell telling a tall tale at The Moth, which kind of ridiculously insinuates that this is a character flaw instead of just a fun story.
More definitively, the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani made this point in her review of Outilers, but extends it to apply to all of Gladwelll's books: "[His] books are filled with colorful anecdotes and case studies that read like entertaining little stories. Both use PowerPoint-type catchphrases (like the 'stickiness factor' and 'the Rule of 150') to plant concepts in the reader’s mind. ... 'Outliers' Mr. Gladwell's latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. ... [His examples are] all based not on persuasive, broadband research, but on a flimsy selection of colorful anecdotes and stories."
Joel Spolsky keyed off of Kakutani's review on his popular blog: "what's been driving me crazy over the last year... an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works." (Bonus points to Joel for swiping en passant at airport book titan Thomas Friedman and his cartographic ironing board.)
Kevin Arthur's post built on Joel's rant, offering a slightly more measured, but still critical analysis: "I feel like clarifying my opinion on this... I think there is great value in pop science books, in articles written by non-experts, and in anecdotes. I read Joel's piece not as a rant against all those things but against those things badly done."
Peter Coclanis at Open Letters just gets downright mean: "[L]et me say from the get-go that my goal in this piece, which focuses on Outliers, is to demonstrate at once how wildly overstated such just-jacket claims are and how egregiously incomplete, insubstantial, and unconvincing Gladwell’s explanation of success actually is. His methodology stinks, too, and, from his dust-jacket photo, he appears to need a haircut." I know what fun it can be to bash someone from afar on the web, but I bet Coclanis is a lousy dresser. Just sayin'.
And not to belabor the point, but let's close up with Isaac Chotiner in The New Republic, taking a stridently snarky look at Outliers: "By the time Gladwell reaches his penultimate chapter, he is in full inspiration mode, and impervious to all forms of critical thinking. ... Here is the Gladwell method nicely on display: a questionable assumption, a partial walk-back of an earlier claim, and finally another questionable assumption synthesizing the half-reversal."

My goal is not to ennumerate all of the criticisms of Gladwell's books — I enjoyed reading all of them, and I like his New Yorker pieces, and that's kind of all I would ask of the guy. But I can't help but wonder if being ceaselessly criticized for using assertions and anecdotes in lieu of hard statistical data has left him much more inclined to criticize others for using the same technique.

I haven't had a chance to finish reading Free yet, but I am sure that both of these authors' books absolutely do lean more towards anecdotal evidence than statistical proof. And honestly, it's okay that these books don't necessarily follow the tenets of hard science. In many cases, they're arguing that a cultural trend is becoming true, or is about to become true, and the reality is that asserting that these trends are ascendent actually helps them come true. In short, these are books designed to create culture, presented in the guise of reporting on culture. I like that!

But of course there will always be those who disagree with the idea of starting from a premise first, and then finding examples to support it. Perhaps the last word in favor of using hard data to support social observations may be from a story package in Wired a year ago, which was headlined "The End of Science" and anchored by a story called The End of Theory:

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

... But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. ... The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

The author of this compelling argument in favor of using overwhelming amounts of data to help replace formulating theories about human behavior? Former scientist Chris Anderson.

Bonus link: If you're interested in actual debate about the content of the book, Mike Masnick's excellent overview over at TechDirt is a must-read.

The Best Music Video Michael Jackson Ever Released

2009-06-26T04:51:59Z

Though he was arguably the most popular solo artist of all time, one of the great joys of being a serious Michael Jackson fan is that some of his best work is remarkably obscure, even after he had already achieved legendary status.

For example, after Michael had ad-libbed an a capella version of the first few bars of his song "Who Is It" during his celebrated interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1992, the song was hurriedly rushed out as a single to capitalize on the remarkable performance. In the record label's haste, a video was assembled from pre-existing clips and served as the video most commonly used for promoting the single in the United States.

The song went on to peak at #14 on the pop charts, but during its run a lavish new video was commissioned, directed by a pre-Se7en, pre-Fight Club David Fincher. Though it's barely been aired (and most compilations use the placeholder montage clip instead), it's among the best videos Michael ever released, and I'd argue it's the finest.

There's an infinite number of amazing music videos to show Michael's work, but I do find something reassuring that there are gems we'll all be discovering for the rest of our lives.

Just let me fill your heart with joy and laughter...

2009-06-25T22:28:07Z

This was probably the one clip of Michael Jackson I wish everybody had seen.

And Then There's Us

2009-06-23T06:11:50Z

Starting last week, New York Magazine asked me to participate in a roundtable conversation with NYMag's book critic Sam Anderson, Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd, the New York Times' Virginia Heffernan and David Rees, creator of Get Your War On. In the august company of these Actual Experts, we kicked around a conversation about memes and viral culture, inspired by Bill Wasik's And Then There's This, his newly-released book whose requisite explanatory subtitle is "How Stories Live and Die in a Viral Culture". We didn't talk too much about the "death" part, but the rest of it we got into in depth and it ended up being a blast to participate in the conversation.

Sam started us off with a strong intro, but I really lit up when Virginia cut to the heart of one of my biggest linguistic peeves with this entire topic of conversation: the word "viral". In her own words:

I see why virology is metaphorically convenient, but as a YouTube obsessive I’ve also been curious about a particular inadequacy in the analogical system. My problem with the analogy might seem trivial, but I think it bears on our understanding of Wasik’s justly celebrated Flash Mobs. ...

I understand how the chain-letter thing is vaguely viral: One person who is “infected” with certain information touches you, via e-mail, with that information and then you’re infected. But I don’t get how accepting a widely disseminated invitation to go somewhere—to a website, to YouTube, to Toys “R” Us—is like getting a virus. Viruses seem so yours, don’t they, when you have them, and you’re very much the host, even if your physiological party’s been crashed. By contrast, getting invited somewhere, willingly accepting the invitation, and joining a gathering makes you a guest and makes the whole experience, to my mind, not very viruslike.

From there, the conversation took off (perhaps thanks to the promotional graphic on the NYMag.com homepage, which I've reproduced here). There was some smart analysis of Wasik's book, but the standalone conversation was perhaps most interesting to me, and that's what I focus on summarizing here. Charlie followed up on Virginia's opener with a really insightful look into his experience with Improv Everywhere, including an important idea that I would key off of later: "It's fun to get together with a large group of people and try something you've never done before." Accordingly, my followup began, "Hey, wait: Isn't this shit supposed to be fun?" and from there I went into a little riff about how I like popular music and that people who make popular memes should think of themselves more like those who make pop music.

And then David took it to the next level. I'm pretty damn fussy about what kinds of PowerPoint presentations I'll praise, but the PDF of David's presentation is well worth the download — it's both funny and insightful. Charlie followed with a really thoughtful writeup from the standpoint of someone who can make videos that are both viral and fodder for memes, seemingly at will. His most resonant statement, for me:

The instant feedback through views, ratings, and comments is completely addictive. I think it's possible to learn from the data, but ultimately you just have to do what you find interesting and not worry about whether it's going to be an epic win or an epic fail (sadly, those are the only two possible outcomes in the eyes of YouTube commenters).

Obviously, fail has been on my mind of late, so Charlie's observations were especially resonant for me. Then Sam took us back to David's presentation with a follow-up that presented a series of visual explanations of a sort of grand theory of meme-making. While I must confess I wasn't persuaded by the argument that the infographics advanced, I was certainly entertained by the endeavor. From the smart-yet-accessible land of the charticle, we went to the other extreme as Virginia got to the heart of the "keeping it real" question, declaring "I don’t understand why male writers think so passionately and complexly about whether something like a band or song is ironic or authentic or produced by the right or wrong people."

That's an annoyance of mine, as well, and I tried to answer it in passing in my next update. But maybe the most useful part of that little essay was the part quoted by The Awl, where I said, "I like music that makes me shake my ass. I like my memes to be fun, created by people who are enjoying what they do."

David brought us back with a sharp but still entertaining riff on Twitter and Iran. He put a Blingee at the top of his post (dammit, I was gonna do that!) and then bookended it by closing with a question that counterbalanced my point perfectly: "Does anyone know of a viral smash that worked because it made people SAD or MELANCHOLY rather than HAPPY?"

The answer, of course, is yes. There are countless treacly and maudlin web memes out there, especially viral videos. Any given "Sad 9/11 Montage" video fits these criteria perfectly, and countless nominally-inspiring-but-actually-depressing stories of people triumphing over adversity fit the bill as well. But I submit that even those videos are meeting a positive emotional need for their audience, those people who really just want to have A Good Cry.

This conversation might never end, of course, but that's as far as we've gotten to date. Best of all, the rambling discourse has inspired some terrific responses. My friend and meme-making kingpin Jonah Peretti, who is featured at length in Wasik's book, responded with some cogent points on Facebook. (You might have to be my friend or something to read that. I dunno.) The Assimilated Negro offered up a characteristically thoughtful take, from someone who knows the meme-making world intimately as well. And it seems appropriate to give the last word to Wasik himself, who was featured on NPR with a lengthy excerpt of the book itself, accompanied by an audio interview.

First!

2009-06-19T03:46:20Z

Jay Smooth, "Please stop calling everyone and their mother 'The First Rapper'":

U-Roy may be one of rap's predecessors, and among the influences that laid the foundation for rap, but he did not invent it...any more than Jocko Henderson, Gil Scott Heron, Lord Buckley or the West African Griots invented it. All of them may be forefathers, but none are the inventors. And muddling their places in music history with his sort of specious, sloppy revisionism does hip-hop AND its forefathers a disservice.

Scott Rosenberg talks about The First Blogger, as part of his promotion for his upcoming book "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters":

It's interesting to contrast these points because all of blogging is hip hop.

Update: If you enjoyed Scott's video, you might enjoy the series of interviews and profiles of pioneers I did for blogging's tenth anniversary, including Dave Winer, Leslie Harpold, Michael Sippey, and Harold Check.

The End of Fail

2009-06-16T20:46:02Z

FAIL is over. Fail is dead. Because it marks a lack of human empathy, and signifies an absence of intellectual curiosity, it is an unacceptable response to creative efforts in our culture. "Fail!" is the cry of someone who doesn't create, doesn't ship, doesn't launch, who doesn't make things. And because these people don't make things, they don't understand the context of those who do. They can't understand that nobody is more self-critical or more aware of the shortcomings of a creation than the person or people who made it.

When someone says "FAIL", what they’re really saying is, "I’m failing to understand a creative person’s constraints."

Of course, I'm not the first to point out that "Fail" sucks. Andy Baio articulated the case quite well, and I even touched on it in my Battledecks presentation a few years ago. Here's the relevant segment:

But we know that people who cry "FAIL!" are assholes — so why do we have to deem their petulant cry completely unacceptable? It's because of the Law of Fail:

Once a web community has decided to dislike a person, topic, or idea, the conversation will shift from criticizing the idea to become a competition about who can be most scathing in their condemnation.

It is in this way that the obnoxious jerks who offer an unthinking, uncritical belch in response to others' efforts kick off an even worse mob-minded pile on. And what I want to make clear is those who begin these conversations are, it must be said, the true failures. They choose a reflexive shorthand instead of a reasoned critique, and they bring out the worst in a community. I care deeply about people being creative on the web, and I care almost as much about people having thoughtful and productive conversations on the web.

So, fail is dead. I won't accept it in dialogue from those I communicate with, I won't permit those I'm connected to on social networks to use it around me, and no, you're not the first to think you're clever enough to use it as a comment here. If you have the urge to say it and you're a good person, then go do something creative instead. If you have the urge to say "Fail" and you haven't done anything? Well, then your statement speaks for itself.

Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames

2009-06-10T16:54:43Z

~~The whole world~~ A small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.

Since its announcement yesterday, there's been a lot of excited discussion of the feature, but in a dashes.com exclusive I can exclusively report this exclusive look at the future of the feature. We'll also cover how the feature's rollout will be covered by the technology trade press and the mainstream press.

June 13, 12:01am: Facebook launches Facebook Usernames. The gold rush is on!

June 13, 12:01:45am: The first completely irrational, highly unlikely theory about how Google indexes Facebook Usernames is emitted from the ass-end of the SEO industry.

June 13, 12:02am: An enterprising and mischevious nerd who is definitely not me squats on the username of a notable tech trade reporter like Michael Arrington.

June 13, 12:06am: The Facebook username system starts getting overloaded with new registrations, but their tech team clears it up in 20 or 30 minutes, for a total period of slowness of about 35 minutes.

June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of "It's alive! Go get your name!" posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can't get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can't get to the feature at all. The phrase "The Facebook Username debacle" is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that "Facebook Username" can be abbreviated "FU", and each thinks he is the first to think of it.

June 13, 1:00am: #FUFacebook becomes a Trending Topic on Twitter. People who are presently whining about how expensive it is to buy a new iPhone because they bought a new iPhone last year will have the chance to see how obnoxious and overprivileged they look, but will not take the opportunity.

June 13, 9:00am: The first mainstream coverage of the feature happens in the New York Times, which includes a one-line mention of the launch in a lengthy feature about Twitter's Verified Accounts. The story includes a colorful illustration of Kanye West, but omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:01pm: Twelve hours after launch, a passionate and vitriol-filled flame war erupts amongst web protocol nazis about exacly which 300-series HTTP header should be used to redirect from the old /profile.php?id=500012896 URLs to the new system. Mark Pilgrim writes an overwrought essay on the topic, and 300 Ubuntu users on netbooks use their free hand to Digg the post. For these nerds, "The Facebook Debacle" refers to the improper headers used on the redirects, instead of the few minutes of difficulty in registering names.

June 13, 12:01pm: Within twelve hours of launch, the OpenID community will quietly reach out to Facebook, asking about their plans to have Facebook Usernames become an OpenID provider. Facebook will decline to comment, Simon Willison will write a thoughtful and persuasive essay about the benefits to Facebook if they were to embrace such a thing, and Andy Baio will politely link to it on Waxy Links. Months later, Facebook will actually implement the feature. For this community, this cordial and fruitful exchange will be referred to "The Facebook Debacle".

June 13, 3:00pm: I tweet a link to my post about owning your identity online. The few folks who read it seven years ago nod in agreement, and everyone else considers reading the short bit.ly URL to be equivalent to reading the post.

June 13, 4:04pm: A white guy named David discovers every variation of his name on Facebook is already taken, and finally reconsiders the condescending contempt he's always had for black people who give their kids unique names. This tiny bit of racial reconsideration is the only unequivocally good news to come out of the Facebook Usernames launch.

June 15, 8:00am: A short and punchy Monday morning story about Facebook Usernames appears on USA Today's website, omitting any mention of the word "debacle", but dwelling heavily on the preponderance of URLs with "Hussein" in them. This vestige of the Presidential elections, which briefly convinced college kids that changing their middle name on a website was a form of political activism, is promptly interpreted as an Al Qaeda sleeper cell movement by most of the paper's print readers.

June 15, 9:00am: In its opening weekend, between four and five million people (or between two and three percent of Facebook's ostensible population) will have registered Usernames for themselves. Tech pundits will say "everyone has a Facebook Username now" and refer to that assertion as an article of faith in future posts about identity. It will not be until 2012 that Facebook supports the full range of diacritical marks and international characters that let the other 5.5 billion residents of Earth use their name as a username, but this fact will go unreported.

June 15, 11:00am: In response to the growing buzz on TechMeme about "The Facebook Debacle", Mark Zuckerberg posts on Facebook's blog with the news that the company has created the Facebook Username Dispute Resolution Community. This group is tasked with creating a policy for arbitrating who can get what names, how conflicts between different people's usernames are resolved, and how to report squatting of usernames. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook. Over the course of its 18-month existence, the FUDR Community will attract thousands of comments, 80% of which ask for The Old News Feed back, and 85% of which contain one or more typos or deviations from standard spellings of English words.

June 15, 1:00pm: LinkedIn posts a thinly-veiled but very smart update on their company blog that happens to mention in passing that they've had friendly usernames as an option for URLs for years, and that it's more likely you want to show your professional profile to the world as the first Google result for your name. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on LinkedIn.

June 15, 1:30pm: The Google Profiles team will write a post that features a bad pun in the headline, ostensibly serving to announce some minor recent feature update, but in reality just trying to remind people that hey, you can get a Google URL. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Google.

June 15, 2:00pm: An enterprising young web hacker will realize that there are 24 items in this list, which means that if you add in a free space, you can very easily turn this post into a 5×5 Facebook Username Bingo Card. Combined with the Creative Commons license on this blog, it makes for a fun idea and a Flickr Pool pops up for people to show the FU Bingo cards they've generated.

June 15, 4:00pm: The first web-savvy celebrity in Hollywood will hold a meeting with their marketing team about what it will take to get their preferred username. During this meeting, the smartest person in the room will try to explain the difference between a profile page and a fan page, why there are different processes for getting vanity URLs for each, and why a person or brand doesn't have control over all the fan pages that can be created about them. That person will be ignored by everyone else for the duration of the meeting. The issue will be ignored by Facebook for nearly a year.

June 16, 10:00pm: The Domai.nr guys release a service that lets you sign in with your Facebook Connect account and automatically find what variations of your name are available as real domain names. While the feature is cool and works well, the team struggles to get press coverage for the launch, since it's predicated on the idea that you can register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 19, 9:00am: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will announce the unemployment numbers for May, showing a loss of 660,000 jobs, with 1/3 of them being white-collar jobs. Coincidentally, 220,000 unemployed professionals will realize to their horror that their Facebook profile now ranks above their LinkedIn profile if a prospective employer googles them, and that they have no idea how to use Facebook's privacy settings.

July 31, 2009: MySpace announces MyAddress, a feature for providing more control over the URL where your MySpace profile appears. Instead of constraining users to a few choices as Facebook does, MySpace gives users very broad control over what kind of address they can have. As a result, users pick web addresses that exactly match their obscure handles on the service, instead of using their real names.

February 15, 2010: Microsoft launches a similar URL service for usernames, providing friendly URLs for millions of people on Windows Live and XBox Live, and providing the feature to more people in one day than Facebook has succeeded in delivering usernames to in eight months. Because the announcement goes out on President's day, and because it's Microsoft, nobody really notices except for a two-line mention on Mashable, half of which is a joke about Bing. Both Microsoft's own announcement and the Mashable post omit any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Live.com.

October 31, 2010: AOL has an internal meeting about providing friendly URLs to users of AIM and Bebo, and make a bold decision to put it on their 18-month roadmap.

I hope you find this overview of the future timeline of Facebook Usernames useful to understand where this exciting feature is going in the future, how our industry will adapt and respond to this sort of innovation, and how our tech trade press will hold the powerful company's feet to the fire as this sort of capability becomes mainstream in the years to come.

And oh hey, add me as a friend on Facebook! Or become a fan of mine! Or something.

Supporting Our Artists

2009-06-01T23:00:44Z

Last week's issue of The New Yorker attracted a lot of attention for its cover art, which was created on an iPhone by artist Jorge Colombo.

From the New York Times to gadget blogs to design sites, the work certainly got a lot of attention. But while a few stories did a decent job of talking to the artist behind the work in addition to covering the technology involved, most seemed like they were fixated on the tools instead of the end result. That'd be understandable if all of these venues were filled with people who'd never seen an iPhone before, but even the tech-savvy got pulled into the "gee whiz, a small computer can make pictures!" aspect of it.

The truth is, Colombo has been creating art for The New Yorker (albeit not covers) for a decade and a half — he didn't suddenly become a recognized artist by using an iPhone. It's not surprising that the magazine would encourage an established talent to use new media to express himself. But that odd fixation on tools over talent perhaps reached its apotheosis in the New York Times's story on Brushes, Steve Sprang's clever little app that Colombo used for his artwork. The piece offers a link for buying the application, but doesn't explain how to buy any of Colombo's work. While I'm glad to see the application's creator recognized, it seemed odd that in all this coverage, very few people talked about how to support the artist who made the cover itself.

Fortunately, we have the means to support Jorge Colombo's work within our community as well. Colombo has been featured on 20×200 a number of times, and in fact his iPhone editions made their debut back in April on the site, as Jen Bekman gleefully notes here.

So, go ahead and buy Brushes. That's cool — Steve Sprang deserves to be rewarded for his creativity. But I think we should be recognizing Jorge Colombo as the artist who uses these tools as well. A work like this beautiful sketch of an interior at Grand Central Terminal starts at just $20. Our technologies are succeeding best when they become invisible or irrelevant compared to the ideas they're being used to express.

Say My Name Say My Name

2009-05-28T13:12:40Z

For about ten years, Slate has had an intermittent series of articles that explain how to pronounce names of people who are in the news. As someone whose (first) name is frequently mispronounced, I can appreciate the effort. (For the record: I pronounce it like the word "anneal", used in glassmaking.)

Amusingly, the column has been running for so long that they've had the opportunity to offer more than one way to say "Pinochet", with the Chilean dictator having eluded earlier attempts at pronunciation. Due to Slate's weird archives, earlier must-hear words don't show up in that archive, including frequently-used conversation starters like Qatar and Abu Ghraib, and a host of others piggybacking under the also-excellent Explainer feature that is one of my Slate faves.

Flags, Windows, Lucky Numbers and Hidden Mickeys

2009-05-21T06:52:36Z

Another new version of Windows is nearly upon us, as Microsoft will release Windows 7 later this year. Vista was greeted with probably a few too many jeers, which in the tech industry means Windows 7 will probably be greeted with a few too many cheers as compensation. I've used it for a while, and Windows 7 is fine or even great if you like Windows, and will not be fine if you don't. But I found some interesting points in the initial marketing materials that are starting to become visible across the web.

Microsoft's gradual design evolution from Windows 3.1-era "What's design?" to XP-era "We're trying our best!" has graduated with Windows 7 into the first visual design touches that are thoughtful, clever, and perhaps even witty. It starts with the logo and promotional graphics for the new version.

There's been a (likely-unplanned) public reveal of the branding around the new release thanks to a site called Windows Lounge. Staying true to Microsoft's uncomfortably awkward corporate culture, the Windows Lounge site is a standalone one-page website that features a YouTube video and some text instructions, all designed to get Microsoft employees to join a Facebook group where they can talk privately about what's planned for the new Windows release. Yes, they're using Google's video service and a private Facebook group to have a conversation that, being aimed at Microsoft employees only, could take place on their own intranet. But I'm not judging that part!

Instead, look at the clever "7" graphic I've included here, which I cropped from one of the Microsoft promo sites. It's clear and simple, like the "7" name itself — no inscrutable "XP", no overly-broad "Vista", just a version number like software used to have in the olden days. Sure, the overdone lens flare gives it a little bit of that I'm-blinded-by-your-brilliance presumptuousness that made squinting my way through the otherwise-delightful new Star Trek movie a little painful. But overall? It's as good a job as any logo Microsoft's done, and it maybe even suggests a > greater-than sign, subtly indicating that this new product represents an actual improvement over whatever version of Windows you're enduring now.

But the moment of delight in truly pleasing designs comes in the reveal, in the sense of discovery that maybe there's something unexpected or unexpectedly familiar in a graphic. It's that moment of FedEx arrows and hidden Mickeys. Which hit me when looking at the familiar Windows flag logo. What if we take this new 7 logo and overlay it on that old standby Windows flag? We get something like this:

Hey, that's pretty cool! It's not perfect, probably as the result of some hand-tuning of the 7 logo. But to take a familiar icon like the Windows flag and use an element of it in a new way — that's a step forward for Microsoft's visual design efforts in terms of thoughtfulness and care. It even echoes the simple, understandable branding of the new platform itself, which uses a lucky number to try to get back some of that feeling (now almost completely forgotten) of when people used to be curious and excited about new Windows releases. You can imagine exactly how they'd animate this luminescent logo in an advertisement, without even having to see it done — that kind of evocative immediacy has rarely characterized any past Microsoft design efforts.

Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the larger corporate culture at Microsoft outside of groups like the Zune team is largely indifferent to design, except where it's actively and aggressively anti-design. Take the official corporate logos page on the company's press site. It features the usual array of Microsoft, Office and Windows logos, along with other smaller products and whatever the hell the Forefront/System Server mesh-typhoon thing is supposed to be. (It's a logo that screams "this product is not for people who like having sex!") But then there's that familiar Windows flag, in large and small versions, laid out however you might want it.

The small version is basically the same as the Windows 7 logo you see above. And the big version, designed for print editors to use in their publications? It looks like this. You can almost hear the folks who were just celebrating their success with the 7 logo sighing and shaking their heads when you click on that link.

I Find It Bonkers, By The Way

2009-05-14T15:24:15Z

If you don't follow me on Twitter, you've been missing out. But fear not! I take care of my loyal blog readers as well, by offering you the highlights of the interesting links I've been sharing there:

"I find it bonkers, by the way!" That's Rick Astley in his tribute to moot, as part of the Time 100 package. He's specifically referring to the the Obama rickroll video, but I think it applies in general.
"If you love something, charge for it. ... People will pay for things they value." My esteemed colleague Andrew Anker makes the case for being unashamed of your value. (Semi-related: Four years later, my post on how freelancers should price their work remains one of the most popular things I've ever written.)
Focus on the Family reviewed Prince's tepid new release and decided that even reactionary late-career Prince isn't tame enough for them. I would pay to see them review Dirty Mind.
"In the U.S. people view names & identities as absolute things ... but in China, identities are more amorphous." It's a bit of an over-generality, but overall this Slate piece on names and identity was terrific. I tend to like Slate articles, though.
Arsenio looks askance at his own Wikipedia article. I wish they would air classic episodes of the Arsenio Hall Show or screen them on Hulu or something; I'd watch them.
I pimped the MP3 of James Brown's "Talking Loud and Saying Nothing" because it's a shame that so many people have never heard the whole thing.
Nate Silver's TED talk about race and heterogeneity is pretty strong throughout (though the reach of some of the conclusions exceeds the grasp of the data), but I most enjoyed the point about 8 minutes into the clip where he talks about the implications of cul de sacs in (sub)urban planning.
There are photos of lots of people wearing Aretha Franklin's big grey bow from the Obama inauguration. Most are photoshopped, but the best are not.
Joel Spolsky gets to the heart of why B&H is a New York institution: "The whole operation is a crazy Willy Wonka factory."
The organizers of the National Day of Prayer (you missed it last week!) have one of their key campaigns focused on praying for the media. It seems to be working as well as prayer usually does.
I liked the new Star Trek movie, though it felt a little bit like when the eye doctor looks at my retinas. Just as enjoyable was this excellent look at Trek food, which has as its only shortcoming the regrettable omission of "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."
Genius illustrator Christoph Niemann's venerable Periodic Table of Metaphors is always worth another look. It's funny because it's true!

This world wide web thing, i think it's going to work out. I think it's gonna be good for the both of us. As always, "HAHA LOL" is courtesy of Alaina Browne.

The Web is Full of Riches

2009-04-29T04:52:25Z

I have some things to share with you.

Alice Marwick's extraordinary keynote speech on internet celebrity from last year's ROFLCon. It was the highlight of the event, imbued with both humor and a conscience.

Mike Pusateri: "I am American, so I make bacon from pork belly."

Rafe Colburn: "If your mechanic wants to buy your car, it’s not time to sell it."

Wes Felter: "The rug isn't under you now."

Jason Kottke: "[M]isleading at best and a complete fucking lie at worst."

Rogers Cadenhead: "She's trying to corner the market on an infinite resource."

Chris Lehmann in The Awl, 2009's Best New Blog:

By no measure, was capital distributed “efficiently”—let alone to places “where it was most effective” in the investor-invented calamity known as the mortgage meltdown. What’s more, the question of where capital “is most needed” is inherently a political one. Post-Katrina New Orleans certainly could make do with a whole lot of efficiently delivered private capital, but somehow it was never kicked up, even in the headiest days of the housing bubble. Likewise, the “exceptional role” played by the nation’s princeling capital-herders, as the piece goes on to ploddingly rehearse, consists largely of emailing to their foreign-market counterparts at odd off-work hours; what they’re really up in arms about—with their New York magazine enablers feverishly goading them on—is seeing their social status in free-fall. “No offense to Middle America,” one of these firebreathing social prophets emails, “but if someone went to Columbia or Wharton, [even if] their company is a fumbling, mismanaged bank, why should they all of a sudden be paid the same as the guy down the block who delivers restaurant supplies for Sysco out of a huge, shiny truck?”

The Awl also does justice to last year's Best New Blog: The Big Picture. Alan Taylor's been justifiably lauded for doing great journalism as only someone native to the web could do, earning a Punch Award, the New York Times' internal awards for outstanding performance (emphasis mine):

The Big Picture ... is the winner of the Journalism and Community Service category. The concept for this photo blog originated with Alan Taylor, a Boston.com software engineer. He envisioned telling stories on the Web with visual power, then brought his idea to life, using high-quality imagery with a focus on current events.

Alan developed and promoted the blog largely on his own time. And we’re so glad he did. Since its inception in June 2008, The Big Picture has garnered almost 37 million page views and engaged its audience in new and profound ways. What’s more it has gained praise from online leaders...

Andrew Anker: "If you love something, charge for it"

Caterina Fake: "People who have broken a leg like video games such as Madden NFL 09 and NBA 2K9, whereas non-leg-breakers prefer Little Big Planet, Katamari Damacy, Super Mario Galaxy and World of Goo." A glimpse into a larger vision:

Hunch is essentially a tool for experts to help non experts -- and when we say experts, we don't necessarily mean people with Ph.D.s, but more often people who have taken the time to do research.

These stories of first nights in New York City, found through Jason's link, are incredibly moving and evocative to me. I've long been a fan of Danny Meyer's, but his story of coming to NYC the night John Lennon was shot nicely explains why I changed from being "someone who lives in New York City" to being "A New Yorker" after 9/11:

It was an amazing feeling: a moment of community and realizing that this horrible tragedy had brought that many human beings together. It wasn’t the violent act that scared me as much as it was the beauty of its aftermath that attracted me.

When I left New York City a few years ago (I returned home to NYC in 2007), I described my second night in the city, in a similar vein to those stories shared above:

I walked down the block at about three in the morning, when it was too late at night for me to call anybody who would reassure me, and having far too much pride to actually break down and start crying. At the end of my block was a pretty standard bodega, with the usual mishmash of newspapers and fresh flowers and other essentials, and next to it was a man opening up a packing box. The box was filled with fresh mangos, mangos that had probably been on a tree in Mexico 48 hours before. And now, for less than a buck, just a block from where I lived, I could have a mango.

In the little town where I'd grown up, mangos had only shown up in the local grocery store a few years earlier, being considered an ethnic food. My mother had brought them home for us regularly, partially in celebration of their availability, but mostly because they were delicious. And here, now, was this fruit in my hand, in the middle of the night. I'd always been a night owl, but this somehow seemed like a sign, that this crate was being unpacked at three in the morning. This city was about exactly that kind of potential.

I'm sitting here tonight eating some Indian mangos as I write this. And seven years after I came to New York City, I went back to that same market just a few blocks from where I live today, bought a mango, and gave it to my wife as I proposed to her. Tonight's mangos are pretty good, too.

Sticking with Last Year's Model

2009-04-22T18:10:47Z

Here's the idea: We can fix the false impression that the newest gadgets are the only interesting ones by simply promoting the fact that we're getting a lot out of our existing products.

I am lucky — I get to talk to some of the smartest geeks in the world, and to learn from their example about cutting-edge technologies. One of the most interesting things I've seen is that, while so much of the talk in tech circles is about the latest-and-greatest, even alpha geeks often don't run out and buy the newest gadgets and electronics the minute they come out.

But you wouldn't know it from the way we talk about our gadgetry.

Instead, there's an incessant focus on what's just been released on the market, or what's becoming available in the future. It makes even those of us who have great, fancy, expensive devices feel like, well, we're slipping behind.

It ain't necessarily so. I bounced this idea off of a few tech experts I know, and they all agreed that the constant pursuit of novelty over actual value takes a lot of the joy out of loving great technology. So, to help promote the idea of being thoughtful about what we buy, and how long we hold on to it, I created Last Year's Model, with a design from my friend Mike Monteiro of Mule Design.

Today is Earth Day — I don't want to diminish the fact that being thoughtful about our consumption is good for the planet. But It's just as important to me that we really think about what we're doing with these tools and toys.

Fortunately, I'm not alone.

Gina Trapani was one of the first people to really encourage me to put the site together, and she's already given a testimonial to the idea for the site and helped spread the #lastyears tag on Twitter with her announcement.
Kevin Rose is on board, too, showing that there's no contradiction between loving the latest in technology and still not chasing every new shiny gadget.
Joel Johnson at BoingBoing Gadgets a really thoughtful take on the idea.
Chris Pirillo's got a personal testimonial of how he's getting the most from his current laptop.

And we've got a ton more examples popping up — I'll be sharing them on my own Twitter account as new ones pop up. You can also join the Facebook Cause to show your support.

I hope you'll participate. I'm very thankful to all my friends who've helped out with shaping this simple little site and the slightly-bigger idea behind it. If you've got a story of how you're getting the most out of the gear you've already got, all you have to do is visit Last Year's Model and share your story.

Video Computer System

2009-04-17T04:25:07Z

A lot of folks seemed to like the Little Red Riding Hood video I linked to the other day, so I thought I'd reach way back into the archives (anybody still hanging around who was reading this site in 2000?) and dig out an old favorite.

Behold, "Video Computer System" by Brazil's own Golden Shower. (Don't blame me — I didn't name the band.) One of the first chiptunes tracks to really take off online, the song was pretty good on its own merits, but was bolstered immeasurably by having a flawlessly-executed montage of Atari imagery as its accompanying video.

Delightfully, after nearly a decade, the original video is still online. It seems, though, that the quality of those old quicktimes clips is a little bit lower than what used to be downloadable from the site ages ago, so I've uploaded a higher-resolution copy of the video to YouTube and embedded it here. The original credits for the film are still online, listing Carlos Bêla, Guilherme Marcondes, Mateus de Paula Santos and Mario Sader as the creators of the clip, for which they won an MTV Brazil VMA for Best Electronica Video. There's a special credit for Alfredo Hisa, who created the video's signature moment, a Matrix homage that is all the more impressive when you remember that the film that was being referenced was only about a year old at the time.

Golden Shower also offers a pretty interesting behind-the-scenes look at how the video was created. It's worth a look just for the time capsule effect of seeing a bunch of old-school iMacs running OS 9 and now-vintage versions of applications. Most entertaining to me was the still-extant blog that the team kept, listing mentions of the video across the web.

There's something to be said for web content that holds up well, even almost a decade later.