frivolous motion

Can You Feel The Nostalgia Tonight?

2009-03-27T08:44:00.003-04:00

Elton John’s “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?” played in my iTunes library last night.

I haven’t heard this song in years.

It’s been nearly 15 years since Disney’s “The Lion King” was released.

And what I want to say about it is probably the reverse of what you’re thinking.

Most people yearn for what they say was the simpler, gentler, safer, time of “X years ago.” They say the world is getting worse, America is getting worse, that it’s harder and harder to get up in the morning and push through the day, harder to see why it matters.

But for some reason I don’t see this. I hear the lyrics of the song and it still resonates:

Can you feel the love tonight?

The peace the evening brings

The world, for once, in perfect harmony

With all its living things

Times are tough, I know, but there's so much to be thankful for. So many incredible things - even just in the world of technology - that are bringing people closer together in a way never before possible.

Facebook lets you connect with old next door neighbors (people your parents' age!) and your middle school best friend's Mom (you know, the awesome one who made you Taquitos and Pizza Pockets?)
Twitter connects people 24 hours a day over trivia, thoughts, feelings, opinions - everything uncensored, unfiltered, in real time. The Beat Poets would have killed for something like this.
The next version of iPhone software has the real potential to save lives (think the diabetes software/peripherals demoed a couple weeks ago) and connect people around common interests. You can play games together, collaborate on a finger painting masterpiece, share photos, videos, voice notes.
You can read books on portable devices. Start reading on your Kindle in bed, pick up where you left off on your iPhone during lunch, and if you lose interest or finish, a new book is a couple taps or clicks away. You no longer have to drive to the bookstore or wait a few days for something to arrive in the mail. New universes are seconds from being born.
Five years ago, you taught your mom how to use email. Now you're showing her how to manage a site using a custom installation of Wordpress, and set up a Facebook Page to connect with her church congregation and share news, events, and thoughts for the day. For goodness sake, your grandparents even have email and Blackberries now.
The President of the United States communicates with regular people, has a video podcast, takes questions from website visitors, and doesn't let the only message we hear be something filtered through a partisan media.

There's so much more than just that, but essentially what I'm saying is that things are oftentimes more awesome than they seem on the surface. Even in an age of economic and social turmoil, there are amazing innovations, and people and companies are doing amazing things that are bringing us closer and closer together.

There's peace and stillness to be found amidst all the noise and distractions.

"There's a calm surrender to the rush of day" lurking beneath the surface, if you're willing to scratch it.

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

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.

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.

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?

Real-Time Politics. But Not On The Web?

2008-01-08T12:54:00.001-05:00

Maybe I’m looking in all the wrong places, but I’ve yet to find a spot on the web that comes remotely close to the realtime updates and commentary (albeit constantly repeated) on the Presidential primaries and caucuses that can be found on practically every TV network. They’re all running day-long coverage of New Hampshire, with up-to-the-minute information about the race and how the votes are adding up.

Online, everything is minutes - if not hours - behind. Podcasts, newspaper websites, YouTube, blogs...they are all totally time-delayed. Twitter’s a little better, but it is too decentralized, and doesn’t aggregate or elevate based on relevancy. You’re either following someone who is talking about politics, or you’re not. And as much value as there is in giving everyone a voice, for important events the signal to noise ratio can get pretty high, and it becomes tricky to determine authority.

Where’s the magic, internet?

If TV is truly dying, where is the realtime news that’s going to replace it?
Why isn’t there an alternative to owning a television?

UPDATE: MSNBC is offering a live video feed of their broadcast. Anyone else?

C.E.S. Laments

2008-01-07T10:01:00.000-05:00

In case you haven’t heard, the Consumer Electronics Show is going down right now in Las Vegas, Nevada. And I couldn’t be less interested.

It’s not because I don’t care about gadgets and HDTVs and all the fancy-schmancy doohickies that are being unveiled. It’s not because Apple isn’t there - really, it’s not. It isn’t even that I’m burned out from the holidays and have too much work to catch up on (which I am, and I do).

The reason is that there’s too much going on for any of it to be important. This is why the announcement of iPhone at last year’s MacWorld (which ran the same week as C.E.S.) overshadowed the entire conference. Zillions of new gadgets and best-ever versions of the same old TVs and mobile phones and media players (now with GPS!) compete for attention, and blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo publish post after post with little more than lists of features, and a couple passing comments on the look of the device being “reviewed.” Even for someone like me, who has a handle on RSS reading, these dozens and dozens of posts cancel each other out. How can you tell what is actually cool, actually worthwhile, actually has a life beyond the 15 seconds of fame and hype that they paid scantily-clad booth babes to create for them?

You can’t - at least not for awhile.

I’ve turned off my Gizmodo and Engadget feeds for the time being. I can’t imagine I will miss anything. Call me next week when they’ve figured out what actually matters.

Matt Ritchel of Bits blog (NYTimes) writes this gem:

Mr. Shapiro said that last year the C.E.A. did a comparison of the media coverage accrued by the iPhone and the entirety of the coverage given to C.E.S. Guess what? All the other gazillion products and companies got more coverage than iPhone and Apple. Take that, Steve Jobs.

No kidding?! You mean the sum of the coverage of an entire industry somehow managed to be larger than the press coverage for a single company and the announcement of a single product?

This kind of thinking (which, to clarify, is not Ritchel’s), is just deadly.

Leaving aside the general absurdity of the statement comparing the publicity for one product to that of thousands, the larger point is this: It’s not how much, but how good.

How many of those thousands of products were on any Best of 2007 lists? How many were sold on Amazon? How many of them can you recall?

Why would it be any different this year?

Short Blogging Break For The Holidays

2007-12-26T08:55:00.000-05:00

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas (or Hanukkah, or Tuesday, or whatever). I am back to work already, and have several great projects lined up for the new year, but in the interest of my sanity and humanity, I’m going to take a brief break from blogging (say that 5 times fast!) until after the start of 2008, so that I can focus on my work, and devote enough time and attention to my girlfriend and, well, to Rock Band, which my roommate should be bringing back to the apartment any day now.

Have a healthy, happy, and crazy New Year, and get ready for a sure-to-be-insane 2008!

Tasty Del.icio.us Links Of The Day

2007-12-21T11:04:00.001-05:00

“Presents Are Awesome” Edition:

Copyright Morality: The Kids Don’t Care

2007-12-21T09:40:00.000-05:00

David Pogue, NYTimes Technology-writer extraordinare, writes a common-sense, but thought-provoking and foreboding (if you’re Old Media) account of the coming shift in perception about what is and isn’t regarded as moral and ethical (perhaps eventually legal) regarding copyright infringement and piracy.

It’s one of those, “Well, duh” articles that seems like anything but to the record and movie and TV industries, who are (a “scant” 10 years after Napster shook everything up) finally (barely) beginning to realize that things might be different than they used to be.

But while I (and you, most likely) certainly have a pretty strong grasp of the moral grey areas of copyright and know that things are changing fast, many folks (espec apparently don’t, and Pogue’s article does more to illustrate the coming shift than anything else I’ve read.

Pogue describes a presentation he often gives, in which he asks the audience for a show of hands regarding whether or not the copyright-related behavior he describes is OK.

‘I borrow a CD from the library. Who thinks that's wrong?’ (No hands go up.)
‘I own a certain CD, but it got scratched. So I borrow the same CD from the library and rip it to my computer.’ (A couple of hands.)
‘I have 2,000 vinyl records. So I borrow some of the same albums on CD from the library and rip those.’
‘I buy a DVD. But I'm worried about its longevity; I have a three-year-old. So I make a safety copy.’

He goes on, and with each successive question, more and more hands go up, indicating a perception that the behavior described is not cool, not right, not allowed.

The exercise is intended, of course, to illustrate how many shades of wrongness there are, and how many different opinions. Almost always, there's a lot of murmuring, raised eyebrows and chuckling.

But then, something remarkable happened. Pogue gave this exact presentation at a college - the first time he’s spoken to a crowd consisting only of “young people” - and it totally “bombed,” as he puts it.

Of the 500 people present, Pogue could get no more than 2 hands to raise for any of his questions.

Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, ‘O.K., let's try one that's a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don't want to pay for it. So you download it.’

There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.

‘Who thinks that might be wrong?’

Two hands out of 500.

College kids. The very same 18-24 demographic so prized by the content industries. I shudder (can one shudder with joy?) to think what the high school kids would have to say about this. The next several years will be interesting.

Read Pogue’s article here.

Online Shopping And Painful Shipping

2007-12-20T09:04:00.000-05:00

It’s definitely crunch time for holiday shopping, and if you haven’t finished yet, well, get to it!

What I’m interested in knowing, though, is how much of your Christmas/Hanukkah/etc. shopping is done online, and how much is done by getting in a car (or by subway or bike or foot) and walking inside a store. What about for the rest of the year?

Marion Jensen, writing for TechConsumer, has a nice story about the convenience offered by shopping online.

Access to research. Access to a community. No lines. No paper coupons. No parking. No driving...What’s not to like?

I agree, and in fact, this Christmas - with the exception of an awesome winter coat for my girlfriend that she picked out - every single gift I’m giving was purchased online. Most through Amazon, of course, but I found a couple other great shops. Heck, even my Christmas cards were ordered online (yes, I actually bought stamps to mail these - all the while feeling like a freakin’ caveman, to be honest).

As I mentioned in a comment on the TechConsumer post, my biggest issue with ordering online has very little to do with the e-tailers themselves, and almost everything to do with deficiencies in the various delivery services (USPS, UPS, FedEx - they all have their issues). Ordering stuff is a snap. Click - done. But actually getting what you ordered is frequently almost impossible - especially if you live in a apartment building.

UPS doesn’t deliver on Saturday, for example, and after three attempts, they’ll return your package - even if you call them to reschedule. They also rarely read or listen to any instructions you try to give them. A couple months ago I ordered a nice dresser set from Target, and by some stroke of complete idiocy, they decided to ship this piece of furniture using a service that only delivers during business hours. As a result, the dresser was returned to Target, my order automatically cancelled, and I refused to place it again. Both Target and UPS lost money because of this lack of judgment.

The United States Postal Service is even worse. They won’t ever leave a package at my door - and of course they only deliver during the day - which means I have to go to the post office to pick it up. Fine, I can deal with that, I have a branch that’s a 10-minute walk away. But wait - it is only open until 5 p.m. during the week, and for only three hours in the morning on Saturdays. How often do I get home before 5, and how frequently am I around on Saturday? Never, and not so frequently. USPS also has a terribly antiquated tracking system that hardly qualifies to be called such, and their phone service is unbearable.

Of course, there are those who recommend having packages shipped to your workplace, and sure, this is usually a better option. But sometimes this is impossible - furniture, large boxes full of Christmas presents: this stuff can’t be carried on the subway.

Is this an argument for buying a car and moving into the suburbs? Some might try to turn it into that, but I’m convinced it is less a deficiency of my lifestyle choice (which I share with millions), than a case of delivery services failing to keep up with the times, and focused far too much on their corporate customers than little people like you and me. Come on guys, surely there’s a better way. Maybe making the shipment tracking better would help? Some communication, even?

I don’t think I’m asking too much. All I want is a fast, reliable way to get my Christmas presents.

What has your online shopping experience been like?

Helvetica Helps Vladimir Putin Win “Person Of The Year”

2007-12-19T13:48:00.000-05:00

OK, so maybe Helvetica had nothing to do with it...

Call me Nostradamus, but I must have known that Putin was destined for big things like being selected as Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2007. Otherwise, why would I have made such a huge desktop wallpaper celebrating his “him-ness”?

In any event, now’s as good a time as any to grab it - I’ve even added a giant 1920x1200 pixel version for those of you with huge monitors like my own (or just huge love for this guy).

1920x1200 PNG (308KB)

Tasty Del.icio.us Links Of The Day

2007-12-18T14:02:00.000-05:00

“Some Good Stuff From The Last Week” Edition:

“Arial: Shameless Impostor” Desktop Wallpaper

2007-12-18T13:42:00.000-05:00

Are you masochistic? Do you have negative feelings toward someone this holiday season? Well, look no further than this totally free “Arial: Shameless Impostor” desktop wallpaper. Set in one of history’s lamest typefaces and in eye-bleeding black and hot pink, this 1920x1200 pixel work of Bad Art is the perfect cure to your suicidal/homicidal tendencies.

But seriously, though, if you’re on the edge, setting this on your computer’s desktop could push you over. Use with caution (just like the typeface).

(Click to download full size)

Some Helvetica wallpaper available here, if you don’t feel like inflicting pain on yourself and your loved ones.

ReadWriteWeb Redesign Analysis And Critique

2007-12-18T09:06:00.000-05:00

ReadWriteWeb, a popular technology blog started by Richard MacManus launched a redesign yesterday (by San Francisco-based Ideacodes). The new look was greeted with a reaction ranging from “it’s awesome” to “Worst. Look. Ever.” with a lot of stuff in-between.

Before I get into my opinion on the design, let me just say that ReadWriteWeb is one of my top-read blogs. MacManus is a smart guy, and his team of writers are pretty high-quality, too. It’s good stuff. I wouldn’t be so picky if I didn’t care.

And this is precisely why the new design is so unfortunate. I won’t pretend to remember what the old design looked like (and the WayBack Machine is down at the moment, so I can’t check), but what was always important to me about ReadWriteWeb was its content. Well-written, well-researched articles offering an interesting and original point of view. The site made sense. And now it’s all over the place. Navigation is redundant, inconsistent, and lacks hierarchy. I don’t want to click anything at all. There are all sorts of little issues with the redesign, and I’ll touch on some of them below, but the biggest issue is this lack of hierarchy - fueled, at least in part, by the tendency of successful blogs to become “content networks.” GigaOM recently relaunched version 2.0 with a similar focus (and a redesign by the same company - coincidence?) and TechCrunch has long been a poster child for this type of “community” of related sites linking to one another. But it just convolutes things and it’s impossible to know what content you should actually care about. What’s important here, and how are these elements connected?

Another huge issue for me (and a quite unexpected one, to be honest) is Richard MacManus’ response to the criticism in the comments. He posted two very long and detailed comments of his own addressing the negative reactions, which, on the surface, might sound like the right thing to do. Isn’t that part of the Web 2.0 ethos, after all?

Yeah, it is, but not the way MacManus handled it on this occasion. I won’t spend too much time talking about this, because you should just read his responses for yourself, but among other things, he even goes so far as to state that he doesn’t respect certain commenters - not their comments - but as people. His justification for this is that they didn’t show respect for himself or the designers, and I don’t see this at all. Two of the three commenters he singled out actually had positive things to say about the design, and I fail to recall a rule somewhere that specifies that all opinions on the subject of design have to be justified by technical know-how.

Not everyone is a designer. Not everyone knows how to explain what they don’t like about a design. You can’t ask readers for feedback and then say that only qualified, properly-educated professionals are allowed to have an opinion.

Here’s another thing that really got to me. In his response, MacManus writes:

Winston said: "Guessing that this may be the result of attempting to appease conflicting opinions through out the design process. Save opinions till the comp is fully fleshed out, then select one.. no mixing and matching."

RM: This is an extraordinary assumption to make. "Conflicting opinions"? There were none. Winston, up to this point your critique was valid. I didn't agree with a lot of it, but at least it didn't jump to conclusions like this.

He claims Winston made an absurd jump to the idea of conflicting opinions leading to issues in the design process (all too typical, gotta say). But in the article announcing the design, MacManus actually says pretty much exactly that.

Personally I love the new logo and header, but I am certain they will provoke different opinions. Why? Because that was the case with the ReadWriteWeb authors during the design process!

I’m not saying that MacManus was wrong to respond, nor that he is wrong about everything he defends. Some of the commenters were indeed disrespectful - it’s the internet, after all - but when MacManus says, “Anyway, enough of me on my high horse,” that’s a clue that he took the wrong approach in his response, and failed to attempt to understand why the reaction was so negative and why “much of the critique here did not mention how clean, modern and fresh the design is.” Could it be because it’s not? Is that even a possibility?

Let’s take a look at the design itself, now, starting with the new logo.

(ReadWriteWeb logo: Before and after)

Comments on the original logo:

The slash is a little awkward and has too light of a stroke.
The color is a little unbalanced - too much red on the left.
The flat yin/yang is just fine.
Interesting typeface.
Clear separation between the Read/Write part of the name and the Web.
Perhaps too thin to be reproduced at small sizes.

The new logo, however, takes these problems and expands on them.

Univers is a poor choice as the typeface. The condensed version here, with multiple point sizes being mixed together in CamelCapsStyle and with a hierarchy of blackness makes it pretty unreadable, even if the focus should be on the initials. (sidenote: are they trying to purchase the rww.com domain?)
Why the subtle gradient on the Yin/Yang? The rest of the site and the logo use flat colors.
I actually like the deep red color, why is the logo just black and grey?
Why did they flip the Yin/Yang over?
I know MacManus likes the Yin/Yang but it doesn’t work with the new slash-less branding. It’s also an extremely overused graphic symbol, and can’t stand on its own.
The logo is really horizontal and has to be reproduced at a relatively large size to be readable.
It really does just look awkward and unprofessional.
Why the rounded rectangle enclosure for the YinYang? It it supposed to be the same as the GigaOm branding?
Kerning (space between letters) is bad. Looks like the default, and makes it seem like there is an actual space between Read and Write, while Write and Web are more snug. Look closely at the dWr and eWe groupings to see this imbalance.

Moving on. My least favorite part of the redesign is the header. Here’s the first piece.

Logo aside, what are the issues? Well, as I mentioned earlier in the post, there is no clear hierarchy to the navigation. Some links on top of the (admittedly odd) rounded rectangle, and some underneath, separated by little shims. Everything gets a decent white rectangle on hover, but the sharp angles don’t quite fit with the rounded corners of the larger box. I actually tried to click the “RWW Network” text several times before realizing it is not a link. The light grey doesn’t do nearly enough to communicate “I am not a link, even though I’m in a really prominent position on the page.”

What is Last100? AltSearchEngine? How are these related? Is the CamelCaps supposed to be enough of a clue that these are sites in the RWW Network?

EverybodyUsesCamelCapsNowadays.

The right half of the header actually irks me more than anything else on the site. First, more links. How many links can you fit in one header with absolutely no hierarchy? RWW has 16. Seventeen if you count the logo, which takes you back to the homepage (sigh, even when you’re on the homepage!). Seventeen links and not a single one is remotely more important than the others.

But that’s not the bad part. The bad - awful - painful part is this collection of subscription forms and Feedburner chiclets. So many boxes, offering so little functionality to a regular reader. It clutters things up and isn’t even clear that the Feedburner chiclets are linked to entirely different feeds than the forms beside them. RWW looks too much like RSS. The custom “Go” buttons looks odd, and what does that mean anyway? Where are you going to go when you click it?!

Why not a single text area with a check box or radio buttons that let potential subscribers select daily or weekly email feeds? Make daily the default and only require someone to do something if they want a non-default setting, rather than forcing every potential subscriber to look at all these boxes and buttons and image links (and don’t forget the “Subscribe” text link, which points to the XML file) and decide between them.

And then there’s another text box underneath, making the header a veritable forest of forms. Can I submit my CV there, too?

I hope you’re not browsing with a font size larger than the default. If you are, you’ll notice that the header navigation is completely broken from an accessibility standpoint. Links disappear, everything overlaps (including forms, which I had no idea was even possible!).

OK, that’s the big stuff. Now to some littler comments on other aspects of the redesign:

This I don’t understand. Why does the footer look like this on the home page:

And like this on another page?

The “Earlier This Week” section is just fine.

And I like these post boxes on the home page, with the related images and preview of the post.

Featured Posts is also nice, but too far down the page to actually be “featured.”

Decent main content on the home page. Latest post and popular posts are featured. My beefs with the design are a lot less with the way the content is presented than with how it is structured and the navigation.

Look, more links! Lots more links in the footer. All the links in the header are down there, too. Why not put a : after RWW Network to separate it more, rather than a | which again makes it look like a visited link

OK, what’s going on here with the formatting for the comment form? Look at that (lack of) alignment! I don’t love it, and it takes away from the cleanliness of the design and the occasionally nice light grey horizontal rules.

And finally, we get two sections in the sidebar with tag clouds. One labeled “Popular Tags” that contains at least 50, and then a totally gratuitous Swicki widget, of which there are two in the sidebar (one with tags, and one that is just a Search form). Tags are cool, but this is overkill and totally non-functional.

What do you think?

Add Me As A Google Contact

2007-12-17T09:27:00.000-05:00

After the Friday-night announcement that Google would be making it easy to see your friends’ Shared Items feeds in Google Reader, I started waiting patiently for the list to auto-populate with the Shared Item feeds of my GMail contacts. I added Robert Scoble, because, well, I kind of had no choice, but other than him and one other friend (who reads far too many Gawker sites for my taste), it appears that no one I know is sharing their Google Reader items, if they even use it at all.

But I won’t let this feeling of loneliness overwhelm me, especially during the Christmas season, so I’m putting a request out to any of my readers to add kevinmichaelkeating@gmail.com to your GMail contact list. I’d love to get an idea what you’re reading across the web and discover some great new stuff.

And don’t worry, I share only a handful of articles every day, so you won’t need to worry about getting overwhelmed by my generosity.

Google Earthing The Crucifixion

2007-12-17T08:42:00.000-05:00

Sydney-based “creative collective,” The Glue Society, presented a pretty awesome project at last week’s the Miami art fair called “God’s Eye View” that depicts several biblical events as they might appear in the satellite imagery used for Google Earth. Along with The Crucifixion, they’ve got The Great Flood, The Garden of Eden, and the Parting of the Red Sea.

Nice work, and definitely thought-provoking, though I think that the emphasized part of this quote by one of the creators might be taking it a tad far:

We like to disorientate audiences a little with all our work. And with this piece we felt technology now allows events which may or may not have happened to be visualized and made to appear dramatically real ... As a method of representation satellite photography is so trusted, it has been interesting to mess with that trust.

Other than something about that line that doesn’t sit properly for me in relation to this work, it’s a great-looking project and is a perfect example of creating compelling and important artistic work with the tools made available by technological advances.

Glue Society via CR Blog via Kottke

Analyzing Ron Paul

2007-12-17T01:51:00.000-05:00

This data about the Ron Paul 2008 presidential campaign was compiled over the course of a months-long, peer-reviewed scientific study of finances, poll results, Web 2.0, and other pertinent data. (To scale.)

Google Reader And GTalk Are Friends!

2007-12-14T20:59:00.000-05:00

The Official Google Reader Blog is reporting what I noticed when I logged in to Google Reader three minutes ago: that you can now see your GTalk (or GMail chat) friends’ Shared Items right inside Google Reader, and they can see yours.

Prior to this, you could email your friends a hugegantic link to your Shared Items list, but having it all together like this is awesome.

Like Scoble, I use the Facebook Google Reader app called “Feedheads,” which is awesome, but I hate visiting Facebook all the time, so this new feature is quite welcome. It doesn’t approach Feedheads in terms of sheer utility, but it is a great little thing that helps connect what have up until recently been relatively separate apps.

Is it just me, or does Google seem to be rolling out stuff at a frenzied pace these last couple months?

Christmas Tree Delivery In NYC

2007-12-14T13:46:00.000-05:00

This year, my Christmas tree is being delivered by the ultra-pleasant folks at MyHappyTree.com.

Good price, too, if being ultra-pleasant isn’t enough to convince you. I’ll get my tree tonight and can assess the quality then, but no matter what, it’ll be worth it for the convenience. Just wouldn’t be Christmas without a Christmas tree, and without MyHappyTree.com, I’d be worse off than Charlie Brown.

If you still don’t have one and are in Manhattan, give them a call.

They do handmade wreaths, too.

Where do you get your Christmas tree?

P.S. Don’t do Christmas? Sorry! Happy December!!!

Long Live Madballs!

2007-12-14T10:24:00.001-05:00

Remember these guys?

Gosh, those were simpler times.

The Case Against Undo

2007-12-13T09:00:00.000-05:00

Paul Buchheit (via Google Blogoscoped) is calling for more use of “Undo” in software - particularly for GMail to add it to the “Send” command. He says, “this will require adding a short delivery delay, like 10 sec, but it's worth it.” Philip Lessen of GB basically supports this assertion, though he adds:

...there’s still the problem that we’re not used to an Undo option suddenly disappearing, which would be what happens after the 10 seconds... maybe there needs to be a countdown ticker as well, or is all this just shifting the same problem around?

I get where they’re coming from. We have, in many ways, been trained that you can always take back your actions on computers - at least when it comes to word processing, browsing websites (though not Flash-based ones!) and using other applications like Photoshop (though only a specified number of steps - so take snapshots!). But one action that there has never (to my knowledge) been an undo associated with is email, and adding it now overcomplicates a commonly understood action.

If implemented in the manner Paul advocates, an “Undo” action adds time to a medium already slower than other forms of messaging that are becoming widely used (IM, SMS, etc.). 10 seconds is a long time on the web. I, for one, do not want to have my email queued for any amount of time to compensate for others acting without thinking and sending messages unintentionally.

And why 10 seconds, anyway? Why not 5 minutes, while we’re at it? You know, just in case you click send, go make a cup of coffee, and while waiting for the water to boil realize that you actually just sent that angry email about your boss as “Reply All” instead of just “Reply to your secret girlfriend in Accounting.”

Just because it’s possible to take something back on the web doesn’t mean that it is a good interaction model, and online communication is one place where I’d argue that it would actually be a negative presence - reinforcing problematic behaviors like carelessness and lack-of-attention. You can’t take back what you say on the phone or in person. Why should we expect to be able to do so online?

That said, I think a feature checking for an attachment whenever you write “attached” or similar (like this Greasemonkey script does) could be a welcome addition.

Ultimately, technology can’t make up for human error - nor should it be expected to. If you screw up and mis-send a message, or forget the attachment, there is always a solution:

Apologize, re-send, and, if necessary, deal with the consequences of your recklessness and haste.

You know, just like in the “Real World.”

Tasty Del.icio.us Links Of The Day

2007-12-12T15:23:00.000-05:00

“First Link Amazing But Graphic” Edition:

50 Critical Questions About Your Website:

2007-12-12T12:34:00.000-05:00

Can you tell someone how to get to your site without having to spell anything?
Are the URLs human-readable or are they full of special characters and dynamically-generated gobbledygook?
Do you have an About page?
Can visitors tell what your site is about without visiting your About page?
Is your contact information readily available on every page - or at least from every page?
If not, what are you hiding from? Your customers?
Is your home page doing you any favors or is it merely an “Enter Site” gateway?
Do you have an RSS Feed?
Did you decorate for the holidays?
When is the last time you added new content?
Why has it been so long?
Is your site ranking highly in search engines for relevant keywords?
What about for your name? Or your business name?
What are your relevant keywords, anyway?
Is anyone linking to you these days?
If not, what can you do to make this happen?
Who are you linking to these days?
How long does it take your site to load at your mother’s house?
Do you need to download anything on her computer to even see your site?
What is the single most important thing you want a visitor to do?
Is that clear from looking at your site?
Does your site look professional, or does it look like a teenager’s MySpace page?
Do you link out to your other web presences (social network profiles, Twitter account, YouTube page, Flickr photostream)?
Is it clear what content is protected by Copyright and what is free to take and re-use?
What one thing can you do to your site today to increase visitors?
Are you commenting on blogs and building relationships with other site-owners in your industry or niche?
How does your site look on a mobile device?
An iPhone?
Blackberry?
Cheapo-plastic-freebie phone?
Amazon Kindle?
Is your site usable with images turned off?
On a computer with no Flash or Javascript?
In every web browser?
How many clicks does it take for a visitor to give you money?
Is your site “fine for the moment” or is it flexible enough to be fine for the next 5 years?
Are your ads annoying?
How easy is it for a visitor to leave a comment or write a review?
Can your site run without you?
Is the entire site backed up?
Is the important stuff backed up multiple times in multiple formats in multiple physical locations?
How long would it take to turn your entire site navy blue with white text?
Is this time measured in seconds (awesome), minutes (good), or hours (you’re doing things wrong)?
Is your branding consistent between your site, your printed material, your storefront, and you as a person?
Do your product descriptions sound like they were written by a person or by a mentally-ill robot programmed with the vocabulary of an out-of-work Madison Avenue ad guy whose last account was for one of those food processors they sell on TV at 2am?
Do you care about your website?
Is it important to you?
Are your readers and customers important to you as people, not just as eyeballs with wallets?
Would you be sad - actually sad - if your site disappeared tomorrow?
What would you do if it did?