I love Facebook. If you’re on my friends list, you know I use the heck out of it. I post links to things I find interesting 5-10 times daily — indeed, things that are fully-awesome — all in the hope of building a list of wonderful things that may entertain and amuse a few of my friends as they stumble along their way.

But, I didn’t always love Facebook. There was a time, many moons ago, when the thought of sharing life stories and whatsits, reconnecting with pre-school crushes, dealing with “pokes” and likes was downright repulsive. I signed up for an account early and deleted it after only a few weeks.

I’ve been back in the Facebook fold for a few years now, and by all rights, I’m what you could call a “heavy user.” Today, I have over 600 friends and manage a half a dozen Facebook fan pages for various projects and clients, and manage dozens of interactions each day with old friends and new. And this morning, two of my closest friends looked me square in the eye and told me they were planning on closing their Facebook accounts.

* stunned silence *

And so, I thought it appropriate to share my own thoughts on the Facebook frustration and maybe, just maybe, build something of a case for the importance of Facebook to emerging communication patterns in social groups, or, “Why Facebook doesn’t actually suck, and why should should not quit after all — in parts.”

1. You are not the problem. Farmville is the problem.

The economic model that sustains Facebook contains two important features. First, advertising. The wealth of information that Facebook harvests on all of us is based on our own profiles; which bands we like, which movies we love to quote, when our birthdays are and where we live — it’s all there for Facebook to eat up, digest, and regurgitate in the form of tasty advertisements that appear on our home pages. The concept has a pretty bow on it: thanks to all this information that Facebook has about us, the ads we see are hopefully better targeted to us and our interests. It may seem a touch Orwellian to imagine all this data crunching going on about us in the back rooms of Facebook, but the net result is twofold: smarter and better targeted ads for consumers, and cheaper ad buys for businesses. The same thing is going on right now on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, you name it. By in large, it’s a good thing.

The second part of the Facebook economic model is the application space, and this seems to be where I hear a lot of folks loosing steam when it comes to Facebook. “All my friends are just playing stupid games. The whole thing is so impersonal. My wall is cluttered with Mafia Farm requests…” And so on.

True and true. The application development space on Facebook serves a special place for running the business, and providing a continuous revenue scape for this free service we use, but the requests and wall posts can certainly get annoying.

Pete’s Take on Problem 1: Hide and Seek

First, look at the ads. Just glance at them. If one of them makes sense for you, click on it. This way, you’re taking a few seconds of your time online to support the economic engine that drives Facebook.

Second, hide stupid stuff. When you hover your mouse over each post on your main newsfeed, a little button appears in the top-left margin of each post that says “Hide.” Do that. For every Farmville request and Zombie attack and Mafia job request, you’ll be able to remove that content from your wall. It’ll even give you a choice: if Dave sends you a Mafia job request, you can choose to hide all posts from the Mafia Wars game, or all posts from Dave all together. That is, if you don’t like Dave all that much. You gotta have choices…

It won’t be long before you find that you are curating a perfectly clean newsfeed that has only the information from your friends, colleagues, fan pages, and groups that you want to follow. In itself, this has the power to completely change your Facebook experience, freeing you from that sinking, suffocating feeling that comes from a wall full of nonsense.

Coming up … Part 2. Facebook Lists: they make you pretty and smart!

Likely the biggest culprit at Amazon is the Kindle, and while we don’t know how many were actually sold this year, Amazon says it was the highest-selling product in the company’s history. It beat the iPod touch — historically top-seller around the holidays. This is all well and good, but remember that Amazon is the only place you can buy the Kindle; clearly not the case with the iPod, or any other top sellers at Amazon.

Still, according to this, if you’re not reading an ebook now, you will be soon. Prepare for the robot uprising, people.

And, since I wasn’t naturally good at moving around, and had some internal spark of talent at the keyboard, that’s where I stayed. I was, by in large, sedentary through highschool, unless by act of grade hijack. Luckily, my metabolism was on my side, and I managed to stay the skinny kid through college. When I got married, at 26, I was still at my fighting weight of 190.

All this is coming back to me tonight because of Alex Fuka. Alex married Lily, a good friend and client, less than six months ago. Alex is the love of Lily’s life; they have been blessedly perfect for one another.

A few hours ago, Alex suffered a massive heart attack and died while out walking in the cool afternoon air.

And tonight, my friend Lily is alone. She’s surrounded by family, her daughter, her friends, her chaplain, but she is alone. When she started today, she was of a pair. This evening, she is deserted.

As much as I could try to post something pithy, some link to a fabulous new tool, all that seems to matter today is this cold reminder that I — that all of us — need to take better care. As technologists, we need to move more, eat less, and stay strong.

I don’t know the details yet about Alex’s condition that lead to his heart attack, but I know mine. I’m no longer at my fighting weight. And I’m still not very graceful in dancing shoes. But every day that passes the stakes on my health go up just a little bit.

So tonight, I offer this bit of grist for the mill, since it’s where my heart and head will be: hug your loved ones, and may your rest tonight be sound. And as your days fill with business, step back and muse carefully on the things that matter more.

The great thing about the vast majority of musicians is that they are at the same time gracious and generous people, and hungry for attention. That means, if you point a microphone at them and turn on a little red light, by-in-large, they start singing.

So it was when Curt and I started Acoustic Conversations a few years back. The first show was a convoluted mix of stunning flamenco riffs lovingly gifted to us by our good friend John Carlson and poorly mic’d wannabe talk radio. Still, that conversation sparked something cool, and posted a stitch in time that leads to today, the last show of our second season, and our newest addition to the family, James Jeffrey-West.

James is a stunningly warm person. I say that as a point of contrast, I think. He’s a contrast to jokers who try to own a room with ego and pomp; he’s a contrast to yahoos who enter a room with jokester hippery; he’s a contrast to crooners who slide into a room with sticky smug insincerity. When James came into the AC lounge, well, we wanted to give him a hug.

In his bio, James says he plays “good, honest acoustic” music. Insofar as we couldn’t see the allusion when we kicked off the interview, we were wrapped up in it by the end. His songs are gracefully simple packages, easy on the ear and difficult to shake. His song-writing is at once worldly and approachable; he weaves his broad life experience into tales that are most often too short to be completely satisfying.

We talked a lot in this show. So much, in fact, that we didn’t actually get to all the music that we’d intended. It’s a shame, too, because for my money, the best tracks of the evening were those recorded after the show had ended. Take a special listen to Sacramento International, a haunting lullaby to congested air travel; and Half a World Away, an anthem to bifurcated love in ticklish harmonics. You’ll find the show, as well as all six of the tracks we recorded with James available free in iTunes. Please subscribe to support the show.

I deeply hope you enjoy the music of James Jeffrey-West. He’s a new favorite of ours and we’re thrilled to bring him to the show. As ever, comments welcome, but mostly, just go buy his CD. It’s in iTunes, CDBaby, and just about everywhere else music is served.

As much as I love Google products, and use them daily, here is a perky brick to the ethical head. The following quote is from Google CEO Eric Schmidt in the current CNBC Google Blockbuster.

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.

When Google was founded in 1998, the company hung its proverbial hat on telling the world that they would be successful without mucking things up in the process. Specifically, number six in the company’s own manifesto:

6. You can make money without doing evil.

This is all well and good until, for example, you’re a global titan with $12 billion and change in the bank, competing for telcom spectrum in an industry as messed up as wireless. What’s that they say about laying down with dogs?

I have lots and lots of problems with the quote, but the crux of my issue with Schmidt’s position here is that it would appear the company’s position operates on the assumption that there is no need for privacy in a world in which you are not actually doing evil. I don’t so much care how Eric treats his own private life, but that he would deem to umbrella my own personal feelings on the matter with his is more than a touch unnerving.

That Google, and others, complies with the current state of the law by invading ones privacy is one thing. It’s generally unpalatable, but not surprising. But that this same distaste for individual privacy advocacy has apparently taken hold at the highest levels of a company we historically have trusted with so much of our collective should be enough to trigger a second or third look at just what we’re storing in the Google cloud.

For that information, head over to your Google Dashboard. This is a new tool from the company designed to give you a snapshot of just how much information you’ve volunteered to share; from Gmail to Voice to Docs to Analytics and more, you’ll see everything that Google sees as belonging to inescapable you.

But that’s only half the story. There appear to be some open questions about just what Google knows about you that doesn’t pop up on the dashboard. And those are the questions we must continue to push, in the tide of the changing face of Google.

So many cool things floating around the internet, I must have been hyped up on sneezing pandas when this most exquisite piece of work bubbled to the surface. It’s “Panic Attack!” by Uraguayan filmmaker, Fede Alvarez. Head over here to watch it for yourself.

The news that surrounds this short film is interesting all alone: Alvarez has been signed to Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures to develop and deliver similarly themed freaky flicks. All I can think is “Cloverfield” — which has A) already been made and B) was super-excellent. Too bad it’s already been made. Still, the deal reportedly starts in the 6-figures with points if his films get made. All this after Alvarez made his YouTube opus on a reported budget of $300 (yeah, likely not including person hours in that budget, but whatever).

All of that is great for Alvarez, whose talent is deserving of a career in the field of moving images, however he ends up there. But it’s not the point of this post.

What “Panic Attack!” illuminates so clearly is the split in personality types when it comes to work ethic. See, people are either doers or dreamers. So, I’m going to wax a bit philosophical here.

Dreamers are everywhere. Like Joe Banks slaving away for a few hundred bucks a week, they’re closet cases, planning and scheming and wondering. They’re looking for the next out, the next exit ramp, entrance ramp, parachute, metaphore.

But the problem with plain old dreamers is that when they finely tune a dream, when they’re just ready to close their eyes and make the leap, they can’t. There’s no natural switch to flip that allows them to plan. They cannot make dreams into realities.

We’re all dreamers in some fashion or another. The special among us are those who can make plans from dreams and execute them. These are the people who practice daily overcoming the fear of failure, dread of hard labor, distaste of sweat, ugliness of rejection. Those who rise to the top, Fede Alvarez and his lot, are those who are on the path of battling those demons and building something truly great.

You can find quite a collection of doers on the net. I have a list of them, the people I turn to when I need to be inspired to execute, to turn from dreams to execution. Here are a few I check in with every day:

• Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-Chief and Chief Doer at Make: Magazine. Founder of Boing Boing (also a daily read).
• David Hobby – Strobist. A guy who just loves photography goes all out and becomes photographic Robin Hood.
• Garr Reynolds – Apple refugee has taken his serious skill and made it a serious commodity around the world. PresentationZen (Site and book) is a staple in design around public communication.
• John Gruber – John’s site, Daring Fireball, has become a staple of sanity in tech writing. His linked list is rich in commentary on current events in the industry. He’s a veteran producer, full-time blogger, and … frankly … he’s just plain intelligent.
• Brian Kurth – Founder of VocationVacations, a service which pairs people looking to change careers, with people looking to share wisdom about their own careers. He’s also a supremely competent entrepreneur and skilled writer. His book, Test Drive your Dream Job, is available now.
• Brian Brushwood – Brian is a magician whose key gift is to make college kids squirm. He’s an incredibly talented showman and host of long running podcast, Scam School (iTunes Link).
• Leo Laporte – As a geek and media person, I’d be remiss if I didn’t add Leo to this list. A decades-long career in television and radio careened nearly to a halt when TechTV imploded under the enormous weight of Comcast. A small brigade of talented technologists from the network moved into a new orbit around Leo, as he launched the TWiT network, a new media conglomerate around his show, This Week in Tech. Now the TWiT network boasts more than 15 shows, broadcasts live daily, all hosted from a studio converted out of an old victorian in Petaluma, California, the TWiT Cottage.
• Garrett Murray – I found Garrett because of his wonderful iPhone app Ego (iTunes Link). Turns out, he epitomizes the renaissance nature of executors. He’s an award-winning filmmaker and technologist to boot.

But this month, you have showered me with useful things. So man, in fact, that I have to shout it from the rooftops.

For Google Apps Users

I’ve been a raving lunatic for Google Apps since they launched. For those not familiar with the service, Google Apps allows you to take your domain name (like fifthandmain.com) and map all your familiar Google services to it. Use the nearly bulletproof Gmail service for your business’s email using your own domain, and have calendars, documents, internal websites, and more all hosted and shared across team members. There are three tiers of Google Apps: Education, Standard, and Premiere. At this time, only the premiere level of service has a fee associated with it — $50/user per year.

That’s all backstory nonsense, though. The big news is here.

Presentations get Collaboration

Google Docs

For some time now, when working on a document in Google Docs (the company’s Microsoft Office challenger) you’ve been able to collaborate with other users in real time; working on a spreadsheet, you’d be able to see the cells your collaborator is working on as they’re editing them — same in word processing documents. This month, you can now collaborate as you build presentation decks, too. From Google: “Now, when editing a presentation with a co-editor, you can see which slides he is editing, and if he is editing the same slide, then you can see which element — text box, shape, image, video, etc — he is editing.”

This is great news for those of us who collaborate with others while writing online. For those who don’t collaborate online, the message here: you should start. That is all.

Shared Folders in Google Docs

Google Docs

If you’ve used Google Docs for any length of time inside an organization, you’ve likely run into the number one frustration in keeping your work in order with others: you can’t share folders of documents.

It seems like a small thing. “Just share one document at a time, Pete,” you’re saying. Sure, punk, I’ll do that. Until I get a list of 30-40 documents for a project and have to organize sharing with 6 team members … one doc at a time. After … ahem … not very long, you start looking for alternatives.

Not anymore! Huzzah from the mountain high! Google has released Shared Folders for Google Docs. This means, share a folder with those same 6 team members and all the documents, spreadsheets and presentations you dump into it get shared as well. I kid you not: this is one of those little features that will change the way you look at Google Docs as a serious collaboration tool. If you aren’t spending much time in Docs now, you owe it to yourselves and your teams to try it out.

Google Groups goes Apps Premiere

Google Apps Premiere

This is a big one. Big like the first iced cake, or the first round tire. Google Apps finally gets Google Groups built in. If you haven’t experienced the Groups platform, head over to groups.google.com for a taste. Then remove the spam and the porn, and imagine a nice, clean discussion forum just for your company. Your branding, your conversations, your colorful vernacular. Adding a rich forum to your internal communication infrastructure can be a real boon to team collaboration and productivity. Microsoft has the same feature set built into their enterprise tool, Sharepoint, which is as fantastic as it is complex. That Google has reduced the barriers to entry to such pittance should go to underscore the game-changing-ness that this represents.

The only downside: it’s only for the big spenders in the Apps Premiere and Education floors. Those of us at the standard level — the freeloaders — don’t get the glitz of Groups. Not now, likely not ever.

Browser Size tool in Google Labs

Google Browser Size

Finally, a tool for all you people who are stuck on how big your web pages are in the browser. The kind folks in the Google usability group have analyzed a sample of the search hits they get and drilled down to the size of each user’s browser.

Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the “90%” contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.

This is useful for ensuring that important parts of a page’s user interface are visible by a wide audience. On the example page that you see when you first visit this site, there is a “donate now” button which falls within the 80% contour, meaning that 20% of users cannot see this button when they first visit the page. 20% is a significant number; knowing this fact would encourage the designer to move the button much higher in the page so it can be seen without scrolling.

I tend to design for the larger browsers, if I can hit 90% (in the light blue area), I’m happy. Here’s a recent design in the tool:

It’s beautiful. Very quick, easy, and free visualization of design and efficacy on the web. Check it out!

Dear Tony,

I think about you often when I work on the web. It starts out fondly, and quickly turns to rage when my browser crashes thanks to over-abundance of Flash advertising which destroys my favorite sites. I think of you, Tony, because, since you’re a Flash developer, this experience makes me hate you, just a little bit. That’s why I’m writing to let you know about ClickToFlash.

ClickToFlash is a browser plugin I’ve installed for Safari on the Mac which allows me to prevent you from taking advantage of me, Tony. It’s simple, and smart: load a page with flash without the plug in and see this:

But load a page with ClickToFlash installed and see this:

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Page loads are nearly instantaneous!

But, I know what you’re saying, Tony. You’re saying, “What about my site — the one that’s all Flash and sweet, sweet sexiness. Can you still see it if you want to?” That’s the beauty of this plugin, Tony. Just click once on any flash box on the page and POW! … the Flash will load in a snap.

My browsing experience has become more smooth, more stable, and more sedate as a result, Tony. The preferences that ship with ClickToFlash allow you to do even smarter blocking than just turning off Flash. In fact, you can turn off Flash cookies, which are dangerous miscarriages of browser justice that do not expire by default, and store more information that you’d normally want in a cookie. I know you’d never use one, Tony, but if you want to learn more about them, read here.

So, I close by reminding you that as a person, when you’re not at a computer, there’s a lot to like about you, Tony. But the fact that you’ve devoted your life to Flash, well, it forces me to strongly recommend Safari users to cut you off by installing ClickToFlash. It’s donationware, and as such, worth exactly what you think it is.

Thanks for reading, man.

Pete

Anyone want to know how much I love this photo? Anyone? Seriously, ask and I’ll tell you. I love it with the white hot passion of a star gone super nova. I love it, because it’s a picture of rocks. It’s a picture of rocks about sex and God, with a dash of good humor and a pinch of humility.

I love it because the man who made it is a man who loves more than anything to work with his hands. You can feel it when you pick up one of these rocks, the surface so smooth it’s as if nothing is there. And yet, the messages are at once salient, and impossible — it’s a burning bush argument: am I really getting fortune cookie karma from a river stone? Yep. From a guy who has a singular focus on what he’s doing, and has just the right tools to get the job done.

So, this is a post about tools. I have a lot of them, the digital kind, and I’m often asked what I recommend and could I teach them, and should client x buy Illustrator or Photoshop or InDesign or Final Cut Pro so they can make quick edits on files and on and on. And I’ve worked up a bit of my own burnished stone wisdom that may help someone other there in the Interworld. Here goes.

1. If you think you need a piece of software, you don’t. Because if you think you need it, then you don’t know how to use it, you’ll be shocked at the price, and pissed at yourself for not being smart enough to know what it is in the first place.
2. Text is the most versatile format ever, ever, ever. If what you do is write things, do yourself a favor and get rid of all the shortcuts to Microsoft Word. Replace them with shortcuts to TextEdit and Notepad. Write there. These are the pencil and paper of computerized writing and will make whatever you write more portable to design, email, web, production, whatever. Make all the partners in your workflow happy and ditch the other cruft.
3. The most important skill you can learn that will improve your communication online and in person, is how to lay a few words on top of a photo. Exception to previous point, PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google apps are clever — and now even a bit sophisticated — graphics applications. You don’t need PhotoShop to build a graphic for a website or poster — just head over to iStockphoto.com, find a clever kitten hanging from a branch, write “Hang in There!” with a little drop shadow, and export to a jpg. That’s all. From there, the world is your oyster. I have a client that does 90% of the graphics work for here organization’s website in PowerPoint, I kid you not. It makes me throw up in the back of my mouth a bit, but it’s true.

Bottom line, simplicity should always trump ego. Software is a drug that feeds that ego, people. Don’t let it eat you up. If you put a few braincells to thinking about alternative methods to doing what you need to do, you’ll find more often than not you already have the tools you need to get the job done, and get back to work.

This is a picture of a scorpion embedded in plastic. I’ve had it for about 30 years — grandmother gave it to me when I was a kid — and I have since passed it on to my 7-year-old daughter. Because, you know, nothing says little girl like scorpion embedded in plastic.

I like this scorpion because it reminds me of just about every service provider relationship I have. In these relationships, predictably, I am the frog, and they are the scorpion. You know this story, right? From Wikipedia:

The story is about a scorpion asking a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if it stung the frog, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well. The frog then agrees; nevertheless, in mid-river, the scorpion stings him, dooming the two of them. When asked why, the scorpion explains, “I’m a scorpion; it’s my nature.”

When I logged into Facebook this morning, the scorpion hit me in the face like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist. New privacy settings. Terrific. Because Facebook has such a stellar reputation with managing privacy. Nothing could possibly go wrong here.

Before I get into any specific advice, allow me to wax philosophical about Facebook itself. From the very beginning of the service, we’ve been conditioned to think of Facebook as a walled fortress. It’s a place for me to keep my group of friends in close contact, a place where my relationships are shielded from the outside world, and a place where information about me is shared only with those I call my friends. Facebook’s privacy settings have pushed boundaries before — giving access to third-party advertising partners my purchasing information and relationships — but all this boundary pushing has always been in the context of sharing that information with my friends and friends-of-friends, not with the world at large. I am a frog in my own pond.

Then, the scorpion hollers from across my pond. When I logged into Facebook this week, I met the terms of service update pop-up. Like most people, I’m pretty well conditioned to click through those damned things as more of a nuisance. Regarding privacy, however, we the people tend to read on. When you do, you see that by default, according to the new terms of service, all your previously private information is now shared on a more permeable public page. In short, that means most of my private information will now show up on the web at large — unless I say otherwise.

A few things to define.

More permeable. The service does not give away the farm completely. Pretty close, but not the farm. It doesn’t give away your physical address and phone number, for example, but it does give out your family relationships and biographical information.

Web at Large. I don’t believe that Facebook hates people. Let’s just get that out of the way. But by giving giving out so much more information outside the walled fortress, the company is increasing by a long acre the number of pageviews pointing to Facebook pages. More pageviews equals greater ad share. Greater ad share equals more money. More money more often than not gives the impression that companies hate their customers. Damned dirty customers.

Recommendations? Sure. First, read carefully. I’ve gone into my Facebook Privacy Settings page and reviewed each of them. Here’s a screenshot of my settings right now:

You can see that I’ve set most of my settings to either “Friends and Networks” or “Friends of Friends” which gives me a broad visibility inside the Facebook fortress, but only my “About” box and wall posts will show up to the world. I post a lot of goodies on my wall, and I’d love for more people to be exposed to them, but I don’t need the world to know my education, religious views, birthday, etc.

This move smacks of a new era for Facebook — one in which the company is even more ad-driven, with an equal focus on page views as they have on registered users. For us users, that Facebook is becoming more of a destination platform for the web, there is a great opportunity — more of the words I publish will be visible to more people. Never a bad thing in the communications biz. But we have to change the way we think about Facebook, and the way we use it may follow.

If you weren’t ready for the change, you feels stung. Make no mistake, Facebook is a growth-focused company and your birthday privacy settings means precious little compared to millions of additional page views. Just read carefully and if you’re not sure, ask someone you trust to help you keep your profile appropriately protected.

This is sort of big news. See, currently, in the United States, if you want a cell phone, you start at a wireless provider, like AT&T or Verizon Wireless or T-Mobile, and you pick out a phone that works for you. That phone will be locked to that provider, meaning that the wireless company will be subsidizing the cost of the phone to you, making it a cheaper purchase, in exchange for your 1 or 2-year commitment to wireless service.

This model was shaken with the release of Apple’s iPhone two years ago, which was offered in partnership with AT&T, but was initially sold unsubsidized — meaning that early adopters paid the full price for the phone, $599 for the high end model back then — and then paid for service with AT&T on top of it. Today, the iPhone is like most other phones, subsidized through AT&T to bring the price down for end users in exchange for the 2-year commitment on service.

When Google launched their Android operating system for handhelds, they did it with the promise that they were not in the hardware business, that they were in the OS business to make phones better across the board. From Android chief Andy Rubin, “‘We’re not making hardware,’ Rubin said. ‘We’re enabling other people to build hardware.’”

Technically, that may still be true. What came out of Mountain View this weekend is a report that Google has handed out a new handset dubbed the “Nexus One” to employees at the Google holiday party. It runs the latest unreleased version of the Android operating system and is manufactured by HTC, long-time manufacturing partner to big wireless. Note, it’s not manufactured by Google.

Subtle. Very subtle.

What Google said publicly is this:

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

But reporters being who they are, we now know the news seems to be somewhat different. We’re hearing that this new phone will hit the market in January of 2010, on the heels of Verizon’s foray into the Android smartphone market with the Droid, and that the phone would be unlocked for a GSM network. That means customers would be able to choose their wireless provider, compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. Unfortunately for Verizon, early pics of the new Google phone seem to indicate that it is much better looking, and there appears to be no battery door to fall off. Tumultuous times indeed.

Buying advice? January 2010 is right around the corner. If you’re hot for a smartphone and can’t switch to AT&T for an iPhone, wait. What Google is hopefully doing with their Google phone is fixing what’s wrong with the iPhone ecosystem. The Google phone will allow customers to buy closer to the center of the ecosystem, with access to an application store not mired by the hotly debated approval process employed by Apple. As long as you’re diving into the Googleverse, you might as well dive into the deep end.

Tiger Woods lay down his clubs today. From TigerWoods.com:

I would like to ask everyone, including my fans, the good people at my foundation, business partners, the PGA Tour, and my fellow competitors, for their understanding. What’s most important now is that my family has the time, privacy, and safe haven we will need for personal healing.

After much soul searching, I have decided to take an indefinite break from professional golf. I need to focus my attention on being a better husband, father, and person.

Again, I ask for privacy for my family and I am especially grateful for all those who have offered compassion and concern during this difficult period.

As much as I’d love to talk gossip, there’s just so much about Tiger I don’t care about. I don’t actually like golf. I detest the sport. It’s designed more to enrage than challenge whenever I play. But there are a few points in here worth noting for posterity.

First, the PGA is crying in their big fancy beers. Sure, it generally sucks that Tiger was playing around. But this guy has made a lot of people rich. When he shows up in his fancy black golf sneakers and vertigo-enducing striped shirt on Sunday afternoons, Nike, PGA, Accenture, and his other sponsors just see dollar signs. That he’s taking this break is likely frustrating and humiliating to those who pay the bills. Let’s be clear: this is the era of Tiger. No one watches golf without him.

Speaking of Accenture, they’ve since pulled the plug on their relationship with Woods. He’s somewhat less useful as a non-golfer.

Second, Tiger Woods and his management have proved time and again to be savvy media managers. Yes, it was likely a misstep to avoid talking about this situation in a non-trivial fashion. His silence so far has been deafening in comparison to the statements of his associated lady friends. When the women come out of the woodwork first, you’ve waited too long to speak up.

But, as if we need a reminder of dethroned pro-atheletes on the comeback trail, Michael Vick is playing football again. And he was involved with dogs.

Woods will be back, sooner rather than later. Because, if there’s a moral in this for handling scandal in the media it’s this: the public has a notoriously short memory for illicit affairs. We want our winners, and will take them battered and bloodied if we have to. Tiger Woods has been a role model and teacher for years, but the comeback from self-destruction may be his biggest triumph yet.

]]> http://www.fifthandmain.com/2009/12/tiger-leaves-golf-for-a-while/feed/ 0 http://www.fifthandmain.com/2009/12/tiger-leaves-golf-for-a-while/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/fifthandmain/~3/vMv1Spc79ls/ http://www.fifthandmain.com/2009/12/if-you-cant-be-first-be-cutest/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:32:24 +0000 Pete http://www.fifthandmain.com/?p=978

I’ve never really worked on the whole “time-to-market” thing with my photography. It’s always just been slogging along there, coming up the rear as I’ve taken on other creative projects for clients.

Case in point this picture from a recent family portrait session. The three shots of this sweet little girl came from the first lighting test shots of the session, but somehow unlocked her inner model. She knocked out the “Three Monkeys” poses in succession and, with photoshop magic, we suddenly have triplets.

But the inspiration for a shot like this is pretty easy to track down. Apart from being an iconic original image of the maxim “do no evil”, it’s a tepid fever on iStockPhoto.com, where a quick search for “Hear no evil” uncovers 179 images riffing on exactly the same theme.

And yet, as with all things artistic, a riff is just a riff, and what matters is your ability to capture an idea in a new way, unique to your vision and principle. For me, this picture is fun and frivolous. It’s unpretentious. Most importantly, it captures exactly the vision I had in my head as I was snapping away in our session together.

For me, this such a photography thing. There are very few pictures that truly have yet to be taken. But with each setting and subject comes an infinite number of combinations of photographers with an equally infinite number of ideas and concepts for capture. And then I think about my friends Curt and Sam and Justin and Tyler and Matt and so on and so on, all musicians working to capture the same images through music, with the same challenges, and the same rich bed of opportunity. Stephen King, Cormac Macarthy, George Lucas, J.J. Abrams, all documentarians of the unoriginal in uncannily unique voice.

The challenge I work toward beating, then, is not to struggle to find the best idea. It’s to find my uncannily unique voice, and apply it to the old, the broken, and to build new connections where none existed before.

It’s safe to say that up to about two years ago, what we call social media was exclusively the domain of artists, teens, and the technorati. The idea of Facebook as a mainstream communication platform was just gaining momentum, and services such as Twitter still required a lengthy explanation in cocktail party conversation. Things have changed in the last few years, however. Now, The New York Times is discussing these services regularly, and Nielsen Online has been tracking explosive growth in the space; from February 2008 to February 2009, Twitter grew 1,382% — from 475,000 unique visitors per month in ‘08 to over 7 million unique visitors in ‘09. Facebook had 20 million unique visitors in February 2008, today boasting more than 65 million — a 240% leap. And 65 million is a fraction of the reported 150 million registered users of Facebook.

Project management is, of course, making it’s way to the social media universe. Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, tells me that Paramount Pictures asked all employees to communicate with one another on Facebook exclusively for one week as a way of getting teams to understand the importance of online social interaction on the tool.

But all of these are just tools. While they might change the landscape of social interaction naturally, they will only change the landscape of your project communication if they make sense, if your people understand and embrace them, and if your project is a good fit. Here are a few tools aligned for project work worth giving a second glance.

Status

The greatest gravity in the social orbit is around the Twitter service right now — a microblogging service that offers space to answer the question “What are you doing?” in just 140 characters. If there ever was a service to serve project management, it’s Twitter. In just a few seconds, team members can post quick updates to project tasks, links to daily reports, questions for the team, and more. For teams, I recommend you “protect” and thereby render private all your status updates, as the tool doesn’t naturally lend itself to discrete team communication by default.

The recently-announced Lists feature in Twitter is a boon to teams, too. Just set up a private project team list and get real-time status updates from team members wherever you are.

Discussion

Facebook has made great effort to make the discussion feature on the site more clear and efficient for groups. Still, the idea of a project team on Facebook is typically anathema to IT security specialists. If your organization doesn’t offer support for team based wikis or SharePoint for team discussions, consider a service such as Ning. Ning offers you the opportunity to create a private social network all your own with rich discussion and file hosting support, all free. Ning keeps the lights on by offering ads on your pages, but for a small monthly fee, you can buy out the ads and clean up the site. It takes all of 15 minutes to get your own Ning site up and running — and only a few hours to move beyond the basic templates and create a project environment all your own.

File Sharing

It may seem simple, but just sharing version copies of your project schedule and plan can be a nightmare over email — an environment which still challenges many of us, fighting inbox overflow. While most corporate intranets offer a perfect sharing solution for internal teams, if you are working with any team members who are contractors or vendors, how do you keep them up to speed on the latest working project files?

Enter DropBox. This simple tool installs as a system preference, and puts a new folder in your documents called “Dropbox”. In it, you can share folders between computers and teams and watch as all your project documents are seamlessly duplicated across all users on your team. Dropbox is free for two gigabytes of storage which is likely enough for most projects. For heavy users, pay up $99 a year for 50 gigabytes of storage, and $198 for 100 gigs.

Most of these tools satisfy a single need for project teams. As an alternative to a piecemeal approach, 37Signals’ Basecamp offers a similar status feature to Twitter, and provides a full project environment, file sharing interface, and messaging platform for team communication. It is the only service in the batch that addresses the complete project environment and was designed specifically for project managers.

I don’t play hockey, but I hear there’s a rule players internalize early: skate to where the puck will be. The rule holds in the burgeoning social media space, too. The next generation of project managers currently graduating from school, working toward their PMP certification, these people have a radically different expectation for project communication than exists in the space right now. The sooner we move ourselves — and our teams — in a direction of communicating, interacting, and collaborating online, the better prepared we will be as the rules of the business continue to change around us.

The video arcade was on Nevada Avenue. It was next door to Fantasy Adult Video. While the video games in the arcade were not of the adult nature, the dumpster behind the facility certainly was. In a related story, a Canadian university has been unable to track down men in their 20’s who have not been exposed to adult content. I’d like to thank the Fantasy Adult Video dumpster and my friends Dogan and John for making me ineligible for that particular study today.

On Saturday mornings they had four-buck all-play at the arcade until 1:00 in the afternoon. We’d be there at 8:00 sharp, armed with our $4.00 in quarters and pockets full of LemonHeads and Cherry Clans to see us through the morning. Even today, it’s not hard to remember the menu for those long Saturday mornings. Burgertime. Moon Patrol. Robotron 2084. Those were warm-up games. Dig Dug and Joust were appetizers. For me, a good round of Q*bert would find its way into the morning, but Tron and (amen) Pole Position were meat and potatoes.

Then, 1983 happened. Out of nowhere we saw Gyruss, Maro Bros., Spy Hunter, Star Wars. Revolutionary. For the first time, I was Kevin Flynn, jacking into the world of these games that was so real I could reach out and touch their pixellated edges. That is, until Dragon’s Lair.

For me, Dragon’s Lair was less of a game than it was a nemesis. It tested not skill and bravery, but raw reflex and focus. At the time, I was having and 11-year-old’s difficulty with not only reflex and focus, but also gross space. So, while I was not paying attention to important things, I was also failing to duck swinging cranes and running into things. Dragon’s Lair tested my nerves where they were most raw.

This is my generation. It’s the generation of men raised in the space too distracted by moving images to really get lost in comic books. It’s the generation of men who find as much classical fantasy in Homer as in Lucas and Speilberg (circa “E.T.” and less “Shindler’s List”). It’s the generation of men who, on seeing Dragon’s Lair available for their iPhones today, don’t think twice about clicking “buy”.

Today’s downloadable Dragon’s Lair is in too many ways exactly like the the cabinet game that bullied me growing up. It’s still a time sink — I’m only almost sure today is still Monday. More dreadfully, it tests all the same nerves now that it chaffed 26 years ago. And even as I’m finding myself tripping over things one time too many, and taking a few knocks to the head on low cabinets tonight, I’m thankful for the gift that today’s Dragon’s Lair download has given me. It’s a reminder of so many good times with friendships that are indelible to time.

One might say, … indelible to the Sands of Time, mightn’t one?

Today, I’m using this bully pulpit to talk about a website you should not visit. It’s called Tweeteorites.com, and briefly, it is a collection of the most favorited tweets in the past 24 hours.

Now, let’s figure out all the wrong in that last sentence:

1) Favorited – this is a poor excuse for a word. No one who speaks to me in their outside voice would ever use this word for fear of me telling them how silly they sound using it. It is a bastardization of favorite which, to be honest, was just the result of the word favor trying to one-up meteor in 1969. And we all remember how that turned out, do we not.

2) Tweets – to get this one, you have to be either a) a bird, or b) a user of the service twitter.com. According to my analytics, most of you are the latter, and 90% of the former are using IE6, which I don’t acknowledge.

3) 24 hours – As if there are actually that many hours in a day. Whatever.

To jump into exactly why you should not visit Tweeteorites.com, requires a bit of a working understanding of twitter itself and — if I may wax serious for a spell — why Twitter is important right now. See, I used to loathe Twitter. I used to think it was a time sink, a hollow waste of digital space and my hard-won time. On a dare, I tried it. The dare was simple: I was to spend 48 hours following a few interesting people on Twitter, and if I didn’t find a compelling story hidden in the service based on just that 48-hour block, I would get to keep the AirHogs nano zero gravity car.

I lost the car, but gained a new appreciation for this service. Twitter is often confused as a social network. It is not a social network, though it shares many features of larger services like Facebook. Twitter is a social engine, a service that exists to collect 140-character bits of news, activity, links, data, authority, comedy, education — and drive each of them forward in space.

I believe it was Einstein who remarked that real intelligence is the ability to make connections between discrete data sets to create information, knowledge, wisdom. Twitter is that data.

When people ask me about Twitter, why I care, what it’s good for, I always start here: The utility of Twitter is directly related to your understanding of the third-party applications that allow you to interact with it. The programming interface open to developers who want to play with the venerable back end of Twitter is rich, meaning many of the third-party Twitter applications are more interesting than the website itself. Check out Tweetie from Atebits, TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, and Twitterific for all different interpretations on interaction with the service. Then, run a search.

Search for something you’re interested in. Ducks. Project Management. Agile development. Your favorite television show. Just run a search on something that appeals to you and start to scan the results. Rinse. Repeat. What you’re seeing there is a tapestry of a discussion happening in real time, right now.

So who cares about Tweeteorites.com? One of the more entertaining ancilliary functions of Twitter is the “Favorite” — a switch you can use to indicated that a particular post you find exceptional in some way. For most, exceptional = funny. Simple math. Tweeteorites is an aggregator of all tweets with over 100 “Favorites” each and growing. You can survey the list by Twitter leaderboard, by your own followers, and you can see a summary of your own wit and witticism that has made a mark in the Twitterverse.

Tweeteorites is one of a few similar services in the Twitter economy. Favstar.fm does the same, albeit with more splash and fancy. Favrd.com is the original, until founder Dean Allen closed the doors on the service just this week, pulling down the archives and leaving a giant sucking sound in the comedy-tweet space. Sad, but it would appear the void has already been filled with these other services.

Twitter backstory aside, if you’re new to the service, beware. You will loose time. And I’m not talking about waking up on the business end of a cranial event, either. Time lost on Twitter, is time for which we’re all accountable, friends.

That said, follow me on Twitter! You can find me @PeteWright. And while you’re at it, after all this, you’d better throw me a favorite or two, people. Seriously.

The Nook (Technologizer’s great review here) is part of the latest gadget bubble to take hold of the elder and technorati set, the e-book reader. Like the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle before it, the Nook allows you to buy books from the Barnes & Nobel store, download them via 3g nearly instantly, and begin reading. The Nook brings not much to the discussion that the other two devices haven’t covered; E-Ink screen, fancy keyboard, books and newspapers. The killer features on the Nook that are supposed to wipe out the Sony and the Kindle are, well, two.

First, there’s a color screen. No, not the whole thing, just an awkward strip across the bottom which allows you to see small covers of your books, and converts to device navigation when you’re not browsing.

Second, you can lend books. This one might have been a game changer, as neither the Sony or the Kindle allow you to loan books to other device-weilding book mavens. A game-changer were it not for the fact that you can only loan a book once. Once. One time for that book, period. It’s a gift that’s only almost as good as not being able to loan books at all. With friends like these… yeesh.

I have the Kindle 2 — Amazon’s remix of their self-acclaimed hit e-book reader. I love it. For sitting down and reading a book with my feet up on the couch, with coffee, and maybe a cruller, it’s the perfect device. The screen is clear, and the fact that it’s not backlit means no eye-strain for long reads. It’s easy to navigate. It’s compact and terrific for vacations on which I’d usually lug along a bookbag. It’s the best way to read a newspaper, too. Seriously, dead-tree apologists haven’t spent enough time on the Kindle; it’s like having a newspaper that is clean, organized, and searchable, right there in your hands.

But, then, I love cross-word puzzles. The Kindle has a keyboard, so I assume I’ll just turn to the crossword and get solving, right? Nope. No dice. No crosswords on the Kindle. For that, you have to turn to something like the computer or the iPhone, which I happen to have in my pocket. OK, fine. No crosswords. How about books not in the Kindle fancy-format? You bet. PDF. Effective two weeks ago, Amazon announced that Kindle users can now drag PDFs to their Kindle 2’s when connected to their computers, or use their Kindle email address and have the documents processed and mailed for a fee.

Or, I could go back to my iPhone and read any damned thing I want right now, PDF or not. And this, right here, is why hardware e-book readers will be one of the shortest-lived gadgets in tech. They’re very cool, until you realize they’re never quite cool enough.

The Kindle epitomizes the paradox of the single function device: focus on one thing and do it exceptionally well, while your competitor focuses on nothing and delivers much with mediocrity. Turns out that in all but the most extreme cases, people want a device the does more, more often, and smaller. I can read my Kindle or my Nook books on my iPhone. I can read PDFs. I can edit documents and take pictures and send emails and play games that let me push people down stairs.

The hardware failings of the Kindle and this ilk come only when you have really discovered your delight in the device. You love reading so much on it, that you want to read more. You want to read email and webpages. But you can’t, not without suffering through the pain of lag in the E-Ink screen. You want speed, but you can’t have that either; the device was designed to do all the heavy lifting that comes with turning pages, for crying out loud. Anything more and you need a laptop.

Luckily, and where I happen to be quite bullish, is in the e-book as a technology and platform for further development. The best thing that could happen to reading books electronically would be for all these devices to fail in spite of themselves — in spite of the industry they’ve kindled. That may just mean that people have rediscovered their love of the written word beyond email and the web, and that they demand more of the tools that help them consume it.

For anyone looking for a recommendation before you head out shopping for that someone special, I’ll keep it simple. Buy a Kindle. It’s less stupid than the others. Then see if you remember how to read.

From the Oxford American Dictionary:

groupthink |ˈgroōpˌθi ng k|
noun - the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility : there’s always a danger of groupthink when two leaders are so alike.

But dictionary people are always so … clinical. This definition doesn’t address — doesn’t even touch — the sense of warmth that comes from a good session of groupthink. You all know what I’m talking about; it’s that sense of calm that settles on a meeting once everyone has realized that the solution doesn’t offend anyone. In the room. So it must be right. Right?

So, you’re thinking about groupthink. Now, think about Tiburon, California. Tiburon sits on a peninsula on the northern end of the San Fransisco Bay. From there, looking south, you can see the city of San Francisco jutting out across the water. There are only two roads leading in or out of Tiburon. It’s idyllic. It never rains, the people are always happy, and being surrounded by water on three sides, the lapping waves drown out the sound of the poor coming from Oakland.

It’s this setting that makes the following story so much more perfect. Here it is: The Tiburon police department is apparently installing a new system of cameras to be installed on the inbound and outbound routes of the city which will read and register the license plates of every car coming in or out. According to the TPD memo, the system is designed:

(1) as a post-crime investigative tool, and (2) as a real-time license- plate alert system in the event of a crime in progress, such as an abduction, a crime under investigation by the Tiburon Police Department, or a similar search for particular plate numbers.

Do you smell it? It’s the pungent-sweet smell of barbeque pizza from California Pizza Kitchen. Also, it’s the smell of groupthink.

Because it sounds good, this plan of looking at all the license plates. It’s to stop criminals, man. It’s about the crime-fighting! Meanwhile, back at the memo…

Technology is available that takes a single, digital color photograph of the back of each passing car. Optical character recognition software “reads” and stores the license plate numbers. A short-retention data base of plate numbers would enable the TPD to look for patterns that match crimes or to search for certain vehicles that might be wanted in connection with particular crimes. The system could be programmed to search for particular license plates including stolen vehicles, those identified in “Amber Alerts” (missing children alerts) or those involved in crimes under investigation by the Tiburon Police.

See? It’s a short-retention database. They surely wouldn’t actually keep all those plate numbers. No, no … in the meeting they said they wouldn’t because it would be wrong. And wrong is offensive. But, you know, look at what the system could do! We could use it for Amber Alerts! Think of the kids! And stolen cars! And murder! We could use it for murder!

Crime-fighting is such a sweet slippery slope. When you’re making decisions like this, decisions with repercussions that ripple throughout a civic house, and you’re doing it from a place of groupthink, you’re thinking only of the right now. The right now is all that matters, the current problem that must be solved, the puzzle that must be completed. The right now doesn’t think about the ripples throughout the civic house. The right now doesn’t care about consequences beyond those making the call.

I probably don’t have to say this out loud, but there are some citizens concerned with the Tiburon PD plan to be monitored. That’s because it’s flawed at its core. And in the spirit of showing-not-telling, take a look at the privacy disaster that’s come of the UK in this fantastic piece by Cory Doctorow, privacy vigilante and novelist. Bit of brilliance from his piece:

And because of Chekhov’s first law of narrative (“a gun on the mantelpiece in act one will go off by act three”), the police have decided to also use these cameras as a surveillance tool, to “catch terrorists” (and other bad guys). So any police officer can add any license number to the database of “people of interest” and every time that license plate passes a camera, the local police force will receive an urgent alert, and can pull over the car, detain the driver, and search the car and its passengers under the Terrorism Act.

No, no, nonono. That would never happen in our town. Not in Tiburon. Because it would never happen at home, with a plan like this. It’s all about protection. So it was with the Brits, too. And, you know, as falls the British Empire…

One day, this great oak of a boy shows up in a shiny new car. He says his divorcee mom has agreed to buy liquor for his high school parties because, he says, “she says that if she buys the booze and my friends come to my house, that will keep us all out of trouble.”

Of course, so will prison, largely.

So the parties move to the Russian’s house, much booze is bought, and this Comcastic train-wreck of a boy never realizes that cosmically, in spite of the dark glasses that he wears and the cool car that he drives, and even in spite of the gallons of alcohol his mom brings to the house … he is still, fundamentally, a jerk.

And here we go again, history repeating itself gloriously. Now, Comcast gets to be the Russian kid, and GE gets to be the guy who only drank soda and goes home with the head cheerleader.

To be sure, this is an absolute dream come true for Comcast. This is the brass ring, it’s the big show. The really, really big show. Now, the cable provider, the distribution network, owns the pipes and a controlling interest in the gas, too. TimeWarner got close, but never quite executed. Comcast thinks it’s going to make good on that.

GE is walking away with a bit of cash — $13 billion — so enough to roll out another microwave oven. More importantly, GE gets freedom. NBC is like that skin tag on your hip that keeps growing and growing, but not doing anything useful. NBC was the goofy stepbrother that came to dinner and never left, back when GE acquired RCA in 1986. If you’re GE in this situation, this is good riddance to bad rubbish.

The problem with all this rot is in the series of flags it raises. Some are big flags. Some are little ones… but they’re all sort of red.

One big one is network neutrality. I’m actually against network neutrality. It’s a market-driven concept and in it’s purest form — paying a premium for higher speed access to content — it serves the people who get content delivered. That’s a good thing. Let the market rule.

Comcast has a different idea of network neutrality, though, and it looks something like internet divestiture. Imagine a day in which you wake up and want to watch the latest “30 Rock” only to find out that you aren’t a paying subscriber to that internet.

As television content moves more and more online, the thought of pillar NBC shows moving behind the Comcast gate could get damned near anti-competitive. And that’s not me talking, that’s  my man Ed Markey (D-Mass.), voice of the little people.

“This proposed deal raises significant questions about consumer choice and competition, innovation and investment in the media marketplace that merit close scrutiny by Congress, the FCC and the Justice Department.”

Best thing that could come out of this rot is the dialog. In the end, Comcast will get their NBC. If history is any indicator, they’ll likely do something stupid with it (I’m sorry, but I’m looking at you, Hulu). But more people who should be talking about these issues in the media marketplace will be talking about them. Out of the ash of big media resignation, though, comes the realization that the media marketplace has already shifted right out from under the mergers and acquisitions. The future isn’t Comcast’s, or NBC’s. The future belongs to the rest of us — latent storytellers waiting for the next writer’s strike, the next studio gaff, the next “GI Joe” for an opportunity to give their stories, real and rich stories, life and freedom.

After yesterday’s tome of a post, I had a few questions hit my inbox looking for details on my own shooting equipment, specifically on which lenses I use most often.

I love my D300 and was wondering what glass you shoot with most often? For people it looks like maybe an 85 1.4? Great depth of field. Do you use any tilt-shift lenses?

Thought I’d answer this one as a continuation of yesterdays discussion on picking out your first DSLR. First, for the first time DSLR buyer, more often than not, I almost only shoot prime lenses. A prime lens, or a fixed focal length lens is a lens that doesn’t zoom. If you want to make an object bigger, you have to get closer to it. Most starter DSLR kits come with a zoom lens, most often something in the range of 18 millimeters – 55 millimeters, meaning you can zoom out to a moderately wide shot at 18mm, and zoom in to a less moderately wide shot at 55mm. This is not to be confused with a telephoto lens, which is typically considered anything that is larger than 200mm. So, rule of thumb, smaller mm number, the wider the image the lens is capable of capturing. The larger the mm number, the closer you’ll be able to focus on things far away.

Back to me. So, I shoot primes for three basic reasons.

1. I find that the quality of my prime lenses is generally higher than zoom lenses that contain the focal range of the prime. There are a number of reasons for this — the optics are typically tuned for the specific focal range, there are fewer moving parts, fewer elements to get in the way of a good shot. Whatever the reason, my own experience dictates that I have better luck when shooting under pressure when I eliminate as many potential points of failure as I can. Shooting fast with a zoom lens is one of those points of failure for me.
2. Given all that muck above, primes tend to be cheaper than zooms of the same quality. Can’t argue with the benjamins.
3. Primes force me to do things I wouldn’t usually do. I lay on the floor a lot with my lens kit. When I was shooting mostly zooms, I never did that. The floor is absolutely awesome. You should totally try hanging out there from time to time. With a camera.

85mm f1.8D - Courtesy of Nikon

My go-to lens of choice is an 85mm f1.8D Nikkor. The focal length on this thing seems to be the sweet spot for portraits, particularly in natural light situations. Since most people shooting with first time DSLRs will likely not have much in the way of external or fill lighting, having a lens that is a vortex for light is key. This one, I can’t recommend enough.

For people, in particular, the 85mm (and longer) lenses let you achieve those magical “Oprah” magazine cover shots. And that’s the real trick for getting a good shot of a person: back up. Get a longer lens and get as far back as you can, while maintaining a good tight shot. Set your aperture low and see what happens!

50mm 1.4D - Courtesy of Nikon

When I’m not shooting the 85, I shoot a 50mm f.14D Nikkor. This lens is fast. When I say fast, I mean the autofocus to lock is as fast as I think it. When I’m shooting events in close quarters, this is the place to be. The 50mm lens is as close to what the human eye perceives as you can get these days. That means, what you see outside the camera is about the same as what you see in the camera. It has a very natural look to it and it’s one that I can trust to deliver results that appeal, particularly to families and couples.

70-300 4.5 - Courtesy of Nikon

I don’t shoot sports or wildlife, so the only zoom telephoto I carry is a pretty junky 70-300mm. Needs lots of light which makes this lens tough to use on all but the brightest of events and it’s dog slow. Still, if you’re banking on the best camera being the camera you have with you, then the best telephoto has to be the best for the job if it’s the only one in your bag.

16mm 2.8 - Courtesy of Nikon

Finally, my favorite fun lens is my 16mm f2.8 fish-eye. It’s not the widest you can get, but it distorts enough to make the results really eye-catching. I have one client I use it for right now, for shooting big, dramatic scapes of a large warehouse they occupy. Makes for interesting dramatic effect in their advertising.

As for tilt-shift lenses, rarely. For those who haven’t seen one, a tilt-shift lens allows you to shift the optical elements in the lens at up to 90% angle from the sensor element of the camera, normalizing the natural parallax that occurs when looking at long/tall objects.

24mm Tilt-Shift - Courtesy of Nikon

One common use is in architectural photography, particularly of tall buildings. With a standard lens, there’s no way to capture a tall building with a 50mm  in total. If you slap a super wide angle on, you may get the whole building, but the lines will be bent with the curve of the optics. With a tilt-shift, you keep the wider angle, capture the building, and maintain nice parallel lines as the building rises.

They’re spendy. I rented the Nikon 24mm f3.5D for a downtown shoot some time ago and got some interesting results. If I were going to make my trade in architectural photography, I’d pop for the $2,000 and change to carry that bad-boy around, but for now, rental suits me just fine.

So, that’s what I carry with me day to day, shoot to shoot. If anyone’s interested in gear porn, I’m happy to shoot a quick tour of my gear bag — all the other goodies that helps make the pictures. Post in the comments or on facebook and let me know.

The point is, last night, for the first time, I received an email through my Google profile from a friend. A friend who didn’t know my email address, and found me through Google. Profile. Man, this system is rock solid. He wanted to know if I had any thoughts on picking up his first digital-SLR camera. Well, I’ll let him tell you.

I want to get a DSLR camera for Christmas, but I do not know much about them. I was hoping that you could shed some light on what would be a good first DSLR camera for a first time user. I am interested in Nikon or Canon, but that is only because of name brand recognition. I am looking to keep the cost around $500.00 for body and lens. Any thoughts?

Do I have some thoughts? Sure I do. This one’s for you, Dave.

I’m a Nikon shooter myself, but haven’t always been so. My first DSLR was a Canon Digital Rebel XT. It was a terrific camera. Lightweight. Soft to the touch. Gentle on the wrists. It was a budding photographer’s dream. I’d been shooting Canon for years prior in the high-end point and shoot range, so the move to the XT was a piece of cake.

When I made the move myself, the ProPhoto guys were so gentle with me. And still, they left me with brochures about competing cameras, camera lines, lens availability, features out the yin-yang, too much stuff. Now that I’ve been shooting in more of a professional capacity for a few years, I’ve boiled my needs down to a simple 4-point system that can be summed up in two gorgeous words: User Experience.

Here are the two things that don’t matter at all when searching for your first DSLR camera.

1. Brand religion. Nikon. Sony. Canon. Panasonic. Unless you’re on the market for a Hasselblad, the brand matters very little. See, all these camera guys do is spend their time trying to figure out how to get the upper hand on one another. That’s it. Low light? They’re all great. Noise reduction? Terrific. Lens speed? Damn near zippy. Every camera is leaps and bounds better than the nearest competitor for all of about 32 days on the market. It’s just something we get used to.
2. Megapixels. Let this go, too. Unless you’re spending gobs of money on a camera with a giant sensor in it, all you’re getting in an entry-level DSLR with high megapixel count is a company jamming more pixels on the same sized sensor and trading off quality of image for the right to impress their dates. You are their dates. You should be unimpressed. A good 6-8 megapixel camera will give you more than enough picture for your buck once you learn the ropes, and you’ll have trouble finding one of those these days. Don’t be fooled.

But there are things that set cameras apart. This gets us back to my handy 4-point system. See, the single most important thing that you are buying in a DSLR camera is your ability to interact with it quickly. You have to be able to plug in to the thing, to make it bow down to you, to do your bidding when you think about what you want to do with it, not when you bend over in the shade so you can read some obscure dial or nob and pull out the instructions. By then, he’s already kissed the bride, left for the honeymoon, and secured their second mortgage on the family home.

What you’re buying is speed, and speed is in the User Experience. Some manufacturers get it, others don’t. So here’s the test, in four points. If you can look at the back of the camera and find these four features quickly, you’re in good shape.

1. Camera Mode. On most DSLRs the camera mode is on a dial that offers some wee heiroglyphics along with cryptic alpha-numeric combinations. If you hit the right pattern, you’ll open a Stargate to Isis. Otherwise, you’re asking the camera to get itself all ready for shooting in certain preset conditions. Portrait, Landscape, Night, Action/Sports… those are pretty reliable, but most shooters I know spend the vast amount of their shooting time on “Aperture Priority,” which allows them to set the aperture setting manually, but let the camera get all the other settings just right given that aperture. Aperture determines how much light you’re letting through the lens — the lower the aperture, the more light; the higher the aperture, the less light. If you can figure out how to set your camera to Aperture Priority (usually marked by an “A” or “A1″, you’re in good shape.
2. ISO. This is what sets the speed equivalent to film. ISO 100-400 for outdoor shooting — nice and fast, low noise, great for bright lights. ISO 600-800 for darker, indoor environments. Today’s DSLRs have insane low-light sensitivity; even the lower end Canon X1i hits 12,800 in it’s highest mode. Taking pictures in the dark with that one.
3. Aperture. Now that you’re in Aperture Priority, you have to set the aperture. On my Nikon D3, aperture is controlled by a lateral scroll-wheel under my index finger, right by the shutter release. It’s completely intuitive, and it has to be. Learn to set aperture appropriately and you’ll master Depth of Field — how to get the backgrounds fuzzy and your subjects crisp. You’ll be using it a lot.
4. Exposure Compensation. Look for the little plus/minus symbol and the button that goes with it. That’s an important button. Can you press it when you hold the camera up to your mug? Exposure compensation is the “nudge” that you give the shutter to make your photo brighter or darker, given all the other settings you’ve fixed. It’s the last bit of nuance in shooting the perfect family photo, and one that will make you the photographic hero of the crazy side of the family that you only send cards to.

Simple, right? If you’re really looking for your very first DSLR, it might not sound simple, but take it from me: if you can walk into a camera store and find those four options on the camera, you’re well on your way to taking absolutely terrific pictures. But don’t just find them. Change them up. Dial aperture way up, then way down. See how quickly you can move from setting your ISO to setting your aperture. Can you really set exposure compensation with the camera up to your face?

The most important bit here is that the control scheme makes sense to you. Nikon makes sense to me. The menu system is clean and very linear. The buttons are spaced appropriately for my hands and, in the case of button-dial combinations, they’re well thought out and intuitive after just a few tries. For me, Canon made less sense, and even after years of shooting with Canon, the menus seemed to be getting even less transparent. I switched. It just wasn’t how my brain was wired.

Dude. What about the photos?

They all take great photos. That’s the beauty of this discussion. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be taking great pictures and expertly navigating your camera like a Japanese schoolgirl on her DoCoMo. Here are a few models to check out.

Canon EOS Rebel T1i

Here’s a gander at the back of the new Canon EOS Rebel T1i. It’s a bit out of the $500 range at $799 MSRP, but the overage may just be worth it when you consider needs and usability.

Images courtesy of CanonUSA

If you can get the buttons working, this baby brings you full HD (1080i) video recording onboard. If you haven’t seen some of the footage coming from video shot on DSLR cameras, check out “Reverie” by Vincent Laforet to get a feel for what you can do. New baby video has never looked so good, plus you get the bonus of shagging only one camera on diaper changes.

Nikon D5000

Image courtesy of Nikon USA.

The Nikon D5000 shoots video, gives you 12.3 megapixels, and has some of the most intuitive controls I’ve used in the line. This camera is wicked fast where it counts — when you press the shutter. Nikon’s new line of digital lenses — a concept most photographers have frowned on for many moons — are starting to get noticed as well, meaning you’ll have lots of options when it comes to kitting out your new D5000 with new glass as you get to know your own shooting style.

Both of these cameras are in the $600-$700 range and frankly, that’s where I’d be starting my search. The D40 is the $499 Nikon starter, and the EOS Rebel XS is the $569 starter for Canon. Both are good cameras, but with the features they’re jamming into the line up with only a few extra pennies, you’re getting pro-level equipment at a fraction of the price that will last you years.

There you go, Dave. My thoughts on getting your first DSLR. Wherever you go with this, make sure the buttons and the menus work for you. Test them. Go to the store and take lots of pictures on them. Make sure you can be one with your new camera. Because the real secret to great photography is this: no one cares what kind of camera you used, if you can take pictures that make grandma cry.

We were focusing specifically on camera function this time. With so many people carrying professionally capable DSLRs around their necks, sporting inequitable skill in using them, I thought it a good opportunity to look at the top 3-4 things to do with your camera that can improve your photos and your confidence when working quickly and taking advantage of natural light.

So many wonderful trinkets and bobbles and textures make for a great photographic playground. If you’ve never been, take the time to stop into this treasure of other peoples’ trash and soak it in. I’ve posted the full gallery here and, as always, comments are appreciated!

And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway. The ones that win are the ones that ship.

It’s fascinating. Go read the whole piece if you’re into HTML nerdery: Why do we have an IMG element? [dive into mark]

• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

To be fair, I don’t go to bookstores often anymore, but I’m a Kindle guy. The rest of this stuff? So much for respondents inflating their answers to look smart…

Mint.com’s chief marketing officer, stunned a room full of digital marketing pros by noting that she really didn’t have much of a marketing budget. Mint.com has gone from zero to 1.5 million users in two years with no ad campaign, save a mid-five-figures sum spent on search engine terms. Rather than purchase traffic, it has pursued the same type of strategy that food trucks and online magazines do: Using free social media and piggybacking on popular new communications technology. Mint.com has more than 36,000 Facebook fans and 19,000 Twitter followers, a well-traffickedblog, and a popular iPhone application.

Great article. Worth checking out in more detail.

As outlined in today’s press release and my blog post, after the acquisition closes, the Mint.com team will contribute to improving the financial lives of tens of millions of consumers and small businesses. I’ll personally be taking on the role of GM of Intuit’s Personal Finance group responsible for online, desktop and mobile consumer personal finance offerings. Joining Intuit enables us to bring our vision of helping consumers understand and do more with their money to millions of Intuit customers. This is a compelling combination of our innovative product, technology, and industry leading user interface design with one of the most trusted brands in software.

This is good news for Intuit — not sure they can get any more disorganized than they are now. It’s probably good news for Mint, though they’re hitching their wagon to a brand that needs desperate help, putting themselves in the position of floating quality for both brands.

I left Quicken this year after being a user for over a decade. The software is less stable than it was when I joined the Intuit bandwagon and there is little evidence of evolution or rigorous development over time. In fact, several of the features I used regularly in those early versions have been taken out of the software today. I’ve moved to MoneyWell and have been able to make a remarkably easy transition to the package.

Widely praised by reviewers as well as users who can already buy it in Europe, the Hero could give Sprint a much-needed boost. This will mark the second recent attempt—following the sale of the Palm Pre—by Sprint to use an exclusive deal for an anticipated phone in hopes of stemming a long stretch of losses.

via Sprint to sell Android phone in October.

I’ve now actually touched a Palm Pre. I was walking through Best Buy and, for the first time, they had a functioning model on the floor — not the plastic brick placeholder they usually have around. I stood there poking around at it for about 20 minutes and walked away with a few quick impressions.

1. You never quite know where you are.
There’s no doubt that the interface is quite slick. It feels peppy and rich and — believe it or not — it’s more gooey than the iPhone interface. Maybe that’s just me not being used to it, but I really did want to lick this thing; it’s that much like candy. That said, even after 20 minutes, you never quite know where you are on the thing. Was I in an app? Was I cycling through processes? Where did the calendar go? It seems like there was just so much going on at any one time, that I was never able to focus on where I was, what I was trying to do. In this respect, this is a de-evolution from the Palm OS that I had grown to love with my first Palm III.

2. Cheap.
The thing squeeked in my hand. Every time I slid the keyboard out, I got that cringe-inducing plastic squelch. Maybe it’s designed for smaller, more delicate paws, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was going to fall apart on me. I imagine this is the feeling with many of these sliding-keyboard jobs, and I don’t have experience with many, but this one just felt cheap.

3. Fixed Keyboards.
The last two+ years with my iPhone have broken me from the physical keyboard thing. It took some time, and I don’t think I ever really took note of it before the Pre, but it turns out that I hate tiny phone keyboards now. They don’t change when my needs change. They don’t get all wide and wonderful when I turn the phone into landscape orientation. They don’t pop-up little markers telling me which key I just typed. There are just so many don’ts that I suddenly find it hard to believe they included a hard keyboard at all. The keys were just too small to get any work done, and too inflexible for the needs of the applications on the device itself.

4. Polish.
There is an entry video on the Pre that follows this shiny ball of light floating about a landscape, introducing you to all things Pre-wonderful. The video is presented in portrait mode, or “tallscreen”, so it looks normal as you’re looking at the phone for the first time. When you touch the screen, the video controls fade in, allowing you to scrub through the video and control volume and such. The controls appear on the left side of the screen, sideways, as if you were holding the phone in landscape orientation. I was blown away. It’s one of the simplest bits of polish that I’d never really appreciated on the iPhone — when you turn a video from landscape to portrait, the controls change too — that when I found it missing on the Pre, I was stunned.

It’s a beautiful device on the whole, that shows what you can do with a smaller screen and alternative input methods, but as a consumer, there are so many little paper-cut issues that hit me in just 20 minutes, I have to worry that in three hours, or three days, I’d have plum bled out.

This is why it breaks my heart to read this piece from Eric Savitz over at Barrons finding that it looks like others are in the same boat — not buying the Pre. Competition is good. Product evolution is better. But the clock is ticking, and aside from Best Buy, I have still never seen a Palm Pre in use in the wild.

Eller adds that “with the Palm’s fade,” takeover talk is also likely to evaporate. As the world realizes that the WebOS is “good but not mature enough for developers,” he adds, “Palm’s strategic value to potential acquirers diminishes.”

link: Palm: Pre Sales To Whiff Targets? – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com

According to NPD MusicWatch, when it comes to the unit-sales volume of music sold at retail – including paid digital music downloads and CDs – Apple iTunes leads in the U.S. with 25 percent of music units sold, which is up from 21 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007. Walmart (including Walmart, Walmart.com, Walmart Music Downloads) remains in second position with 14 percent of music volume sold at their stores and Web sites with Best Buy ranked third.

via Digital Music Increases Share of Overall Music Sales Volume in the U.S. .

This is where we are starting to see the trouble of Apple’s dominance in the market. Competition is important. Competition drives innovation. Apple, of all companies needs competitors. But the dominance in the market of iTunes and the iPod/iPhone is killing it. I want the Palm Pre to succeed on the merits. I want Amazon to be a killer digital music store (it’s on the way). I believe Apple’s products and store ecosystem are best-of-breed right now. But they can be beat. What is scaring me most about the current state of the digital music market is that before long, the most creative among us may just stop trying.

So Flash is kind of a big deal on new smartphones. The iPhone doesn’t have it, the Pre doesn’t have it, BlackBerry devices don’t have it… but the Hero does. Unfortunately, in our testing, we found the inclusion actually hurts operation of the phone more than it helps. When browsing to a site heavy on Flash (there are many), the browser loading times were abysmal. Furthermore, trying to view videos in-window produced choppy, nearly unwatchable results. You may have a better experience with lighter kinds of content, but in our opinion the main reason to introduce Flash into a mobile environment is to allow for broader media viewing options, and in the current state of this Flash player, you’re not really going to get much mileage out of it.

Watch the video and see for yourself. Loading the Flash movie is an atrocious, fist-pounding experience, and while I thought Topolsky nailed the rest of the review, on this point he was far too gracious. Two things I take out of it:

1) If your customers are clamoring for a feature in a product which you know will deliver a maddening experience for them, don’t deliver the feature. There’s a reason the iPhone doesn’t have Flash. There’s a reason the Blackberry doesn’t have Flash. There’s a reason the Pre doesn’t have Flash. It’s because the experience is abysmal for users.

2) This is more of a damning review for Adobe than it is for HTC. It’s clearly tough to scale Flash down to mobile devices, but it’s been years now and the natives are moving passed “restless” and into resignation that they’ll never get Flash at all. Politics aside, maybe HTML5 is a better bet?

And for my next theory, Palm is making a very simple play for Apple to shut them up by buying the company outright. And they’re doing it the only way they know how anymore: engineering hooliganry. Audacious play, indeed.

Oh, and one more thing: Palm webOS 1.1 re-enables Palm media sync. That’s right — you once again can have seamless access to your music, photos and videos from the current version of iTunes (8.2.1).

No surprise that the latest iTunes breaks the Palm Pre USB hack which allowed the device to sync with iTunes. This is a promise Palm should never have made, and users who bought the Pre thinking this was a viable option to get music on their phones are the folks who suffer.

Who wins? doubleTwist is on that list. Check it out if you were counting on that iTunes sync. This may be a good alternative to managing your media.

So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the uncanny valley. By establishing a conceptual framework that mimicks Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different.

Read the rest here.

Apple yesterday seeded iPhone OS 3.1 and iPhone SDK 3.1 betas to developers for testing, and users have been digging through the new releases to document new features. Among the changes found so far by readers in our forums, at Redmond Pie, and at MobileCrunch:

- Trimming video clips on the iPhone 3GS now offers the ability to save the edited version as a copy rather than simply overwriting the original file.
- Voice Control over Bluetooth is now available, allowing users to Initiate calls and control music playback via Bluetooth headsets.
- MMS is now enabled by default, but still not supported by AT&T.
- iPhone vibrates when rearranging Home screen icons.
- A “Fraud Protection” toggle is now available in Safari settings.
- iPhone startup and shutdown and app launching times have improved.
- New APIs allow developers of third-party application to access and edit videos.
- OpenGL and Quartz have seen improvements.

Some of these simple bullets are a big deal. Non-destructive editing in the simply-fantastic video recorder? Voice control over Bluetooth? Speed improvements? This is a dot-release to a very recent major system update, and some of these features would be big enough to be part of yet another press event.

I’ve had a handset since 1994. Back then I upgraded once a year, a pace which increased over time. In 2003, I was upgrading once ever 3-5 months. I’ve been a happy iPhone user for over two years now and have no interest in changing platforms. I just don’t feel the same level of innovation in the handset market that I get from Apple.

The biggest challenge for AT&T is that their performance on launch weekend doesn’t include key features the phone now supports around the world: Tethering and MMS messaging. AT&T says both features will come soon — later this summer is the word — and more importantly, they say it’s not their fault, that the network is up and running and could support these services immediately. Whatever. That doesn’t serve me right now. Oh, and don’t forget the devs — WWDC this year appears to have been something of an anti-AT&T party.

From Wired Gadget Lab

Still, it’s unlikely Apple is going to find a new dance partner in the U.S. Together, Apple and AT&T have sold more than 6 million iPhone 3G units to date, according to AT&T. With that much at stake, it’s unlikely the two will call it quits after coming so far. Our advice? It’s time for a little heart to heart. When stuff gets rocky, a common method is to look back and discuss the situation to avoid repeating mistakes. The following is our analysis of what went wrong with the iPhone launch and why (according to AT&T; Apple has not answered our requests for explanation), coupled with suggestions for how execution could have been better.

It’s just too demoralizing to see Speak Up not perform like it used to. And it never will again, because of the expectations I have put on it and the ones that you have all put on it. It’s just not the same. I really feel relieved that we are closing it. Its time has come. It served its purpose and it made its mark. Not many blogs can claim that and we are happy with what it’s done. Time to move on to other things.

Jump over and read the rest of the post, and browse the comments. Then read Byrony’s goodbye, too. It’s worth reading to remind us all the importance of good content and loyal readers. Good to see Armin and team has lots and lots to do to fill the days to come.

I disagree with his premise that readers are only leaving because they don’t want to pay for yesterday’s news and advertisers are following them. I think the technological shift in publishing is far more pervasive than the disdain for old news. The truth appears to be that people want information when and where they want to consume it, and paper is a chronically inefficient method for satisfying that need.

But this video highlights a stopgap to the inevitable end for print, and I think portends a far more interesting future: whether on paper or online, designers should be given a bigger role in the presentation of information across publications. This is a great example of rethinking the role of design from scratch.

Things changed for me almost immediately when I went freelance, though, and there were suddenly real dollars associated with my time. Was it really useful having me in a client meeting, for example, when the client knew that it would cost them something just to have me sit there and look pretty? Sure, I would dress up and all, but was it important that I be there? Would I be a contributor?

Ninety-percent of the time, I wasn’t needed. Instead, I’d get an email or a Skype call from a contact with a list of things to think about, a list of things to respond to, and a list of things to actually do. Each of them easy to communicate in a quick call or an email, none of them specifically outcomes of the meeting itself.

I ran a test with a client recently testing this theory on project team meetings. These folks were meeting together twice weekly, two hours per meeting, for status updates. Four hours a week, by nine attendees, is 36 hours of meeting time in a week. My hypothesis was simply that a large part of that 36 hours per week could be put toward actual project work.

So I built a matrix of team members with their annualized hourly rate attached to it. At the end of each day, the meeting organizer — usually the project manager, but could have been anyone on the team — was asked to mark down on the matrix just how much they spent of company money having each attendee in the meeting.

At first, we didn’t tell the team members that their time was being measured this way. After the first week, the project manager had tallied over $1500 in meeting money that he’d spent on a week of status meetings.

The second week, we filled in the rest of the team.

OK, the results were pretty predictable. When team members are aware of their cost to the project, the cost of their time, they get creative with their activity. By the fifth week, status meetings were back to weekly, and down to a half hour each. Their Basecamp use went way up, email task assignment blossomed, and project work became the real work of the project — not just more meta-project meeting-filler.

Seth Godin has a quick rundown of meeting do’s and don’t’s that is pretty clever. Check it out and see if you can make your meetings irrelevant.

Twenty-four hours ago, I made a three-minute speech in the European Parliament, aimed at Gordon Brown. I tipped off the BBC and some of the newspaper correspondents but, unsurprisingly, they ignored me: I am, after all, simply a backbench MEP. When I woke up this morning, my phone was clogged with texts, my email inbox with messages. Overnight, the YouTube clip of my remarks had attracted over 36,000 hits. By today, it was the most watched video in Britain.

How did it happen, in the absence of any media coverage? The answer is that political reporters no longer get to decide what’s news.

–

I’m in San Jose right now. Did you see that coming? What with my clever title and all? To be fair, the tune I have in my head is actually from “Rent” — and let me say this about that: This show breaks me right the hell down. I’m not kidding.

There’s a new release of the show, I believe celebrating the final Broadway performance. It’s a taping of the current Broadway cast, on stage, doing their thing. You can rent it in iTunes now, and I just can’t recommend it highly enough. The current cast is absolutely stunning, and the show continues to inspire today.

As I was saying, San Jose. Yeah, this lame travel schedule has thrown my posting schedule a scooch, but there IS news here, so better late than never.

Acoustic Conversations with Matt Vrba live in the feed

The first time I caught Matt Vrba was some two years ago, singing in a parking lot next to an RV that was pumping out baked beans and burgers. It was a company picnic. A company picnic.

[Chinese monks are walking through the airport right now. In my head they are Shaolin and could kill me by looking at me. In reality, they cannot find their way out of the airport. Attempting to do a good deed by showing them out.]

So, two years ago, Matt Vrba was ingratiating himself by playing solo for the ungrateful unwashed at a company picnic. Now, two years later, he’s relocated to Nashville and we get to catch him on a tour of the Pac Northwest, witnessing him ingratiating himself on our show.

A lot can change in two years.

And yet, the music that originally stuck with me is here and better than ever. This guy has a fantastic story to tell, and he completely kicks it with the live tracks we’re giving away right now. So go, now, open iTunes and update your feed for the show. Watch those tracks trickle onto your computer. Drop them on your iPods and Sansas and … whatevers … and kick it with Matt Vrba.

Want more of Matt? Visit his site at MattVrba.com.

What’s more important than that? Buying music!

If you like Matt, or the other artists we’ve profiled, remember this: A GREAT way to support the show is to click right over on the “Store” link in the top-right corner of the site and buy their music! That’s right, live and in color, straight to you courtesy of Amazon.com, you can buy music, AND fund the show, AND support the artists all at the same time! So help us out, us creative types battling a flagging economy, and buy some great tunes. You won’t regret it. Neither will we.

As ever, thanks for your support, and stay tuned for more great musicians coming this month!

I just finished recording a great discussion for the soon-to-be-launched, if not long-awaited, OutsourcedCMO show in which we not so much dissect, as gloss over, Amazon.com’s retail reign in spite of economic turmoil. It’s an interesting discussion that spans the history of online direct selling, including the online cambrian era in which the first macroscopic retailers emerged from the boom/crash sludge, to the phanerozoic era, in which abundant online retail life exists and many such life forms are trying to figure out whether or not they should actually kill one another.

I, for one, don’t think that they should. Kill one another, that is.

Whatever does this have to do with Amazon and the Kindle?

The Kindle is a brilliant platform — right, I said it, it’s a platform — because it greases the skids on a whole category of products that Amazon already owns outright: books. They have boatloads of them. They are known for books. They’ve been doing books forever. And other than Google, there is no other company making such hay about making books available electronically. You can’t underestimate this point: There is no cognitive leap required to go from thinking about Amazon the book seller, to Amazon the ebook seller.

But, platform? According to NYTimes, Amazon is working on making the Kindle format open to mobiles.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”

If the Kindle initiative was about channel and platform development more than just unit sales, they succeeded on many fronts. First, the device ain’t bad to hold and look at. Second, they throw in absolutely sexy always-on wireless from Sprint bundled in the cost of the device. Third, they give you access to a massive library of content, including the web, with no real strings attached. It’s hard not to be sucked into the Kindle movement, even if you don’t actually own a Kindle.

And there’s the rub. Opening up the platform to iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and so on, suddenly has greased the skids yet again, providing content to devices Amazon no longer has to support. Will Kindle on iPhone kill the Kindle device? Probably not, but who cares? Amazon has already won on the platform.

Last night, we hung out with Tyler Stenson. He’s a musician, a guitarist and troubadour, and he joined Curt Siffert and myself for the innaugural episode of the 2009 season of Acoustic Conversations. The AC show itself hasn’t been posted yet, but stay tuned… it’ll be up online soon. Read on for a little Stenson present.

This post isn’t about the music. The music is great. Go listen to it. Buy it. Enjoy. I’ll even help out as a shill here for a bit. See how nice I am? Instead, this post is about success. It’s about what it means to be successful, what it means to know you’ve made it.

Making it casts a broad net, and it’s a theme that continues to come up in the AcConvo shows as we talk to more artists — what is the general expectation of acceptance and success, and how will you know you’ve achieved it? 

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star like everyone else,” Stenson told us. “I’ve grown up a bit since then.” 

And this is the bit that struck me. You’d think that a musician, fresh from quitting his day job to pursue music full time, struggling to find a model around his own music business, would be looking for the fastest way to stardom, to sponsors, to chicks and groupies and all the trappings of celebrity. As it turns out, there’s a more human approach.

Stenson says he’s shooting for relevance. “My goal is not to make you bob your head and snap your fingers. It’s to put a lump in your throat. I try to stay true to my character, my brand,” he says. There are people who email him, who reach out to him that tell him his songs have changed their lives in some way, people he’s never met. “I’ve had to ask myself, ‘Tyler, how big do you want to get? Because you know if some people think you’re a rock star, you are.’ … I don’t want to play 300 songs a year. I used to have dreams of stardom, but now, as long as it’s a livelihood and as long as I’m changing some peoples’ lives — I don’t need my face on TV to feel like I’ve made it.”

There’s honor in modest goals. You’ll hear in the show that Stenson in no way totally dismisses the throngs of screaming fan thing. But what’s clear about him is that you can tell he’s thought hard about what it mean to be successful, what it means to be happy. Sitting there talking to him, it’s hard not to ask yourself the same tough questions.

Dr. Nicholson

I had lunch with a dear friend an mentor, John Patton, yesterday afternoon, before the interview with Stenson. We get together to talk about careers, business, books, and such every six months or so and this time, he asked this question: “How big do you want to get?”

That’s a tough question. See, the challenge in a question like that is that it presumes you’ve thought about what you want to be doing from day to day some time out there, sometime when you’re confronted by future you.

I told him my work right now is pointing me toward education. Not in the classroom sense necessarily, but in the more archetypical fashion. Then he told me about Dr. Nicholoson.

Apparently, Nicholson was one of Patton’s professors in college. In one of the first class sessions, he told the class the following: “Each of you will profoundly affect the lives of 11 people in your lifetime.” He explained to the class that they would affect these people not just in the yeah-I-have-a-best-friend fashion, but in a way that something you do or say, or some invisible influence or intervention you serve that will dramatically change the course of life for 11 people before you die. 

Patton’s response: “I realized, 11’s not enough for me.”

For the last 30 years, Patton’s served as CEO of a company that teaches others how to manage projects. For the first 15 years, his work was mostly domestic. Scale changes everything, and now his company serves companies around the globe, and has lisenced his methodology to others on almost every continent. This is his contribution to the arithmatic of expanding his 11 people to hundreds… thousands.

The 11 People

I don’t know my 11 people. I have an idea who a few of them might be, a few of the chance encounters or run-ins with others that I feel may have changed their lives. I think it’s important to think about, but I doubt I’ll ever know for sure. It’s far more important to keep trying, to keep moving in a direction of helping and supporting others, to serve as someone with the power to help profoundly.

Here’s what I do know: I know the people who have profoundly changed my life, the souls for whom I am one of their 11 people. Kira, Sophie, Nick. Lloyd and Debbie. Brendan Murphy. Orion Ross. Chris Lowell. Don Heider. Dogan Barns and Trent Adams. The list goes on, and on, and on, and for each of them, just as I’m sitting here, I can pinpoint a moment in my life that changed as a result of a moment in theirs. For better or for worse, I’m a different person as a result of them. 

Success and Relevance

What Stenson said about being relevant, and what Patton said about invisible influence, these are things we should stop reflect on. Because the ripple effect of our actions is always broader than the net we cast with them. Our businesses, the stories we tell, the relationships we cultivate, the brands we follow and collect, the politicians we respect — and those we don’t, the network of interactions and the reactions we will never see, these are the trappings of success.

If you haven’t thought about your 11 people, about the people for whom you’ve changed the course of their lives, do so. Just stop, sit quietly, and take a minute. Do you know who they are? Do they?

Meanwhile, back with Tyler Stenson

At the end of the session, I asked Tyler to play his favorite cover tune. As it happens, it’s also one of my absolute favs: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. It’s a bit of a low rent recording, but I dumped in the raw audio from the performance mics. Hope you enjoy.