Well done, Apple. Not only does Ping not add anything of use to the social space other than providing you a great new way to sell new music, but the first of your featured artists’ profiles on which I happen to click — Yo-Yo Ma — gives me this perfect example of broken social.

Sure, if you show all the comments on each post, some of them are thoughtful. Some of them are discussion. But that the very first on each of three posts from Mr. Ma is spam indicates to me that you are not the company to bring social to music.

I’ve been a long-time fan of GelaSkins as the perfect sort of protection for my iProducts. They give you the perfect stickiness so the damned things don’t fly out of your hands when you use them. Today I received the first batch of shots using my own photos, and they turned out great and delivered faster than I imagined they could. Here’s a quick look at what you get in the envelope.

A Review of Verizon and Google’s Net Neutrality Proposal | Electronic Frontier Foundation

It’s tough not to get myself worked up when I read things like the recent Google-Verizon proposal for a framework around network neutrality. Invariably, it feels like power is amassing to limit freedom, and that tends to cause people to run around like their hair is on fire. Mine included.

The initial emotional response appears to be that Google has been on a long path of selling-out to corporate partners, even though experience may be saying something else. This is a reflection of cognitive dissonance as in general, Google has done good, smart things for this industry. If there’s anyone I’d like to see at the table discussing net neutrality, it’s probably them.

Time will tell. A wise man once said, “I’m not cheap, but I can be bought.”

The EFF has posted their response, and their hair is not yet on fire at this point. That’s a good thing, because it makes the issue far easier to parse. If you haven’t read the full statement, you should. And then you should read Cindy Cohn’s well-though response.

On Monday, Google and Verizon proposed a new legislative framework for net neutrality. Reaction to the proposal has been swift and, for the most part, highly critical. While we agree with many aspects of that criticism, we are interested in the framework’s attempt to grapple with the Trojan Horse problem. The proposed solution: a narrow grant of power to the FCC to enforce neutrality within carefully specified parameters. While this solution is not without its own substantial dangers, we think it deserves to be considered further if Congress decides to legislate.

This has been a thinking vacation. We’re here on our annual pilgrimage to Chautauqua, New York, and the Chautauqua Institution. It’s a place of learning and investigation, teaching and debate. And last week, as it happens, great introspection.

Each week here at Chautauqua is measured in by a different theme. Here’s the description of last week, week 5, the first week of our time here:

Picture This: Photography

In collaboration with Kodak and George Eastman House, this week will celebrate the history of photography, its contribution to and relationship with surrounding culture, its place in the art world, and its reflection of technological innovations that have reshaped the industry. We will meet photographers practicing their craft, and SEE this nexus of art, science, culture, biography, and history.

So, that’s the set-up. As a photographer, obviously I have some interest in this stuff so I was looking forward to getting schooled by these whomever they invited to take the stage.

Steve McCurry. McCurry? This dude’s images have been dancing around in my head for as long as I can remember. I felt like I was going to a job interview just sitting in the audience. If you aren’t familiar with McCurry’s work, the image at right will hopefully stir the memory banks: Afghan Girl was a cover on NatGeo 25 years ago and sets the bar for iconic cultural portrait work.

Ed Kashi. Kashi has been traveling the globe capturing the turmoil of world events for decades. Only in the most recent decade has he turned his camera on issues affecting our own country; in one of his most powerful displays, he played a short film of his work covering the aging population in America, a piece that evolved from his very personal efforts to care for this aging father-in-law.

Margaret Geller. Geller has devoted the better part of her career as a scientist to taking pictures of the universe. The photos from her team help to map the stars, to give us a better picture of where we are in space, and perhaps of equal importance, to further the development of wildly advanced electronics in digital photography.

I’ve been struggling with how to frame my own introspection this week. These are remarkably humble people given what they do. I’m struck by this feeling that they have come to a level of intimacy with their work that has surpassed the short term results, the quick glance at the LCD screen on the back of the camera, to be supplanted by the grander scope of their place in the world, and their role in reporting on it through imagery.

Kashi told this story, talking about shooting in Iraq last year. A father approached him as he was asking permission to take a picture of this family as they were struggling to buy food in a market. The father said, “why should I let you take my picture? Ten years ago, a man was here just like you. This man said I should let him take my picture because these pictures would help me change my life. It’s been ten years and my life hasn’t changed. Why should I let you take my picture now?”

Kashi was stunned. After taking a moment to collect himself he said, “I’m not important. I’m here to take your picture because what you’re going through is important. And if you don’t let guys like me tell your story through images, you’re going to loose the drumbeat of this issue. The world will lose the drumbeat of the issue. Your life might — or might not — change because of this one picture. The one thing I can guarantee is that if you don’t let us take your picture, nothing will ever change at all.”

What people like Kashi and McCurry and Geller do so beautifully is illustrate the incredible simplicity that getting up and going to work can have, if you are one of the lucky ones that has discovered the path to best apply your unique skills to change, to better the world around you.

For me, it’s made me evaluate the projects I take on, and those I don’t. It’s made me reflect on the clients with whom I partner. It’s made me double down on my own efforts to increase output on personal projects — the things that are important to me-and-only-me — and apply my own voice to the stories I’m passionate about, critics be damned.

We all have a role in this place, and a unique set of skills to support it. Whether we’re copywriters or photographers or accountants or plumbers, what we do has the power to change the lives of those around us. What I’ve learned from this week of discussion: my job is to live up to the potential of my own craft. Do you?

Publish Your Own Book With WordPress and the Anthologize Plugin

Years ago, living with the brilliant @curtsiffert in California, I got to play with his little pet publishing project Storysprawl. It was a terrific web app for writers to collaboratively build choose your own adventure stories. Some of my most fun writing was on Storysprawl. At one point, I think I even made up some banner ads for it when we were talking about releasing it as a tool for schools and publishers to use it white-labeled for building their own books online and prepping them for publication. No, Storysprawl isn’t live right now. But I hear rumblings that it might be on the way back. Rumble… rumble… rumble…

While the Anthologize plugin for WordPress 3.0 doesn’t appear to do the choose your own adventure thing, it sure does nail the prep-for-publication angle. I haven’t tested it yet, but I think I’ll test it to release my latest novel on my own site. Definitely worth checking out for all you would-be self publishers out there.

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

As an aside, this project comes out of the One Week | One Tool project, which is one of the coolest initiatives going to support smart, open source development for the humanities, critical angle, that.

Generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, One Week | One Tool is a unique summer institute, one that aims to teach participants how to build an open source digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, from inception to launch, in a week.

AppleInsider | RIM, Nokia respond to Apples “Antennagate” press conference

Clearly, Steve Jobs is pissed. I would be, too. You pour thousands of hours collectively into a project like this and you want people to just use the damned thing, enjoy it, and have it change their lives on some level. That the media has churned up such a storm over this issue has got to be not-a-little-bit frustrating.

Apple’s media materials are always top notch, and what they produced highlighting the antenna design process at Apple, the tour of the inner sanctum of antenna design on campus, meet the standard. They included videos on apple.com and in the conference demonstrating the exact same signal loss on previous generation iPhones, along with phones from Nokia, Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung. Hold the phone in just the right way, signal drops. In fact, as Josh pointed out in the linked piece over at Apple Insider,

In June, Nokia’s official blog poked fun at the iPhone 4 “death grip” issue. The post included a variety of pictures showing a range of grips, encouraging consumers to feel free to hold their Nokia device any way they like without suffering any signal loss.

Users of the site then posted links to videos showing signal loss on several of Nokia’s handsets, as well as instructions from a Nokia manual warning users “to avoid touching the antenna area” and that “contact with antennas affects the communication quality.”

I waxed sarcastically on Twitter that Verizon’s cheeky attitude toward this antenna thing would bite them in the ass. I’m bummed the prediction isn’t wholly accurate in that I didn’t use Nokia as my case point. That would have made me far more prescient. At least someone looks foolish here. It’s never really smart to publish material dragging your competitors through the mud on untested, unconfirmed reports.

Which is why I’m on the fence about Apple doing just that in this case, dragging these other manufacturers into the ring with them on this issue.

As uncharacteristic as it is, I’m not sure they had another choice. This is a PR disaster. It’s a disaster specifically because it’s a nominally interesting story that has been spun out of Apple’s tight control, not because there is any more or less scandal to it. Their response strategy of choice is clearly to soften by deflection — get us all thinking about these other guys so we’re not so focused on the iPhone 4 soft spot.

Apple’s biggest issue in this mess is completely self-created, and it’s not that they created a phone that has a major antenna flaw (we know there’s a flaw, I’m just saying that’s not the biggest problem here). It’s that Steve Jobs stood on stage for the iPhone announcement and choose to point out that the antenna design is legendary, revolutionary, incredible, and then showed the world exactly where the antenna is. The fact that the world media has been so focused on the antenna is a problem of Apple’s own making. Given the tone and timbre of the press conference, it’s clear that Apple knows this. Their own duct tape solution is to give out the bumpers for free. It’s payola for those who bought the phone, love the phone, and want to keep the phone in spite of their problems with connectivity.

The other manufacturers have come out pissed. Rightfully so, but it sure is hard to defend indignation in the face of video evidence. Apple knows this. So does Nokia, RIM, Samsung. Best case result of Antennagate is that we all get the phone of our dreams because of a renewed focus on better, smarter, clearer antennas from all these manufacturers. At least we know from their responses so far that the intent may be there to do it, if only because Apple just made the target in Cupertino that much bigger.

In TechCrunch’s follow up, Arrington makes an ironically apt comparison. Job’s coming on stage to give all this data of the reality of the ecosystem, that 30-day returns at AT&T is about 1.7% — down from 6% for the iPhone 3GS, is akin to Facebook execs coming out to talk about how people really aren’t jumping off the service as a result of Facebook Privacygate 2009-10. But for all those affected — punditry, gadget hounds, privacy advocates, the works — those affected are not likely to change their opinions based on reported data from the company. People who feel betrayed by Facebook will not come back to the service as a result of a press conference. And folks like Arrington will continue to be as venomous as ever of the iPhone.

Anandtech has been leading the charge with data-driven coverage of this whole mess. After the iPhone iOS 4.0.1 update which mixed up all the bar data display across iPhones, they posted some terrific graphs which compare the dBm mapping to bars displayed to cover just what has changed on the phone and how it will help to convey more clearly what level of coverage you might be able to expect in a certain area.

So then, as long as Apple is trotting out the dog and pony show about their antenna labs, where was this data from them? If Anandtech is able to produce such terrific analysis as an external party, it seems only natural to have even greater expectations of Apple. Just because the Blackberry or Nokia drops two bars has no effective comparison to the iPhone dropping two bars without those dBm comparables — they’re just bars, tiny pixels that (as far as I understand it) have little relation to actual connectivity at all. On TWiT 255, Jerry Pournelle and Spencer Webb remind us that on digital phones, bars mean little; that a more effective indicator would be a lightbulb. If it’s on, you have signal. If it’s off, you don’t.

[UPDATE: Dammit. Gruber and Aaron Swartz beat me to this little bit of wisdom. I hate being late to the party.]

I got my iPhone 4 the day before it launched. I’ve dropped one call. I was talking to my dad, and driving through an area at the top of Sylvan Hill on highway 26 in Portland. With my iPhone 3Gs, I’d drop calls there every single day. With the iPhone 4, I’ve dropped only one, in spite of regular use in that area. Other than that, the phone has absolutely out-performed all my previous iPhones. I have a bumper, but I rarely use it. Yes, I’ll likely go get the refund Apple is offering for it, just cause, you know, 30 bucks.

Still, my impression here is not that Apple has perpetrated some kind of crime on consumers. I really do believe that Apple is learning as they go along based on data they’re collecting in real time. This is a monster of their own creation and is more a result of the death grip they have on their own communications, testing, and public relations policies than anything else. It’s a trade-off, and if you’re going to build policy around secrecy, this is the no-win scenario you have to be willing to confront. Kobayashi Maru, indeed.

Here’s a quick snap of the front of a postcard I did for a client this year. It’s to announce their participation at the National Association of College and University Business Officers conference in San Francisco this month.

Just a quick bit of commentary on this one that I found interesting. When I first stumbled on the tree image on iStockphoto, I was really moved. There’s something about the life that is communicated through such a stark bifurcation of the tree that hit home for me. Seems only a little trite to apply such a cool image to a tradeshow postcard, but it works.

In any case, we got our first bit of direct feedback on the card from a recipient on the mailing list. The list is made up of college and university business officers — predictably, I guess — and this particular respondent’s title is “Vice President for Business & Finance/Treasurer” for a major east coast university. The line that struck me from his response:

The half-dead tree is a rather graphic thought-provoking device and illustrative.

The original of the image has the tree dying from left to right. I flipped it because I thought the metaphor worked better simulating growth rather than death over a simulated left-right timeline. I wanted folks who looked at it to see that transformation, that growth.

There’s this concept that never fails to flip me. When creating a piece, you want your reader to either feel the pain, or see the hope. In this case, we were shooting for hope. The response illustrates that we may have hit the pain more squarely.

How to Install Adobe Flash V10.1 with VoiceOver– The Mac-cessibility Network – News [Lioncourt.com]

Last week, Adobe released version 10.1 of their Flash player plugin for both the Mac and Windows operating systems, which included a large number of security fixes. Much to the frustration of visually impaired users, the installer application, which had previously been accessible, was rendered inaccessible with screen readers on both operating systems. This, of course, means that many visually impaired users are stuck using an older version of the plugin, along with all its known vulnerabilities.

I can’t pretend to know what’s going on with Adobe that they’re so tied to this installer monkey business. The accessibility issue above is just one symptom of larger trouble that serves to confuse those of us who — admittedly — think maybe-too-deeply about this stuff. Nonetheless, this is puzzling.

When you download an installer from Adobe, you get this fancy, flashy wrapper that comes up, and then calls the real installer which is buried in the thing you just downloaded. That hidden, real installer is everything you need to install the software on your Mac. Everything else is just cruft.

Think of it this way. The buried installer is the bar of soap you will use to wash yourself. The primary Adobe installer is the sock in which you will place the bar of soap so that you may more effectively beat yourself with it.

Ep 15: We Digress – with Greg Schneider from 3BL Media | the naked marketers

Ad spending is up. You Facebook people have a real monetary value and you know what? You ain’t worth much. You spend a lot of time online and you’re a candidate for gambling AND gaming addiction from Virgin. iPhones sell by the boatload, and risk sinking it. This week on the show, Greg Schneider CEO and co-founder of 3BL Media joins us to talk the new calculus of media distribution in a social media economy.

Pegatron lands Acer notebook orders for 2011

Even the rumor of a CDMA phone in 2010 is going to piss people off. Q4 isn’t that far away, and with all the fervor over iPhone 4 sales this week — and all those freshly-minted 2-year AT&T contracts — that there’s even a remote chance for a Verizon CDMA iPhone on the heels of launch will spark that good, old fashioned spirit of entitlement all over again. Get ready to let yourselves feel all wonky and let down by the man, people.

Still, this is a bit of old news. Apple’s put an awful lot of weight behind GSM and to go to Verizon with essentially a custom phone seems oddly uncharacteristic of their behavior in the market.

There’s that, plus DigiTimes’ loose relationship with accuracy, too.

Pegatron will also start shipping a CDMA version of the iPhone 4 to Apple in the fourth quarter and is currently using its plants in Shanghai, China to produce the products, the sources noted.

The Legendary Tales of Old Uncle Scrubby

“… It’s also brought to you by this book. ‘Success’. If you want to have any success, you should read it. … Looks like a good one.”

There’s just nothing that’s not funny about Uncle Scrubby.
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Taking Control Podcast Ep 8: Getting Control of Paper Clutter | Take Control Organizing

Getting control of the paper in your life can help you get control of so much more. This week on the show, Nikki Kinzer and Pete Wright talk about how you can put the systems in place in your own home to put paper in its place and get back on top of your own process!

Ep 16: Building Your Vision 2020 Part 2 – with John Eldert and Howard Teibel : Teibel, Inc.

Academic planning often adopts the business approach to strategic planning. The results are predictable: clear, measurable outcomes; tight, pithy vision statement; focused strategy targeting a clear and “directable” organizational culture. But these assumptions don’t fit the higher education planning environment, with many parallel lines of activity, complex vision, and an environment that is often far more self-directed. This week on the show, we bring you part two of our conversation with John Eldert, Vice President of Administration at Berklee College of Music as he joins Howard Teibel to discuss their work on adapting the business approach to strategic planning for higher education.

Taking Control Podcast: Ep 7 – Preparing your Garage Sale | Take Control Organizing

Running a successful garage sale can be a lot of work! But it can be a rewarding and profitable way to kick-start your summer organizing by clearing out the cruft in the way of your new lifestyle. This week on the show, Nikki Kinzer and Pete Wright talk about how you can plan the perfect garage sale — from set-up, cleaning, pricing, and payment — and launch your summer organizing right!

Ep 15: Building Your Vision 2020 Part 1 – with John Eldert and Howard Teibel : Teibel, Inc.

Academic planning often adopts the business approach to strategic planning. The results are predictable: clear, measurable outcomes; tight, pithy vision statement; focused strategy targeting a clear and “directable” organizational culture. But these assumptions don’t fit the higher education planning environment, with many parallel lines of activity, complex vision, and an environment that is often far more self-directed. This week on the show, we bring you part one of our conversation with John Eldert, Vice President of Administration at Berklee College of Music as he joins Howard Teibel to discuss their work on adapting the business approach to strategic planning for higher education.

Ep 14: The Importance of Training as a Team : Teibel, Inc.

We underestimate what it means to collaborate. The result is often a catalog of missed opportunities for improving function across the organization, which comes at the expense of systems training and technology solutions for simple problems. This week, Howard Teibel joins Pete Wright with a few suggestions for team cross-training — ensuring that teams are aligned across departments and functions, and that process, not just systems, are tested all along the line.

Wonderfully clever little tool here, this Google Search Story Creator. What’s a search story? It’s the story of your business as told through Google’s search results. Simply enter search terms that are representative of your business or brand online and Google will craft a clever little commercial for you.

Whether it was a lifelong talent, a desire to be your own boss, or a great idea at 2 a.m. that kick-started your business, there’s a Search Story about your journey just waiting to be told. And with just five minutes, a keyboard and a mouse, you can create a video of your own!

They do a handy bit of lobbying in the email announcing the Search Story Creator:

In 2009, Google generated $54B in economic activity in the United States – one business at a time. See how Google helped small businesses in your state at www.google.com/economicimpact.

In looking at the Oregon economic impact, I see that “Google generated $512 million of economic activity for 29,000 Oregon businesses, website publishers and non-profits in 2009.” Even better, the map linked me to this profile, highlighting Clive Coffee in Portland through a Google Doc whitepaper. This is a terrific use of absolutely free tools to get your stories out there into the broader web. From a data-enabled Google Map to a PDF in Google Docs, this company has done more to integrate small business communication tools for the masses for free than any other I can think of. If you’re not taking advantage of all the ways you can tell your story in this space, find someone who can help you do it.

It serves as a funny reminder, if you stand back a bit, that so much of the story of our existence on the web is inextricably linked to Google’s presentation of that story. Yes, it’s a wide open web. But if your place in the wide open web doesn’t exist in the Google sphere, you’re not really taking part in the discussion, are you?

Think about that. In the meantime, here’s my search story. Took me about three minutes.

Mark Zuckerberg – From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings

Speaking up for the first time since f8 on the privacy mess.

Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.

Facebook and Others Caught Sending User Data to Advertisers

Wow. Tough to say you really care about user privacy when you’re handing really private data over to advertisers. As an advertiser? I don’t even want this kind of information.

The Journal found that Facebook went farther than most in sharing identifiable data, by sending the username of the person clicking the ad as well as the username of the profile they were viewing at the time. This news could hardly come at a worse time for Facebook, a company that currently faces a privacy backlash potent enough to make the cover of Time Magazine this month.

The game of deliciously hard choices – Resort to Cannibalism

Why yes, it is a Flash game in which you try to beat your raft-mate and eat him before he eats you. Thank you for asking.

D.C. Douglas PSA For Tea Party And FreedomWorks Critics

Takes stones to be divisive and funny with such a marvelously patronizing tone. NSFW. Thanks Amy Lambert for the tip.

“

Jack Dorsey on turning ideas into reality

Commit your ideas to paper before you worry about committing them to code. Get your idea out of your head so you can see it from a different perspective. And just as importantly, share it with others.

5 Lessons TV Should Learn After Losing Heroes | Wired.com

I loved the show. I loved all of it. But this certainly rang true for me. The part that got so frustrating was watching the team try and try to write Sylar’s character in a compelling way, and go completely off the rails every other week. There was just no thread.

“If you end up creating bad guys cooler than your good guys, let them ride. Don’t make them into heroes. Zachary Quinto’s Sylar is an excellent example of this formula gone wrong. If you start off a show with your primary madman chopping off the heads of cheerleaders, it’s exceedingly hard to flip him into a savior of mankind, even if he is the show’s most magnetic personality.

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010: “”

Absolutely stunning images from Sean Stiegemeier of Iceland volcano action. Watch on Vimeo for HD goodness.

Clock calculates wasted time at meetings

Pretty much sums up how I feel about meetings in general. Nice visual reminder, this.

Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)

Sometimes, what a person says is magnified 1,000 times by who says it. This is one of those times. Danah is a smart person. This is worth reading.

What I find most fascinating in all of the discussions of transparency is the lack of transparency by Facebook itself. Sure, it would be nice to see executives use the same privacy settings that they determine are the acceptable defaults. And it would be nice to know what they’re saying when they’re meeting.

At it’s core this is a question of the changing tide of our cultural evolution. Jarvis once again nails it here:

* As I suggested here, it should study 16th century history about the origins of the public and private and understand that it is playing with bigger, more powerful and profound forces than even it knows. I just wrote in my next book that we are undergoing a similar shift in how society organizes itself with similar tools. Mark Zuckerberg says that he is enabling big change in society. I say examine that belief.

Yes, there is great, deep value in history. We’ve been through this transition before. We are innately social creatures. But that hard-wiring is difficult to scale cleanly. Moving from tribes of connections to villages to cities to distributed networks causes strain on the system. It’s true, we’re probably moving away from some of our plainer collective sense of privacy, but that doesn’t mean we individually walk away from our right to chose how we make that journey.

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options – Graphic – NYTimes.com

This is fantastic. Note — two of the most important privacy options in Facebook are not actually available on the Facebook User Profile Privacy Settings page. How would someone just *know* that?

And, say what you will about Facebook transparency, there’s just no excuse for a privacy statement to be longer than the Constitution (minus amendments).

Global ad industry grapples with new spending trends
| Reuters

This is a message from the immediate future for small to medium-sized businesses, too. Big companies are recognizing the power of their own sites and the agility they have in creating content they control, and they’re spending money accordingly. The same can be true for smaller players.

“Technology is enabling companies to communicate in ever more sophisticated ways directly with their customers, while social networks like Facebook and Twitter offer ways for users to multiply the effect of corporate messages.

Chuck Richard, lead analyst at information advisory and research firm Outsell, says companies now spend more than half their online marketing budgets on their own sites. ‘It’s been 50 percent or more for the last three years,’ he says.”

Star Wars the baroque version

It is … pretty much … what it is. My fav is the Imperial Walker.

Special Report: Can that guy in Ironman 2 whip IBM in real life?
| Reuters

Great article in Reuters today on Ellison’s involvement in the restructuring at Sun. He pokes fun at Schwartz’ blogging addiction, which is a treat to read. But more importantly, this bit on sales strategy:

“More infuriating, says Ellison, is that Sun routinely sold equipment at a loss because it was more focused on boosting revenue than generating profits.

The sales staff was compensated based on deal size, not profit. So the commission on a $1 million sale that generated $500,000 in profit was the same as one that cost the company $100,000, he said. ‘The sales force could care less if they sold things that lost money because the commission was the same in either case,’ he said. Ellison added that Sun also lost money when it resold high-end storage equipment from Hitachi Ltd, storage software from Symantec Corp and consulting services from other companies. Oracle is ending those deals.”

This, right here, is why companies like Apple are succeeding right now. They care first and foremost about profitability per unit. Market share means nothing if you’re not making enough to keep the lights on.

New Seattle’s Best: Best-er or Worse?

I quite like the new logo, but while it seems a departure for Seattle’s Best, it seems like more of an alignment with Starbuck’s (Best’s parent). I’m not sure that’s a wholly good thing.

In other news, the agency responsible — Creature — has a hyper-flashed-out site, which keeps forcing me to Adobe to download some new plug-ing after I’ve already downloaded it. So, I can’t see their fancy site. Which is aggravating, if you’re me.

The Most Corrupt States – The Daily Beast

Tennessee is number 1? That’s crazy-talk. At least a little interesting that the most corrupt states in the Union are south, deep south, and more south until you get to Nevada at #7. And congrats to New York and New Jersey for being right at the top of the bell curve.

Spoiler: Really want to escape corruption? Head to New Hampshire.

Here’s a quick link to the gallery of states in order of corruption.

The first time I played Portal, I did it in two sittings. I think my children had to eat or something, but their tiny collective voice was about all that could break my concentration from this game. With the exception of the Bard’s Tale series, to which I also lost much of my life as a youth, Portal is the most engaging game I’ve played on any platform.

Steam for Mac is finally out, and Portal is available for free for a few more days. Go download and get this fascinating puzzler. You have to play through it before Portal 2 hits the shelves.

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative | Epicenter | Wired.com

Is there a substantive alternative to Facebook on the horizon? Google? Anyone? Hullo?

So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

This Week in Google – ep 41 offered a terrific discussion on the nature of trust. I’ve made fun of Jeff Jarvis in the past, mostly because of the paranoid hand-wringing that always seems to emanate from his general direction, but the world needs more people who think deeply about these issues — guys just like Jeff. In this case, his point is that while Google started out as a company vested in publishing your public information to the world at large, then transformed into a company offering more services targeted at maintaining your private life and connections, Facebook started out as a company dedicated to helping you connect with a private network, and has, over the years, moved the other direction. The result is a certain cognitive dissonance that people-who-think-deeply-about-such-things can’t quite assimilate.

Those of us who choose to live our lives in public are stuck between a rock and a hard place. I, for one, would love to find an alternative to Facebook with simpler controls. The sometimes unfortunate nature of networks is this: you have to go where the people are if you want to do more than shout at an empty room.

A few months ago, I wrote a post about how to get more out of Facebook. My intent, at the time, was to write a series on configuring the application to protect your privacy, reduce Facebook apps annoyance, and allow you to connect with the people that are important in your life. I got one post into the series and got swept away by events. When I finally got back to it this week, I started digging into the terms and options after the last round of Facebook updates and have come to a frustrating realization: I think the original intent of my series is now impossible to deliver.

First, take a look at this visualization by Matt McKeon demonstrating the change in Facebook default privacy settings over time. If you have some time, peruse the comments, which have a few interesting points:

One thing which is almost as interesting is how much the effectiveness of the “most restrictive” non-default has also gone down in a similar pattern. Not only have the (enormously powerful) defaults become super-permissive, but facebook has reduced the ability of concerned parties, or really the small subset willing to keep constantly twiddling their privacy settings, to keep their private data private.

and…

There is this bizarre meme running through the press that, somehow, Facebook has a MONOPOLY on publishing personal information, and that we are all pawns in some sort of vicious commercial game, but that somehow we can’t STOP being on Facebook.

On the first point: given the convoluted nature of the latest privacy options panel, I’d be interested in data on the size of that subset since April 1, 2010.

On the second point: What Facebook has isn’t a monopoly. Monopolistic practices don’t enter in to this discussion. What’s disturbing is that Facebook has collected a massive amount of data on each of us, and has a documented history of changing the way they present that data — and to whom they present it — with each evolution of policy. The implication is that data I gave to Facebook under terms I once agreed to, is now offered publicly under terms I no longer agree to (or potentially understand), with limited clear method for user intervention.

If you’re more of a reader, check out this piece on BusinessInsider. In it, there’s a great review of salient language from the Facebook Privacy Policy as it was at each update from 2005 to present. The most interesting line is this from the update in April, 2010:

If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

I’d sure be interested in someone more lawyerly than I am to translate that bit, cause here’s how I read it: If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

Come to think of it, pretty damned good advice, that.

Facebook’s E-mail Censorship is Legally Dubious, Experts Say | Epicenter | Wired.com

Not sure this should be a surprise, but Facebook sniffs email content exchanged on the built-in messaging platform, then censors that content. I haven’t tested this.

As outlined in the post, it’s not unusual for content to be deconstructed algorithmically, it’s done all the time. And email shouldn’t be considered private by any stretch. But the fact that Facebook is then censoring that data wholesale amps up the discussion about Facebook falling out of favor with some.

Wired.com ran a test using a torrent file linked on the Pirate Bay to confirm:

Wired.com confirmed Facebook is blocking private messages by sending a link to a Pirate Bay torrent feed of a book in the public domain. Such content is freely available to everyone, as all copyrights have expired. Nevertheless, the message bounced twice, returning the following failure notice: “This Message Contains Blocked Content. Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.” (Facebook’s link-censoring system is may be just tilting at windmills, however, because removing a single vowel from the domain name lets the URL go through.)

In the case of Wired.com’s test, there were only two Facebook users who should have been aware of the content — Wired.com editor John C. Abell and his message’s intended recipient, who was sitting five feet from him — and neither had the slightest objection to it whatsoever.

The whole post is worth reading.

YouTube – Ironing Man

Yes. Ironing Man. I’ve watched it four times. It’s not good, although, at the same time, it’s absolutely brilliant. Go figure, right? Off to number five…

The Third Way: A Narrowly Tailored Broadband Framework – Broadband.gov

Here’s the latest framework from Julius Genachowski. I’ve only just skimmed it, but so far some interesting comments re the Comcast decision which so horrendously knee-capped the FCC.

One, the Commission could continue relying on Title I “ancillary” authority, and try to anchor actions like reforming universal service and preserving an open Internet by indirectly drawing on provisions in Title II of the Communications Act (e.g., sections 201, 202, and 254) that give the Commission direct authority over entities providing “telecommunications services.”

Two, the Commission could fully “reclassify” Internet communications as a “telecommunications service,” restoring the FCC’s direct authority over broadband communications networks but also imposing on providers of broadband access services dozens of new regulatory requirements.

I have serious reservations about both of these approaches.

From the sound of it, no one is happy about the FCC’s latest direction, least of which is the FCC. Worth reading if you have even a remote interest in access and fair practice in broadband.

Kobo eReader Available for Pre-Order

Not the most glowing review Borders has posted to highlight their new Kindle/Nook-esque ereader. Inauspicious marketing launch.

…Kobo is considerably cheaper than other eReaders. The design aims to make eReading more accessible to book lovers. – The Wall Street Journal

Court Says Internet Filtering in Public Libraries Not Censorship

Terrible news for freedom of information for the public. As much as we may find some content distasteful, filtering in public libraries kickstarts a dangerous trend that impacts those who use their library as their only access to the internet.

ongoing by Tim Bray · HTML5 and the Web

Bray is so centered on this issue. I need to dial down my own rhetoric on the subject. He says clearly what takes me far too many words to describe vis my feelings on Flash.

What’s not to like, then? Well, the user experience, which in my experience is fourth-rate for anything but games; No “Back” button, feaugh. And of the course the fact that it remains essentially proprietary.

So, I use a Flash-blocker every day, and I am not a friend of Flash inside Google, but none of my arguments have anything to do with being part of the Web, or not.

The Naked Marketers | Ep 11

I don’t remember when I started using Evernote, but I think it still had a “Beta” badge attached to it at the time. Since then, it’s become the hub for every single bit and byte of random life data that I’ve accumulated. From client passwords to saved web pages to account information to software serial numbers to meeting notes to recipes to photos to books to movies to snarky things I’ll probably tweet later to things to get my wife when she’s mad at me to things to get my kids to you name it… it’s probably in my Evernote.

So, you can imagine just how it makes me reflect soberly on how much I love being involved with the naked marketers when people like Evernote VP of marketing Andrew Sinkov agrees to join us to come share his wit and wisdom. I’ll tell you, in case you can’t actually imagine it: it is awesome.

Andrew, and the Evernote team, are part of a gentle sway in the marketing business that started some 10 years ago. As I piece these little nuggets of data together, the only thing I can think of to describe this sway is the feeling you get when you’re at the very top of the Sears Tower in a stiff wind: you’re moving, or you’re pretty sure something is moving around you, and you’re suddenly no longer convinced that life, the universe, and everything are safe just then. We talk about that sway on the show this week, and wrap it up in what Andrew actually does day-t0-day as chief marketer for Evernote. In spite of some Skype shakiness, I think it’s a good interview, and I recommend you listen to it if you’re into this movement of Engagement Marketing that’s bubbling up from the start-up nation around us.

The Naked Marketers | Ep10

This was a really fun interview to do. First, Brian is wicked smart. And let’s be honest: You have to be wicked smart to work for a company that acts as both service provider for, and competitor to, the most popular handset in history. The guy is sandwiched between two incredibly buzzy developer networks and is charged with making less buzzy platforms interesting to same, and thereby to users. It’s a rock/hardplace scenario, and when you listen to him talk about it, you sort of can’t help but both pity him for the placement, and envy him for the wonderful challenge every day. It’s a hardcore marketer’s dream job.

We really, really try to hold our tongues this week. We tend to ramble on a bit at the mouth when it comes to news — me, mostly, I know — but it’s just so hard to keep my wits about me when we start talking tech. So head over and take a listen to the show. And if you like it, leave a review or drop us a nice note on iTunes. That’s really helpful, the iTunes thing, as it helps other people discover the show.

Finally, I know this post is WAY late since we’re recording another episode tomorrow, but our next guest gave us a terrific review that I just can’t wait to shout from the rooftops:

I’m psyched to participate. I’ve been steadily working my way through your back-catalog. TNM has officially displaced a couple of crappy food podcasts that I’d been listening to.

Did you catch that? We’re better than a couple of crappy food podcasts! And this from a guy who hasn’t even been on the show yet! If this isn’t the perfect segue for a “Dumb and Dumber” moment, I don’t know what is.

From Jason Rosenthal’s email to network creators this afternoon:

As long-time Network Creators, you no doubt already see the value of Ning. We intend to focus our efforts 100% on meeting your needs and building the features you’ve requested. The phasing out of free services won’t happen until July, and we’ll be providing those who can’t join us with a clear migration path at that time.

Well. It’s good to know that now, after years in service, they’re going to start meeting our needs.

All snark aside, I think this is probably a good move for the company as the reality of the Free Market Culture sets in and more and more organizations realize it’s time to, you know, make some money. Ning has been a terrific tool for many of my clients, but once you hit the ceiling on functionality, you’re locked up. API access is coming, apparently, which is good for developers, and more flexibility in custom designs, too.

Which is all great. But I just got off the phone with the owner of a terrific Ning network looking to move the site and all his members to a new platform in the wake of all the changes and the deteriorating service over the last year. And he is already a paying customer.

I hope they can pull it together and that the new premium model isn’t a day late, dollar short.

Cause migrating networks is a massive pain.

The Zombie Table!

Yes, I’m exactly the sort of person who reposts links to things like “The Zombie Table.” You shouldn’t even have to ask.

Behold, the Zombie tested and victim approved Safe Bedside Table. Getting rushed by flesheaters? No problem! The Safe Bedside Table has a removable leg that acts as a club and a top that doubles as a shield for self-defense.

Is H.264 a legal minefield for video pros? – CNET News

With all the hoopla around video codecs, both open and closed source, here’s a bit of reporting covering MPEG LA terms around what is poised to be the next great standard on the net, h.264. Why does this matter? Because of patents, someone has to pay when I produce a video for a client which is later sold. And there are always patents. This story certainly goes a long way to ease my own concerns over royalty payments to patent holders, particularly the last part, emphasis mine:

“Realistically, it’s unlikely that a consumer who unwittingly plays a video clip from an unlicensed source is going to be pursued by MPEG-LA or by patent owners. The legal framework for patent damages is different than it is in the copyright area, so you’re not likely to see lawsuits against ordinary consumers, like some of the highly publicized suits filed by the RIAA [Recording Industry of America] in the United States,” Homiller said.

Another way where professionals can get off the hook for payments is if the video is broadcast for free over the Internet. Earlier this year, MPEG LA extended through 2015 a provision that means streaming H.264 video over the Net requires no royalty payments as long as anyone can see the video without paying.

Microsoft confirms, kills Courier in one fell swoop

Yup, predictable. From Engadget:

It seems, however, that things just didn’t manage to take shape, and word was handed down very recently that the incubation period had reached its conclusion — sans product — and resources would be directed elsewhere.

As a final note, I still love my currently-available-in-stores iPad.

What Would Nick Denton Pay For These Things I Found In A Bar

I think this is the first thing I’ve posted about the lost iPhone. I was going to swear that I would make this the last thing I’d post on the lost iPhone too, but as the story goes on, it’s getting almost too interesting not to share. In the mean time, this is too good not to pass on.

How Much do Music Artists Earn Online? [INFOGRAPHIC]

This about hits my assumption that sticking with the independent route hits the sweet spot. More important is keeping a balanced portfolio and avoiding exclusives. Other artists out there seeing the same?

(thanks @CurtSiffert)

Thoughts on Flash

From Jobs missive on Flash today:

Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Of course, Adobe is going to make a great product for authoring in HTML5 and so on, because a great-big-non-trivial-part-of-the-business exists to do that. But by saying this out loud, Jobs just guaranteed that Adobe will be resentful the whole time.

chillout song :: zefrank.com

Reason #1,248 that Ze Frank is a classy guy.