If you missed it, Jennifer Egan and The New Yorker started serializing her new short story "Black Box" on Twitter tonight, coming from the @NYerFiction account. Earlier today, Egan posted a bit on the backstory:

Several of my long-standing fictional interests converged in the writing of “Black Box.” One involves fiction that takes the form of lists; stories that appear to be told inadvertently, using a narrator’s notes to him or herself. ... I’d also been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters.

She wrote the story in a notebook that is probably intended for sketching storyboards...but whose black boxes now just look like textareas:

The 140 character limit necessarily impacts her prose and the story she's telling. But what I love is how Twitter turns each of the "narrator's notes" into individual, addressable objects, each with a social life of its own. I haven't pulled stats on every Tweet, but just eyeballing it, several hours after the initial delivery of Tweets the line with the most social heat (RTs and favorites) appears to be this one...

The first thirty seconds in a person’s presence are the most important.

— New Yorker Fiction (@NYerFiction) May 25, 2012

Followed closely by this one:

Giggling is sometimes better than answering.

— New Yorker Fiction (@NYerFiction) May 25, 2012

(I don't disagree.)

At first blush, having this reaction data isn't much different than viewing the most highlighted passages on a Kindle. But the difference is that this is happening in real time, in public, connected to identity, and has the potential to be conversational. And there were a few intrepid readers who were willing to break the fourth wall and talk back to the story. Here are two of my favorites...

On discovering that our story's protagonist was on the beach, @bklynreader shared her weekend plans:

@NYerFiction Definitely preparing to get some nourishment this weekend.

— Annette Trial-O'Neil (@bklynreader) May 25, 2012

And when the story took a particularly adult twist, @Chocolatemama38 seemed a bit caught off guard:

@NYerFiction Oh my -- shades of grey time.

— Alyce Koruna (@Chocolatemama38) May 25, 2012

Egan says that it took a year to "control and calibrate" the story she's now tweeting; her tight prose doesn't exactly invite replies. But the shift into Twitter is a truly modern serialization technique; there's more going on here than simply contemporary fiction meted out 140 characters at a time.

The "all the grains of sand on all the beaches" metaphor is played out. What we need are some new ways to help kids think about infinity. Here are a few that I might use with mine.

• Every pixel in every billboard, television, computer monitor, checkout terminal, tablet and smartphone.
• Every JPG, PNG or GIF (static or animated) image shared on Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram. Including the automatically cropped versions, resized versions and cached copies (whether at a CDN, ISP or in your browser). And all the pixels in those images.
• Every beep after which you are supposed to leave a message. Every time you’ve pressed pound to continue. Every breath taken while waiting on hold.
• Every email, instant message, text message, private message or direct message sent from one loved one to another. Or from one colleague to another. Or from a loved one to a colleague.
• Every spam that’s been caught by filters. Or not.
• Every bit of every stream or download delivered by iTunes, Netflix and Spotify.
• Every event written to a log. Every click, keypress or browser event captured by Google Analytics. Every purchase signal captured by Amazon. Every like, friend request, comment or poke on Facebook. Every display ad impression.
• Every keyboard press, screen tap and mouse click made by people. Or pets, accidentally. And every processor cycle spent waiting for that input.

Ever.

Reading the transcript of the Retraction episode of This American Life is one thing; listening to it is another. The most interesting bits were the silences, not only because Daisey is so clearly uncomfortable answering the questions, but also because we’ve been trained as radio listeners to abhor silence — it makes us incredibly uncomfortable.

So here is my edit of the most relevant moments of Retraction.

I was listening to an episode of The Talk Show (I know, I know…) with Chairman Gruber and John Siracusa on the way to work this morning, the one where they talk about Mountain Lion. A good part of the discussion was about just who Apple is competing with on the PC operating system front. The general consensus that it wasn’t Microsoft any longer, but instead Google. That Mountain Lion + iCloud competes with Google (w/apps) + Android.

I have a slightly different take. I’m sure Apple thinks about the customer experience of Mountain Lion + iCloud v. Google + Android or Windows 8 + Skydrive. But I don’t think that competition is what’s driving them. Instead, I have a feeling they’re working with Mountain Lion to fulfill user expectations that they’re setting with their mobile platform. More and more people are coming to the Mac because of iPhone and iPad, so what Apple’s doing on the Mac + iCloud is developing features that fulfill on the user expectations that are being set by their other products. Even though you’re using a laptop (which is a very different device from a phone), of course it should be as easy to use. And of course your calendar syncs. And your contacts and mail and reminders. And your photos, videos and media. And of course you’ll be able to trust the applications they help you discover and install on your Mac, just like you’re able to trust the applications they help you discover and install on your iPhone and iPad.

This does build a competitive product, of course. But what they’re doing is using each part of their platform — mobile device, Mac, iCloud — to ratchet up the quality of the customer experience, piece by piece. And then bringing the other pieces in line, fulfilling user expectations. “Of course it should work like this.”

It's my last day at SAY Media. Proud to have been part of such an incredible team here and at Six Apart.

— Michael Sippey (@sippey) January 20, 2012

It's time for new challenges: very excited to join the product team at Twitter in a couple weeks. Onward!

— Michael Sippey (@sippey) January 20, 2012

I've been enjoying PandoDaily this week; kudos to Sarah Lacy. (Disclosure: I've enjoyed her chicken[1].) I am seriously impressed with how much great content they've produced in these first few days, and it only goes to prove just how wrong Jeremiah Owyang was three weeks ago when he declared the golden age of tech blogging over.

Here's what I think is working for Pando:

• Simple site, simple launch. Yep, it's a blog. Reverse chron, nice author pics, comments, simple sections with simple nav. There was no need to go all Verge-y with v1: get the voice out there, start producing content, see what works, adjust.

• Smart, fast commentary. In tech blogging, fast used to be a differentiator; it isn't anymore. And smart usually takes enough time to render the opinion moot[2]. But Sarah's delivering smart stuff, fast. If she can keep it up, she'll start to set the context for the broader conversation..

• The ticker. Not only is it smart to mix short form and long form, but the old school blogger in me loves the sidebar linkblog format. And it's refreshing to see links! To other sites! With credit!

• The editorial philosophy. The name may be awkward ("But wait, where's the cute panda logo?? Oh, PandOOOO..."), but it means something. "What really matters is what happens below," Sarah writes in her intro blog post. Couldn't agree more, and even in the saturated land of tech media that kind of coverage will fill a hole and find an audience.

PandoMedia angel investor[3] and board member Andrew Anker (disclosure: I've enjoyed his Giants tickets and other forms of largesse, professional and otherwise[1]) writes in his blog post about the Pando launch:

Media sites make for inherently cyclical, constantly transforming businesses where you’re only as good as the last story you pushed out. The people who contribute are the ultimate product — the media are just the messages.

Emphasis mine. We watch The Daily Show for Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report for Colbert, the Late Show for Letterman, etc. We're watching Pando because it's Sarah. And to take it all the way around, we're really watching Pando because it's Sarah watching us.

[1] Yes, you can consider these awkward jokes on the constant PandDisclosure-ing.

[2] Ahem.

[3] Speaking of investment, for those keeping score at home the $2.5 million Pando raised is equal to 50 Classicals.

When I visit the beach I come back with pictures of the kids and sand in my shoes. When Kevin Kelly visits the beach he comes back with blog posts like this one, A Whole Lot of Nothing:

Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen. What is a oxygen atom made of? Not oxygen, but of smaller particles, like protons and electrons. And what are they made of? Mostly space. ... I know the monks on the tops of mountains have been saying the real world is immaterial for eons, but the difference is that now we say can it precisely, and in such a scientific way that we can predict what else we should see if this view is correct. So far we can't use ordinary words to describe what this fundamental intangible is.

I'm enjoying Kevin's blog immensely lately; see also his previous post We Are Stardust.

I like what Jason has to say in reaction to Matt's post about his bad Kickstarter experience. Worth quoting at length...

Shipping a product or app is hard. It requires experience, hard work, and a little luck. But providing effective and genuine customer service might be even harder because you just have sit there, take it, and react well under pressure over and over and over. The entrepreneur side of your brain is saying "this is a great product and I am proud of it and anyone who says otherwise is wrong and I will show them and succeed" and sometimes customer service is acknowledging publicly and repeatedly the exact opposite thing...that the product isn't meeting needs, you are right, we will fix it, and thank you sir may I have another? That's a lot of potential cognitive dissonance!

If one were to dramatically over simplify the two extreme approaches to managing products, one would be "have a vision and stick to it," the other would be "listen to the market and react quickly." As always, the real world is made somewhere in the middle, but not always at the same point in the middle. Not only are different approaches required for different types of products, but also at different points in a product's life cycle. But more often than not, product people* live in that land of cognitive dissonance. As Jason points out, if you can find the place where pride and humility not only balance each other but work together to move the product forward...that's magic.

* Defined expansively here to include product managers, designers, engineers, marketers, support people, bus dev, sales people...the entire team that it takes to deliver on a product's potential.

Huge congrats to Kickstarter on their 2nd anniversary, and I love that they published so much interesting data about the funded projects in the past year. But I wasn't really a fan of their pie chart (where all the slices were equal), since we know (from their own commentary!) that some slices are more equal than others. So I took the liberty of shuttling all the data they shared about projects in the past year into a Google Doc, and calculated some averages and made some better graphs. I've published the spreadsheet and charts.

Some interesting things...

• Cultcha! Film & Video + Music = 55.7% of funds raised.
• Design and Tech = bigger budgets. Average raise / funded project for those two were much higher than other categories. Were there outliers that screwed the averages?
• Tech backers spend the most. Average kick per backer was $119 for tech projects.

Kickstarter's sitting on some really interesting data...especially about project funding patterns and pricing tiers. Averages only tell you a little tiny, tiny slice of the story; would love to see some time series data that looks at the psychology of funding behavior. For example, is there a "best time" for big backers to show up on the board to drive volume of smaller pledges? What's the optimal pricing curve for pledge tiers by category? Etc., etc.

I can't believe we're still having this argument...and losing. Headline on Time.com: Oregon Court Rules Blogging Isn't Journalism (tastefully illustrated with a Getty Images stock photo of the words "blog blog" coming out of an antique typewriter).

See also this afternoon's stream of tweets from Gothamist's Jake Dobkin. Presented in chronological order...

Today's update: I filed the official appeal on my (2nd!) denied application. And Norm is also going to talk w/the city's attorneys. #

At this rate, I'm almost certain to have a press pass before @gothamist's 15th anniversay in 2018! #

I don't understand how @MikeBloomberg can claim NYC is friendly to startups, when @gothamist still can't get a press pass after 7 years. #

We're a NYC born and bred media startup that employs more than twenty-five people. We work hard to deliver original content every day. #

Last month we had 2.5MM unique readers in New York City. But the @nypdnews tells me we're not a real news organization. That's just wrong. #

But how can we be expected to deliver more original content if we're denied the same access mainstream news organizations take for granted? #

I just can't believe that it's going to take a lawsuit to get us the same basic treatment newspapers, radio, and TV stations get every day. #

So next time someone accuses a blog of aggregating- ask yourself, how can they avoid aggr without all the tools to produce original posts? #

We've democratized the tools of content production, distribution and monetization to the point where Jake can build a sustainable media business that employs 25 people and reaches millions of readers. But as Jake rightly points out, the set of "tools" he needs to run his business go beyond a CMS, a CDN and some SEO. It also includes tools that give his contributors access.

Via things, Scott Weaver's 35 year project to build this kinetic sculpture of San Francisco out of toothpicks and pingpong balls.

Weaver writes on his site:

I have used different brands of toothpicks depending on what I am building. I also have many friends and family members that collect toothpicks in their travels for me. For example, some of the trees in Golden Gate Park are made from toothpicks from Kenya, Morocco, Spain, West Germany and Italy. The heart inside the Palace of Fine Arts is made out of toothpicks people threw at our wedding.

If you just skimmed his quote, go read it again. Especially that last bit.

This morning Very Short List pointed to Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC, a project from Mark Terry. Since 1999 he's been archiving images of book dust jackets, and offers prints of them for sale on his site. Here's one from William Faulkner, one from Agatha Christie and one from Don DeLillo.

I've been kind of obsessed with these today; not because I'm interested in ordering replacement dust jackets, but just with the idea of replacing the "book on the shelf" as the signifier of ownership (and maybe even actual enjoyment) of books. Facsimile dust jackets are one angle, of course -- and repro's of vintage titles are the library nerd equivalent of the old Italian movie poster. But are any book publishers taking the approach that TopSpin championed with musicians?

• Give me the digital sample chapter in exchange for my email address
• Sell me the ebook for $9.99
• Sell me the ebook plus a frameable repro of the book cover for $19.99
• Sell me all that plus a hardcopy for $29.99
• Sell me all that plus an archivally printed copy of background material, editor's notes, rough drafts, etc., for $99.99
• Etc., etc.

Following in the footsteps of the music business, if the book itself is no longer an artifact, can publishers create new ones that fans are willing to pay for?

Pan Macmillan is republishing Don DeLillo's back catalog, with new covers commissioned from New Studio London with illustrations by Noma Bar. They're not only beautiful, but highly evocative of the books themes and major plot points.

If you're a DeLillo fan, you'll want to take my "match the title to the cover" quiz. I whipped it up this morning, cropping the title from each of the books.

If you're really good, you won't need the answer key. But if you need to cheat, check out the grid of covers at New Studio London's site.

Possibly the best piece of translated marketing copy you'll read all day: "If you think to leave a memorial portrait of yourself or your loved one, a world-class reality 'The REALFACE' would be the best fit."

Halloween costume idea: a REALFACE mask that you carry around and wear over your real face. When people ask you what you are, you reply "my Facebook profile."

There's something wonderful about watching someone do something they're good at, when they're not performing, or even deliberately practicing. Just doing it, because it's what they love to do.

Especially when they have no idea they're being recorded.

In 2008, my colleague Ray Marshall and I had the privilege of being able to demo TypePad's iPhone app onstage during the keynote of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. It was a career highlight for me, not only for the opportunity to step up on what's arguably the biggest stage in tech, but for the glimpse it gave me into the culture of excellence that Steve Jobs created at Apple.

That year about a dozen third party app developers were given two minutes each to present their apps and demonstrate what was possible with the iPhone SDK. While from the seats or the web stream those two minutes may seem quick, each of those segments were the result of 40-50 hours of preparation and coaching from the team at Apple.

It started a week before the keynote, when we arrived at 1 Infinite Loop with our app and two minute demo script. We thought we were ready. We weren’t. They worked with us non-stop that week to refine our app, shape our story and polish our script. We rehearsed hundreds and hundreds of times ("Better. Now do it again," was a constant refrain), and presented to dozens of different people inside Apple.

Including Steve.

On the Wednesday afternoon before the Monday keynote we were to present in the theater on Apple’s campus to Steve, Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller; they’d have the final word on whether we’d make it to the big stage at Moscone. The wait outside the theater was torture, the walk down the aisle was nerve wracking, and the two minute demo we gave went by in a blur. I’m pretty sure I rushed it.

But Steve smiled. He said he liked it, that we had done a great job. And then gave us advice. Move a line up, emphasize this particular point, fix that button on the app. Coming from him it was all obvious stuff -- we felt foolish for not seeing those flaws earlier. And then he cocked his head and asked if those were stock photos that we were using. Which, of course, they were. "Don’t worry," he said. "We can get you photos. We have great photos. Thanks guys." And with that we were done. By the weekend’s rehearsals, the demo iPhones were loaded with a few of Apple’s beautiful in-house photos. And on that Monday the whole thing went off without a hitch.

When Jobs resigned in August, John Gruber wrote "Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself." I couldn’t agree more. While I'm lucky to have been able to have received both product and demo advice from the man, I'm privileged to have had even the briefest experience with the culture of Apple that he helped create. Excellence, quality, passion, attention to detail -- those aren’t just attributes of Apple products, they’re attributes of how people at Apple work.

Over the next few days and weeks, we’ll hear a lot about what Jobs did at Apple over the last ten years. While he may be impossible to replace, I have to believe that the senior team at Apple knows that their most important job, and the best way to honor his memory, is to continue the culture he created at Apple. Based on what I saw three years ago -- and the products they’ve introduced since -- I’m bullish.

Rest in peace, Steve.

I'm leading a panel discussion at an event in a few weeks, and I was asked if I would need anything above and beyond the usual (projector, mics, etc.). And since I'm regularly asked to lead panel discussions, I thought I'd share my rider in the spirit of making your panels better...and easier to organize in the future!

Here's the list of what I ask for every time I appear at an industry conference.

• An old school overhead projector with seven clear transparencies and four colored markers (green, red, black and blue)
• A supersized post-it note flipboard, with six colored markers, preferably the ones that have nice smells (strawberry, lime, blueberry, licorice and cherry)
• A bullhorn, with a spare set of batteries
• Three stick-on clown noses
• One pair of groucho marx glasses with attached nose and moustache
• Juggling pins
• Three quarts of flourescent paint. Seven 2" and five 1" paintbrushes.
• Black lights to fill the room
• Eight cases of bottled water
• One hunting knife, preferably serrated
• 2 x 50ft lengths of braided polypropylene general purpose rope
• 11 flourescent green glow sticks, at least 6" in length
• Six rolls of 1.87" wide silver duct tape
• 24 10x10 clear plastic sheets / drop cloths
• 2 body bags
• Three sheets of CIA-grade blotter acid

Oh, and SxSW is going to be awesome this year. You should definitely vote for the panel Ted Rheingold and I are organizing: On the Internet, Everyone Knows You're a Dog.

Miramax launched their movie rental service on Facebook, because, according to CEO Mike Lang, it's where the fish are.

Initially, Lang also considered a separate storefront for Miramax.com. He quickly shifted gears, explaining in an interview: "We wanted to fish where the fish are. We could have created the most robust Miramax.com in the world and other than my family members, who would be there?"

I'm usually the first one to argue that the fish are actually on the web and Facebook is just a part of the web, but in this case maybe Miramax is doing the smart thing by going with Facebook on this one. First, I have to believe it's a small number of consumers that actually make decisions about what movie to see based on the studio it comes from, so investing in a full blown Miramax.com destination site probably wouldn't have been the brightest move. Meanwhile, if there are fans of the studio they'll find those flicks on Facebook and broadcast rental decisions to their friends.) Second, launching a destination with 20 titles would have been pretty pathetic; but a Facebook app with 20 titles? It's an experiment. Third, they'll get some nice PR out of this by being tied to Facebook...and I bet they probably got some development and co-marketing support from Facebook as well.

The ship has sailed on the studios competing with iTunes / Netflix for owning the customer relationship in any significant way. But look for more apps like this, where Facebook and the studios take advantage of the app platform, social distribution & payment infrastructure of Facebook to put chinks in the armor of Apple & Netflix. Bonus points to the studio that takes advantage of the real-time social aspects of Facebook to juice back catalog titles: Would you spend your two dollars to watch Better Off Dead with your friends?

Great profile of Berg in the New York Times. I loved this bit from Jack Schulze...

"Historically, design has associated itself with utility and problem-solving, but we prefer the landscape of cultural invention, play and excitement," Mr. Schulze said. "When technology is infinitely complex, and our attention increasingly finite, producing something you can act on and observe at a human and cultural level is hard."

Via kottke.

As previously blogged, David Cronenberg is directing the film adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis. It stars Robert Pattinson, which means there is already plenty of enthusiastic online coverage of the movie. Like, say, cosmopolisfilm.com, which features fan art that combines heart throb shots of Pattinson with text from DeLillo.

Mind blown.