Why does Billboard exist?
August 19, 2008
Just read about Lily Allen on Billboard. It’s the same piece, with similar sources, that was on Idolator yesterday. Indeed, in recent months, I’ve noticed that plenty of music-industry news stories in Billboard appeared one or two days earlier, with much the same sources and a lot more attitude and context, on Idolator. So why is there still Billboard?
Most confusing online form of the day, this time courtesy of Interop (an ongoing series)
August 19, 2008
As we’re preparing the fall relaunch of the MIT Sloan Management Review website, we’re thinking hard about how to make things easier for people trying to get around our site. (Indeed, I have a document on that very topic due for my boss tomorrow.) We’ve been looking closely at forms on other websites and I just came across this doozy:
This is as hostile a web form as I’ve seen lately. Checking the box unsubscribes you, except when it doesn’t … because there are two ways to unsubscribe. The sentence right above the “unsubscribe” button was written by someone who either (1) didn’t like English class in high school and still carries a grudge or (2) has been instructed to make the unsubscribe so confusing that plenty of people will stay on the list by accident.
But why should there be a form at all? Even better, as my colleague (and Wordle enthusiast) Sean Brown points out, wouldn’t it be better, when someone clicks on an “unsubscribe” link in an email, for that person to arrive at a page simply confirming that he or she has been unsubscribed? Do what your customer wants and get out of the way.
Facebook status message of the day
August 14, 2008
“[Name redacted] has just learned that the imprisoned ex-husband of the house seller has put a lien on the property and his lawyer will join us at the closing. Sounds like fun.”
Headline of the day
August 11, 2008
Gmail Suffers Outage, World Ends (Webmonkey)
Questions for the proprietor
August 5, 2008
Where you been?
Canada, mostly. The five of us and a friend of Eli’s packed into the van: half a week in Montreal (good, and I was not responsible for this), half a week in Ottawa (great), and a one-night stopover in Burlington, Vt., on the way back. As of Tuesday, I’m three-quarters of the way to Inbox Zero. I need to learn French for the next trip to the Great White North.
Was everything the same when you returned?
Mostly. Manny is gone, and so is Scrabulous, but it looks as if the latter has returned in not-too-diminished form. I missed a particularly weird Carl Icahn hissy fit, and I’ll have to check in with Paczkowski for guidance on how to interpret that.
What did you learn about your newspaper-reading habits while you were gone?
As I’ve noted previously, I’m done with print newspapers. For the first half of the vacation, I did a reasonably good job of staying off the laptop (and we were in another country, so I didn’t want to turn on the iPhone unless absolutely necessary). If I wanted to know what was going on in the world I had to read the print versions of the Times and Journal, both of which were available in hotel gift shops at imminent-apocalypse prices. I imagined that reading newspapers this way would feel like a luxury. Instead, compared to their younger online siblings, they felt out of date and, well, short. Aside from the immediacy you get from following news via the net, chances are you see that news as part of a larger river of information. It’s always coming at you. In comparison, reading the news in a newspaper feels limited, finite. It ends. News on the net never ends (for better or worse).
Is there anything better than watching your girls swim in a hotel pool?
Not much.
Also worth looking at was the National Gallery in Ottawa. We spent two hours there. I bet we could have gone at least two days without running out of surprises. I was particularly taken by William Kurelek’s “Arriving on the Manitoba Farm,” which looks dark and formless in this image, but reveals more and more layers of detail and meaning when you have the pleasure of standing in front of it.
When you stopped in Burlington, Vt., on the way back, did you see any newspaper headlines you’d expect to see only in Burlington, Vt.?
Yes.
What did you read?
Parts of Francine Prose’s Read Like a Writer (mostly zzz, but it did introduce me to this guy) and Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, and (several times) my favorite Chekhov story, “The Lady with the Dog.”
And you read them all on your…
Kindle, right. It’s a usability nightmare and the selection of Amazon-blessed-and-DRMed books is insufficient and random, but I found it convenient and comfortable under all but the most low-light situations.
Did you write?
Yes, especially early in the week when I was still keeping that off-the-net promise. It’s amazing how less depressed you can be about the quality of something if you’re actually working on it. And maybe I should consider a new business model.
What was Jane’s most memorable quote during the week?
There were so many candidates, but I’m going with “I’m trying to save the tattoo.”
How’s the new job going?
So far it seems like a very good fit. I’ll have a full report at the end of The First 90 Days.
Weren’t you going to tell us the point of this blog?
Comments from Doug, Owen, and Andrea — and a gift from Brian — showed me the limits of my thinking from a few posts ago. And Jane has suggested that I write about what I think about: namely, media and technology. So, unless you’re reading this via a newsreader, you’ll see that the blog now has a new tagline: “media, technology, and the rest of it.” I’ve got some ideas for making this more than a vanity blog; we’ll see if I can live up to them. Oh, and to warn you, I’m going to pay more attention to Twitter.
What’s next?
Gotta see how the WordPress app for the iPhone works.
On not raising your hand unless you have something to say (or, the opposite of blogging)
July 21, 2008
One of the unexpected side effects of moving this blog to WordPress was easy access to real-time statistics. I could tell, pretty quickly, whether a particular post or type of post was getting picked up or ignored. It’s seductive stuff — as anyone who has followed his or her book- or record-selling stats on Amazon knows so well. The bad part, aside from the time-wasting, is that the easy access to stats makes a blogger think too much about audience before posting. Blogs, I believe, are supposed to be about unvetted expression, capturing a moment, embracing the amateur and enthusiast in you even if you’re a professional writer in your real life. I intended to title one of my previous blogs “Quality over Quantity,” to celebrate that, but as old-timers know, I committed a typo and wound up titling that blog “Quantity over Quantity,” an unintentional joke too amusing to fix.
Now I’m not so sure. It’s 2008 and almost everyone has a blog (or has at least tried):
Is blogging getting old? Over the past two years, Twitter and Facebook status messages have emerged as media for distributing thoughts deemed too evanescent for a blog post. And now there are so many such services that aggregators such as FriendFeed and Ping.fm have emerged. More are coming. Nothing is so mundane that it can’t be shared immediately via many media. As Philip Greenspun’s blog puts it in its tagline: “A posting every day; an interesting idea every three month.”
I am a bit too enamored with my own ideas, as are many of us. As Jane said to me once and probably thought many more times, “Tell it to your blog.” The blogosphere is a wonderful place, but it’s one by definition full of noise. Although I value that noise and revel in it sometimes, I think too many of my posts are mostly noise, little signal.
Sometimes statistics reveal a truth. The two posts here that received, respectively, the most traffic and the most pointers in recent weeks were Barack Obama, Rolling Stone, and the secret of one great magazine cover and Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Twin “Hurricane”s in Rio. They’re two of the more substantive posts here from the past month. Neither post will change the world and both of ‘em featured pointers to more interesting content elsewhere. But they both sought to do a bit more than point to something and say, “Cool.” So, as this blog trudges forward, I’ll stop posting just to post. If I have something interesting to offer, I’ll try to communicate it in a substantial and entertaining way. If I don’t, I’ll try to shut up.
Buried in Apple’s new App Store is the ebook reader app eReader. It’s pretty good, considering the small screen, but the best news is that all the ebooks I bought from the eReader store when I thought I’d be on the PalmOS forever work again. Now if Apple could squeeze a competent tasks app into the iPhone I wouldn’s miss my Treo so much.
Marcel Proust Meets Web 2.0
June 23, 2008
For a few weeks, colleagues and friends have been pointing me to Wordle, a web app that takes text and presents it as a “word cloud.” I tried it with a few pieces of my own writing with the expected pedestrian results, but then I copied one of my favorite-ever pieces of someone else’s writing, the “Combray” intro to Proust’s Swann’s Way, and saw this work of art:
(You can click on the image for a larger version.)
Why is this so great? Because, despite being a mere text cloud, it tells the story of the first section with elegant precision. The young narrator is in tremendous psychic pain awaiting the arrival of his mother to kiss him goodnight. So “mother” and “mama” are in large type in the center of the image; even larger is the “room” to which he is confined, as is, just below it, “time,” the narrator’s great obsession. And then, in small type, hiding, is that elusive “kiss.” It’s an intriguing alternate way to consider or enter a story. I’ll play with it some more.
Download the future
June 11, 2008
Back in October 2007, at the Web 2.0 Summit, I raved about Jonathan Zittrain’s talk on generativity and the web. Now you don’t have to take my word for it. Zittrain’s recent book, The Future of the Internet — and How To Stop It is now available via free download. Read, argue, decide for yourself.
UPDATE: Turns out there’s more Zittrain news today.
For the record, part deux
June 4, 2008
Someone sent me a note about the post earlier today about “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. The subject line of the note was “Prove It.” Well, OK, here it is. (Thanks to Eric Mongeon for digging up the file so quickly.)
For the record
June 4, 2008
In 2005, I was part of a team that launched a fine but short-lived magazine for Forrester. In the first issue, which came out in March 2005, we led one section with an article headlined “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Next month’s cover story in The Atlantic, written by someone who wrote a piece for the Forrester magazine, is entitled, of all things, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid.” Not for the first time (I’m thinking of one barely-permitted-to-be-published article, “How Apple Gets Away With It,” and one outright-killed one, “The Post-Microsoft Era”), I want to congratulate my esteemed once-and-future colleagues Harris Collingwood and Eric Hellweg for being consistently ahead of pretty much any technology or media trend you can imagine. Note to The Atlantic: If you’re interested in what will be important to your readers three years from now, you might want to give Harris or Eric a call.
I’m a twit, for now
May 30, 2008
I am, against my better judgment, experimenting with Twitter. Please don’t subscribe. What I’m doing there is boring. Not sure that a format that’s even more evanescent than blogging will work out for me, but all my cool friends are doing it and I suppose the answer is yes, apparently I would jump off a bridge if all my friends asked me to. But you have to worry about a form that, in such a short time, has annoyed people so much that there’s a need for an app like this. On the other hand, many of the “tweets” I “read” are about the service being down, so my testing may be short-lived.
A modest question
May 29, 2008
On Facebook, I only accept “friend” requests from people I know. And even then, I don’t accept ‘em all. So why do I have many more friends on Facebook than I do in real life?
How can you tell when your Web business is doomed?
May 29, 2008
When you’re so out of ideas that you try convincing people that you’re running a social network — and when you’re so scared thatyour moment has passed that you can’t waste a second to notice that you’ve rendered “its” incorrectly.
Most confusing first sentence in a press release ever?
November 16, 2007
“[Name redacted], a leading provider of enterprise search, automatic categorization and eDiscovery systems for law firms and enterprises, today announced the availability of the [name redacted]™ 5.1 platform, which combines robust navigation and grouping controls over external content with multi-layered security to deliver a deep and powerful federated search framework.”
WHAT????!!!!
What to do with all that spam?
November 14, 2007
Spam header of the day
October 26, 2007
“Vampire Tapestry Horse Leg Carrot Sandwich Train”
Turned out to be a stock tout.
What the Internet can do, or something
October 6, 2007
On my Facebook News Feed today, I read:
“Jonathan Segel and David Lowery are now friends.”
Finally, more than 20 years after they both found themselves in Camper Van Beethoven (a band noted for contributing to The Sandinista Project, among other things), Segel and Lowery are now friends. Congratulations, guys.
Plan ahead, people
October 4, 2007
Stupid Facebook trick of the day
October 4, 2007
