Following Project - a set on Flickr
A project where I gradually add highest available res avatars of the people I’m following on Twitter.
What a cool idea. Go, Zeldman.
Clips are lower-threshold links, words, images, ideas, and hobby-horses from the guy who does 43 Folders.
These are things that got his attention.
The inevitability of my favorite bookstore closing doesn’t make it any less brutal to watch.
Data points:
- Where I bought my Rough Guide to SF on my first trip here in 1997
- Where I bought dozens of issues of Harpers and The Atlantic
- Where we bought the first books that Ellie helped pick out for herself
- My 2nd-favorite downtown public restroom
- A store whose rent, an employee informed me last month, was $65,000 per month. Every month. Sixty-five thousand dollars.
It’s super-hard to watch good businesses with good people go down; but it truly is just the beginning of a lot of change.
As much as I adored this store, I can’t imagine the insanity of a $65k monthly nut. Especially when you’re competing with free delivery from a company that stocks every conceivable piece of media in print — let alone groceries, toys, electronics, and pretty much any other hard good on the planet that can fit into a box.
Sad, awful, and horribly overdue inevitability that, in this instance, feels like a lot more than a statistic and a shrug.
There is an easy formula for doing it wrong: publish attention-getting bullshit and pull stunts to generate mindless traffic. The entire quote-unquote ‘pro blogging’ industry — which exists as the sort of pimply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO industry — is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient.”
— John Gruber, as ever, encapsulating the blah blah blah into a succinct, memorable, and paint-peelingly candid précis. Damn.
Merlin Mann, The Bros. Chaps & Jeff Olsen of adultswim.com on Online Branding
Jesse just posted the aforementioned IMA panel as a podcast episode of The Sound of Young America.
An unusual Sound of Young America podcast: I talk with 43folders.com writer Merlin Mann,
Homestar Runners creators Mike and Matt Chapman (aka The Bros. Chaps), and Jeff Olsen, creative director of adultswim.com, at the Integrated Media Association conference in Atlanta. The (somewhat cheesy) title of the session was “Blow Up Your Brand.” We chatted about how to do something on the internet that people will actually give a hoot about.
June, I can just see it: Apple launches 2 new OS’s, a new phone, and Steve returns. Headlines: ‘NO TABLET. WORST KEYNOTE EVER.’”
— Neven Mrgan
Announcing Wikirank: Tracking what’s popular on Wikipedia, by Jeffrey Veen
The result is Wikirank, a tool for exploring what’s popular on Wikipedia, discovering comparisons between topics, and sharing them with the world. We launched it yesterday, happily coinciding with the 14th anniversary with Ward Cunningham’s invention of the wiki.
Don’t tell them I said this, but, at this point, there’s exactly three entities on this planet that I’d work for:
Watch those Small Batch guys. They are going to be responsible for many amazing things.
Related: my interviews with Jeff when he (and Greg and Ryan) were still at the Google.
I gave up picking just one woman in tech who has inspired me over the years. I certainly knew that I couldn’t list them all. Here’s a roughly chronological list, which breaks down at the end when I realise that there could be no end.”
— Danny O’Brien
Now I sort of think of the whole engine as a special genetically engineered cow who eats music and poops money - I have no idea what’s going on in its gut, and I have the luxury of not really caring that much about the particulars.”
— Jonathan Coulton
via gordonshumway
Yes! It does exist!
Android Versus iPhone 3.0: The Showdown »
Terrific article from Gina. I’ve used a G1 alongside my iPhone for a couple months and like it way WAY more than I expected.
IMA Panel: Social Media, Revenue, and Brand
I hope you’ll forgive the (equivalence of) a self-link, but I wanted to share a few video clips that I think are kind of related to the Kutiman rant I’d posted earlier today.
My friend, Kristen Taylor, shot these bits from a panel that Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America hosted at last month’s IMA (public media) conference in Atlanta. The unfortunate title of the panel was “Blow Up Your Brand” (ugh), but it did feature yrs truly, alongside my old Tallahassee band buddies1, The Bros Chaps (yep, Homestar Runner), plus Jeff Olsen, who’s the the super-smart Creative Director of [Adult Swim].
We talked about our experiences with thinking about social media, trying different revenue models, and ultimately looking at some various ways that public media stations and networks might try to adapt some ideas from our playbook. I think it went pretty well.
First, here’s Jeff on the limits of advertising and finding unexpected money; Jesse on the opportunities to making great content in support of public service.
Blow Up Your Brand panel at IMA09 from Kristen Taylor on Vimeo.
Here’s the Homestar Runner guys on agility and me on waiting for the right money. [Also, PowerBar.]
Blow Up Your Brand panel at IMA09 from Kristen Taylor on Vimeo.
Here’s me, on social media, and understanding 1) why you have a community around your site, 2) what you’re prepared to do (or change) on the day that your community becomes incredibly successful, powerful, and influential in how you are perceived.
Blow Up Your Brand panel at IMA09 from Kristen Taylor on Vimeo.
Finally, here’s me on the revenue thing, and the value of being open to finding money in places you never expected (or wanted). How one free talk at Google completely changed my career.
Blow Up Your Brand panel at IMA09 from Kristen Taylor on Vimeo.
Thanks a million to Kristen for posting these and to my panel dudes for being there and being all smart. And super-special thanks to Jesse for the panel invite, and to Keith Hopper for working his ass off to make the conference a hit.
It’s true. Matt and I shared a drummer back in Tallahassee. And somewhere, deep in Matt’s audio archives, there lives a recording of the two of us playing some really drunk GbV covers. Me and Strongbad. Playing “Smothered in Hugs.” ↩
Big Evernote for Mac Update »
I agree that this is a very big update for my favorite notes app. The Safari clipper is particularly swell.
Five things you should know if you're new to Boxee »
Like it says on the tin. Very useful — and it introduced me to thetvdb.com.
Cleaner pages (for reading and importing)
arc90 lab : experiments : Readability
Terrific, customizable bookmarklet attempts to reduce any web page to just the part you want to read — no ads, no janky css, or what have you — kinda similar to one piece of Marco’s insanely great Instapaper.
This bookmarklet’s certainly useful in its own right for tidier and less distracted on-screen reading, but it’s also useful for cleaning up a page you want to send to Evernote, a text file, your Kindle, or any such text-centric inbox in your life. So for Evernote:
- Find something to read, like this TIME article
- Hit the bookmarklet
- Select all (
CMD-A) - Copy (
CMD-C) - Paste into Evernote (
CTRL-CMD-V)
No more fussy mousecentric selecting. Boom. Done. Love it.
RegexKit Framework »
Badass framework behind Safari AdBlock
Everywhere:
