A Better Mousetrap

iControl Everything

2010-09-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

I firmly believe that within a couple of years, expensive universal remotes will be all but dead, as more home theater devices ship with Wifi built in and a phone or tablet app that controls them.

However, I'm worse than an early adopter- I'm an early experimenter. That's why rather than waiting for this to come built in to my next generation home theater/TV/cable box, I am going to spend a bunch of money and go through a bunch of hassle to try and make it happen right now.

My goal is to have total control of my media centers- both television and house-wide streaming video- from my iDevices by the end of this month. Here's what I am using to accomplish this:

Redeye Universal Remote System for iPhone and iPadThis is a clever device that joins your Wifi network and translates control inputs from your iPhone, iPod or iPad to IR control signals for your home theater. It's well reviewed by the users who seem to have realistic expectations about it. The few negative reviews seem to come from people with very large homes, and apparently the IR signals aren't powerful enough to propagate very far.

Overlarge rooms certainly won't be a problem for me, but the need to place this in front of the devices it controls is a problem- that will place it squarely in range of my 1 year old son, who will undoubtedly yank it off the coffee table the moment he sees it.

To avoid that, I'm going to pair it with a set of remote IR emitters. That way, I can hide it from prying hands and keep my family room coffee table a bit cleaner, too. It will add a bunch of wires to the rear of my entertainment center, but it's a rat's nest back there anyhow- a little more won't make much of a difference.

Music is going to be a little more complicated. I could go out and spend a bunch of money on a Sonos multi-room music system, which comes complete with an iPhone app for control. However, I already have a few parts that should allow me to (in theory) approximate the benefits of a Sonos without much extra money and work.

One of those pieces I already own is an Airport Express, which allows me to use a Remote app on my iPhone to play downloaded songs and streaming Internet radio from an existing Mac Mini. However, that setup misses on important piece of the Sonos experience - the ability to easily play different playlists and sources to different rooms, and seamless integration with Pandora and Sirius XM streaming radio. To enable that, I'm looking at Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil, which seems to have a few solutions to allow for that kind of flexibility using the Airport Express/Mac Minin/iPhone combination.

Sonos fans typically aren't satisfied with cheaper workalikes, but perhaps never having samples the Sonos goodness will allow me to live with a more "hackish" solution for the time being. However, if I have to keep running down to the Mac Mini to reboot something or restart the server software, I will probably relent and crack open the wallet eventually.

The goal is to have this stuff up and running in the next couple of weekends. I do know that juggling nine total remotes for three TV systems is going to get old quickly. If nothing else, the savings from AA and AAA batteries alone should be significant...

Blogger Template Designer...

2010-03-16T07:02:00.001-07:00

...interesting enough to get me to actually post again!

Like millions of others, my blog has fallen victim to the seductive ease of tweeting or updating my Facebook status. A large part of the blame (credit?) goes to my iPhone, hich has largely replaced my laptop for casual computing purposes.

It's simultaneously easy to post short notes to Facebook/Twitter and difficult to type longer form blog entries on the iPhone.

Will the iPad re-orient my consumption and creation to longer form social media? I guess I'll find out when I get my greasy mitts on one.

In the meantime, the Blogger Template Designer is a quantum leap in being able to customize the look for those of us still using Blogger. I hammered the poor demo girl at SxSW with questions, few of which she was able to answer. However, together we determined that you could use your own imagery in the templates with a couple of "advanced" drilldowns- very similar to the old template methods but a little easier. That said, the canned templates and images are pretty decent, too.

We'll see if the romance lasts for a second post in 2010.

Test with a photo

2009-06-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

Posting from Blogpress worked. Now trying it with a photo...

Testing BlogPress from iPhone

2009-06-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

If this works, I might actually start posting to this blog again...

What are Social Networks Good For? How about Saving the Internet

2009-05-14T06:48:00.000-07:00

Twitter is inanity, 140 characters at a time. Facebook is the world's most engaging and least profitable website, spending millions of dollars a minute so that people can bore each other with baby pictures. MySpace, already written off by the digital elite, is the lowest common denominator of online interaction, the cheesy strip mall of social experiences.

These are not necessarily my opinion- I'm condensing common criticisms, a distillation of the chatter these brands elicit on the web. However, I have recently begun to think that this activity, so far mostly untapped by frustrated marketers who are looking for a linear return on their ad spending, is what will ultimately redeem the interactive medium and fulfill the promise of this new platform.

Here's why: Trust is at the heart of all successful human transactions.

In an environment of password phishing, Nigerian scammers, Craigslist killers, and doing it for the lulz, we're going to need a way to measure our trust in those we interact with online.

Social networking sites, tools, and services bring a level of transparency, familiarity, and insight to those we choose to interact with. Thanks to his Twitter feed, I know know more about Rainn Wilson's family than I do the family two doors down on my actual street.

Facebook's worldwide membership numbers are approaching the total US population. Twitter's growth keeps accelerating, and LinkedIn has settled comfortably into the professional social networking space. I foresee a time when the average user will refuse to accept email or interact with an online entity that is not socially connected to them somehow, however tenuously, through the 'web of trust' they've constructed on these networks.

Who knows... if I make some friends in Nigeria, maybe I will actually encounter a deposed prince who needs my help in recovering his millions...

Google: Great Web App builders, awful Web Comic publishers

2008-09-01T22:37:00.000-07:00

I haven't had an opportunity to use Google's Chrome browser yet, so I'll reserve my opinion on its user experience enhancements until I do. However, I have had an opportunity to read the web comic that Google posted outlining the new features and philosophy behind Chrome. One thing I am able to conclusively say to Google- as far as publishing Web comics goes, don't quit your day job.

Google recruited Scott McCloud, the creator behind the excellent Understanding Comics and its followups, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. These books really drill down into the essential truths behind what drives the comic book medium on paper, and how it can successfully make the transition to new platforms and distribution methods. Check out this neat web comic that uses an innovative method of inter-panel navigation; it's the closest thing I've seen on the web to simulating the peripheral 'clues' you get from reading a printed page panel-to-panel. This comic does everything right, from screen friendly formatting to an easy to navigate and informative index below the panels:

That's why I was so surprised that the Google Chrome comic suffers from utterly awful usability. In a nutshell:

The pages are formatted like a printed comic- in a taller, rather than wider (also referred to as 'portrait' vs. 'landscape') orientation. That means that every page is a scroll, even on my 23" HD monitor.

The navigation is on the very bottom of each page- two Javascript links that go forward, or back. No index or method for jumping to the very beginning, or end- if you're on the last page (38), and want to go back to page 6, you're either hitting 'back' 32 times or starting over from the original link.
The pages themselves are flat jpeg images, with zero semantic information about the content on the pages. Ironically, Google's own search engine would pretty much utterly disregard these pages, with no textual information about the content and Javascript links its browser would ignore.

I paged through this web comic in utter disbelief- how could Scott McCloud, the paragon of exploring new and innovative methods in creating comics for the online medium, have contributed to such a mess?

The answer is on Scott's site, in an apparently hastily assembled page* linked from his homepage. The comic itself was designed and drawn as a printed piece, intended to be sent to journalists and bloggers as part of the announcement. When the mailing went out earlier than intended, scanned copies of the comic began to appear online. In response to the demand, Google apparently slapped their own hastily assembled Web version up - access was more important than accuracy and craft, in this case.

However, this begs the question- if you're creating a piece of documentation intending to communicate the benefits and thinking behind a new way to browse the Web, shouldn't you anticipate that it will be consumed on the web at some point? And as such, shouldn't you prep a Web version well in advance of an announcement that will, inherently, break on the Web in the first place?

At least it ends up being a program management and product marketing failure rather than an unbelievable gaffe on the part of one of the creators I admire most. I'm sure Scott is cringing ten times as much as I am as he pages through his most visible Web comic to date, and is probably furiously pushing pixels to fix it right now.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with my favorite panel from the work- there's just so much right with the intentional wrongness of this panel- it could be a whole blog post on its own.

*I assume it's a quick reaction to the breaking news because, as of this writing, the title is incorrect - it reads 'Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection' rather than anything to do with Google - and none of the links on the global nav work. Based on the attention this site and comic is getting, it will probably be fixed by the time you read this.

Eyes On The Road, Pal

2008-08-12T21:01:00.000-07:00

Last week, while traveling for business, I ended up with a rental Hyundai Sonata. While slogging through LA freeway traffic, I adjusted the preprogrammed radio stations to my liking. I then checked to see if there were steering wheel mounted controls, so I could scan the stations and adjust volume without taking my eyes off the road.

Well, yes on one count. The Hyundai did have steering wheel mounted audio controls, but in a curious configuration:

What struck me as odd was that the volume controls were tucked away behind the main face of the steering wheel, while the station controls where on the front. I actually had to duck my head and peer behind the steering wheel to determine the placement and functions of the buttons. Once I sussed out where the buttons were located, I had to modify my grip on the steering wheel to reach them, extending my fingers out as if I was holding a phantom soda can in my left hand. This was uncomfortable and made me effectively steer one-handed.

Contrast this with the button placement on my wife's Honda minivan:

The buttons are all right up front, no neck craning or awkward peering necessary. Additionally, they can all be easily manipulated by my thumb while my left hand is in the normal '10 o'clock' steering grip position.

I can only imagine that the Hyundai designer was trying for something 'neat,' both in terms of visual presentation on the front of the wheel and in terms of functional gimmickry, trying to be different for the sake of being different. The end result is a lack of what I call contextual awareness for the controls.

If this were some trick looking iPod dock, meant to sit on a bookshelf or mantle and exude sleekness, I could forgive odd or non-standard button placement- once you learn where the buttons are, it's not that much more difficult to use it. However, the context of steering wheel mounted audio controls is completely different- not only is the user in a situation where their attention is probably more divided than usual, but they are actually impaired in their ability to perform one of the main functions of the vehicle- steering it clear of obstacles - while using the control. Taken to the absurd extreme, the Hyundai controls could actually contribute to your demise as you fumble and peer for the proper controls.

I highlight this real world example to draw a parallel with controls or input methods in online applications that similarly fail to understand the context of their use. Typically, non-context aware controls on the Web don't lead to a shower of glass shards and an airbag deployment, but they sure can put a dent in the enjoyment of your trip. You've experienced them- usually when you're undertaking some sort of task and you're stopped dead in your tracks, trying to figure out what the web page wants from you to continue.

Some common examples:

• Dropdowns to set data more easily entered as text, such as an event time in a calendar application, or worse- year of birth, with a dropdown listing years from 1945 to the present (I've seen that a few times, sadly). This is typically the result of a desire to limit the possibility for mistakes on data entry, but it shifts the burden to the user when errors could just as easily be checked and trapped in the background in many cases.

• Popups (such as calendars) that set data on the main page. Again, this strikes me as lazy programming - if you want to provide a piece of function that will take up an inordinate amount of space on the page when not being used, there's better ways to manage that than by banishing it to a popup. By moving a control function out of the flow of the page, you introduce ambiguity about what action to take next, and increase the possibility of errors.

• Unnecessarily deep drop-down menu trees. In a misguided attempt to mimic some desktop apps, I've seen web apps that offer three and four level deep dropdown menus for navigation. Typically, your mouse needs to follow an extremely narrow and precise path along those menus to prevent them from popping off and leaving you where you started. I invariably abandon the tightrope act and try and find another means to reach the subpage. In one case, I actually had to view the source of the javascript that generated the menus to pull out the URL I needed when I couldn't manage to thread the correct path.

These are just three of many similarly annoying web gadgets that fail to understand the context of most online applications: to allow you to complete a task or to obtain information as quickly and easily as possible. Forgetting, or worse, flouting that goal is what leads to high bail rates and low stickyness. Are those things worth showing off your neat Flash drag-and-drop skillz on your main site navigation? About as worth it as a car crash when you're trying to find a decent station while driving.

Per iPhone: Google is a Verb

2008-08-07T11:42:00.000-07:00

Although the Oxford English Dictionary has already decreed that the term Google is a verb, a more culturally relevant institution - the iPhone - has resoundingly confirmed it.

Here's the search screen from the iPhone's implementation of Safari:

Once you've entered your search term, you're invited (by the active, blue button on the lower right) to Google it.

I'm now searching the rest of the iPhone interface for definitive answers on energy independence, gay marriage, and the nature of free will - I will post those revelations as they emerge.

Google to index Flash - and why this is a non-announcement

2008-07-01T16:29:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of buzz about today's announcement about Google's improved Flash indexing.

For those of you not obsessed with Flash or SEO, the reason this post is getting so much attention is simple: previously, Google's crawlers were unable to index text within Flash movies. Since quite a bit of content (on entertainment sites, especially) is locked up in Flash, a lot of stuff wasn't discoverable via search.

On the face of it, this is a huge boon for those sites that publish interesting content in Flash (like AOL's photo galleries). However, if you read deeper into the Google blog post, you'll see there are two deal breakers for most modern Flash sites.

The first: the crawler will not index Flash that is embedded in the page via Javascript. To avoid the IE ActiveX 'click to activate' security feature, the vast majority of Flash movies published by professional outfits are written into the page via Javascript. Thus, few of them will be indexed.

The second: The crawler will not index externally loaded SWFs or XML. The vast majority of Flash movies published by professional outfits load external information as SWFs or XML. The crawler will follow links to those items and index them separately, but that's fairly useless for the goal of increasing the relevance of the main page.

About all this will effect are designer and photographer portfolio websites, which generally have hardcoded text content. Not exactly an Earth-shattering move for the rest of the Flash-using web.

Websites Are Not Software

2008-02-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

It appears that Microsoft feels it's so far behind in the online advertising space that it needs to spend $44 billion on purchasing Yahoo! - which will still leave them in second place.

Why does a company with massive amounts of money, talent and market share in the PC world need to buy its way into an online also-ran position?

I think it's very simple: it's because Websites Are Not Software.

Websites are made up largely of software components, but categorizing them as software is akin to declaring that hamburgers are beef. A hamburger, much like a website, is a recipe, a formula, a preparation, of disparate elements that must come together in the proper proportions for a successful result.

The extension of this is that companies (or teams, or people) who are most familiar with making software are likely to see a website mainly from the software perspective. This can be likened to putting an electrician in charge of a television network, since after all, the medium consists of electrical impulses transmitted to a screen.

The Web is hamstrung, and enabled, by the artifacts of the technology that spawned it- multipurpose computers, clunky browsers, incomplete and oft-ignored standards, and a myriad of proprietary media formats. It doesn't have the same neat and tidy inputs and outputs that you can get from delivering shrinkwrapped software- a predictable platform, release cycle, or product roadmap.

Microsoft Word doesn't need to restructure its menus when a celebrity OD's. Adobe Photoshop doesn't need to sell sponsorships on its startup screen. You don't go out and buy the latest version of GMail to install on your computer.

When an organization used to the tidy inputs and predictable outputs of making software tries to use that mindset to tame the wild, wild web- the results are predictably poor.

Can Microsoft buy its way out of its software-oriented worldview? Based on recent statements, it seems that Microsoft is positioning the acquisition as an opportunity to obtain Yahoo! engineering talent. If those engineers are put on task to build more Microsoft software, then I'm skeptical that the acquisition will do much more than reinforce my point that Websites Are Not Software.

Driven to the future

2007-12-12T01:44:00.000-08:00

While driving to the Albany area this past weekend, I realized the future creeps up on us a minute at a time.

I hadn't done a similar drive since around 1989, when I navigated my 1973 Karmann Ghia up the thruway to visit a friend at RPI in Troy, NY. That vehicle was essentially a compact box of pressed metal, folded around a clattering air-cooled engine designed in the 1930s. The dashboard instruments consisted of a speedometer, fuel gauge, and a broken clock. The combo tape-deck/radio I had installed seemed terribly modern in the middle of the terribly retro fake alligator skin dash covering I had also inflicted on the car. The passenger seat held a massive road atlas, which I would study at frigid rest stops in a futile attempt to decipher the tangle of intersecting highways in the state capital area. If I failed, I would have to find a working pay phone at a rest stop and hope I had enough change left over from the tolls to call my friend, or at least hope he was home to accept a collect call.

18 years down the line I flipped the ignition on my rented Ford Edge, waited a moment while both the navigation system and the radio acquired two separate satellite networks. I plugged in my iPod, itself about the size of the cassette tapes of yore, yet holding about 20 days worth of music vs. 90 minutes. Cruising up the Thruway in comparative silence, I idly flipped through the onboard trip computer display that calculated my momentary gas mileage and 'distance to empty.' The GPS dutifully announced upcoming turns, merges and road names, and provided me with a countdown to an estimated arrival time. Nestled in the cupholder, my Blackberry plucked incoming emails from roadside cellular towers. Toll plazas silently charged my EZ-Pass as I cruised through them and their empty booths, a relic of when they harbored a human dipped into the stream of traffic to shave quarters and nickels from passing travelers.

The act- driving solo a few hundred miles up the Thruway- was identical, but just about every aspect of the trip has been transformed in ways that are now startlingly mundane. The temptation when predicting the future is to bird dog the sensational- "The car will drive itself! It will be powered by discarded banana peels!" We tend not to think about the quiet innovations that will flow in around those infrequent revolutions, and nestle themselves unnoticed in our lives until they are suddenly indispensable. Sure, I could drive to Albany and back without a satellite guided GPS system, but why would I if I have such a device? There's no equivalent fun for me in "going paper," as there might be in driving a manual transmission vehicle rather than an automatic. Flipping through a tattered road atlas on a freezing night holds no special nostalgia- I gleefully relegate that memory to the fading past.

Ten years from now, will I find it odd that I couldn't, with some strategic keywords and gestures, edit together a three minute video journal of my travels compiled from the cloud of ubiquitous video cameras along the route? Will I curse my rental for not having warned me that up ahead the driver of the Expedition was likely to drift into my lane because his eyelid blinking pattern had slowed to dangerously drowsy levels? Will I look back in horror at the barbarity of having to actually check my email to find out my wife, home with the baby, had taken ill, and that the System hadn't realized the urgency of the message and surreptitiously flashed it across the far wall of the conference room I occupied that day?

Regardless of the magical technology that may envelop us further in the coming years, I am fairly certain one element- me- will remain comfortably consistent. All the king's satellites and all the king's microprocessors still couldn't prevent me from missing my turn into the rental return lot. I was otherwise occupied, fumbling with the radio to extinguish 2Live Crew's embarrassingly blaring 'Me So Horny' before I pulled into the return line. I can only hope that the radios of the future will contain a taste subroutine that drives them to discreetly mute themselves rather than betray my guilty pleasures to the outside world.

Hey Tesla: Partner With Google to Wire the Highways

2007-11-29T04:14:00.001-08:00

As I type this, I'm traveling about 60 miles per hour in an electric car with unlimited range. Every day I ride this electric car to and from work, as do thousands of other people.

Of course, this electric car is part of an electric train, and it doesn't have to worry about battery range because it receives continuous power from a rail above the track. The downside is that it's constrained to a prescribed route. I can't have the 6:43 drop me off in front of my house; I live about 5 miles from the train station.

The promise of an electric automobile, like the Tesla Roadster - as opposed to an electric train- is the ability to drive anywhere you'd like, without being constrained to the tracks. The main sticking point is the range- after about 200 miles you need to plug in for a lengthy recharge, vs. a five minute fillup for your gas vehicle. That makes it a little tough to do a 400 mile roadtrip, like the Los Angeles to San Francisco trip I used to do frequently on my motorcycle.

Looking at this map, you can see that there aren't a heck of a lot of choices as to the route between the two cities. In fact, Interstate Route 5 is so direct and straight, it might as well be a train track. My proposal: Tesla, partner with Google to wire the I-5 freeway with a 'third rail' for electric vehicles. You don't have to do the whole thing, just the 200 miles worth of desert in the middle- that way you can throw up solar panels and wind farms to provide part of the energy.

If this as-yet-undeveloped third rail can power the car without depleting the battery, suddenly the vast majority of California between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and even up to Santa Rosa and down to Long Beach, is reachable in a day's drive via electric car:

If the third rail can recharge the battery pack while running the car, even better- suddenly San Diego is in reach for San Franciscans looking for a little sun.

This undertaking would undoubtedly be costly and require a lot of engineering and political effort. However, I think it's a natural fit for Google, for the following reasons:

Google can pump map, traffic & local information / advertising down to vehicles on the wire.

Google can garner important information about traveler's buying and search habits, as well as traffic flow information for traffic reporting.

Google wants to take real action to reduce our impact on the environment

Greatness comes to those who dare to do great things, and we could use a little more greatness in this country lately.

So how about it, Google? Are you going to keep trying to give free wifi to people who have enough already, or are you going to turn California into an electric vehicle paradise?

Facebook... Our Macarena

2007-11-26T05:07:00.000-08:00

This morning, the first item on my Facebook 'Status Updates' feed caught my eye....

(Names have been obscured but the messages are real).

This isn't the first time I've seen someone using a Facebook feature to complain about Facebook features. I personally enjoy using Facebook to keep track of friend's milestones, both significant and minor. The games, gifts and zombies? Not so much (although I admit that I have bitten a chump or two in my time).

I am beginning to think that Facebook is our Macarena. When everybody's doing it, it's easy to jump in and play along with the crowd. I suspect when the music stops we'll all wonder what we found so appealing about it.

Kindle vs. iPhone vs. an old, beat up Palm....

2007-11-21T00:15:00.000-08:00

While I was writing my previous post on the Kindle about a highly portable yet low-rent reader client that I could synch daily with periodicals and feeds, and drop the odd e-book onto when necessary, I felt a gnawing feeling of familiarity. Later that day, I realized that rather than imagining an ideal future, I was recalling the fading past... I was doing exactly what I described in the ancient era of 2003!

Back then, I had recently relocated from Los Angeles to New York City. In LA, I commuted by motorcycle, so reading on my daily trip was out of the question. In New York, I found myself with an hour's worth of downtime on the subway each day. Never a fan of ink-stained hands or managing a clumsy folding broadsheet on a crowded train, I set out to find a way to read the daily paper without ever touching paper.

I eventually settled on the combination of a Palm Tungsten T3 (an early 'large screened' Palm, with a slider body that revealed a bright 480x320 LCD screen) and an AvantGo subscription. I set up AvantGo to download the NY Times and other feeds each morning at 7:30- a few minutes before stepping out the door I'd press the 'Sync' button on my Palm cradle, the feeds would download to the device, and I'd be out the door.

Once on the subway I could browse the channels I had downloaded to the device. I also had an e-book reader - Mobipocket, I believe - so if I wanted to overpay for e-books, I had the option. Usually, however, I downloaded freely available classic books from Project Gutenberg - I burned through everything H.G. Wells ever wrote in a matter of weeks.

Nowadays I plop myself down on the train and whip out my Blackberry. In between writing and answering emails, I usually catch up with the day's news via the NY Times and Google Reader- the difference being now, in this modern age, I wait an excruciatingly long time for the tiny text files of the NY Times mobile site to slog their way through Verizon's 'high speed' EVDO network and render on the dull, cramped screen of my device. Four years ago, since the information was already downloaded to my device, it would snap instantly on to the crisp, wide screen of my Palm. So this is progress?

Sure, with the wireless connection I can now follow a link to a Wikipedia page that will take forever to load, or do a Google search for the name of the poignant, time-lost Sleestak on Land of the Lost... but I really only stand for the interminable load and terrible screen experience because I'm a captive audience for that forty minutes each morning. I'm completely out of luck when I transition from the above ground commuter train to the underground subway- a limitation I didn't have with AvantGo.

AvantGo still exists - in fact, I just tried an old username and password combination and found that my AvantGo account still exists - and it's free. For $19.95 a year I can upgrade it to an 8MB account limit (up from 2mb- of which my channels are apparently using all of 175k). My Palm Tungsten still exists- it's been collecting dust in my office since I dropped it for a dear, departed Sidekick a few years back. I turned it on for kicks the other day and I was pleasantly surprised by the clean simplicity of the OS after living in the DMV office-like interface of the Blackberry this past year.

So, while yesterday I was wistfully anticipating Apple coming to my offline reader rescue with some expensive new device, I think I'm going to get back in the e-reader business after the Thanksgiving holiday- for all of twenty bucks.*

[*To be fair, at the time I purchased it, a Palm Tungsten was $399- exactly the price of today's Kindle. However, you can pick up a brand new, equivalently featured Palm for $199 nowadays, and if you're more economically minded, it looks like T3's are going for about $120 on eBay- which I must admit seems surprisingly high to me for a 4 year old gadget.]

Amazon Kindle: Nice Idea, Weird Execution

2007-11-20T06:52:00.000-08:00

I haven't seen a Kindle up close, so I'm not going to comment on its dubious industrial design (at least not much). However, the fact that it looks like a medical instrument from 'Space: 1999' is irrelevant to the actual issues I believe will plague this device.

Issue 1: When was the last time you got on a plane or train and thought to yourself, "I wish I had 200 books to pass the time!" I'm guessing, never ever. An iPod for books is unnecessary, as we don't consume books passively in three minutes (Blogs are another matter, which I will touch upon shortly).

Similarly, the ability to shop for, and download a book, on the go via Whispernet will only be crucial for the most ADD among us. Nowadays, when I hear about or see a book I might be interested in, I pull out my BlackBerry write myself an email reminder to order it (from Amazon, of course) when I get back to my laptop. Rarely do I kick myself for not being able to consume that book right there, on the spot (Magazines are a different story, and these too will be dealt with shortly).

There's one common situation that I can imagine there being a benefit from having access to dozens of 'books' in portable form - being a schoolkid, taking a half dozen courses, each with a ponderous companion text.

(An uncommon situation would be traveling around the world purely via surface transportation, which would involve long weeks at sea on a freighter or multi-day rail trips traversing frozen wastelands- but there's only one person I know who has ever done the like, and she's a pretty small market).

Back to the schoolkid- so great, you have one portable device you can carry to read all your books on. Then, once you've finished your research, you...open your other portable device (a laptop) and write your assignment.

Since the schoolkid is going to be forced to carry a laptop anyway, which does everything the Kindle does (with a couple of ergonomic differences), do the supposed advantages of the Kindle make the extra device worth it?

The root of the problem is that book reading isn't passive enough to be relegated to a pocket sized device of inconsequential size and weight (like my nearly microscopic iPod Shuffle) nor is it primary enough to command its own obtrusive device. The incremental improvements it brings over reading a book on a laptop do not argue for a dedicated device for reading so much as point out some minor improvements that could make laptops more usable.

I think the Kindle service would be a great adjunct to a paperback sized laptop with a fold-back keyboard and a touch sensitive, high resolution screen. You could read your books, flipping the pages with a flick of your fingers, and when you needed to write your report (or check your email or pay some bills), the functionality would be there.

I do believe there is a market (and a use) for a dedicated e-reader. I've already opined that books are ill-suited for a dedicated portable device, especially one as expensive or feature-rich as the Kindle. Newspapers, magazines and books? That's another matter. The key is to diminish (or eliminate) the hardware cost and footprint.

I'm envisioning a device about 4"x 6"- the size of a typical snapshot. Ditch the bezel- make it all screen on the front with a flip cover. Give it enough memory to hold five books, or twenty magazines, or fifty daily newspapers. Yank out the wireless capability and the keyboard- give it an iPhone-style virtual keyboard for the rudimentary notes you might be taking- and require it to be dropped in a dock every night to recharge and receive updated subscription content. Grab it on the way out of the house and browse Time, Newsweek, the Times, etc. on the train, plane or automobile of your choice. Charge me $9.99 a month for an all-you-can eat periodicals subscription and the normal per-book charge. Give me the device for free or cheap with a three-year commitment.

Add a few extra gigs for MP3s and a decent music player and all of a sudden you have what sounds like an overgrown iPod Touch. Since Apple's already got non-Space:1999 style hardware designs for that, let them build the thing- and let Amazon's service fill it up. To me, that's the winner (and I bet, the eventual end game here).

All The E-Mail That's Fit To Read

2007-11-05T19:41:00.000-08:00

The New York Times published an article on combating distractions caused by e-mail. Among other charming bits of advice, it contains this tidbit:

Most organizational experts suggest setting aside two or three times a day to check e-mail.

Great idea! Let's extend it further. Hey restaurant chefs! Don't bother cooking all the orders as they come in, just hold on to them and cook two or three times a night! It will make it much easier to prep the ingredients, monitor cooking time, etc. etc.

The Times' advice may be useful for folks who work in mostly offline jobs, and who use e-mail as a general communication tool- like someone processing mortgage applications, or a photographer. However, I wager most of the people suffering from e-mail overload are information workers like myself- and separating 'e-mail' from 'work' is simply not possible.

This Times article is the latest in a long line of proposals and articles around managing e-mail overload - including a concept posted by my brother, of non-essential emails with an expiration date. I still believe the key is in a basic revision of e-mail interfaces, which haven't changed substantially since I first installed Eudora on my Mac IIcx in 1993.

Why can't e-mail programs:

learn who I consider to be important senders?
automatically tag and create views for grouped messages?
automatically condense redundant information within messages (like signatures repeated ad infinitum in long reply chains)
adjust their views dynamically based on how many messages are in my inbox?
allow me to file messages in more than one folder or hierarchy?
condense a long string of replies into a single, BlackBerry friendly compendium message that dynamically updates?
provide me with an insights panel like Quicken so I can get a snapshot of email activity (hot threads, reply percentage, aging for drafts, etc.)

I could go on. Given the obvious demand for such an improvement (as evidenced by the never ending stream of 'Cure e-mail overload' articles) you'd think some enterprising application developers would come up with solutions that aren't worse than the problem they're trying to solve. I've got some ideas around fixing it, but they will have to wait until I get over the annihilation of my spare time due to my new job and newborn son... hopefully he won't be stuck with the same ineffective interface by the time I'm e-mailing from the nursing home to complain that he never SuperPokes me anymore.

Hulu, Sam, and the User Experience

2007-10-29T22:05:00.000-07:00

Savvy calendar users can determine that it's been some time since I last updated this blog. That's owing to three important, and recent, new beginnings:

1) The launch of Hulu.com and its associated distribution network

This was the project that ate my summer. I was part of the launch team; initially, I focused on the destination site, and then transitioned to leading the product definition for the partner distribution network.

Hulu demanded a lot of time from me, and more-so our team of developers, who spent many sleepless nights aiding in the unprecedented launch of both a destination site and a network of distributed players across five of the most popular destinations on the Internet.

Prior to the announcement of the final brand, my teammates and I referred to it by its working (and roundly mocked) name, 'Newsite.' When Jason Kilar was hired on as CEO, he expedited the name search process and came up with Hulu- a name which, in his words, "is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce..."

Regardless of what you think of the name, Jason & crew have developed a service that is going to change the way people consume professionally produced content online. Their primary concern is the quality of the user experience around watching video, and it shows. They've done a great job around this launch and I am sure they're going to continue to build on their amazing experience in the weeks and months to come.

2) My new position as Vice President of User Experience at NBC Universal.

I typically don't speak much about my job on this blog for reasons of company confidentiality, but I can discuss the significance of my new team without spilling any beans. Creating the role I now occupy, and building the team to support me, is a significant move for NBC- it is a statement that we have joined the ranks of Google, Yahoo, and Apple in recognizing the strategic value of UX in doing business in the information age. Nowadays, our content can be distinguished not only by the quality of its writing and direction, but also by the ease of its discoverability and the convenience of its consumption. I'm thrilled to be part of the team tasked with this important mission for our company.

3) The birth of my son, Samuel Joseph Siry.

If a new site and a new job weren't enough, my wife Paula and I have added a new addition to our (mostly 4-legged until now) family- little Sam Siry. He arrived right in the thick of things, a week late on the last day of July.

Why did we name him Sam? Well, we had a few reasons for choosing that name, but I must admit that it's "short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce..."

Present and Accounted For....

2007-07-17T15:34:00.000-07:00

I just added a Meebo Me widget to this blog. Meebo is a great web IM service that allows me to sign in to multiple messaging services and manage them with one buddy list. I can chat with folks through a web browser, eliminating the need to run another app (I always have a browser open) and avoiding the firewall issues that plague typical IM clients.

They also enable you to create an embeddable chat widget that will not only let you know I'm online, but also allow you to send me an anonymous IM whenever I'm around. This could be very cool or very annoying- I'll post a followup when I decide which it is.

In any case, this is a glimmer of a Web where Presence is a embedded in every online experience- your presence, my presence, and the presence of every visitor to every site, in one way or another. There are interesting vectors in this space that are only beginning to indicate convergence... in a later post I'll describe one of those possible convergent futures. For now, I've got to go chat with someone claiming to be my dog....

The Times Gets Usable

2007-07-08T19:42:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has an entry-level article on the profession of usability, making it seem like an emerging field demanded by a greater level of human-computer interaction (I think someone over at the Times is jealous of my series concept, Job Descriptions From The Future).

In reality, the discipline of usability has been around ever since there have been things to use. Henry Dreyfus, who I am absolutely certain never designed a web site, defined a whole century of communication with his eminently usable Model 500 Telephone. One of the seminal volumes on usability, Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (originally published in 1988), contains an appendix where he expresses doubt that humans would ever be able to design something as complex as a hypertext information retrieval system (for those of you with less nerd quotient than me: you're looking at one right now).

Lateness to the party aside, the Times does manage to skim the high level points of a usability professional's lot in life, and they even touch upon a point that I feel is often lost in the shuffle of user experience design- the presumption of knowledge on the part of the user. The author writes:

"The creator of a Web site may assume too much knowledge on the part of users, leading to confusion."

This happens more often than not. Designers leave off labels, navigational pointers, summaries, and explanatory text that would help users orient themselves within an application or site. They forget that not everyone using their site has spent the last three months poring over comps and wireframes like they have, and they often skip the crucial step of naive user testing, even though it could be as simple as walking down the hall and borrowing someone from another department to poke around your beta site for 15 minutes.

To combat this, I have declared that one of our team's required ingredients in any design is to be 'Obviousness.' The designers should look at a page or application state as a singular slice in time and ask some simple questions:

1. Assuming I've completely forgotten the context of my visit to this site, is it obvious what I'm supposed to do here?

2. If the inherent design of the page doesn't help direct me, is there obvious labeling that can help reorient me?

3. If I panic or don't have time to read the labels, is it obvious how I can 'punch out' and reset the experience to a familiar state without screwing something up?

'Obviousness' is one of several experience values I am requiring all our work to express. Over the coming weeks, I plan to do a series of blog posts on the top experience values that contribute to the success of a user experience design (unless the Times beats me to it, of course).

Design, Intelligent and Otherwise

2007-07-08T02:01:00.001-07:00

I find the ongoing debate between the proponents of evolution and the believers in intelligent design to be fairly ludicrous. I understand why the content of school curricula is important to both sides- education shapes outlooks for later in life and we all want our children raised with our values- but as an interactive designer, I'm trying hard to figure out why the two ideals are incompatible.

When my team sets out to create an interactive experience, we never come to the conclusion right out of the box. There's discussion, and questions, and discovery, and exploration. We'll create dozens of wireframes, selecting the best to go on to the next phase, and discarding the rest. Sometimes we'll travel down one path, only to discover it's a dead end- our interactive design has grown too complex for the needs of the project, or it has been rendered obsolete by a changing environment. We've had to scrap entire lines of thought and their attendant designs more than once, and start over with a clean sheet of paper and a fresh outlook.

Image: An extinct interface, from a company that has itself evolved into another form.

With all this fine tuning, and iteration, and exploration, our design process looks a lot like... an evolution of ideas. The much-loved rollover preview feature in our application turns out to be a trilobite in user testing and is finally excised; or the three extra configuration screens we reluctantly added to our interface turn out to be so vital they expand into their own family of applications.

For the record- I am a firm believer that our species and all others are the result of countless generations of evolutionary change over the unimaginably long gulf of time. I also understand the absurdity of comparing my team of all-too-human interactive designers to the concept of an infallible Designer creating the entire universe and all life therein... but I've also never met a designer who didn't iterate on their work, evolve their output, and believe that they could improve their creations with just a little more time.

Job Descriptions from the Future: Director of Metadata

2007-07-04T04:47:00.000-07:00

First in a series of jobs that don't exist today but will come into being as the interactive industry matures.

Metadata, for those of you not hip-deep in content management system (CMS) implementations, is most simply defined as 'data about data.' For example: you may have a movie file on your hard drive; its filename, "funny dog.mov" is a bit of metadata that gives you some information about what you might find in that movie. Pop open the 'get info' or 'properties' box and you'll find a field for description- a place where you can enter a longer bit of text outlining the movie contents.

Upload the movie to YouTube and someone might tag it with the word 'pets' or another descriptive term- these tags are now part of the metadata (within the environment of YouTube; they obviously won't extend back to the file on your hard drive).

Metadata is created and added to content (like video, photos, articles, etc.) in order to help organize it. It makes it possible for a system (such as a CMS) to search for it, to allow users to browse for it by some attribute, and for the system as a whole to generate reports about usage.

Metadata comes in pairs- the name of the attribute and the data itself. In my example, the 'file name' attribute is described by the data 'funny dog.mov.' Since these attributes are blank until they are filled in, they are referred to as 'fields.'

I outlined three types of metadata our video file might have- filename, description, and tag. In a typical implementation of a CMS, a video file might have thirty, sixty, one hundred or more fields of metadata, depending what the need is to categorize this content to a particular level of specificity and precision. When grouped for the use of a system, metadata is referred to as an 'ontology' or a 'schema.'

Some metadata is implicit- for instance, if you transcode the movie into a Flash streaming file, the format is 'FLV.' That's just what it is; your opinion on the file format is immaterial. Other metadata needs to be assigned- for instance, is the clip from a comedy show? You might assign 'comedy' to a field labeled 'genre.' At this point in time, a human being somewhere along the line needs to determine that the system needs to know the genre of the movie, and then make the proper assignment.

That's where our Director of Metadata comes in. This is a job position that is currently desperately needed by rarely created. Instead, this position is chopped up into multiple pieces and distributed among multiple people in an organization, each of whom has a definite interest in the metadata the business needs to operate, but not the clear ownership this gig requires.

Nowadays, you see the following disciplines saddled with one piece or another of this job:

Editorial team: These are the the most visible users of metadata, since they actually create and compose much of the information that will ultimately become metadata. However, their focus is informational and not necessarily operational- without support from other disciplines, they are likely to create extremely intricate descriptive fields and skimp on the system level fields that are needed for effective categorization and workflow control.

Operations team: Tasked with making sure that the metadata allows for day to day operations of the company, the Operations team tends to focus on fields that describe the 'state' of the item- which in some cases is not necessarily the job of the metadata, but rather should be managed by a system external to the item itself. Fleeting or temporary information like the type of ad campaign running against a piece of content shouldn't be tagged as part of the content itself since it will change frequently, but the Ops folks need somewhere to put it, and the metadata schema looks like as good a place as any.

Product team: As part of the product specifications process, the Product team will of course attempt to gather every other team's requirements for the metadata, but will not typically act as an effective filter for it; if Joe from accounting says we need to track the price in dollars, pounds, and lira, who are they to argue? What ends up happening is the Product team gathers an astoundingly long list of fields, many of them redundant or flat out unnecessary, and then watches as it's progressively whittled down by iterative review- which is fine in the end, but time consuming and ineffiecient.

Technology team: the group that actually needs to make the system happen. Their focus will typically flow toward system performance and stability, so they will be rooting for the least amount of metadata possible to make the system function, sometimes at the expense of flexibility or automation somewhere up the workflow chain. This attitude causes the other groups to try and stuff as much information in at the outset, so whatever ultimately ends up making it into the system is robust enough for their needs.

When there's no clear owner of a project or capability it typically limps along halfheartedly until deadlines or desperation shock it into frantic activity. In either case, decisions are not being made in a clear and methodical manner, and the ultimate result is not as well fashioned as it could be. Since metadata is at the core of so many operations, interactive businesses ignore this deficiency at their own peril.

There are metadata specialists today- taxonomy consultants, ontology experts- but they are typically brought in for a segment of the project, and not given the organizational heft necessary to solve the interdepartmental issues that make these projects so contentious and inefficient. What's needed is a strong internal owner for this crucial business segment- someone who can determine, define, and defend the decisions around the metadata schema that will serve as the engine for the company's information flow.

Let's start with the job description:

The Director of Metadata is tasked with managing the metadata schema for the Company's video products. DoM will work with the Business Development, Editorial Programming, Product, Operations, and Development teams to:

- Fashion metadata requirements for content partnerships
- Determine metadata needs for editorial programming interfaces
- Develop a schema that supports product capabilities for discovery and reporting
- build out the CMS and data entry methods to support the schema
- plan for future expansions and revisions of the schema as the business evolves

So now the tricky question: Where does the Director of Metadata work? In the Technology team, since that's where the development will ultimately happen? In the Product team, since their job is all about definition? In Operations or Editorial, since they're the ones that are going to have to live with it?

If there's a Chief Information Officer in an organization, I would roll the DoM up that line. Otherwise, I would drop them in the Product organization (which is cross-functional by definition) but give them a special dispensation and the independence to attach themselves to other teams in order to gain a properly broad and balanced outlook on metadata needs. Metadata is the language each internal group, and ultimately the consumer, uses to communicate with the assets of the business; it's too important a task to leave to someone who speaks only one organizational language.

Information Overload Hacks, Part 3

2007-06-27T04:54:00.000-07:00

In my previous posts on this topic, I discussed the information overload the wired worker deals with, and some of the causes of the overload. I wrote that part 3 would be an overview of a possible solution to one component of the problem- email overload.

Well, the plan has changed- the main point of Part Three will be about how there is no Part Three.

For each blog entry I post, there’s five or six that never make it past draft- I realize halfway through the writing that the topic is not actually that interesting, not germane to the subject of this blog, or I’m just not doing a very good job of expressing myself. Well, Part Three is different- it’s the first time I’ve spiked a post because it was apparently too good.

I’m not referring to its literary merit, or even its pure entertainment or informational value- I’m talking about the basic idea. I was planning to outline a possible software solution to the problem of email overload; a combination of technology and design that, if built, could substantially help humans manage the flood of email they receive every day.

I ran an overview of the idea past a couple of people who are much smarter than I am- and they convinced me that there is a real possibility to develop some intellectual property from my concept- property that I shouldn’t be freely distributing on my blog. I had intended the exercise to be a thought experiment to demonstrate how a fresh review of an entrenched problem can lead to novel solutions. These smart people pointed out that there are people who start businesses and launch companies on similar premises, and that I’d be a dope not to at least explore that avenue (especially given some of the funded companies out there with no discernible utility, let alone business plan).

Given my schedule (and my full time job) it’s highly unlikely that I would be able to make much progress on it on my own- but maybe some Red Bull fueled fit of wireframing will lead to something I can hand off for development. If productized, my idea won’t change the world- but it might make email just a little bit better to use, and it would certainly make my life easier- and I may even end up answering that email you sent me ten months ago.

A Message To Architects of the Past, and the Future

2007-06-23T19:01:00.000-07:00

Here's a suggestion: If you're going to name your building the 'Steel Building,' make sure it's made out of, you know, steel.

Slapping a steel entrance, oddly reminiscent of a 1930's robot, onto your extremely conventional brick building doesn't make it right.

Extensive Googling failed to turn up any substantive information about why this building wears its misfit name. In the absence of any actual facts, I'm going to presume it was the headquarters for some minor steel industry office in the past, and they didn't deem it worth going over the top with an all steel building (unlike Alcoa, who use aluminum in their offices as much as possible).

Real world architects aren't the only ones guilty of hyperbolic naming. Information architects, and the marketing departments they support, are quite fond of declarations that don't quite fit the structure they're stamped on... for instance, can there really be 109,000 "premiere online destinations" on the Web?

Similarly, is your website really 'easy to use' if you feel compelled to issue a press release explaining that you now have an index page that links to other pages on your site? Holy New Web Paradigm, Batman!

A truly great interactive experience, like a real steel building, doesn't have to label itself as great. Hopefully architects of the future- both structural and informational- will resist the temptation of patently false claims (such as this page that is inexplicable returned by a search for 'simple instructions').

Seven Sevens

2007-06-22T05:21:00.000-07:00

Tonight I had dinner with an old friend and a group of young Drupal architects. Their company, Lullabot, has enjoyed great success, and they described how it grew organically from the two founders to an organization of about a dozen rockstars. At that point I reflexively said, 'Stop at 45!'

The 'Bots were understandably curious about that arbitrary number, so I explained how I have been a member of several startups- all of which ceased to be 'fun' places to work around when they crossed the 50 person mark. However, I couldn't exactly target why this was the case.

Further discussion and subsequent pondering led me to a realization that 50 is just a hair over seven groups of seven. There seems to be something resonant about the number seven in the human calculus; besides all the seven references in our culture (seven days a week, seven seas, seven years bad luck) there also appears to be a hardwired capacity to manage information in groups of seven. Usability professionals speak of the (sometimes derided) 'seven plus or minus two' rule when designing interactive experiences- a menu with three items seems like too few to be consequential, whereas a side nav with twenty items is an overbearing list.

Just as web designers tune their sitemaps to achieve perceptual comfort in their information architecture, it appears humans prefer to build their social structures in similar fashion when creating organizations where interdepartmental communication is important. The department I am currently part of, while a sub group of a much larger organization, operates in a close-knit startup fashion- and yes, there are eight sub groups, each with roughly 5-9 employees (Two of the smaller groups could arguably be lumped into a single function if not for the presence of two VPs in the top roles, thus crowding what would otherwise be a streamlined org, bringing us down to seven groups).

Like a burgeoning website losing the familiar and personal touch of its quaint beta days when it begins to add more sections and navigation layers, a company that expands beyond the seven sevens becomes too large to be your extended family anymore. You cease getting to know new employees personally, and start to define them via their job functions first and personalities second. You pine for the 'good old days,' when things seemed less complicated even though the workload was proportionately higher. You tighten your circle of mental responsibility to those in your department, and suddenly you're not pulling for the company as a whole, but for the success of your circle vs. those in that other, suddenly foreign department.

These small association groups can be extremely powerful- enough so to jump apparent gaps, like an electrical spark. My small division has been thrown into the mix of a joint venture between my company and a traditional competitor- yet the virtual teams have melded together into strong working groups of about- yep- seven full time individuals (I have a hilariously uniform org chart devised by a consultant who I suspect did not ponder the metaphysical implications of their perfectly aligned Excel spreadsheet).

So it's all well and good when we can organize according to our psychological imperative- how touchy feely. What happens when this guideline breaks? My experience shows that it creates a flawed organization.

In my previous job, my boss received instructions from above to maintain a 'flat' organization- reduce the number of levels between him and the lowest employee, in an effort to reduce bureaucracy and increase accountability. As a result, he ended up with 18 direct reports- all of them design managers rolling up to his VP level position.

Each of these managers, in turn, led a team of one to three designers, each dedicated to a particular business unit in the company. The result was nearly universal dissatisfaction- operating in micro-teams, the designers had no clear relief when their workload exploded; two more hands on each team would have led to more psychological comfort that help was available for those overflow events.

Meanwhile, the eighteen design managers had less than 15 minutes a week of interaction with their manager, whose communications would often come in the form of late night email responses to inquiries sent weeks before and likely outdated by the time of reply. Finally, the VP himself was run ragged, exhausted by having to keep track of 18 teams worth of status and continually falling behind on tasks both mundane and important- he simply had too much on his plate. Additionally, he wasn't doing his career any favors, because he never had the time or mental bandwidth to demonstrate to *his* boss that he could be a strategic leader instead of a frantic email responder.

The ultimate conclusion? The entire department was killed in a fiery bus crash when the VP fell asleep at the wheel. Actually, nothing that dramatic- the VP asked for and received permission to reorganize his department, raise a couple of lieutenants to Director level, and restore harmony and balance by moving to a more reasonable number of subgroups to manage (I'll let you guess the number). I hear it's a much nicer place to work nowadays.

The next time I have to design a department org chart maybe I'll apply some guidelines based on this seven sevens concept- and decree that managers and directors can have no more than seven directs and seconds, and VPs can have no more than seven directs. It may lead to some interesting dynamics and efficiencies in organizations where problems are typically solved by throwing bodies at a them- if a manager knows they only have a limited number of resources, I bet they'll make sure they have the strongest candidates possible in place, and be more vocal about copping to their limitations and asking for cross departmental help or relief when faced with a sudden overflow situation.

Would such a structured and rigid policy be a help or a hindrance to organizational success? I suspect the former, as project failures are usually attributable to human inabilities to recognize self-limitations. Perhaps by imposing ground rules that restrict us to our psychological comfort zones we can reduce that source of project uncertainty and failure.

At the very least, it will result in some very pretty org charts.

Earth Friendly Crusaders or Ironic Parasites?

2007-06-20T19:43:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading a story about Freeganism on the New York Times website. In a nutshell, they are a social movement that attempts to reduce their impact on the planet by living off of other people's castoffs.

On the face of it, their story is a good soundbyte...they are the ultimate recyclers, extracting everything from household goods to food from the considerable piles of garbage generated by our capitalist society. However, like most good soundbytes, it starts to ring hollow upon deeper analysis.

The Freegans are railing against the very system that allows their lifestyle to exist. Without the constant churn and turnover of consumer goods, and the excess wealth created by the productivity consumerism incentivizes, there wouldn't be dumpsters full of mostly functioning consumer electronics and conveniences for them to raid. Visit an impoverished country like Mexico or Malaysia, or any of the myriad African countries Marie hangs out in, and you'll see this phenomenon happening as a well defined part of the economy. There are no piles of anything worth taking in the hills outside of Ensenada... the locals have made an art out of squeezing every last bit of function out of everything they've got, and not because they're trying to make a statement.

Back here in the states our Freegans don't even bother to stockpile food- because they know there will always be more in the trash tomorrow. So, the crusaders against waste are comfortable in their lifestyle precisely because of waste. It's no surprise that the movement is strongest in New York City, our country's greatest concentration of wealth and population (and garbage) in a single area.

So what is this post doing in a blog about invention and interaction?

I'm irked by the statements of some of these individuals, well meaning as they are, because they are only able to sustain their lifestyle due to the inventions of others. They could have even less impact on the earth by moving out to the wilderness, and living on what they 'find' out there- but I suspect not a one of them would last a week without the goods and services designed, produced, and delivered by those more industrious and productive than them. The goals of Freeganism and the discipline of design are the same- to improve the world. However, the designer wishes to devise, to create, to improve that which exists in order to foster a positive change- it's would be unthinkable for a designer to stand up and says, 'Let's not do anything new, and just try and reuse what we've got.' Whether it's vapid consumer goods or a bionic arm for amputees, it takes a desire to improve the world- or at least your own economic situation- to make things happen. All I expect from the Freegans are more wacky human interest news stories with sanctimonious statements about all the detergent we throw away.

To me, the real irony will come once commercial recycling becomes effective and automated enough to make it worth mining the trillions of tons of junkyards and landfills out there (I'm convinced this will be a booming business within twenty years). Suddenly, the Freegans will be competing in the garbage heaps with robotic recyclers out to make a profit from the base elements in the garbage- and their way of life will be extinguished by capitalist dumpster divers mining refuse for a living.

Why Safari on Windows? Here's Why.

2007-06-15T09:05:00.001-07:00

Om Malik asks, 'why Safari on Windows?'

Om notes that alternative browsers don't thrive on the Windows platform, and that releasing software (even a free browser) to the wider Windows platform opens Apple up to the slings and arrows of outrageous (and unfriendly) pundits.

Om speculates that Apple's motives center around switchers- the more Apple interfaces you can acclimate Windows users to prior to their switch, the easier the transition becomes.

I think there's a more subtle, longer term motive to this plan, and it can be summed up in one Ballmeresque sentence: "Developers, developers, DEVELOPERS!"

Here's my reasoning:

1) The iPhone runs Safari.

2) The only way to write 'apps' for the iPhone is to create Safari-compatible widgets.

3) Making Safari available to Windows users makes it easier for Windows developers to create iPhone widgets, widening the pool of potential iPhone developers by a factor of 10.

Safari on Windows, and all the costs and PR headaches that go along with it, are a component of Apple's master plan to democratize mobile application development and create a platform owned by device makers (like Apple) and less dependent on carrier control.

iPhone: Crippled Also-Ran or Clever Revolutionary?

2007-06-13T06:36:00.000-07:00

In the wake of Steve Jobs' Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, there's been a firestorm of discussion regarding the lack of a 'true' SDK for the much-anticipated iPhone. Most of the negative feedback centers around the assertion that without the ability to write 'true' software apps for the iPhone, Apple is shutting out development of really useful apps. Instead, developers (and by extension, users) will have to make do with widgets- AJAX applications designed to execute in a browser running off information stored on servers.

The interactive experiences I invent are pretty much all browser based applications, so I come into this argument with a bias- but what truly interests me is not what I can get out of the iPhone. In this case, I'm more interested in the business perspective, and what this decision will do to the mobile platform in general.

In my work, I speak with interactive professionals who work in the mobile space, and their #1 complaint is the endless multiplicity of platforms they need to develop and deploy to. #2 is the management layer of the various carriers who control those platforms. As a result, it's a lot harder to gain a critical mass of users in the mobile application space than in the web space- there's no equivalent to making a quick Flash game and having it available to 90% of users overnight.

If you're a web designer, the situation is akin to their being fourteen different browsers you would have to build and test for- plus, these browsers operate differently for Yahoo! users, for AOL users, for MSN users, etc.

Despite its apparent popularity, the iPhone isn't going to change this situation overnight. Even Apple has stated they'd be happy with a 1% marketshare in 2008- that's not going to represent a market mover in terms of platforms.

Instead, I think what Jobs & Co. are doing is more subversive- they are democratizing the mobile application space. That's the core of the dismay we're hearing from developers- the flip side of their argument (they can't make real apps) is that AJAX apps are somehow fake. This is an echo of the old back end vs. front end non-argument that erupts all over the interactive industry map when web developers meet software engineers.

When all it takes is a copy of Dreamweaver, and O'Reilly book, and some copy and pasted Javascript to make a web app, we will see an explosion of single purpose widgets proudly proclaiming their iPhone compatibility. Most of these will be utter rubbish- and the message boards and ratings on Hotscripts and Versiontracker will serve to banish them into well deserved obscurity. However, some will be gems- as a frequent air traveler and motorcycle rider, I rely on the OS X Dashboard 'Radar In Motion' widget to predict whether I will be delayed or drenched. It is completely immaterial to me that this widget is just an HTML fragment and not a compiled blob of code- it does what I need it to do, elegantly and conveniently.

No matter how many Diggers cry foul, when Jobs stands up at Macworld San Francisco and proclaims that thousands of apps for the iPhone have been developed since launch, no consumer is going to care that they aren't 'real' apps. All they are going to care about is: Does this widget let me do something I couldn't do, or make something easier to do? I firmly believe that all the 'fake' developers need is imagination, insight and focus to supply that user experience, despite the sandbox Apple is making them play in.

Not So Smart Phones

2007-06-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

As part of my job, I carry a Blackberry, which I use as a mobile phone, an email client, and a web browsing device. It has undeniably benefited my productivity and flexibility- I'm tapping this note as I wait in a train, stopped in a tunnel for some unknown reason- but through my incessant usage I've identified some ways in which it could be enormously improved:

1) Always show the time!

The only screen in which the time is visible is the 'home' screen, which is only visible when I'm either doing nothing, or in the process of selecting an app to launch. Once I'm actually doing something (such as composing this blog post on the train) the current time is hidden, and I would have to save this message as a draft and exit the 'mail' application, or look at my watch- which seems like a brutish workaround for an otherwise advanced piece of technology.

2) Allow sensible multitasking

Multitasking has different demands on a mobile device than a desktop computer- it doesn't make sense to have both your web browser and your email client open at the same time, due to limited screen real estate and the methods of interaction unique to mobile email and web. However, there are times when I wish for at least limited multitasking- mainly when I'm using the Blackberry as a phone. Typically, I'll be gabbing away on the phone and the individual on the other side will ask me about my availability for a meeting, or need some info from an email I've sent or received- and I'll have to apologize, explaining that the info they need is on the device I'm using to speak with them, and that I won't be able to access it until I terminate the call.

This may be a limitation of my current device- a corp-issued Blackberry 7250- my carrier's version of the software, or even myself- there may be a way to swap into another app while I'm talking. If there is, I haven't found it- during a call all I see is a button indicating how to end the call. Being able to look up contacts or access email during a call would be a welcome improvement (and something I seem to recall was possible on my dear departed Sidekick II- but that may just be nostalgia talking).

3) More info about incoming email, please!

Similar to the note above about poor multitasking, I'd like some more informative notification of the content of incoming e-mails.

When I'm tapping away at an email, or browsing the web, new incoming email is denoted by a blinking red light on the device. Urgent messages from my boss get the same treatment as a piece of spam... blink blink blink. If I want to stay on top of incoming emails I need to interrupt my session to view the latest messages.

A brief popup preview, with the subject, sender and first line of text, overlayed on the top of the screen would be extremely helpful. If it's something I want to see, I could 'jog' up and select it to view the full message, or I could 'cancel' to dismiss it if its presence offends me- or I could just wait a few seconds for it to disappear on its own. Either way, I could continue my current task secure in the knowledge that I wasn't missing anything important.

4) Spell check- even a painfully slow one, please!

This entire post was tapped out on my Blackberry- it's how I pass the time on various trains and buses I travel on each day. The email composing software is savvy enough to catch common misspellings- it will automatically correct a transposition in 'their' for instance- but it falls down in both grammar (it won't catch the dropped 'd' in 'peas an carrots') nor will it catch longer manglings, such as 'portotyppe'.

This weak spellchecker is unfortunate, since the cramped ergonomics of the thumboard and the pint sized screen make it more likely that I'm going to commit a typo. I understand that space and processing power are limited on a handheld. How about a function where I can submit my composed email to some online spell checker that then returns it with errors flagged along with a little XML payload that lets me choose from possible guesses? Google and Blogger seem to do a pretty good job with online spell checkers- I'd wait ten seconds for a submit and response if it means a cleaner outgoing email from my Blackberry.

I suspect some or most of these shortcomings will be addressed by upcoming handsets, more purpose built for mobile work (such as the iPhone) and more aware of the challenges and opportunities posed by mobile multitasking. None of my requests require new technology to be developed- they just require some thoughtfulness and good interface design.

Information Overload Hacks, part 2

2007-06-11T05:50:00.000-07:00

In my last post in this thread, I wrote about a corporate cry for help- the internal '24' campaign at a big-name branding agency, designed to create a sense of urgency around emails and voice messages that reference the numeral '24.'

I by no means blame the individual or organization for succumbing to a social hack to solve the problems of information overload, as the issue they're grappling with affects all of us in the connected world. Fred Wilson went so far as to declare email bankruptcy- the public admission that he could not keep up with the constant flood of emails that trickle in throughout the day.

The root of the problem is not that our society is flawed, or that people are workaholics and send too many emails. I blame email itself- the medium, and the technology that expresses it. Like an aging trolley system in a burgeoning metropolis, email has failed to keep up with the task at hand.

The problem with email is that the presentation obscures the important information. We each receive emails of wildly varying importance and urgency each day, but aside from some incredibly minor interface elements (a tiny '!', or language in the subject line ('URGENT' or, at the company I mentioned, '24'), there is no immediately obvious way to differentiate the noise from the truly important emails.

Instead, you begin to methodically examine each email:

- who is the sender? Is it an important colleague, client or loved one?
- if one of the above, does the subject line reference anything I am especially interested in, or does it de-escalate the message urgency or interest?
- assuming the message passes one of the tests above, you then need to open the email, read and evaluate the contents, and then make a decision- reply? Trash it? Defer it for future action?

While the three steps above are simple in themselves, the true cost comes from the frequency and variability of the action. Making hundreds of such evaluation / decision loops a day would be fairly easy if you were inspecting identical flower pots on an assembly line for defects- the work would become automatic, and you might even describe it as mindless. That's because you would be able to focus on the small set of possibilities in each decision set- is there a crack in the pot? Is the rim malformed?

With corporate email, the scenarios you need to instantly load into local memory, evaluate, and render a decision upon are fairly endless- anything (in my case) from obscure automatically generated emails informing me of a forgotten contractor's building access expiring or some helpdesk in India failing to receive my expense receipts, to cloaked cries for help from a staffer unhappy with their job and their relationship with their coworkers. The danger I find is missing the latter in the flood of the former- but ignoring the 'noise' brings its own risks (I've suffered the wrath of the expense receipts department before, and I dare not repeat).

The constant mental switching is what tires us out and frustrates our desires to find continuity and focus in our daily lives. I hear it all the time when staffers feel like they are being unduly buffeted by administrative or procedural requests- 'I just want to come in, sit down, and do my job.' They (rightly) don't consider the constant peppering of emails from all points of the compass to be part of their core duties, and they fear it endangers their ability to succeed at what they were hired for.

Ok, I promised a solution in the last post, and I'll deliver- I think the problem can be mitigated by rethinking what e-mail is, and how email clients work. Obviously, changing a piece of software is not going to alter patterns of behavior that have emerged as part of the information economy, but it will prevent email from taking a bad problem and making it much, much worse.

The core of the problem lies in email's weak answer to the question of importance sorting- the current framework puts the onus on the sender to indicate importance to the receiver. How in the heck is someone external to me, possibly by thousands of miles and several organizational rat mazes away, supposed to know what I'm most concerned about in any given moment?

Email, and all similar messaging, must change to be more user centered- to be more aware of the context in which the receiver is evaluating the messages. It must give the user control- not to sort, delete, or search emails, that stuff has already been developed within its limitations. Email must evolve to the next stage, where it becomes a partner to help you understand and evaluate the incoming information, and provide clarity and control over your precious decision making time and mental bandwidth.

In my third and final post on this topic, I'll outline what a next generation email application that performs these functions might look like, and what it's going to take to get us there.

Beta: The 'Under Construction' of the Aughts

2007-06-06T19:14:00.001-07:00

Does anyone remember this icon?

It was the image you placed on your website back in the '90s to signify that you weren't quite done with the page, and that the viewer should pardon any poor table alignments, or groovy background images that didn't tile correctly, or perhaps your accidental wrapping of the entire site text in an unfortunate blink tag.

The usage of these icons faded away once web designers clued up a little, and realized that the best web pages were continually evolving- and that you did no one a favor (most of all, yourself) by pointing out the deficiencies of your creation.

Fast forward to the present, and we have the concept of 'Beta.' Slapping a Beta tag on your otherwise open and functional site signifies that you're not quite done with your app, and that the user should pardon wonky CSS, or a Flash movie that doesn't quite play right, or the bad Ajax that makes your text blink every time the user moves their mouse.

Today, I sat in a room of interactive professionals helping to conceive of a next generation user experience around media consumption, and I challenged them to live without the Beta crutch. If we're going to have a Beta, let it be a real one- with a closed, limited group of beta testers, who are tasked with running the site through its paces and reporting on any last minute tweaks and fixes that need to be made.

I think Beta goes both ways- it can be an excuse for limited or half-baked functions, but I bet it sometimes appears when the site owners want the aroma of a fast-paced, innovative release cycle, rather than a cautious, test-until-it-works old school model.

My advice to would be Beta launchers: If it's just a launch where you didn't get everything in there that you wanted, call that version 1 and pick up version 2 where you left off.

With The Spinning Blades, and the Screaming...

2007-06-05T05:14:00.000-07:00

Seen on the Captivate elevator screen this morning:

"Lawn mower accidents- all of them preventable- send 9,400 kids to emergency rooms each year."

OK, so I understand the point of putting 'preventable' in the sentence, to increase the senselessness of the carnage. However, doesn't it beg the question of what an unpreventable lawn mover accident looks like?

"We were walking on the beach... nowhere NEAR a lawn... when the mower emerged from the waves and bolted up the sand, shredding sunbathers left and right! We tried to run, but it happened so fast- there was no way this could have been prevented!"

Information Overload Hacks

2007-06-05T05:11:00.000-07:00

I had a meeting at a big-name branding agency today, and saw something that reminded me how much work we user experience professionals still have to do to make technology really useful for humans.

It was a poster on the bathroom door, with a giant numerals '24' on it. The text of the poster outlined the new office wide '24' initiative- any message (email or voice) that referenced '24' in the subject or body was to be acted upon, responded to, and satisfactorily resolved in 24 hours.

This amused, saddened, and enlightened me all at the same time. It perfectly illustrates how humans make up for deficiencies in applications by hacking around them out of desperation.

Doesn't just about every email system have a method to mark an email 'Urgent?' I can only assume that so many people marked emails 'urgent,' that eventually that function lost its meaning. I bet at that point, users started to add the word 'URGENT' in all caps to messages, until that method was likewise ignored.

Somewhere, someone dropped the ball after ignoring too many 'URGENT' emails, and an operations lead decided the way to reset the urgency meter was to introduce a novel way of indicating something is 'urgent,' some way that people had not yet developed an immunity to, and then reinforcing it with a company wide awareness program using official posters to impress the seriousness of the 24 initiative.

I can just imagine that the overloaded office drones, informed via poster of their misbehavior and the new top down initiative to correct it, began to immediately subvert the system with messages like:

24- lunch plans

Hey, what are you doing for lunch today? 24.

- since that is obviously a question that must be answered well within 24 hours, otherwise it's hopelessly out of date.

The effectiveness of this policy will be directly proportional to its enforcement. Will the first person to take 26 hours to reply lose their job?

Next post in this thread: attacking the root of the '24' problem.

We're All Nodes Now

2007-04-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

Sometime in the last year, I became a node in a network.

I got a preview of it when I carried a Sidekick, and left myself logged into AIM 24/7. I'd wake up to collected IMs- fragmentary missives from those too lazy to write an actual email- stacked up on my device. I'd answer those from the logged in and defer those from the disconnected, and go about my business.

At that point I was like a store and forward server- always available, but with an expectation that my network activity was sporadic and time insensitive. I might ping back in a second, an hour, or never.

The qualitative shift came when I turned in my personal Sidekick for my corporate Blackberry. Suddenly, my network participation was sponsored by my employer, and a new set of expectations came along. I received an email from my superiors one Monday that I was expected to have my Blackberry on all weekend, and to respond in a timely manner to messages and emails. The network was imposing an SLA on me.

Now that SLA has gone down from 'timely' to 'instant'. In my position, I often participate in conference calls or meetings, and when I'm leading those meetings it's generally considered impolite to take a phone call and ignore the people sitting in the room with me. No matter to the other nodes trying to get in touch with me- if I don't pick up the phone, they send me an email or a text message demanding that I call back or pick up the next time they call.

The fact that e-mail, voice mail and text messages allow for asynchronous communication is meaningless to many of my fellow nodes. Secure in the knowledge that I have my Blackberry with me, they try every port available to yank my attention from the here and now for their remote intervention (someday, I'll finish my post about why the telephone, until very recently, was the worst invention of the millennium).

I typically don't respond instantly to these triple pings- if I didn't pick up the phone in the first place, there's probably a good reason. Furthermore, the frantic attempts to demand my attention often drop a return call to the bottom of my priority list, somewhere behind feeding my cat. At that point, I'd rather respond with an email, composed asynchronously and on my schedule, than get on the phone with a demanding node.

I'm a bad node.

So Funny, I Forgot To Laugh

2007-04-08T20:48:00.000-07:00

Why is it technology nerds think it's funny to change the name of an object of your derision to make fun of it?

[This post was inspired by, but is not directly about, the NBCU-Fox joint venture I'm involved in; it has generated a ton of commentary online, with a slew of 'funny names,' like Clown Co., MeeTooTube, NBCFoxTube, etc.]

I first ran into this odd phenomenon when I cajoled my Mom into spending the then-princely sum of $399 for a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer. I thought it was pretty slick, since it connected to my TV and allowed me to manipulate ANY ONE of eight colors on the screen, with an astounding 64 pixel resolution (for the entire screen, not per inch).

My elation at this device was dampened when I was informed by a fellow at school that I in fact had a 'Trash-80.' This bit of techno smackdown was delivered with a sneer.

Never mind that this kid wore flannel shirts that reeked so bad you imagined they could reproduce on their own. I was crushed- not only had my formerly cool computer been taken down a notch by this nascent technology commentator, but he had used its OWN NAME AGAINST IT! How subversive.

Years later, along came the Internet, and now I could communicate with millions of nerds, minus the pleasure of smelling their flannel. Imagine my surprise when I found that the practice of clever name changing was alive and well, and flourishing!

Off the top of my head, here's some of the more memorable fake name slams:

MicroSuck
MicroSloth
Micro$oft (Yeah, they make money, and therefore they suck!)
MicroShaft
MicroShit
Nutscrape (for the Netscape browser- what did it ever do to offend anyone?)
Internet Exploder
Crapple Computer
MacinCrap
MacinTush

These all share a single attribute: They are absolutely unfunny. They do not bestow a burst of insight, leading to laughter. They do not make you chuckle when you suddenly make the connection. They are embarrassing to the people who use them in earnest, and they are embarrassing to you, since you don't want to look like a spoilsport by pointing out that the person who just uttered a funny name is most likely a raving idiot.

These stupid, unfunny, soul-deadening silly names have been bothering me for so long, I was sure someone else must have written volumes about how stupid they were. However, I was unable to dig up any previous body of work on the suckyness of this 'humor' and its practitioners. Part of the problem was that I had some trouble even fashioning a search for it.

My first try:

'What do you call it when someone changes a name to make fun of something?'

came up with absolutely no usable results. I then ran my clumsy query through my, uh, brain and condensed it to:

'name change mockery'

This got me closer, but still no deep Internet store of derision and hatred; no extensive body of work deconstructing these alleged jokes and the alleged jokesters who use them.

I guess you have to start somewhere. I call on all bloggers to post up your opinions on this asinine 'Name Mockery'- unless, of course, you're one of the a-holes using Immovable Hype.

Har har har

Is this DRM's Katrina?

2007-04-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

The thing about those levees surrounding New Orleans was that they didn't have to collapse all the way... just one little section gave way, and the lake came rushing in. The force of the torrent eventually collapsed the rest of the barriers, but it must have started with a single drop somewhere...

This morning's announcement that EMI and Apple would offer DRM-free music would have been unthinkable just a few months ago- Jobs' original anti-drm manifesto was greeted with derision by many in the content industry.

I believe this is the pivot point...that in a few months, the unthinkable will be actually spending money, time and effort to encrypt files that are being purchased by those with no intent to steal anyhow (duh, they're already buying it), especially when there is an easy way to illegally copy and distribute the software using existing, widespread technology. Anyone can rip any CD using iTunes and post it anywhere- all the DRM on the iTunes music store wouldn't put a dent in that.

What WILL put a dent in that is punishing those who egregiously break the existing laws of copyright violation, while easing back on the witch hunt aimed at the people you should be rewarding - the ones who buy music in the face of easily available (and illegal) downloads.

Windows in a.... window

2007-04-01T06:34:00.000-07:00

Although I buck the corporate trend by using a Mac as my primary machine at work (I'm one of four in my 55-person group), I still need to occasionally use internal websites or utilities that function only on Windows.

In the past, I've had to go so far as to find a Windows machine that someone wasn't using and borrow it for five minutes to fill out a form, approve a ticket or take a 'preventing violence in the workplace' course. Unfortunately, tincupping for IE time on coworker's computers didn't help support my smugly superior Mac user attitude.

Thankfully, the fine people at Parallels have come to the rescue of my frail Apple ego. With Parallels Desktop for Mac, I can boot up Windows in a window on my desktop, and launch Windows apps like Internet Explorer and go about my business of learning why I shouldn't batter my subordinates.

Sounds like a good setup, right? Well, it gets better. Recent versions of Parallels allow me to shrink the Windows window down to the specific application windows I'm using- this is called 'Coherence.' This allows me to use Windows applications without having to look at the rest of Windows:

Since the distinction is rather subtle in this mode, that's a screenshot of IE running in Windows, acting like a windowed application within Mac OS X.

An interesting artifact of this method is that it's actually a better experience running Windows in this mode. Since all the hardware is virtual, Windows doesn't have to fuss about installing drivers for this screen adapter or that USB device- Parallels manages the inputs, and makes everything on my Mac look like a plain vanilla PC to Windows.

The lack of hardware predictability has always been Window's main downfalls; the Mac OS has the luxury of a limited set of hardware profiles to support. By relieving Windows of the burden of playing a technological twenty questions every time I want to change a setting, its user experience goes from actively frustrating to merely goofy.

Microsoft benefits by selling another instance of Windows (I had to pay full price for it, something like $300) since it doesn't come pre-installed with Parallels, as it would on a physical PC. Since I'm not trying to make Windows work with a homemade PC using a video card manufactured by Frank's Discount Electronics and Fishing Lures, they don't have to spend money on a support person to tell me it's not Window's fault that the machine isn't working.

Of course, this does throw a wrench into Microsoft's plan to be the software that runs everything everywhere- on my hardware, Windows is a effectively a very complicated and bloated application runtime environment, like the Java virtual machine or the Flash plug-in.

One of the arguments coming from the Mac camp against virtualization went something like this: When Macs can run Windows apps, no one will bother writing Mac specific apps, and that will eventually lead to the end of the Mac software market- we'll be forced to use Windows versions of everything from Adobe Photoshop to SpaceWard Ho!. That might have been the case when Macs had proprietary, unique, expensive hardware- but now that Macs have Intel inside like the rest of the club, and the cost differential between Mac hardware and its PC equivalent has narrowed or disappeared, I'm seeing a different dynamic at work.

The logic I'm hearing nowadays is 'Since Macs can run both Mac OS and Windows, why would I buy a machine that can only run Windows applications?' Hardcore developer colleagues of mine are now switching over to MacBook Pros, confident they can still boot Vista to do their industrial work, but switch back to the Mac OS to organize their photos or videos with the iLife suite, or do super-easy video chatting with iChat and the nifty built-in camera on all Mac laptops.

Apple loves this, since they make very little money off their OS anyhow- it's mostly a shiny toy to get you to buy their computers. If they can add 'Windows' to the list of applications that run on the Mac, then they've got the world's largest software company effectively marketing their machines.

There's a few ways this story can go from here, but I'll leave the wild-eyed extrapolation for a future post. Suffice to say this is starting to evolve along the same lines of other tech vs. tech stories- as the technology behind a market advantage becomes widespread and commoditized, other qualities, such as brand, ease of use, reliability, and customer focus begin to reassert themselves. Steve Jobs should be thanking Gordon Moore and his eponymous law for chips that are powerful enough to render moot the OS as the overriding definition of the computing experience, and let task-based applications float to the top based on their merit.

Why The Web Will Persist

2007-03-29T23:06:00.000-07:00

An odd little thought I had while tweaking my Blogger template: The Web is great because it's sort of sucky. Browsers haven't materially changed much since 1996, web pages have gained more media and styling but they are still spaghetti code wrapped around a glorified electronic Dewey Decimal System, and the majority of the stuff posted online is only marginally more interesting than random ASCII code.

However, I can go on this vast, unregulated wasteland, and post a comment on how much it sucks, and still have the potential to reach millions of people and waste their time with my worthless analysis. Now that's real ultimate power!

For a great contrast, poke around the 'special features' in your TiVo menu some time. It takes about 40 seconds to become totally, utterly, slack-faced bored with the uber-mediated media snippets they push to that menu backwater. Add the TiVo interface, which is AWESOME for flipping through stored video files but completely innefective in creating an immersive, branded experience, and you've got exhibit A as to why the Web hasn't been discarded in favor of some modern Minitel, castrated by a product developer's idea of a clean, intuitive interface.

Then again, I bet I can find a thousand similar posts on why the Web will never superscede Usenet.

For those of you with puny babies...

2007-03-29T13:56:00.001-07:00

Great Conan Clip

2007-03-23T12:47:00.001-07:00

Are you experienced?

2007-03-23T01:00:00.000-07:00

I've gotten some emails and phone calls fishing for information or opinion about today's NBC Universal/News Corp deal. While I don't specifically comment about my work on this blog, I would say that I'm bullish on our prospects. I've worked for both Fox and NBC, and they're both full of extremely smart, creative folks who know how to create an emotional connection with an audience.

The underlying subtext of much of the coverage seems to be that two 'old media' companies are going to have to learn to compete in a new space. That seems odd to me- both companies have been in the business of electronic distribution of content for some time now. I'd say this is a case of experienced vs. old- especially when it comes to the business of making money with video advertising, and other minor details like that.

What's everyone running from?

2007-03-17T05:03:00.000-07:00

While perusing the Web 2.0 Conference track, I noticed that a lot of the sponsor logos seem to be on the run...

I assume the running humanoids (and swimming cephalopod) are intended to represent that the companies in question are agile, responsive, and leading the pack- but clustered together, they leave me with the impression of an industry fleeing an unseen, Gojira style threat.

Well, whatever the reason, it beats a logo depicting a bunch of Playskool peg-people breaking and entering...

Finding Gigs: A Helpful Guide for the Recently Jobless

2007-03-15T05:45:00.000-07:00

While the job market is relatively hot lately, I've been running across more and more people who have recently left long-term positions at companies and are now looking for jobs for the first time in five or ten years. In speaking to these folks, it occurred to me that all sorts of new jobhunting and networking methods have evolved in the last couple of years that might be news to newly jobless workers.

As a person who has built two large teams in the last half dozen years, I found myself dispensing a lot of advice- and I finally decided to write it all down in one palce so I could just forward a link next time.

Note that the specific examples are written with a slant toward design professionals- but I suspect the techniques can be universally applied to any information worker who is web savvy.

---------------------

Here's some tips about quickly getting a lot of leads for gigs:

1) Set up Feeds for Craigslist

Sites like Monster.com have the sorts of jobs that HR departments put
up three weeks after a hiring manager asks them to. On the other
hand, Craigslist is often the place where people who have an
immediate need turn- mainly because it's so effective at turning up
dozens of resumes immediately.

Because of the number of applicants who typically reply to a
Craigslist job, the key to getting the gigs is to A) reply soon after
they are posted, and B) to reply in a manner that stands out from the
crowd.

A) Setting up a Feed from Craigslist

You can easily set up a feed of new jobs that appears in a feedreader
or in a feed module in a web page (such as My Yahoo or Google
Reader). First, go to your local Craigslist (in this case,
Washington, D.C.):

http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/med/

From this page, search on the term you want to find- let's say 'Art
Director':

http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/search/med?query=art%20director

When I did the search, it turned up 23 jobs, which is fine, but what
you want is to be able to monitor the new jobs without having to go
back to Craigslist every five minutes yourself. So- look in the lower
right hand corner of the page- you'll see a link marked 'RSS'. That
link leads to the following URL:

http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/search/med?query=art%20director&format=rss

You can follow that link, but you'll just see an RSS formatted XML
feed. What you really want is to plug that feed into an RSS reader,
either one that is a standalone application or a module on a portal
page you visit often (I have my feeds sent to Google Reader, which I
can place as a module on my Google Homepage). The feed will update
periodically and you can monitor new jobs as they come available.

B) Replying in a way that will get results

When I place a job on CL, I get a wide range of responses- everything
from a blank email with a resume attached, to a long, obviously
heavily scripted email with all sorts of long explanation and
hyperbole about being 'the perfect fit' for the job. Since there is
such a massive volume of replies, I typically gravitate toward those
who write a cover e-mail that indicates they've read my job
description, and gives a concise outline of why their experience is a
match and what their availability is. Those are the people I follow
up with- the ones who make it easy for me to evaluate and decide.

You'd be surprised at how few applicants write a concise yet
informative cover e-mail- I'd say about 10%. So although Craigslist
may flood a hiring manager with resumes, you can increase your odds
of a reply with some common sense in your email. Here's an example of
a type of email I react well to:

Hi,

This is in reply to your posted job for 'Design Director' on
Washington, D.C. Craigslist.

I'm an Art Director with 10 years of interactive experience. I've
designed both entertainment and finance websites, most recently with
America Online, where I was on the design staff for eight years. I
am a mid-level Flash designer (design mostly with light ActionScript)
and I'm extremely experienced with Photoshop and Illustrator. You can
view samples of my work at:

http://my.portfolio.com/

and my resume is viewable online at:

http://my.resume.com/

I'm available to work either remotely or on site starting Monday,
3/19. I am eventually looking for a full-time position but I'm
willing to freelance at first. References available on request.

Thanks,
My Name
myemail@domain.com
(917) 555-1212 mobile
(703) 555-1212 home

You'll notice that there's no text describing how thrilled you'd be
to work here, or how reliable and thoughtful you are, or how much
value you'll bring to the company- the text of the letter wasted no
words outside of the minimum necessary to inform me that you're
professional, courteous and qualified. A link to your online
portfolio and resume is a must, of course.

2) Watching the Feeds for companies getting funded

While you might not want to bet the farm on a startup, there's no
harm in getting a gig, especially from a startup that's flush with
recent investment capital. You can set up a feed from a news site
like PaidContent.org and receive daily notice of companies likely to
embark on hiring sprees, or needing to quickly spin up freelance
teams. Here's an RSS link to PaidContent:

http://feeds.paidcontent.org/pcorg

You can embed it straight in a feedreader from there. Right now,
there's a news story about TMZ.com opening a Washington office:

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-tmzcom-to-launch-dc-spinoff-called-tmzdc/

Sounds like a great opportunity to start making inquiries around
their local needs.

Obviously, once you find out a company is funded or expanded you
still have to get in touch with hiring managers, but you can often
find that information (and much more) on...

3) LinkedIn

Doing a search on LinkedIn for 'TMZ' turns up 9 people in my network
and 6 other people on LinkedIn. The last 3 people I interviewed at
NBC for a fairly high position (Product Marketing Manager) came to me
via connections or direct contacts through LinkedIn. Sure, anyone can
join LinkedIn, but the fact that I can easily peruse a person's
profile and see what they've been up to makes me more likely to
respond to appropriate people who contact me there.

Jobs are posted, but you can also just contact people at companies
you want to work at- the worst that can happen is they ignore you or
can't help you. I actually had someone contact me because they saw me
at an event sponsored by:

4) Meetup.com

Meetup has actually been really helpful in helping me increase my
personal profile- I joined two Meetups (a technology meetup and a
video meetup) and was asked to present my division's work at NBC at
one of them, which sparked a lot of followup contacts and networking.
You can find and join Meetups in a variety of places on
a variety of topics- here's one in the DC area that might work out
for a DC area designer:

Web Design & Combined Networking Group

http://webdesign.meetup.com/46/?gj=sj5

You might also see if there's one that focuses on the business or
technology side of things- at the monthly Tech meeting here in NYC
they are continually announcing needs to hire people at the Meetups.
Paradoxically, you'll probably find more opportunities at business
oriented meetups than design oriented meetups, since the biz folks
are the ones who need to hire the designers! In any case, it's a
great way to have an ear to the ground of what's going on in the
area, just like:

5) MediaBistro.com

http://mediabistro.com/

While less design oriented than Creative Hotlist, the people going to
this site are the project managers, producers, editors, etc. who work
on projects that need designers. They also host periodic networking
events- I think you just need to register and indicate an interest-
it's been a while since i signed up.

---------

These are the main venues I would look for gigs and contacts in- but every discipline has its own cluster of community sites and professional organizations, so the sites may vary for you. The biggest piece of advice I have is to get yourself out there and make it known you're looking for work. There's no shame in advertising your availability as long as you don't cross the line to spamming message boards and mailing lists. Good luck!

---------

Any updates, comments, quarrels, anecdotes, and further tips from jobhunters are welcome.

What to Wear When Pregnant

2007-03-01T09:43:00.001-08:00

Testing the nbbc Player at 300x250

2007-02-24T00:35:00.000-08:00

Obviously, needs a little bit of work to address the text funkiness- but it's nice to have a player that can scale to any available size in a page (this one is sized to fit in medium rectangle IAB spaces).

The Sad, Premature Death of the Widget Economy

2007-01-28T10:30:00.000-08:00

Aaron Cohen (CEO of Bolt.com) spoke at a local Video 2.0 Meetup last Thursday night, and tucked in the sweeping arc of an insightful discussion was one ominous note for the burgeoning widget economy.

[I'm using 'widget' to describe the broad class of mini-applications that are intended to be deployed on personal home pages, such as Netvibes or the Google homepage, or downloaded to be run in a desktop environment like the Yahoo! widgets and the Apple Dashboard widgets. Widgets are popular with consumers because they allow them to assemble personalized experiences using content and information from disparate sources.]

It's clear that widgets are hot- there are several companies out there dedicated to building widget ecosystems. I am sure that some of these companies will find varying measures of success, probably in the form of acquisition or technology licensing fees, vs. creating a networked economy that rides the various widget collection sites to runaway success.

The reason is the cyclical and inevitably cycle of ideation to realization that happens in software:

A new capability emerges
Smart people sieze on that capability to create things that let you 'do stuff'
Consumers, engaged by the novelty of the capability, do that stuff in droves
After a while many imitators emerge with similar capabilities, and the capability to 'do that stuff' becomes commoditized
At that point, only the companies who siezed on the attention garnered by their novelty to move their models to the next level survive as independent entities. The rest either fail, are acquired, or limp along as agencies / service bureaus / professional service firms.

I call this the 'feature company' syndrome. The test is to look at a company's offering- if your first reaction is, 'That's not a business- that's a product feature,' then you've probably spotted one. This idea has been covered before

Stu Phillips (the author of the linked post) implies that the only value in building a feature company is to own a category and wait for acquisition- which, from the point of view of a VC, sounds like a pretty good plan, I imagine. However, many of the founders of these companies have different ideas- they extrapolate a future where new behaviors emerge around their features, and as the category killers, they are immediately granted ownership of all activity around that capability. This is far-fetched at best, and delusional at worst- mainly because the widget makers typically don't own the two most critial pieces to next-level success- content and distribution.

Which brings us back to Aaron's talk, and the inevitable reference to the 800 pound gorilla of widgets- YouTube. Every widget company's business plan is going to have a reference to YouTube gaining wide distribution through web page embeds, and then flipping over to Google for $1.65 billion. Cohen argues that rather than proving the viability of widgets, this story actually just proves that MySpace is good at generating page views, which YouTube parasitically exploited to gain enough streams/users/eyeballs/buzz to become an acquisition target (because Google certainly didn't acquire them for their technology or revenue strategy).

Furthermore, by becoming a very visible widget 'success story,' YouTube has ruined it for others who want to build vast distribution without paying for it- MySpace is rumored to be planning to exact a toll for using their platform, which will inhibit others who are looking for a free ride on their page-view highway to success (Om later prints an email from Fox denying that they have any plans to charge for widgets, but Young does not retract).

This plan may backfire for MySpace, who are starting to exhibit an inward-looking attitude perfected by AOL in its early years- but it's really the only thing that they can do now that they are owned by a public corporation, and are no longer in the business of squandering investor money to acquire users. I bet they feel like they've got enough critical mass so that they can swap out all the third party widgets that made MySpace actually useful and interesting and replace them with internally developed tools that keep the monetization loop all in the family, and their userbase will mostly not care (and I sort of agree).

So, if widget makers have mostly missed out on the free MySpace ride to wide distribution, and their technology is commoditized to the point where it's not worth acquiring, and they don't own content compelling enough to power viral distribution, what's their fate? They get to compete with each other to sell their services to the companies that hold the actual power in the widget economy- the content owners and the distribution platforms. Unfortunately for those with the grandiose plans, servicing the economy is not as attractive as owning it.

Whip until frothy.

2007-01-25T07:18:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the wonders of >nbbc syndicated video, I have learned that you can't make an omellette without breaking a few eggs.