hello typepad

If you want an invite to the latest beta, just kick off the forgot your password flow. Usually a user will be created for you. 99% of programmers would fix this, but during the alpha & beta process this kind of thing usually falls to the bottom of the list. See also Andre's How to Clone Delicious in 48 Hours.

Scouting What Remains Of The Ship’s Mast

Inside A Williamsburg Bar That’s Been Boarded Up For Nearly 19 Years: "‘There was a silver fringe curtain and you never knew what would come out of it. The first time I went, I was thinking it was right out of a David Lynch movie. Maybe 20 minutes later the midget from Twin Peaks came out and danced around; his name was Michael Anderson.’"

I do try many times a season to put Alison [Brie] in a situation, wardrobe-wise, that I know is going to end up as an animated GIF file! I observe that stuff and the way people are consuming it, because I'm a nerd too and I love to obsess about my favorite TV shows.

via www.iwatchstuff.com

Amazing! I think 30 Rock does this too. Of course we should have anticipated the trend would work its way into television. These GIFs would make a good coda to Anil's treatise on animated gifs.

Jeremy

From Bill Simmons' All-Linsanity Mailbag:

Q: I was walking my dog and like every other Asian-American in America, watching every Jeremy Lin youtube clip I could get my hands on and realized that Jeremy Lin sounds EXACTLY like Matt Saracen. Then I started to delve a little deeper into this half-baked thought.

1. Both were thrust from outsider status into the spotlight under unexpected circumstances and subsequently thrived.
2. They are both quiet, humble leaders, and their teammates love them.
3. Both became instrumental to their team's success and turned around what seemed to be hopeless seasons.
4. Seriously, have you listened to JLin talking? It's uncanny!
5. They're best friends with a guy named Landry."

That is incredible!

It's Just Jeremy

From McSweeney’s, Jeremy Lin Has Helped Me Through Some Pretty Tough Times:

Jeremy Lin has given me hope as a young Jewish athlete from the suburbs of New Jersey. Although he has recently come out as Taiwanese American by nationality, Christian by religion and a native of Northern California, it is clear he is Jewish by spirituality and, according to my uncle who works near Madison Square Garden, studying at a Rabbinical school in Paramus.

The arrival of Jeremy Lin in the city is the closest we'll get in our lifetimes to witnessing a superhero's origin story outside the pages of a comic book. Just as Superman, Spider-Man, and Batman before him, Jeremy Lin is someone that could not have been anticipated — I think that ESPN was able to dig up a scout that spoke warmly about Jeremy Lin three years ago, but that's it. Jesse Eisenberg rewrites his personal history above; schoolyard bullies are sent away in favor of geeks, a school play is cured of it's awkwardness, kidneys being donated in a time of need. If a point guard, the first Asian-American starter in the history of the NBA can lead the Knicks on a six-game winning streak and break NBA records (both scoring and oops, turnovers, for a player's first five starts), anything is possible. This same spirit inspired me to use Mixel to replace fictional heroes with Jeremy Lin on the covers of their respective debuts.

New Yorkers know the Knicks are not one of the elite teams in the East (I'm not even a true Knicks fan, I save my rooting energy for the Mets), although they may finish as high as fourth. I see the model minority myth creep subtly (and not-so-subtly) into every corner of the sports & city sections and I wince a little bit. But for today, I simply want to appreciate Jeremy Lin, who has not only brought hope to Knicks fans, but also expanded the imagination of the city, a rare feat indeed.

From Checking Out, by Avi Steinberg:

According to our porn books, the library, once a hothouse of eros and a laboratory of realism, has become a burial site. But somewhere on those shelves there’s still a memory of when books were really subversive, when being a libertine was actually about Voltaire and freethinking, and young girls were guarded from the corrupting influence of novels. The fantasy of awakening the librarian is also a fantasy of awakening the subversive power of the book, of excavating life from a dying cultural monument—or else scratching a bit of graffiti on it.

via audrey

The Internet went out in our office this afternoon so I caught up on Instapaper (and by "caught up" I mean I archived 3 of around 500 remaining Instapaper'd articles). I was putting off Avi Steinberg's survey of librarians and porn (why??) but it's an engaging read. Happy Valentine's Day!

Cardboard Junkie (blogging)

In the greatest Ted talk of all time, Erin McKean said "the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm."

To this I would add "and pictures!" but I think she pretty much nailed it. Despite blogs dying every three months or so since 2002, I still read a few hundred of them (using Google Reader, and now also stellar), and I try to follow enthusiastic bloggers regardless of their expertise. Dayf, the Cardboard Junkie, is one such blogger (and conveniently I also love baseball cards). I was taken with his comparison of Topps' 2012 "Heritage" Card set, inspired by the 1963 Topps set, and the actual 1963 Topps Card set. Compare the uncut sheets from 2012 (on the left) and 1963 (on the right):

The Cardboard Junkie writes:

I know this entire post makes me look like the baseball card version of Jack Nicholson washing his hands 47 times an hour in As Good As It Gets, but it's just bad process. Aligning the page in the '63 style would have cost absolutely nothing extra and could have saved a whole lot of potential quality issues with the product. And it didn't even take a genius to figure it out, it would just take someone who was actually familiar with the history of the original set to copy the idea. If the new photo is actually how the uncut sheets are aligned, then I'll be very interested to see some of the inevitable Heritage ripping posts upcoming in the card blogging community for any weirdly cut cards with little slivers of color where they shouldn't be.

….

I just think that in a Heritage product celebrating the days of yore, it might be helpful to actually understand how it was done in the olden days when designing the product… Then again, just because your ship is unsinkable, it doesn't mean that it's a good idea to not bring enough lifeboats on your maiden journey. If you're gonna create a retro-styled set celebrating your Heritage, at least have one freaking person on the design staff, paid or unpaid who actually knows the history of the product and can use that knowledge to improve the new release.

I agree! But the problem is that Topps is actually the only company currently licensed to make cards, so we end up with a lot of (to borrow NBC's headline) "crappy baseball cards." I recommend Gary Cieradkowski's Infinite Baseball Card Set. Since he only produces cards of players from the past, or from fiction, there's no licensing involved. His work captures, better than Topps ever will, the spirit — not to mention the enthusiasm and heritage — of baseball cards. And blogging.

What Does this Make? Valentine's Day Edition

1/4 ounce gelatin

4 ounces Sprite

40 ounces powdered sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

via www.seriouseats.com

Welcome to Hello, TypePad's newest category: What does this make?

On Gamification

I enjoyed the Badgeville CEO's takedown of Foursquare on Techcrunch this morning. Here is a fascinating quote:

Badgeville Co-founder and CEO Kris Duggan pulls no punches when it comes to one of the most visible and early adopters of gamification, the check-in king: Foursquare. The CEO says that Foursquare was early in its attempts at gamification, but that its incentivization models remain fundamentally flawed.

Duggan points to the “Mayorship” system within Foursquare: “You have literally hundreds of people and only one mutually-exclusive point of recognition, the Mayor. What happens to the other hundreds of people? Not only are they not engaged, but you don’t take into consideration different types of users.” Duggan believes you need to engage not only the heavy user, but medium and light users as well. Rather than a one-size-fits-all methodology, you can appeal to each user type and incent them accordingly.

via techcrunch.com

I have a slightly different take. Just as there's not really a tablet market, only an iPad market, I don't think Gamification exists. I think Foursquare exists, and I think it's excellent. But besides Foursquare, has "gamification" ever meaningfully advanced a product?

I surveyed the community services I frequent - Metafilter, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, Mlkshk, Mixel. These services do present goals to their users and they have crafted a user experience that nudges them towards those goals - but they do it without points, ranks and the other mechanisms and patterns advertised in the Techcrunch post above. I also browsed the success stories and case studies of the companies linked from Techcrunch, and I couldn't find a single hit.

People love to share their favorite restaurants, bars and hangouts with their friends, and Foursquare built a fantastic engineering and product culture around that idea while creating real value for the venues & partners who pay the bills. As usual, the truth is simpler than it appears, and at some point people are going to wake up to the fact that the gamification industry is a scam. "Mayorship" was (and is) a fun conversation point, but it's never been what keeps people returning to Foursquare.

And as you've probably guessed, I don't think Gamification was a meaningful factor in Foursquare's success either. Foursquare made community outreach a priority both for the most active users of the mobile app and the merchants and restaurant owners who pay to see the other end of the Foursquare experience. Most businesses go to potential customers asking for a chance to demonstrate how they can create value, Foursquare walked in the door knowing as much or more about a restaurant's best customers than they did themselves — what specials are the most effective at bringing in new people, who are the best customers, where else they like to go, and so on.

Art History Through Sci Fi-Colored Glasses:

John Mattos took on Marcel Duchamp’s mechanically abstracted Nude Descending a Staircase and brilliantly reset it with C3PO. Then took Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians to the Star Wars’ Cantina.

Usually this kind of pastiche doesn't work that well, but these are great.