hello typepad

At my age, it’s supposed to be over for me. So I had to treat it as though it were over… ‘If I didn’t have a career, what would I do?’ I would try to learn.”

Good interview with NO I.D.

Welcome, MarsEdit 4

I'm certain the vast majority of posts I've written here have been composed in MarsEdit, and now there is a new version!

I happily paid to upgrade... now if only MarsEdit could somehow get me to write more!

via blog.blankbaby.com

"What the Betamax Case Teaches Us About Readability:"

Finally, this whole episode is a good reminder that the problems of the publishing industry haven’t gone away just because the world has gone digital. In fact, personal archiving is an example of a way it’s gotten worse. You never needed a ‘reading layout’ with a magazine or a newspaper because they were already optimized for reasonably efficient reading. Now layouts are optimized for ‘time on site’. You also never needed a separate service to help you ‘Read Later’ a magazine or newspaper because you could, you know, just read it later. As digital publishing continues to try and balance profits with audience satisfaction, you can expect many more debates like this from smart people like Anil, Gruber, and Zeldman. Just as it’s important for us to defend upstarts who fight the status quo, it’s also important to hold them to as high of a standard as we hold ourselves.

I'll blog more about this, but I love Mike Davidson's take on this weekend's scum-gate. From Anil's post, "The Price we Pay:"

Because when I would spend my time flinging zingers at Matt Mullenweg about the merits of Movable Type vs. WordPress, you know who was winning? Mark Fucking Zuckerberg. Facebook won the blogging wars. The web became a more closed place than if either Movable Type or WordPress had evolved into the tool that powered social networking.

An oversimplified post-mortem may be that Wordpress cared more about open source and open software, whereas Six Apart let people own their data — our terms of service was clearer about the ownership of hosted blogs, and the majority of authors used our installed tool (Movable Type). In Facebook's world, authors have given away more ownership & rights for their work and have less visibility into the software itself. In other words, the end result for users was negative in every way possible.

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.

Daisy's Blog Post

Over IM yesterday, I requested (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that Daisy write a post on pencil sharpening. Seriously:

Writers don’t write so that we can sit at home all alone with our cats and cheap grocery store wine while perusing our journals from high school. You think I wrote those journals for ME? Please. Every single word I’ve every written was in the hopes that one day—some day—I’d have an audience who wanted to read them.

…pencil sharpening stuff here…

So there you go David Jacobs. This is what happens when I can’t sleep at night and when I make a New Year’s resolution two weeks into the New Year that I’m going to post on my blog at least two times a week. What tough topic would you like me to tackle next?

Daisy notes how much I love her writing (I do). Between her blog, her regular column on sfist: "Daisy Does the Niners," and her run as xoJane's "sports gal," she's developed an impressive body of work. Even when she's writing a feature perhaps based on a forced conceit, she maintains a consistent voice and tone across titles & time. That's really hard to do! Cheers.

Of course every link from a blog is flattering — and more meaningful than than a twitter mention or facebook post — but it also struck me that Daisy joins a growing cohort of my friends who have re-embraced blogging in the New Year. People who love writing, and who want to build an audience of people who want to read said writing, are looking at Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and whatever else and are realizing it's simply not enough. I think that's interesting - it's going to be an exciting year!

Election Year Tech & Maps

@erikhinton
erik hinton Guys, I hope you are all ready for 10 months of tweets about reverse proxy caching and maps. #nov6giddyup
Jan 03 via Twitter for iPadFavoriteRetweetReply

The election season is a great driver of web innovation, because so many news organizations rely on these cycles for the survival of their business, and the spiky nature of election traffic & news is among the hardest to design for from both a presentation & infrastructure perspective.

Al Shaw reminds us of thinner. There are a lot of moonshine cache invalidation schemes, but thinner is pretty good. This is the year varnish becomes a part of the core stack formerly known as LAMP.

Mike Migurski designed a solarized stylesheet for Open Street Map tiles (available on github). In addition to being lightweight to render and easy to read on low resolution or small devices (like phones), these styles are beautiful. I'd love to see more people running tilestache instead of Google Maps for location projects. The same news organizations who have been relying on google for traffic and infrastructure are going to be looking for technology independence going forward — and an open maps component is a huge piece of that independence.

Speaking of maps, don't miss Slate's coverage of David Imus' handcrafted map of the US. Imus worked on this seven days a week for two years, examining (and usually adjusting) every text label, outline, and location. I'm not an über map nerd, but the attention to detail is breathtaking, and the improvements are immediately obvious even in the limited detail offered in the article above. You can buy the map on Imus' site.

I'd also like to follow up on my Mixel post from a few weeks ago. Paul Soulellis has decided on 16x24 prints on rag paper for the presentation of his mixes. They'll be up in Denver until Valentine's Day.

Morning Open Tabs

Path.app does not report the correct phase of the moon.

Edith Zimmerman on the Making of The Hairpin:

I don't read Jezebel -- and there's a reason for that, I don't want it to come off sounding like "Oh, I don't own a TV" or "I couldn't be bothered to read Jezebel." I love that site, I think it's fantastic. It's totally part of the reason I'm doing what I'm doing. But it has to do with one of the two pieces of advice that Alex gave me when we had that sit-down before the site started. One: "Be as weird as you can, just so it stands out. Because who needs a new website?" Two: "Stop reading all-women’s sites, just so whatever you do isn't even obliquely referenced or influenced by things you read elsewhere." So I just don't read any of them at all, which is a very easy way to answer your question. I mean I've totally been on those sites, and I know what they're like."

David Tate on "The Dangerous Effects of Reading":

If you quiet your mind and allow yourself to stop judging everything you will find that you have more potential for innovation (at work, in the kitchen, in the garage, in the bathroom [this just got weird - bringing it back], with your hobbies, with your thoughts) than you thought before.  You were using the same brutal quality filter on yourself that you used on viral videos, talk radio, and blog posts.  You deserve better."

David Tate is trolling here. There are reasons not to read or follow the work of folks in your space (as Edith explained re: Jezebel). Tate's post reminds me of productivity "experts" who are also legendary procrastinators. Consuming media quickly and efficiently is at the heart of remix culture, and when a product is built to produce microcontent that can be reused, people will be inspired to create.

@eqx1979
Chrysanthe Tenentes what good is an activity stream if i can't comment on the items? engagement comes from action, @twitter.
Nov 10 11 via Twitter for MacFavoriteRetweetReply

Even further along the tangent, Chrysanthe notes that engagement comes from action¹, and Matt offers a way to encourage that. I'd still like to be able to reply to or favorite favorites (especially ironic favorites).

Looks great, but this could have been blocked, right?

¹ At the time of Chrysanthe's tweet the activity stream was still in a nascent state, repeatedly reminding me that Anil Dash and Jake Dobkin were favoriting "a tweet."

On Apps

The main issue is that readers – paying or not – aren’t engaging with overtly magazine-like apps. There’s a simple reason for this: printed magazines work better in every way. They are a simple one-off purchase that can be used (both in a navigating and reading sense) anywhere. They are lightweight, easily shared and disposable. You’ve heard the arguments plenty of times but this first year of apps have done nothing to weaken them. Why would you buy an app when it only repeats the printed magazine?

via magculture.com and spd

Jeremy Leslie's thoughts are generally spot on, he is one of my favorite bloggers, and I am generally as inclined as anyone to embrace the idea of an iPadocopalypse when it comes to the current state of table application design. But I think it's a stretch to say "printed magazines work better in every way." Print doesn't work better for breaking news, interactive visualizations, collaborative real-time problem solving, blogging whimsical ideas that aren't print-worthy (a la The New Yorker), community, e-commerce, location-aware behavior or searching archives.

Right now many iPad apps are designed to replace what the print magazines do well, not augment what they do well with what the iPad (natively) does well. And that is the basic problem with most tablet apps today, especially the Adobe-produced behemoths that seem to be unfortunately gaining traction.

I'm oversimplifying Leslie's argument, he goes on to outline some new apps that he expects to be better, but I think that most people overcomplicate the problems publishers and marketers are facing right now. This is, of course, an opportunity to start over and do everything better.

Tim Fadek: Is Social Media Destroying Public Interaction?

Out of curiosity I went to the cocktail reception at the New York Public Library for the launch of Social Media Week. This is a yearly event, started in 2009, with a series of conferences to discuss trends in social and mobile media. This gathering I photographed was intended to be a social event to bring hundreds of social media executives together.  Maybe it’s a stretch, but I see irony here — guests seemed to spend more time with their phones than with each other.  This begs the question: Outside of virtual, online sociality, does Social Media make us more or less social in person?

via www.bagnewsnotes.com

Via @A_L.

What the Daily, Yo?

Why did I do this? The Daily's publishing free, web-based versions to every article, but without an index, it's very inconvenient to find or link to individual articles from the web. And since the iPad app appears to only carry today's edition, it makes finding any historical articles you've paid for nearly impossible.

Frankly, I'm also very curious about the legal implications. My understanding is that linking to public news articles is unquestionably legal, and I believe that right should never be discouraged. It's also worth noting that Google's slowly indexing all the articles too, and search engines aren't blocked in their robots.txt file.

via waxy.org

"The Daily: Indexed," is smart and saucy, Andy Baio at his best. Andy is an artist and a scholar at once. But why did The Daily launch without a homepage? Because they are trying to market it as a phenomena, not a really good blog with a pretty good iPad wrapper, which is what The Daily is.

Now that Andy's made an index, and we can browse the Daily as we do the Times (or other blogs), we can put aside our hipster swords and recognize that some of these stories are pretty good. For news, I still prefer Gothamist. It is updated throughout the day, so I know I will get the latest news, I find the comments both fun and insightful, and the design stays out of the way of the content.

And I have to admit, I'm cool on big geometric carousels, they remind me of the Phantom Zone in the Superman movies - as seen here (watch starting at :50 if you're impatient). UPDATE: This recut is a superior examplar of the phantom zone.