Showing only Notes + Links tagged the internet
I’ve never commented on the NYT before; that was kind of fun.
This guy’s like: “Oh god, can I Like this photo of people dying in Haiti?” and all of the Old People on the NYT are freaked out and suggesting new words, such as APPRECIATE (Marco: “because it’s better to APPRECIATE people dying it Haiti, right?”), and RECOMMEND or INTERESTED (wonder what that icon would look like?).
Also this is my favorite comment:
1. You don’t have to click on the Like button.
2. Instead of clicking on the Like button, you could have written something in response to the article’s posting.
3. You could have just done nothing — no one really cares about your opinion on their Facebook page posting.
4. Who cares?
5. Get a real job.HAH. People are the worst/best.
Hah is right.
Hey, ‘Friend,’ Do You ‘Like’ My Sad Story? — NY Times
I recently “liked” a story about five people dying in an explosion in Connecticut.
I didn’t actually “like” the fact that five people had died in a terrible accident. Technically, I didn’t even “like” the story — I found the reporting and writing informative and the narrative engrossing, but not the contents of the piece. On Facebook, however, the only option I had to tell people I had read the article was to either add a comment or press the little “like” button that appears at the bottom of everyone’s status update.
The same act of “liking” something applies to the Web site Tumblr. Several weeks ago, when I visited a friend’s Tumblr Web site, at the top of the page sat a series of photos from the devastation in Haiti. There were images of dead bodies, of toppled buildings and of a child crying in the street. Yet below all of this there were a series of tiny icons with people’s names saying they “liked” this set of images.
You can also find these strange juxtapositions on Google Buzz and on the fan pages of Facebook.
Although these calls for approval have been around for a long time on social networks, they can still be jarring and confusing when this terminology is used in the wrong context.
(via infoneer-pulse)
“Turbo“, 2008 by Baptiste Debombourg.
Tom Moody dissects this piece of “internet aware art” from VVORK, which he defines, in one sense, as “offline art made with internet presentation and dissemination in mind.”
Neat idea but it doesn’t need to exist as a piece—you have everything you need from the installation shot. The bulge, a gallery pole, and the human for scale. It reads as instantly and dramatically as an advertising image, with the “product” being an academic soundbite about patriarchal space rendered abject. Would this have been made without vvork.com and the internet to spread it around? Yes, it could be an image in an art magazine, but would it have survived the first critic’s visit who noticed the piece only “read” from a couple of angles and didn’t hold up to more than a few seconds’ study? Vvork means never having to explain—success is presumed.
One of my teachers says that a good work of art can’t be read like a sentence.
We have so many customers that I can’t always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them.
Joel Spolsky, in his announcement that he is quitting blogging. (via @caterina)
Spolsky has really interesting opinions on running a company (these are the posts that have always brought me to his blog) and I understand the whole corporate responsibility thing—grow the business!!—but it’s a shame that he’s quitting blogging because, he says:
- It’s too time consuming (no ROI)
- He has fished out the blog-reader-as-customer market
- He can’t please every single one of his customers while voicing his opinions.
He continues:
My hope is that giving up blogging and the rest of it will be the equivalent of making a cross-eyed kid wear an eye patch on his good eye for a while: The weaker eye will grow stronger*. My company needs to get better at what every other company already knows — how to promote and market products without depending on one single channel. We’ve completely saturated a small slice of the target market, and now we have to go after a much larger group of potential customers.
It just seems kind of sad to see businesses transition from startup to corporation and leave their voice behind.
On the advertising end of the communications spectrum, which Spolsky is hoping to skew towards, is this profile of pants-by-mail company Bonobos from AdAge:
Mr. Dunn says the company spent little on advertising until its second year when it took to Facebook with the slogan, “End Khaki Diaper Butt.” About 20% of Bonobos’ current base was acquired through Facebook. Because of its direct-to-consumer model, Bonobos can be efficient with ad dollars, tracking which sales result from a specific click-through behavior.
With the average Bonobos customer spending $200 on his first visit, Mr. Dunn drew up a cost-per-acquisition model that concluded the company can spend up to $100 per new customer and still have a profitable first transaction.
…
“You’ve got to focus on the product, not the marketing,” Mr. Dunn said. “If word-of-mouth isn’t there, it’s hard to get to those first 10,000 customers.”
Though the advertising clearly works, I’m wary of all this coming from AdAge (a publication about how great advertising is). But $100 per new customer is a pretty enticing number…imagine all the things you could do with that!
* Is that even true? Either way, best metaphor ever.
Around 13 Billion Years Ago, the comments on things that I post on the internet were contained in a tiny ball that could fit in the palm of your hand.
A couple of weeks ago the American Museum of Natural History (@atAMNH) tweeted:
I copied this into my notebook, as I sometimes do with weird little facts and phrases that I like, and also posted an inverted (space!) version on my Tumblr and Flickr.
There it sat in relative obscurity for the next few weeks, but today when I was checking my Flickr it reported a pretty big spike in views of this image tracing back to Tumblr.
It turns out that a Tumblr user named Blua who “doesn’t want to be famous on the internet” accidentally made me kind of famous on the internet by setting the ball rolling on over 700 likes and reblogs of my silly notebook page. Anyway, what I wanted to point out is how freaking hilarious some of the comments are—as in, they actually made me laugh out loud.
The fatalist:
*a tiny ball that could fit in the palm of your hand [whose gravitational field was so strong it would suck you in at a infinitely violent speed, rip your frail body apart, and most likely turn you into some inhuman matter after the big bang]. —insertironicsentiment
The realist:
except for, wouldn’t you also be in that ball? —auntumnwake
The romantic:
If i had that ball, i’d wrap it in ribbons and bows and give it to you. —richpickings
The skeptic:
no, i’m sure it wasn’t. —dvndvy
The evolution evangelist:
So really, I love this. I think the universe is so amazing and cool. It’s even more amazing that all these seemingly coincidence atoms created us! I honestly cannot understand why religious people don’t believe in evolution. Where did Cain’s wife come from, huhhh? Scientists often say that learning more of the universe makes them believe in God even more. And that’s true. The universe is such an awesome spectacular place. Full of mystery and some explainable phenomena. I can’t even contain how cool it is. :] —justlikeamy
The Quantum Mechanical theorist:
& then the ” Big Bang ” happened & what is holding the universe from expanding is called Dark Matter. —kdgutierrez
The teenage girl:
amazingggggggggggggggggg <3 —taniaa
Not even sure what to make of this one:
Our whole universe was in a hot dense state haha love the Big Bang theory :) —need-want-love
Echoing my sentiments:
This is somehow inspiring to me. —nikkiraffail
The Machiavellian:
i guess thats pretty cool… i could be the master of universe… woah :D —lehani
The pessimist:
now is just giant complicated shitness —reitarawrs
Thank you, internet. Have I mentioned how ridiculous and great I think you are?
YOU KILLED MY MOTHER CHOIRE. JUST LIKE THE INTERNET KILLED PUBLISHING.
A Conversation with Paul Ford, Web Editor of Harper’s Magazine | The Awl
All kidding aside—and there is a lot of kidding—this hilarious conversation between Chore Sicha and Paul Ford, (who has proven himself to be one of the brightest minds in online publishing, and whose taxonomized website Ftrain.com has been blowing my mind since a very long time ago) is really intelligent, interesting, and ridiculously fun to read.
Last week at 20x200 HQ I had a really interesting conversation with David about how people react to and share things on the web (new retweets vs old retweets, liking vs favoriting, rating by stars vs emotions, etc). That discussion led to talking about redundancy (e.g. reblogs, old reweets, where content gets copied over and over) and then to the general merits of having structured data.
When using blog oriented content management systems like Movable Type, a lot of repetitious information gets inputted in a non-systematic way. E.g. coding a link to a pop-up image into a text field, rather than uploading the image into a field designed for that specific type of image and having the system take care of the rest in a standardized way. The problem is that it’s not just difficult to write a custom CMS that covers all your needs, but also to find out what your needs are, anticipate future needs (lots of my job at 20x200 involves going back in time and filling in blanks or adapting unstructured data into the logical new system), and create a system that strikes a balance between total lack of structure and too-rigid-to-function. I half-joked that every single person should be required to write their own CMS.
I think some of the most compelling web content today is “bespoke” meaning it breaks out of the boring “text and images slopped into a pre-packaged template” and features posts which are still organized in a linear way, but designed individually with respect to the content. This seems to break away from rigid/templated/database-centric design, but I find that Ford’s Ftrain.com and Harpers.org, which don’t have custom designs for every single page, are equally—if not moreso—compelling. They evoke a sense of bespoke-ness not through a decorative custom design for each page, but through a handcrafted and thoughtfully considered taxonomy of their contents.
This is all a roundabout way of getting around to saying that Ftrain.com was the first time I realized that though one CMS may fit all, the magic really happens when an author takes publishing tools into their own hands. After experiencing Ftrain, I promptly went out and bought a book on XSLT, which I never read and am still too intimidated to tackle. I don’t even know if it’s still a relevant technology, but the point is that years later the idea is still not out of my head!
Paul Ford on the hierarchy of Ftrain.com:
Many people come back to Ftrain over a course of months of years before the structure makes sense, and then, they tell me, it suddenly makes perfect sense. The structure is an essential part of the site. So if you like the writing, but are put off by the structure, know that other people have felt your pain, but that sticking with it might reward you. Might.
Ftrain is a hierarchy. Any given page has one or more of parent, children, and sibling pages, and every page lives somewhere in the hierarchy.
The front page is the very top node of the hierarchy, and everything branches out from there.
On the front page are all the pages flagged for release on this day, or, if there are none, the most recent piece written.
If you use Mozilla, a recent Netscape, or Opera the wonderful “Site Navigation Bar” feature will also allow you to quickly race around Ftrain’s hierarchy.
You can also navigate chronologically, by following the “Navigate by Time” links at the bottom of the page.
Ftrain is this complicated because it has over 1000 separate nodes, all of them connected to one another in some way, with something like 700,000 words between them, and all extensible. It was designed to make it possible to tell stories over time, so that a piece begun in one year could be resolved in the next, just like it happens in life, but with the added satisfaction of narrative completion.
I think the navigation is an okay, but imperfect compromise between the technical and the prosaic, and will continue to develop it.
Time and time again I am hit with pangs of guilt when dashing off notes + links containing words like “bespoke” and “carefully considered” to my off-the-shelf solution that is Tumblr, but they have truly created a set of tools that make it sufficiently stylish and effortless to capture ideas. I have ideas for some changed or additional features for interacting with my specific type of content which extend beyond the scope of Tumblr, but who has the time or knowledge to code these dreams into existence?
Me? I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no. But it’s a good reminder that it’s time to brush up on my programming.
The days of an internet where every stumble was a moment of true discovery are gone forever, perhaps, as curatorial zeal fast overtakes quiet collectomania as the principle online activity.things magazine: an online journal about objects and meanings (via jomc)
Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Failure of Empathy
Fact:
As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service.
In other words, the iPad is (once the geeks get over it) the computer for people who don’t really care about computers. It sounds kind of antithetical because the device has caused such strong reactions among nerdy-types, but in the long term it opens the door for designers to create mind-blowingly intuitive, user-friendly* interfaces to accomplish simple real-world tasks (think reading, drawing, organizing; not hacking).
(via jenbee, who must’ve been reading my mind about what I was about to post)
* Where have we all heard that term before? It was, forever—and maybe still is—how most people describe the difference between Macs and PCs. Now “more user friendly” is the reason to switch from laptop to iPad.
The way [Pandora] hooked me in with the free hours made me feel like this is something I should probably pay for because I clearly value the service they are providing. Thinking about it more, this perhaps might be an interesting model for publishers. Not sure how it would work or if tracking time spent on a website is the way to go or not, but it would be interesting if content producers could come up with easily digestible measurements to show consumers how much they value the service or content that’s being provided. This would weed out the fickle viewers and for the power users it would make them realize how much they actually value the content they are consuming. The goal is always to hook your dedicated power users.
There are clearly some challenges to something like this, but from a psychological point of view Pandora has put me in a position where I understand how much I value their service and the great benefits I will receive if I subscribe. Regardless if I end up paying a subscription fee or not, they have made a compelling offer, and no matter what, that’s what content producers and service providers need to do. Make compelling offers and show consumers how much they value the content or service that’s being provided.
Bryan Formhals — la pura vida: You Are Running Out of Free Hours
The $6 purchase price of the McSweeney’s iPhone app comes with delivery of free iPhone formatted web content everyday forever and six months of exclusive, bespoke (designed) content once a week. It’s totally worth it. If they keep up the good job, I have no qualms about renewing for another $6 (from within the app, charged to iTunes!) when my subscription lapses…I’ve been hooked.
I jotted down some thoughts on the night of the iPad announcement about why it’s awesome but my opinions have basically been reiterated across the web. This is an incredible opportunity (big screen, touch based, app store, always online) to design interactions!
I was skimming through Apple’s iPad Human Interface Guidelines last night (Google it if you want to find a leaked PDF) and one part that struck me as particularly interesting was to let users play with your application before asking them to provide any more information than the system provides. If it’s still necessary later, do it as soon as you can, but not until the user has gotten a test drive and run into a situation that requires filling out a form—or in this case, buying a paid subscription.
Google Oops Part 2 « MiLK & toast
Megan posted these awesome images of scanning errors from Google Books. I had no idea that there are actual people wearing weird finger condoms who turn the pages.
Today, if we want to refer to a book we once borrowed, we can generally count on finding it again in a library or a bookstore. In the 18th and 19th centuries, though, bookstores and libraries were far smaller; though a good book might cost (as it does now) no more than a good restaurant meal, stores and libraries were orders of magnitude smaller.
As a result, readers habitually copied out passages they wished to remember in a personal journal or commonplace book. The custom had the advantage of calling the reader’s attention into intimate contact with those passages that appealed to them most intensely. By copying passages longhand, the reader gains time to reflect both on the meaning and the construction of their favorite works.
And, having copied the passages, you’ll always have your copy. Though photocopiers and scanners mean we can easily make exact copies at trifling cost, copying striking passages can remain a valuable exercise and a rewarding activity. A collection of selected passages makes a wonderful intellectual portrait. Shared with friends and colleagues, it also helps focus discussion and provides much food for thought: a manager’s commonplace book, placed online, can provide a superb tool for guiding organizational culture and strategy without imposing onerous and easily-resented training lectures or consultant interviews.
Notes About Notes: Commonplace Book
Love this description of what is essentially the archaic version of a tumblelog, mostly because it makes me feel dignified*.
I’ve read way too many crappy articles trying to convince everyone that their brains are being turned to slush by the act of reblogging. My view is that it’s simply the best way to capture an idea. As I wrote earlier this month,
A little over a year later I’m still adding to [Notes + Links] almost daily, and still frequently searching my own site for, say, something great I read about architecture a few months ago that I want to share. As Joanne McNeil of Tomorrow Museum notes in her post How to Capture an Idea: “Search is really the key reason I feel digital storage is the best place to save other people’s ideas I want to build on. However well I label paper folders, I still can’t plug in “beijing” and “shoe design” or whatever and come up with several results in a snap.” Having this searchable database of my external influences has been really interesting and it remains the real reason why I keep feverishly posting Notes + Links with near-curatorial-abandon.
* Also because it’s from a site called Notes on Notes, how freaking meta can you get? So awesome!
(via the-space-in-between)
There’s no question that content producers are struggling to find ways to sustain their practices but expecting consumers to begin to fork over their hard earned cash out of sympathy is not the right path. Content producers need to find new business models to put food on the table, and in reality, many will still fail because it is and always has been a highly competitive industry. There are people succeeding though without bemoaning the culture of free. They are the innovators, the early adopters, the thought leaders, the individuals who see this current situation as an opportunity not a challenge.Brian Formhals, lapuravidagallery
At the Hacks and Hackers meetup here in SF a few weeks ago, we kept using the words “artisanal” and “bespoke” to talk about designed content. I like these words a lot, but I’m also wary of them:
I like them because they imply a real care for craft, and they imply that form matches function. They also imply, you know, skill: smart people doing their best work.
I’m wary of them because they can serve as an excuse: “Oh, yeah, we only post one new story every two months because… it’s artisanal.” Designed content shouldn’t try to compete head-on with Demand Media for page-views and placement in Google results, but it can’t ignore the reality of the web, either. It can’t be all stock and no flow.
Robin Sloan - The future of designed content « Snarkmarket
As Robin notes, “We’ve suddenly got a pretty bad-ass toolkit!” It is definitely an exciting time to be consuming and creating things on the web.
The magazine is the print format closest to the blog: short articles that come out serially. The difference is the issue format. The beautiful thing about issues is that they begin and end.
I love flipping through a magazine, reading the pieces that catch my eye, then doubling back and scanning for the morsels I didn’t notice. Again: exploring the walls of a contained environment.
There are, of course, blogs that have experimented with the issue format, A List Apart is a well-known example.
But I think there’s a lot of room left in the idea of containing content so that one enjoys the satisfaction of finishing.
Metagames and Containers – Sleepover
It feels sort of wrong to take this quote out of its brilliantly designed context, but these are wise words.
I passed right over this beautiful, interactive, thoughtfully considered blog post, titled Metagames and Containers, when it came up earlier today on my Twitter feed. I should’ve known that it would be worth my time, because it was written and designed by David Cole, a designer at SF based Sleepover, specializing in “modern websites for magazines, writers, publishers.” If you care about design, writing, and/or publishing on the internet, then read this. I love what these guys are up to.
(via meaghano)
