practicalist

HOWTO: Make a Mac development environment with Eclipse, Subversion, Apache, MySQL+phpmyadmin, and PHP5

2008-06-29T18:49:24Z

At my job they use a more elaborate setup for development than I've been used to (the Very Special engineer that I am). It has some advantages over the quick 'n dirty approach I've used, but it has proved to be extremely tricky to set up. So I thought I would share the set of solutions I gathered that make a working setup, in case it helps anyone else. (In advance I should say that these aren't the über geek ways of doing these things; for that, learn to love the Linux command-line and tip forums. They are stripped down and simplified.) I do mainly design, so I don't want to spend that much time getting things perfect, just workable. I run Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. I've been doing a lot of one-person development with Textmate, Fetch, and Terminal. If that sounds similar to your speed, this setup might be interesting.

The idea is that you run a local Web server, manage code revisions in a shared repository, and set up a virtual host for each project. This has the advantages of:

Giving you a fast, private, local environment to see and test your work
Having code that can will work on a public server with no changes
Letting you roll back to a previous version before you screwed everything up
Collaborating with others or working on more than one machine, effortlessly
Use a bloated-but-pretty-good development application with idiot-proof debugging, code hints, docs, variable name lists, and function tracking

It has a disadvantages of:

Being complex to maintain
Requiring more steps to do simple things
Being wrong for small projects

So, anyway...

Eclipse is a coding tool, a completely free Textmate or Coda replacement that has 18,423,521 features. It takes a lot of getting used-to, but in the end I do like it better than simpler tools. Projects can get complex really fast, and it's much better for that than any tools I've used. Plus it has a lot users, plugins, and developers.

1. Eclipse

Eclipse is mainly for Java development, so it needs a plugin to function well for PHP coding. The easiest way to get that is to download a free, pre-configured version of Eclipse 3.3.2 that's maintained by the PDT project.

Download the PDT "all in one" build (Mac DMG file, gzip)
Double click on the file to uncompress it, then copy the folder to Applications. Open the 'Eclipse' application inside the folder
Make a 'workspace' folder when the application starts up that is not in a system folder (like Library or Applications). I use Macintosh HD/dev/workspace in all the below steps

2. Subversion

Subversion is a version management tool that lets you go back to previous versions of files and collaborate with others really easily. Happily, Mac OS X ships with it pre-installed.

First, set up a repository (where your code will be tracked)
Open the Terminal (Applications » Utilities) and enter:
sudo mkdir /dev/svn sudo mkdir /dev/svn/repository sudo svnadmin create /dev/svn/repository sudo chown -R www:www /dev/svn/repository
Then, if you want to get the most out of Subversion, continue following the instructions in the excellent documentation, setting up a trunk and branch for each project. Or, you can just create a new repository for each project like I do, and continue to the next part right now.

The simplest way to use Subversion is an Eclipse plugin called Subclipse. To get it, open Eclipse, then:

Go to the menu Help » Software Updates » Find and Install
Select "Search for New Features to Install"
Click "New Remote Site" and enter a name for the site (e.g. "Subclipse")
Enter http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x for the url and click 'Ok'
On the 'Update Sites to Visit' screen, make sure the checkbox next to 'Subclipse' is checked, then click 'Next'
On the Updates screen, expand the 'Subclipse' item and uncheck the 'Integrations' item
Click next and accept all the following dialog's defaults
Create a new project (File » New » Other... » SVN Folder » Checkout Projects from SVN)
Choose 'Enter a new Repository' and enter http://localhost/dev/svn/repository/, select the item created, and click 'Finish'
On the next screen, set up the project as PHP by finding the PHP folder, opening it, and choosing PHP Project. Then give it a name, and code away
Be sure to read about how to use Subversion, and Eclipse either at their sites or from within Eclipse Help.

3. Apache

Both Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard come with Apache already installed. Turn it on in the System Preferences » Sharing preference pane. To configure it for this setup:

Open the Terminal application (in the Applications->Utilities folder) and:
for Tiger enter sudo nano /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, then your password
for Leopard enter sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf then your password
Scroll down (cntrl-v) until you find the line:
# Virtual hosts # Include /private/etc/[apache2 or httpd]/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and change it to:
# Virtual hosts Include /private/etc/[apache2 or httpd]/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
Then add a 'Directory' block, entering these lines below the lines above (use what ever folder path you made for your workspace in the first line):
Order allow,deny Allow from all
Next, set up Subversion for Apache. Enter in the same document, after the above lines:
LoadModule dav_svn_module /usr/libexec/apache2/mod_dav_svn.so DAV svn SVNParentPath /dev/svn
Save the file (cntrl-o) and exit (cntrl-x).

Next, set up a virtual host so that you can type in the url for your domain and see your project almost exactly as on the final server. Open the Terminal application (in the Applications->Utilities folder) and:

for Tiger enter sudo nano /etc/httpd/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf, then your password
for Leopard enter sudo nano /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf, then your password
Delete all the lines in the file that don't have a '#' at the beginning
Enter, at the end (replace www.domain.com with your server domain):
NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1 DocumentRoot "/dev/workspace/www.domain.com" ServerName www.dev.domain.com

4. php5

On Mac OS X 10.5, you can use the existing PHP5 installation:

Open Terminal and enter sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
Find the line #LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
Remove the # and save the file
Restart Apache (System Preferences » Sharing).

On Mac OS X 10.4, the existing PHP install doesn't seem to work reliably. Easiest is just to use Marc Liyanage's install packages with Apache 1.3 that comes installed:

Download the installer (gzip)
Follow the fantastic instructions

5. MYSQL

On Mac OS X 10.4:

Marc Liyanage's great post has the best instructions for setup

On Mac OS X 10.5:

Download MySQL 5 (dmg)
Run Installers for MySQL, the startup item and preference pane
Make sure the preference pane (in System Preferences) indicates it's running
Open the Terminal application and enter /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root
Remove a big security hole by adding a MySQL root account password. Enter:
update mysql.user SET password=PASSWORD('yourpasswordhere');
Enter EXIT to leave MySQL

6. phpmyadmin

Phpmyadmin lets you use a Web-based interface to MySQL instead of the command-line. For most tasks, this is drastically slower but far easier than the command-line.

Download and uncompress phpmyadmin
Copy to /Library/WebServer/Documents and rename the folder "phpmyadmin"
Open Terminal and enter sudo cp /private/etc/php.ini.default php.ini
Open the php.ini file and change the lines
mysql.default_socket = and mysqli.default_socket =
to:
mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock mysqli.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock
In your Web browser, go to localhost/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php and click 'add' in server section, then:

Leave all defaults as they are, except for...
set config user as root
set config password as the one you set above in MySQL section
Click the 'Save' button

Go to the folder Macintosh HD/Library/WebServer/phpmyadmin/config/config.inc.php
move config.inc.php up one directory level and delete the 'config' directory
Go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin to use your database

You're done! Whew. Now, as long as you don't code any absolute paths, you can develop in Eclipse, save as you go, and see your site in its final form by going to www.dev.domainname.com. When it's time to deploy, you can move your files as they are to the production server and avoid all the last-minute path-fixing (at the very least).

(Thanks hugely to Jeff Reiecke and Yixu Lin for various pieces of help with this.)

funniest thing I've read in a long time

2008-06-19T17:04:38Z

NY Times magazine on flickr: fail

2008-04-29T18:12:33Z

In an article about Flickr by Virginia Heffernan ("Sepia No More" in the New York Times Magazine), she bemoans what she sees as the dominant aesthetic on Flickr:

As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. ...the most distinctive offerings, admired by the site's members and talent scouts alike, are digital images that "pop" with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.

She then ends with disappointment in the site because "...none of it looks like Diane Arbus or Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer many critics still consider the greatest of all time."

To me, the site's most popular photos are as good as or better than most magazine photography. Flickr members have created large amounts of quality work from the willingness to love and critique each other's work and newly available decent equipment. This is work that would otherwise not exist if not for the site, a strong contribution to popular culture.

It's hard to believe that Ms. Heffernan would confuse popular culture with incandescent art in the offline world; why does she try to mix the two up on the Web?

News Media vs. Web aggregators: what deal can stop the race to the bottom?

2008-04-18T21:24:10Z

In a recent post on Hitwise by Heather Hopkins, "Content Aggregation is King?," the bind that existing news media is in is highlighted again:

"Aggregators are taking a larger piece of the pie but the size of the pie is growing with visits to content creators and all News and Media websites growing. The trouble is - creating all that content is expensive. It's tough to justify the cost of content creation if those that sift and sort are gaining on those that create."

If the current situation continues, both content creators and aggregators will lose out. The pool of content will shrink, and the aggregators will lose overall pages to place ads on (there will be an expansion of participatory media, but it will not replace the clear demand for general news displayed by the numbers of people visiting Yahoo News, for example). This will be a race to the bottom. What the post doesn't do, and few people have, is to try and figure out what kind of business deal can avoid this result.

The deal between the a consortium of newspapers and Yahoo to outsource listings functions to Yahoo in return for a cut of revenue was predicated on the idea that there is a way to do some basic arbitrage on this situation, but even that doesn't work over the longer term. News media simply can't justify the cost of their content creation staffs, even if they get rid of the printing presses and costs of classifieds businesses. And they have yet to really deal with this (probably because they are still much larger than the aggregator sites even now).

Maybe, as the news media starts seriously shrinking the content pool, the aggregators will start to strike deals like Yahoo did, but more expansive and lucrative. Done right, such deals could raise all boats. For example, rather than aggregating traffic on one domain, Yahoo (or Google, etc.) could drive traffic to news media sites that federated their news with aggregated content from all over the Internet. A network of these sites, served by a single ad engine, could broaden the ad inventory far beyond what Yahoo would ever be able to support on its own and save some amount of a business model for content creators.

It may take a risk by someone on the scale of the 2001 AOL-Google deal, which similarly tied a content network to advertising engine. Marissa Meyer talked about it as "a very big bet, a revenue guarantee" to AOL:

"It caused a huge amount of controversy at the time because by some of the models that we had run, the deal was going to bankrupt Google. Like Jonathan Rosenberg actually got up on the table and jumped up and down about how much we shouldn't do this deal because Google was going to go bankrupt. We had models, one said that we were going to go bankrupt, one which said we might break even... and one year into the deal what we saw was that by signing AOL and broadening the reach of our advertising network we attracted so many more advertisers, and RPMs (revenue per thousand pageviews) went up across the network and we outperformed our expectations by a factor of two, maybe even three times."

The rest is history of course. Something like this may be a fantasy, but following the same course we're on is going to be pretty grim for everyone.

Time for a different solution for personal data on social networks

2008-04-09T19:47:07Z

Many of the good ideas below came in talking about personal information with Doug Fritz, the bad parts are my own ideas.

When Friendster and Flickr started getting traction (2002 and 2004 respectively), I wasn't a huge fan of the functionality, but the social aspect was totally addictive. I got seriously into each (and even got comfortable with the photostream concept eventually, though the fact that I can't easily control the order of the photos without using the organizr still bothers me). These sites ability to connect me with other people blew away all other shortcomings. At the time, the fact that I was putting so much personal information into a public space didn't bother me at all; I assumed a that the Web made old ideas of privacy kind of obsolete, and we would all eventually adapt and make new social norms to cope.

But now that social networks are taking on large chunks of people, I am not so sure. Facebook with a dozen real friends is a much different thing than Facebook with 140 "friends." The information I post there is, to me, the things that define me personally as I choose to represent myself. In the social network context however, the sites ultimately have more control over how I get represented than I do.

I had an experience with that when my story about a stolen cellphone and pictures from the thief unintentionally uploaded to Flickr briefly became news. There were some wrinkles in the story that caused people to be suspicious that I was doing marketing, or lying about the phone being stolen (as opposed to lost). I knew the facts of the matter and was not looking for any large amount of attention in posting the story. But once there was that attention, the people who read the story simply did not believe it and couldn't be convinced otherwise. They used personal information about me that was publicly available (on Flickr, my blog, and other sites) to make the case that I was perpetrating a hoax (for example the fact that I worked at Yahoo was used to say that I was marketing the Flickr service). Even the Reuters reporter that interviewed me asked "how can I know you're not deceiving me?" I didn't have an answer for her. The effortless flow of personal information (flow that I started) did not lead to anything like the truth, and caused some people to think that I was not a real person at all. Privacy as we knew may be gone, but the idea that everyone is now a public figure (with none of the protections of public figures) strikes me as wrong.

We can say that in the context of computer networks "information wants to be free," and I support the idea that copyright is an outmoded framework for intellectual property. But when it comes to representing ourselves, how can it be that personal information should flow everywhere and be used by anyone however they want? Open Social and the Data Portability initiatives are good starts for independent mechanisms, but I still have to give these systems a truckload of personal information, with no way to take it back after it's out there.

An alternate solution would be to allow people to own their personal information store, and choose to allow social network sites access to this store. Sites that behaved badly could be banned. This is much like OpenID and Oauth in concept, where one's identity is tied to a DNS-like way of creating a single namespace for unique user identifiers. It could take the form of a fancier version of an "Attention Profile Markup Language" file; a "Social Profile Markup Language" file, say. It would be stored on my own web server and under my direct control. If I wanted to share with Friendfeed or mybloglog (for example) what sites I've been posting to, saving, liking, or reading, I could allow them to access my SPML file under the condition that it be removed if I decided not to use the application any longer. (This is a geeky solution, but that's usually where these things start.) There should be a better solution to the new portability of social data than exists today, or my own understanding of my personal information will mean less and less.

my fake startup out of stealth mode

2008-04-05T09:38:37Z

Update: I really wanted to switch to Evernote, the built in OCR is amazing, but its lack of easy integration with all my existing stores of things that are spread all over was a deal-breaker ultimately. Still hoping for the new, real thing that's better...
Update 2: Looks like we have a winner: Buru. If it had a badge and a couple other bells and whistles, I'd switch...

My development skills are pretty limited, so when I actually do something I have to make a big deal about it. I hacked together a tool so that I could more easily save links and publish my links feed. I wanted to save some to del.icio.us, some to my blog, some to an email list, and some to twitter, but these were all separate bookmarklets and copy and paste. So the project comprises a new bookmarklet and a bad copy of a Tumblr-like linkblog, which can easily live as a badge on my main blog (there it is to the right). So then I had to come up with a bunch of fake stuff (with that crap Web 2.0 shininess) to make the accomplishment more than it is of course. In the five minutes before Tumblr or someone else makes this thin idea obsolete, it features:

- Extraction of thumbnails, descriptions, and tags for Flickr images, Amazon products, and Vimeo videos.
- Extraction of media embeds for YouTube, Current TV, and Vimeo videos.
- Tagging and collections for all saved items
- Up to 10 email lists of 10 recipients each

So where can you use it? You can't unfortunately; I only have a tiny bit of a server, and I have no idea how to support an actual application. Sorry! I hope someone actually builds something like this so I can use it. For the time being it will be my basement hobby...

Not "out of print" at all, just out to lunch

2008-03-31T17:56:22Z

Eric Alterman's article ("Out of Print, The death and life of the American newspaper" in The New Yorker) about journalism is wrongheaded and off-base. As someone who really loves newspapers wants them to survive, I was surprised by how inadequate to the circumstances it was. His example of an alternative, the Huffington Post, is a great site but is not journalism as we value it nor a business model to follow. Despite its traffic, the site does not support a newsroom of reporters, and every post is heavily opinionated. How is this site (or the Drudge report, or any similar site) relevant to the troubles facing the journalism business? They are just less valuable versions of existing media. Actual new forms of media like Wikipedia, Flickr, Newsvine, and other participatory content sites have the potential to increase our connectedness and make our media culture more human. In setting up a conflict between these sites as populist and journalism as elitist, the article is comparing apples to oranges. As the article points out, social news sites base a lot of their opinion on the work of journalists, and it could be vice versa. The better answer to the choice between the two is "yes." Smarter thinking is needed to create a model where both can exist -- they need each other.

a single-use tool

2008-03-29T04:46:03Z

When I was a teenager I was lucky enough to own a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, with a 300 baud modem. It allowed me to program in BASIC, compose documents in a Wordstar-compatible text editor, and even access CompuServe (sorry about those hourly rates Dad!). It started instantly exactly where I left off, no need to save at all (until you had to change the batteries, then it was time to break out the cassette tape recorder drive). It's eight-line by 40 character LCD screen used little power, so I could use it for 30 hours or so on one set of batteries. I doubt anyone has ever looked so completely scary nerd while believing that they were the hottest shit as I did with that thing. I wish there was something like it now, something smaller, lighter, and simpler of course. I would just like to be able to write wherever I am, without carrying or pulling out a laptop, and I would like not to worry about saving, battery life, weight, expensive equipment, etc. Something like the Flip for words.

Specifications 2GB RAM (enough for 8000 pages of text or about 5 million words, surely enough for anyone), full keyboard, non-backlit LCD display, low-power Bluetooth transceiver (file access only), 1 mini-USB port for data transfer and charging. 22 hours of use per charge. RTF/HTML format text editor. 8 x 8 x 0.3 inches, 1 pound.

Update: Rob Mcartney points me to the Alphasmart, a little bulky but maybe just the right thing! Ordered one... thanks Rob.

magenta

2008-03-27T12:31:52Z

magenta from benjaminclemens on Vimeo. Another fragment, with the very patient Elan Freydenson and Lily Chai.

clear thinking about social media

2008-03-27T11:08:47Z

Given the petabytes (exabytes?) of words that have been expended on social media, user generated content, participatory media, etc. etc. etc., it is miraculous to read a book that lays out clearly and simply the why and how of the phenomenon. That book is Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. I like reading a lot of the clever and snarky commentary about the blogosphere, and geek out on the details of one start-up's idea or another. But the clearing away of superfluous material and the deceptively simple and straightforward presentation of ideas is a masterpiece of editing. Making social media tools and products has the potential to make our connectedness to each other and our culture better and more human. But the huge amount of half-assed opinion there is among all the people trying to figure this stuff out could swamp that project in bullshit. Shirky has done the world a favor.

See also a video of Shirky's lecture-presentation on the book, and his blog around the book's themes.

hush

2008-02-04T06:57:56Z

hush from benjaminclemens on Vimeo.

Five design processes that don't work

2008-01-10T22:30:30Z

See update at bottom.

Having a "design process" for Web projects is an appealing idea. It codifies principles that designers like into rationales for involving design in major decisions. Since design is imagining, a lot has been written about doing innovation through design. Since I'm getting really old now I have seen many different attempts at making an innovative design process. I can say right up front that the only thing that actually works is working with a designer on a small team that is driven, wants to create something new, and has the courage to go where that leads. As a former advocate and practitioner (for years) of these design processes, it's my experience that they contribute little of value to the success or failure of a design.

1. User and market research doesn't work. As Douglas Rushkoff sez:

"...because you can only research the market's past, not its future, consumer research doesn't ever lead to true innovation. It only helps companies to sort out some of last year's trends in order to create an illusion of sales predictability." -- pg 235, Get Back in the Box (Thanks to Bob Baxley for this quote!)

Users (i.e. people) simply will not tell you what new thing they actually want. In focus groups or other artificial situations, people will reject unfamiliar things. Lab studies and interviews can only evaluate performance of elements of a product, not the whole. Live A-B testing has a homogenizing effect on products, reducing them to whatever is immediately familiar to users. Innovation is ultimately about changing user behavior, not hewing to it.

2. Brainstorming doesn't work. Creation of many ideas and scenarios divorced from reality is good, but limiting this to a two-hour meeting every so often insures that ideation is not part of major decisions. Occasional brainstorming with project teams is often used as a team-building exercise, so everyone is happy when the ideas they produce are close-in, not new or disruptive directions. Make brainstorming part of making the product, not a separate meeting.

3. "Wizard of Oz" videos don't work. Fleshing-out an idea in a speculative (i.e. faked) animated scenario is a tactic used by some designers to sell an idea that has no existing engineering or business basis. Without constraints, real innovation does not happen, just out-of-control "idearrhea." Actual innovation is build-able in some way, anything else should be taken as suspect.

4. Personae don't work. Defining users as archetypes and attempting to see the product through their eyes has some use for avoiding massive disaster, especially for non-designers. But they are of limited use for designers making hard decisions. Personae should not be over-sold as the answer to making the product user-centric, that has to happen in other ways.

5. "Agile" methodology doesn't work. Scrum is a huge success in helping large companies redefine engineering to give ownership of products to teams and to deliver better products. But the process fails when applied to design and ideation. A two or three-week sprint is simply not enough time to try a few design directions and prototype working code (and I have tried on at least a dozen occasions). Any kind of exploration has to go out the window. A very experienced Scrum master and advocate I've worked with agrees that Scrum is best for delivering against a well-defined specification, and even then produces huge amounts of stress on designers (who have to stay somewhat ahead of the other team members in their deliverables).

A good objection to all of the above would be that IDEO and other great companies have been very successful at innovating through design and have many solid methods they use that they detail in books, etc. I would point out that most of the examples people use for success are physical products (like, as is mentioned again and again, the iPod), not Web sites. I think this is because it is much, much easier to create a prototype of a physical product and see how it feels to use it that to do the equivalent with Web work, where application pieces, data structures, and lots of other very abstract design work needs to be done before you can see how something feels in use.

Another good objection would be that for utilitarian, task-oriented projects, the goals are clear enough that all of these techniques are valuable, and that's true enough. But these kinds of commodity projects (e.g. building a new shopping cart or a content management system) are not what most designers can contribute to in valuable ways.

Creating products is not a rational process; much depends on tiny aspects, timing, and emotional dynamics between people. Designers should embrace this and stop trying to define their value through processes. Designers should ideate through building, directly with engineers on small teams.

Update: Thanks to Kai Turner who made several valuable points, I've edited the post to not sound old and cynical quite as much. I should also make the disclaimer that this is a polemic and deliberately foamy-at-the-mouth.

further

2008-01-06T00:11:14Z

further from benjaminclemens on Vimeo.

A ten second thought in pictures, inspired by and made with Jill.

Saving newspapers and books, writers of all kinds

2007-11-28T17:57:55Z

In an article about the politics and economics of consumer choice in cable entertainment ("Bland Menu if Cable Goes à la Carte") in the New York Times, the author talks about how it's actually a good thing that the costs of producing niche programming are borne by all cable subscribers, as otherwise such programming would be very expensive and possibly not attract enough buyers to exist at all (even the most popular channel, ESPN, would rise from $3/month to $12/month). This makes sense, and could be a useful way of thinking about two other media businesses that are in some trouble: the Web and newspapers, both of which are in that bad à la Carte downward spiral.

In the case of the Web, despite the large amount of investment and growth in Web users, the economics still do not support niche content in any serious way. Small publishers have not made a living off of their content, depending on VCs or large distribution networks for investment to stay afloat, or publishing despite the lack of money. And even the most popular blogs on the Internet make a tiny amount of money compared to any other publishing medium like books, magazines, TV, etc. For example, Boing Boing is estimated to bring in $50,000/month in advertising revenue, which sounds like a lot until you consider that a single full-page ad in a local magazine like New York generates the same amount of revenue. Traditional media companies like AOL and Yahoo! have tried to aggregate many small publishers and sell ads across all of them, but despite getting a lot of traffic for this content, the rates for ads remain low (and at flat growth rates). The money remains in search text ads. Jaron Lanier pointed out in an Op-ed that this model doesn't work for content authors.

In the case of newspapers, their audience is falling steadily and won't sustain the costs of keeping the staffs of reporters and editors working (let alone the costs of publishing in print). They have had some success working with internet networks like Yahoo!, but this is likely not sustainable nor will it replace enough revenue to keep things going at current spending levels (magazines haven't had the same problem, but that's another topic).

So given that the cable model supports a number (not a huge number, but a number) of niche content players, and given that the Internet functions well as a big lab for new ideas but not for building content businesses, maybe what's needed is a sort of content consortium, or at least association of creators, with thresholds for membership and the ability to bargain collectively for better compensation. This would be different from a union, more like the Author's Guild or Screen Actors Guild, where plenty of work is done outside their auspices, but productions that generate a lot of revenue must conform to standards of pay. The cable model shows that if companies seeking to exploit content have to buy in to a collective pool of content, content costs are lower while allowing even niche content to thrive. This model doesn't need the cable networks to work for the author's benefit.

In a rough environment for content creators, where the economics are against them (but no one wants them to stop creating), the authors and makers should hang together more than they are. Some kind of association would re-balance a business that is out of kilter, draining the money out of a very valuable part of the culture we live in.

Paul ford is my hero

2007-11-18T14:39:23Z

$5 Chocolate Bar "the urge to say something stupid or fucked rises up like habit, but I fight it. I'm hungry for one genuine moment without insult, wit, or smoke."

sarah is three!

2007-10-23T18:26:13Z

Sarah just turns me to warm goo, babbling all the clichés I've heard, because the overwhelming love blows all other thought away: She amazes me every day, she is beautiful, precious, it is such a blessing to take care of her, it is unnerving how fast time slips away, etc. We are so, so lucky. She is three!

Page One of Today's New York Times

2007-10-22T17:42:45Z

Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web - New York Times

"Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections. The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available. Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service."

It was extremely gratifying to see this story played so prominently today, Katie Hafner and the editors show great judgement in highlighting a part of the Google book project that few people have wanted to talk about before. I am very happy for Brewster and team, and hope we can help them with some great (and open!) projects.

nextfest

2007-09-15T21:51:22Z

Once again an amazing effort by talented artists pulled together a great datavis show put on for nextfest folks: six examples of y! network data, the latest finished the night before. Thank you to Havi, Jeanne, and Jen for having us. Incredible datavis work by Aaron Koblin, Michael Chang, and Aaron Meyers. The rest of nextfest was very uneven for me, with some amazing things and many just ok things. The highlight for me was definitely meeting Jeff Han and talking with him about his multitouch screens, but I also liked the Green stuff a lot, and the Bumptop folks. More pictures.

UPDATE: Here's me giving an interview about the "bursting queries" visualization to Noah Barron from Annenberg's Online Journalism Review. Oy, I sure do go on and on, stupidly saying the same thing over and over! The incredible visualization was created by Aaron Koblin based on an idea from Aaron Meyers and with the original 'bursting' data analysis by Jasmine Novak, something I added at the end of the interview but got cut out. Sorry :(

storytellers vs. searchers

2007-08-12T06:21:13Z

[see updates, below]

My brother, Michael A. Clemens, is an expert on issues of economic development and was recently asked to do a book review for the pre-eminent journal of thinking on international politics, Foreign Policy. I am not able to appreciate his work fully, but I know he's very smart and worked very hard to get to the point where his ideas can get the influence they deserve, and I am very proud of him and happy to share his name! In his honor, I want to rip off one of his frameworks and use it for my own purposes; pretty bad behavior, but that's family for you.

He divides thinkers on economic development for poorer countries into two camps: "planners" (who want to create grand visions for the future and fund large projects) and "searchers" (who want a more incremental and experimental approach to finding what works). If I butcher his arguments completely, I could say that he concludes that neither camp adequately and seriously takes on the complexities of actually improving the economic situation of developing countries at all, however. Development is hard to do, and there are no short-cuts.

Far away from the moral value of his work and in my petty world of Internet bullshit, there is an analogous divide, between "storytellers" and "searchers." The storytellers are usually the big thinker types and designers, who believe in their ability to imagine a solution, build excitement, tell the story of how it will make things better, and make it happen. The searchers don't believe in stories anymore, they trust hard facts and cold reality, eschewing fanciful stories for careful scientific principles and evolutionary methods.

In engineering, the culture is heavily weighted toward the searchers. In design and marketing, the culture is weighted toward the storytellers. For example, today visual artists were described to me as interfering with good design decisions in Web sites, "failed artists" who shouldn't been taken as seriously as "an architect, say." This is clearly a searcher perspective, heaping scorn on the emotional side in favor of 'more serious' approaches. Conversely, the storytellers will deride the 'incrementalism' and 'lack of ambition' of the searchers, wishing for the 'next game changing idea' to emerge out of some yeasty marathon whiteboard brainstorm.

Recently this article about the weaknesses of "democratized design" looks disapprovingly at the new "hack culture" of participatory innovation, saying that genuinely new things ("like the iPod" --ugh) can't be produced "by committee"; the clear implication is that a single person's great idea (storyteller) will beat a mob of tinkerers (searchers). I'm not sure about that either; seems too grandiose.

You can even find parallels to this in ancient philosophy, where Plato exalted the unseen ideal (storyteller) and Aristotle wanted to ban plays and poems because they distorted clear thinking (searcher). Being a designer, I constantly find myself on the wrong side of whatever group I'm in. Being able to draw a picture of something does not count nearly as much as code, but I am addicted to the power of stories. I have attempted to bridge this gap by becoming a designer who builds, but most people I know still sort themselves firmly into one of the two groups.

In fact, the abstract nature of Web products allows people to work purely in one camp or the other, without a hard need (other than the success or failure of their projects) to cross the divide in their thinking. This is apparent all the time in the whining of designers and their fantasies of becoming dictators to engineers bound to execute whatever they say, and the resentment engineers have toward the promiscuous, irresponsible, and arbitrary ideas of airhead designers. This game is stacked against a synthesis right now, and we're all worse off.

Ultimately, I come down on the side of the storytellers, but try to make a practice of humility about my ideas, checking them relentlessly against reality. The best practice is like life-drawing from a model: make a bold line and decide how you want to show a subject, but constantly look back and forth from your sketch to the person in front of you, making sure your drawing still has a likeness.

Update: This article on egotistical architects bemoans the masturbatory elitism of top architects, and feints briefly with democratic design ideas before coming down on the side of the elitists:

[Democratic design advocate Bruce] Nussbaum is dreaming if he thinks democracy and design are seriously compatible. Truth is, they're not even love muffins.
This is partly because specialism - as in honed, polished expertise - is the core of what we call civilization. Designing your own may bring spiritual satisfaction, and homegrown design may be less ill-advised than homegrown, say, brain surgery. But be it blog, bog or village, it still has that unmistakable backyard look.

"Design democracy" is a feelgood idea, and that's about the only quality it offers. As the Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy told last year's Aspen Ideas Festival: "If I was competing with the US, I would love to have the students … spending their time on this kind of crap. To be a great designer is very hard. It's not about your friends [liking] something you did."

It's hard because humans are hierarchical primates. Only the few can be great at design or anything else. To be a great architect - a Brunelleschi, say - may require a self-belief so vast as to be limitless, but it also requires more than a Botoxed self-portrait as proof.

Meh, seems like they are trying to have it both ways. I think it's all about tension, not one extreme or the other. You could create a simplified two-card Oblique Strategies deck, with one card reading "let the usage and ideas of ordinary people be your guide" and the other reading "trust only your instincts and ruthlessly pursue what you think is best," and switch strategies randomly!

Update 2: An Economist blogger flagged Michael's review, and highlighted an idea that was implied in the review my brother wrote, that the only development strategy that made sense was allowing freer emigration to functioning economies (rather than trying to pursue 'planner' or 'searcher' strategies in countries that are so screwed up that no strategy is implementable. This made me wonder what the analogue to my world might be, and I think it's something along the lines of opening up companies and products so that their data and ideas are more portable and free. If products are 100% interoperable and your data is your data (not trapped or siloed) but completely portable, we could have a faster, easier evolution of better networked products and services. As it is, people satisfice; sticking with some things just because it's hard to move data around and nothing works easily with anything else.

Failing at Testing

2007-08-08T19:51:46Z

The use of A-B testing and bucket testing for optimizing tasks can provide a clean, programatic way to make many design decisions. It's an invaluable technique for comparing two similar but incompatible choices, and the results are impossible to have much debate about. Because of the urge to move fast, some groups have been tempted to use A-B testing to create artificial certainty about qualitative questions, however:

Testing can't give insight into what the product package should be; it will never tell you why the results are what they are. Trying to test features individually and then assemble them into a coherent package will not give insight into the success or failure of the entire package, nor provide a sense of what the right product is. At best, it results in a sort of "drunken sailor's walk," as each new incremental test takes the product in a different direction.

Testing won't tell you which product will be more successful; direct comparison is seldom the way that people decide what to buy (Pepsi beats Coke in taste tests year after year, yet Coke has 44% of the market and Pepsi is stuck at 32%). In fact, attempting to compare a new products to each other this way can result in audiences simply choosing what's familiar. This can be seen in the heavily AB test driven designs of the search results pages of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, which are all very similar.

A great deal of research has been done into the product choices people make, and it consistently points to the formation of a "story" around a product being the most important factor in whether it succeeds or fails (the most eloquent person on this topic is Seth Godin, ex-Yahoo! employee). This is not the marketing at all, but how the actual product makes overall sense to people who use it, surprises them with something new and better, or disappoints for some reason. There is no way to create a story out of a list of features or parts, instead it's the combination that either works, or it doesn't.

holy f*

2007-06-27T10:01:18Z

Yikes, f8 looks like a monster, either a sea-change or the beginning of one. I guess openness really is built in to the way people want to use the Internet. Now, if only Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google would follow suit... come to think of it, if only the US mobile data market was opened up like this... *sigh.*

UPDATE: Jason Kottke nails the backlash against f8 as another AOL-style walled garden, overhyped. It's true that there are similarities, but I think they are overstated. Currently, many of the ways that people interact socially aren't built in to the Internet (his suggested open-standards replacement for the closed Facebook), so people find it useful to use Facebook or MySpace. Until there are open "social OS" protocols added on to the Internet, social network sites are useful and valuable. f8 is an open platform for development with standard tools, and a step in the right direction.

technorati tags:facebook, f8, social, network, applications

Richard Rorty, rest in peace

2007-06-10T17:14:43Z

A real hero of authentic, human, and humble attempts to figure out how to live and think: Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

Update: Jügen Habermas writes the eulogy:

...philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the holy, the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

Update 2: More great Rorty quotes from past interviews being published...

If there is anything to the idea that the best intellectual position is one which is attacked with equal vigour from the political right and the political left, then I am in good shape. I am often cited by conservative culture warriors as one of the relativistic, irrationalist, deconstructing, sneering, smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fibre of the young. Neal Kozody, writing in the monthly bulletin of the Committee for the Free World, an organization known for its vigilance against symptoms of moral weakness, denounces my 'cynical and nihilistic view' and says 'it is not enough for him [Rorty] that American students should be merely mindless; he would have them positively mobilized for mindlessness'. Richard Neuhaus, a theologian who doubts that atheists can be good American citizens, says that the 'ironist vocabulary' I advocate 'can neither provide a public language for the citizens of a democracy, nor contend intellectually against the enemies of democracy, nor transmit the reasons for democracy to the next generation'. My criticisms of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind led Harvey Mansfield - recently appointed by President Bush to the National Council for the Humanities - to say that I have 'given up on America' and that I 'manage to diminish even Dewey'. (Mansfield recently described Dewey as a 'medium-sized malefactor'.) His colleague on the council, my fellow philosopher John Searle, thinks that standards can only be restored to American higher education if people abandon the views on truth, knowledge and objectivity that I do my best to inculcate.

technorati tags:rorty, pragmatism, philosophy

"What can design do?"

2007-05-28T10:40:44Z

In a meeting last week, I said I wanted to try to involve some other designers in a project, but just got a blank look and the question "what can design do?" — designers can't really help with the actual making of the product, they meant. Ugh. It's true: Silicon Valley-type engineers and other very smart people have put designers to shame by creating products and services that no one imagined but that many can't live without, and for which design is just not critical.

Rather than working within people's needs and expectations (the traditional approach of practical-minded designers), the work of engineers has changed people's habits, thinking, and behavior. Designers are relegated to optimizing a use-case, working out the complexities, or putting a nice shiny coat of varnish on top (and rounding the corners). This approach, and the "undesigned" look of Google, Craigslist, MySpace, etc. has led people to talk about design more as marketing (and to be avoided) than as part of the product. The real work is in the engineering, and invention happens there first.

I've tried the fancy idea of using "design thinking" as a way of making product decisions, to be more strategic (and less production-oriented). It works for IDEO, but not so well for me — it feels more like business development than inventing. Heroically, Bruce Nussbaum has tried to save us all by equating design and innovation, as the secret sauce that will enable the West to compete with China, etc., but I don't think it's gonna stick.

Ok, I'm starting to finally get it: this may be a time when the myriad possibilties of creating new-to-the-planet things means engineering. But I am not ready to give up all the fun to those folks! I would rather undergo some wrenching adjustments to what it means to "design" and be relevant again. I want to be able to say that 'design creates new things to make people happy,' not 'design makes it look pretty or more usable.'

Like an architect would, I am going to have to know a lot more of what an engineer does, and be able to work directly with a good part of the code if I really want to play in the deep end of the pool. I am going to start designing in code, maybe bullshit, arty code, but code nonetheless. This is a little rough and later in life than I would have liked, but what the fuck, bring it on!

technorati tags:design, designers, engineers, web

go mets

2007-05-28T09:32:35Z

The Mets have come into their own as a team, finally. They have a convincing claim on leadership of the East, built with hard work and despite missing their best pitcher, while the Yankees cannot find a win with a huge roster of monster talents and an almost hysterical desperation. It shouldn't be this way looking at it from the "moneyball" point of view, or the momentum point of view, or any point of view really. The Mets are comprised of a decent payroll of good players, a couple of stars, and a good coach, but they have no superheros among them to speak of. They play doggedly year after year, occasionally miraculously, mostly unevenly, sometimes heart-breakingly badly, but come back again and again somehow to compete in the most tantilizing, frustrating place in the world: just outside the Yankee's spotlight (clearly, a great place to get slowly and quietly good, though).

It's worth mentioning the way The New York Times has dealt with this switch in fortunes: amazingly badly. Here's a grudging, fourth-paragraph quote from their main story as the Mets took their second win in the series with the Yankees, and pulled away from the Braves to first place in their division as the Yankees fell apart: "But nothing about this game [...] could alter what those around here already suspected: The Mets are a better team, and not only because of their record, which improved to 28-14, the best in the National League..." As the capper, the headline for the article is "Another Injury to Another Pitcher And Another Loss for the Yankees." Give me a fucking break. They should stop reading team popularity polls and cover what's actually happening.

Regardless of what happens this year (the Yankees will eventually do something, the Brewers and the Indians look pretty good; it seems wide open), these Mets look like they are settled down and playing for themselves, and it's great to watch.

UPDATE: Wow, what a difference three weeks makes! Despite all the injuries, I'm still loving watching those Mets...

UPDATE 2: Oh my fucking God what the fuck was that?????!?!?! Utter, complete, total humiliation!!!!

thank you

2007-04-28T08:33:02Z

Thank you to Joy, Ash, Bradley, Caterina, Salim, and Larry, who said yes go ahead, and thank you to Mike Chang, Aaron Koblin, and Juliana Yamashita, who made all of the utterly amazing visuals and demos, thank you to Brian, Brooke, Eliote, Christine, Jennifer, and Carrie who did the hard work, and thank you to Kiersten, Lucy, Larissa, and Monica for actually making it happen. It is wonderful to work with great, talented, and generous people!

technorati tags:openhouse, yahoo, brickhouse

ideal use case for tagging behavior

2007-04-13T17:41:21Z

This screengrab is the list of tags for a Flickr photo I ran across randomly. It feels more like micro (or nano?) blogging than tagging, in fact it's anti-social!

I love casual personal revelations. It feels like there is a great deal of rich meaning in fragments of thoughts and ideas set down semiprivately (in a search box, or a tagging input) that is lost in the ultra-self-conscious blog post. Also, making a disorganized list of thoughts is more personal than a diary entry. It feels like there are several epiphanies somewhere in gathering my private thought fragments and using social media and networks to connect them to other people's fragments.

technorati tags:tags, terms, private, thoughts

compound meanings through terms and clusters

2007-01-28T08:55:39Z

There are great sites that help to pre-chew a lot of information for you somewhat -- search results are sorted by relevance, news feeds are combined into one list by date, tags combine like photos into one page. This is a huge improvement that people are only starting to usefully take advantage of.

But actually taking things a step further with these sites is a pretty manual process: I save a few items, follow some links, email a few, post some to my bottomless pit of a bookmark site. I can connect to information one application at a time, and I never see the big picture. The words I search for or tag with are my own, but they are spread all over a bunch of separate applications. I don't do a good job of tagging, I am not great at formulating a search query, and I couldn't put into words the topics I want to read about.

I would like some way to combine and compound the words, meanings, and content in these separate applications. The words that I use to search for something are the same words I use as tags, after all. But now they are in separate meaning-silos. A useful compound relationship between these sites would help me understand the words I use better.

In fact, a means to do this already exists, clustering, but it is not used as an interface to information right now. Creating "clusters" of terms means showing the groups of ways that people commonly understand a word: for example, "jaguar" can be a car, or a cat, and grouping around either car or cat could work across applications (search, photos, news) and content types (search results, articles, photos). You can see this for yourself on Flickr cluster pages for jaguar, java, or San Jose.

And clusters are derived from the ways that people use content, so they can show me how a word I use ("java") is understood generally (a programming language, an island, or a kind of coffee), and give me a direct line to improving my understanding of the concept (e.g. many of the people who use the word java in the Indonesia way are interested in Borobudur and yogyakarta, so I should look those up if I am planning a trip there). Seeing clusters helps me better understand my own ideas and words, and creates a compound of my own words and meanings and those from the outside world.

I believe that an interface that would connect the words I use with the words the rest of the world uses, through clusters of content, could be very useful.

the iphone and swooshiness

2007-01-21T12:58:26Z

It was impossible for me not to know about the iPhone as soon as it happened, I am a sucker for anything Apple. But I don't actually want one, which is weird to me, as usually I would want one of each from the entire Apple Store. I don't love my Treo at all, but the main value in it for me is as an Internet device; for that the damn keyboard is the affordance that makes it workable and useful. I really do hope that the touch screen is a great text entry thingy, but having used many, I can't really see how it will be.

But I do like the phone for the way that the interface is implemented. It is nicely visually polished, and the interaction design is ok, but what really makes it sparkle I think is the cinematic way that all interactions have smooth transitions from one state to the next. Looking at the demo of retrieving a voice mail, all the steps flow smoothly into one another, and when I close an item it zooms back into the place where it came from.

It's profoundly relaxing to see, and makes me realize how much brain overhead it takes on a daily basis to look at my phone and interpret what is happening, what just happened, and what I can do next; these things take very very tiny bits of attention, but it really adds up. It's like a tracking shot in a movie; where rather than cutting from shot to shot to show someone doing something the camera simply moves to follow them continuously ( I think of the opening sequence in Nashville and Boogie Nights — it works to introduce the characters because it's obvious whose story it is from the shot, instead of asking you to interpret artful framing or a sequence of different emphases into a whole).

Web design could use some of this continuous quality. The fanciest Ajaxified sites are still mostly a deck of flash cards, unfortunately.

UPDATE: I now own one, of course. My skepticism lasted only until the price drop :)

believe

2007-01-08T07:15:22Z

Ben Fry (a genius himself) has a great quote at the bottom of his site page:

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life,
when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
— Albert Einstein

Besides being utterly true, it hints at the social nature of happiness -- human happiness does not occur in isolation (despite what the pop psychology says). Creating or stumbling on the circumstances that get a few people together in their enthusiasm about an idea or anything is the key, the answer, the holy grail. But how elusive that turns out to be!

The Mob vs. the Groundswell

2006-10-25T18:10:06Z

I got a very quick and intense sample of what it's like to get public attention -- now that no one reads my blog again (and I have the numbers to prove it) I can write about it. In this episode, I was just not ready for the fact that in that arena everything is distorted, and a lot of people will believe (and will be unable to stop believing) things that are completely wrong. The network creates and magnifies a mob effect: shrill, paranoid, jumpy, stupid (in my case, people were more interested in whether it was marketing tricks or not than the really significant parts of the story, and people just couldn't let go of that wrong idea once it was out there). And on the Web, no one knows they're a mob, so no one knows they're part of something dumb. So if this is the social Web, participatory media, authentic media, who needs it?

So actually, the mob effects enabled by Digg, Slashdot, Technorati, and especially TechCrunch (which is a more a publicity firm than a blog, despite great instincts and virtuoso promotion of what I agree are good startups) are not the social Web at all, just reflections of existing and very old dynamics around attention -- more similar to the effects of traditional publicity than anything really new. On Digg and Slashdot and in the world of traditional press, seeking and getting mass-audience attention is the coin of the realm, and people participate in these systems in order to own all that traffic. This leads to all kinds of gaming of these systems and jealous watching of rank, etc. This is fine as far as it goes, and is fun and pointless in the same way that celebrity news is.

I like Digg and Technorati a lot, but I think they are oriented toward the "head" of content, the hot stuff, the latest stuff, and this is not so interesting for the vast majority of people like me, that live and contribute to the tail. By contrast, Google Base, Flickr, and Del.icio.us are systems that connect me to other content I might be interested in, people like myself, and places where my content can find a niche. Here in the tail, there's no jealousy and distortion, and I think it's more likely that the stuff people make even though no one's paying attention is valuable and interesting.

I think systems that serve the groundswell (Google Base, Flickr, and Del.icio.us) will be more valuable and productive than systems that serve the mob (Digg, Slashdot, and Technorati). I hope I'm right.

technorati tags:social, web, social media, digg, flickr, slashdot, 'google base', attention, mob, Technorati

choosing to live in fear

2006-09-29T17:05:26Z

New laws are limiting very old protections that individuals have had: not to be held indefinitely without trial or access to a lawyer, no warrantless searches, no torture, the right to a fair trial. Where is the crisis that justifies these changes? Even if terrorists attack again and again and kill thousands more, which they surely will, they cannot threaten the existence of any Western country. This is not World War II. No matter how fervent, they are small groups of desperate people that can be hunted down and killed, not entire states (crazy as they are, Iran and North Korea would cut deals with the US under the right conditions). Why are people acting as though these terrorists have such huge power? Why are they willingly giving away the rights and protections that everyone says is the good part of the West? Why are people choosing to live in fear instead of calling bullshit?

finally

2006-09-29T04:40:37Z

Finally, there is a feed reader at least as good at Bloglines and a bit better: the new version of Google Reader. Whew. As soon as I have five free minutes I will integrate its shared links feed into my blog, and my little information ecosystem will be easier. Still wishing for: a way of gracefully blending new items into a single view (by most read, most updated, my clicks, anything), a latest photos from Flickr/Photobucket pane (like Flock), and a Firefox extension so I can be done with the damn bookmarklets.

silicon valley

2006-09-25T20:54:32Z

I pinned the poster for the AIGA's latest studio visit series up outside my cube at work. I listened as two people stopped to look at it, at first confused about what it was for; then finally figuring out it was for a design event. "Oh, now I know I can safely ignore it," said one. As they were walking away, the other one said "XML is the future, I guess we won't need any graphics or posters..."

mass-observation and the internet

2006-09-13T13:55:22Z

An excellent article in the New Yorker recounts that in the U.K., in the thirties, there was a mini-movement called the "Mass-Observation" experiment. Members gathered as much detail about the lives of everyday people as they could, and synthesized it into a series of books (sample details: when a train goes through a tunnel at least one person per car will make loud animal noises in the darkness, most people tap the filter end of a cigarette before lighting it, many women had fantasies of torturing Hitler to death, and in Blackpool on a given night there were an average of four outdoor copulations). The catalyst came from the concurrent Surrealist trope in art; Surrealism attempted to give access to the hidden and primitive sides of ourselves (normally hidden away by our need to adhere to socialized reality) through accident, automatic writing, and exploring the unconscious. Beneath the polite exterior of social niceties there is a chthonic underworld that contains our real fears, dreams, and needs. For the Mass-Observers, this world could be accessed by simply recording what people actually did in their lives and gathering the details together into a "people's poetry."

This historical quirk was a direct prequel to the phenomenon of authentic media (or participatory media, or [shudder] user generated content), the realization of what could only be hinted at back then. It's goal and value, to know ourselves better through the aggregated stuff of our everyday needs and desires, is the best rationale for blogs and sites like MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, etc. Despite the headlong rush to treat these applications exclusively as a business model, it's worth remembering that as they become part of people's lives they will be creating a more and more authentic picture of what people are really like, in all their neediness, beauty, nastiness, ingenuity, anxiety, stupidity, sweetness, laziness, and practicality. It's not happening yet (and probably won't happen in this mini-boom), but it will happen, and it is the best reason for the Internet.

glare of attention

2006-08-30T18:59:20Z

So, for someone who gets almost no online attention, I got all kinds today for my post about my stolen cell phone uploading pictures to my Flickr account. Kottke, and then about 50 other blogs pointed to my blog post (my favorite title: "Yo Quiero Your Cellphone"), and I instantly had about ~~15k~~ 40k unique visitors and 78k pageviews on the post. The story got 2100 diggs. My blog's server crashed. My comment mechanism went down (and is still down, sorry). Since there was some weirdness about the car pictures, I had a long string of people on Flickr saying I was some sort of guerilla marketer for ShoZu (the cell phone app I used). A brief story appeared on Reuters and CNN sites. I had about a dozen obscene emails, ~~20k~~ ~~80k~~ 200k views to my photostream, and a handful of calls to my desk phone at work with people saying things like "what the fuck are you doing?" in the space of three hours. Many weird words were used. I think it's over now. Whew. I will be happy to get back to obscurity.

Update: I still have many people saying that this episode is a hoax, and/or I am a marketer. Please, this was not marketing, I have no connection to Shozu, the story is accurate and happened exactly as I've recounted. I simply posted the story to my blog, that's all. I really am just some guy that this happened to. Thanks.

words my baby says

2006-08-25T04:09:52Z

Four months later, a verbal explosion! 262 and counting...

again
airplane
alligator
apple
applesauce
are
arm
around
away
baby
ball
balloon
banana
barn
bath
bathroom
bear
bed
bee
beep
belly
big
bike
binkie
bird
bite
blanket
blocks
boat
bonk
book
bottle
bowl
box
boy
bread
brush
bubbles
bucket
bug
bunny
butterfly
camel
camera
car
carrots
cat
cereal
chair
change
milk

mommy
cheese
chicken
chin
clean
clock
close
clouds
coat
coffee
cold
colors
cooking
couple
couscous
cow
cracker
cup
daddy
deer
diamond
diaper
did
dirty
dog
doing
done
door
down
drum
duck
ears
egg
elephant
eyes
face
fall
find
fire truck
fish
fit
flower
foot
fork
frog
funny
fuzz
get
girl
glass
glasses

go
goat
gone
gorilla
grape
grass
guitar
hair
hand
hat
have
head
hear
heavy
help
hi
hippo
hold
home
honk
horse
hot
house
hug
hurt
I
in
inside
it
jacket
jump
keys
kiss
kitchen
knee
knock
kookaburra
leaves
leg
legos
light
lion
little
lock
lotion
make
mat
mess
mine
monkey
moon

more
mouse
mouth
move
movie
my
new
nice
night
no
noise
nose
nurse
off
okay
on
one
oops
open
other
out
outside
owl
pajamas
pants
peas
pee
picture
piece
pig
plate
play
please
poop
put
raisin
read
rice
ride
right
rock
run
see
shave
sheep
shower
shirt
shoe
sink
sit
sky

sleep
slide
snack
snake
snap
soap
sock
spoon
star
stairs
stool
strawberries
stroller
sun
sweater
table
take
that
there
throw
tickle
tiger
tired
toast
toes
top
towel
tower
toy
train
trash
treat
tree
truck
turkey
underwear
uh-oh
up
walk
want
warm
wash
watch
water
where
who
work
yes
yoghurt
you
zip

authentic media, exhibit b — pictures of the family of the person who stole my cell phone posted to my flickr account

2006-08-16T01:50:58Z

My cell phone was stolen last Friday. I had it disconnected and arranged to get a replacement. It had been set up with the excellent service from ShoZu to automatically upload all pictures taken with the phone to Flickr. So today, completely surprisingly, I find pictures on my Flickr account of the family of the person who took the phone. I'm not sure they knew what was happening (they replaced the SIM card with their own, clearly, but probably didn't notice ShoZu), I have no way to find my phone with these pictures, ~~and I've disabled my ShoZu account so it won't happen again.~~ See update, below.

But: what a great illustration of how social media, inadvertently or not, blows away all normally private separate identities and separate worlds! I don't just know something about the person who took the phone, I see some of the more intimate details of their family and life. Social media and applications create conditions which would otherwise be impossible. These technologies are only beginning to have a profound impact on social norms and behavior. The photos are below.

Update: the kick-ass car of the person who stole my cell phone. I've decided to not disable the ShoZu account, seeing as this person is obviously much cooler than I am. I expect that random pictures will keep showing up in my flickr photostream, and I hope the coolness keeps flowing...

Update 2: It looks like the ShoZu function has been disabled, as there have been no other photos uploaded in a few days, sad to say. Thank you for the many kind words! I have received a spike in traffic on this post, and it seems that there is some problem with commenting, sorry about that!

Update 3:It seems that the car pic was not taken by the camera but uploaded as a wallpaper. Several people have said that I must have done this as some sort of marketing campaign for ShoZu, or that it's a hoax of some kind. It is not a hoax, and I have no connection to ShoZu. Thanks for your interest...

the mouse

2006-08-13T04:21:33Z

Many years ago, I battled mice in my aunt Amy's kitchen. Repeated battles cause a sort of obsession, documented here in this short video.

Oblique Pictures

2006-08-11T06:16:23Z

I've always loved the deck of cards Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published back in the 70s, Oblique Strategies. The koan-like ambiguity is helpful when wrestling with design decisions. I like words, but I thought some of the concepts would be even more usefully vague in pictorial form...