Official Google Reader Blog: Breaking up isn't hard to do

They say here that Google Reader has moved on from Google Labs, which I guess means it is no longer Beta:

Official Google Reader Blog: Breaking up isn't hard to do

I'm a bit befuddled by the fact that GMail is still Beta. Talk about perpetual Beta, GMail is the poster child for that. Google needs to step up and take full responsiblity for GMail as a non-Beta app and quit the hedging already. C'mon, even *flickr* is out of Beta for Pete's sake!

Canopus 3

Canopus 3, originally uploaded by Pierre J..

I spent about six weeks, spread across two different trips, in the Tahitian islands back in the early 90s. I was both happy and sad to have been one of the very last backpackers who was able to camp directly on the lagoon on Bora Bora for $9/night (Chez Pauline; while I was there the first 3 huts went up as they began replacing the campground with those awful boxes, and the campground moved across the road). To keep some connection to the islands, I've long subscribed to a feed of Polynesia photos on flickr.

I remember hiking around to see old WWII cannons, but at the time it was hard to connect those islands with the savage war. This shot provides a nice contrast to the usual blue lagoon vistas. Chilling.

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails - O'Reilly Ruby

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails - O'Reilly Ruby:

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE *YOU* ARE BETTER

That is how Derek Silvers concluded his article over on O'Reilly about a bad experience trying to rewrite his existing PHP site in Rails. How true!

Another key message from Derek's column, though he doesn't say it directly: there can be tremendous value in refactoring, and refactoring does not require porting or changing platforms. All modern languages and platforms are capable of supporting large scale high quality systems. Sure, there are differences, and pros and cons, to each for various applications. But those differences are in the noise compared to the differences in capabilities of architects and developers themselves.

The lesson to me is: if you have a day to spend to make things better, do you invest it in learning a new language or platform, or in improving your own skills? I invest that time in myself. Advantages from switching platform or language can be had, but those wins are usually longer term, and can be undermined by abandoning some of your previously built skills and fluency.

paidContent.org - The Economics of Content - Magazines Online: A Brief Essay

paidContent.org - The Economics of Content - Magazines Online: A Brief Essay:

At the end of the day, magazines are about communities of interest, whether professional or lifestyle driven. If magazines keep that driving mantra in mind, and use the Web for all its is worth, things could begin to look brighter and bigger on the monetary side soon.

I love the sentiment, and I like the enthusiasm to the reader comments to that article. Nice counterpoint to the print is dead crowd. Interestingly, I don't hear these folks saying that online will increase the value of their print mag! I think many in traditional print have been a bit whiplashed by the Web, and think that the play for print mags is to garner additional revenue from online. Look at JPG Magazine for the countering precedent: the magazine and online community can become one. The print version is where the revenue is, but it is the web based community that creates that value.

More to come. And I'm sure small and independent magazine publishers will like what's coming.

Community Building isn’t about Features - Bokardo

Thank you, Josh Porter, for the concise summary of the Businessweek article "Ten Ways Flickr Builds Communities".

Community Building isn’t about Features - Bokardo

Happy unlaunch day at Like It Matters

I liked Brian Oberkirch's mini-rant yesterday, on "putting your head down and executing on ideas that delight the people your app is really made for," rather than cultivating flash and hype. But what topped off his entry for me was his update at the bottom:

Happy unlaunch day at Like It Matters:

[update: OMG, I almost forgot an important sidenote. Too much horserace guy attention at the wrong time may kill you. Witness the 2 year debacle that is Flock. Ill-timed hype & expectation building made their time to experiment disappear and probably killed a potentially very interesting project. Instead, be like Threadless. Do awesome things, and eventually, media will figure out that what you’re doing is cool. By then, you are far enough long that they are less likely to screw you up.]

When dealing with misguided marketing and PR folks, it is not enough to simply say you want to execute and avoid hype. You have to say *why*, and this is exactly why. Hype and attention are indications that expectations of your business have already been set. These expectations are close to impossible to undo. If you are not completely sure what your winning business or technology strategy is, you absolutely have to preserve your ability to change. Premature expectations will inhibit your ability to change and adapt.

8020 Publishing at TechCrunch 40

TechCrunch has an underwhelming mention of 8020 today, in a summary of a session at TechCrunch 40.

TechCrunch 40 Session 3: Community & Collaboration

8020 Publishing is a media company that publishes user generated magazines. They currently have two magazines JPG and the yet-to-launch Everywhere. Members of the 8020 community can contribute and critique the content in the magazines. However, 8020 Publishing still fills normal publishing roles like choosing themes, putting the magazines together and providing the final vote on all published content. The community also gives them a built-in subscription base not to mention loyal online communities.

8020 is aiming to “make magazines better.” JPG Magazine is used as an example.

Launching “Everywhere” Magazine, the “insiders experience”…travel magazine that is submitted by the community.

Then later, seems like hardly a peep about it relative to the other companies in this session, StoryBlender, Flock, TripIt, and MusicShake. All I can say is that there is room to be a lot more visionary about magazines.

Word of the day: hundredopoundoglossopaperotextaphobia

hundredopoundoglossopaperotextaphobia: from our HP Labs Indigo press operator/czar, referring to a syndrome I suffer from.

I may have complained about HP 100# Glossy Text paper once too often! As I tried to explain, "Look, even if you eat your favorite food every day you are going to get sick of it eventually!"

Paul Kedrosky: Apple: More Troubles Today

Paul Kedrosky: Apple: More Troubles Today:

As I said yesterday, in a perhaps perverse way the $100 Apple in-store credit troubles me more than the initial price cut. I could handle the latter -- Steve's playing for keeps, and he wants to make a statement in the cellphone market. He's prepared to compete on both price and features, which makes him a formidable competitor in that cut-throat business. Fair enough. But the credit's belated arrival suggested the iPhone price cut was ill-considered and somewhat rash, not part of the original plan.

I've been fascinated by the whole iPhone pricing phenomenon. Not just the recent price cut "fiasco", but the fact that Apple released it, and pumped it, at the initial price of $599. That's totally crazy. In fact, $399 is really too high for a phone, even a really cool one, to be mass market, which is what Apple wants.

Which leads us to the real reason for this "fiasco", and why I think my favorite financial geek, Paul K, is partly off. This price cut may have been ill conceived, but it wasn't rash. The only way Apple could pass off $399 to mass market consumers as an attractive price was to intro at $599, a totally outrageous price, then cut it by what appears to be a significant amount. "Hey, a phone for $200 off? That must be cheap!"

But I agree that this move was definitely ill conceived, Apple truly botched this one. Not only is $399 for a phone still way out of reach of mass market consumers, this self-inflicted PR shot to the foot will take a lot of work to undo. Jobs will always find a way to make his cult happy about getting screwed and ask for more, but he's got no such sway over the masses he hasn't won over yet -- and he just pushed them a bit farther out of reach.

Ironically, I finally see an Apple product I might buy! I think the new Nano might finally fit my late adopter tastes :-).

Open Letter to Derek Powazek - Bokardo

Derek Powazek seems to be getting a lot of love since leaving 8020, this time Josh Porter whips up the crowd:
Open Letter to Derek Powazek - Bokardo:

I’m writing to ask you if you would consider writing an update to your fantastic book Design for Community. Your book, as much as any other, helps to define what it means to create and curate community online. It’s a great book, but it’s a bit old and hard to find.

Gotta agree! Derek, you should start working on it in, ..., well, ..., how about getting around to it about 3 months from now?

Geotagging links photos to locales | Tech News on ZDNet

Geotagging links photos to locales | Tech News on ZDNet:

'Every photo was taken somewhere. That's almost always part of the story of the photo,' said Stewart Butterfield, general manager and co-founder of Flickr, which now houses 36 million geotagged photos--roughly 3 percent of its total archive.

I remember when Microsoft's WWMX had 10,000 geotagged photos and it was a big deal. 36 million is still a drop in the bucket of all online digital photos, but it is likely an enormous lead that Flickr now has over any other online photo site. This is one of those situations where more content makes their services more valuable, so new content tends to go to that service -- a positive feedback loop that sets up Flickr/Yahoo! to be the dominator in location related services for consumers.

Word of the day: playatards

Courtesy of Valleywag: those people who venture out to Burning Man each year.

Black Rock CIty: Burning Man arson suspect caught - Valleywag

HP Invests $300 Million in Print 2.0 - PhotographyBLOG

HP Invests $300 Million in Print 2.0 - PhotographyBLOG: HP is spending $300 Million on a global marketing campaign to help promote the company’s Print 2.0 strategy.

Huh? When did marketing spend become an investment? Hey boss, call me confused. I'll give you more Print 2.o that you'll ever see from that marketing spend for 0.5% of that sum.

Web 2.0 way to find a community manager

Now this makes perfect sense.

SquidBlog >> Blog Archive >> A little bit Wonka

At Squidoo, when we decided it was time to bring on a Community Organizer, we did a reverse-Wonka. Over the past year and a half we’ve had the privilege of hearing from and watching a few hundred passionate lensmasters as they’ve used and evaluated and championed and criticized and grown and talked about our site. We’ve taken their comments to mind, and their support to heart.

So we didn’t have to look among unknown faces and unproven talent to find someone for the job. We had her right in front of us, in the SquidU forums, in our inboxes, on lenses, and on other sites around the web talking about Squidoo. Who better to hire than a lensmaster who has been on the site since beta, seen our ups and downs, and has never failed in her enthusiasm for trying new ideas, mentoring other lensmasters, pushing the platform just a little harder, and bringing new people in.

Makes me wonder, what if right when you launched your startup site, you let everyone know that you'd be using participation as a primary tool for recruiting future employees? Would that motivate more and better participation?

Japanese discus collecting cartoon character come to life

Can you tell the 2007 World Track & Field championships are being held in Japan?

iaaf.org - Osaka 2007 - Latest Photos


Credit: Getty Images (via iaaf.org)

This is a remote control discus shuttle, one of those surprising modernizations of what is a very simple, pure event. These are fun to watch doing their thing.

The Dilbert Blog: Invent This Product

Sigh, too bad I had to mothball Virgil due to lack of interest inside HP. Now even Scott Adams is asking for this!

The Dilbert Blog: Invent This Product:

Invent This Product I’d love to have a complete scrapbook of all my vacations, but it’s too much work. That’s why I need a service that would create the scrapbook automatically, online.

Here’s how it could work. First, my digital camera should have GPS so it always knows where I am. When I download my photos, a Google map would pop up, and the photos would go into storage according to the points on the map where the pictures were taken, ordered by date. The map forms the backdrop for organizing the scrapbook.

...

Everything Scott goes on to ask for was under consideration to be included in Virgil, which I began working on about 7 years ago. The project has been inactive the last two years, I just had to give up due to lack of uptake by HP product divisions, and start working on The Next Big Thing. The good news is that Yahoo and Google are continuing to drive geotagging services and applications, and this vision is coming together gradually.

I think Yahoo! is outrunning everyone in this space, but I am growing impatient with their slooooow progress pulling it all together. But I empathize with their Big Company challenges, which I'm sure play a part in that. Here are a few Yahoo-ish places for the interested to begin:

The Flickr World Map Flickr's geo features kick ass.
Yahoo Trip Planner So much potential in this app, c'mon, work it Yahoo!
ZoneTag If you're a mobile user, you'll like this.
TagMaps Killer tech here, c'mon Yahoo, use it!
Dan Catt's Geobloggers site Stop teasing and tell us what you're doing.

For a dark horse in this space, head on over to Slovenia for a look at TripTracker.

Kitty said what?

New favorite trashy video around the house:



This is fantastic. Meow, meow, ...meow-meow!

End of the road?

End of the road, originally uploaded by aefitzhugh.

K2 Zed 4.0. I used up the rest of my REI rebate on my first new mountain bike in ~20 years. I haven't ridden my road bike since Mia was born one year ago, I may never return to the road now! Besides the lack of time that comes with a newborn, it seems some poor cycling soul is run down every week now in the Bay Area. I have enough fun things to do in life than to deal with that.

My previous mtb is the only one I've ever owned. As crappy as it was (a Performance store brand, feels like 40 pounds, even has a hole in one of the welds!), it went to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado with a former teammate in its younger days. Hard to believe how crappy it is compared to this one.

I've never even ridden with shocks or disk brakes before, I've been in a time warp!

Andy McKee - Official Website - Andy

Long vacations are nice. They allow you to lose touch with all your local news, and life slows down to a more natural and comfortable pace. But how often have you discovered, long after the fact, that some noteworthy person died while you were so disconnected, but you never heard about it? This has happened to me a couple of times. The notable person dies, there is a brief burst of news about it, but by the time you've returned it is all over. It can be 6 months, a year!, before you find out, and then when you do it is oddly stunning. How could that famous person who I am so familiar with have been gone all this time, and everybody knows, and I was completely unaware of it until now?

This happened to me recently when a long time, well known local newscaster died. We were on the east coast for 10 days, he died the day we left, and by the time we got back there was nary a sign he was gone. I only read an offhand reference to his passing two weeks after we returned, and wow, I was stunned.

This same thing happened to me with my guitar hero, Michael Hedges. I'd seen several of his shows, owned all his albums, etc. After I brought up Hedges in a dinner conversation one night, lacking the expected somber tones, my colleague asked, "You do know that Michael Hedges died in a car crash, don't you?" I was floored. How could such a notable passing occur without my hearing about it?

I remember all this after getting shunted to YouTube today by some random link, where I came across Andy McKee, the second coming of Michael Hedges. Hedges came before online video, and even sitting up close at a small show I could never quite make out just *how* he could sound like three guitarists playing at once. Andy McKee has a series of videos on YouTube that gets me that much closer. Apparently these videos have led to his discovery by the masses, no orchestrated marketing by record executives involved.

He says a bit about this on his website, Andy McKee - Official Website - Andy:

IC: Your videos really exploded in popularity late last year, and have now received millions upon millions of views! What kind of an impact did all the publicity have on your career?

McKee: It's been stunning to say the least. I had been teaching guitar for the last 10 years but recently stopped due to all of these gig opportunities. I was on the late night show Last Call with Carson Daly back in February. Someone there had seen the YouTube videos and emailed me. I recorded a tune for Josh Groban's next album in late April. He was really a nice guy - unreal voice. Apparently he saw my videos while on his tour bus in Arizona! I performed in England, Germany, and Austria a couple months ago, and will be in Portugal in June, Canada this summer, Japan in September. The impact has been huge on my life to say the least. CD sales are going strong as well as transcriptions. I'm really living my dream, making a decent living playing music! It's all I've wanted to do since the age of about 14.

Check out the videos! Start here:

Scott Adams on... web design?

Scott Adams is a geek, so should we be surprised that he has taken to the Web better than any other cartoonist? I've long read his blog not only for its general hilarity, but also for the candid insights into a famous cartoonist's life. Recently he has been running the blog version of a reality show, where he mentors a wannabe cartoonist to make it big. This has been fascinating stuff and I liked today's more than ever.

The Dilbert Blog: Basic Instructions, Part 6:

There are only about a hundred jokes in the universe. All humorists recycle them with their own twists and characters. In this case, you’re seeing a variation of “advice that makes things worse.” Scott’s twist on it is great because doing a bad job calming a child is naturally worse than doing a bad job at most other things. His setup does half of the work. That’s how he can find four separate humor points on one setup.

I took that same excellent setup and put it in an office setting. By featuring Dilbert, there’s a lot I don’t have to explain to the reader. You already know Dilbert has no skill in dealing with people, much less children. And you know his impulse for honesty and quantifying things causes him trouble. I don’t need words to describe any of that.

Click to enlarge



Using familiar characters, in familiar situations, makes humor work more easily.

Wow, is that class A instruction or what? He whipped up an illustrative example on the spot to demonstrate the point, awesome. So I'm not a cartoonist, but I like his punchline, "familiar characters in familiar situations makes humor work more easily," because it applies to many other processes that have nothing to do with comic strips or humor. Think about this in the context of building a successful web site: once you've established a familiar context with your users, what advantages do you accrue?