Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Rands:
The articles on Rands keep getting longer and longer, and as I’m finishing a piece, I worry, “Is it too long?” I worry about this because we live in a lovely world of 140-character quips and status updates, and I fret about whether I’ll be able to hold your attention, which is precisely the wrong thing to worry about. What I should be worried about is, “Have I written something worthy of your attention?”
(Via David Lesue)
Houzz.com on "magic mirrors" — computerized touch surfaces on the mirrors and windows in your home:
Magic mirrors and magic windows — in fact, magic glass surfaces all over the house — will soon become commonplace, thanks to breathtaking advancements in computers, computer interfaces and, of all things, glass.
Count me as a skeptic on the word "soon". This technology barely exists, let alone having a good reason to (yet).
Devices should be getting more mobile, not less. To be successful, innovations should also solve a problem. I don't remember having the urge to check my email while leaning over the bathroom sink. It's also fairly counterproductive to OCD-types like me: "Now introducing smudgy screens all over your house, not just in your pocket."
The whole thing reminds me of the Google Glasses: why do we need it? Speaking of which, they've popped up in the news again; it turns out it won't be nearly as cool as originally pitched.
Does this all sound familiar?.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Michael Lopp defending gamification:
... there are a lot of folks who think gamification means pulling the worst aspects out of games and shoving them into an application. It’s not. Don’t think of gamification as anything other than clever strategies to motivate someone to learn so they can have fun being productive.
Gamification is a buzz word, and it's gotten a bad name. Brent Simmons calls it manipulative, and Ben Brooks is a bit more colorful (and passionate).
The ever-insightful Lukas Mathis took the thoughtful middle ground. After I read his piece, I started a draft of my own. Now that draft will probably never see the light because, although the whole article is worth reading, Lopp has in three sentences summed up my feelings.
Of course, if your purpose in using gamification is anything other than helping the user enjoy learning and to be productive, then you'd do well to hear from the critics how you might be making your users feel about your software.
Mike Myatt, blogger for Forbes.com, writes:
Creating or expanding business relationships is not about selling – it’s about establishing trust, rapport, and value creation without selling. ...
Engage me, communicate with me, add value to my business, solve my problems, create opportunity for me, educate me, inform me, but don’t try and sell me – it won’t work. An attempt to sell me insults my intelligence and wastes my time. Think about it; do you like to be sold? News flash – nobody does. Now ask yourself this question, do you like to be helped? Most reasonable people do. The difference between the two positions, while subtle, is very meaningful.
Great article, and a lot to think about. A corporate goal like "increase sales by 50%" can be taken two ways.
One way would be to imagine that more people need to be convinced to buy your product.
The other way is to consider how you can add value and find the customers who most need what you are offering.
Create goals that communicate your actual intended action and aren't open to interpretation. Measurements should be customer happiness levels, not dollars of income (that may or may not have been pried from your customers' unwilling fingers).
Focus on the reason that your product exists and help it help people.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
By C. Jane Kendrick, writing her life story as a series of concepts and topics. This one is fantastic.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Looks like it's downfall-prediction time in the popularity lifecycle for Facebook.
Geoffrey James of Inc. Magazine published an editorial which argues that Facebook, unlike LinkedIn, is vulnerable to being ditched for "something 'cooler'":
LinkedIn is all about business and people's resumes. Because its scope is limited to fundamentally dull information, LinkedIn is simply not vulnerable to something "cooler."
Sure, somebody could launch a site similar to LinkedIn. (And I'm sure plenty of people have.) But why would the customer base bother to change? Nobody on LinkedIn cares about being cool. LinkedIn's beauty is that it's dull but functional–like email and the telephone.
Fair point. Being popular because you're cool does make you vulnerable to the next cool thing. But he doesn't make good arguments — or any at all, really — for his case that people have been using Facebook because it's cool.
Specifically, this argument falls flat for me:
Consumer-oriented social networking sites are like television networks: People will switch when there's something better on another channel.
Actually, consumer-oriented social networking sites are nothing like television networks. Exclusive content provides customers a reason to use more than one network. And, most importantly, there's no cost to switch to something better on another TV channel — in fact, it's common to switch back and forth.
Facebook, on the other hand, with years of posts, photos, and other social interactions (yes, many of them useless), as well as a large current audience, has a huge cost for a user that wants to "switch".
James does address that:
Frankly, I think it's just one online conversion program away from losing its customer base and becoming the next MySpace.
An "online conversion program" might provide a way to minimize the data loss, but Facebook has a much larger asset: market momentum.
ComScore analysis shows that 69% of North American internet users have Facebook accounts, according to a CNET article. People use Facebook because other people use Facebook — their friends, specifically. That's been one of the primary drivers of its virality, and it is now the reason for its ubiquity. In that sense, Facebook is more like email or the telephone than LinkedIn.
No online conversion program is going to move their friends over to the "next" Facebook.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
A dead-simple, free, JSON API for retrieving the city and state from a zip code. And, a sample/beta jQuery plugin to show how easy it is to auto-populate those fields when the zip code is typed. Could this be an end to the years of extra-typing madness?
(Via Daring Fireball)
Monday, April 9, 2012
Great article in Forbes by Warren Buffett for their "When I Was 25" series.
Warren Buffett, age 25:
Although I had no idea, age 25 was a turning point. I was changing my life, setting up something that would turn into a fairly good-size partnership called Berkshire Hathaway. I wasn’t scared. I was doing something I liked, and I’m still doing it.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Don't believe the don't-believe-the-hype hype.
According to a meme being passed around Facebook, Pinterest and other sites in various forms, the historians who calculated the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar as December 21, 2012 forgot to account for leap days. Oops?
This is even being picked up by some news outlets. The International Business Times reported it with the attention-grabbing headline, "Why the end of the world will not happen on December 21, 2012":
There have been about 514 Leap Years since Caesar created it in 45BC. Without the extra day every 4 years, today would be July 28, 2013. Also, the Mayan calendar did not account for leap year...so technically the world should have ended 7 months ago.
Unfortunately for those who want to disprove the doomsayers a few months early, this is completely wrong.
The Mayan calendar makes use of five different periods of time, starting with a single day (k'in). The next period, winal, is 20 k'in. Then, tun is 18 winal (360 days), k'atun is 20 tun, and finally, a b'ak'tun is 20 tun, which makes it 144,000 days.
As the meme suggests, this calendar does not include leap days. In fact, it doesn't have anything to do with solar years at all. At 360 days, a tun is a rough approximation of a solar year, but it's already 5 days off.
The "end of the world", according to doomsayers (and, in Mayan tradition, the end of the current age, or what they considered to be the fourth world), was after the current long-count calendar reached 13.0.0.0.0, or in other words, completed the thirteenth b'ak'tun (the digits in the calendar start with zero).
That means that the thirteenth b'ak'tun ends on the 1,872,000th day since the beginning of the calendar. Leap years or not, exactly 1,872,000 days.
So how did we get December 21, 2012?
Since we know that the 13.0.0.0.0 is equivalent to 1,872,000 days, we need to know exactly what date the Mayan calendar starts on.
According to astrologer John Major Jenkins, an archeologist named J. Eric. S. Thompson determined that 0.0.0.0.0 corresponded to the Julian date 584283.
Plug this into a handy calculator and you can see that December 21, 2012 is, in fact, 1,872,000 days from Julian date 584283.
Leap days included.
While it would be convenient and quite funny if some anonymous Facebook skeptic realized that historians and chronologists had "forgotten" to include leap days in the conversion from the Mayan calendar to our modern calendar, we can't rule out the end of the world quite yet.
Friday, February 3, 2012
David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise:
Macs were (and are) just better. Not just because they were better built or put together, but because Apple was a better company. A braver company. A company that stood for higher ideals. When compared to the empire of Microsoft and the Dells, Sonys of the time, it simply felt like they were more right.
When I looked at that, it seemed like an injustice that Macs and Apple were the odd ones out. Like quality was being held back and barred a chance to shine just because the dominant gorillas in the room had so much power and inertia going for them.
You may or may not agree with this. You may even think this statement is ironic; that Apple is now the evil empire.
But think about this: If Apple is the gorilla now, who are they keeping down? Samsung? Sony? Microsoft? RIM? Google?
Don't get me wrong; Apple has made its fair share of blunders. However, the list of players in the personal computing industry that are actively proving their general ineptitude, indifference and/or outright malice toward their customers in one way or another is long and growing.
While Apple has certainly shown that at times they’ve let their power corrupt, they’re still guided by the fundamental principle we fell in love with: Superior products through superior design.
If Apple isn't that, the company with the higher ideal, to actually create a superior product, we are in a sad state of affairs.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Google Voice made a valiant effort to transcribe a voicemail I received that consisted entirely of hold music:
Hey. Hmm, hey. Thank you. Look forward to talking with you. Fine, hey right back with you. Hey, ciao they Yeah, hey Yeah, hey. Hello. Thank you. We're hoping we sincerely appreciate your patience. Please stay on the line and we'll be back in December.
Hey, yeah. Hello, hey bye. Hey, they. Bye. Hey, We appreciate your time and patience you stay on the line will be back hey hey. Bye, bye bye bye I did. Thanks for holding We appreciate your time and pasted. Please stay on the line and we'll be back in just a moment, bye hello. Bye bye But thank you for a likes.
Don't know why back. I was put Hello, Thank you for alone We look forward to talking with you soon. Please hold the line. I will be right back with you.
Monday, January 9, 2012
A short film by Corey Rich asking an extreme kayaker, a free soloist, and a long distance mountain biker "why?".
The entire film is shot on the brand-new Nikon D4.
Inspiring.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
This is so well done — the right cursors and everything.
Via Daring Fireball.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
The Oatmeal:
You remember those Magic Eye books from the 1990s? The ones where you'd look at them, relax your eyes, and a 3D picture would pop out? Saying that 3D movies are the future of cinema is like saying that Magic Eye books were the future of literature.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
If you'd like to judge the 2012 Republican presidential candidates by the size of their entourage, or lack thereof, this is the graphic for you.
Rick Santorum:
I've just had my hopes of registering "ni.ck" dashed — the Cook Islands, the country for whom .ck is the country code top-level domain, has chosen to employ a second-level scheme for their domain.
Businesses in the Cook Islands may or may not appreciate this decision. As it turns out, it means they may register a name under the ".co.ck" second-level domain.
And don't get any funny ideas; there is a no-vulgarity policy in place. Strangely, that doesn't preclude the .co.ck category itself.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Struggling to come up with a New Year's resolution? Learn to code. Code Year, a site put together by Codecademy, is offering a weekly interactive lesson delivered to email.
The interactive lessons on Codecademy consist of a Javascript console that inserts the instructions in the console itself as you complete each task. Here's the first:
How long is your name? Find out by typing your name in quotes and ending it with .length
For me, that'd be "Ryan".length
Very cool.
Love this quote on Code Year by Fred Wilson:
A young man asked me for advice for 'those who aren't technical.' I said he should try to get technical.
Dan Frommer (at splatf.com):
2. Apple is happy to go a whole year without a major hardware design revision.
The iPad 2 wasn’t that much different than the first iPad. The iPhone 4S was, famously, “just a 4S”. (Still no LTE, NFC, etc. — for good reasons.) The iPod, Mac, and Apple TV lineups didn’t change much this year, either. And Apple still grew at a crazy rate, setting new sales records in every line.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Scott Johnson writes:
This year’s number one word is ‘creative’. ‘Creative’ took the number one spot in many countries across the world and wasn’t even on the list last year.
What is changing? ... What is driving it is a shift in workplace dynamics. The Facebook generation enters the workforce with different expectations and ambitions than previous generations. Those expectations are leading to a realization that the only competitive edge anybody can have in this day and age is the ability to be creative.
LinkedIn calls their list "overused buzzwords", and some of them are. I like Scott's take; the move to creativity is a real shift in marketplace values.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
