Author: John Roberts

I’ve been cluttering my Safari bookmarks bar with the following for a while. Some of them were even worth the wait.

• Digital Media Mistakes – Notes from the newspaper world on mistakes to avoid. Not incredibly useful for me, but right in touch with online-news.
• Slashdot review of a book I’d like to read someday: How would you move Mount Fuji? about Microsoft interview questions (it’s more than that, but that’s the Cliff notes).
• Some people don’t need the internet. Freaks. 😉 There is a research study from Pew behind this post.
• Barry Parr on why the definition of content is too broad when you’re looking at content sales. Classifieds don’t count (well, they do, but not in the same category as news).
• Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters is already, seemingly, a blog classic. I did read it, and I enjoyed a few things. First of all, his definition of “makers” as the right kind of hacker. Also, on a longer note, his reminder that time must pass for reputations to really center.
  

  The only external test is time. Over time, beautiful things tend to thrive, and ugly things tend to get discarded. Unfortunately, the amounts of time involved can be longer than human lifetimes. Samuel Johnson said it took a hundred years for a writer’s reputation to converge. You have to wait for the writer’s influential friends to die, and then for all their followers to die.

• Another note from Barry Parr on the slow, steady progress of The Economist online.
• More about building the Memex, from Emergic. I did read Vannevar Bush’s “As we may think” several years ago. I was one of the people who helped get it online at The Atlantic in 1994 (AOL) and 1995 (web), where it was originally published in the magazine in… wait for it… July 1945. It’s been almost 60 years and we’re still striving to meet the visions here. I want to read the biography.
• Social capital of weblogs – nifty diagram, but tries to make too much of the topic.
• Newspaper as UI from Don Park. We are still re-learning some of the UI lessons of the print world here online. Yes, it’s different, but we (the audience) are still much the same. Maybe the next generation or two will change that, but not yet!
• Where is the knowledge in a CMS? It’s a damn good question.

OK, well, an afternoon. A beautiful day all around, which I spent racing, napping (no link necessary!), and lounging on the beach in the sun. This being San Francisco, a sunny day at the beach still means long sleeves thanks to the wind, but with a full-on view of the Bay, parking within 50 yards, the Golden Gate Bridge, kite-surfers flying, and a kid happy to be playing in the sand… nothing to complain about.

Emergic pointed me to this outline of the ultimate weblogging system. I’ll have to read the entire thing at some point, since I’m curious about other systems. However, the reality is that I just need more time. My wife asked me when I started this whether it was just one more thing I was going to feel guilty about. Sort of…

Straight from Seth Godin’s site… he doesn’t have permalinks, so I’m going to cite the post in its entirety. The question I ask after reading it is… what is a hit for news? Is there one?

The power of a hit

One thing I didn’t write about that much in my latest book is the phenomenon that allows a new product to cross the chasm and reach the vast majority that are so busy ignoring you.

It’s the hit effect.

When all the early adopters at radio stations start playing a Norah Jones song, it becomes a hit. Billboard magazine charts it. It spreads. First to radio stations that only play what’s on the list, then to consumers who only buy what’s on the list.

When all the early adopters in silicon valley start carrying a Blackberry pager, it becomes a hit. They feature it at Fry’s. It spreads. First to the friends of the geeks, then to people who buy what nerds buy.

The middle of the market wants to be safe. They want to buy what others are buying, read what others are reading. And scorekeepers–like bestseller lists and cash register displays–are the barometer they use to determine whether a new idea is safe yet.

Tivo’s challenge, for example, is that Tivo is essentially a private device. There’s no obvious list it could be on. No retailer it can dominate. As a result, it takes far longer for it to jump over to the middle of the market.

One lesson here is to try to create products that have obvious lists. The second is to figure out how to work with early adopters in a focused, coordinated way to get on that list.

Time is short, so here’s a list… for the future (maybe).

• Wired article about Denim, a website ‘sketching’ tool
• Comments on different approaches to combatting spam from a VC who was once at Apple, so speculates on Mail (which I’m using now, to good effect)
• Quick note about new OPA study about the at work audience from Barry Parr
Dot Boom, the card game (let’s see how many I recognize)

Hard to be ambivalent about the Los Angeles Lakers. They won today. Series is tied 2-2. I still want them to lose.

‘New Media’: Ready for the Dustbin of History? is an article in today’s NYTimes Week in Review.

Mr. Diller and others have come to realize that two things succeed commercially on the World Wide Web: searching (like Google and Yahoo) and shopping (like Amazon.com and eBay).
Is that what the digital revolution has come to? Back in the mid-1990’s, it was going to cause a media revolution.

Steve Lohr, the author, then goes on to write off the efforts of AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, and the media-focused efforts of Microsoft… all because commerce is the be-all and end-all. When you write a perspective article, and you refer back all of 6-10 years, I think it’s a bit early. Yes, journalism may be the first draft of history, but maybe the jury is still out? Of course, I’m biased. I work at a media company founded for the internet… in retrospect, at least. We’ll see. I’d like to think we’re still making history — though we can’t tell whether we’re going to like the story yet.

We’ve had a beautiful day here in the city, and all three of us spent some time down in the back yard. Part of our backyard has a beautiful, deep green, luscious lawn (the rest is concrete, porch foundation, etc.). Of course, that luscious lawn is fake. It’s FieldTurf, and it was one of the best decisions we made when redoing the back porch and our small yard. The motto my wife always throws out is “No mow, no grow, no H2O.” Given the San Francisco climate and my lack of interest in yardwork, FieldTurf has been quite the answer for us — and we only have a tiny back yard. After reading “Fields of Dreams?” from the NYTimes, I feel even more ahead of the curve. The article, which will disappear behind the premium wall eventually, isn’t about artificial replacements for the American lawn. Rather, it chronicles the increasing competition for fields, not only in cities, but even in suburbia. Of course, the examples are in Westchester, north of New York City, but I expect they represent other urban areas and their surrounds, too. The (proper) growth of girls’ sports and burgeoning leagues for adult recreation, competing against the price of urban land, means that the limiting factor for recreation is often the field.

The demand for more sports fields came as open space was diminishing and land prices were rising, and it has all added up to a shortage of athletic fields writ large.

As Ben outgrows kicking the ball in the house (any week now), and then outgrows the backyard (still a year or so away… I think), I’ll start to see this affect us more dramatically. Most of my sporting activities are more about endurance, but team sports are fun and integral to making friends… and they require space, whether fields or gyms. I’ll have to start paying more attention to how San Francisco handles this… it’s a long-term issue, so if I want to have a voice, I need to be informed now. I hope FieldTurf comes down in price, either through competition or other market forces.

I ran around the track at Kezar today. The track is open for public use. The field is not… has to be reserved.

Here in San Francisco, they are tearing down another highway. After the 1989 earthquake, apparently, two damaged highways were pulled down instead of rebuilt. I never visited San Francisco before those disappeared, but I certainly appreciate the openness of the Embarcadero now. Now, after several votes back and forth over several years (at least the entire 6+ years we’ve been here), the Fell off ramp (aka, the Central Freeway) is coming down. The San Francisco Chronicle, of course, has followed the progress, and lack thereof, all along. A mid-April editorial, Life after freeways, wonders if we’ll have similarly positive results with the current highway.

“NO CITY hates cars like San Francisco. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, city leaders tore down two heavily-used freeways while other towns battled to replace theirs.”

We won’t know whether to celebrate the outcome or not until 2006, when it’s all scheduled to be done. Follow the project yourself.

On a more personal note, it sure was fun, for all of us, to watch some of the demolition. In the morning, we stopped by the Oak/Laguna intersection to watch the workers prep everything (laying dirt down, perhaps to protect the road surface?). Ben was, predictably, fascinated — but Brooke and I found it interesting, too. Later in the afternoon, we went back and watched the controlled chaos. Three excavators with ‘breaker’ attachments (I know these things now, thanks to Ben), a skid steer, a loader, and various trucks to cart away the rubble… all of them focused on tearing down an overpass. Amazing how much concrete and steel are in a highway section. I had a headache from all the noise eventually, but an entertaining hour-plus on a sunny afternoon.

Most mornings, about this time, I get on my bicycle or put on my running shoes and head to work. It’s three short miles across San Francisco, mostly downhill or flat on the way to work. It’s a tiny bit of exercise and a faster commute than the bus, most of the time. But this morning B is going to drive me to work… feels decadent, but I get a few more minutes here and she gets to sleep in a bit longer. Never hurts on a Friday.