Category: Uncategorized

Nothing like getting on a morning airplane to make for a light sleep the night before. Off to Brooklyn to meet the new niece, with boy and girl in tow. Wish me peace and quiet, courtesy of JetBlue.

Yes, there is a 10K run, too. But I’m happy to get out and earn my Gary Larsen long-sleeved T-shirt at half the distance right now. Turned in an 18:53, for a 6:04 pace, which puts me 34th overall for the 5K, 28th male, and 7th male in the 30-39 age group. Official results came online the same day, which is nice. Best of all, my time was 40 seconds faster than last year.

I couldn’t find a graphic on the website, but the T-shirt drawing is a good one… caption: “At Slow Cheetahs Anonymous.” I believe Larsen does these drawings expressly for the race, which raises money for California Academy of Sciences.

My post expressing my personal feed preference hit on a quiet weekend in the tech world, clearly. I noticed the post was the lead on Memeorandum by early this morning, and it stayed there until just recently. (I’m not kidding myself… Scoble’s link is what pumped up the volume.)

People feel strongly about this issue, as I do. I didn’t underline strongly enough that this is about my reading style. My preference is not an economic issue, nor do I avoid full-text feeds. I use two newsreaders regularly, Newsburst and NetNewsWire. Like many (most) of the hundreds (thousands?!) of RSS readers out in the wild now, both readers have several options for viewing… like Alice’s Restaurant, you can get anything you want. I’m a scanner and have things set up to accomodate my needs.

In general, I’m pretty happy that the people and publications I want to read have feeds, of any/all varieties. I think the idea of giving people choice (full/partial) is wonderful, but aren’t we all struggling to get people outside of the Memeorandum crowd to figure out what the orange buttons are? Now you want to offer two (or more) buttons? Less is more, perhaps?

Side note: this blog doesn’t have comments or TrackBacks enabled. I’m happy to reply to e-mail (jbr + domain name). During the long weekend, I did spend several hours on a long-overdue blog migration project. When complete, those features and other obvious gaps should be closed. I have some bugs to iron out (time zone of old posts, especially), but with luck, or maybe some help, I’ll be moving DNS (easy, but worrisome) and software platforms in the near future. I will blog with a warning message before I do something irrevocable. 😉

I’m amazed at the mild foolishness exhibited by a NY Times headline writer in this article: “Wishyouwerehere.com: Blogs From the Road.” That’s right, the headline writer put a URL in the headline, which leads to several problems.

1. The URL in the headline is nowhere in the article (either page). That’s appropriate (see #2), but confusing.
2. The URL wishyouwerehere.com goes somewhere unrelated to travel blogs, which are the focus of the article. It’s not anything salacious, fortunately, just a UK-based production company, Fremantle Media, who’s (hopefully) thrilled with a small (?) amount of unsolicited traffic to their corporate website.

We’ll hope that Fremantle Media keeps up their domain registration, so the domain farmers don’t swoop in later.

Does the copy desk at the NY Times really not have a web browser available to them? Or, worse, they do, but never stopped to consider these outcomes?

I use my RSS feeds as notification. I want to scan.

I want to somehow squeeze the juice out of a couple of hundred feeds, leave the pulp behind, and spend the real time on the six to nine posts a day which are worth three to five minutes each. Full-text can interrupt the scan. Even full-text has to earn the “launch to browser” action. Most stuff worth reading ends up in a browser window.

Different tools and contexts matter. If I ever did anything offline, maybe I’d be crazy for full-text, but I think of those rare moments when I’m away from a computer as deliberate, so why not enjoy the connection and the focused reading experience available in a browser?

I’m bringing this up because Scoble is again sharing his preference for full-text feeds. In Back to reading feeds…, he notes he’s cleaning out his blogroll. (And, now he’s done.) The first criteria for elimination?

Any feed that doesn’t run full text. Except for the New York Times.

I disagree, as noted, but then I don’t spend oodles of time on airplanes or other in a disconnected environment. For more of my opinion on this topic, read my earlier posts on this subject… easier to link than repeat myself.

• May 18, 2005: The spectrum for RSS content is broader than you imagine
• June 24, 2004: Full-text feeds: the answer?

Aside…If I were really an attention geek, maybe I’d throw off a feed with every RSS item which caused me to spawn a browser window. You get the juice, without doing the squeezing yourself. Reality is, you’d want to combine my “juice” with that of other folks you read and (presumably) trust, and see whether you end up with truly refined sugar, or simply more juice to drink. More juice takes more time… which is part of the problem attention is trying to solve. So refinement is the answer.

At first glance, two posts on successive days from the smart folks at 37 Signals are in opposition.

First, there is “Do Fuss:”

Spend the time. Put forth the effort. Make it great.
(snip)
Well, if it’s just a little thing, then fixing it is just a small matter!

In other words, details matter and are worth the effort. I agree, even when I can’t live up to the ideal.

One day later, a different member of the 37 Signals team explains why simple features are not always such “small matters” in Revealing hidden assumptions in estimation:

Imaginary work is always easier to do than real work.
(snip)
Next time you find yourself thinking something ought to be simple to do–whether in a project of your own, or in someone else’s–pause for a moment. What assumptions are you missing? What real work are you overlooking because the imaginary work is so much more attractive?

I’m happy to give credit to 37 Signals. I use Tadalist quite happily, and hear good things about the other applications.

Still, I think I think the posts, in combination, demonstrate a push-and-pull in play. “Do Fuss” is aimed at other developers, ostensibly, but may be applied far beyond software. “Reveal…” speaks to developers’ tradeoffs, but feels like a warning to customers, too.

I guess I’m asking… do you want us to make a fuss or not? Or only about our own work, not yours?

That’s not a fair question, of course.

Remember, though, people make a fuss about things they care about. Customers who make a fuss do so because they have a frisson of recognition when using an application that in some fundamental way matches their expectations or needs. (Even the needs they didn’t know they had until that moment!) That recognition is rare enough, I think, that it inspires incredible excitement. You feel “Finally, someone who understands me and the way I work/play/create/consume.” However, all customers move quickly on to the next stage, which is “if it only did _____, I’d really be happy.”

In most scenarios, only that second stage gets communicated to the developers. But the second stage is never reached without passing through the first stage. Developers must remember that process, and hear the (too often) unspoken thrill their customer felt in the first stage in the background of their complaints, nudges, and requests in the second stage.

Developers should fuss about their work, and be glad someone else fusses about their work, too.

Lots of family, in person, over the phone, and via iSight… whatever it takes. Plenty to be thankful for, starting right there.

Jarhead on a Tuesday night a few weeks after its opening did not crowd a theater. Unlike many movies, I read at least two reviews ahead of time. The San Francisco Chronicle liked it. The Wall Street Journal (no free link) did not. I suppose I come down somewhere in the middle.

Actors are interesting, especially Peter Sarsgaard in the supporting role… reminded me of John Malkovich. But the introspective tone doesn’t really mesh with the more vivid visuals. I understood the tedium of waiting four months in the desert before the war began, but I didn’t want to feel the tedium. Seinfeld may have been a “show about nothing” but (a) it was comedy and (b) it was 22 minutes an episode. Jarhead isn’t a comedy and it’s two hours long. The time didn’t drag, but I wanted something to happen. Maybe that’s what the director wanted to convey… but if he was successful and I still feel disappointed in the film, what does that mean? Also, the epilogue showing the soldiers’ return home was out of sync with the rest of the film. Strangely, it was too brief. For the characters we care about, their “re-entry” into life outside the military could be compelling. These characters felt real. Their story felt real. Reality, though, isn’t always interesting. At least, it’s not why I go to the movies.

The Metacritic score was 56. Slightly lower than I might have given the film on a 100 point scale, but not out of line.

After the film, I stayed in the brightening theater, searching the credits for a close friend’s name. He spent several months of this year working on this film. Maybe I missed it, but even after the 2nd Assistant Accountant (!!!) was credited, I still hadn’t seen his name roll by. I couldn’t wait any longer than the credits for the staff at the Mexico location. I’ll simply have to learn why the arcane rules of movie credits left him invisible… or how I missed it early on.

Separately, why wouldn’t the website have the full credits available? Sure, not something for the public to have front and center, but why leave it up to IMDB.com to have all the details?

The news is more than ten days old by now: TimesSelect Surpasses 270,000 Subscribers in Less Than Two Months is the November 9 press release. Various people have parsed this release for meaning, direction, and the future of all information. Personally, I find it most telling that TimesSelect is such a non-entity in my daily news consumption.

Beyond my review of the introductory experience, I haven’t come across a single article behind the pay wall. No one has forwarded an email, no one has blogged an article, and my few articles a week from the Technology feed never led me any farther.

Coincidentally, my News Tracker subscription ended on November 12, three days after the release.

Dear News Tracker Subscriber,
You are receiving this e-mail because our records indicate your
News Tracker subscription has ended.
News Tracker is now a part of TimesSelect, a new premium service on NYTimes.com.
If you subscribe to TimesSelect you will maintain all of your News Tracker
preferences in addition to getting exclusive online access to the Times’s Op-ed
and select News Columnists and extensive access to The Archive.
(snip)
If you wish to subscribe to TimesSelect, and keep your News Tracker
preferences and alerts, please purchase or sign up for TimesSelect.
(snip)
If you do not wish to continue your News Tracker subscription, no action is necessary,
as your subscription has ended.

I’m pleased that NYT did not roll over my subscription in an opt-opt manner. That decision gives the customer some credit for intent, and boosts my confidence in the numbers cited. I appreciate politeness.

I do know of at least one print subscriber who has struggled — and given up — on enabling his free TimesSelect subscription, so the “convert from print” numbers can only go up. But it’s telling that the need for the information has not lifted my colleague’s efforts enough to go beyond the frustration of the process. If he were not reading the print edition, would he miss what’s available via TimesSelect?

That’s the question that NYT needs to find the right answer to over the next decade or so. I think they have at least that long to make this transition, but maybe people and events will move faster than I imagine.

Last night, Scoble noticed The Big Picture, a CNET News.com feature introduced with the redesign in early October. His brief post ends with

Easy to miss, too, cause it looked like an ad over on the right side of the page.

Damn!

Because The Big Picture is visual, instead of straight text, Scoble thought the visual tool was an advertisement. I know he’s not the only one.

But there are still innovative things to do with graphical presentation, or images, as an integral part of site content, not an optional part of the experience. In less than a dozen years, we’ve gone from the introduction of a web browser that supports images to a world which fears images as potential obstacles along the path to information nirvana.

I’m hardly the world’s largest advocate for visual design, probably because I can create words more easily than images. Yet that same gap in my skills helps me understand just how powerful the right image can be. I hope (and believe) that the right mix of text and graphical information is out there somewhere. I’d ask everyone publishing (blogs and beyond) to remembers that visuals support more than marketing messages. Give those poor images a chance! 😉

The larger reading public has been trained all too well that an image or a graphic is potentially (probably?) an advertisement. This tendency even has a name coined back in 1998 or so: “banner blindness.” In a mild irony, the gap contradicts the burgeoning success of photo sites. The original banner — a 468×60 rectangle born on Hotwired many years ago — is a rare bird, if not quite extinct, replaced by several other (mostly larger) sizes.

I’m not pointing fingers here. My job and my company rely on advertising to pay the bills. It works, or advertisers would not return — they are smart people who need to get a return on their investment. But it’s time to free those pixels for all uses once more.

A related curiousity: how long before the Google/Yahoo/etc. textual ad servings suffer the same “blindness”? Or will contextual appearance delay the inevitable? I know I recognize AdSense blocks instantly. I’m not yet blind to them, but I do continue seeking on the page.