Archive for December 2006
Anybody have a SlingBox I can commandeer via IP? Just moved into a new place and no TV for a week.
is extremely happy that Newsvine just made Time Magazine’s Top Ten Web Sites of 2006…
Non-technical female is not getting it.
is trying to explain Twitter to non-technical female.

An Animated Look at Why E-Mail Is Broken

The interactive animation below accurately describes the state of my e-mail situation, in this, my 13th year with the medium:

Over the last couple of years, I’ve gone from someone who returns 99% of e-mails — and relatively quickly — to someone who routinely takes days, weeks, and sometimes even months to return certain mails, recently resorting to instant deletion just to avoid the buildup.

I’ve tried to figure out how to best express the dynamics of the situation in words, but an animated illustration seemed to get the point across much better, so this weekend, I whipped out Flash for the first time in about a year. The end result is kind of soothing actually… turn spam off, slide the top to “Fast”, and slide the bottom to “Manageable”. Now that’s e-mail nirvana… something I’ll never achieve.

Thanks also to professional mathlete Tom Laramee of SongStage.net for helping me even out the slider effect with an exponential decay equation.

Ok, I still don’t get it. I must be an OLD MAN. OLLLLLLLLLLLLLLD MAN I tell ya!
This has got to be the noisiest web app ever invented. The input is excellent though… who will be the first to use it in an actually-useful way?

Inquisitor: Spotlight for the web

A nice little tool which transforms Safari's search box into a live search box.

What's In Al Gore's Bookmarks Bar?

I have this really peculiar habit of always examining what is in the Bookmarks Bar of people’s browsers. I do it when I’m looking at someone’s computer screen, when someone sends me a screenshot which includes their browser, and even on TV when I see a browser somewhere in the frame. You can tell a lot about someone by what they’ve decided to drag in there.

So tonight, I was watching Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on DVD and about halfway through the movie, they cut to a scene of Gore typing on his Powerbook. For a split second they showed his web browser and I hit pause and snapped this picture:

I’m not sure exactly what URL that is, but it appears to be one of the results from this Google Images search.

I don’t know why I think this is worth posting about, but it just seemed weird to me. You can tell by the rest of his Bookmarks Bar (not shown) that he hasn’t customized much else, but he apparently felt the need to have photos of him on the web one click away at all times.

So what’s in your Bookmarks Bar? Post screenshots in the comments using a standard IMG tag…

UPDATE: Thanks to Mike West’s further investigative work, we also now know that Gore is apparently using Gwen Cassidy’s nytimes.com account! … and possibly her laptop as well.

How Pregnancy Happens

Thanks to D.L. Byron for sending this to me. I normally hate it when people send me web cartoons, but this one is pretty damn funny.

Shared

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

- Matt Thompson on why the way we report and consume news is precisely wrong. Matt is, of course, precisely right. If you’re at SXSW next week, I don’t know how you could justify missing this talk.

Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!

Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.

"Add features and customers forever and rake in the dough.":

The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs.  I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.

Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome. :

I actually really like how clubby it is.  Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.

Episode 2 of Dan Benjamin's "The Conversation" is Live:

I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.

LESS - Leaner CSS:

Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.

How 3D works, and why it's back:

Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.

The Importance of Removing Features:

This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)

Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???

A nicely done british parody of 60 Minutes style video journalism. It’s easy to miss how formulaic our news is sometimes. (via B-Tizzle, originally via E-Chizzle)

Colosseo: This is why Cameron is a king and we are all just pawns in his world. I can’t wait to get my hands on this poster. I will point out, however, that the outro credits on the video need some kerning. Someone is going to lose their right hand for that.

Spezify:

New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).

Realism in UI Design:

Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)

Overshared
At the first Doughty show of the night at the Triple Door. If you're in Seattle you should come down for the 2nd at 10. Excellent!
This Kindle ad is cute and Applelike but misses the mark. Advertise what you do well: price and battery life http://bit.ly/cFBw70
@codinghorror Aliased Monaco 9 should be in the Smithsonian.
Why does the media continue to cover what Rob Glaser thinks about the future?
@Trenti Ummm, the Timex Sinclair came out after the VIC-20, beeeeeeeayatch! I will out-old you any day!
@paulsmith Wow. I love the user manual shooting out from Shatner's shoulder at the perfect angle. http://j.mp/am10eU
@paulsmith You have me beat by mere months there! I cut my teeth on a Practical Peripherals 1200 bauder.
@roblifford Probably a 10% chance I fly in at the last minute for a couple of nights. Other than that, planning to skip this year.
I can't believe @shauninman's first computer was a G4. I feel ancient. Mine was a VIC-20. http://5by5.tv/pipeline/5
Wow, how did I not know about Lala until now? Tons of great full albums, free: http://bit.ly/dBrdLw
Thanks for everyone who suggested Brizzly. Going to fire that sucker up again...
Is there a way to unfollow people but still allow them to DM you? Like a "mute" setting or something?
@levifig Burn-in was a bigger issue with first-gen plasmas. They are much better now. LCDs have their own lighting issues as well.
@horsedreamer The black isn't quite as good as some other top plasmas, but it's better than all LCDs. At an inch thick, I'll take it.
@levifig Isn't ghosting mainly an issue for LCDs? I've had a plasma for four years and no ghosting whatsoever.