Mike Industries

Photo by swirlspice

I’ve only met Jason Kottke once. A few years ago at SXSW, I said hi, we chatted for a few seconds, and that was that. Although I’m occasionally in his sidebar and he links to Mike Industries every so often, I can’t say I’m a “friend”. In fact, while I’m on the subject, am I the only one who hates when people on the web say “our friends at ____” or “my good friend ____” when they’ve never even spoken to the person(s)?

Annnnyways…

Jason Kottke is known as one of the most interesting bloggers around and a particularly good “linkblogger”. But what does it mean to be a good linkblogger? For your standard “prolific linkblogger”, it’s simply about unearthing interesting new links on the web. Simple enough, right? Just follow other linkbloggers and regurgitate the good stuff.

What separates good linkbloggers from great linkbloggers is a little more subtle though: it’s all about the setup. And this is where Kottke excels. Take for example this entry from yesterday:

This timelapse video of man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours is difficult to watch. The video accompanies an article in the New Yorker about elevators.

White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice-it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

The end of White’s story is heartbreaking. On the plus side, the article also discusses a favorite social phenomenon of mine, how strangers space themselves in elevators.

If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range — less than eighteen inches between people — “intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”

(via waxy)

Let’s look at what makes this a great item:

1. Read the first sentence. This is the first hook. Timelapse videos are generally entertaining, and the “difficult to watch” part is a cue that, yes, you should probably at least try to watch it because it’s dramatic.

2. The setup also mentions the full article in the New Yorker, which is very important, since it provides a lot more information than the video. A straight link to the video is not nearly as interesting as video plus full background story.

3. The first quote from the article is well-selected. It only serves to increase the reader’s curiosity about the incident.

4. “The end of White’s story is heartbreaking.”. This is probably the most genius part of the link. It makes watching the video alone almost pointless. It *requires* the reader to click over to the New Yorker article to find out what actually happened. And this bit of motivation turns out to be quite important because the New Yorker article is written in a very strange style whereby White’s story is sprinkled into the overall piece a few paragraphs at a time. It’s quite a bizarre format, but since Kottke has given me motivation to find out what happened to White, I end up reading a lot more of the New Yorker article than I normally would have.

5. Kottke also parenthetically mentions how the article talks about the social phenomenon of “elevator spacing”, an extra added bonus for those of us who have always had an unnatural interest in such things.

6. And finally, Kottke credits Andy Baio for exposing him to the link… and upon visiting Waxy, Andy in turn credits Nelson Minar… and upon visiting Nelson’s delicious page, Nelson credits Metafilter. The “via chain”. So nice. Yet so often neglected by people (self included).

So in the end, we have a a story/video that most people probably would have either skimmed or missed entirely, but because of the thoughtful setup, both were consumed in their entirety with nervous anticipation. In fact, two other people sent me links over IM to the elevator video this morning and when I asked each if they had read the accompanying New Yorker article, they both answered “Nope… too long”.

Linkbloggers remember: The setup is everything.

If you live in the U.S. and have high-definition cable service, there’s a good chance you have a channel way up in the nosebleed section of your dial called “Mojo”. If you haven’t checked it out already, you should. It’s full of all high-definition programming and includes three great weekly shows I have now set Tivo Season’s Passes for:

Startup Junkies — A documentary about a fledgling startup called “EarthClassMail” and the ups and downs of its everyday operations. Having just gone through the entire startup experience with Newsvine, this show hits home for me in many ways. Number one, it’s set in Seattle. Number two, it nicely covers the highs and lows of startup life, from the stress of procuring your financing, to the thrill of launching your service, to the interpersonal issues that often crop up around the office. Someone asked me a few days ago if I would have ever let cameras into Newsvine for this sort of thing, and my response was “hellllllllll no”. I wouldn’t recommend most startups do it either, but watching someone else expose themselves like that sure is fun!

Wall Street Warriors — A documentary about several people with various jobs on or around Wall Street. The cast here is extremely diverse. There’s the 28 year old superstar manager of a hundred million dollar investment fund who probably has five times the energy of any normal human being. The guy is nails. Awe-inspiring to watch at times, although not someone I’d trade places with due to his non-stop, high-stress lifestyle. There is a recent NYU graduate just getting into currency trading. There are two commodities traders who do the yelling in the pits that you always see in stock market stock footage. And finally, there are two schmucks who work at a downtown investment brokerage who take pride in getting rich people to hand over their money to them. These two jerks then pay back their clients by putting all of their eggs in one basket (in this case SanDisk) and losing most of their money. Good times. Makes for healthy skepticism towards all investment brokers. Update: Entire series available online at Hulu… nice!

Bobby G: Adventure Capitalist — Bobby Genovese is a venture capitalist/entrepreneur who lives the high life and invests in such interesting businesses as the Neptune Society; a service which cremates your remains, mixes them with cement, forms the mix into statues, and then sinks the statues to the ocean floor so divers can swim around the underwater memorial. Bobby is also in the process of reviving the Clearly Canadian brand of sparkling water which has fallen out of favor in the last several years. I hope he succeeds. I loved that stuff. Update: Entire series *also* available online at Hulu… nice again!

If you haven’t filled out an NCAA bracket yet (or even if you have), head on over to the Newsvine Cinderella Bracket Challenge and pick your teams before Thursday’s tournament tipoff.

The grand prize this year is an XBOX 360, and once again, we’re proud to present you with what we believe to be the best NCAA Tournament game in the business. Instead of taking an hour to pick an entire bracket full of teams only to see the people who pick the top seeds score the most points, the Cinderella Bracket Challenge gives you a limited budget of 300 credits to pick as few or as many teams as you want. Top seeds cost the most and weaker seeds (”Cinderellas”) are cheap.

Your goal is to pick the basket of teams you can afford, given a fixed budget, that will net the most total victories in the tournament.

So if you’re interested in the NCAA Tournament, head on over to the Cinderella Bracket Challenge and you can fill out up to three separate entries. Make sure to either join an existing group or create a group of your own and invite your friends in. We don’t encourage gambling at Newsvine, but what you do behind closed doors is your business. :)

“SSSS”. The mark of the beast.

Ever wonder why sometimes, airport security personnel (TSA) ask you for your boarding pass immediately after you pass through the metal detector, considering that you just showed your pass to a TSA agent right before you got to the detector lines? Furthermore, do you ever wonder why some people get comprehensive searches and others don’t? Well today I got a tough lesson in security and airport incompetence which has caused me to finally give up and cancel my trip to Austin for SXSW.

First, some quick background.

Tom Watson, Jeff Croft, Ben Tesch, and I were supposed to fly to Austin via Dallas yesterday. I had instant status alerts set up through one of my new favorite sites FlightStats.com and made sure everything was A-OK before leaving for the airport. After checking into my flight and waiting near the gate, however, the entire thing got cancelled due to snow in Dallas.

American Airlines couldn’t get me on any other flights that day so they put me on an Alaska flight through San Jose for the following day (today). Fair enough. Weather shit happens. I get that.

Here is where it starts to get absurd though.

So, Tom, Ben, and I show up today a full 90 minutes before our flight, we check in, we go through security, and then at 12:50pm, five minutes after boarding has begun, we try to board. The person at the gate scans my ticket and says:

“Sorry sir. You need to go back through security. You need to get back on the train to the main terminal and tap a TSA agent on the shoulder and show them your boarding pass.”

I say:

“What??? Why? My friends too?”

She says:

“Yes, so sorry. Hurry.”

(more…)

After skipping last year’s SXSW because of panel and conference burnout, I’m heading back down to Austin for this year’s get-together. I look forward to throwing back beers with anyone who happens to also be going.

Before the conference gets started though, my MSNBC colleague Ben Tesch (B-Tizzle in the inner circles) and I are heading out for a round of golf at Falconhead. The tee time is at 11:12am this Friday and we have two extra spots. Anyone up for some hackery?

Once again, the blogosphere’s trashtalkingest and most reprehensible fantasy football league, the IKNFL, is increasing its roster. We’re expanding to two leagues of 14 teams each this year, and there is an extra spot up for grabs. Past champions include D. Keith Robinson (2004), Jeff Croft (2005), and Wilson Miner (2006).

Personal transformations have been known to occur in winners, as can be witnessed by Keith’s opening of the highly successful Blue Flavor design and development studio, Jeff’s relocation from a rural chicken farm in Kansas to the city of Seattle, and Wilson’s remarkable metamorphosis from early Swiffer mop prototype to ladykilling heartthrob (see below).

Before IKNFL Championship:

After IKNFL Championship:

The IKNFL is $80 to join but the payouts are equally rich. We include individual defensive players and use a normalized scoring system that ensures every position on the field can score big. There’s a lot of trash talk so make sure you can take the heat before applying.

SO… if you’d like to join, all you have to do is leave a comment below requesting membership. As a simple test of your football knowledge, name who should be the #2 pick of the draft and why.

So after my post about the disappearance of Pine Bros. cough drops, Freckles discovered there was an eBay auction offering up one unopened box of the honey-flavored variety. The rub being that they were from a production run in the 1950s.

I placed a bid of $6, won the auction, and my 50-year-old box of cough drops is now en route. So the question is: what is the shelf life on an item like this and are they safe to eat? If yes, I will eat them. If no, I will just keep them as memorabilia.

Any scientists out there in the audience? What happens to honey and glycerin over the course of 50 years? I have actually heard that honey is the only food in the world that never spoils.

Our superstar new intern, Rob “Double Tall Non-Fat” Goodlatte, just whipped out a Newsvine election widget for use on Facebook. If you have a Facebook account and want to express an endorsement for the 2008 Election, head over to the page below… it only takes a second:

Newsvine Election ‘08 Widget for Facebook

This is the first in a series of excellent election-related Newsvine features coming very shortly. Stay tuned.

How are these brothers still around? Punks.

Everyone knows cough drops are wolves in sheeps’ clothing. Pretending to cure you of your esophageal ills, these sugary lozenges usually do nothing more than stimulate your salivary glands into wetting your throat down until the next dose. The better they taste, the more you eat, and the less frequently you think about how crappy you actually feel.

When I was little, the undisputed taste leader in cough drops were Pine Bros (also known as “Pine Brothers”) chewy throat lozenges. Actually, back then, I don’t even think they were called “throat lozenges”… just “cough drops”. Short and sweet. They came in Honey flavor and Cherry flavor and had no medicinal value whatsoever. Just soft, chewy, long-lasting, and fabulous on the tastebuds. We ate them like candy. Awesome candy.

I forgot all about Pine Bros. cough drops for about 15 years between the late 80s and around 2002 when I unexpectedly found a reference to them on the internet and had to have them again. Through medichest.com, I was able to order several cases at very reasonable prices. The recipes had changed slightly and the lozenges were now being sold as “glycerine based zinc supplements” by a different company — with nary an actual Pine brother to be found — but they were still great. I ended up buying several more cases until the product suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth a couple of years ago.

Since that time, subsequent product searches have come up empty. There are even posts on eBay offering top dollar for any existing supply.

… which leads to my two questions:

1. Does anyone know exactly what happened to these things and why?
2. What is currently the most widely accepted substitute for Pine Bros. cough drops in the world today? I’ve recently gotten hip to Airborne Gummy Throat Lozenges which are pretty damned close to the real deal. The upside is that they taste every bit as good as the original, but the downsize is that they are a whopping $3 a pack and you have to pick out the nasty licorice ones from the otherwise great flavors of honey, orange, cherry, grape, and lime. I have also heard that Grether’s Pastilles and even Weight Watchers, believe it or not, are making decent substitutes for the originals. Anyone tried these?

One question per day. 150 words or less per answer. One answer per person.

Those are the only rules for the freshly announced Newsvine Question of the Day competition, and thanks to the nice people at Nike, each winner this week will receive an iPod Nano and Nike + iPod Sport Kit as a victory keepsake. Did you know Nike means victory in Greek?

We’re very excited about the launch of the Newsvine QOTD because it’s the first in a series of “lighter” activities we’re prepping for debut on the ‘Vine. Sometimes you’re just not in the mood to read and debate articles and essays and would rather spend a minute or two here and there doing less time-intensive things. The QOTD is designed to be read quickly and answered quickly. We’ll see how it evolves.

So head on over to the QOTD landing page (http://questions.newsvine.com) and answer the first question. It’s about the public figure below: