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Took hour+ on phone (2nd call since yesterday) to resolve internet connection issue on Verizon's end. Service not worth what I pay for it.
The freedom of non-obvious connections
by JS on March 22, 2011
I was reading an article on Jonathan Ives 
(How did a British polytechnic graduate become the design genius behind £200billion Apple?) which mentioned he went to Japan to see one of the leading makers of samurai swords and spent hours in a sweets factory for inspiration.
For some reason, this reminded me of Paul Isakson‘s presentation How to Wander With Purpose:
Viewing the presentation again, the connection wasn’t as immediately clear as it initially felt in my head. So I decided I should write this post, in hopes of finding clarification (and having what I’m learning stick).
I think it has to do with the freedom to make non-obvious connections. The time and space and openness to learn from outside your immediate sphere is not something many employers provide, and it can be hard to find the energy to do completely on your own. That doesn’t make it less vital. I’m lucky in that I have a job where I’m expected/provoked/encouraged to open my mind and see where things may go. That means I can do a lot of this “for work” and that gives me the energy to do it not for work. Another thing I’m realizing yet again is that for work/not work isn’t a distinction that always makes sense for me.
That’s ok. I’m wandering.
You are reading right now. Aren’t you?
by JS on February 24, 2011
People don’t read. Wrong.
That’s what I say to myself every time I hear one of the “but people don’t read” arguments. People do. Sure, there is the tl;dr crowd, but the rest of us? We use Instapaper if we don’t have the time to finish, or pinboard, or some other bookmarking service. And most of the time, we really do go back and read the thing. My Instapaper account has a far shorter list of articles waiting for me than I have unread books in the house.
Lately I’m noticing a resurgence of reading online. I’m not sure what has sparked it. A fascination with a new form factor is no doubt part of the equation — using Flipboard makes a lot of web content more fun to read because it is an iPad app. It’s also more enjoyable because it is focused on the reading experience in a way that far too many websites are not.
One way to make “people don’t read” more accurate is to make it as difficult as possible for someone to read something on your site. First, shrink the font to an impossible to read at arms-length size. Then chop up content into pages, forcing a new page to load every two hundred words or so, so you can increase the number of page views where you serve up ads. Yes, make sure to liberally apply advertising: big obnoxious animated ads, ads that pop a box covering the content people came to see, little text ads sandwiched in between bits of real content, and my new favorite, ads that pop up in boxes when someone hovers over a link. Keep the real content to between two-thirds and one-half of the screen real estate. People won’t read if you make the experience terrible.
So there are all these new methods to make it less terrible, that make it fun, like Flipboard. Like Readability, which not only offers a vastly improved reading experience, but goes so far as to offer a different (and in my mind, more credible than most advertising) model for generating revenue from content published online.
There are so many tools to publish online — clearly we are all writers, of a sort — and yet I’m encouraged every time I see a new tool that makes it easy for people to publish on the web. Things like Posterous, which mainly relies on email to post stuff, meaning it’s accessible to anyone with an email account. Things like Pen, which is designed to let you publish “beautiful text based pages in seconds and share them with the world”.
Because the world that reads.
2010 in photos
by JS on January 1, 2011
Krista’s post inspired me to take a look at last year in photos. This is what 2010 looked like:
[Click on the grid to see a larger version, or click through to the individual images: 1. the awesomeness of the shelves, 2. grasp, 3. sunspots, 4. purple tulips, 5. illuminations, epcot, 6. somewhere over the midwest, 7. city lights #1, 8. summer, 9. tenth avenue, 10. the dishes, 11. soapboxes and matchbooks, 12. fireworks]
I didn’t shoot as much as I wanted to, but I still found time to play around with a wide-angle lens, a scanner, a macro, my android phonecam, and a lensbaby as well as my usual nifty fifty. (I tested out some of the impossible project polaroid film too, but didn’t like any of the results well enough pick them to represent a month.)
This year, I’m planning a few photo projects, so I will be spending more time on photography. It makes me happy.
finding value in “the golden age of graph innovation”
by JS on December 27, 2010
I’ve been playing around with Etsy’s taste test. Before you click on that link, I should warn you that it could potentially cost you a lot of money if you have poor shopping impulse control. What this nifty thing does is get you (in a few well-designed clicks, choosing preferred items) to a selection of objects it thinks you will really like. And it works: out of the vast inventory of things for sale on Etsy, it knew right away to serve up birds, quirky illustrations and octopus-related items.
I like the idea of a taste graph much more than I like the idea of a social graph. Ok, let me amend that: I like the idea of Etsy graphing my taste far better than I like Facebook’s ham-handed attempts to own my social graph. Etsy isn’t saying it has the final word on what I like, it’s saying hey, if you like these things, you will probably like these things also. This is pretty convenient for me and for Etsy, because otherwise I’d probably never find these things.
Etsy isn’t overreaching — it isn’t saying it knows just what movie I should see or what book I should read next (perhaps Hunch could help me figure that out, or LibraryThing, or check-in taste profiler GetGlue). Chris Dixon, one of the founders of Hunch, thinks the next few years may be the golden age of graph innovation. I hope he’s right.
I am not looking for one graph to rule them all. I’m looking for tools/services that will make it easier for me to discover things I’d like, and things that will make is easy for me to share discoveries with other people without feeling like I’m pimping a service or spamming my friends. I want to plug in all sorts of info — my twitter stream, the bookmarks I save with pinboard — as well as answer questions, or set some parameters, and be happily surprised by how eerily accurate the suggestions served up are.
If a service seems useful enough, I’d pay for help managing/sharing my graphs and the graphs of others. That is one of the things I use twitter for, albeit in a clunky sort of way. I think there is much room to innovate in this space, if people can get past the build-an-audience-get-lots-of-eyeballs-for-advertising model. That model is broken. It’s not that well done. (Facebook frequently serves up completely irrelevant ads, such as one for a dating service for folks older than I am, despite knowing my age and that I am married.) It’s boring. It’s not adding any value.
I am increasingly mindful of the notion that if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. I don’t want to be a product, though I may want help in finding great products, or telling people I know about great products. Folks who can make the distinction and build a service that puts me in charge of my information and the information about my connections — I want to see what they let me do and build with my graphs, what they make possible or just easy that was impossible or impossibly difficult before.