Stream of Awesomeness

2012 Wrapup

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:57:00 -0500

I usually try to do my yearly wrapup by February 1, which is already late, but this year has just gotten ridiculous. Last year, I went with a nutrition facts theme which was kind of cool, but we took down the other pieces of my blog for a bit so there is no link. This year is busier so I’m going old school with just a regular post. Here’s how I did on my plan for 2011.

Throw an awesome Brooklyn Beta 2011

Against all odds, this went very well. Chris and I were both very terrified that conference wouldn’t live up to expectations but somehow the combined forces of Analog, Fictive Kin, & Workshop were able to pull it off. I’m really proud of the event we threw and it feels good to know that people enjoyed it. Extra major thank you and hugs to Jessi, Josh, Creighton, Teams Fictive & Analog, Studiomates, our speakers, and all the attendees for making it great.

Finish off our TeuxDeux bug / feature list.

We did zero things on TeuxDeux this year. Goose Egg. Nada. Considering it is an app that I use every day, I don’t feel great about that. We’ve got some ideas for how to change that in 2012 and I hope they turn out to be good ones.

Publicly launch Gimme Bar

We did this. Gimme Bar is a maaaaaaaaaaassive app with tons of major components and nuances. Our little team has handled that challenge very well and I feel lucky to work with such nice, dedicated, and talented people. We’re deep in a redesign / rearchitecture that we hope will knock your socks off in the next month or so.

Lose 22 pounds

If you looked at me with your eyeballs right now, you would not be especially impressed with my level of fitness. That said, I met this goal. I’m down 34 pounds from my high of this year which is probably higher than when I wrote the resolution. So I can’t count all 34 pounds towards the goal, but I can still feel good about trimming down a bit. The key to it all was the diet I invented called Scotchkins. I hope to talk more about that later this year.

Attend 10 Concerts

I killed it on shows this year. I saw incredible concerts, comedy shows, & broadway plays. Gonna be hard to top that in 2012.

Concerts

Jamie XX @ LPR
The Knocks @ Some random church
Fang Island @ Bowery Ballroom
James Blake @ Music Hall of Williamsburg
Godspeed You Black Emperor @ Brooklyn Masonic Temple
LCD Soundsystem @ Madison Square Garden (final show)
Animal Collective @ Great American Music Hall
James Blake @ Bowery Ballroom
Surfer Blood @ Music Hall of Williamsburg
Best Coast & The Decemberists @ Prospect Park
Bon Iver & Rosebuds @ Prospect Park
Jeff Mangum @ New England Conservatory
Nicolas Jaar @ Mo MoMA PS1 (5 hour show)

Comedy

Norm MacDonald - Cobb’s Comedy Club
Bill Cosby - Cerritos Center for Performing Arts
Louis CK - Beacon Theatre (the show he sold for $5 online)

Broadway

Importance of Being Earnest
Book of Mormon
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
Sleep No More
Jersey Boys

Concerts Skipped (sadly)

Mt. Kimbie - LPR
Nicolas Jaar - LPR
Air Guitar Competition - Bowery (So sorry Rob.)
Disintegration Loops @ The Met (Major Regret)

Read 10 Books

I read 13 books. A lot of them were short books, but whatevs.

Elements of Content Strategy
High Output Management
Managing Oneself
On writing
Impro
Born Standing Up
Why We Get Fat
On booze
Endurance
Delivering Happiness
Design for Emotion
Mobile First
Old man and the Sea

I also read a whole bunch of comic books. Work was hard this year, so comic books seemed a more manageable meal than a full-fledged novel.

We3, The Mighty 1-2, Locke & Key 1-4, Batmans, RAFL 1, Shazam, Incognito 1 & 2, Northlanders 3-5, Baltimore, Astro City Dark Ages 2, All Star Superman Vol 1, The Amazing Screw on Head, Daredevil, The Homeland Directive, Ex machina 4-6, & Silverfish (and frankly probably a lot more).

LCD cover miss you

I tried my darndest to get LCD Soundsystem to cover Miss You by the Rolling Stones. Give that a listen and tell me that’s not a noble cause. Anyhow, who could have predicted they would go and break up. I haven’t given up on this, but it’s not a 2012 goal either. It’s a long play.

Close out NYC tourist mode

I was supposed to do The Statue of Liberty, The Empire State Building, and Harlem Jazz. I did none of those things. Gonna try again this year, but am more skeptical than I was before.

Speak at one conference

Great Success! I spoke at Colly Con this year and had a great time. This is the second time I’ve made the trip over to the UK to work at Mild Bunch and then catch up with everyone in Nottingham. Being a speaker at an event is very different and a bit more stressful. Really glad that the first place I spoke was at a conference run by my friends (Simon & Greg). Was also pretty darned cool to speak alongside 3 Brooklynites (Travis, Dan, & Frank), old friends (Trent, Robbie, Naomi & The Standardistas), and new friends (Denise & Ben).

Start a design R&D group

We ran two Design R & D projects this year and learned a lot about how they should work. I’ll go into more detail later about what all this means. Gonna wait until we launch the relevant projects first.

Write a comic book

Once again in 2011, total fail. Given that this is two years of failure on this front in a row with no sign of even starting such a project, I think I’m gonna table this for 2012 and look to a possible 2013 reunion.

Discover Fountain of Youth and / or Holy Grail

I had no luck on this front. In 2010 I tried for atlantis, but Frank Chimero beat me to it. In 2011 I set out for everlasting life, but Jack Sparrow beat me to the punch. As it turns out, I’m terrible at finding ancient monuments, but excellent at predicting the years in which they will be discovered.

Miss every single Nicholas Cage movie

This was easier than you might expect. Had I proposed this resolution in 2010, Kickass would have turned out to be a problem. But in 2011, it was a breeze. Monsieur Cage came out with 5 movies: Season of the Witch, Drive Angry, Seeking Justice, Trespass, & Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. None of which were especially enticing and the last of which was mildly enfuriating. I’m going to try to keep the streak alive in 2012.

2012 Goals

10 concerts
15 books (i want to read more)
52 blog posts (I don’t think our industry writes enough)
Lose 25 (more) pounds (fighting shape!!)
Surprise people with the new Brooklyn Beta gumbo we’ve been cooking up. (It’s got shrimp!)
Launch 4 new applications (Rushmore, News, DnD, & Bright!)
Release a massive Gimme Bar redesign / rearchitecture (now with 50% more gimme!)
Miss every single Nicholas Cage movie (even The Frozen Ground w/ Vanessa Hudgens & 50 Cent!)
Exclamation Point (!)

You Can't Transfer Will

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:07:00 -0500

Last year, I met up with Josh Stylman. We took advantage of the small window of gorgeous Spring weather and grabbed a couple afternoon Negra Modelos at Pacifico. Josh is a former-entrepreneur turned investor / advisor and I asked him about that transition. He mentioned that part of what makes investing in startups difficult is that “will is non-transferrable.” You can advise and encourage a startup all you want, but at the end of the day, it’s up to them to exert the will and effort required to get things done.

That phrase hit me hard. I called Josh a “former-entrepreneur” but that really just means that he’s an “entrepreneur between obsessions.” Entrepreneurial character traits are hard to shake even if there is no immediate project on the docket. Of all the entrepreneurial traits I can think of, self-reliance and strong personal will are the most foundational. People like Josh, myself, and the rest of the Fictive team have been conditioned to rely on our will to get things done and so it is frustrating to see its absence in a project you are involved in.

I don’t do a lot of angel investing, but in my personal life I often feel like a kind of early-stage investor. Instead of investing money in startups, I invest my time and energy in the dreams of my friends & family. These folks hope to build something great or change careers or advance in their existing careers and have asked me for advice on how to do so. I didn’t realize it until recently, but these personal energy investments bear a great deal of resemblance to financial investments.

Once someone has involved me in the plot for their dreams, they keep a little piece of me with them, whether they know it or not. They can take that energy and turn it into something great or let it fade. Either way, I have a very real emotional stake in their outcome.

I used to think that I had near-infinite energy reserves, but it’s become increasingly clear that, like a financial investor, I need a return on my energy investment. If people involve me and then go on to accomplish what they set out to do (or even just work hard toward it) I gain a great deal back in the satisfaction of knowing I helped someone. It’s then easier to pay that energy forward to other folks who want my help. If they go on to do nothing, I lose the energy I invested and it won’t be coming back.

This year, I’m making it a goal to fully internalize Josh’s comment. Will is non-transferrable. In order to have the biggest impact possible, I’m going to need to be increasingly discerning with my energy investments. I need to throw myself behind the most eager folks so my reserves stay full and I can keep being generous with my time and energy for a long time to come.

Heroes

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:05:00 -0400

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

-Ernest Hemingway

Understatement of the year in whatever year he said that. I’m not old, but I’m getting older and I’m hurting for heroes. Once you leave school, learning is no longer structured. You have to figure things out for yourself. You still want to learn because learning means growing and growing is the most enjoyable way to live, but it’s gotten a lot more difficult. I’ve discovered that I learn much more from other people than I do from textbooks. I also realized that these people - my heroes - come in three flavors, one of which is in short supply.

The first group of heroes I think of as “role models.” The role model group is composed of my peers who are smarter and more talented than me in one way or another. I try to spend as much time as possible with people like this and, on that account, I’ve been very lucky. I’m surrounded by tremendous role models in my family, among my friends, at Fictive Kin & at Studiomates. Their proximity makes them incredible sources of learning. I can see their behaviors and ideas in action on a daily basis or I can go deeper with them on a walk home or a fireside scotch conversation. As such, no other group has done more to shape me into the person I am today.

The second group of heroes leaves the idea of proximity behind altogether and enters the realm of imagination. It may seem weird, but I look up to a lot of the fictional characters (Holmes, Protagonist, d’Anconia, Dantes) and historical figures (Franklin, Edison, Lincoln, Hemingway) that I find in books and movies. These heroes tend to excel at some aspect of human ability or spirit that I would like to see more of in myself or in others. Because they are essentially imaginary (even the historical figures) these heroes are aspirational in a sort of unrealistic way. Sure I’d love the observational powers of Sherlock Holmes, but that’s not very likely. That doesn’t mean I can’t learn from his character to be more observant in my day to day life. It does mean there are limits to the impact these heroes can have on my life. You never fully feel like it’s possible to accomplish what they accomplish.

The final group of heroes is a marriage of the first two. I like to think of them as the big “H” heroes. Mostly because I don’t have a better name. These Heroes are people have done astounding, almost unbelievable, things and yet they aren’t imaginary. They’re real. You can see them. You share the air with them. They’re existence makes the world seem full of possibilities because they stand as an example of just how far one person can go. My first love is products, so for a while now my only version of this Hero has been Steve Jobs. This article, which I wrote when I first heard about the SJ biography being released today, was meant to be a thank you to him for setting that kind of example. I’ve had to edit things because he is dead. Overnight, he was transformed into a historical figure. There is no next chapter. As of today, I have no living Heroes. I’m pretty bummed about that.

Brooklyn Beta 2011 Schedule

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:04:00 -0400

Wednesday

9:15 - morning hang
10:00 - in session
10:30 - small group love
12:00 - lunch
13:00 - in session
13:15 - small group love
14:45 - break
15:45 - in session
16:15 - big group love
16:45 - dinner & drinks

Thursday

9:15 - morning hang
10:00 - in session
11:05 - break
11:55 - in session
12:30 - lunch
14:00 - in session
15:00 - break
15:50 - in session
16:55 - dinner & drinks

Friday

10:30 - morning hang
11:00 - in session
12:10 - lunch
13:10 - in session
14:10 - break
15:00 - in session
15:50 - break
16:40 - in session
17:30 - dinner & drinks

Yikes, HP.

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 12:26:29 -0400

So HP is probably going to bail on making PCs. That’s pretty crazy, but what’s even crazier is what they’re giving them up for.

Move HP into higher value, higher margin growth categories
Sharpen HP’s focus on its strategic priorities of cloud, solutions and software with an emphasis on enterprise, commercial and government markets
Increase investment in innovation to drive differentiation

Increased investment in innovation to drive differentiation. I can see it now.

Measuring our Environmental Impact

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:35:00 -0400

On Saturday night I was skimming through my Google Reader and landed on a Techcrunch post about the effect of commercial fryers on the environment. They highlighted the following impact:

“If every large vat fryer in the [country] met the new Energy Star requirements, energy cost savings would increase approximately $81 million per year and reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the emissions from nearly 95,000 cars.”

We really need a better way to communicate the environmental impact of our actions. Who decided that we should use cars as the primary unit of measurement? If you stop using plastic bags for your groceries, that’s like one car. Recycle all your cans, that’s like two cars, but one of them is a Hummer. Stop driving you car to work, that’s like five cars (trust us). Presenting gains in terms of theoretical cars off the road only confuses the matter and does little to connect with us on a personal level.

There’s a story in Made to Stick about when CSPI wanted to get people to stop eating buttered popcorn because of the tremendous amount of saturated fat that was in it at the time. They used the following language:

“A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings — combined!”

That story is tangible, relevant, and personal. They compare food with food and require no mental abstraction on the part of the listener. The facts are startling and make you think, “Do I really want this popcorn when I could have all this other good stuff instead?” Probably not.

We can also see this kind of clarity in the message charity:water uses to help raise donations. First, they lay out the enormity of the problem to show that it is worth your time.

One billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water.

If they stopped there, the enormity of the problem would be clear, but would also be daunting. Few potential donors would feel that anything they could do would make a dent in the situation. But, thankfully, they do not stop there. They make it simple, personal, and easy with the following two figures:

$20 = clean, safe drinking water for one person.
$5,000 = a well for a community.

And all of a sudden, my personal role in this huge problem is clear. All I need to do is come up with an Andy Jackson and I can help a single person get clean drinking water through the creation of a sustainable well.

I don’t know what the equivalent language is for understanding our environmental impact, but I’ll be thinking about it a lot. The best language might be tied to relative measurements. What is my impact relative to my neighbors? What’s the per capita impact of my community relative to neighboring communities? You could also make it about money. How much more does the greenest person on the block save than the most wasteful? Clearly I don’t have an answer yet, I just know it isn’t cars. If you know of folks doing compelling work in this area, please let me know.

Internships Part II: The Implicit Contract

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:44:00 -0400

For part one, go here.

There is an implicit contract that the intern and employer enter into when an internship begins. I think that because it is implicit, it is rarely heeded. I’d like to take a moment to make it explicit for both parties. This post has the same disclaimer as Part One which is that I am talking about internships with individuals or small teams, not larger agencies that have whole processes in place for chewing through interns.

Interns

Interns. It is your job to lighten the load or increase the capacity of your employer. You do this in exchange for valuable experience knowledge and industry connections. In most cases you should be paid, but not a lot. You are making a sacrifice early in your career for much greater gains as you develop. While you should expect to work on some interesting projects, not all of your work will be knowledge work. Gopher work should be a part of it too and you shouldn’t shy away from it.

Because many employers are too polite to request help with menial tasks, you can distinguish yourself by spotting and doing them proactively. Offer to go on coffee runs. Clean up the office space without asking. If you see your employer, for example, taking out the trash every Wednesday, offer to save them the time & effort. If you find yourself without anything to do, feel free to suggest a project or a couple projects to your employer. It will be easier for them to pick something from a list than to generate something on the fly.

During your time as an intern, your goal should be to ship as many quality projects that you can show off in your portfolio as possible. Before you start your internship you should set this expectation and hold your employer to it. You should measure the success of your internship by how much work you ship and how much fun you had. The next step is either a full-time position at the place of your internship or some other interesting company.

Employers

Employers. When you take on an intern, you are agreeing to mentor them and help develop their skills. You should be consistently imparting industry knowledge and meaningful feedback to them. If you are doing that right, the intern will leave the internship more talented and more employable than when they started.

It’s ok and give interns some amount of gopher work as long as you are balancing that with meaningful project work that gets completed and published. Don’t take on an intern if you don’t have specific projects lined up for them. It’s not fair to either of you. An intern does not simply want to bask in your glow. An intern wants to ship. They may bask for a little while, but soon they will realize that you, like everyone else, are just a person.

Set your internship for a finite period of time. This is a jumping off point for the intern and you need to ensure they do not get stuck. As the internship is coming to a close, you should be attempting to help your intern find a job. You should consider your internship a success if you either decide to hire your intern on a full-time basis or you are able to help them find a full-time gig somewhere else that is cool. If your intern struggles to find a job following your internship, odds are you didn’t do right by them.

This contract is sealed

If each side lives up to their end of the bargain, you have a smarter, more employable intern, a lightened load for the employer and a long-term industry friendship. This contract is sealed.

Unclaimed Internships

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:43:00 -0400

This is a public service announcement for all you young designers & developers out there looking to get started in the web industry. There is a conversation happening again and again at Studiomates that I think you should be aware of.

Studiomates is pretty high-traffic in terms of interesting guests covering a broad swath of awesome. Lately, at our guest lunches, we can’t seem to avoid the subject of interns. What I’ve found interesting is that the conversations all follow the same arc. They start out as a longing and turn into a sort of dejection punctuated with lines like “I’d love an intern, but they’re too much work”.

I was raised in a “waste not, want not” household and I hate to see great potential internships go to waste because of some perceived quantity of effort. The reality is that internships only seem like a lot of work. When done well, they are a huge boon for both the intern and the employer, they improve the knowledge base of the industry as a whole, and they lead to life-long industry friendships. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few more around.

Quick disclaimer: In this article, I am talking about internships with individuals or small teams, not larger agencies that have whole processes in place for chewing through interns.

Effort

Thinking of interns as “too much work” seems to put the blame on the intern, but the reality is that the employer holds much of the responsibility. The problem is that most employers are tremendous practitioners of design & development, but not as practiced in the art of management. After doing the work to find an intern, they don’t always know how to get the most out of them. There are two things that I think can improve the quality of the internship and reduce the sense of effort.

Ask for help with administrative tasks. Creative work is challenging when interruptions are high. Offloading your distracting, administrative tasks to your intern will improve your productivity. Sure, it can be uncomfortable to tell other people what to do, particularly if the work is not glamorous, but as long as you aren’t giving your intern only menial tasks, you shouldn’t hesitate to lighten your daily load by asking them to mail a package or make copies.

Be willing to delegate. Too many folks in our industry micromanage their interns instead of trusting them. Of course interns will seem like a lot of work if you have to constantly scrutinize their work as well as your own. There’s no leverage in that. Let your interns solve problems iteratively. Check in at the end of each iteration, give thoughtful feedback, and point them in the right direction. It may take them a bit longer (in terms of days) than if you had done it on your own, but the effort required of you to get the project done will be minimal and the whole time you can be getting work done on your other projects.

The moral of the story here is that employers have just as much a responsibility to keep an internship effortless as does the intern. Let’s have a look at the intern’s responsibilities, shall we?

Initiative

Hi interns. This is may just be Old Man Cameron talk and I’ll probably catch a lot of flack for saying it, but it seems to me that kids these days have talent up to their eyeballs and initiative up to the soles of their feet (standing position, not jump kicking). If you are under 25 right now, I am almost certainly talking about you.

I don’t think I am alone in thinking this way and it’s useful for younger web folk to understand that this is a prevailing attitude. The interesting implication of that attitude is that when you are trying to land an internship or even a great job, you aren’t really competing on talent. Talent is a prerequisite, but it doesn’t get you the job.

Instead, you should focus on your new favorite word: “initiative.” You need to be able to be given a problem and just go to town on it with little supervision. You need to be able to internalize feedback and make adjustments to your work accordingly. You need to be able to take notice of when you are idle and generate some possible suggestions for how you can be made productive. You need to be looking out for ways to help that your employer hasn’t even noticed yet. If you can do that you are invaluable.

The good news is that if you are one of the under-25 crowd and you are genuinely a hard-worker with some solid initiative, you are extremely well-poised to get great work and dominate the web industry. Your peers are weak sauce and you are Sriracha.

Part II

This post was getting a bit long and, in deference to our modern ADD world, I broke it in two. The second post is all about the implicit contract between employers and interns and what each should expect of themselves and each other. Bon appetite.

Brooklyn Beta 2011

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:13:00 -0400

Despite our playful splash page inspired by one of our favorite Brooklyn beers, Brooklyn Beta does exist and it is taking place this year from October 12-14. Over the past six months, it has become increasingly clear that demand for BB tickets will far outpace supply. Lots of folks, including many friends I would greet with a hug, will be disappointed. This post is an attempt to offer some insight into the situation so everyone will know what to expect and maybe even take it easy on us when the tickets are gone.

At the end of last October, when folks were saying nice things about Brooklyn Beta, it felt good. Chris and I knew we wanted to create a conference, but it was by no means clear that we’d be able to create one that people liked. It’s not widely known that just two weeks before the event start date we had only 4 speakers (doesn’t count as a conference) and stood to lose about $15K each (money that we absolutely did not have). Needless to say, we weren’t sleeping great. In the end we got lucky. @k and @marcoarment took a chance on us and rounded out our fantastic speaker list. H&FJ, Mailchimp, Fontdeck, Ning, Siteleaf, and WonderProxy took a chance on us and saved us from the poor house. It wasn’t just sponsors and speakers who took a chance on us, it was friends and even strangers travelling from around the globe to attend a “friendly web conference” (whatever the hell that is). These people showed up not knowing what to expect and then made Brooklyn Beta awesome.

This awesomeness did not go unnoticed and demand for tickets this year is nothing short of frightening. Chris has the details on how we’re doing the tickets this year. We’ve tried to be as fair as possible with the process, but we are also trying to keep a lot of the magic of last year alive. To us, that means a couple things. First, we’re keeping the event small. We’ve made it about 30% bigger, which is not so much that it will lose last year’s intimacy. Second, we are inviting back quite a few of the folks who took an early chance on Brooklyn Beta and helped make it great. This includes our respective teams and studios, last year’s speakers and workshop leaders, our sponsors, last year’s crew, and a small batch of positive people like @lachlanhardy & @scenariogirl who signed on to BB from day 1, travelled from Australia, and had two of the best attitudes before, during, and after the conference. That still leaves quite a few tickets, but again, demand is high.

If you don’t get a ticket, please look at it as an opportunity. Build sold out in under 24 hours, 600 folks descended on Nottingham for Collycon, folks travel across the globe for Webstock, and people are currently kicking themselves for missing JSConf tickets. People want more friendly web conferences. Ones that are run by small groups of passionate folks. This is a great time to put on an event that shows off your neighborhood and your community. Put on a friendly web conference and they will come. (Me, too.)

A Cameron Apart

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 17:48:00 -0400

Today an article that I wrote was published on A List Apart. I can’t explain just how much that means to me, but to say the least, it makes me very proud.

When I started out making things for the web, the ALA articles were an invaluable source of both education and inspiration for me. The site itself was even more important. I spent numerous hours looking it over and trying to understand all the decisions that made it what it was. I believe that even today, it remains one of the best site designs on the web. If there was such a thing as a gold standard for web design, ALA would be it.

And then there’s the illustrations. Oh, the glorious illustrations of Kevin Cornell. How does he do that every issue? It is entirely possible that my favorite part of being published on ALA is the fact that I got a badass illustration created for my article. Thanks Kevin.

As far as the subject matter of the article is concerned, I got really lucky. The idea of orbital content is one that is very important to me and is at the heart of the work we’ve been doing on Gimme Bar. Some of the concepts are pretty out there and may be a bit controversial, but I think they are very much worth reading. I hope the article will shed light on some of the ideas behind our app and generate some discussion that will push us to be better.

A final note is all about the thank yous. Thank you to Carolyn Wood who encouraged me to submit this article to ALA and gave me an early round of much needed feedback. Thank you to Mandy Brown for her spectacular editing. She once tweeted: “If I do my job as editor, you shouldn’t be able to see I was there. It should just be the best thing you’ve ever done.” This was my experience working with Mandy. Lastly, thank you to Chris Shiflett, Sean Coates, Evan Haas, Bedrich Rios, Frank Battaglia, Ed Finkler, and Tyler Mincey for reading the early versions of the article and telling me how bad they were.

Things are getting Frothy

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:38:03 -0400

If you’re running a startup or doing any kind of fundraising, I’m gonna put something in your head that you won’t be able to shake. At every meeting with an investor watch for them to say that the investment market is “frothy.” When it happens (oh, it will happen), take a mental shot.

The herd mentality among investors is always surprising to me. This month it’s frothy, next month it is something else. I don’t know where they’re all going to get the word du jour, but I want in. Can’t handle the suspense of waiting for what comes next. “This market is a classic ultra-skim soy market.”

Anyhow, been hearing frothy a lot and wanted to pay it forward. You’re welcome.

Tim Armstrong's 80:80:80 Focus

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 08:18:00 -0400

On my walk this morning, I spent a long time mulling over AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s comment on AOL’s 80:80:80 focus:

The Huffington Post is core to our strategy and our 80:80:80 focus – 80% of domestic spending is done by women, 80% of commerce happens locally and 80% of considered purchases are driven by influencers.

This quote is from a memo about AOL’s acquisition of The Huffington Post last month and it has been nagging at me since I read it.

I haven’t been able to track down studies that back these statistics up, but I decided to share the comment anyway because it makes for a great thought experiment. If you’re building a product, are you jumping into the 20 with everyone else and ignoring the 80:80:80? I think we at Fictive Kin have certainly been overlooking these areas. I don’t intend for it to stay that way. No definitive plans yet, but we’re on the case.

Amazon Cloud Drive is not Dropbox

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:31:00 -0400

It’s better.

At least it will be very soon.

Not Dropbox

I want to write a bit about Amazon Cloud Drive because I think it is a very important product and it is mostly getting dismissed because of comparisons to Dropbox. Let’s hold up a sec. Amazon Cloud Drive is not Dropbox. It is something different. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t do any of the magic syncing that Dropbox is known and loved for. It’s going to do something better: release an API and become a platform.

Cloud Drive Platform

The Amazon Cloud Drive was not launched on its own. It was joined by a new web and mobile (android only) app called the Amazon Cloud Player. The Cloud Player allows users to stream any mp3s that live on their Cloud Drives. It is the first app built on the Cloud Drive platform and though it may be ugly, it hints at some exciting potential. That potential lies in separating storing files in the cloud from doing cool things with those files. One such cool thing, as evidenced by the Cloud Player, is streaming music from anywhere, but there is no reason to think that another cool thing might not be some sort of Dropbox-style syncing. When your files live in the cloud and can be opened up at your request with an API, there is no limit to what new apps that can be built. Of course this is all dependent on Amazon releasing an API, but they aren’t the type of company to commit such a misstep so I have faith.

Dropbox V2

I wouldn’t be surprised if a version of Dropbox that plays nicely with the Cloud Drive is one of the first Cloud Drive apps on the scene. It makes a great deal of sense. Instead of paying Dropbox for storage and syncing, we could just pay them for syncing. As it stands now, Dropbox is a middleman between you and Amazon in terms of storage. The costs for 50GB / 100 GB Amazon Cloud Drives are half the price of Dropbox and have a better chance of staying that way. Amazon has mastered storage and Dropbox has mastered syncing. Let’s allocate funds to the right places for the right services.

Rough and Tumble

This is a pretty rough and tumble writeup and I’m sure I’ve missed some important points, but I wanted to get something out there to change the dialog from “not a viable Dropbox competitor” to “Holy shit there is going to be an inexpensive platform for content in the cloud!” I hope it helps.

I Bought this: All Tiny Creatures - Harbors

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:12:37 -0400

I’m a big Thomas Wincek (Collections of Colonies of Bees, Volcano Choir, All Tiny Creatures) fan. His output is staggering but he manages to maintain a high quality of material throughout his various projects. This morning I followed the Pitchfork review of Harbors on over to the Hometapes store to buy the album. I had no idea what I was in for. Check this thing out. It has everything I look for in an album:

Incredible music - Check
2XLP Gatefold - Check
Incredible Package Design - Check (courtesy of Draplin)
MP3 Download - Check (increasingly a must)
Multi-colored vinyl - Check

Roger that. We are all systems go.

The only downside to this release is that you are randomly given one of two color combinations. Either yellow & blue or green & red. Frankly, both combos look gorgeous and I’ll be happy with either. That said, I’m such a dope that I probably would have gotten one of each color combination if it hadn’t been random.

Look at how incredible this yellow looks. So incredible, in fact, that I almost used an exclamation mark in that last sentence.

Looking forward to seeing which color combo I get and to giving this baby a spin. So yeah, All Tiny Creatures - Harbors. I bought it. So should you.

Greenville Grok

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 16:54:00 -0400

I was part of something very special this week. Instead of springing for #SXSW, I decided to head to Greenville, SC and put myself in @squaredeye’s capable hands for an event called Greenville Grok. Grok is my kind of event. Less of a conference and more of a small gathering. Less about speakers more about discussion. Less technique more concrete problem-solving and idea sharing. The event was largely under the radar so I wanted to jot down some of my thoughts for posterity and whatnot.

A Friendly Web Gathering

The Grok folks did a great job of showing off their community. I’d never been to Greenville, but I already feel at home there. I’d never been to Co-Work but I feel like I could walk in any day and be welcomed. Looking only through the lens of the web, I had thought something special was happening in Greenville, but having now been a part of it, there is no doubt. This is a group of talented, motivated web folks with big ideas, big ambitions, and the ability to change the world. Their pride for their city, their work, their families and the web are immediately apparent and infectious. I feel compelled to remain a part of the Greenville Grok community. As a proxy, I put together a Twitter list of all the folks involved so I can keep tabs on everyone and watch as the big ideas I heard shared this week unfold into real products and real processes.

The Format

The Grok format alternated between rapid conversations called 10/20s and extended social activities in which the ideas from the 10/20s could be further considered and discussed.

The 10/20s were 10 and 20 min blocks during which anyone could get up and lead a discussion around a question they have, a problem they need help with, a demo they want feedback on, or an idea they want to explore. These discussions reached surprising depth considering that all of the subjects were ad hoc and no one had done any preparation. Now, in the wake of the event, I find myself wishing the discussions had been recorded or at least that I had taken better notes. There was just too much good stuff to retain it all.

The 10/20s were interspersed with much longer periods of social time that were loosely structured and food / beer-supported. During these social hours we got into the nitty-gritty of the ideas presented earlier in the day. I can’t overstate the impact these discussions had on me and my thinking.

Thank You

I want to say thanks first off to Matthew Smith for setting this all up.

Second to Co-Work for generously sharing their space with us.

And lastly to the following amazing folks:

Amy Smith - Possibly the world’s greatest host. Took our missed flight in stride and generously lent Mr. Smith to a bunch of geeks for 3 days despite being voiceless and under the weather.
Bermon Painter - Pushed my thinking on what a small, well-crafted web team could accomplish and got me thinking about the power of being a generalist.
Yaron Schoen - Got me thinking about timelessness, unions, and the perils of a lactose-free lifestyle
Paul & Mark Johnson - Got me to rethink the future of education
Dodd Caldwell - Got me excited about services for nonprofits.
Jamin Jantz - Was an ongoing example of an ultra-competent web project manager. We need more like him.
Jeremy Jantz - Got me thinking more deeply about neighborhoods and trying to understand their financial underpinnings. He also found me an awesome new pipe.
Annie Jantz - Thanks for gracing us with your presence at Compadres, tolerating our geekier than usual geek talk, and not lording your Instagram superfame over us.
Adam Clark - Thanks for reminding me of the joys and stresses of the first year in the business and for not laughing (though you had every right to) during my terrible late-night pool playing.
Jeremy Nigh - I’m still thinking about the notion of working to aggressively affect change within an existing organization with long-standing, existing practices.
Kevin Smith & Andrew Ramos - Really pushed my thinking on stripping an idea to its bare essentials and on sticking to your guns with your vision.
Emily Smith - Thanks for calling a time out on vegetarianism to kick off #grok with some delicious barbecue. Next time we need a 10/20 on IA / UX. I’m dying to know more about your workflow with visual designers / project managers.
Chandler Van De Water & Mike Meyer - Thanks for getting busy making the mobile beer app I’ve been waiting forever for.
Lauren Van De Water - The architect of our table of 17 at the Lazy Goat, the most gorgeous restaurant of the trip. You are awesome.
Joshua & Mandy Blankenship - Thanks for helping me leave Greenville with green thumb aspirations. Looking forward to further discussions on my home turf.
Rob Wright - Thanks for coming down like the hammer of Thor on poor project management practices.
Sean Gaffney - Thanks for making the trip up to Ashville with us. Almost makes up for missing #grok. ;)
Ronnie Taylor - Thanks for reminding me of the importance of having a good memory.
Barley’s - Thanks for your bottomless selection of beer, the tour of you new restaurant, and for supplying the assorted games that allowed me to show off my skill of gracefully accepting defeat.

I’m looking forward to sharing these experiences with @shiflett and seeing how Grok will shape our thinking about Brooklyn Beta 2011.

Nailed it

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:30:00 -0400

I was cleaning up my files when I came across this post from 2009 that I had written in response to something Fred Wilson wrote. Not sure if I ever published it anywhere, but I’m putting it online now (with some minor grammar edits) because I nailed it. I still feel exactly the same way and not a whole lot has improved. It also really foreshadows some of what we’re going to do with Gimme Bar.

It’s also super relevant to Twitter’s new developer-enraging policies.

——

I figured I’d write up a little response to Fred Wilson’s post on behavioral data. Behavioral data, specifically data collected automatically (as opposed to manually entered by the user), has long been an obsession of mine and was a major reason why we built BlogRollr for Fred.

There are two key components to working with behavioral data:

Data collection – Getting your behavioral data into some digital format.
Data manipulation – Playing with your data. Analyzing it. Using it to learn more about yourself and others. This is the fun part.

I’m not terribly happy with how music applications are addressing either of them.

Data Collection

Credit where credit is due. Last.fm does a good job of getting my aggregated music data online. But it stops there. And they accomplished that like 4 years ago. Not a lot has happened since. It doesn’t get my additional metadata from iTunes. It doesn’t let me vote up songs that I happened to hear on a cd in my car. The concept of a scrobble has not evolved into anything more interesting than a play count.

Data Manipulation

I’ve built up a good chunk of data over the last few years and I just feel like I can’t do anything fun with it. Last.fm pretty much stops at charts. Simple queries such as “What is the list of Animal Collective songs that FictiveCameron has listened to?” are impossible. Their API is weak and does little to foster innovation. It seems like a cautionary tale of what can happen when an interesting startup gets acquired. They built the scrobbler, but have done little with our scrobbling data.

Towards Openness

I’d like music apps to pay a bit more attention to the “tweet”, which has emerged as the exemplar open data object. I can take my tweets with me wherever I go. Twitter’s API has enabled a flood of interface innovation / sophistication in a very short period of time. You don’t like Twitter’s interface? Pack up and go to Tweetie. Don’t like that? Check out Tweetdeck. Why can’t I do this with my music data?

This openness is going to be essential as music heads for the clouds. Ubiquitous wireless connectivity will usher in a new era for music and a movement away from massive file libraries. I want to be able to overlay my music behavioral data on whichever cloud music app I choose and something tells me I’m going to get pwned. That’s right. I said it. Pwned.

——

Looks like I totally underestimated the amount of pwnage in my future.

Ideas of March

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 11:37:57 -0400

I’ve put it on record time and again that I don’t much care for Chris Shiflett. So, it is begrudgingly (to say the least) that I admit his most recent post is a a good one. He and a number of other folks are trying to start a blog revival and have asked that we citizens of the Internet contribute by pledging to post more often. I can only say that I am down like a clown Charlie Brown. Once again, I pledge to blog more.

Chris has also asked that we share a list of what we think makes blogs great. Here’s mine:

They encourage us to write.
They encourage us to think.
They force us to stand by and defend our ideas.
They offer us enlightening glimpses at the previous versions of ourselves.
They turn us into our own clients.
They give us a design project to never be satisfied with.

The Delightful Elements of Content Strategy

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:43:00 -0500

Erin Kissane is having a big March. Last week she joined up with the undeniably lovable crew at Studiomates and today sees the release of her new book, The Elements of Content Strategy, which also happens to be the third of the A Book Apart series. Erin and the ABA folks were kind enough to let me read an early copy of the book so I figured I’d take a moment to share my thoughts.

Although A Book Apart bills itself as “Brief books for people who make websites,” I expected this to be a somewhat more insular book aimed at content strategists. I was wrong. Every web designer and web entrepreneur should read this book. Before Erin’s book I knew that content was valuable. Afterwards, I understood why it was valuable.

I’m reminded of a quote from The Elements of Typographic Style:

In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn.

Great design draws readers in, solid usability guides them to the right content, but when all is said and done, great content has to be there to seal the deal. When a user engages with content, the design has to relinquish the attention it has drawn. If the content lacks substance or is poorly considered, no amount of solid design will get the message across or spur the user to action.

Despite the fact that great content is fully entangled with great design, clients rarely consider content to be worth paying for. That’s why I also think you should have each of your clients read Erin’s book. If you can get to place of shared understanding with your clients about the value and role of content, there will be no stopping you as a designer. My accountant says that before you pay someone you hand them a 1099. I say that before you take on a client you hand them Erin’s book.

I'm So Rich I Don't Need Shoes

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:23:40 -0500

I love Subway graffiti.

Here’s the ad from afar:

And then up close:

I Like This Grant Hamilton Character

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 12:58:00 -0500

This stuff actually deserves a via, but I can’t remember which Internet human pointed me in the right direction for these kickass polaroids. I just know I set the link aside as something to come back to when I had more time.

Anyhow, I had more time today so I figured I’d just pay forward just how fantastic they are.

I also just like how these thumbnails look:

The End.