Great, I took a nap this afternoon and now apparently I’ll be up all night! Guess I’ll just amuse myself by installing Android apps like Swype and this mobile WordPress thing I’m using to write this post…
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
I like this story at lot. It sort of reminds me of “i went fishing with my family when i was five” by Tao Lin (text|video) but maybe with a bit of Bukowski or Wes Anderson thrown in there. More good stuff at that firmuhment blog too!
In observance of St. Valentine’s Day, Google Reader & I just wanted to share these two stories about love & velocity:
- Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan’s Ultimate Mix Tape Of The Human Experience
- The Calculus of Saying “I Love You”
Bonus linkage: Here are some historical Valentine’s cards from the University of Iowa Digital Library Services department. I particularly enjoyed the 1907 rebus card (see above) although I think maybe the (heart) and (pants) symbols should switch places? In any case, make sure you click through to the link to check out some other pansy cards and a recipe for pink pie!
(See also: “Pink Pie” at the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks)
UPDATE: Oops, almost forgot to include perhaps the greatest Valentine of all… I mean, how can you not love a Swear Bear? =D
Kris Kringle, the CEO of xmas.hup, has today gone on record as stating that rumors of widespread outages in his so-called “physical gift” distribution network (aka “SleighR”) are completely unfounded, and that this Thursday’s midnight launch event will go off without a hitch.
Over the last several weeks, Kringle’s detractors in the press have been hounding the “Jolly Old Elf” for details on how he plans to turn a profit by manufacturing and giving away over $30 billion in merchandise this December, a prospect which is only made more difficult by the sheer logistical nightmare of having to service over 7000 homes per second in order to meet delivery targets.
The xmas.hup East Palo Alto Distribution Center
The bullish Kringle remained cautiously optimistic however, his eyes twinkling merrily as he explained how his proprietary behavioral-targeting software would prioritize requests from “good” users, and why “crowd-sourcing” much of his work to parents and other charitable organizations was an innovative solution to a thorny distribution problem.
“In a lot of ways, we’re simply evolving from a free to ‘freemium’ business model,” said Kringle, during an impromptu meeting with bloggers on Monday. “And as long as people continue to find some kind of value in the xmas.hup brand, then we expect to see more and more users becoming active participants and content creators within our community.”
In response to cash flow questions, Kringle pointed out that his organization provides a variety of lucrative consulting services to Fortune 500 businesses, as well as being the beneficiary of undisclosed millions in licensing fees from these same companies.
While leading guests through one of his dozens of global distribution warehouses, the red-suited CEO stopped to point out how the QR codes printed on each shipping container would be scanned by powerful light-emitting diodes implanted in the noses of his reindeer.
“It’s this attention to optimizing our process that allows us to accomplish in just one night what might take other organizations a week or more!” he said (in a not-so-subtle dig at one of his main competitors, hannu.ca).
In any case, Kringle and his investors appear to be very well-situated regardless of the outcome of this week’s launch, as several tech heavyweights are said to have been in talks with the group recently about a possible acquisition.
“From a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense,” claims holiday analyst Charlie Dickens. “Kringle and his team have done an amazing job finding an audience in the important 3-13 demographic, but they’ve had a hell of a time holding on to older users! The right partnership could allow them to engage those customers in a lifelong series of irrational beliefs and purchases.”
In a related story, the results of the EU’s action against xmas.hup over Kringle’s requirement of “cookies” are still not expected to be known until Q3 2010.
For whatever reason, the way my mind often works is by relating new input and experiences to an existing “reference” from the past, whether real or fictional. More often than not, these reference points are from an episode of the Simpsons. For example, if I were to overhear or witness somebody making an attempt to appear knowledgeable about a topic or situation that they really didn’t understand, my brain would immediately jump to the moment in an old Simpsons episode (Sideshow Bob Roberts)where Bart & Lisa are recounting all their past encounters with Sideshow Bob to Homer, who can’t recall any of them. After some considerable effort, he remembers what they’re talking about, and he attempts to excuse his prior cluelessness by saying “Oh… SideSHOW Bob!” as if he had confused him with another person having an equally ridiculous name. So anyway, my point is that when I find myself in a situation where somebody is trying to disguise their ignorance or thickheadness by means of circumlocution, I just think to myself (or occasionally say out loud) “Oh… SideSHOW Bob!” and laugh to myself about it.
So all of this is just to give you some background on the next few links I’m going to post. Because another of my “standard” references has to do with somebody rambling on in a stream of consciousness that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere and their language becomes more confused and ornate with each passing moment until it seems like a tidal wave of ridiculousness might crash over their heads and drag the entire monologue back out into the sea of irrelevance, and that reference is from a classic episode of Mr. Show, in which a famed “travelist” recounts his experience on safari in search of the African lion. Here’s a quote:
The lion moves! Each muscle so vast it moves like a school of fish moving together with one mind and all the hairs on the tip of your penis spring forth! And the long hank of unbraided hair tickles the scrotum at the base of your knee. In your hunter’s crouch you feel the nipples on your ass become erect….
You really need to watch the video in order to appreciate the crazy, ranting nature of his diatribe though. So here it is:
Ok, so now with *all* that explanation out of the way, I just want to share with you this link to a web page that I came across today, that attempts to explain why Evangelion is being re-released to theatres:
Evangelion 1.01: You Are (Not) Alone
Anyway, if you click on the “What are we attempting to create by doing this once more?” link, you’ll be treated to a multi-page essay that ultimately boils down to “BECAUSE WE WANT YUOR MONEYS” that I personally find pretty hilarious. Here’s a (brief!) excerpt:
In this closed, stagnant modern era, I think what is important is not to have a technical discussion, but to state one’s aspirations. The teens and tweens are supposed to be the primary demographic supporting animation, but as they lose interest, I feel that there needs to be a work of animation targeted towards them. It is so that we may be free of the past, refrain from taking advantage of the present, and aim for a future with progress.
OK… This concludes my strange and pointless journey up my own ass. Thanks for stopping by!
A couple months ago I started reading this series of posts called “The Money Diaries” on the blog I WIll Teach You To Be Rich. The series follows a different reader of the blog every few weeks, and asks them to document all of their financial transactions and decision-making for a seven day period. It’s a pretty interesting window into what’s usually a private matter, and in many cases good for a few laughs as well. I was particularly amused by the guy who talked about getting high and buying cell-phone accessories, for instance.
Anyway, after reading that for a while, I discovered that it was based on *another* blog series, New York Magazine’s “Sex Diaries” which follows the exact same pattern except that diarists are asked to detail all of their sexual & romantic interactions for a week. Here you’ll read about such characters as “The Semi-Retired Engineer Who Has Discovered Nudism, Tantra, and Internet Porn” and “The Ex-Banker Living on Alcohol, Hookups, and Unemployment“.
Recently NY Mag published a “critical (but highly sympathetic)” analysis of the past few years of these diaries, which attempts to identify some common threads and shared experiences among the diarists. These are presented as a series of “anxieties” (the anxiety of making the wrong choice, the anxiety of appearing delusional, etc.) and the role of technology (particularly the cell phone) in catering to and/or creating these anxieties is also examined in some detail. (Which, in case you’re wondering, is why this post begins with an awesome portrait of Yoshiaki Zumino, the great spirit of cellular phones and other cordless devices, from Episode 3 of “Tenchi in Tokyo”, who derives his power from the collective angst and misery of relationships ruined by cell phones. BTW, it’s actually a really funny episode, you should check it out!)
Well anyway, now you’ve got plenty of stuff to read (and watch) on this Sunday afternoon. Enjoy!
There’s a pretty cool documentary available for download from your favorite torrent site (or for streaming on Vimeo) at the moment. It’s called “Us Now” and it looks into the way that new communication technologies are beginning to change the way that people, organizations, businesses and governments organize themselves and carry out their work. Here’s the Vimeo link:
I actually became aware of it while browsing the “movies” section on mininova the other day, where it was (at the time, anyway) ranked #1 in terms of concurrent downloads, outpacing Hollywood blockbusters like Surrogates, Zombieland, Up, Star Trek and etc. Which is apropos since, to quote the film itself:
We are living through what economists have called an positive supply side shock to the amount of freedom in the world. More people can say more things to more people than ever in history and that is still growing enormously.
And while it’s unclear exactly what effect that “shock” is going to have on the film and music and publishing industries (not to mention government and society at-large) it’s definitely something worth spending a few moments to consider. Because we’ve been faced with similar examples of systemic change throughout our history, and in many cases failed to realize the opportunities afforded by these changes, ceding victory to the forces of inertia and tradition. Not to say that’s necessarily a bad thing, but consider the example of the industrial revolution, in which global productivity increased by several orders of magnitude, presenting humanity with the chance to completely reconsider the relationship between work and leisure. But instead of taking this opportunity to redistribute leisure equitably among all workers, our adherence to a traditional morality that praises the “virtue” of hard work has created a situation in which many are overworked and an increasing number are unemployed while government and corporate entities continue to enrich themselves on the surplus of industrial output.
But it didn’t need to be this way. Bertrand Russell, writing “In Praise of Idleness” in 1932 proposed the following:
In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and the capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.
Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.
So yeah. Maybe whatever revolution it is that’s going on right now is another chance to stop being foolish. To dismantle some of the unidirectional, broadcast models of “communication” that have helped to create the neurotic, image-obsessed society we live in, and to experiment with some new means of expression.
Or maybe, as David Berman said about MDMA, it will only serve as a new kind of opiate for the “strangely passive kids who grew up in the child protectorate of the U.S. eighties and nineties [and] came of age, craving depersonalization. Apparently it helps them dance. They’re a very attractive lot. Have you seen them dance?”
Additional Reading:
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (2001) Steven B. Johnson
Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (2007) David Weinberger
Derek Powazek stirred some shit up with his recent blog on the evils of SEO (titled “Spammers, Evildoers and Opportunists” lol) and the the inevitable backlash from the SEO “community” has been somewhat amusing to watch. For instance, Lee Odden’s “The Truth About SEO” points out that SEO ranked #3 in a recent poll of “top digital marketing tactics” among readers of a popular search marketing blog. Hmm… there may be some sampling bias in there.
Anyway, as a guy who’s spent a fair amount of time being talked to about SEO, I wanted to share a few observations about why it is that both sides of this debate seem to have such a hard time acknowledging each others’ arguments.
- SEO experts are a bunch of haters! – Or vultures or negative Nancies. Whatever you want to call it. It’s totally understandable why this is the case, I mean… this is how they put food on their family, right? But my point is, they go over the helmet of competent, professional web developers and play on the technophobe fears of their bosses in order to secure a consulting contract. Listen… Web developers (good ones) spend a *lot* of time thinking about extremely nerdy stuff like information architecture, keeping content & presentation seperate and cross-platform accessibility. After all, it’s their job! So when some guy in a polo shirt shows up and starts talking about how they’re going to need to perform a site “audit” it’s often interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on the professionalism and competence of the web developers responsible for the creation & maintenence of the site. Sometimes this is an over-reaction, sometimes it’s not. But anyway, I’m just sayin!
- SEO is a weapon of message destuction! – Many of us who have grown up along with the internet relate to it in a very personal way. From the early days of newsgroups and email listservs, we have understood the net has been a means of BI-DIRECTIONAL COMMUNICATION, and while we accept that change is inevitable, we find it pretty important to preserve as much of the net’s egalitarian nature as possible. As a means of publishing information, the web is without parallel, and the ability to search through all this stuff instantaneously via Google is nothing short of miraculous. SEO profanes this miracle. Consider the following example. A man in Kansas begins selling obscure electronic components on the web. Since he is the only supplier for these components, he becomes Google’s #1 result for related searches. Over time, a number of other people begin selling similar products and competition eventually unseats the pioneer from Kansas. Google keeps track of which merchants garner the most links and feedback from customers, and for John Q. Public, a search for “Magnetic Diode X344″ leads to rapid & satisfactory results.
Enter SEO.
By means of some creative string pulling, a less reputable diode supplier rises to the top of the search results. Eventually both Google and the honest merchants realize what is going on and “fix” their sites to resolve the issue. Order and balance are restored. More strings are pulled. The honest merchants get fed up with waiting around for Google to take care of things and resort to pulling some strings of their own. Lather, rinse, repeat.
On some level, this is simply a natural extension of the same competition that Google encourages by “ranking” sites based on their relative influence among web users, but there’s something else decidely more sinister afoot as well. Becausewith each escalation of string-pulling and search “optimization” the simple act of offering a quality product for sale and taking care to provide adequate customer service, becomes less and less important. In traditional brand marketing, this is standard operation procedured (so much so that blind tests often reveal that there is no discernable difference between competing brands) but viewed through the idealistic eyes of the web native, this is nothing but a pointless arms race that creates spam and makes it harder to find what you’re looking for on the web. (And, by the way, we all know who the only real winner of an arms race is… The people manufacturing the weapons. Like Geto Boys said: “Fuck a war”.) - Adwords already exists! – Not only has Google seen fit to make searching the web absolutely trivial, but they *already* provide a means for marketers to reach extremely specific and well-qualified groups of users by means of keyword bidding. This is something that any company 15 years ago would have killed for, and you’re telling me you’d rather dick around with hiring spam factories in India for thousands of dollars a month to raise your organic search result a few notches when you could use Adwords to have the #1 result for pennies a click and not only that but only pay for the users who actually click through? WTF is wrong with you!?!
Anyway, that’s just my $0.02. Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong.
An Incredibly Unfunny Thing No One Should Do Again
Published October 10th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 1 CommentAs you may have gathered from the URL of this site, as well as my AIM/Gmail handle, I’m not particularly fond of words. Some words, however, I find even more distasteful than the rest. For example: “Stay-cation” which refers to spending your time off work at home, instead of jetting off to Rome or Cancun or whereever it is that people who take vacations go. Now, it’s not the *most* objectionable word, and as you can see from this Google Trends chart it hasn’t shown much year-over-year growth in its brief history. However, just the other day I read a thing on the web about “greycationers” and I started to get worried. With winter fast approaching, were we to be subjected to a relentless series of horrible “-cation” puns, simply to satisfy the whims of the vacation-industrial complex?! The only solution, I decided, was to head this situation off at the pass by publishing a list of all such puns as are linguistically feasable, thereby suffocating the oncoming media frenzy before it has a chance to gain any further strength. The following then, are the worst puns I could come up with, given the urgency of the situation, as well as corresponding pull-quotes & story seeds, provided as a reference for particularly lazy journalists.
- Eh-cationers – “Emboldened by a strong loonie, our neighbors to the north are taking the country by storm!”
- Bay-cationers – Like regular “stay-cationers” but since they’re in the SF Bay Area, they really believe that where they are already is better than anyplace they could actually *go* on vacation.
- Filet-cationers – Adherents to this pescetarian diet eat nothing but fish for a period of 7 days each month.
- Gay-cationers – This could either be about noted gay-friendly destinations, or people who engage in homosexuality for a brief period, in lieu of (or in the course of?) traveling.
- Hay-cationers – “Sleep with the horses in a real barn!”
- i-cationers – People who liveblog their trips on facebook, twitter, yelp, etc. etc.
- Pay-cationers – A cheerful euphamism for “the unemployed”
- Tay-cationers – Superfans who visit all the locations referenced by Tay Zonday in his classic song Chocolate Rain
- Vajayjay-cationers – see “gay-cationers” above, but reframed for the female audience (Cosmo, Oprah, VH-1)
- Weigh-cationers – Fitness addicts who eat Wendy’s, Krispy Kreme and other miscellaneous junk for a week, before resuming an all-kale diet.
Thanks for your support in helping to confront this national crisis. And please feel free to post additional reference material in the comments if there’s anything I’ve overlooked.
I read a well-reasearched (but unfortunately titled) article about Craigslist this morning that re-hashed many of the typical criticisms of the service that have been kicking around the internets for the past several years. The article itself does a pretty fair job of representing both sides of the argument, and I encourage you to read it. If you have any experience working in or around customer service, there are a number of things that will surely resonate. Example:
By eliminating marketing, sales, and business development, craigslist’s programmers have cut out all the cushioning layers that separate them from the users they serve, and any right they have to teach lessons in public service comes from the odd situation of running a company that is directly subservient only to the public. Here’s the lesson: The public is a motherfucker.
Anyway, in this response, I just wanted to offer some of my *own* thoughts on the subject, presented in the format of a Socratic(?) dialog between myself and a hypothetical marketing dweeb. Enjoy!
(Disclosure: I write extremely nerdy folk music which derives all it’s lyrical content from “Missed Connections” posts on Craigslist.”)
Marketing Dweeb: OMG U need to leverage the “social graph” for great justice 2.0!
Me: Sites like Facebook, MySpace & Friendster derive a huge portion of their value from persuading individuals to document & maintain a wide array of personal information. Where you work, where you live, who your friends colleagues are, what music you like, etc. In return, these sites add value by analysing & presenting this data in a variety of ways that are useful to their members.
Similarly, eBay keeps detailed stats on each of their users. Number of transactions, positive & negative feedback, length of membership and so on. In effect, when you make a purchase on eBay, you’re not so much bidding on a rare, pornographic Mickey Mouse comic book as you are on the reputation of the person offering it for sale.
Couldn’t Craigslist add value to *their* offering in a similar way, by documenting the relationship between buyers and sellers, keeping tabs on transaction histories, and using this data to discourage spam and fraud? Well, aside from being an obvious example of “Shit’s Easy” Syndrome, I’d argue that taking such measures might actually be counter-productive, in the grand scheme of things, to the purposes of the site.
Consider a dude looking to rent an apartment. Aside from the obvious considerations of price & neighborhood, he probably wants to cast his net as widely as possible at first before narrowing his search based on the unique merits or drawbacks of the individual properties. Is he concerned with his future landlord’s taste in music, or whether they share any mutual acquaintances? Most likely not, and any attempt to narrow results by such criteria can only limit the reach and effectiveness of the search.
The issue of eBay-style reputation is a bit thornier, since who *wouldn’t* be interested in knowing what past tenants have to say about a particular landlord’s scruples (or lack thereof) before signing a lease? But the fact remains that in spite of eBay’s best efforts to prevent it, both buyers and sellers on their service are still routinely the victims of fraud. Why? Because, in the absence of any real, reliable way to establish and verify identity online, eBay’s reputation system, like all reputation systems, is subject to trivial manipulation and gaming. Fortunately, Craigslist already has an elegant solution to this issue, and it’s called “meeting face-to-face.” Curious as to why the rent for an apartment is suspiciously reasonable? Go take a look at the building and see whether it might be in danger of falling apart in the next 12 months. Can’t figure out why some dude is charging $500 above blue book value for a 94 Honda Civic? Go check out his meticulous collection of oil-change receipts and tire-rotation records dating back to the Clinton administration. Lonely and looking for some companionship, but you’ve got a thing against burly transvestites? Meet her at a coffee shop before going back to the hotel.
Marketing Dweeb: Shit dude, you could make so much money by charging for “premium” ads or “sponsored” search results!
Me: Aside from the fact that it seems like Craigslist just really isn’t all that interested in “monetizing” their “clickstream” it actually makes a huge amount of sense that they don’t engage in this type of thing. Consider sponsored results on Google. You know, those links in the light-grey box that you never click on? Exactly. Well, but somebody must be clicking on them! Otherwise, why would people be paying for them! OK, fine… *somebody* is clicking on them. Your mom. Your Uncle Ralph. The kid who works at Safeway. Point is, the quality of those “sponsored” links is almost *always* going to be lower than the “real” search results located directly below them. In Google’s case, this is an acceptable evil because… what are you going to do? Email Google and complain? Probably not. Either you’ll quickly develop a Pavlovian tendency to avoid clicking on things that appear on a light-grey background, or you’ll just continue on your way, blissfully unaware of the (slightly) better life that could be yours.
On Craiglist, however, the stakes are a bit different. Whereas 99% of Google searches don’t end in a financial transaction, a pretty large number of Craigslist searches do. And while your mom, Uncle Ralph and the Safeway kid probably won’t be too butthurt about clicking through a bunch of dumb teeth-whitening ads before reading Chewbacca’s biography on starwars.about.com instead of getting the *real* story from Wookiepedia, you can be damn sure they’ll be considerably more aggrieved when they find out that the apartment they just rented is managed by the EvilBastard Property Co. and that furthermore, Craigslist deliberately put EvBaProCo at the top of all their search results, simply because they were willing to pay $10 a click for the privilege.
And as to the suggestion that charging more for premium placement would provide Craigslist with some additional revenue to improve the overall quality of search results, as well as improving the UI and signup process for the site? I’ll ask that you take a quick look at the Gamasutra jobs site (for game industry jobs) which charges up to $750 for a single job listing, and yet is still able to deliver one of the shittiest user interfaces known to modern man. Not to say that Craigslist wouldn’t spend their money more wisely than Gamasutra, but in any case, I think it’s important to note that increased revenue does not necessarily lead to an improved user experience.
Which brings me to my final point…
Marketing Dweeb: Come on you guys! The UI… What is this 1997?
Me: First of all, you know what? The internet was pretty fucking sweet in 1997. So don’t talk trash about it! Secondly, it’s just a damn list. A plain-text list, with a full-text search. What else do you want? You know what other website is just a plain-vanilla text entry field that searches a big “list” of useful content?
Google.
Anyway, look… I’m a geek. I love flashy interfaces and whiz-bang visualizations as much as the next guy, but as a geek I’m still a reader more than anything else. For a while around the turn of the century, it seemed like being a reader was going to become a quaint and lonely affectation of days gone by, but I’m pleased to report that this has not come to pass. Thanks to stuff like instant messaging, RSS and Twitter (i.e. “The Hipster RSS”), the written word has come back with a vengeance. To put it another way, “Text is the Internet’s Payload” and I think Craigslist can take pride in having reminded us of this fact all along.
(written on an Acer netbook in notepad.exe, August 2009)
