Nailin’ it:
Here’s what Jim and the rest don’t seem to realise. Revenue from Adsense and its ilk is a reward for writing content that made people want to visit your website and grant you a pageview. If you do it really well, you’ll get a bunch of pageviews, and a bunch of money. Employing tricks like needless pagination, auto-refreshing (see Salon.com), misleading headlines, and the like is cheating. You didn’t earn those pageviews, you tricked people into giving them to you.
— Oh Man, That Jim Lynch Guy • nostrich.
Rob Tannen from Bresslergroup:
But what if you could do divide your attention among multiple facets of the same task, rather than across different tasks? That’s the idea behind “narrow-tasking”. For example, I might be watching a World Cup Game while getting additional information about the players on an iPad. Technically I am still multi-tasking, but the tasks are intended to augment, rather than divide each other.
— Designing For Humans, Narrowtasking And Mobile 3D – PSFK.
The article “Why I Sold Zappos” is adapted from Tony Hsieh’s new book, “Delivering Happiness”, and well worth a read.
He outlines how the board pushed him towards a sale, and how the recession took its toll on Zappos as well. Even though they generated more than $1,000,000,000 in sales, they were afraid of the banks being unwilling to help them buy more inventory. This would have halted the expansion of the business, obviously, and throughout the article you sense how frustrated Tony Hsieh is with the board essentially calling the culture in Zappos “Tony’s social experiments”, not understanding that it’s the foundation upon which the company is built.
This part of the story obviously makes it worth the read, but at the end of the article something interesting is presented:
In the first quarter of 2010, net sales at Zappos were up almost 50 percent, and we’ve added several hundred new employees. The growth has made Amazon very happy, but it’s also creating new challenges. I’ve noticed that at company happy hours, you don’t see as many employees from different departments hanging out with one another.
To address that, we’ve begun tracking employee relationships. When employees log in to their computers, we ask them to look at a picture of a random employee and then ask them how well they know that person — the options include “say hi in the halls,” “hang out outside of work,” and “we’re going to be longtime friends.” We’re starting to keep track of the number and strength of cross-departmental relationships — and we’re planning a class on the topic. My hope is that we can have more employees who plan to be close friends.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a system that essentially creates a living, breathing social network analysis continuously. One could assume that the data is constantly evolving and thus provide the most accurate representation of the relationships, seeing it comes from the employees themselves in real-time.
Definitely interesting, and I hope we get to hear more about it later on.
Duncan Wilcox:
To a novice user, aiming at something on screen with a mouse is like trying to ring a doorbell using a broomstick.
— Touch Content Creation — Cocoa Theraphy via ignore the code: Duncan Wilcox on Touch Content Creation.
I’ve been looking for this for a long, long time. Hope it works as advertised:
Wacchen helps you collect all the videos you want to watch in one place. It’s a nice place to keep, and watch your to-be-watched videos.
— Wacchen: A nice place to watch video – Wacchen.
Creating a beautiful display and patting yourself on the back for having good typography is disingenuous, I think. It’s a little like saying a high-definition television set makes for better television shows; an absurd claim at best.
— Subtraction.com: Better Screen, Same Typography.
Perhaps instead of flamebait posts of ‘Apple are out to get us’ media companies should be asking themselves ‘how did reading content online become so sucky’?
— nikf.org ~ On this Safari 5 Reader Hysteria.
Some has misread what Nicholas Carr wrote on delinkification as a crusade against linking per se, which is a shame, because it’s an interesting thought:
Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not.
— Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Experiments in delinkification.
This is a fantastic idea—a Services menu for the iPhone. It doesn’t sound that helpful immediately, but this is what multitasking should be like. No switching windows or copy-pasting—you’d have context-aware actions across all apps.
Make sure you see the video as well:
“Mail, for instance, would advertise a Service that says ‘if you have a file or even a snippet of text, I can send it’ and every other app on the platform would get Mail integration for free. Flickr’s app would advertise a Service that says ‘if you have an image, I can upload it’ and then every app—including Apple’s own Photos app—would be able to upload photos to Flickr. Or Facebook. Or Tumblr. Or Posterous. Or an SFTP server. The possibilities are endless, and the beauty of Services is that they’re context sensitive: a Flickr Service would only be visible when you’re handling an image. This keeps the Services menu uncluttered.”
(Also, don’t forget to view source on Chris’ blog—it’s semantically beautiful.)
— A Services Menu for iPhone – Release Candidate One.
This week I read two blog posts that deal with the same issue: The metaphorical concept of files in operating systems. And why they suck.
David Shoemaker and John Perry wrote the posts I refer to, and you owe it to yourself to read them.
In short, John Perry wrote about horizontal vs. vertical organizers. He is a horizontal organizer that likes to have everything on the table at once. That way he gains an overview with everything in sight. Vertical organizers can file anything in a cabinet and take it out when they need it again. A terrible method, if you ask me – I tend to be horizontally organized as well.
But my operating system of choice disagrees with me. The desktop metaphor seems to derive from vertical organizers’ idea of filing documents in folders and cabinets. It is directly converted to how Windows, Linux (in general) and OS X handle information. Now, Google has released a beta version of Chrome OS that hopefully kicks off the end of the regime of OSs being structured for the horizontally-focused. With Chrome OS, documents are stored in Google Docs, pictures in Picasa, emails in Gmail etc.
Obviously, the “items” (text documents, pictures and emails) are still stored in a database, but for the user, the real strength comes in archiving these items with metadata wrapped around them. No need to scan for the right email – just search for it. No need to figure out in which document you wrote about “football” – just search for it. Want to find your dad in a picture? The face recognition makes sure you can search for it (well, at least that’s how it should/will be).
David Shoemaker points out that within OS X, the developers form Apple have a slight disagreement on how to approach files vs. items. iTunes and iPhoto treats what you put into them as items that you can manage, whereas iWork handles documents and files.
Today, I’ve wiped my hard disk and reinstalled OS X. I do this every now and then to clean out all the junk I tend to gather. It’s also a way for me to rethink how I work with my computer and which apps are essential to me. One thing I noticed this time, is that I need something like iTunes/iPhoto for my pdf-files. Previously, I’ve used Evernote, but it’s unstable and slow, so I’m looking for something that can help sort my documents horizontally, not vertically. Papers looks interesting, but is there anything better out there?
It’s a small step towards a new way of working with information, and I can’t wait for Apple to start treating textual information as items, not documents.