A Whole Lotta Nothing

My new blog about cycling and stuff

I've started and abandoned a metric ton of blogs in my time, but my latest is one I'll be sticking to at least for the entire year of 2009 and likely beyond. My new blog is called Stronger, Fitter, Faster and it's about how I'm devoting a lot more time and energy into getting in shape, losing weight, and racing bikes.

Over the past year, half of this blog has turned to cycling related stuff but I felt like taking the next major step of having a cycling coach would mean I'd have a lot more to talk about and a lot more stuff that'd likely be boring to any non-cyclist, so I'm going to toss those kinds of things on the new blog.

This also means my internal flow chart for how an idea in my head ends up as a post on the web is even more complicated, with some stuff going to twitter, metafilter, this blog, the new cycling blog, or anything else I can post to. I should really draw up a visualization of this.

So yeah, cycling stuff will likely go over there from here on out, but I'll try to post more here in 2009 and not let twitter take every idea for a blog post away from me. No more of this "one post per month" crap.

Three more for the old reading list

Three blogs I have recently found, devoured, subscribed to, and squeal with glee when they update: FiveThirtyEight (awesome election stats and coverage), Lovely Package (it's to product design what longtime favorite Brand New is to logos), and Be Sportier (like Uncrate, but just stylish sports stuff, with large photos and consistently otherwise impossible to find goods)

Almost there...

If you're visiting this site in a browser, you've likely figured out I've moved to Typepad and there are a few bugs in commenting, in my archives, and in my feed (feed still points to my old blog and permalinks). Things should be working as intended soonish.

update: yay, everything seems to be working now. Comments are out of order on my old imported posts, and I don't currently have URL redirection for old WP urls yet, but everything basically works again and I'll likely be posting much more because heck, Typepad is kind of fun and easy.

Testing out iPhone posting

Throwing in the towel (or the death of blog CMSes)

This blog is approaching 8 years old and after two years on a custom system I wrote myself, followed by four years on Movable Type, followed by two years on Wordpress, I've given up completely on hosted blog software and moved this blog to Typepad. I really like Typepad and though I'm giving up things like custom .htaccess redirects for old posts and my old permalink URLs, I'm gaining things like the easiest to use posting UI available and most importantly, I'll never need to update any software by hand ever again.

It's been a long, frustrating week with several days spent trying to move off Wordpress (I was tired of my weblog app chiding me for upgrades every two weeks) followed by several days trying to get MT to work followed by brief experiments with Textpattern followed by giving up and finishing here. There are so many things wrong with each and every blog app that I feel like developers really should revisit my anti-blog CMS screed from early this year.

Becoming an old (blogging) man

Today I realized that I'm part of the "old guard" of blogging because I remember a time when blogging was so new that very few sites had comments (it seems like MetaFilter was one of the first few?) and after a few years when they started to become commonplace, people were generally decent to each other because it was very literally turning a blog into a face-to-face conversation.

But I think the root of the problem (described in various media outlets over the past year or so) of snarky, or mean-spirited, or generally unhelpful comments becoming the norm has to do with the distance we've achieved from those original link-and-essay heavy blogs.

I have a feeling that if you've only seen blogs in the past five years (which is probably 95+% of people reading blogs today) you consider comments to be de rigueur and they are entirely divorced from the original concept of a conversation between the reader and the author of the original post. It's not an intimate conversation, it's just another content management feature available to you on the web.

This has a de-humanizing effect that I'm seeing play out more and more often in the weirdest places. People will post about their idle curiosities on their personal blog ("Why does x happen when I do y?") and instead of seeing friendly answers I would expect many years ago, I'll often see someone early on read into the question and assume all sorts of accusations ("well, maybe it's because you are a, b, and c, and everyone knows it!") and watch most followup comments start from there and go into darker directions.

It's tough because I love blogs and I love comments in blogs, but I'm starting to think there's this "new generation" that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you'd never say anything in a comment that you wouldn't say to a friend's face. Also, know that I mean "new generation" in a way where age of person in it is irrelevant. You could be 50 years old and started reading blogs last summer and I'd put you in that group.

Of course, I could just be talking out of my ass, old people tend to do that...

Satisfaction - People-Powered Customer Service

Satisfaction has launched (more on their blog). Disclaimer: officially I'm a "member" of their "advisory board" (airquotes because it sounds more important than it seems -- unofficially, I talked to Lane every so often over the past few months and they patterned some design/interaction decisions similar to the ways I run MetaFilter and Ask MetaFilter).

I'm happy to see the site going public, I think they've got some great ideas and a great design, and it'll be interesting to watch them grow. At the moment, they're a great way to get tech support help from regular folks instead of the large companies that typically have bad tech support and I'm sure a lot of smaller companies might just use them for all their support needs (why reinvent the trouble ticket wheel for the 1000th time?). If enough small companies get on board, it'll be interesting to see how larger corporations interact with the service. I think the challenge out of the gate will be to keep things helpful and on a positive note, without descending completely into a consumer rant/spew/rage kind of thing that sites like Consumerist sometimes veer into.

Check it out -- there's not much there now but I think it'll turn into something really useful and novel in a short period of time.

Boing Boing redo

I gotta say that I'm enjoying the Boing Boing redesign so much that I'm actually breaking down and making a real blog entry about it (as opposed to a witty twitter quip, or simple delicious link, or a lowly screenshot posted on flickr).

I thought the old design was showing its age and the ad layouts were very distracting (the jokes about it looking like NASCAR weren't too far off). I even sent a mockup of a cleaner layout to Xeni and Cory a couple years ago, but I never thought it would change and assumed it would putter on for several more years in its previous state. I don't know what prompted the change, but the new look is a great improvement. It's way cleaner, easier to read, and the ads are no longer distracting. I disagree with Nelson on the change (though I agreed with his previous assessment). At this point in the lifespan of Boing Boing (one million dollars!), I no longer compare them to other blogs and instead to major media outlets, so I'm cutting them slack on three ad zones. Look at any page at even nicely designed media sites like the New York Times and you'll see 3-5x more advertisements. So among top-shelf media sites, their advertising is barely noticeable.

I'm also happy to see a new gadget blog that's unlike all the other million gadget blogs out there. It helps that it's authored by my all time favorite gadget blogger, a man that deserves a medal for getting hired to write a regular column on Gizmodo, only to get fired after Gawker editors and readers took his first essay way too personally and seriously. It's clear from day one of this new Boing Boing blog that this won't be another shopping or wishlist gadget blog. Free from all the pointless gadget lust that powers other sites, this looks like it'll be more along the lines of "interesting crap someone built that looks cool/works in a cool way."

Bottom line, it was a great surprise to see Boing Boing's new layout and direction today and I think it's a huge positive change (and adding comments was nice too).

Ads good! No ads better!

If you've followed this site for a few years, you probably saw my old essays introducing Google's Adsense to the blogging public and that time I said ads in RSS were a no-no. Today I wrote an extensive update on the same subject over on my new blog: How ads really work (superfans and noobs). I basically lay out everything I've learned from hosting ads for the past five years including some data from my own sites and those of several friends.

My new site: fortuitous

When I came back from Austin, I mentioned that I wanted to do a new site focused on business type advice. After a month or so of the idea gelling in my head, I wrote down about 30 ideas for essays I'd like to write, I banged out a mockup, and I looked up a bunch of goofy domains. A couple more weeks passed and thanks to the CSS coding of Ryan Gantz, editing skills of Anil Dash, and the nice fellow that sold me the domain cheap, I give you: fortuitous.

It's a new essay every Monday about some aspect of business that I've learned while running the MetaFilter/PVRblog/etc empire. Nothing too earth shattering, but it's a fun outlet and I think it'll help a lot of people in a similar situation out. Subscribe to the feed and follow along.

(btw, the design of the bottom frame CSS hack thing is totally cribbed from NorthTemple and it does display funny if you scroll your mousewheel like mad. It was also the first thing I've ever built using Coda as the IDE and it was fantastic, with a little more polish/features it'll replace Textmate as my editor of choice)

What the hell, old school bloggers?

On some random blog, I found a link to this book "Founders at Work", a book interviewing the founders of tech companies. The person mentioned Caterina talks about Flickr in it, among big famous 70s and 80s software geniuses so I ordered it thinking it'd be a history book about a bunch of classic Silicon Valley companies with maybe a recent one like Flickr thrown in there.

It just showed up and I can't believe how many recent companies are in it (del.icio.us, Blogger, Six Apart, 37Signals, etc) but I didn't hear about this book from any of the long-term bloggers that are part of it. C'mon Ev, Mena, Jason, and others! I read your blogs daily, and would have ordered this book weeks ago if I knew it existed.

You've come a long way, baby

January 2007: Macworld Highlights includes a "Microsoft Bloggers Lounge"

January 2000: Camworld Blogger Meetup at Macworld. My photos of the event.

Vox is a Go!

Vox launched today and I can't say enough good things about it. Just try it out and see (it helps if you get a few friends and family roped in as well).

Dad, if you're reading this, this is that invite I sent you a few weeks back that you never used. Sign up and email me your Vox blog URL when you're done.

Thanks Mena, Ben, and the rest of the Six Apart crew for building this app. It is going to literally make many people's lives better.

Rambling about blogging and TV

I've long wondered when the act of blogging TV would take place. I don't mean writing blog posts about the last episode of Lost, I mean actually snipping segments from TV and posting them for all to see. Basically doing with TV what bloggers were doing in 1999 with the web -- snipping bits here and there to make a full picture of some topic through the use of quotes and links.

YouTube (and to a lesser extent Google Video) have finally reached a tipping point of blogging TV. With 1999 blogs, I knew that anything happening online that was interesting would get picked up by those few dozen blogs and eventually I stopped following primary sources like CNN and the NYT and just followed blogs. With TV, there's no way I can keep up, but I know if something interesting pops up, it'll be all over YouTube the next day.

I'd argue that YouTube is the king of this movement because they have such loose and lax legal guidelines. Of course, everyone that uploads claims they own the copyright and got release forms from everyone involved and cleared anything seen on camera, blah, blah, blah, but in reality, it is totally lawless and people are basically uploading random interesting TV bits they dump right off their computer. It reminds me of Napster in 1999, totally interesting, and totally illegal in the eyes of IP lawyers.

Like Napster, there are positive sides to this kind of loose fair use/infringement. It's only because things are so lax that everyone and their brother saw the Chronicles of Narnia SNL spoof video, and SNL ratings definitely saw a spike in the shows that followed (and I noticed SNL tried to capitalize on this by putting Andy Samberg in more skits and letting cast members do funny little videos for the two following episodes).

I'm really surprised that TVeyes didn't become the tool of choice for this type of activity. If you've never seen their service, it's really incredible. The thing with TVeyes is they already record pretty much all the major networks including cable outlets. Then they digitize it all, index the closed captioning, and provide search tools for the text and automatically crunch out video segments that meet your search criteria. So for instance, if like me you watched the SNL show on your DVR the night it aired, you could say "damn, that was good, I need to get a copy to my friends" you just pop onto TVeyes, do a search on NBC for "narnia" and it would find the segment and prepare a little 3 minute video capture of the show. It's like TiVo for all TV, with searching and quoting features built it, which is exactly what YouTube is doing, but they require that someone, somewhere recorded and digitized it.

TVeyes has been around since at least 2000, back when they'd email you whenever a word popped up anywhere on TV. Unfortunately, TVeyes seemed to focus on the enterprise, acting like a video clip service to corporate giants, but I guarantee if they kept this stuff open to all, everyone could flock to it and share the videos. Overnight, you'd have thousands of people mining the very best bits of TV and revolutionizing that industry.

In a way, I'm already starting to see the effects of YouTube and its many clones. Goofy clips are starting to pop up on more comedy shows like The Colbert Report -- stuff they never did before, but suddenly they have these small chunks of random comedy (click on the charlene video) that seem ripe for viral spread through YouTube, almost like they were trying for it.

Maybe stuff like clips on YouTube vs. regular format TV is kind of like how blogging was first viewed critically in 1999-2000. Everyone was afraid people wouldn't read 3,000 word essays if blogs took over -- that it was shortening our attention span as everything had to become small, easily read chunks with links to more information. It was the death of the long format and it was going to ruin us all. But it didn't, and I don't think sharing TV clips is going to ruin TV anytime soon.