Lab Experiments, The Web & Death: Our SXSW Proposals

There are two SXSW talks that I’d like you to vote for, not because I’m asking you to but because they will be awesome.

Content, the Web and Death

The first is a panel called The Content Economy and the Web’s Rumored Demise. I’m joined by an amazing group of people: Jeff MacIntyre, content strategist and freelance journalist, and principal of Predicate LLC, the infinitely entertaining Paul Ford, contributing editor to Harper’s and consultant for Predicate (and the man behind Ftrain), Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and finally TED alum Jennifer 8 Lee, former journalist for the New York Times.

We’re going to talk about content, reading, and the presumed death of the Web. If this talk makes it through, I think it could be one of the better panels at SXSW, and I’m not just saying that because I’m involved.

SXSW Talk = Laboratory Experiment

The other proposed talk is a bit out of left field. We’re going to use one of the presentation slots at SXSW to debut our next Arc90 Lab experiment. It should be interesting (or catastrophic, depending on how things go). The talk is entitled: Toss the Projector: Redefining the Presenter/Audience Dynamic. We’re going to build a service that attempts upend the way presenters and the audience interact. You can get a sense of what we’re going after by reading this blog post on the Arc90 blog. Also, don’t miss Tim Meaney’s post on attention for a great background.

So if you can find it in your heart, please take a minute to vote:

• The Content Economy and the Web’s Rumored Demise
• Toss the Projector: Redefining the Presenter/Audience Dynamic

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Incredibly Good Non-Technology Related Deliciousness: Sam’s Bakery is Open for Business!

Disclaimer: I am woefully and helplessly biased in the following endorsement:

I’m a big fan of the Family Owned Business. I’d personally jump on any chance to experience the distillation of years of experience, knowledge and just that indefinable family-ness of a business. You can manufacture history, nostalgia and authenticity or it can be real.

And it doesn’t get any more real than Sam’s Bakery. The Cafe at Sam’s Bakery is located in Brooklyn, New York. Sam is my mom, short for Samia and…how do I say this subtly:

SHE MAKES THE MOST INSANE BAKLAVA YOU WILL EVER TASTE.

I’m no food critic, but you really have to experience it to fully appreciate why Sam’s baklava is so special. It isn’t soppy or doused in honey. It’s a subtle, rose water-infused flavor that plays between flaky, crunchy and moist. It’s an old family recipe that is under 24 hour lockdown in my mama’s mind.

If you care about eating awesome things, go order some. As a special promotion to my loyal baklava-loving readers, enter coupon code BASEMENTBAKLAVA to get 30% off any order. There’s other tasty stuff on there as well. It makes for a great gift too. We’re talking marriage-saving gift here folks.

To all the Brooklynites (which seems to be just about everyone I meet these days), I highly recommend visiting the cafe in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It has amazing wood roasted coffee from  Millar’s Coffee, shipped all the way from Washington state, a communal table for making friends and of course, free organic wifi.

If you order some or visit, I’d love to hear your feedback. In fact, you can email my mom directly. She’d love to hear your feedback too. Just be warned, she’ll email you back…every day…forever.

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The New Clutter

There’s a new kind of clutter littering Web pages. It’s not just the obnoxious “Refinance your mortgage” ads plastered atop and alongside articles. It’s also not just the animated nonsense that floats by as you’re trying to read.

It’s the article itself.

In the never-ending quest to get page views, the choices writers and editors are making to attract eyeballs and drive traffic are creating a new breed of low-brow, gimmicky disposable content.  At its best it adds little insight and at its worst amounts to a slimy bait-and-switch (catchy headline, nothing to say in the article).

It’s the new clutter. The article itself has devolved into a flashing, animated pile of fluff. The casualty of the rat race towards ad impressions isn’t just crappy layout and thoughtless art direction. It’s awful and useless content. The formula is pretty straightforward: catchy headline, hot topic of the day, add a dash of controversy, stir into a gooey mixture and bake for ten minutes. Even better: take a jab at someone who’s on top: Apple, Facebook, etc. People love to shoot Goliath (or at least shoot in his general direction).

So where’s the good writing on the Web? It’s everywhere else. The interesting new perspectives and provocative thinking isn’t coming from Gizmodo and Silicon Alley. It’s the blogger I’ve never heard of that is blowing me out of my chair these days. They’re not writing with a hidden agenda. They’re not following a Gawker Media Formula For Success (internal guidelines that must exist).

This type of clutter only goes away if business models change and the mechanisms for determining success change along with them. There are too many good writers producing clutter on the Web today.

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A Short Story On How Not To Share Things

Imagine I bake a delicious batch of cookies. They’re still warm and mushy. I put them into a bowl while they’re nice and warm and walk them into the living room where a group of my friends are lounging around. I sit down and they get a whiff of my fresh batch of cookies.

I’m proud of my cookies and I look forward to sharing them and hopefully getting a few compliments in return. I put the bowl forward for all to share and enjoy. As soon as someone reaches for one, I grab their hand by the wrist.

“$0.75…please.”

That’s not nice. In fact, it’s rude. This is why I think paywalls will fail on the Web. They’re not nice and they’re rude.

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Why We Built Readability

Over at the Arc90 blog, I share some thoughts on why we built Readability and where we plan on taking it. It’s an interesting time. The big players – the players that can afford to build their own mini-Internets - are already battling it out.

For us, it’s about doing it on the Web. It’s about elevating the Web providing amazing experiences around content. It will require great tools and a fair amount of discipline, but the Web can become the premium place to explore and consume quality content.

Look out for where we’re taking Readability this summer. It’s going to be fun.

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Pulse App Pulled For I-Don’t-Know-What

So wait.

The Pulse iPad app gets pulled because the New York Times put the squeeze on Apple to remove the app from the iTunes store. The key text from the New York Times legal:

The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.

So be warned, Netneswire, Reeder or any other feed reader out there. Hell, anybody that is pulling in content via RSS into an iPhone or iPad app be warned. This is big news. Consuming content freely available on the Web crosses a line, a brand new frickin’ line that didn’t exist yesterday.

Now, this can’t be real right? There has to be some nuanced fine line that Pulse crossed. The New York Times cease and desist letter goes on to say:

I note that the app is delivered with the NYTimes.com RSS feed preloaded, which is prominently featured in the screen shots used to sell the app on iTunes.

Emphasis mine. Ah, now I see. It’s because the Pulse reader preloads the New York Times feed as a default. If a user pulled it in, then that’s OK (I guess) but if Pulse preloads it, they’ve crossed a line?

Guess what else crosses a line? Apple Safari on the iPad or iPhone. By default it comes preloaded with the New York Times among a host of other news sources.

This is an incredibly dangerous precedent. I predict the New York Times will come to its senses and reverse their position. I can’t imagine this sticking.

Update: Position reversed. I’d love to hear an explanation behind what happened.

Update #2: Wait, The Times Company still wants it out. Stay tuned!

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Growing Old Friends

Every day, many times a day, millions of people snub millions of other people on the Internet. It happens amongst those of us that are fortunate enough (or unfortunate – depending on your viewpoint) to have crossed a relatively modest threshold of social connections facilitated by the Internet and more specifically email.

The typical snubbing goes something like this:

• You’re introduced to someone in person or you reach out to someone that you think is worth connecting with. You send an email.
• They respond and thank you for the note and convey that they’d love to meet up some time for a drink or lunch or coffee or whatever.
• You follow up with them and they never respond. Ever.

I can attest that this has happened to me. I can also shamefully attest that I’ve done this to others. I promise a follow-up and I never actually follow up.

Here’s the ugly reality of email overload: the outcome isn’t just a cluttered inbox. It’s countless people waiting to be acknowledged and – dare I say – respected. But we simply can’t do it. We can only handle so much at a time. The incredible efficiency of email and other communication tools have far outpaced and blown out our own expectations of how we should respectfully and properly communicate with one another.

As I stare at my countless emails, I know for certain that there are senders in there that deserve a response and probably won’t get it. Many times a day, every day we send the following signal to those waiting on the other end:

“I haven’t gotten to you because there are others that are more important to me right now and, I’m sorry to say, you just haven’t made it up the list.”

Doesn’t it sound awful? This is exactly what we do when the flow of emails come in. We prioritize in real-time. The chosen few will get a response. Some will get one almost immediately. The rest? They get nothing. They don’t even get a “sorry, I’m very busy right now” response. They get silence.

When we do run into someone we’ve failed to respond to, we usually pile on the “…I’ve just been so slammed with work and the whole conference thing that I just haven’t been able to catch up!” The other person usually just smiles and looks away. They understand where they’ve landed on the priority list.

Everyone applauds the hyper-connectedness we’re experiencing today. The truth is we can’t really leverage it in a very meaningful way. There are a chosen few that get proper attention, the rest just end up in a sort of long tail of human connections. They’re relegated to an almost trivial status – only acknowledged as a scored point on your “friends” or “followers” tally.

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion of late about what the Internet is doing to our brains. Nick Carr is leading the charge with a recent Wired feature and a new book called The Shallows. In short, the barrage of information that comes at us via the Internet is rewiring our brains. We’re optimizing ourselves for short, fleeting bursts of information. The capacity to focus and think deeply is under threat. I agree with much of Carr’s thinking because I’m experiencing it first hand.

Carr makes a compelling argument on the psychological impact of the Internet. What’s most unnerving to me is that some of the “content” I’m consuming (or expected to consume) isn’t a book or an article. It’s people. My diminishing ability to focus and give due attention is actually having a social impact on the people I know and the people that attempt to connect with me.

A new social protocol is emerging. We’re starting to sense that we can’t really give one another due attention. The outcome is a dilution of the basic building blocks of social mores. Words like “friend” or “connection” have been watered down and our expectations around them have diminished as well.

Take each of us in this shallow state that Carr describes and put us in a Petri dish. How will we connect? Do we just buzz around occasionally bumping into another? Can we connect deeply? Will we give one another the chance to form the subtle but deep roots that connect people in a meaningful way?

I don’t think anyone can predict how we’ll adjust and tweak our behavior to deal with these changes. We’re flooded with information today, but it doesn’t linger. It doesn’t stick around and age. The best social connections we can make are the ones that we keep around and cultivate. I hope we don’t lose that capacity to give worthwhile connections their due attention. As the writer and critic John Leonard said: “It takes a long time to grow an old friend.”

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Readability Updated: Hyperlinks Be Gone! (If You LIke)

What I love about working at Arc90 is that, rather than just putting in my .02 on some heated debate on design and technology, we actually get to ship stuff to state our case. Shipping is the strongest statement you can make.

Nick Carr recently wrote an interesting post entitled Experiments in Delinkification. The premise was simple: the lure of hyperlinks are a distraction from the reading experience. A heated (and I mean heated) debate ensued and many others chimed in.

Well, we decided to do something about it. Today, we’re releasing an update to Readability that adds the option to turn all hyperlinks in long-form text into a set of footnotes. You can learn all about this update by visiting the Arc90 blog.

This clever little update would not have been possible had Tim Meaney not clamored for it and had Chris Dary and Dan Lacy not built it. We hope you find it useful.

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The Museum of Magazine History

Interfacelab and iA do an admirable job of ripping the new Wired iPad app to shreds. I don’t need to add more to what they’ve already said. I will add what they didn’t say:

Fundamentally, what makes Wired so good is the content. It’s a good brand because its content is good. This app is the equivalent of Wired taking its content, throwing it in a pit and pouring cement over it. It’s an instant fossilization. The content is mummified. Never to be touched or dissected or shared. I can’t even circle a paragraph on the fucking thing. 

With technology, shit is supposed to move forward. You’re supposed to be able to do stuff and experience stuff that you couldn’t before. This app is more like a tribute to magazines than a reimagining of where publishing can become.

It’s anti-Web, anti-sharing, anti-copy/paste - anti-everything. It’s a disservice to what was created. On the Web, content lives and breathes. This isn’t a digital magazine. It’s a tomb.

One final thought: there’s an odd irony about the whole experience. The iPad brings us closer to content – physically – than any technology to come before it. The whole experience is almost a tease. You’re swiping and touching all these “pages” and you can’t do a single thing with them. Welcome to the Museum of Magazine History.

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IPad Impressions (Because The World Really Needs One More F#*%ing Blog Post About the iPad)

Yes, everything that can be said about the iPad has been said, except what I’m going to say (which is hopefully different than what others have said - maybe):

• I input less on this thing. There is no keyboard. I explore less. I find myself bookmarking pages that I like perusing because I don’t see myself doing anything highly interactive on it. By taking the keyboard away, I’m pressed towards a passive posture (I’m not insinuating this is bad, it just is).
• You can’t multitask. This is a good thing. Without being poked and prodded by juggling five things at a time (which usually includes some sort of chat client), we’re giving our brains a chance to dive deeper into the experience in front of us.
• I have one question for content creators, publishers and even some of the application designers out there: why did you wait for the iPad to clean up your shitty designs? USA Today. Time magazine. New York Times. Even some of the apps that have Web interfaces got an upgrade. Why not make them great on the Web?
• You can’t resize the Web browser. By imposing this constraint, it frees up designers to think more about composition and art direction. There are two modes – horizontal and vertical. It’s a hat tip to paper. You can’t resize paper.
• Historically, devices became more magical by getting smaller. From a big cassette player to the Sony Walkman to the iPod shuffle. Imagine if the iPad came first. Imagine if rumors started flying around of a “miniature iPad that could fit into your pocket.” It would run all of your existing apps (scaled down) and it would let you make phone calls.
• I don’t think anyone will do long form reading on it. The Kindle is small, light and feels more like paper. I don’t think people want light emanating from a book they’re trying to read. I could be wrong here.
• I think the introduction of $5 magazines-as-apps that look like Web pages without all the garbage is preposterous.
• There’s something irksome about the way this thing shuns the Web – not just in terms of Web browsing, but in terms of how it overwhelming imposes its own patterns and paradigms that only render things more cumbersome. Maybe this is where we’re headed: vertical lock-in from device to cloud. That would suck.

These are my impressions after a couple of days. What’s fun about a device like this is that I can honestly say I don’t know what my impressions will be in a week or a month or 3 months. For all its strengths and faults, it is different, and it’s forcing us to ask new questions about design, technology and how we want things to work. That’s always a good thing.

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