Thought Process : Process Thoughts

Is it the greatest rock and roll swindle? No, I don’t think so, but it made a nice headline.

I have to start off with a disclosure - I’ve read very little about the Kindle; next to nothing in fact. Dave Winer twittered a link to Become a Kindle Author on Crave and Cliff Gerrish twittered his post, a great “what if” around it, and John Gruber twittered a link to this post on Daring Fireball and I watched the videos and executive interviews at Amazon’s product page. One person on twitter even quipped “I hear there’s a hack coming out that will let you run old Pippin @World software on the Kindle”; OK, that was me.

So I guess I’ve read a couple things. I just can’t buy into it. As much as I’d like to, I think it’s going to let the shareholders down in fairly epic proportions. First off, the name of the product sounds like it’s going to start a fire like ones tyrants and despots throughout history have used to burn books; not a nice connotation.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a book freak. Amazon is by far my most visited site. I’d say I go there almost every day and I buy a couple books a week. I own books that are family heirlooms, I have fiction and non-fiction which can’t be sold for enough to cover postage, and I’ve spent way to much over the years on expensive computer books that go out of date before I’m done with them. I sell my used books on Amazon and keep the money in their Gift Certificates to “reinvest” in more books, CDs or DVDs (usually guitar instruction DVDs). Pictured here are a couple photos of my unruly bookshelves, disheveled because I’m really trying to cull through and sell some more.
I also have a penchant for the tactile. Cliff (who also just posted his perceptive take on Kindle) and I frequently trade links to sites about pencils. Yes, Pencils. Pencil sharpeners too. Sad, I know. In fact, one of my favorite books “Thinking with a Pencil” is prominently displayed in the photo to the right, and I currently covet “Sketching the User Experience” - guess I’ll have to sell a few books over at Amazon.

So, why no dice on the Kindle, besides the unfortunate name? For some books, I’m sure it’s fine - New computer manuals, yeah, maybe. They could have taken that a lot further if the author could designate segments to be beamable and equip it with infrared , so you could beam code snipits to your computer. Business titles, one’s you really don’t need to keep. Yeah, maybe, but most of them are so boring I tend to get them at Audible. Businesses could also use it for training or on-boarding as it matures. For fiction? maybe for someone, but not me. For classics? Nada - I just don’t see myself reading Sherlock Holmes on a we computer screen.

One pro, is it uses SD cards; so does my Treo and my Elf, so that would work. Fragility. Books are pretty durable, and they have to be; they get tossed around, say on, slept on. etc. and, the price tag… $399? over an iPhone, well, that toy’s gonna have to wait. I’d rather wake up Christmas morning to find a Chumby, by far.

Boy, these are tempting - an attractive internet retrieval device:

Check ‘em out: www.chumby.com

With more and more of our time and attention spend in applications we are currently calling "Social Media" most of which send email and otherwise communicate with us via our channel of choice, and most of us having a personal, personal business, or work Web site to repose our contact info, I began wondering what folks were putting on their business cards these days.

Original Tweet: Hey Gang: quick survey: what addresses, URLs, numbers do you put on a biz card now? Feel free to pass to your followers. I’ll agg & post.

As the twitter tweeted, I only got 3 responses, but that’s OK. here they are, and feel free to add on in the comments section

mtlb I freelance, so just name/blog name/title/email/cell/blog url. No other IM/web/social media info. I save that for email signature.  06:17 PM November 06, 2007

miguelrodriguez   @joetennis at least these: name, title, primary address, email, website url, office and mobile phone numbers   05:04 PM November 06, 2007  from web in reply to joetennis

tastybit   @joetennis on my latest moo card, I include my name and one url: http://seriousaboutcamo.com    01:33 PM November 06, 2007  from twitterrific  in reply to joetennis

Thanks for the replys, and readers, feel free to add your own answer as a comment.

If you haven’t caught the Mimobot craze, Julia Roy certainly has - you can see her extolling their virtues here on Seesmic

As I move through the process of helping my day job develop a community strategy, I’m trying to tease out the kernels of unique truth about “social media”. There are many facets that people are grappling with, some technological, some sociological and a few economical. Interestingly enough, the politico’s haven’t entered the arena yet, and quite the opposite, social media is giving rise to methods of circumvention within oppressed cultures like mainland China.

This is all good, but what’s unique about it? What will “stick”, because evolution demands endurance. Most everything people voluntarily spend their time on is justifiable as relevant. When those people are, on the average, intelligent, they their justifications sound more relevant.

Since computers fit so well into the business sphere, the benefit of a new phenomena (like CD-ROMs, or Shopping Carts, or distributed ID, or Social Behavior) is most frequently cost justified in it’s benefit to business - this fits well with the Enthusiast/Professional/Lay-person adoption trajectory which most technology products go through. What’s really the case, is for business to benifit, they have to create innovative ways to bridge the early adopters sense and the mass market demand.

So, to have endurance, a capability (I’m calling Social Media a capability, as it’s everything from software to behavior) has to eventually be generalizable to the broad, non-technical population, because for the vast majority of humans, computers are vastly unsatisfying places to spend time.

So, towards identifying some of the bridges between traditional methods of social behavior, and this new stuff, I’m just capturing some notes for my analysis stage:

• People have always created media: Photos, home movies, poems, invitations, thanks you cards.
• People have always exchanged small messages: “small talk”, sound bites, cocktail party chatter, all the way back to notes passed via foot messenger.
• Most of what is created by individuals is not worth consuming: this goes for music, the written word, food, paintings, etc. People do much of these creative efforts for self expression, therapy and numerous other personal reasons.
• As with Spam, as the cost of production goes down, quality will drop in direct proportion and expectations will be met less often.
  Case Study: in the days of hand written Christmas cards distribution was limited and responses were understandably infrequent. Follow-up was in the form of reciprocity and might have a cycle of a year or so. I believe this is what used to be called personalization
• As input channels multiply, peoples ability to manage the information inflow will be more and more challenged and they will be forced to triage in relation to their need to juggle their other day-to-day obligations.

This is nothing but notes… observations. it should just be up on a wall somewhere, but for now, this is my wall, and you are welcome to help me analyze it.

Riiiiing… Rrrinnngggg.

Hey Hugh, it’s me, Lawrence. I gotta talk to you about this new open standard that’s going to revolutionize the way we drink: It’s called the Dixie Cup.

It’s really great. What we’ve done is wax coated a plain old paper cup, and now it’ll hold more types of beverages… it’s almost universal! I mean, from Grapefruit Juice to a Gin and Tonic, this thing holds up. It’s going to change the way companies think about distributing and consuming fluid.

Right out of the gate we have agreements from Rubbermaid, PG and Acme Co to modernize their fluid distributions to be transitionally contained by this exciting open standard, and Saul’s working on a logo as we speak.

We also see an expanding market for dispenser apparatus; think about it: every house in America with a Dixie Cup dispenser in the kitchen. You could show up at a party with Dixie Cups and KNOW they’ll fit in the hosts dispenser apparatus.

Oh yeah, we turned the cone shape into a flat bottom to increase lateral stability thereby extending its intra-usage utility. Ted’s doing some R&D around optimal radius to metacentric height ratio to maximize stability.

This is great: Guy Kawasaki opened up a BoutyUp fund so everyone could pitch in and get Dave Winer a new Diamond encrusted iPhone. Details here:
http://www.bountyup.com/bounty/Buy+Dave+Winer+a+Jeweled+iPhone

It was when I was doing a freelance gig, producing the online version of the 1996 Bank of America Annual Report (kindda ironic, as that’s where I work now), and after showing my client the usual four tiers and types of pages the site would comprise, and getting them approved, and going into production to grind out a couple hundred pages just to have the client (yep, that was you, Cliff ) say:

“Blue… could we change all those table headers from grey to blue?” Continue reading »

Listening to conversations between designers and developers is an endless source of amusement. Contributors and visionaries from both camps will always have expectations and frame questions from the view of their own professional specialty.

It gets even better, when a programmer and a designer discuss working Agile methodologies, and gets even better when they have varying appreciations of what exactly agility is. Continue reading »

Please sign your emails
You know what annoys me. People who put include really handy signatures in their e-mail, but only now and then, so when you try to find their number by looking at the bottom of the last mail they sent you you have to sort through 6 months of posts.
No biggy, just a peeve.