Communities of Creators Last week, I found this picture of a group dinner at Guero’s restaurant in Austin, TX, taken during South by Southwest in 2002. At the time, most of us at the table knew each other primarily through the web and through the then-nascent blogging...
DRM and Friends This one’s been kicking around in my head for a while, and maybe you can all help me understand it. With any contemporary social networking site, I can control who has access to the things I share, and I can update or change or revoke the...
Details of Execution Sometimes if you do something very difficult, and you do it really well, the end result is that your achievement becomes completely invisible. I mentioned a year and a half ago that I like Twitter. That was a little bit less common a position to...
Ten Thousand Fingers: Little Things Count When we were unpacking the delightful Nintendo Wii a few weeks ago, I was marvelling at how well-thought-out the process was. Beautiful, pleasant, and of course full of anticipation at the great machine we were about to be enjoying. But the we had to...
The Problem Is, The Zune Is Brown Microsoft has just launched the Zune, which will be one of the most popular digital music players ever made, and could have been considered a wild success as a result. Instead, the device has been inevitably and irrevocably compared to Apple’s...
TL;DR One of the great, definitive abbreviations for the social web is TL;DR. It stands for too long; didn’t read, and epitomizes the short-attention-span crowd, the willfully idiotic segment of the online population that 1. we all sometimes belong to and...
Life or Death for Web 2.0 A month ago, I began a series of posts outlining some common themes: Any system faces danger when it becomes a monoculture Diversity offers many broad-ranging and sometimes unexpected benefits There are many parallels between biological systems and...
100 Perfect Pixels: Vox Neighborhood This is the third post in a series where I’m pointing out some nice little touches that take up less than a 100×100 pixel square on a screen. Today’s is from the Vox Neighborhood page. Sure, Vox is still in preview. Sure, I work for the company that...
100 Perfect Pixels: Amazon's Gold Box This is the second post in a series where I’m pointing out some nice little touches that take up less than a 100×100 pixel square on a screen. Today’s is the Amazon Gold Box. It’s been four years since the introduction of Amazon’s Gold Box, and...
A Review: Long Tail in the House! I’d started reading The Long Tail (You’ve read the blog, now buy the book!) by surprising myself with how excited I was to read the book; After all, I’d read the original article in Wired when it came out, and have been following Chris’ blog since it...
The Flip 2K5 Or, “Yahoo bought everyone on my buddy list, and all I got was this t-shirt”. Following up on the discussion about Web 2.0 from last week, the only thing as glaring as who was missing from the room was the talk of a new bubble. I can’t even count how...
How Do We Judge Our Tools? Just to be a little bit contrary, I’m gonna share some thoughts on products and services and companies I actually like but that I have some skeptical (cynical?) questions about. Consider this a disclaimer: Just because I’m asking a question doesn’t...
A Personal Panopticon One of the recurrent ideas that surfaces in science fiction and in the predictions of futurists is an always-on record of a person’s life. Typically, it’s presented as the stuff of a dystopian nightmare future, where the record is falsified and you...