My Friend James announced yesterday a mini-symposium/discussion on development and aid in Africa and the West’s role in it all. I am away to my friends’ wedding that day, but if you’re in London I strongly suggest you check it out on September 12.
W3C:
Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C’s position regarding the future of HTML.
(Via DF.)
A look at a very simple yet powerful way to organize different “views” for your websites, iPhone apps and more in Photoshop.
Well, I have yet to met a pixel-pusher who in fact uses Layer Comps.
Neven, I’ve been using layer comps for 5-6 months now, but we’ve never met, so you’re off the hook.
I haven’t yet read Chris Anderson’s newest book, “Free”, but it is generating a lot of buzz. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article recently for the New Yorker that critiqued the concepts presented by Anderson.
As a rebuttal Seth Godin recently an article titled “Malcolm is wrong”, which contains some snippets that, for me, set off a bit of an alarm.
[Malcolm is wrong.] I’ve never written those three words before, but he’s never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go.
Having spent several years heavily involved in the church, I know how dangerous a statement like this is. Basically, Godin is placing Anderson in a position of infallibility. He is declaring that Malcolm is wrong because he has disagreed with Anderson. For me, this is a very tough argument to swallow.
The first argument that makes no sense is, “should we want free to be the future?”
Who cares if we want it? It is.
In Godin’s first rebuttal, he takes on a sort of defeatist mentality, declaring that whether we like it or not, we are bound to this new reality of “free.” I do not know my history as well as I would like, so I cannot say whether the course humanity is on is impossible to alter. I do, however, seem to be able to name at least a few people who have changed the course of history over the past few millennia. I highly doubt that this particular course is unchangeable. I believe we do have the power to make our future.
Godin makes the same defeatist claim in his next rebuttal:
The second argument that makes no sense is, “how will this new business model support the world as we know it today?”
Who cares if it does? It is. It’s happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient, but it’s true.
I would hate to have had to face this mentality during the civil rights movement. I would also hate to be fighting for change in Iran right now, or in a country facing poverty if Godin’s mentality were the absolute truth.
Godin goes on to basically say that unless publishers are able to produce free digital content, they are screwed. His premise is that consumers now demand free, and that’s what they’ll get. What he’s failing to realize is that access to the internet isn’t free. As far as I can tell, it never will be. It’s either the cost of a monthly access fee, or a daily coffee at the local coffee pub, or taxes that pay for access at libraries or other municipal locations.
As John Gruber wrote:
[S]everal readers have asked why I seem opposed to Anderson’s view, given that I’ve made a nice career for myself by giving away my own writing for free here on Daring Fireball. My answer to that is that Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets charged.
As far as I can see, nothing we have experienced on the internet has been free. It’s just a matter of who is paying the bills.
Lastly:
[I]t’s ironic that sometimes people pay money for my books (I view them as souvenirs of content you could get less conveniently and less organized for free online if you chose to.
Ironic, and highly convenient for Godin, if you ask me.
Matt Mullenweg:
I reached out to the Software Freedom Law Center, the world’s preeminent experts on the GPL, which spent time with WordPress’s code, community, and provided us with an official legal opinion. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
(Via Ian Stewart.)
The Tapbots story still inspires me to no end. Love what Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad have done.
That we had to wait two years for the iPhone’s text selection and pasteboard is a good example of one aspect of the Apple way: better nothing at all than something less than great. That’s not to say Apple never releases anything less than great, but they try not to.
And yet 12 months into the App Store and no one can say it’s a great product or experience. I’m not disagreeing with Gruber here, I’m simply wondering aloud why there is such a disconnect between the Apple we know and love and whoever the heck is running the App Store.
(Via DF)
The key ingredient I see in successful apps, Mac or web — and, really, in creative commercial endeavors of any kind — is that the creators are building something they themselves love. That’s what you should copy.
Just going through some older articles on some favourite blogs, and stumbled upon this great quote. The project I am working on now, the Mac app I plan to create, the iPhone app I’m dreaming of at the moment, and this very blog are all projects I want for myself. If you happen to like them too, that’s great. I would just be highly suspect if you like them more than me.
(Via DF)
June 25, 2009
A Couple More Weeks…
Sometimes you think you have every detail worked out, every plan checked and re-checked, and every possible situation accounted for.
Then life happens.
As I’m sure many have noticed, the project I’ve been working on for the past months didn’t launch this week as intended. It may be another 2-3 weeks before we are ready. We’re working now on making sure our initial offerings are solid, rather than trying to achieve every goal we set out right off the bat.
I’ll have more details as soon as I can share them. In the meantime, thanks for sticking around. I really appreciate it.
How the music and movie industry in Canada constructed the impression of independent consensus on what the current copyright landscape looks like, and what it should look like in the future. Hint: they have big wallets.
World’s Cleverest Ad Campaign Is Big Failure
For the past 5 years, ad agency Crispin Porter Bogusky has been managing the marketing for Burger King, creating several award-winning campaigns. Only, there’s a problem:
Between 2003 — the year before Burger King hired Crispin as agency of record — and 2008, Burger King’s share of the burger-chain market fell to 14.2% from 15.6%, according to Technomic, while McDonald’s share rose to 46.8% from 43.6%. McDonald’s has posted average annual sales growth of 6.3% compared with BK’s 2.9% gain during that period.
As Joshua Blankenship comments, “if your agency of record is making you less profit than you had before hiring them, fire them.”
(Via Blankenship.)
June 23, 2009
Fever Etiquette
Yesterday I purchased and installed Fever, the self-hosted feed reader/personal recommendation service from Shaun Inman. I’m still learning the ropes, but so far I’m really impressed by both the functionality and the design of the user interface. Shaun has once again done a great job.
Since its launch, Fever has become the preferred feed reader of a number of people. Thanks in large part to Shawn Blanc, a number of new Fever users have recently subscribed to my blog. Prior to Fever, this was the level of connection I had with my readers:
Graphs and charts outlining my readers’ choice of RSS reader, browser, operating system, etc. were the only indicators (outside of personal contact) of who was reading my blog.
While for the majority of my readers this hasn’t and will not change, for the growing percentage of readers using Fever, suddenly anonymity is no longer guaranteed. In my Mint stats, as people access my site via their Fever installation, their domain name is also tracked. Every time someone visits my site from their Fever app, I am able to see exactly who subscribes to me, and with that information I am able to visit their site.
There are some very cool benefits to this circumstance. I now have the opportunity to return the favour to my readers and subscribe to their blogs. I am able to make contact through email or their comments section. I am able to get a much clearer sense of the types of people who are reading what I have to say.
At the same time, however, this poses some unique questions about how to approach this new level of openness. Is it appropriate to email someone who subscribes to me, thanking them for taking the time to read what I have to say even if they’ve never made direct contact with me? Are there other security/privacy issues that arise when I am made aware of who is reading my blog? How will knowing who is reading affect how I write?
I’m interested to see how the Fever user community grows and begins to interact with one another in a very new way. I hope that Fever will continue to integrate social connections between its users, beyond the side-effects of having a self-hosted app. It could really open up a whole new way of sharing news, finding information, and beginning dialogues around what we are collectively reading.
Just wanted to let you know that I was able to renew patdryburgh.net a lot quicker than I had anticipated, and it now redirects to patdryburgh.com through a 301 redirect. This should fix how Google index’s my site, as well as bring back my readers subscribed to patdryburgh.net/feed/. Thanks to my twitter friends for the help this afternoon, especially Michael for the 301 redirect info.
So, to recap: patdryburgh.com is now the official domain for my blog. patdryburgh.net redirects here. And you, my friends, are awesome.