Earth to Cable: You don’t control us.:
Whether or not cable and phone companies succeed in building out the fully licensed world (that is, sucking everywhere down under the lids of their closed systems), we will remain free. We can live without you if we have to. Always could, always will.
[Amazing how quickly Noah got used to not watching TV when he lost the privilege. It’ll never be back in its old form.]
Source: Doc Searls Weblog
According to the US Mint’s annual reports, the cost of producing a penny surpassed $0.01 in 2006, and the cost of producing a nickel surpassed $0.05 in 2009. So why does the Treasury still mint these coins?
[Because we do lots of things that don’t make sense.]
Source: Simple Blog
Responsible Disclosure Policy:
There has been some confusion over today’s security vulnerability and our policy on responsible disclosure and account suspension that I’d like to clear up.
[I think they’ve covered this fairly well. Not awesome, but fairly well. The biggest problem is that they weren’t completely forthright about what happened in their first blog post. Maybe they should’ve have waited a little while longer before posting… but I’m Monday morning QB’ing here. It’s all too common for people to take an all or nothing response to everything. They’re the best! They’s the worst! But that’s too easy. Rarely is life so binary. Besides, it’s all too easy to throw stones and in case there were two large targets… Rails and Github. Meh to all. ]
Music Lessons (that work for publishing, too) – The Domino Project:
- The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now.
- Past performance is no guarantee of future success
- Copy protection in a digital age is a pipe dream
- Interactivity can’t be copied
- Permission is the asset of the future
- A frightened consumer is not a happy consumer.
- This is a big one: The best time to change your business model is while you still have momentum.
- Remember the Bob Dylan rule: it’s not just a record, it’s a movement.
- Don’t panic when the new business model isn’t as ‘clean’ as the old one
- Read the writing on the wall.
- Don’t abandon the Long Tail
- Understand the power of digital
- Celebrity is underrated
- Value is created when you go from many to few, and vice versa
[Go read the whole thing, because a lot of this applies to everyone.]
David Garcia Studio: Pessoa Clock:
In an attempt to formalize the ritual of waiting, a clock was devised to leave traces of poems while it was turned on. The clarity of the traces is directly proportional to the amount of time one has to wait. The text engraved in the base is a poem by Pessoa, depicting concepts of time, and the futility of understanding them fully. Cinnamon is slowly dropped by the rolling cylinder, leaving traces on the street.
[I’d want up with cinnamon everywhere… but I like the idea of creating some art while I wait. I dislike waiting when it’s because the other party is late…]
Source: Chris Adler
And what did I do? I pushed back at him about the talk he gave. While he was making his points on stage, I was taking an inventory of the things I didn’t agree with. And when presented with an opportunity to speak with him, I quickly pushed back at some of his ideas. I must have seemed like such an asshole.
[Been there. Trying to teach “give it five minutes” to my son. Might be one of the better things I can do for him.]
Edging toward the fully licensed world:
By losing the free and open Internet, and free and open devices to interact with it — and even such ordinary things as physical books and music media — we reduce the full scope of both markets and civilization.
But that’s hard to see when the walled gardens are so rich with short-term benefits.
[Insightful as always.]
Source: Doc Searls Weblog
Alex Payne — How Not To Sell Software in 2012:
Basically, the farther away you get from being like an app store or Amazon Web Services, the less likely it is that you’re going to get my money.
[Same problem for lots of classes of people. If you babysit, you need to get Square.]
If I had one bit of advice to someone thinking of a startup—including myself, at times—it would be this. Solve a genuine problem, even a trivial one, that you actually have, and that isn’t being adequately solved by an existing solution. Then think about how you can get money for solving that problem. Be wary of scenarios in which your revenue base and your customer base have no overlap.
If I had a second bit of advice, it would be this. Is the elevator pitch for your new startup—no matter how sincerely you believe in its fantastic future—at its heart a variant of, “Think [well-known service name] but with [added feature or new twist]”? If it is, you’d better know somebody willing to call bullshit.
[Seems like right fine advice…]
Source: Coyote Tracks
Is this the beginning of the “Success by UX” era?:
At first read I agreed with Cross completely, but you know, there’s still a lot of successful products out there that don’t provide a good user experience. Apple is successful by (mostly) providing very good UX and that’s certainly influencing the current generation of designers, but it’s not the only path to success—and there’s an awful lot of work influenced only by Apple’s superficial aesthetics.
[In the end… it’s not about aesthetics. It’s about making tasks easier to accomplish. And about understanding what people were trying to do when they did something and being smart about how you react to it. the aesthetics are the final piece to a very complicated and difficult puzzle. ]
Source: Coyote Tracks
turnings :: daniel berlinger 