Anil's Tumblog
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If you hang around in the NYC media bubble long enough, you develop the social depression of a collapsing industry. The west coast is full of a giddy frisson about the inevitable demise of big media, while the midwest is skeptical of everything that gets force-fed to them from the coasts. NYC, which has essentially zero awareness of any of this, continues to constantly be shocked! when a TMZ or Pitchfork or The Onion comes along from the hinterlands with a massively successful enterprise.
The reasons for this amounts to a lack of vision. Even smart people, vampiracly [sic] bound to the past, seem completely blind to developing new formats. The standard for online innovation right now is ‘launch another blog,’ which no one seems to recognize is about as depressing as launching another newspaper.
OH SNAP INSIDE DOT COM REFERENCE!
Rexy (via caro) (via mikehudack)
Since Rex moved here, I’ve heard him make endless pronouncements about New York. Some of them are dead-on and some of them are inaccurate, but the latter are mostly a function of Rex having lived here only a little over a year. And this graf is (sorry, Rex) indicative of the latter.
I’m not an expert on NY media by any means, but I was here, and no one in New York was shocked (shocked!) by the appearance of TMZ or Pitchfork or the Onion. TMZ was funded by New York (TWX is based here), the Onion moved here (because they thought it was necessary) and suggesting that NY media isn’t interested in Pitchfork (because most music pubs here cover mainstream music) is not a proxy for suggesting that it was surprised by Pitchfork’s arrival.
And people don’t launch blogs because they think they’re innovative. They launch blogs because the blogging format (and it’s a FORMAT, not a medium, and not a descriptor of editorial content) is the most conducive to high volumes of content at the cheapest price point. It’s popular because it’s economically and operationally efficient, not because anyone thinks they’re single-handedly shifting any paradigms with their amazing command of WordPress.
But it’s ironic that mediaite is being held up as a contradiction to all of that. Because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that ranking system before. And blog software publishing into grid layouts, and so on. So where are the new ideas, exactly?
(via spiers)
My wife gave me a haircut tonight and I arranged the clippings into this self-portrait. Yes, just another exciting weekend at the Ohlenkamp household. Click for a closer look.
“ One or two generations from now, the impossibility of scrubbing every private utterance for the demands of permanent public presentation will lead to a society much more accepting of occasional flubs, faults, and flaws. Behold, the triumph of context.
I like the disclaimer heather-rivers appended: ”This is what I’ve been banking on all this time with my incurable oversharing.”
Yesterday and early this morning, while talking about our impending move to a new apartment a few blocks away in a much bigger building (and no longer on the ground floor), Alaina and I talked about how being in a larger complex essentially acts a…
“ What I wish I could find is as thoughtful an analysis of our choices in online communities. We don’t yet have a Jane Jacobs for those who build social websites and communities online. And we continue expanding our networks without perhaps enough information about the implications of all of these choices. The other day, Baratunde caught me saying “we are influencing culture when we think we’re just making feature decisions”.
(via benbrown)
“ When some says FAIL, what they’re really saying is; I’m failing to understand someone else’s constraints.
Me, at dinner last night (via msg)
Office 2010 preview
I’ve been a recreational and professional computer user for, what, 25 years, and I can’t make heads or tails of the user interface on this Office 2010 preview that Gruber linked to.
I know that Microsoft replaced the traditional toolbar with something called a “ribbon” and I’ve never understood what it’s supposed to be. It seems to be a categorized toolbar where you can arbitrarily stack icons of varying sizes, with or without labels, in whichever layout strikes your fancy.
Seriously, go look at this thing. There’s some sort of “mini toolbar” in the title bar of the window in addition to the standard window controls. (Before my fellow Mac users get too sanctimonious, let’s consider Safari 4 beta’s “top tabs”, which my internal jury is still out on.)
Then you’ve got the ribbon itself, which appears to be tabbed, and one of the tabs has what I can only guess is a resize widget. I mean what is happening here?
The first section of the ribbon is “Delete” which has, as far as I can tell, three separate icons for delete. Do you have to use a specific delete button for a certain type of data? Why? What is this about? The delete icons are also two different sizes, and one has a popup menu hanging off of it.
The ribbon has an “Actions” section containing a “More Actions” popup.
The Find section is, unlike all the other sections, unlabeled. It appears to contain a toggle button with a popup arrow underneath it.
I also like the Zoom section which contains a single icon, also labeled Zoom.
This is impenetrable. It’s UI salad. I realize this is not (yet) shipping software, but my god. If you sat me down in front of this, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea where to begin.
I think this stems from a corporate culture that is unable to say no to anything. Office has a bazillion features, and no doubt is being marketing-driven to add a few thousand more to justify the upgrade to 2010. Everyone has a particular way that they use Office, and they are literally trying to accommodate every possible layout or customization that anyone has ever wanted in the history of time. They are terrified that someone is going to stop using Office (as if they had a choice) because they couldn’t position their three delete buttons just so. It’s madness.
It’s usually at this point in the argument that Windows advocates say “well, this is why Windows makes a REAL computer — just look at all these options I have!” There’s no question that Address Book and iCal do only 10% of what Outlook can do, but somehow that 10% is 80% of what I need. It is hard to make a simple interface for an application that does a lot of stuff — I can attest to that. I don’t envy Microsoft’s task here. I know they’ve got smart people in there somewhere, and I don’t think this is the best they are capable of.
I think this is a particularly shoddy screenshot that’s also color-distorted, and being judged by people who’ve never used any of these apps. The Ribbon in Office is a great UI, as is obvious to anyone who’s used it for any duration of time.
Maxwell’s “Pretty Wings”. I’ve been waiting 8 years for him to put out a new record, and two years since I first heard a snippet of this track. Worth the wait.
