A presentation from Maciej Ceglowski about his Pinboard experience: The Business of Bookmarking (warning: PDF).

The most popular business model has been to offer a free service and then shut down.

(Ha.)

...while the [Pinboard] business is healthy and profitable, no angel investor or venture capitalist would touch it with a long stick, as it sits on the wrong side of the risk/reward curve. The combination of low startup costs and investor aversion means there are all kinds of opportunities lying around for a developer to run a profitable small business, provided he or she remembers to charge money.

...An archive needs to have a credible plan for offering the same basic feature set over a time scale of decades. Any major redesign risks spooking users who will perceive it as a sign of instability. And the last thing people want to hear is that you're swinging for the fences - real archivists bunt.

A good role model here is craigslist, which has endured sustained derision for its 'ancient' UI for years from a succession of more modern websites, nearly all of which are now out of business.

Related: A fellow named Tom Armitage created a workflow which automatically turns his Pinboard stream into books, by year.

• A Year of Links [Infovore]

Comic writer/artist Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant) dispenses a bunch of good advice for aspiring comic writers/artists in: A lil' Q and A, part one [tumblr]

My first comics were awful. Everyone's are. Some people are awful for a long time then stick with it and get good. But you have to know you can.

(You can.)

... The real wonder of the New Yorker is that anyone can submit cartoons, so technically, anyone has a chance of getting in. Can you say that about many other 'prestigious' publications? Not really.

Last Thanksgiving I found this carving video more valuable than all carving instructions and videos before it: Wegmans Turkey Carving Time Savers.

• Stevey's Google Platforms Rant (first found via Flutterby)
• metafilter thread

Fascinating reading if you work on software. Quoth Medley after reading it, "Now I need a cigarette..."

Found this linked a few places today, and if you care about interfaces and communicating complexity (like I do), then it's a fascinating read.

• Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction by Bret Victor

The toy example itself isn't important at all, but the approach is.

In sad news, Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C, has died. His death coming close to Steve Jobs' means that some people are already straining to weigh the contributions of the two against each other, as though it is a contest.

Really people, they can both be titans in their own way. It's OK.

This at least shows that Netflix can understand whacks on the nose.

But what has struck me throughout this odd episode is their misunderstanding of what their own customers like about the service.

Making customers split their queue management into two separate websites which don't integrate with each other was a really really bad plan (with -- notice -- no actual reason given for it), and I can imagine lots of heated arguments in-house from the people who could tell it was a deeply stupid move. Tip for the head office: keep a list of those people and consult them the next time you get a really 'bright' idea.

The most foreboding aspect (for anyone wishing Netflix any success, that is) is the continued dimness and/or pridefulness of the executives. The juicy quotes in the New York Times report on the policy reversal do not inspire confidence:

"We underestimated the appeal of the single Web site and a single service," Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said in an interview, before quickly adding: "We greatly underestimated it."

Ok, so far so good. They have understood their basic error. But wait.. Reed Hastings doesn't agree with his own spokesman:

"there is a difference between moving quickly -- which Netflix has done very well for years -- and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case."

Replace 'moving too fast' with 'moving in the wrong direction' and you've sold me.

'Moving too fast' just tells me you really want to try this again in a year or two. And that means you do not understand your basic error.

We are still customers for now (and switching to streaming-only), but we'll be keeping an eye out for further drug trips and policy freakouts from the Netflix head office.

Complexity

• Where it comes from
• Tools to make it both more comprehensible and easier to manage

• How to communicate effectively with outside parties about how complex a thing actually is

  That's a compact way of saying: it really ticks me off when people who clearly understand many nuances and tradeoffs involved in some things (say, their job, or a sport or two) then consider everything they are not that familiar with to be very straightforward and obvious.

  This happens among otherwise-elite, brainy people too; this XKCD is a great example.

Uncertainty

• Humanity is constantly having to make big bets based on limited information.

  (I think this has always been true; while you could argue that people throughout history have been solving much simpler problems than we have today, they also lacked most of the modern tools we have to tell us about the world - accurate maps, for instance. We're always bumping against the limits of our understanding.)

• How we (as a society) handle decision-making under great uncertainty could be improved.
• How we (as a society) view past decisions made under great uncertainty could be improved.

Music - studying, performing, appreciating, describing

Software - design, construction practices

Apple stuff - Mac OS X, iOS devices (yes, still a big Apple fan)

Parenting - I have a 3-year old. 'Nuff said.

Business - Management; "Organizational Behavior"; Emergent properties of systems of people

Checklists (a la Atul Gawande) and any other ways to improve the performance of groups of people doing complex tasks.

Politics & Media - the various intractable problems we face and the channels through which we all learn about them.

There's plenty more, but those are the headline grabbers for me at the moment.

Rationales:

• What good is it to learn a whole lot of things if you never share what you've learned with anyone? I haven't been idle for the last several years; I know about many more things now than I ever used to before. I've just been quieter.
• I'll never be 'ready' to come back in full force if I keep waiting for it. The only way to do it is to practice it and get better at it again. The only way to practice it is to get started even when I'm rusty. So, here I am.
• I've learned (from a lot of observation) that you shouldn't expect to think-think-think in isolation and then produce a finished perfect thing. The people I most enjoy reading are willing to think out loud and share unpolished ideas in order to gain the benefit of getting good input from other smart people about the same topics; it's a better outcome all around.
• "Real Artists Ship" - Steve Jobs

Proximate cause/kick in the pants which led to actually posting something:

• There have been lots of things which should have triggered posts. But yesterday's boot to the behind was the news that Steve Jobs died. If that won't get your ass in some kind of gear to try and make a bigger dent of your own in the universe, then not much will.

P.S. In case there is anyone reading this who doesn't know, I have at least been active on Twitter for the last few years.

	Small: <img src="http://nowthis.com/misc/ivoted-stars72.gif" width="72" height="72" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" />
	Medium: <img src="http://nowthis.com/misc/ivoted-stars96.gif" width="96" height="96" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" />
	Big: <img src="http://nowthis.com/misc/ivoted-stars.gif" width="154" height="154" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" />

(Follow the link for more versions, including higher-resolution printable versions.)

I'm OK with other people loading the image directly from nowthis.com. I'm not a heavy-bandwidth user normally, so I don't expect it'll cause me any bandwidth charges.

Recently Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, announced that they're going to shift focus to become a 'modern media company', SAY Media. The Movable Type software itself is not going to be quite as important a focus for them as before. Ambivalence.. rising.

Dave Cross, Perl hacker, has since switched his blog from MT to WordPress. In his post discussing it, he put into words several points I've also been pondering:

WordPress [Perl Hacks]

[In 2002] Movable Type was the only real choice in this area and it had the bonus that it was written in Perl so I could hack on it if I wanted to. Of course I never got round to doing that.

... There just isn't the community of people producing themes and plugins for MT that is for, say, WordPress.

... Oh, and just to head off some obvious comments - yes, I'm using a blog engine that is built in PHP, not Perl. My operating system isn't written in Perl, nor is my web browser or, indeed, most of the software I use from day to day. It would be great if there was a powerful and popular blogging engine written in Perl. But there isn't, so I'm using this instead.

A commenter asks the next obvious question, "What about Melody, a community fork of Movable Type?"

Oh, I know all about Melody. I'm watching with interest and I'll try out their first release when it appears in the next month or so. But it's going to be some time until they have a community to rival WordPress's.

Related: The Future of Movable Type is Melody [OpenMelody.org]

...we are pleased to announce that we are in the final stages of our first official beta release of Melody 1.0, due out this November. Not only is this release one that fixes a multitude of bugs affecting Movable Type customers today, and not only is it a release that adds plenty of new features people will enjoy using, but it is also a release that looks to the future by folding into the core platform essential infrastructure to support the next generation of designers, developers and users of the platform. It is a release that signals a new era for the platform.

So, I haven't switched to WordPress yet, but I'm strongly considering it. Lyn has had some issues with installing WP upgrades from time to time, but we always get through it somehow.

At the same time, OpenMelody is intriguing and still in Perl.

On the third hand, there's Cross' "Of course I never got round to doing that." Is 'hacking on the blog engine' really ever going to make it onto my todo list? And even if so, I could just as well be hacking on WordPress.

Continuing to ponder.

Ammann's earlier article on the beginnings of the blogosphere was as good a short history as I've seen: Jorn Barger, the NewsPage Network, and the Emergence of the Weblog Community. (Scott Rosenberg's book-length one is surely worth a mention here too: Say Everything.)

(That article's appearance in the Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia probably marks my first appearance in an ACM publication. Milestones.)

Anyway. The topic is, the attribution of links as practiced in the early days (which nowadays means 1997-2000).

Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:09:28 -0500
From: Steve Bogart
To: Rudolf Ammann

RA: What were your thoughts when you picked up Barger's system of link attribution? What significance or promise did the system appear to hold at the time?

SB: It just seemed like a good solution to a problem I was encountering -- one of the natural problems of writing a weblog.

On the one hand, I didn't want to just avoid using any links other people saw first. For a little while that was in fact my instinct, because there were few enough sites to follow that it just felt like if one site had the link, everybody who was reading me would see it anyway, and I didn't want to be seen as just parroting other people. But it became a very limiting principle to try to adhere to; how many times would I realistically be the first person to mention something?

On the other hand, taking the opposite approach, I could just use any and all links I found without worrying where they came from, as though I found them all myself. I resisted this, because I seem to remember having the experience of seeing a link I had found make its way around other sites and thinking, "hey wait, you got that from me". So it would feel wrong to just do the same thing to other people.

In hindsight, it's obvious how to navigate between the extremes; just give credit when you got a link from someone else.

It was a bit of extra work to add attributions, but it was the best choice as far as balancing my peace of mind with not wanting to be limited in what I could write about. (Plus, eventually the 'via' shorthand evolved, which made it a little less cumbersome to do the crediting.)

RA: Did you by any chance, in adopting that system, comply with a request by Jorn who might have contacted you asking for attribution of a link he'd posted first?

SB: I don't believe so. I don't recall much correspondence between us. As explained above, it was a fitting solution to a dilemma I'd already been having.

RA: I'm asking partly because of the condition under which you would not credit a link: "If I saw something first, though, no dice. ;)" This sounds a little bit like a reply to a request. Did Jorn ever make such a request?

SB: No, that was just me being thorough / pre-emptive / trying to think through all the cases.

I don't believe anyone did ever approach me about adding a credit to them for a link, probably because I was fairly conscientious about doing it in the first place.

youtube found via Matt Yglesias, who just turned 29.

Which makes me old. Well, older. (10 years older!) Old.

mathowie for one is pretty pleased: "The ABC-tv and Popular Science magazine iPad apps feel like they were ripped out of a sci-fi movie and I'm still amazed they're real."

Cory Doctorow and Mark Pilgrim's conviction that the iPad is a Bad Thing and not only won't they buy one but YOU SHOULDN'T EITHER!! is much-discussed. I've considered a lengthy argument of my own but have lacked the cycles. Greg Knauss had a pretty good response, including these fine phrasings:

Simplicity has a purpose, and complexity -- "hackability" is just a form of complexity -- has costs. ... The story of technology over the course of the past 20 years is the expansion of one at the expense of another. It's been more than a fair trade, despite detours and disasters and greed and stupidity. To object to this positive (and historically inevitable) trend on the grounds that you maybe can't trade comics anymore is to remove the benefits of technology from billions of potential users, for your own myopic ends.

... If you need to change a battery to feel like a whole man, then perhaps you're missing the point.

I will say this, in the end it just seems weird to have so much hate/fear of people liking and wanting a product, and to act as though Apple has a gun to everyone's head which will keep them from ever trying to make anything of their own. It's a strange reaction.

Returning to mathowie's tweets for a sec: at this Flickr page showing his 4-year-old drawing an Easter bunny on an iPad is the entirely appropriate comment:

According to Doctorow this is KILLING her creativity, Matthew!! KILLING IT!!

I'll surely be getting an iPad someday, just not for a while. Have talked myself into the position that I have to finish a certain related project first.

I'm very intrigued by the nicer interfaces you can make with such a big touchscreen -- see gizmodo's screenshots of several iPad apps for a sense of the variety & capabilities now in play.

The Netflix streaming is a pretty exciting prospect all by itself.

Today's date can be read as either US-format (m-d-y) or sensible-format (d-m-y).

bradchoate Just put up a fresh beta build of iMT 1.1 for Movable Type. And it supports MT 4 and 5 now: github link

Pretty excited about this actually. Regular MT doesn't play that well with the iPhone OS.

Posted from my iPad Jr.

Don't make authors angry at you, but especially don't make Scalzi angry. He is quite skilled at explaining himself.

All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend by John Scalzi

Hey, you want to know how to piss off an author? It's easy: Keep people from buying their books. You want to know how to really piss them off? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them. And you know how to make them absolutely incandescent with rage? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them, and keep it a surprise until it happens. Which, as it happens, is exactly what Amazon did. As a result: Angry, angry authors. Oh so very angry.

...

Think about the disparity of corporate responses here. Macmillan issued a detailed statement from its CEO discussing the event and his company's reasons and rationales for acting as it did. Amazon issued an unsigned forum comment written by someone who is apparently a little shaky on Macmillan's relationship to its own product. Now, which of these two corporate responses ... appears to be the work of actual adults?

A Message from Macmillan CEO John Sargent