In My Experience

in my experience

Old timey snowmageddon.
February 8, 2010 11:41 AM

It was clear as a bell after two days of snow.

Taken with an iPhone and processed with Mill Colour.

Blizzard Noir.
February 7, 2010 5:05 PM

Noir isn't entirely original, and neither are snow landscapes, but I don't care!

Taken with an iPhone and processed with Mill Colour.

No Comments, Revisited.
February 2, 2010 1:41 PM

Today, Engadget, the king of gadget blogs, turned off comments site-wide. I did the same thing here a while back due to spam reasons, but Engadget has done so due to "mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening" comments posted on the site. User and community involvement is a double edged sword, and I have to say, that on my own site, I miss seeing and reading the comments from my readers (I never had very many, but they were loyal).

So, what to do with comments on blogs? You'll never escape spam nor offensive comments, but there are ways to manage the issue...

Tweetboard uses Twitter which has seen wide adoption, but has had some reliability issues (eg, the recent database migration was fubared). I like it though since it has some viral (eg, po.st link) qualities to it.
Disqus offloads the commenting engine onto someone else's shoulders, but since it's somewhere else you can't control it's availability. Also, user have to go sign up for another account at another site.
TypePad exists, but nobody I know ever talks about it. I never see it on the web (it's a Wordpress world these days).

I'll be watching what Engadget does since they are a part of a much larger network of blogs and there has to be a better way to do this (or at least a way that allows for comments that doesn't totally suck).

Lifestreaming evolution.
January 20, 2010 10:51 AM

Almost a decade ago, blogging got started and today we have far too many ways to show everyone how awesome we are. You can post your photos on Flickr, Tweet your lunch and become the mayor of store and let everyone know about it. But, the lowly blog remains the one place where you can (should?) collect your thoughts into a longer and more coherent format.

The main issue with blogging is that it takes a long time if you care about it at all. You write your thoughts on a given topic, reread it, rewrite it, maybe show it to someone else for some copy editing and then post it. Back when I was blogging regularly, I was spending two hours or more per post to make sure I was making a clear point that was at least vaguely supported by a fact or two. Then I had a kid and the value of time and coherent thought went thru the roof.

Today, many people, including me, who used to blog every day are now just using Twitter since the format itself encourages you to be short and carefree. From time to time though, you want/need a longer and more permanent format, so the blog remains relevant. Still though, I have signed up for, and continued to use, many cloud services, such as Flickr, Facebook, and Digg and I'd like to have more content here on IMX than just the blog entries.

So, it's time to evolve past the blog and aggregate all of these various cloud activities, and Storytlr seems to be a way to do that. The best part is that I don't have to relinquish control which is a big deal, so I'm going to give it a try. But due to the reasons that I use Twitter a lot more and blog a lot less are still in play, so it's like the circle of life(streaming).

I think the concept of personal cloud aggregation is something MovableType can't ignore and I can see myself dropping it for the first time since I migrated from GreyMatter to MT.

No ubiquitous wireless means all of my apps are useless.
December 28, 2009 11:02 AM

I have an iPhone 3GS and six pages of apps (I try to keeps things tidy). I use about 20 of those apps on a frequent basis and am generally over-connected. For Christmas my daughter got an iPod Touch, and since she's so young (6), I turned off the wifi connection and then configured which apps should be installed. I learned a couple of things...

I have many apps (read: most) that are completely useless unless there is a 3G/wifi connection.
The app store has tons of app for adults, but precious few quality apps for 1st grade kids.
I'll only pay a buck or two for an app for me, but will gladly pay $5 for a good app for my kid.
The entire first page on my iPhone is made up of connected apps (except Calendar and 1Password) and my daughter's first page is all games.
My six year old kid knows how to use an iPod Touch with ZERO instructions, but if she had to use iTunes to get apps onto it, she'd fail miserably.

There's a market here somewhere.

Mall photo.
December 16, 2009 1:10 PM

My local mall has this future retro thing going on with its architecture. I took this photo on my iPhone and processed it a bit with Mill Colour (which is a pretty cool, and free, photo app).

AOL's logo/branding is out.
December 16, 2009 12:48 PM

Like I said, now that AOL has pushed the "Aol." style logo and branding out the door, no one is around to whine about it. I've seen one comment about it so far, and that was a positive comment (I can't find it now, of course).

I think if your new logo and/or branding idea doesn't make at least some people react negatively, then you didn't do a very good job at trying something different, new and/or radical. Now isn't the time for AOL to go with "safe" or otherwise anonymous branding decisions. Instead it's time to mix things up, and more importantly, execute well on its business strategy. People will then associate that success or failure with the brand and you'll then reap the rewards (positive or negative).

Social aggregation UIs.
December 4, 2009 2:19 PM

As noted by John Gruber at Daring Fireball, the simplicity of a Twitter post opens up a lot of UI opportunities. As a result of that and available APIs, we are seeing more and more Twitter clients (I have four on my iPhone), but beyond that, we are seeing the start of the next logical step, convergence.

Socialite and Raindrop are the two best examples that I know. These are applications that aggregate your social footprint on the internet and attempt to wrap some meaningful UI around it all. Raindrop is still in early dev and requires you to be a bit savvy if you want to use it, but Socialite is (Mac only and) immediately available and is quick to set up, so give it a try.

Something worth looking at when using a variety of Twitter apps and these convergence apps, is how the designer has chosen to organize and present everything. If you boil things down a bit, a tweet, blog entry, Facebook update, Flickr post, rss feed and email, all have the same basic parts...

The person who sent it (which includes a way to reply, such as an email address or @twitter account)
The content.
A title/subject/name.
Some other bits of data, such as time/date, category names or tags, etc

With such a simple set of elements, there is a ton of opportunity to design a look and feel around them. The Raindrop folks have been sharing their design ideas on Flickr and you can see they have been exploring many ideas. It's not a surprise to see a 3 pane UI like you have in Outlook, Mail.app and NetNewsWire.

Socialite has completely Mac-ified that experience, and while some folks think the UI is just too intense, I think it's done elegantly and sensibly. You can see though that there is a lot you can do in the app, especially on the right side of each entry. At times there are 5 icons and one of them has a menu with 15 actions you can take. But overall, the UI is based on a use case you already understand, email.

Back to Twitter clients, compare something like Tweetdeck (which is entirely consistent from iPhone to its Air counterpart) to something like Tweetie 2. The base philosophy of these two clients are very different, but they use the same source material. As Raindrop continues to develop, it will be interesting to see if they can find a different but equally (or more!) usable format than you find in Socialite.

For a good overview on Socialite, check out Mashable's article from last week.

Names I didn't recognize.
November 27, 2009 5:46 PM

I went to the Emerging Tech conference back in 2003 and had an eye opening week. I didn't know it at the time, but there were important people there (well, important to me as it pertains to my job type). I met Clay Shirky in an elevator and contributed to a back channel doc (we used SubEthaEdit I think) during a talk led by Stewart Butterfield. The resulting doc is still out there on the internet and is still interesting.

No comments.
November 24, 2009 3:35 PM

When I started this blog in 2001 I had comments turned on and received very little spam, but of course, that didn't last. Even trackback entries were spam, so I turned it all off. It looks like the folks at TypePad have put effort into dealing with that issue, but I'm not ready to turn comments back on yet.

For now, if you have something to say, then say it via Twitter/Tweetboard. You can use the Tweetboard on the left side of the page. Just click the "tweets" tab and figure it out. If you can't make it over that low barrier, then chances are I don't need to know what you had to say anyway. Also, you get to say what you want, without me having any control.

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