it's clear to me...

industrial design

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:07:26 -0700

Apparently, industrial design aesthetics can be characterized as masculine and feminine. I suppose I always intuitively knew this, but until my friend mentioned it the other day, I never actively considered where the objects that fill my life might fall in that spectrum.

I notice this issue most dramatically and clearly represents itself among my collection of gadgets. For example, my Lenovo ThinkPad X300 is decidedly masculine with its right angles and subtle utilitarian look, while my MSI Wind, with its glossy and rounded look, is doubtlessly feminine.

However, I find my eye is most drawn to gadgets that share both masculine and feminine design cues. The Xbox 360 has fairly rounded curves on the front panel, but the edges all taper to a harder more masculine angle. Similarly, Apple’s Macbook Pros have rounded corners around the perimeter of the chassis, but all of the other angles and the materials—aluminum and glass—are fairly masculine.

I don’t actually know anything about design but I wonder if the balance exhibited in designs like the 360 and Macbook is why they’re so universally loved.

What do you think? @reply me and let me know (@benmcinnis).

As I’ve often complained to my friends before, mp3 player...

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:38:05 -0700

As I’ve often complained to my friends before, mp3 player management (specifically iTunes) is the last piece of client software I’m forced to deal with. It is simply the only thing keeping me from being fully cloud-based.

That’s why I think Spotify is “the next big thing”.

Imagine a scenario in which you could manage your email, calendar, and contacts via Hotmail or Gmail, your docs via Office Web Applications or Google Docs, your images via Flickr, Picasa, or SkyDrive, and, finally, your music via something like Spotify. I think it would be great. The only problem is that Apple probably won’t allow this app. Apparently they think apps that “duplicate functionality” already native to the iPod/iPhone are too confusing for their users.

What a bummer.

Online ad types are to website users as antibiotic types are to bacteria.

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:47:04 -0700

1. “Run of site” ads lack targeting but are good at reaching a large swath of the user population, just as broad spectrum antibiotics lack specific killing power but are generally good at impairing most types of bacterial infection.

2. Behaviorally or demographically targeted ads are good at reaching specific users, but you need to know which users you’re trying to reach. Similarly focused “narrow spectrum” antibiotics are good at killing specific bacteria types, assuming you can first identify the bacteria you’re trying to kill.

3. Finally, “takeover ads” (the really aggressive ads that drop down or fly up and cover the homepage of the site you’re visiting) are great at reaching and impacting a huge proportion of the user population at a single time but, just like the new class of “super antibiotics” (e.g. Cipro which is used against Anthrax) which tend to have some negative side effects for the patient, these ads tend to negatively impact user satisfaction. They’re simply too overt.

What does this silly analogy tell us? In my opinion it suggests that, just as antibiotics are more effective when used sparingly, ad scarcity improves ad effectiveness. Let’s have less ads. They’ll work better and publishers will be able to charge advertisers more and annoy users less.

coffee cup sizes and the great Charles Darwin

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:20:52 -0700

This morning I didn’t have to commute so I walked a few extra blocks to try out a new café that has been getting a lot of great reviews on Yelp. It was one of those independent cafés that really goes out of its way to impress upon you just how not-dependent they really are. They’d even—gasp—bucked the industry trend and appeared to be using “Small,” “Medium,” and “Large” for cup sizes. I enjoy coffee as much as the next fellow so I ordered a “Medium” expecting to be presented with a paper cup brimming with 16 fluid ounces of coffee. However, this coffee shop had callously decided to disrupt societal norms an instead attempted to pass off a 12 ounce cup as a “Medium.” As you know if you’ve been to a Starbucks, Tully’s, Seattle’s Best, Pete’s, etc in the last decade, a 12 ounce cup is a “Tall” or “Small.”

At this point I, somewhat indignantly, query the barman as to the locale of my remaining four ounces, only to have him deliver a lecture on the correct and incorrect volumes for proper coffee service. It seems that 20 ounces, the standard “Venti” or “large,” is simply a grotesque affront to the proud tradition of coffee and, as he clearly couldn’t offer his pristine brew for sale in such unholy quantities, he was forced to promote “Medium” to “Large” and so forth.

Usually I can endorse most forms of elitism, but for some reason this outraged me. I think the reason I’m so irritated is that, as far as I’d ever heard, these sizes were pretty much standards. It is as if this proprietor was so taken with his particular brand of java that he saw fit to flout the conventions of society—conventions that exist for his benefit. Standards are just inorganic adaptations that help a system fit into the larger system. This café owner is basically spitting in Darwin’s face, and I for one won’t stand for it.

read these blogs

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:51:09 -0700

Two of my good friends have recently started blogging and I’m pleased to report that both blogs are solidly better than this one.

Christopher Cutting’s Tolled Peculiar.

Charlie French’s Charlie Freedom.

For a software company, 37Signals is doing some of the most...

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 10:55:00 -0700

For a software company, 37Signals is doing some of the most interesting and hilarious industry critique anywhere. If TechCrunch, Bits, All Things D, Mashable, etc, etc were half this insightful with ten times more column inches I’d be amazed. But I guess I would think that, being a thought leader and all…

Cartoon via 37Signals Noise to Signal blog, via ReadWrite Web

golf and newspapers are for old people

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 13:13:00 -0700

Getting some beers and truly horrendous nachos with a few colleagues the week prior to last, the topic turned, as it often will among gatherings of like-minded corporate slaves, to the hotly debated industry issues de jour. In this instance: the collapse of newspapers.

Some background on this particular collapse may be needed to appreciate this post further so, without boring you too much, I can say that it is my official businessman opinion that newspapers are going out of business because they insist on spending more money writing and delivering newspapers than they end up making selling the ads that go inside them. Obviously this business model is a foolish one, but luckily my powers of free-association and eavesdropping enabled me to come up with a solution—don’t pay the writers. Voila! Fixed.

Let me backup. While we were discussing the imminent failure of The New York Times we were also discussing professional golf. It seems that wannabe professional golfers are compelled to compete for a “card” which entitles them to participate in officially sanctioned competitions and thusly become true professionals. However, until said card is secured, these fellows actually pay to travel to and participate in regional qualifying tournaments, apparently, at great expense to themselves. In this model, like with most professional sports, newcomers are so enthusiastic and passionate about their craft that the mere chance of later greatness (and money) is a tempting enough possibility that they pay into the pyramid scheme that keeps Tiger rolling in private jets and diamond-encrusted iPods.

So, perhaps my theory is now obvious. Newspapers must replicate this pay-to-play model and, through the Woodward and Bornstein worshiping eagerness of new J-school graduates, the industry can remake itself.

Also, let’s save a few trees and stop printing out pages and pages of stock quotes. Anyone with enough money to invest probably got a computer about twenty years ago.

For those that missed it, here’s a video of Ballmer...

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:30:25 -0700

For those that missed it, here’s a video of Ballmer talking about Bing at D7.

Don Dodge is on This Week in Startups — Watch it.

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:56:46 -0700

Don Dodge is on This Week in Startups — Watch it.

crackpot prediction: globally unique person names by 2059

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:51:00 -0700

I see a few long-term trends potentially colliding in an interesting outcome—individually unique names for each person worldwide.

I know, I know…hear me out.

Some trends and long-term predictions:
1. The Internet is absorbing nearly every network-dependent aspect of society. 50 years from now all education, civic engagement, communication, and non-convenience or entertainment-based commerce will occur via the Internet
2. The globalization of cultures and commerce continues relatively unchecked. 50 years from now everyone will speak a single global language—probably English—with most speaking others too. This will make communicating with everyone around the world possible.
3. Open data and authentication standards continue to erode the “walls” that previously isolated communications services from one another. 50 years from now all communications services will be fully and automatically interoperable—real unified communications.
4. Mobile connectivity and communications will continue to saturate society at exponential rates. 50 years from now data connections will be so pervasive that the concept of mobile will have faded away.

So, assuming my predictions are roughly correct, it’s 2059 and we’re living in a world where every conceivable aspect of daily life is, at some point, dependent on your connection to an infinitely ubiquitous network. You do your job on the network. You do your shopping on the network. You vote on the network. You go to school on the network. And, very certainly, literally all of your non-face-to-face communication will flow over the network.

I would argue that you now live in a world where your identity on the network is as or more important than your identity in the physical world. So, at what point do the names for the biological you (the you that walks around your hover-apartment eating soylent green) and the network you (the you that votes, works, shops, etc) converge into a single you with a single and distinct name?

In some ways this is already happening. If you Google or Bing (plug!) my name, I’m the first entry and most of the first few pages. In very real terms, I’m the version of the words “Ben McInnis” the Internet cares about. That’s fine for now, the other Ben McInnis’ out there probably don’t care but, if they had to really live on the Internet, it would become intolerable pretty fast and, at some point, having your friends call you “Ben McInnis 122” might make sense.

My friend Brian’s Internet video series is currently in...

Mon, 11 May 2009 19:24:37 -0700

My friend Brian’s Internet video series is currently in its second season.

The concept is that Brian, and his two buddies Rob and Matt, travel the globe with the money they made after a few months working minimum wage jobs in Seattle—finding odd jobs along the way to bootstrap the adventure. So far they’ve been to Vietnam and Japan…and I think South Korea.

It is certainly entertaining and the social experiment angle is a unique take.

Watch it.

Gentrification at a small scale is just blind speculation. ...

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:56:16 -0700

Gentrification at a small scale is just blind speculation.

For example, this amazing Pb Elemental designed house, recently built in Seattle’s Central District, was initially listed for over $600,000. However, the Central District is “upcoming” at best. So, any potential point of comparison, although clearly apples-to-oranges, would suggest that, given it’s size and location, it should cost about $60,000. In fact, Zillow suggests that exactly.

Clearly the $60,000 figure is automatically generated and anyone could see that this house was worth more than the houses next door, but obviously, at some point, the $600,000 figure came out of the air.

So the issue is, as ever, one of location. Do you think any house is worth $600,000 if it comes with sweeping views of public housing and boarded up abandoned businesses?

Google’s data center secrets are apparently, 12-volt...

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:26:51 -0700

Google’s data center secrets are apparently, 12-volt batteries, shipping container enclosures, and commodity hardware. Makes sense.

This Qwest ad is from 1999. When I first saw it I was in Junior...

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:55:00 -0700

This Qwest ad is from 1999. When I first saw it I was in Junior High School. Back then I, like many, found the vision truly amazing but, comfortingly plausible. It seemed to me that this utopia would really happen because demand had so neatly lined up with the technology and the supply. However, as I write this, it is over ten years later, nearly every facet of every industry and culture has been materially and irreversibly altered by the progress the Internet Age has brought, yet this specific vision, which was once so easy to picture, still eludes us.

Why?

I think the culprit, practically speaking, is the difficulty faced by the mainstream media around clearing rights to the discreet pieces of content that comprise the eventual works we view as movies and TV shows. But this excuse is far too easy and, in my mind, a symptom of larger issues. I would argue that the real disease is media owners so afraid of change (and piracy?) that they forego promising opportunity. Happily we live within a free market system that, although bemoaned of late, eventually self-corrects. We will have this vision, probably very soon, but it will come via YouTube, Netflix, Britecove and other new ventures instead of directly from the traditional media powers for whom, apparently, a decade’s head-start just wasn’t enough.

Out of curiosity I pulled the data on the top 1000 movies of all...

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:22:01 -0700

Out of curiosity I pulled the data on the top 1000 movies of all time by revenue. As you can see, and perhaps as you suspected, the long-tail/power law distribution remains constant with blockbuster movies too.

What I found most striking as I mined through the list was the sheer number of computer animated movies like Finding Nemo, Kung-Fu Panda, and the like that were at the top of the list. Similarly, any film starring Will Smith—even Hancock—was pretty near the top.

If I were running a studio I’d try and bankroll as many CGI movies starring Will Smith as I had budget for.

notes on tardiness

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:27:00 -0700

As most of my friends and colleagues know, punctuality is a big deal for me. I try to recognize that I’m generally a bit more anal about it than most, and give people some leeway, but it still upsets me fairly regularly.

Two manifestations of tardiness irritate me more than the rest; the “power play” and the “starbucks.”

The power play is when the offending party excuses their lateness by simply referencing their busy schedule or some similarly trivial aspect of their life. This circumstance is especially infuriating because the sub-text is so very clear. This person is actually saying, perhaps not in so many words, that the trivial minutia of their daily schedule takes precedent over anything that you might have had scheduled. This is, of course, insulting, absurd, and the pinnacle of passive aggressive moves.

The Starbucks is a similar variant in which the offending party is late to a meeting—usually a morning meeting—and walks in sipping a freshly purchased cup of coffee, or a muffin, or whatever. In this instance the person is actually communicating that the coffee is more important than your time. This is outrageous.

Our first home brew is finally done and I’m pleased to...

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:08:48 -0700

Our first home brew is finally done and I’m pleased to report it appears to be 100% not poisonous or rotten. It even looks, smells, AND tastes just like an actual beer.

Synthesis blog

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:09:49 -0700

Synthesis blog:

Everyone should be required to read this blog. I’m totally blown away with the sheer volume of thoughtful posts that pour out of Shafeen.

Mentions of the term “Hooverville” in the Google...

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:00:20 -0800

Mentions of the term “Hooverville” in the Google News index have grown from 53 in all of 2006 to 91 in 2008.

I’m not sure I like what this metric says about the Zeitgeist.

FORTNIGHTLY! This is awesome. More people should use this...

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:16:58 -0800

FORTNIGHTLY!

This is awesome. More people should use this word.