Andrew P. Brett: Citing the Text
From the archives
Posted on 31 December
***Five years ago I had a job writing for Grist, an environmental news blog. I just came across this old post from way back then, when 'blog' was still a four letter word. It's actually in response to an article by a colleague at the time. While the original topic was about the environment, I took things in a decidedly more philosophical direction, and the content is still relevant because of that decision.***
I would throw this analogy out there. In the hypothetical, completely ideal world of globalization where people and nations do only what they do best (hold a comparative advantage for), everything gets divided up and specialized.
But in the real world, people and nations like to do some things themselves. On the national level, defense is one example. Producing a pretty fair amount of food and energy domestically is another. On the personal level, there are tasks and jobs that people just prefer to do, or at least be able to do, themselves, even if they aren't that great at them. For example, most people like to have a certain degree of culinary expertise, usually extending beyond ramen, if only slightly.
I extend this analogy to the "thinkin'" world. There is absolutely no way for everyone to do all their thinking for themselves. They must learn which sources to trust, as you say. But there's a certain level to which you have to be able to do your own thinking, a level which is different for everybody.
For a timely example: I am no legal expert, and probably would have never even seen the NARAL ad opposing SCOTUS nominee John Roberts had it not been for the online firestorm that resulted. Annenberg Political FactCheck is an organization that I have come to trust because of its work on other issues, so when they say something like "the ad is false," that tends to convince me. It also means that on this issue, I did not dig through the legal briefs myself in order to be convinced that the NARAL ad was misleading.
This is also (warning: cliche ahead) the power of blogs: when there's a new blog created every second, there's going to be someone who is willing and able to blog in-depth about almost any particular topic there is, to become the expert on it. Does it really make sense for me to immerse myself and investigate fully a topic like land trusts if someone I trust, like Pat Burns, has already been doing a superb job for some time and will thus be much more efficient than me at analyzing news when it breaks?
The irrationality of some heuristics certainly throws a monkey wrench into this whole thing. The "price implies quality" bias can be a devastating argument against free markets with the exception of commodities markets, since it scuttles the assumption that people act rationally/have good information, since the information they are inferring is incorrect if it's based solely on the "price implies quality" idea.
The idea of "perceived consensus" is also an interesting one, and one which contains elements of framing in it. If something starts to be referred to with words implying consensus, it won't be too long before there is a perceived consensus. Of course, if the basic facts of the matter are incorrect, it won't get anywhere, mostly because of blogs and organizations like FactCheck, but simply having the facts right isn't enough.
One potential problem then is the fact that those who are adept at getting the facts out and investigating might not the ones who are best at framing the issue and getting the message out.
Rails Rumble 2009 - Vote For Your Favorite App
Posted on 30 August
** Originally published on TechCrunch **
Ruby on Rails is well-known for being a powerful tool to help developers quickly turn ideas into working code. Rails Rumble harnesses that power and drives it to its only logical conclusion: a 48-hour programming competition pitting more than 200 teams of coders against one another for some pretty serious prizes. Each team of up to four people is provided with exactly the same thing: a virtual private server from Linode, a private repository on GitHub, and a really tight deadline. BYO caffeine.
The competition has ended and now that many of the contestants are awake again, it's time for the public to kick the tires on these mini-applications and vote to decide who will take home the championship belt (and no, that's not a figure of speech in this case. There really is a belt). The 22 finalists include something for everyone, whether you're a developer working to nail down requirements, a boozehound trying to figure out what cocktails you can make with the leftovers from last night's party, an old-school arcade nut looking to play multi-player Asteroid, or a hopeless romantic trying to employ Twitter to woo a crush.
Even the teams that don't come away with any material prizes will have gained some very valuable feedback on whether their idea might have any legs in the long run. Fifteen of the entries from the 2008 competition are still active and available to users, including all of the prize-winning applications.
So head on over and check out the applications, leave some feedback, and vote for your favorite(s). Voting ends tomorrow, Sunday, at 5 pm PST. You'll be deciding a grand prize that includes a netbook for each team member and a bottle of 12 year Pappy Van Winkle Whiskey (from GitHub - I knew those guys were classy), not to mention year-long bragging rights.
Inbox: Zero. Google Reader: not so much
Posted on 22 July
I'm a big advocate of the "Inbox Zero" philosophy of email management. I don't have the merit badge, and I don't think it needs to be quite so extensive, but I still like to keep things pristine.
My RSS reader is another story; I rarely clear it out entirely. When I go through the items (once per day), I'll mark a few choice ones as unread for further perusal and keep plugging through the chaff. Once I start to hit things that I've seen before, it means I've finished the boring part.
There's usually somewhere between 10 and 25 items, spread over a week or so, that remain marked as unread. These savory morsels get read, re-read, shared, emailed, or (theoretically) turned into fodder for blog posts. The best ones are approved by the Senate and become a law! get starred and saved for all time.
I prefer this system over the inbox zero method because it allows the ideas in the posts to seep a little deeper into the gray matter. It's a fundamentally different mindset that you're in; often if someone emails me an article I'll use this handy bookmarklet to get it into Reader and then move it to a separate folder.
I still haven't decided what to do with the new features the Reader team keeps rolling out, though.
Ad-free Pandora
Posted on 21 May
Yesterday I subscribed to Pandora's new ad-free service, "Pandora One." The tipping point came when 'Graceland' was followed by an audio ad for Terminator: The College Years.
The service is, in my opinion, perfectly priced, at $36/year. I suspect that this figure was chosen (as opposed to, say, $40/year) because it prompts you to do the mental math and figure out - for yourself - that it's only 10 cents/day. Brings you back to the days of pledge week on NPR, doesn't it? And speaking of which, how great is technology that it can exempt subscribers from requests for money or ads? I remember that being my main mental counter-argument to Bob Edwards - if I send you money, I still have to listen to you solicit us for two weeks every few months!
Anyway, the service is great. No ads of any kind, really great audio quality, plus a sleek desktop app with built in growl-type notifications of what song is playing. I'm also hoping that, since it's a stand-alone app, this means that I'll be able to map the keyboard controls for iTunes to control Pandora instead. If anyone has already figured out how to do this, please let me know!
The way we [should] share now: Tonido
Posted on 9 May
Tonido is a company after my own heart. They address many of the concerns that I have about the way that people publish and share their own content online. The short version of that post is that you should be able to publish content in one place, that you control, and easily choose how to share each individual item with your friends (as well as which friends to share it with).
Tonido takes a big step in that direction. By providing a low-cost, energy-sipping, user-friendly home server, they make it easy for people to take their data out of the cloud but not lose any of the associated benefits.
The other development in this arena that has me excited is Facebook's decision to further open their API and make it even easier for third party sites to seamlessly integrate a user's network into his experience on the site.
In other words, it allows me to do something like host my own photos on my own server (or Tonido if I so choose), and have any social activity (new albums, comments, tags) be posted back to Facebook just as if it had happened there in the first place. This is a huge shift (though one that Facebook has slowly been inching towards for a while now).
But we're not there yet, which is the most exciting part. I could easily see Tonido, as much as I like them, getting overtaken by a fast follower who offers a more appealing combination of applications or even more seamless integration with social networks.
Maybe I'll even give it a shot -- after all, I have 10 spare hours a week.
The Music Man: Your young men will be Twitterin'
Posted on 27 April
With sincerest apologies to Meredith Wilson
Well, either you're closing your eyes
To a situation you do not wish to acknowledge,
Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster
Indicated by the presence of the social web in your community.
Well, you got trouble, my friend, right here,
I say, trouble right here in River City.
Why sure I'm a Facebook user,
Certainly mighty proud I say
I'm always mighty proud to say it.
I consider that the hours I spend
With a mouse in my hand are golden.
Help you cultivate a network
And a personal brand and a social graph.
Ever take and try to find
An iron-clad link from yourself
To a Fortune 500 boss, in two connections or less?
But just as I say,
It takes judgement, brains, and maturity,
To score in this online game,
I say that any twit!
Can take and tweet a text from their pocket
And they call that Twitter!
The first big step on the road
To the depths of the Singularity -
I say, first, informational texts from a plant,
Then tweets from a baby!
And the next thing ya know,
Your son is bloggin' for money on a MacBook Pro.
And listening to some big out-of-town VC
Here to tell about somethin' called YouTube
Not a wholesome television show, no!
But a clip that you upload right there yourself!
Like to see some stuck-up Charlie-boy
Chompin' on his brother's thumb? Make your Rick "roil," well, I should say.
Now friends, let me tell you what I mean.
You got one, two, three, four, five, six connections in the graph.
Connections that mark the difference,
Between a gentlemen and a bum,
With a capital "B" and that rhymes with "C" and that stands for Cuil!
And all week long your River City
Youth'll be twitterin' away,
I say your young men'll be twitterin'!
Twitterin' away their noontime, suppertime, choretime too!
Get the pix up on Flickr
Never mind gettin' blog feeds pulled
Or the software patched or the corners rounded.
Never mind sendin' any emails
'Til your parents are caught with their inbox empty
On a Saturday night and that's trouble,
Oh, yes you got lots and lots of trouble.
I'm thinkin' of the kids up on MySpace,
Shirt-tail young ones, peekin' at the lolcats
Website after school, you got trouble, folks!
Right here in River City.
Trouble with a capital "T" and that rhymes with "C" and that stands for Cuil!
Now, I know all you folks are the right kind of parents.
I'm gonna be perfectly frank.
Would you like to know what kind of conversation goes
On while they're surfin' around that web?
They're tryin' out Bebo, tryin' out Friendster,
Tryin' out Tumblr logs like Stumblin fiends!
And tweetin' all about
How they're gonna delete all those photos on TwitPic from last night.
They leave the Ping hall, headin' for Netflix Watch Instantly,
CollegeHumor men and CuteOverload women!
And Pandora! Streaming music, that'll grab your son, your daughter
With the arms of a jungle animal's instinct!
Mass-participation!
Friends, the social brain is the devil's playground!
Chorus:
Trouble, oh we got trouble,
Right here in River City!
With a capital "T", that rhymes with "C", and that stands for Cuil,
We've surely got trouble!
Right here in River City,
Right here!
Gotta figure out a way to keep the young ones offline after school!
Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble...
Harold:
Mothers of River City!
Heed that warning before it's too late!
Watch for the tell-tale sign of corruption!
The minute your son leaves the house,
Does he resize his urls below the character limit?
Is there an overuse strain on his texting finger?
A porn cookie hidden in his browser history?
Is he starting to memorize facts from chucknorris.com?
Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
Words like "LOL"
And "icanhascheezburger?"
Well, if so my friends...
You got trouble,
Right here in River City!
With a capital "T" and that rhymes with "C" and that stands for Cuil.
We've surely got trouble!
Right here in River City!
Remember the meme, OK GO, and the series of tubes!
Oh, we've got trouble.
We're in terrible, terrible trouble.
That site with the social network graph is a devil's tool!
Oh yes we got trouble, trouble, we got big big trouble!
With a "T"!
Gotta rhyme it with "C"!
And that stands for Cuil!
That stands for Cuil!
Freedom to Tinker: The Double-edged Sword
Posted on 17 April
"Freedom to Tinker" is not only an apt title for a great blog; it is also an overarching theme that spans many of the thoughts that have been occupying my spare brain cycles over the past few weeks.
Freedom to tinker can be a wonderful, empowering thing. It's at the root of every invention, every new business, every mashup (no matter how puerile). It's at the root of the open source software that I've come to embrace more and more recently.
In other words: it's fun to futz. But not only is it fun - it's also important and valuable. Robert Pirsig paints a protagonist in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance who stands in stark contrast to the other characters in the book because of his ability and, more importantly, desire to understand every last ball bearing in his trusted machine. The trait is timelessly invaluable.
Letting the end users of a product tinker with it has a downside though. Facebook took a huge amount of flak from its users for their most recent changes, but as TechCrunch points out, they should probably just ignore it. "When you listen to your users, you get vanilla, feature creep, boring." The Getting Real crowd would have similar things to say (about user feedback, not necessarily the UI design).
However, the tinkerers are probably not the ones sitting around whining about the new design. They are the ones building applications to interact with Facebook's API, or building the next Facebook entirely. It's important to engage these tinkerers and power users, for entirely selfish reasons. When you listen to your users, you get vanilla. When you listen to your power users, you get the App Store. Not only that, but you get an entire App Store's-worth of developers who are interacting with your product instead of building a competitor.
Web browsers are another example. In theory, it's great and completely reasonable to say that people should be able to tweak their browsers, choose different browsers based on their personal preferences and needs, write their own if they are so inclined and able. But it makes life very hard if you're publishing content and have to worry about how it's going to show up in 18 different settings. Even if you agree that you should make sure it's minimally functional everywhere, it's a giant hassle and takes a lot of the, well, fun out of content creation.
Sometimes it is a legitimate design decision to force a browser choice (or other choices) on the user - for example, the iPhone only allowing Safari. In some ways, it can be just as fun to have an implementation hidden and unavailable to you as a user - this is at the root (and is unfortunately a tradeoff) of the "it just works" approach.
Of course, mentioning browser wars leads directly to the idea of standardization. I won't delve too deeply into that topic here, but I did have a particular quote stick with me from Stephen D. Crocker's op-ed in the Times a couple weeks ago, on the early days of the Internet:
Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.
So when is it best to practice strict enforcement of standards, versus letting users play around and "roll their own"? Or is that even the right dichotomy?
...and in with the new
Posted on 17 April
Welcome to the latest incarnation of Citing the Text, most recently hosted by Blogger. It's been a long time since the days of Xanga; hopefully this latest version is a little easier on the eyes.
I recently wrote about how I decided to overhaul this site's architecture. This new blogging platform is the first of many features that the redesign will enable.
In the spirit of getting things out there in front of real users and iterating in response to feedback, this blog is being released in a deliberately unfinished state. It is certainly not a design masterpiece by any stretch, but it's something to build on.
Lastly, a million thanks to Ryan Bates and his always useful and inspirational Railscasts.