Tim Carmody, on Kottke, about Kottke:

“And that’s it. It’s the five basic units that blogs were built on, distilled to their essence. And titles and comments are important, but Jason’s done without them both. They’re paratext. The real core is link, pull, response.”

Stephen Hargrove:

Along the way, I looked to Daring Fireball, Marco.org, and inessential.com for design and “how the hell do I do this” inspiration and instruction. Standing on the shoulders of giants, if you will.

I like the idea of “standing on the shoulders of giants” – wish I’d made that call – especially when it comes to embracing the quote and referral. John Gruber, Marco Arment, and Brent Simmons have definitely set a standard. I’m also leaning on Jason Kottke and Dan Frommer’s SplatF.

What I like about Frommer’s approach is how he’s used coloured headers to visually delineate “link posts” from his longer pieces of writing. In a way, the shorter hits are the Daring Fireball approach: grep article, process, agree and / or send them to the cleaners. But there needs to be commentary. Kottke uses the same method but the difference here, besides Gruber’s dogmatic verbals, is their linking methodology. Gruber (and Frommer in his shorter posts) link out, while Kottke links in. It really doesn’t matter to me that much but it has got me thinking. Only time (and my designer) will tell.

Martin Luther: the world’s first social media expert – The Economist

Wax on, wax off, comments on, comments off – Matt Gemmell

Matt Mullenweg fights for your right to publish independently – GigaOM

“You have to have skin in the game…” – Rolling Stone

Scene from a Toco Bell drive-thru – BusinessWeek

The Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers are not characters out of a Dr Seuss book – The New Yorker

T La Rock was Def Jam’s first rapper, until he forgot – Grantland

Matterhorn is what happens when you take to drawing in old coffee shops in Tokyo – Nieves

Matt Mullenweg:

I worry about the independent web. I worry about the content creators, and I worry that if 100 percent of the distribution of everything starts to go through just a few websites, that kills the vibrancy.

It gets better. It gets scarier.

As things like Facebook’s news feed become ever more ingrained in our lives, the knobs they turn are hugely influential. For a year now, I’ve said scripting is the new literacy. That’s something I strongly believe. In Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, he talks about “program or be programmed.” That is, if you’re not in control of your inputs, you’re not really in control of your outputs either. You’re just a reactionary force.

Not only that but we’re signing over our content, our memories, perhaps never to get them back. At least as an independent publisher you’re in control of that. The thing is it still feels like an entry level blog or website is too much work. That and all the fish are in Facebook’s pond. For now.

When the scientist aliens crack open my note book they are going to have a field day with me. I’ve spent the better part of the last four days fretting over different coloured headings for posts and, while we’re on the subject of Dan Frommer, attribution activism and better living through referrals. There’s also the whole authorship thing that’s currently doing the rounds. Oh yeah and the fact that there’s absolutely no navigation on this site and it pretty much flicks from words to pictures over the weekend. But all this fretting is stopping me from doing what I actually set out to do: write. So to hell with it for the moment. I refuse to explain myself for now. Deal with it.

“It’s not about putting up pretty content, but about maximizing the value of the eyeballs in front of that content,” said Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, a technology research firm. “There’s a real opportunity for him at Yahoo, if they can take all this data and use it for advertisers.”

I’m not much for punditry, not yet anyhow, but it’s lines like these that will drive me to it. This totally smells of the idea of a push into a Google / Facebook ad serving platform except Yahoo! is neither. Can we stop “maximising eyeballs” and actually think about what we want to be?

“That, she noted, is in contrast to Google, which aggregates content from around the Web and concentrates its investment in technology, but does not spend money to create media content itself.”

Except Yahoo! isn’t Google.

Yahoo! have already screwed Delicious and might just stick a fork in Flickr. Which would be a shame. There needs to be a balance between “maximising eyeballs”, investing (and believing) in technology products, and generating quality content. Or maybe not. If the beast has too many heads maybe it’s time to start slicing them off. Though this isn’t about the Lernaean Hydra, this is about quality responses. Which I may, or may not have, just delivered.

These are books I’m talking about. It’s not like I’m leaving home or anything.

I bought a Kindle about a month ago. On the advice of a friend, I decided to continue my ongoing dance of not purchasing an iPad in exchange for, instead of my iPhone, a larger reading area and the reclamation of much needed shelf space. (It’s off to the attic with the tree killing paperbacks I’ve collected over the years: sorry books.) The smaller-than-iPad screen I can probably deal with; the Japanese have been reading books and manga off their phones for the last decade. I won’t get into the weight issue either, other than to say my wrists are all the better for it. What gets me are the new pop-ups: notification after notification after, for the most part, self-gratifying notification. Try consuming a long read amongst all that shelling. And try not replying to that email, nor playing the next Scrabble move, nor liking that post. You can kind of see where I’m getting at here. I hope.

Instapaper works a treat on the device. I get an updated digest every night, there’s a lot less scrolling which allows me to focus on the writing, none of the aforementioned digital mosquito bites … it just works. It feels right. From bothersome website covered in advertising that I just ignore anyway to stripped back article that makes me think in one click and a cron job. That’s so good it’s almost perverse.

Thing is when I started reading a novel, IQ84 if you really want to know, a couple of things happened. First off I found what I thought was a typo, a sentence ending in an em dash. I got fixated on it for a while, reread the paragraph, then reread the page. My first thought was that there was something wrong with the file, the bits; this couldn’t happen in a printed book. But it can and it does, all the time. For a good couple of minutes the technology had failed me. I even emailed my aforementioned buddy to check his copy but then couldn’t find the typo so just let it go. Just like I always did when I came across a hardcopy mistake. The second quirk is the progress bar – percentages instead of page numbers – which I kind of like when reading essays but again bugs me when reading a novel. Again this isn’t a big deal; perhaps I’m missing the cool white flesh of the classic paperback with dog ears and oily stains and underlined sentences.

It’s good to be home.

I wrote this back in June 2010 when Season Of Sneakers first launched. It still is one of my favourite content ideas of 2010 and holds true today. More like this please.

Ford “Fucking” Davis Media Conglomerate Group (FFDMCG) – whose custom web assets include the highly controversial “Pull Out Bros” alongside daily musings “blog” Ford Davis – have just launched their latest title, a joint venture with JTL LLC.

The question and answer/fashion hybrid “blog”, “JTL’S Season of Sneakers“, is seen as a grab at the burgeoning Q&A market, pitting themselves against titles such as About.com, Answers.com, and newcomer Quora. But their possible point of difference could be taking the unusual step of selecting a single spokesperson, JTL chief Johnny The Ladd, as the site’s one and only voice/ambassador.

“We’ve spent a six dollar figure in R&D and Johnny was an unlikely choice” says FFDMCG chief Ford Davis. “But in the end the data and research rang true: the world is finally ready for the meme that is JTL”. When questioned on likely revenue streams Ford was tight-lipped, only to imply that a private webcam pay-on-demand service is in the works. That and “we’ll sell the front windscreen for the right price”.

Early reports are bullish with the site doing over 60 million unique browsers in the first few days, only second in traffic, in Australia, to Facebook. “The combination sinkhole party and South American “blogger outreach” was a great strategy in getting it [JTL'S Season of Sneakers] in front of the target eyeballs”, said Ford Davis from his condo in Guatemala City, “now comes the tough task of ensuring we keep the content fresh and JTL relevant”.

The writer was flown 1st class into Guatemala for this interview and stayed in the presidential suite at the Westin Camino Real Guatemala City courtesy of FFDMC and JTL LLC.

I was adding a new site to MAMP PRO the other night. A tiny little one-page HTML job that I look after for a friend. I added the new host, it told me it needed to reboot for the new site to take effect, then it flatlined like Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Bacon and Julia Roberts in that movie from 1990. Quit and restarted. Nothing. Rebooted the computer. Nada. I did the usual: asked Google, got a hit on Stack Overflow, tried and tried again. I killed processes and renamed configuration files but from what I can tell MAMP PRO runs encapsulated in its own instance: you can’t kill the individual MySQL process. (Please email me and tell me I’m wrong). I had recently upgraded my machine to Lion and found that MAMP didn’t play well with virtual hosts so I decided to go PRO.

And you know what? I was using a hacked version. Yep – I didn’t pay the lousy $50 AUD for a license. A developer or team of developers probably put a lot of work into that piece of software. It’s simple, intuitive, and does what it’s supposed to do (most of the time): serve database driven websites. And I had the nerve to buck the system. $50 has now cost me ten times that in billable hours rebuilding my local development environment.

For the record I purchased a license straight away. In fact I wrote this as my order was being processed “within the next 4 hours, but in no case will it take more than 24 hours.” I’ll reinstall, rebuild, and get going again. I’m prepared for it going all seppuku on me again as I understand these things happen. I might complain. Nothing will probably come of it. I might restore from backup. But at least this time round I’ll know that I paid for somebody else’s mistakes.

Fuck you, karma police.

Pigs die in hot cars – Pigs Don’t Fly

Maybe it’s time to fire your creative technologist – Wieden+Kennedy

America’s gone and got its gun, again – Bloomberg

Dan Frommer drops some writing knowledge – SplatF

Possibly the best way to introduce yourself to Captain Beefheart – The New Yorker

I asked @alexvitlin for some good writing on all things NBA and he delivered, in buckets – Grantland

If you’re having trouble conentrating just blame Google – The Atlantic

Greg Egan’s “Dark Integers” – Asimov’s Science Fiction