Dear internet, I'd like you to meet Ollie Kottke.
Some vital statistics: He was born on July 3 just before 1pm, weighed about 7 lbs., 2 oz., loves to eat (and then sleep), is O.K. (ha!), dislikes sponge baths, unfortunately doesn't have any descenders in his name, both mom and baby are home and doing fine, Ollie is not a particularly popular name right now (and is not short for Oliver), and I've never been quite so content as when he fell asleep on my chest yesterday and we snoozed together on the couch for an hour or so. A little slice of heaven.
Also, I'm going to be taking about two months of paternity leave from working on kottke.org. I'll probably post a few things here and there when I can, but it won't be a priority by any means. I hope you all have a good rest of the summer and that you'll find the site again when I start back up in the fall.
Update: Meg has a post up too and there are photos on Flickr.
A quick meme I found on Rivers are Damp:
Go here and look through random quotes until you find five that you think reflect who you are or what you believe.
Here are my five:
- Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields. (Peter Borden)
- The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind. (May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, 1965)
- Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. (Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Walden)
- It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. (W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), 'Of Human Bondage', 1915)
- Your best shot at happiness, self-worth and personal satisfaction - the things that constitute real success - is not in earning as much as you can but in performing as well as you can something that you consider worthwhile. (William Raspberry)
So, it's day five of my cold[1]. Last night, I was down to only two out of my five senses. My sense of taste and smell left the scene sometime on Saturday. On Sunday, I had salad and fruit for lunch because I figured if I can't taste anything, I might as well eat healthy. Trying to smell or taste strongly aromatic substances like wine or scented shower gel produces a sensation not unlike that of tasting or smelling something, except there's no smell or taste. It's the weirdest thing...I don't even know how to properly describe it. It's like there's a ghost of a taste and when I think too hard about trying to really taste it, it's gone. It'll be a relief when I finally decongest and can enjoy food again[2].
And then yesterday while driving, we went from sea level up to around 600 ft of elevation, which caused the pressure to build up in my head enough to affect my hearing. By 4pm, everything was kind muffled and I was asking Meg speak up repeatedly. I could just barely hear the hum of the highway under the car. Last night at dinner, I couldn't taste anything, smell anything, hear anything, and my voice was so gravelly from my cold (and probably way too loud from overcompensating for the hearing loss) that listening to me was probably not very pleasant. My ears finally popped somewhat this morning and I can hear ok again, but smell and taste are still missing. Come back, guys, I miss you!
Update: Here's an article by Jason Feifer from the Washington Post about his investigation into his poor senses of taste and smell. (thx, mim)
[1] After a bit of research this AM, I've determined that what I have is a cold and not the flu.
[2] I remember reading a book or article once that mentioned a person who lost their sense of taste and when it would briefly return, that person would drop whatever they were doing and go eat a great meal. Anyone know where that story is from?
If you happen to be in NYC on November 3rd, stop by Eyebeam in the evening and check out a panel that I'm on about criticism called "Everybody's A Critic, Or Are They?" Here's a description:
With 9 million blogs, umpteen online message boards, thousands of shows on hundreds of cable channels, and an increased number of magazines on the newsstand, the number of outlets for expressing criticism has never been higher and the barriers to would-be critics have never been lower. Is this devaluing evaluation or does the shotgun approach result in better criticism? YOU be the Judge!
Joining me on the panel are Emily Gordon, Village Voice film critic Michael Atkinson, and Columbia professor & author Duncan Watts. The wonderful Steven Heller will moderate and no doubt bring the conversation to a higher level. Details:
November 3, 2005
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Eyebeam (map)
540 W. 21st St.
New York, NY 10011
Today is my birthday -- I'm 2^5!** -- so I'm taking the day off. No posts or links, aside from this one.
** That's ! as in exclamation point, not ! as in factorial. I'm not 1.33 x 10^36 years old today.
I'm going to be on Attack of the Show on G4 TV this afternoon/evening. The show airs live at 7pm ET/4pm PT. So check your local listings and watch me be awkward and make mistakes in real-time (kinda like what I do on kottke.org already).
Update: Well, that wasn't so bad. The show's barely been over for 20 minutes and Matt already has a torrent of the segment up on his site. Meg and Lia took pictures. Thanks, guys.
I did an interview about Google for netzeitung.de, a German news web site. If you don't read German, I've included an English version of what I sent them:
Q: Mr. Kottke, how far away is Google from "being evil" in general in your opinion?
Google is doing better in the corporate morality department than a lot of other companies. From all accounts, their leadership wants to not be evil, they treat their employees well, they take great pride in the usefulness and relevancy of the results of their free search service. The terms of service for their AdSense program is definitely a step in the wrong direction, like they're letting marketing and legal determine their approach to business instead of the other way around. But Google is a long way from a Verisign/De Beers/Enron level of evil.
Q: But that was Google's rule number one, wasnt it?
I think every corporation's real #1 rule is "make money". That Google wants to make not being evil an equally important priority is commendable.
Q: How effective is Google still, given the springing up of Google Spam (lots of doorway pages leading to sponsored links) and the "noise" coming from weblogs etc.?
Google's search results are at least as relevant as they have always been, if not moreso. I can almost always find what I'm looking for in the first 10 results or so. I think part of the problem is perception. The perception is that their results should continue to improve as they refine their search methods and algorithms, but there's an inherent limitation in their approach that limits the maximum possible utility. There's only so much information about how pages relate to each other that you can glean from scraping web pages, and if Google is close to reaching that limit, any changes they make will only result in small changes in usefulness.
Q: Can Google do anything about this?
Perhaps they might want to start grouping web pages and sites into groups and analyzing the sites in each group in a unique way to improve the overall database. Weblogs are a good example of a group that could be analyzed differently. Weblogs consist of separate posts, which should be treated individually to get the best possible data from them. Weblog posts often contain more metadata than a typical web page, things like date and time of publication, categories, backlinks, etc. Google can use that post-level metadata to get better information about the sites that weblogs point to without having to pump the weblogs up in the overall rankings -- as many people have complained is not so good. Many weblogs also have RSS feeds with structured metadata that could be analyzed to improve general search results.
Q: Does Google need more competition?
A little competition for Google would be a good idea. Microsoft and Yahoo have both announced efforts to improve their search engines, but I don't see them developing anything to threaten Google's search.
Q: What will the Google of the future look like?
Given that the look of their site hasn't changed significantly since the beta version, I wouldn't look for it to change much in the near future. The biggest change will probably be more personalized search results where my results for a given search would be different than yours based upon our usage of the site.
[Hopefully that all makes more sense in German.]
Those wacky cats are at it again. This time, Gilpin & Marigold Explore The Wonders Of Wakayama Prefecture:
In traveling you can be a tourist or you can be a guest. Do not look at travel books. We can read about this place at home. Instead let's walk to Negoroji Temple, which I think is not too far in that direction. Not lost, just far away from our old lives."
Kevin was kind enough to let me design the title card for this installment. Enjoy more of Gilpin and Marigold here.
The pace of news has slowed over the past month or so, but I'm still posting away on the Adaptation weblog on Susan Orlean's site and will continue to do so until after the Oscars. If you've seen the movie, you might want to check out the site for background about how it all came about.
Particular posts I would recommend are:
Susan says Adapation is "amazing"
Deleted scenes
Behind the scenes pictures
Artist renderings
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and how it relates to reporting
Adding to the pile
Spoof?
New Yorker review
And of course, there's the book on which the movie was based: The Orchid Thief.
Liz Bailey recently wrote an article called Lo-Fi Allstars (PDF) for Graphics International on the trend toward simpler, more usable web design. The article includes a few quotes from me about weblog design. Here's part of a rambling email interview I did for the article:
Weblogs have definitely affected the look and feel of the overall Web. With weblogs, the design doesn't matter so much. It's not even really design, not to the people who just want to get a blog online so they can get their voice out there quick. All they want is something reasonably readable and distinct (and even the distinct part is optional...there are loads of BlogSpot sites that look exactly the same).
The explosion of zero-budget amateur publishing (nearly impossible before the Web) we've seen with weblogs, has resulted in a parallel development of zero-cost amateur Web/graphic design. Everyone is a writer. Everyone is a designer. As opposed to the design of personal home pages in the mid 90s where people were designing pages that expressed their individuality and personality, weblog design is much more functional in nature. There's so much content flowing through the site that the design is almost a non-factor. If people can read the posts and if the design isn't getting in the way too much, then it's done 95% of its job.
Weblogs very much embrace the idea that the Web is ever in flux. In the late 90s, many Web design firms developed a 'prototype, test, reiterate' approach to information architecture and Web design, with various degrees of success. Webloggers seem to have developed a similar system on their own. The content they post is so fleeting that the weblog is always a work in progress. The writing is never done so why would the design ever be done either? Everything is malleable. Get a bad design up...if it works, tweak it using the feedback from your audience, and if not, throw it away and start over. But quickly, there's writing to do.
Best practices are huge. If someone else is doing something that works, why change it? If you load up 10 weblogs at random and squint your eyes at the screen, they all look about the same.
I did a quick interview @ kiruba.com. The only reason to read it is for the comparison of weblogs to the McDonald's Dollar Menu (and even then...).
A project I've been working on for the past couple of months went live today. Gawker is a weblog focused on NYC media gossip, a snarkier, fluffier version of Romenesko's Media News. I designed the logo, did a bit of MT heavy lifting, and contributed most of the layout.
The best Gawkerism so far is "real estate porn": that's when folks get all excited in their bathing suit areas about cool architecture and such; think the SoHo Prada store designed by Koolhaas.
Your feedback is appreciated.
With the NY/LA release of the movie less than two weeks away, the weblog I'm writing for Adaptation is picking up speed. My main concern is that the traffic for the site has been flat for the last few weeks. With my limited time online while in France, I haven't been able to promote the site as I would have liked. And I'm surprised that in all the news stories about the movie, the Web site hasn't been mentioned...it seems like something that might tie into the whole "metaness" thing that most of the articles seem to pick up on. Perhaps with the demise of sites like Suck, Ironminds, & Feed and magazines like Yahoo Internet Life, there's nowhere to publish stories that have an Internet angle (the rest of the world seems to have forgotten about it).
A site I've been working on for the past few months (on and off) has finally gone live. susanorlean.com is the online home of Susan Orlean, staff writer for The New Yorker, author, and Meryl Streep impersonator (or is that the other way round?). In addition to the design, I also exercised my Perl muscles in building a little widget to let Susan upload her articles without going through me all the time.
This was a great site to work on because it was fun to do, the client was really enthusiastic about it, and it introduced me to Susan's writing (The Orchid Thief is recommended). After working on dozens of corporate Web sites with buzzword-compliant copy, it was a delight to read through Susan's articles in the process of building the site.
I'd love to hear any comments, questions, or constructive criticism you might have.
Not a lot to say about it this morning with 50 other things to do after a relaxing/stressful weekend in the wilderness, but yes, that's me in the NY Times this morning with a webcam eye. Ok, maybe a few quick things:
1. One quote from me which didn't make it into the piece was "the more, the merrier".
2. Tools are important. So is the format. It's not as important as what people use them for, but tools and formats shape the environment in which they are used.
3. Most webloggers (75%+ at least, in my estimation) are not tech bloggers or warbloggers. They're just the ones that get all the press. LiveJournal has hundreds of thousands of members, a tiny fraction of whom talk about technology or current events. Out of the "10 most recently published blogs" on blogger.com right now, none are tech blogs or warblogs.
Blog.craze is the most fun article I've read on weblogs, my appearance in it notwithstanding. The weblog-style article thing has been done before, but this one did a good job in not only telling people about weblogs, but showing them the style in which they are often written (the article even has a hint of the informality (smartassed brevity?) typical of weblogs).
Due to what I am assuming to be a glitch in the system, I am now a celebrity judge for the Iron Webmaster Showdown at SXSW (Sun @ 3:30pm). Ben and Dana will be heckling everyone in sight, including the contestants, so it should be a good time. I will have my full Iron Chef Judging Panel shtick going, so don't spare the foie gras and truffles.
For McSweeney's: Names of the Most Popular Colors According to the Color Marketing Group's 2002 Color Forecast. The original list is good reading as well: "Purples and browns are still the biggest story with 'bi-polar' purples moving both bluer and redder" and "Blue is trending towards green".
Google tweaked their news headlines page, incorporating some of the changes I suggested a couple of weeks ago (mockup). Google is impressive; they do more than "focus on the user", they listen to the user as well.
Holy design issues, Batman! Google's news headlines page is a great idea, but it's impossible to scan quickly. Perhaps something like this quickie redesign would work better.
Tons of things have been happening with 0sil8 so I will summarize. The Simply Porn ads are still off of my site, but can be reached on several other sites (a list is available). They've also garnered some press coverage, most notably in The Wall Street Journal, news.com, The San Jose Mercury, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, and Salon.
0sil8 was selected as Rave of the Day over on Netscape's What's Cool page.
A review of 0sil8 appears in the St. Paul Pioneer Press today. My favorite quote: "And, by the way, when typing the address, remember that only the 8 is a numeral." Great. Exactly wrong.
The Apple Dodge Neon gets some press in the online version of the Red Herring. Turns out my little parody was somewhat of a prediction as well.
"AOL Drops Backing From Film For Lack of Product Placement!" is playing over at the Drudge Retort. It's about that film "You've Got Mail". I love writing fake press releases and news articles.
