National Geographic's new photo Tumblr  Mar 11 2013

National Geographic has launched a new Tumblr site that features the less-celebrated-but-still-awesome parts of its vast photographic archive. I want this car:

(via the verge)

Large-format photos of NYC's past  Mar 05 2013

NYC Past has hundreds of large format historical photos of New York City. Like this one:

I'm not through all 49 pages yet, but I am getting pretty close.

My Design Matters interview  Jan 07 2013

Debbie Millman interviewed me for her Design Matters podcast the other day. Spoiler: we did not actually talk much about design.

Trend alert: small internet publications  Dec 04 2012

For the longest time, the web was all like "blog blog blog blog" and we were like "fave fave fave like like like" but a bunch of recent publications and publishing systems seem to be breaking out of that mode. Craig Mod calls it Subcompact Publishing. Not sure I like the name, but I dig his gist. Here are a few examples I've seen:

Evening Edition: A daily roundup of the news brought to you by Mule Design.

29th Street Publishing: They're building a platform to make publishing Newsstand apps as easy as publishing a blog. Example pubs: The Awl's Weekend Companion and V as in Victor.

NextDraft: From Dave Pell, a culture-centric newsletter available via email and for iPad/iPhone.

Brief: "Technology news worth caring about", compiled daily by Richard Dunlop-Walters.

The Magazine: A bi-weekly iOS magazine for tech/internet lovers published by Marco Arment.

MATTER: An outlet for long-form journalism founded by Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson.

Tapestry: A platform for making tappable iOS publications from Betaworks.

Stay small or go big?  Nov 09 2012

Emeril Lagasse made an appearance on Treme on Sunday. I watched a clip of his scene a few days ago and have been thinking about it on and off ever since. In the scene written by Anthony Bourdain, Emeril takes a fellow chef to the building that used to house Uglesich's, a small-but-beloved New Orleans restaurant that closed back in 2005. The chef is having misgivings about expanding her business, particularly about all the non-cooking things you have to do, and Emeril explains that the way the owners of Uglesich's did it was one way forward:

You see, they kept it small, just one spot, just a few tables. There'd be a line around the corner by 10 am. You see, they made a choice. Anthony and Gail made a choice to stay on Baronne Street and keep their hands on what they were serving. They cooked, everyday they cooked, until they could cook no more.

But there's also another way to approach your business:

The other choice is that you can build something big but keep it the way that you wanna keep it. Take those ideas and try to execute them to the highest level. You got a lotta people around you, right? You're the captain of the ship. Or what I should say is that you're the ship. And all these people that look up to you and wanna be around you, they're living in the ship. And they're saying, "Oh, the ship is doing good. Oh, the ship is going to some interesting places. Oh, this ship isn't going down just like all the other fucking ships I've been on." [...] You've got a chance to do your restaurant and to take care of these people. Just do it.

kottke.org has always been a one-person thing. Sure, Aaron posts here regularly now and I have guest editors on occasion, but for the most part, I keep my ass in the chair and my hands on what I am serving. I've always resisted attempts at expanding the site because, I have reasoned, that would mean that the site wouldn't be exactly what I wanted it to be. And people come here for exactly what I want it to be. Doing the site with other people involved has always seemed unnatural. It would be selling out...that's how I've thought about it, as opposed to blowing up.

But Emeril's "until they could cook no more" and "you're the ship"...that got to me. I am a ship. I don't have employees but I have a family that relies on the income from my business and someday, when I am unable to do this work or people stop reading blogs or all online advertising moves to Facebook or Twitter, what happens then? Don't I owe it to myself and to them to build something that's going to last beyond my interest and ability to sit in a chair finding interesting things for people to look at? Or is it enough to just work by yourself and produce the best work you can?

Or can you do both? John Gruber's Daring Fireball remains a one-man operation...as far as I know, he's never even had an intern. I don't have any inside knowledge of DF's finances, but from the RSS sponsorship rate and the rate for sponsoring Gruber's podcast, my conservative estimate is that DF grosses around $650,000 per year. And with a single employee/owner and relatively low expenses, a large amount of that is profit. So maybe that route is possible?

I don't have any answers to these questions, but man, it's got me thinking. Emeril got me thinking...who saw that coming? Bam!

Twitter, Facebook, and old new media  Oct 19 2012

Newsweek announced yesterday that the print magazine will cease publication and the entire thing will move to an all-digital format.

Newsweek Global, as the all-digital publication will be named, will be a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context. Newsweek Global will be supported by paid subscription and will be available through e-readers for both tablet and the Web, with select content available on The Daily Beast.

In talking about the shift on his Daily Beast blog, Andrew Sullivan notes something interesting about reading online vs. reading in print (emphasis mine):

Which is why, when asked my opinion at Newsweek about print and digital, I urged taking the plunge as quickly as possible. Look: I chose digital over print 12 years ago, when I shifted my writing gradually online, with this blog and now blogazine. Of course a weekly newsmagazine on paper seems nuts to me. But it takes guts to actually make the change. An individual can, overnight. An institution is far more cumbersome. Which is why, I believe, institutional brands will still be at a disadvantage online compared with personal ones. There's a reason why Drudge Report and the Huffington Post are named after human beings. It's because when we read online, we migrate to read people, not institutions. Social media has only accelerated this development, as everyone with a Facebook page now has a mini-blog, and articles or posts or memes are sent by email or through social networks or Twitter.

People do tend to read people and not institutions online but a shift away from that has already started happening. A shift back to institutions, actually. Pre-1990s, people read the Times or Newsweek or Time or whatever. In 2008, people read Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish or Paul Krugman's column in the Times or Gwyneth Paltrow's GOOP. Today, people read feeds of their friends/followees activities, interests, thoughts, and links on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr, i.e. the new media institutions.

Now, you may follow Daily Dish or Krugman on Twitter but that's not quite the same as reading the sites; you're not getting the whole post/article on Twitter, Krugman items are intermingled & fighting for attention with tweets from @horse_ebooks & Lady Gaga, and if you unfollowed Krugman altogether, you'll find when he writes something especially good, someone else in your Twitter stream will point you to it pretty quickly. That is, Twitter or Facebook will provide you with the essential Krugman without you having to pay any attention to Krugman at all.

What that means is what blogs and the web are doing to newspapers and magazines, so might Facebook & Twitter do to blogs. Blogs might not even get the chance to be called old media before they're handed their hats. It'll be interesting to see how smartphone/tablet apps affect this dynamic...will apps push users/readers back toward old media institutions, individuals, or the friend-packaging institutions like Twitter?

An appreciation of 10 years of Daring Fireball  Aug 13 2012

Daring Fireball turns 10 years old today and Robinson Meyer has an appreciation at The Atlantic.

Gruber's best when he's writing about perfection, excellence and what it takes to achieve either. He can describe eight iPhone Twitter clients, or the software limitations of the iPad, and evince a common sense of aesthetic. His voice can be muscular and rigorous. The man's clearly animated by a hatred of everything he knows to be BS.

I share Meyer's assertion that Apple's "engorge[ment] as a company" has slightly flattened the site's tires, but Daring Fireball remains my favorite blog, a spot it has held for several years now.

Now here's a look at how DF's design has changed over the years, presented in animated GIF form:

Update: I love this analysis of DF's content over the years, especially the visualization of the shift in interest from desktop to mobile.

Google Earth Time Machine  Jul 30 2012

The Google Earth Time Machine blog uses Google's historical satellite maps to make now-and-then comparisons of interesting places around the world. Like the transformation of this Texas river bend into an oxbow lake over 60+ years:

(via stellar)

Gawker's Kinja, circa 2003  Jun 27 2012

Gawker has rebranded their new commenting system...it's now called Kinja. The name is recycled from a project that Nick Denton worked on with Meg Hourihan starting in 2003. Kinja 1 was an attempt to build a blog aggregator without relying solely on RSS, which was not then ubiquitous. Here's a mockup of the site I did for them in late 2003:

Luckily they got some real designers to finish the job...here's a version that 37signals did that was closer to how it looked at launch.

Where is the team that worked on that Kinja? Nick's still hammering away at Gawker, Meg is raising two great children (a more difficult and rewarding task than building software), programmer Mark Wilkie is director of technology at Buzzfeed, programmer Matt Hamer still works for Gawker (I think?), intern Gina Trapani is running her own publishing/development empire & is cofounder of ThinkUp, and 37signals (they worked on the design of the site) is flying high.

Curators gonna curate  Jun 01 2012

Former kottke.org guest curator Choire Sicha rails against the dirty filthy c-word. That's right, "curator".

Your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you're a low-grade collector, not a curator. You're buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling -- and you're then reselling it on your blog. You're nothing but a secondary market for someone else's work.

I got fresh Sicha content. Anyone buying Sicha? 2-for-1 Sicha for the next hour only. Free embedded tweets! I'm also selling links to @curateordie for a limited time only, act now!

Epic Pepys diary rebroadcast to end  May 30 2012

More than nine years ago, Phil Gyford started publishing The Diary of Samuel Pepys online as a time-shifted blog...perhaps the first of its kind. During that time, each entry in Pepys' diary was published 343 years after Pepys originally wrote them. In time, a popular Twitter account was added. The final entry will be published tomorrow (May 31), which is when Pepys suspended his diary in 1669 due to poor eyesight. Congrats on the run, Phil!

How to blog anonymously  May 15 2012

From former call girl blogger Belle de Jour, a guide on how to publish online and maintain your anonymity.

You will need an email address to do things like register for blog accounts, Facebook, Twitter, and more. This email will have to be something entirely separate from your "real" email addresses. There are a lot of free options out there, but be aware that sending an email from many of them also sends information in the headers that could help identify you.

When I started blogging, I set up an email address for the blog with Hotmail. Don't do this. Someone quickly pointed out the headers revealed where I worked (a very large place with lots of people and even more computers, but still more information than I was comfortable with). They suggested I use Hushmail instead, which I still use. Hushmail has a free option (though the inbox allocation is modest), strips out headers, and worked for me.

(thx, fred)

Process blog for the NY Times Graphics dept  May 01 2012

chartsandthings is a behind-the-scenes look at how the infographic sausage is made at the NY Times.

A history of The Huffington Post  Apr 19 2012

A long and thorough history of The Huffington Post from Michael Shapiro at Columbia Journalism Review. HuffPo cofounder Jonah Peretti calls it "the best article that will ever be written about the creation of the Huffington Post".

In the course of a few hours, Peretti would watch with wonderment as Arianna Huffington eased herself from setting to setting, all the while making the person she was talking with feel like the most interesting and important person in the world, hanging on every word, never shifting her attention to check one of three BlackBerries. "I loved being a gatherer," Huffington would later say. "I don't really think you can make gathering mistakes."

Peretti saw this talent through a different prism. "Arianna," he says, "can make weak ties into strong ties."

He returned to New York to discover that Lerer was already a few steps ahead of him. He wanted to talk about the venture the three of them would embark upon. "I remember him saying things like, 'We don't want to build a big website,'" Peretti would recall. "'We want to build an influential site.'"

Sort of related: there's an interesting article to be written about Google's relationship with blogs. Early on, blogs provided Google's Pagerank algorithm with plenty of links to rank (I would argue that without blogs and the personal web, Pagerank simply wouldn't have worked...businesses didn't link to anyone but themselves at that time) and then a few years later, with Huffington Post leading the charge, blogs filled Google with all sorts of crap and nonsense that made it less useful.

Happy tenth birthday, waxy.org!  Apr 16 2012

One of my favorite blogs in the whole wide world turned ten years old the other day...waxy.org is one of the handful of sites I visit manually every day. Creator Andy Baio talked about the milestone and shared some of his favorite posts from the past ten years.

Most of the interest in writing online's shifted to microblogging, but not everything belongs in 140 characters and it's all so impermanent. Twitter's great, but it's not a replacement for a permanent home that belongs to you.

And since there are fewer and fewer individuals doing long-form writing these days, relative to the growing potential audience, it's getting easier to get attention than ever if you actually have something original to say.

Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work, is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time. It's why, after ten years, my first response to anyone just getting started online is to start, and maintain, a blog.

My favorite part is how Andy casually mentions he has a complete archive of The WELL. Ten more years!

kottke.org redesign by the numbers  Apr 05 2012

A month ago, I launched a redesign of kottke.org. While there are still a few issues to iron out¹, I am overall very happy with it so far.

If you're actually reading this on the site and not in RSS (guys, come on in from the cold, don't be shy), you'll already have noticed that I changed the "look and feel" of the site. In doing the design, I focused on three things: simplicity, the reading/viewing experience, and sharing.

Aside from those three things, one of my unstated goals with the redesign was to increase the number of people reading kottke.org² and I had a hunch that the focus on simplicity, sharing, the reading experience would do just that. Using Google Analytics and a couple of other sources, I compared the traffic stats from the past 30 days (I didn't include the day of launch because that was an outlier day, traffic-wise) to that of the previous 30 days. Here are some of the results. (Except where noted, when I say "traffic", I mean visits.)

- Overall traffic to kottke.org was up 14%. And February was a pretty good month itself so that's a nice bump.

- As I hoped, the two areas that saw the most improvement were mobile and referral traffic. Mobile was the lowest-hanging fruit I addressed with the redesign...kottke.org's previous mobile experience sucked. It's better now. And the focus on sharing boosted referral traffic.

- Mobile traffic now accounts for 19% of kottke.org's traffic and increased by 25% over the past 30 days. iPad usage in particular shot up 40% and iPad users are spending longer on the site than they previously were. iPhone and iPod touch traffic both showed double digit percentage increases as well.

- Referral traffic now accounts for 45% of kottke.org's traffic and increased by 28% over the past 30 days. Most of this increase come from social network sharing. Traffic from Facebook increased by 45%, Facebook mobile was up 43%, Twitter increased by 6% (I already did Twitter sharing pretty well before, so not a huge jump here), and Tumblr referrals went up 125%.

- That big Tumblr increase was due to kottke.org's new Tumblr blog. Having kottke.org posts be properly rebloggable is paying off. In addition, it's got over 800 followers that are reading along in the dashboard. I'd like to see that number increase, but I'd probably need to engage a bit more on Tumblr for that to happen.

- For reference, kottke.org's Twitter account added 1000 followers over the same period, about 20% more than the previous month.

- One of the small changes I made was to stop using post titles for posting to Twitter. I had hoped that using more descriptive text would make the tweets more easily retweetable...look at this tweet for example and compare to the title of the post it links to. This hasn't really happened, which is surprising and disappointing.

- I also removed the links to the tag pages (like this and this) from the front page. I had a hunch that very few people were using those links compared to the real estate they took up and the traffic numbers bear that out...traffic to tag pages decreased only 3%.

That's enough for now...I very rarely dig into the traffic stats so it's difficult to stop when I do. That and it's rewarding when you redesign something and it actually works out the way you thought it was going to.

[1] Like this weird Safari bug that results in overlapping link text. Many people have reported this but it only happens sporadically (and usually goes away with a refresh) and I can't reproduce it or find any other sites/designers who are having the same issue. Oh, and it seems like it only happens on OS X Lion. I have no idea if it's the web fonts or something in my CSS. Anyone have any ideas? ↩

[2] Not for $$$ reasons, although that is certainly a consideration. No, it's more that I believe there are literally millions of people out there who are not reading kottke.org that would love it. I put a lot of myself into the site, I'm proud of it, and I want people to see it. That's pretty much it. Oh, and I would also like the unlimited power that comes with millions of readers. evil cackle and cat stroking noises And the money. even more cat stroking noises And the chicks. expensive champagne cork popping noises And my kids' love and respect. surprisingly loud whining noise that you can't even believe came from someone less than 40 inches tall oh come on you just watched Wallace and Gromit for the past hour and you want more orange juice jesus come on give it a rest and now there's a surprisingly loud whining noise coming from a 38-year-old man that should know better... ↩

OMG American history LOL  Apr 04 2012

Perez Hamilton is a site covering American history through the lens of gossip blogger Perez Hilton. It's up to the 1690s now...here's an account of Leisler's Rebellion from 1691:

During all the drama between the Boston revolt, New England and New France going to war and King James II being overthrown, German-American Jacob Leisler seized control of New York and ruled it against the wishes of the new King William III. In response, KWIII sent a new governor to NY, but he didn't get there for a couple years because he was lazy delayed by bad weather.

After an awkward stand-off resulting in words along the lines of, "You're not governor, I am!" and, "No, bitch, NY is mine!" Jacob Leisler was finally arrested by the REAL governor and sentenced to death.

This is riDICKulous. You can't just steal New York and expect to get away with it!!!!

If it was THAT easy, don't you think we'd have stolen it loooong ago?? Where else can you get the best food and fashion in America??!

Blog skis  Feb 22 2012

Atomic sells a ski called the Blog.

The Blog is ideal for freeskiers who refuse to compromise on airs and tricks in the backcountry.

(via meg)

Those who think The Onion is real journalism  Feb 08 2012

The Literally Unbelievable blog is collecting examples from Facebook of people who think stories from The Onion are real.

(via ★swissmiss)

Halloween or Williamsburg?  Oct 26 2011

Got this from several people yesterday: are these people dressed up for Halloween or just live in Williamsburg? It's surprisingly difficult to tell.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses  Oct 18 2011

I've found it! The world's best Tumblr reveals itself after years of searching: Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses. It's a collection of photos of celebrity noses modified to look like ninja turtles.

Internet, can we best this? I have my doubts.

Stalking in the age of Facebook  Oct 13 2011

This is the contemporary take on the guy-meets-girl-at-party story. Guy isn't particularly interested in girl but at some later point starts surreptitiously taking photos of her and posting them to a secret blog. Girl finds out, isn't creeped out at all. Boy doesn't feel shame at girl's discovery, only that it ruined his creative outlet before "he might have gotten better at it or something". Girl decides to interview boy for her communications class. You know, completely normal.

She messaged Walker through Facebook, and at first he seemed receptive. "He thought it was funny," said Merker. But after an initial show of interest, Walker got skittish, canceling and rescheduling the interview repeatedly. When Merker finally sat down with him, it was only after she had managed to catch him off-guard, saying she was already in his neighborhood and offering to meet at a bar.

Walker had one condition: he wanted to do the interview "in character" as the persona he had established through the blog. That would mean interviewing Merker, too; after all, any blogger who had devoted an entire Tumblr to a single person would certainly take the opportunity to directly question his subject.

You know when Mark Zuckerberg says stuff like privacy doesn't matter and Facebook makes formerly private information public without notice and all the tech pundits (most of whom are older than Zuck) go bananas tearing out their hair about how stupid and crazy that is? Now you know where Zuck and Facebook are coming from.

The Wirecutter  Oct 04 2011

Not sure if it'll stay like this, but what a great idea for a gadget site for normal people: a list of recommended technology products broken down into categories based on how people actually make buying decisions. Sample categories include Best Laptop Ever Created, The Great TV I'd Get, and Best Wireless Carrier.

Museum of 8-bit video game title screens  Oct 03 2011

Title Scream is a collection of 8-bit video game title screens. Not just static images either...animated GIFs, yo.

Robottke = robot Kottke  Sep 28 2011

As part of a series of articles about robots in the workplace, Farhad Manjoo has his colleague Chris Wilson build a robotic Jason Kottke to see if it could pick links as well as I can. Say hello to Robottke.

In computer science parlance, Kottke doesn't scale. That's a shame. While services that collect popular stuff online are useful, they lack any editorial sensibility. The links on Techmeme and Summify represent a horde's view of the Web. The material on Kottke represents one guy's indispensible take. The Web ought to have both kinds of aggregators, but I'd love to see more people starting link blogs that offer a clear editorial vision. But how do you get more of something so hard to do?

Enter Robottke. Over the last few weeks, Chris Wilson has been building a machine that aims to automatically generate links you might find on Kottke.org. Robottke isn't meant to replace flesh-and-blood Kottke; we just want to come up with a list of items that Jason Kottke might link to each day.

You can check out Robbotke here. How does it work? We began by crawling all the sources that Jason Kottke is likely to look at every day -- we look at all the sites he links to, and all the stuff that people he follows on Twitter are sharing. The hard part is choosing the best, most Kottke-like links from Robottke's collection. It's helpful that the human Kottke meticulously tags all of his posts with keywords. When Robottke finds a link, it searches for topics that it knows Kottke likes -- the more it finds, the higher the article ranks.

Hey, that riderless bike link at the top of Robottke actually looks pretty interesting...

Things that Apple is worth more than  Sep 21 2011

New Tumblr: Things Apple is Worth More Than. Such as: the GDP of Singapore, every single home in Atlanta, Georgia, and all the illegal drugs in the world.

A fond farewell to The Obscure Store  Sep 06 2011

Jim Romenesko is shutting down The Obscure Store and Reading Room after thirteen years. TOS&RR was an early blog that helped shape many that came after it...it was one of my favorites back in the day.

Romenesko was also one of the first, if not the first, full-time bloggers...the Poynter Institute brought him on in 2000 to write the MediaNews blog. Romenesko is stepping away from Poynter (he'll continue as a part-time staffer) and will launch a site on his own domain soon.

(Fun fact: I did the design for TOS&RR back in, what, 2002? 2003? I was amazed (and somewhat embarrassed) to discover that the logo survived until the present day.)

The Kid Should See This  Aug 24 2011

Great new site from Rion featuring online videos, photos, books, and other media that's appropriate for little kids.

There's just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...

But we don't underestimate kids around here.

With obvious exceptions, media "made for kids" is mindnumbingly dumb. YouTube, Flickr, and Vimeo are amazing resources of not-made-for-kids but totally-appropriate-for-kids stuff like what Rion is posting here. I've often wanted a Wikipedia For Little Kids (for the iPad) that's almost exclusively video- and image-based that I could let Ollie loose on to learn about stuff. (via @swissmiss)

Fake + logo = Fauxgo  Aug 09 2011

Fauxgo is a site that collects fictional logos from movies and TV shows.

Happy 12th birthday, MetaFilter!  Jul 14 2011

Wow, for the 12th anniversary of MetaFilter, Matt bought the domain of the first site MF ever linked to (cat-scan.com) and dedicated it to stories from the site's early years. More here.

Fastest possible drawings of everything  Jul 07 2011

A blog composed of quick drawings of objects, like so:

Colossal  Jun 29 2011

Can't remember who tipped me off to this (Cederholm? Hoefler? Pieratt?), but Colossal is a top-notch visual art/design blog. There are a dozen things on the first two pages that could slide right into kottke.org quite easily. He's on Stellar too!

Game of Thrones food blog  Jun 17 2011

The Inn at the Crossroads is a blog dedicated to exploring the cuisine of George R.R. Martin's Fire and Ice book series, from which HBO's Game of Thrones is adapted.

The Queen took a flagon of sweet plum wine from a passing servant girl and filled Sansa's cup. "Drink," she commanded coldly. "Perhaps it will give you courage to deal with truth for a change."

On pagination navigation  May 10 2011

Sippey posted a brief item on pagination navigation on "river of news" type sites, comparing the opposite approaches of Stellar and Mlkshk. I thought a lot about where to put those buttons and what to label them. There's no good correct answer. For example, "older" usually points the way to stuff further back in the timeline that you haven't read, i.e. it's new to you but old compared to the first page of stuff...are you confused yet? I focused on two things in choosing a nav scheme:

1. The Western left-to-right reading pattern. If you're in the middle of reading a book, the material to your left is a) chronologically older and b) has already been read and the material to your right is a) chronologically newer and b) unread. From a strict data perspective, a) is the correct way to present information but websites/blogs don't work like books. b) is how people actually how people use blogs...when a user gets to the bottom of the page, they want to see more unread material and that's naturally to the right.

2. Consistency. Once you add page numbers into the mix -- e.g. "< newer 1 2 3 4 older >" -- it's a no-brainer which label goes where. I don't think I've ever seen the reverse: "< older 4 3 2 1 newer >".

Also, I do whatever Dan Cederholm does. (But dammit, he does the opposite on his blog! Hair tearing out noise!!) That said, I like Sandy's suggestion of getting rid of the "newer" button altogether:

We put "Older" on the right, but did away with "Newer" altogether in favor of a link back to page 1. If they want to go back to the previous pages, people can use their back button.

http://mlkshk.com/p/212C

Or maybe put "newer" at the top of the page? Still a waste of screen real estate? Anyway, once I figure out how I want to do infinite scrolling on Stellar, those problematic older/newer buttons will go away. Huzzah!

Queen of All Me Media  Feb 24 2011

Dooce gets the NY Times Magazine treatment this weekend. More than anything, reading it made me nostalgic for a certain short period of time where people could write personal blogs intended to be read by more than just family and a few friends without worrying about money or a "personal brand". God, those were the (clearly unsustainable) days...here's the new reality:

Amy Oztan, who blogs at SelfishMom.com, is particularly transparent when it comes to her sponsors. She has a lot of them -- companies who pay her, in money or in product, to advertise on her site or to mention them. Oztan has an entire section explaining how she makes her money, including an extensive index of tabs she uses to alert readers to the economics of everything she writes. It starts with Level 1 -- "The product or service mentioned was provided to Amy free of charge (or at a considerable discount not available to the public)" -- and goes up to Level 13: "This is a sponsored post. Amy was compensated to write this post. While Amy's opinions in the post are authentic, talking points may have been suggested by the sponsor." In between these extremes are compensation for inserting links to a certain Web site, attending an event or administering a product giveaway. Which pretty much explains why, between daily witticisms, she so regularly describes how she offered Kleenex to the woman next to her at a conference or placed her HTC HD7 Windows phone on the tray table next to her when she lucked into an empty row on her last plane trip.

Movable Type sold to Infocom  Jan 21 2011

Six Apart Japan, Movable Type, and the Six Apart brand will be acquired by Infocom, a Japanese IT firm.

We are happy to announce that Six Apart KK (SAKK), a Japanese subsidiary of SAY Media, has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Infocom, a Japanese IT company, as of February 1, 2011. As part of this transaction, SAKK will assume responsibility for the worldwide Movable Type business, and the Six Apart brand.

We at SAKK are very excited to continue our investment in Movable Type, the Movable Type Open Source project and the worldwide community of developers, publishers and bloggers around the world that use Movable Type.

This depresses me. (via waxy)

Fake Criterion films  Dec 08 2010

Favorite Tumblr of the week: Fake Criterions, featuring mockups of Criterion films that would never get made. For example:

Note: a surprising non-fake Criterion is Michael Bay's Armageddon. Well, it does feature Steve Buscemi and Oscar winners Billy Bob Thornton and Ben Affleck. (thx, george)

Kim Jong-il looks at things  Dec 01 2010

A collection of photos of Dear Leader looking at things: corn, your desktop, wheat.

Actually, I can't recall seeing a photo of Kim doing anything but looking at stuff. (thx, steve)

Civil War blog  Nov 02 2010

Disunion is a new NY Times blog that will be covering the events of the Civil War in "real-time" as it happened 150 years ago. From one of the first posts about the last ordinary day:

[November 1, 1860] was an ordinary day in America: one of the last such days for a very long time to come.

In dusty San Antonio, Colonel Robert E. Lee of the U.S. Army had just submitted a long report to Washington about recent skirmishes against marauding Comanches and Mexican banditti. In Louisiana, William Tecumseh Sherman was in the midst of a tedious week interviewing teenage applicants to the military academy where he served as superintendent. In Galena, Ill., passers-by might have seen a man in a shabby military greatcoat and slouch hat trudging to work that Thursday morning, as he did every weekday. He was Ulysses Grant, a middle-aged shop clerk in his family's leather-goods store.

Great idea. The Times started publishing in 1851 so their archives should have a ton of stuff related to the war. (via df)

Sicha and pals are Awl in (and other puns)  Oct 25 2010

Nice little piece by David Carr in the NY Times about The Awl, a small batch blogging concern owned and operated by Choire Sicha, Alex Balk, and David Cho.

"My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for," Mr. Sicha said. "All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn't that hard to figure out."

And the Pursuit of Happiness  Oct 15 2010

Maira Kalman's lovely illustrated NY Times blog about American democracy is now available in book form.

Roger Ebert talks with Errol Morris  Sep 17 2010

Roger Ebert recently sat down with Errol Morris to talk about his new movie, Tabloid, and a bunch of other stuff. The interview is presented as a series of eight YouTube videos. In this one, he talks about how he got started writing his blog for The NY Times and how that helped him get over his 30-year struggle with writer's block:

He's working on a seventeen-part article about a murder case for the blog. Seventeen parts!

Sesame Street on Tumblr  Sep 14 2010

They're posting classic clips from past shows.

Zuckerberg and Style Rookie and Dyson  Sep 13 2010

The New Yorker has a trio of interesting articles in their most recent issue for the discerning web/technology lady or gentlemen. First is a lengthy profile of Mark Zuckerberg, the quite private CEO of Facebook who doesn't believe in privacy.

Zuckerberg may seem like an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing. But that's kind of the point. Zuckerberg's business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertisers. Happily for him, and the prospects of his eventual fortune, his business interests align perfectly with his personal philosophy. In the bio section of his page, Zuckerberg writes simply, "I'm trying to make the world a more open place."

The second is a profile of Tavi Gevinson (sub. required), who you may know as the youngster behind Style Rookie.

Tavi has an eye for frumpy, "Grey Gardens"-inspired clothes and for arch accessories, and her taste in designers runs toward the cerebral. From the beginning, her blog had an element of mystery: is it for real? And how did a thirteen-year-old suburban kid develop such a singular look? Her readership quickly grew to fifty thousand daily viewers and won the ear of major designers.

And C, John Seabrook has a profile of James Dyson (sub. required), he of the unusual vacuum cleaners, unusual hand dryers, and the unusual air-circulating fan.

In the fall of 2002, the British inventor James Dyson entered the U.S. market with an upright vacuum cleaner, the Dyson DC07. Dyson was the product's designer, engineer, manufacturer, and pitchman. The price was three hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Not only did the Dyson cost much more than most machines sold at retail but it was made almost entirely out of plastic. In the most perverse design decision of all, Dyson let you see the dirt as you collected it, in a clear plastic bin in the machine's midsection.

Things Organized Neatly  Aug 30 2010

A collection of photos of things organized neatly. If only life were like this.

Fidel Castro has a blog  Aug 27 2010

And here it is. He's written 40 entries about capitalism and 44 about the blockade. (via @tcarmody)

Best sites for film criticism  Jul 20 2010

An annotated list of the best film criticism blogs. (via the house next door)

Blogging the periodic table  Jul 13 2010

Sam Kean is blogging the periodic table of elements over at Slate.

Starting today, I'll be posting on a different element each weekday (the blog will run through early August), starting with the racy history of an element we've known about for hundreds of years, antimony, and ending on an element we've only just discovered, the provisionally named ununseptium. I'll be covering many topics-explaining how the table works, relaying stories both funny and tragic, and analyzing current events through the lens of the table and its elements. Above all, I hope to convey the unexpected joys of the most diverse and colorful tool in all of science.

If you like that, Kean has written a whole book on the topic.

Are blogs dying?  Jul 07 2010

The answer is yes, sorta, and no.

People are not tiring of the chance to publish and communicate on the internet easily and at almost no cost. Experimentation has brought innovations, such as comment threads, and the ability to mix thoughts, pictures and links in a stream, with the most recent on top. Yet Facebook, Twitter and the like have broken the blogs' monopoly.

Pepsi blog on nutrition?  Jul 07 2010

ScienceBlogs has added a blog about "innovations in science, nutrition and health policy" sponsored by Pepsi to their roster. Posters to the blog will include Pepsi research staff. Some of the other bloggers on ScienceBlogs are not happy.

However, that said, I am completely mystified by ScienceBlogs' latest development: adding the PepsiCo "nutrition" Blog. How does ScienceBlogs expect to maintain their (OUR) credibility as a science news source (we are picked up by Google news searches afterall) when they are providing paid-for content under the guise of news? Further, I cannot imagine what sorts of credible nutrition research PepsiCo is doing that they can or will actually talk about publicly, nor can I possibly imagine any "food" corporation actually caring about promoting public health. PepsiCo is a corporation, not a research institute, fer crissakes!

(via @tcarmody)

Time's best blogs of 2010  Jun 28 2010

On the list are kottke.org favorites like Hilobrow, The Sartorialist, Shorpy, The Awl, and Roger Ebert's Journal.

Seminal webzine archives back online  Jun 21 2010

After nine years offline, FEED Magazine republishes its archives.

Welcome to the archives of the web magazine FEED. Launched in May of 1995, it was among a handful of "webzines"--as they were once called--in existence then. FEED tried to re-imagine how we would read and write in the digital age even as we dedicated ourselves to the craft of writing, a craft we were perfecting as green writers and editors ourselves.

We also convinced a handful of published authors to contribute. Hence, FEED was billed as the first Web-only magazine to feature "established writers." But its ultimate legacy may be the collection of writers who published some of their earliest work at FEED, and who then went on to luminous careers: the novelist Sam Lipsyte, Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox, media theorist Clay Shirky, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, Talkingpointmemo's Josh Marshall, and many others.

One of the pieces that FEED published was an early look at weblogs by Julian Dibbell. (You have no idea how much it bruised a certain naive blogger not to have been mentioned in that article. Perhaps there's been a certain "I'll show 'em" element to this person's blog ever since. Or so I've heard.)

You're either repetitive, bored, or urgent  Jun 18 2010

Google breaks down mobile device users into three categories: repetitive now, bored now, and urgent now.

The "repetitive now" user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.

The "bored now" are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don't offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.

The "urgent now" is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.

This works for general web users as well. Blogs do well when they appeal to repetitive now and bored now users, but the really effective ones target all three types at once. Somehow this is related to stock and flow.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows  Jun 09 2010

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a collection of imagined definitions for useful contemporary phrases. My two favorite recent entries are the McFly effect:

n. the phenomenon of observing your parents interact with people they grew up with, which reboots their personalities into youth mode, reverting to a time before the last save point, when they were still dreamers and rascals cooling their heels in the wilderness, waiting terrified and eager to meet you for the first time

and especially contact high-five:

n. an innocuous touch by someone just doing their job -- a barber, yoga instructor or friendly waitress -- that you enjoy more than you'd like to admit, a feeling of connection so stupefyingly simple that it cheapens the power of the written word, so that by the year 2025, aspiring novelists would be better off just giving people a hug.

(thx, john)

High-brow World Cup blog  Jun 08 2010

The New Republic has started up their World Cup blog again.

This spring, we recruited Aleksandar Hemon to write a monthly column about soccer and encouraged him to write without pandering to a broad audience. And that's the same spirit that we've embraced for this enterprise. Our cast of bloggers is filled with many eminent novelists and journalists (and a Deputy Mayor of New York City). They will write about the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of this tournament, I'm sure. But they will also write about tactics and players and coaches. They have a green light to be as wonky as they want.

Self-delusion  Jun 07 2010

You Are Not So Smart is a blog about self-delusion. There are recent entries on the Dunning-Krueger effect, fanboyism and brand loyalty, and the misinformation effect.

The Misconception: Memories are played back like recordings.

The Truth: Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes things like eyewitness testimony unreliable.

(via mr)

FiveThirtyEight goes to the NY Times  Jun 03 2010

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight is licensing its content to the NY Times for the next three years.

In the near future, the blog will "re-launch" under a NYTimes.com domain. It will retain its own identity (akin to other Times blogs like DealBook), but will be organized under the News:Politics section. Once this occurs, content will no longer be posted at FiveThirtyEight.com on an ongoing basis, and the blog will re-direct to the new URL. In addition, I will be contributing content to the print edition of the New York Times, and to the Sunday Magazine.

The Times' own Media Decoder blog notes that the deal is similar in structure to the arrangement Freakonomics enjoys at the newspaper: more of a rental than a purchase. I believe Andrew Sullivan has had similar deals at the various publications at which he's blogged. (thx, nevan)

Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry  Apr 27 2010

Marina Abramović Made Me Cry is the Tumblr blog of the moment.

Abramovic sits at a table in silence, and museum guests can sit across from her and stare. Some people couldn't handle the heat.

Long-form journalism  Apr 26 2010

Longform.org is collecting some of the best long-form journalism available on the web. See also Instapaper's editor's picks and @longreads on Twitter. (thx, yehuda)

Quitting the internet  Apr 08 2010

James Sturm, fearing he's addicted to the internet, is going offline for four months. He's blogging about it (via fax and phone) for Slate.

Even when I am away from the computer I am aware that I AM AWAY FROM MY COMPUTER and am scheming about how to GET BACK ON THE COMPUTER. I've tried various strategies to limit my time online: leaving my laptop at my studio when I go home, leaving it at home when I go to my studio, a Saturday moratorium on usage. But nothing has worked for long. More and more hours of my life evaporate in front of YouTube. Supposedly addiction isn't a moral failing, but it feels as if it is.

Beautiful software  Mar 24 2010

For my future reference: Well Placed Pixels, a blog highlighting beautiful software. (via df)

My interview on The Pipeline  Mar 23 2010

I try not to do too many interviews these days (they tend to get in the way of actually getting stuff done), but I was pleased to be interviewed for an episode of Dan Benjamin's Pipeline podcast.

They discuss blogging for a living, general vs. niche blogs, content longevity, making the transition to full-time blogging, how taking a break (even for a week) can affect traffic, finding links, guest bloggers, the good and bad of comments, and more.

(Christ, is that my voice? I *was* just getting over a cold...)

Pre-modern blogs  Mar 18 2010

From the New York Review of Books blog (on Tumblr no less!), a consideration of some pre-blog and pre-Twitter writing that is bloggy in nature, including documents written of the events in London coffee houses and French cafes.

To appreciate the importance of a pre-modern blog, consult a database such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and download a newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news "story" as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits, often "advices" of a sober nature -- the arrival of a ship, the birth of an heir to a noble title -- until the 1770s, when they became juicy. Pre-modern scandal sheets appeared, exploiting the recent discovery about the magnetic pull of news toward names. As editors of the Morning Post and the Morning Herald, two men of the cloth, the Reverend Henry Bate (known as "the Reverend Bruiser") and the Reverend William Jackson (known as "Dr. Viper") packed their paragraphs with gossip about the great, and this new kind of news sold like hotcakes.

"No headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type"...that sounds damned familiar. (via @bobulate)

NYC typography  Feb 25 2010

New Type York showcases typography found in NYC. (via quips)

The elements of the incendiary blog post  Feb 02 2010

If you're looking to drive a lot of traffic to your blog with controversial posts, here's your template.

This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers' attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people.

The comments are worth a read too. (thx, mira)

Update: See also Charlie Brooker on How To Report the News. (thx, christian)

Math for non-experts  Feb 01 2010

Mathematician Steven Strogatz is doing what sounds like a fascinating series of posts on mathematics for adults. From the initial post:

I'll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who'd like to have a second chance at the subject -- but this time from an adult perspective. It's not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it's so enthralling to those who get it.

More subject blogs like this, please. There are lots of art, politics, technology, fashion, economics, typography, photography, and physics blogs out there, but almost none of them appeal to the beginner or interested non-expert. (thx, steve)

Living on Craigslist  Jan 21 2010

Jason Paul lives off of Craigslist and is documenting the whole thing on his blog.

What does that mean exactly? I have made some ground rules that I will be living by over the year. Here they are:

- I will start with $2,500 that I've saved during college
- I will have a car, a phone, a computer and cameras to document the trip
- I am not allowed to live out of my car
- I am not allowed to live with someone I know for longer than a week at the beginning of each city
- I am allowed one large bag containing clothes and a few staple foods
- I am not allowed to initiate contact with someone unless it is through an online interaction

This means, put simply, I will find jobs, housing, friends, food and other necessities entirely via Craigslist.

Update: Craigslist Joe is a documentary film with the same premise. (thx, dennis)

Online PR dos and don'ts  Jan 13 2010

Lindsay Robertson's list of guidelines for how PR people should interact with bloggers is spot on, especially the "pick eight sites" advice:

She picked the eight blogs that covered her client's subject, TV, that she liked the most on a personal level, read them religiously, and only sent them only the content she thought each blog would be into. While the rest of the publicists in her company were sending out mass emails to everyone, hoping to get bites from Perez Hilton, Gawker, HuffPo, or wherever, this publicist focused on a lower traffic tier with the (correct) understanding that these days, content filters up as much as it filters down, and often the smaller sites, with their ability to dig deeper into the internet and be more nimble, act as farm teams for the larger ones. A site can be enormously influential without having crazy eyeballs, because all eyeballs are not equal.

Best blogs of '09  Jan 05 2010

Worth checking out: Rex Sorgatz's list of the 30 best blogs of 2009.

Growing Up Heroes  Dec 21 2009

The Growing Up Heroes blog is collecting photos of little kids wearing superhero costumes. (thx, jasons)

Update: See also I Used To Be Younger.

2009's best new blogs  Dec 16 2009

Bygone Bureau asks a bunch of folks: what was your favorite new blog of 2009?

Detainee 063  Dec 07 2009

Detainee 063 is the interrogation log of Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohammed al-Qahtani; each entry is posted to the site seven years after it was recorded (a la The Diary of Samuel Pepys).

Over the course of the fifty days, Al-Qahtani, Detainee 063, is questioned by teams of interrogators working in shifts, typically for twenty hours a day. While individual entries of the log are sometimes brutal and unpleasant to read, what is particularly disturbing about the treatment Al-Qahtani receives is its relentlessness. By publishing the log in real time, this site is intended as a kind of re-enactment -- to show how mistreatment which might not appear immediately as terrible as, for example, waterboarding, can nonetheless come to amount to nothing short of torture, how by being prolonged and unceasing it can become unbearable.

(thx, ben)

Free Errol!  Nov 20 2009

For some dumbcrap reason, the NY Times has redirected Errol Morris' excellent blog about photography and the truth -- formerly at http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com -- to some new thing called Opinionator. They did the same with Dick Cavett, Olivia Judson, etc. Oh, all the content is still there -- here's Morris' stuff -- and permalinks redirect, but there are no author-specific RSS feeds. There is only the main feed, which started shoveling a bunch of crap I didn't want to read into my newsreader. Come on Gray Lady, just give me Morris; I don't care about the rest.

Update: The Times blogs are on Wordpress and with WP you can add "/feed" to any URL and get a feed. So here's Morris' feed...which helps you and me but not much of anyone else. (thx, mark)

Update: The Times is working on it. (thx, benjamin)

Keeping Belle de Jour's secret  Nov 16 2009

Darren from LinkMachineGo, an old school blogger, guessed Belle de Jour's identity soon after her blog started. How? Pre-Belle, Brooke Magnanti ran an obscure Robotwisdom-style link blog and wrote in a few other online forums and Darren recognized the writing style. Not only didn't Darren tell Magnanti or anyone else, he even set up a clever Googlewhack honeypot to detect people searching for her secret identity and tipped Magnanti off that The Daily Mail was sniffing around.

That's Dr. Belle de Jour  Nov 15 2009

London call girl blogger Belle de Jour has outed herself and, surprise, she's a hot nerd.

Her name is Dr Brooke Magnanti. Her specialist areas are developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. She has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science and is now working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. She is part of a team researching the effects of exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos on foetuses and infants.

(via waxy)

Summing up the 2000s  Nov 02 2009

The blog You Aught To Remember is counting down all the of the memorable people, ideas, and trends of the 2000s. Some recent entries include the demotion of Pluto, World of Warcraft, the Red Sox winning the World Series, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

How to write badly well  Oct 26 2009

Writer Joel Stickley keeps a blog about how best to write badly. Here's a snippet from a recent entry titled "Describe every character in minute detail, taking no account of narrative pacing":

Terrence Handley shifted his weight, the weight that had been steadily increasing for the last ten years and showed no sign of diminishing, at least while his wife Marie continued to excel as she did at the design and production of delectable gourmet meat pies, and shuffled his feet restively as he waited.

Iconic photos  Oct 20 2009

The Iconic Photos blog reminds me a bit of Letters of Note (and Footnotes of Mad Men). It's one notable photo per post plus some context.

Alex Ross on the move  Oct 15 2009

Alex Ross has moved his blog from The Rest is Noise to the New Yorker site. It's now called Unquiet Thoughts.

From the desk of Mr. Jagger  Oct 15 2009

You are still reading Letters of Note, yes? A couple of recent letters include Bill Gates' infamous An Open Letter to Hobbyists -- "most of you steal your software" -- and a letter from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol about the design of an album cover in which Jagger gives the impression of being the perfect client...do whatever you want and let me know how much to pay you.

Update: Jagger's letter to MC Escher didn't work out quite as well.

By the way, please tell Mr. Jagger I am not Maurits to him, but
Very sincerely,
M. C. Escher.

(thx, @pjdoland)

Vivian Maier, recently discovered street photographer  Oct 14 2009

Vivian Maier was a street photographer from the 1950s-70s in Chicago whose extensive body of work (40,000 negatives) was recently discovered at an auction. This blog is presenting that work to the public for (I think) the first time.

(thx, frank)

Update: Blake Andrews discusses some other photographers who came late to the public eye.

The other X factor in recognition is a curatorial champion. Bellocq had Friedlander. Atget had Abbot. Disfarmer had Miller. Without their discoverers, these photographers might still be anonymous. For Maier it's been John Maloof. An interesting mental experiment is to wonder what would've happened had Maier posted her own photos on a blog while still alive. Would they have the same impact? Or would they just be another series of old images from some self-promoting has-been?

Letters of Note  Sep 14 2009

Letters of Note is a blog that publishes important, unusual, and memorable letters.

Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and even emails. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at. Updated weekdays.

Here's a letter from Winston Churchill to his wife to be delivered in the event of his death in WWI and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping ransom note. Fantastic idea for a blog and well done too. Subscribed. (thx, felicia)

Blogger as accidental puppeteer  Aug 31 2009

Heather Armstrong purchased a new washing machine which promptly broke. After several attempts to get it fixed failed, she registered her displeasure on Twitter to her 1,000,000+ followers. The rest of the story is amusing but I enjoyed it for more inside-baseball reasons, i.e. this is how you fucking blog. Take notes.

This is where some of you are all, WTF? You spent how much on a washing machine? Don't you know that some of us don't even have washing machines? Don't you know that some of us have to drag our five loads of laundry AND our three kids down to the laundromat every week? HOW DARE YOU EVEN WRITE AND/OR COMPLAIN ABOUT YOUR PRECIOUS LITTLE WASHING MACHINE.

And you can give me a goddamn break. It's not like we said, you know what? Let's just go spend fourteen hundred dollars today! It'll be fun! Where can we go? An appliance store! Hurry, let me change into my diamond-studded panties and climb into our golden chariot! Have the local police shut down traffic so that we don't have to maneuver around the little people! Also, where is Clive Owen and that blow job I paid for?

Life advice from old people  Aug 27 2009

Seth Menachem takes his video camera out on the streets and collects Life Advice From Old People. Menachem is in the movie biz so he even got advice from Jon Voight and Errol Morris.

The best of Wikipedia  Aug 26 2009

The Best of Wikipedia blog collects interesting entries from Wikipedia. Some recent entries include Lawsuits Against God, Missing White Woman Syndrome, and Dead Cat Bounce.

The footnotes of Mad Men  Aug 18 2009

This may be my favorite new blog of the year: The Footnotes of Mad Men. Sample footnote: The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, the tentacle porn hanging in Bert Cooper's office. (via sandwich)

Bloggers and press passes in NYC  Jul 21 2009

Gothamist's Jake Dobkin attended a public discussion of "Rules for City Issued Press Credentials" in NYC today and took some good notes. The proposed new rules address some inconsistencies in the city's issuing process...in particularly the denial of press passes to bloggers and other online publications.

Restrictions limiting press passes to certain mediums will be removed -- in the future, online, offline, on-air, etc. will all be treated equally. To qualify for a press pass, the journalist or journalism organization will need to provide six clips from the last 24 months showing news-gathering activity that would merit a press card -- that would include live reportage from police and fire scenes, public assemblies, government press conferences, or similar events.

Hurley has a blog  May 22 2009

Sweet Marvin Candle! How come no one told me that Hurley from Lost has a blog?

Birth year cultural scrapbook  May 07 2009

Sveinn Birkir has been collecting images from 1976 and putting them on his blog in order to create a visual anthology from the year he was born. Neat idea.

In defense of Twitter  Apr 23 2009

Living in a big city, you get to hear other people's conversations all the time. These are private conversations meant for the benefit of the participants but it's no big deal if they're overheard on the subway. And you know what people talk about most of the time? In no particular order:

1. What they had or are going to have for breakfast/lunch/dinner.
2. Last night's TV or sports.
3. How things are going at work.
4. The weather.
5. Personal gossip.
6. Celebrity gossip.

Of course you'd like to think that most of your daily conversation is weighty and witty but instead everyone chats about pedestrian nonsense with their pals. In fact, that ephemeral chit-chat is the stuff that holds human social groups together.

Ever since the web hit the mainstream sometime in the 90s, people have asked of each new conversational publishing technology -- newsgroups, message boards, online journals, weblogs, social networking sites, and now Twitter -- the same question: "but why would anyone want to hear about what some random person is eating for breakfast?" The answer applies equally well for both offline conversation and online "social media": almost no one...except for their family and friends.

So when you run across a Twitter message like "we had chicken sandwitches & pepsi for breakfast" from someone who has around 30 followers, what's really so odd about it? It's just someone telling a few friends on Twitter what she might normally tell them on the phone, via email, in person, or in a telegram. If you aren't one of the 30 followers, you never see the message...and if you do, you're like the guy standing next to a conversing couple on the subway platform.

P.S. And anyway, the whole breakfast question is a huge straw man periodically pushed across the tracks in front of speeding internet technology. There is much that happens on Twitter or on blogs or on Facebook that has nothing to do with small groups of people communicating about seemingly nothing. Can we just retire this stupid line of questioning once and for all?

(Would you like to post this link to Twitter?)

Update: From Twitter, two pithier reformulations of the above:

@phoutz: If Twitter is banal it is because you and I are banal (It's called social norming)

@thepalephantom: The "no one cares what you're doing" proclamation is a solipsists way of saying "i don't care"

Update: Three related articles. How the Other Half Writes: In Defense of Twitter by Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG (thx, @secretsquirrel):

Again, I fail to see any clear distinction between someone's boring Twitter feed - considered only semi-literate and very much bad -- and someone else's equally boring, paper-based diary -- considered both pro-humanist and unquestionably good. Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It's a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.

Twitter: Industries of Banality by Struan McRae Spencer of Vitamin Briefcase:

Living with friends and colleagues would be a cheap alternative to living alone. People generally don't do it because it's not a good thing for humans to do. We are genetically predisposed to need time in solitude occasionally. So instead of living with your friends and colleagues, try living with their disembodied thoughts floating around on your computer and popping up on your desktop every fifteen, thirty, sixty, (manual refresh), minutes. Fellowship exists to provide us with relief from solitude and our individual pursuits. Living in a state of constant fellowship with hundreds, if not thousands of people who have known you (or not) across various stages of your life becomes an insurmountable problem the longer you try to do it.

To Tweet or Not To Tweet by Maureen Dowd of the NY Times, the essay that finally set me off in the first place:

Do you ever think "I don't care that my friend is having a hamburger?"

Stinky blogging stats  Apr 21 2009

Mark Penn, a former Clinton pollster, writes in the Wall Street Journal that:

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers.

Understandably, Penn's catching a bit of flack for that and statements and the numbers he uses to back them up. From Waldo Jaquith at VQR:

Penn's thesis is that average American citizens are becoming professional bloggers, offsetting the loss in journalists, with millions enjoying a revenue stream from blogging and nearly half a million making a living at it. That's wrong on its face. There's simply no way there there's more than, say, 10,000 Americans are paying for their basic life expenses purely through blogging.

Scott Rosenberg, who has done all sorts of research about blogging for his forthcoming book, reacted similarly:

Technorati's are the longest-running and most valuable, and consistent, series of blogging studies over time, but like any study's numbers, they can be easily misrepresented: here, Penn relies on them for the datum that bloggers who reach 100,000 uniques a month can earn $75K a year. But if you read the source, you find this:

"The average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower - $22,000."

In other words, the $75K average is skewed by a handful of outlier successes, but the great majority of bloggers who get 100,000 uniques/month earn more like $22,000. Here, the median is far more relevant than the average. Penn, of all people, knows this.

From my perspective as someone who does make a living blogging, Penn's numbers, especially this 100,000 uniques --> $75K business, are misleading at best and a complete fucking lie at worst.

College English class on the postprint era  Apr 21 2009

Schools are finally taking the end of print media seriously. Professor Robert Lanham is offering a class called Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era that will be graded on the "Raised by Boomers, Everyone's a Winner" system.

Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.

OMG, this class is totes HFACTDEWARIUCSMNUWKIASLAMB.

Keith Starky explains Twitter  Apr 15 2009

Keith Starky's blog examines tweets as "part of his ongoing research in humor propagation and fluid reputation dynamics".

The central conceit of the "tweet" in this case is the idea that Ninjas, which are black-clad martial artists who employ tactics of stealth to both defeat their opponents and avoid waking people up at night when they go to the bathroom, could partake in some of the worldy pleasures of the non-Ninja world (e.g., crunchy snacks) if that non-Ninja world consisted entirely of people wearing noise-canceling headphones. Henceforth we refer to this world as Headphone-World.

Sorry for the two "explains Twitter" posts in a row. I'll make the next two extra special (i.e. "explains Facebook"). (via jim ray)

Goodbye, Speak Up  Apr 13 2009

Long-running design blog Speak Up will cease publication later this week.

Earlier this year, Bryony and I made the decision to close Speak Up. Seeing weeks and weeks go by where we have only two or three posts (and one of them being the Quipsologies round-up) has become too painful for us. It's also like watching Ozzy Ozbourne today, still holding on to that rock glory but he can't really rock no more, not like he used to.

Extreme borrowing in the blogosphere  Apr 09 2009

In the past week, both Joshua Schachter and Matt Haughey published articles that were excerpted in the Voices section of All Things Digital, a web site owned by Dow Jones and run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of the WSJ. Each excerpt was accompanied by a link to the original articles. Schachter and Haughey both reacted negatively to All Things Digital's posting of their work. Andy Baio has collected responses from Schachter, Haughey, All Things Digital's Kara Swisher, other writers whose stuff has been excerpted in the Voices section, and a couple other long-time online writers. Merlin Mann's comment on Twitter sums up what the independent writers seem to be irritated with:

Republishing online work without consent and wrapping it in ads is often called "feed scraping." At AllThingsD, it's called "a compliment."

It does suck that ATD's linking technique makes it appear as though Schachter and Haughey are in the employ of Dow Jones and that DJ has the copyright on what they wrote. ATD should make the lack of affiliation more clear. Other than that, is the ATD post really that bad? In many ways, All Things Digital's linking technique is more respectful of the author of the original piece than that of a typical contemporary blog. For comparison purposes, here are screenshots of Schachter's original article as linked to from a typical blog (in this case, Boing Boing) and by All Things Digital.

Go read both posts (ATD, BB) and then come back. With its short excerpt and explicit authorship (i.e. there's no doubt that Joshua Schachter wrote those words), the ATD post is clearly just an enticement for the reader to go read the original post. On the other hand, BB's post summarizes most of Schachter's argument and includes an extensive excerpt of the juiciest part of the original piece. The post is clearly marked as being "posted by Cory Doctorow" so a less-than-careful reader might assume that those are Doctorow's thoughts about URL shorteners.

[Metaphorically speaking, the ATD post is like showing the first 3 minutes of a movie and then prodding the viewer to go see the rest of it in a theater while BB's post is like the movie trailer that gives so much of the story away (including the ending) that you don't really need to watch the actual movie.]

What ends up happening is that blogs like Boing Boing -- and I'm very much not picking on BB here...this is a very common and accepted practice in the blogosphere -- provide so much of the gist and actual text of the thing they're pointing to that readers often don't end up clicking through to the original. To make matters worse, some readers will pass along BB's post instead of Schachter's post...it becomes, "hey, did you see what Boing Boing said about URL shortening services?" And occassionally (but more often than you might think) someone will write a post about something interesting, it'll get linked by a big blog that summarizes and excerpts extensively, and then the big blog's post will appear on the front page of Digg and generally get linked around a lot while the original post and its author get screwed.

So I guess my question is: why is All Things Digital getting put through the wringer receiving scrutiny here for something that seems a lot more innocuous than what thousands of blogs are doing every day? Shouldn't we be just as or more critical of sites like Huffington Post, Gawker, Apartment Therapy, Engadget, Boing Boing, Buzzfeed, Lifehacker, etc. etc. etc. that extensively excerpt and summarize?

Update: I'm pulling a couple of quotes up from the comments so that the opinions of the people involved aren't misrepresented.

Joshua Schachter:

I really just objected to the byline on the ATD thing. It made it appear that there was a relationship when there wasn't. If there is curation, the curator should be the one noted as making the choices.

Andy Baio:

All the complaints stem from the affiliation issue. Running ads and having comments on an excerpt are only an issue if it's presented as original content, instead of curation. Put an editor's name on there, remove the author photos, throw it in a blockquote, and all these complaints go away.

Number eighty  Mar 30 2009

80. Wear a sportcoat when traveling by plane. It has easily accessible pockets.

1001 Rules For My Unborn Son is a poignant idea that's well-executed.

Old school web design  Mar 13 2009

The Vintage Web blog consists of screenshots of sites whose current design appears to have not been updated since the 1990s.

Nerd Boyfriend  Mar 09 2009

Nerd Boyfriend breaks down the wardrobes of the fashionably nerdy male, including those of Peter Sellers, Alistair Hennessey (from The Life Aquatic), Buster Bluth, and Sir Edmund Hillary. (via lonelysandwich)

The Lone Gunman is one  Mar 03 2009

The Lone Gunman is one of my favorite new sites. Proprietor Lloyd Morgan doesn't update super often but each post is solidly within the 40- and 50-point zones of my interests (this is likely the first and last skee ball metaphor you'll read today). Morgan celebrated the site's first anniversary with an entry reviewing the last year of posts...lots of good liberal arts 2.0 stuff in there.

The business blogging bust  Feb 09 2009

Dan Lyons, who wrote and tried to monetize the now-defunct Fake Steve Jobs blog, on the business of blogging:

Blogs can do many wonderful things [but] generating huge amounts of money isn't one of them.

As businesses go, blogging is a lot like shining shoes. There are going to be very few folks who own chains of shoe shining places which make a lot of money and a bunch of other people who can (maybe) make a living at it if they bust their ass 24/7/365. But for many, shining shoes is something that will be done at home for themselves because it feels good to walk around with a shiny pair of shoes. Everyone else will switch to sandals (i.e. Twitter) or sneakers (i.e. Facebook) and not worry about shining at all. (via fimoculous)

Eye On Springfield  Jan 27 2009

Eye On Springfield celebrates Simpsons moments from seasons 1-9, when the show was "still funny". If you're around me for more than a few minutes, it's likely you'll hear "freshen ya drink, govenah?" at some point.

New White House site  Jan 20 2009

Several readers have noted that The White House Site has already been refreshed to the now-familiar Obama look-and-feel. It's even got a blog on the front page. Will there be a Twitter account? The Wikipedians have been busy too: Obama is listed as the current President on the President of the United States page.

Update: Oh, and all of the third-party content on the WH site is licensed under Creative Commons. Wow.

Update: Oh, there's a Twitter account. Pair with THE_REAL_SHAQ for maximum fun! (thx, brian)

Update: This appears to be the official WH Twitter account, former updated by the Bush administration but now helmed by the Obama folks.

Useless superpowers  Jan 15 2009

Fun new blog on Superuseless Superpowers. So far, they've got 13th Bullet Bulletproof (aka Eventual Kevlar Skin), Achieving 99% Opacity (aka The Slightly Invisible Man), and Ultra Short-Range Teleportation:

This unamazing power lets you teleport up to one inch away. When done in rapid succession, it gives that old-timey stop action feel. It can also really push your "popping & locking" routine to the next level.

Update: David O'Doherty possesses Very Mild Superpowers. (thx, tom)

People Who Deserve It  Jan 07 2009

People Who Deserve It is a blog listing people who have earned a punch in the face, including Office Food Thief, Traveler With Giant Backpack On Subway, Loser Who Pisses on Toilet Seat, and Sexual Innuendo T-Shirt Guy. My NYC pedestrian-related submissions: Cab Driver Who Honks Excessively From Three Cars Back Just As the Light Turns Green and Bike Messenger with Whistle. (thx, casey)

Ze Frank blogs about participation  Jan 07 2009

Ze Frank has started a blog of notes and advice about fostering online participation. Lots of good stuff so far.

Usually there will be a few contributions that are outliers in technical merit and scale. There is a temptation to reward these contributions by drawing specific attention to them while the project is running. This can sometimes have the effect of damping the project as a whole, since potential contributors will measure their work against an artificially high standard. Alternatively, only displaying the most recent contribution allows the tonality of the project to be at the whim of the last contributor.

Instead of only focusing on technical ability, draw attention to qualities that can be expressed by anyone: simplicity, individuality, and humanity. Allow there to be a feeling of "Hey, I could do that too".

(via snarkmarket)

outside.in's StoryMaps  Dec 26 2008

I made a slight addition to the kottke.org archives page the other day: a StoryMap from outside.in's GeoToolkit.

[I removed the map temporarily because it wasn't loading.]

To construct the map, outside.in scrapes kottke.org's RSS feed, looks for names of specific places, and plots the related blog entries on a map. There's not a lot of local content on kottke.org but the results are still pretty good; it works a lot better on a local site like Gothamist. [Disclosure: I am an advisor to outside.in.]

Daily routines  Dec 09 2008

The Daily Routines blog collects stories about interesting people organize their days. For instance, Thomas Friedman "can't wait to get [his] pants on in the morning". Neither can we! Reminds me of rodcorp's How we work. (via snarkmarket)

The Best of LIFE  Dec 08 2008

The Best of LIFE blog is mining Google's Life Magazine archive and Flickr's Commons for the best photos.

Does the broken windows theory hold online?  Dec 01 2008

The Economist reports that experimental tests of the controversial "broken windows theory" of social behavior indicate that the theory is correct.

The most dramatic result, though, was the one that showed a doubling in the number of people who were prepared to steal in a condition of disorder. In this case an envelope with a EUR5 ($6) note inside (and the note clearly visible through the address window) was left sticking out of a post box. In a condition of order, 13% of those passing took the envelope (instead of leaving it or pushing it into the box). But if the post box was covered in graffiti, 27% did. Even if the post box had no graffiti on it, but the area around it was littered with paper, orange peel, cigarette butts and empty cans, 25% still took the envelope.

Here's the 1982 Atlantic article in which the theory was first discussed in a popular forum. (Great article, BTW.)

At the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.

Reading these articles, I wondered: how does the broken windows theory apply to online spaces? Perhaps like so:

Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to "own" their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same. Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves. More likely, they're discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether.

Unchecked comment spam signals that the owner/moderator of the forum or blog isn't paying attention, stimulating further improper conduct. Anonymity provides commenters with immunity from being associated with their speech and actions, making the whole situation worse...how does the community punish or police someone they don't know? Very quickly, the situation is out of control and your message board is the online equivalent of South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, inhabited by roving gangs armed with hate speech, fueled by the need for attention, making things difficult for those who wish to carry on useful conversations.

But what about a site's physical appearance? Does the aesthetic appearance of a blog affect what's written by the site's commenters? My sense is that the establishment of social norms through moderation, both by site owners and by the community itself, has much more of an impact on the behavior of commenters than the visual design of a site but aesthetics does factor in somewhat. Perhaps the poor application of a default MT or Wordpress template signals a lack of care or attention on the part of the blog's owner, leading readers to think they can get away with something. Poorly designed advertising or too many ads littered about a site could result in readers feeling disrespected and less likely to participate civilly or respond to moderation. Messageboard software is routinely ugly; does that contribute to the often uncivil tone found on web forums?

Pictures of Numbers blog  Nov 12 2008

Pictures of Numbers is infrequently updated, but the subject matter is timeless and the archives are worth a look.

Pictures of Numbers is a book-project-in-progress, consisting of practical tips and techniques for busy researchers on improving their data presentation.

The Blogging Scholarship  Oct 17 2008

The College Scholarships Foundation is offering a $10,000 blogging scholarship.

Do you maintain a weblog and attend college? Would you like $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs? If so, read on. We're giving away $10,000 this year to a college student who blogs.

Here's the 2007 winner's blog (and the two runners up). The application deadline is October 30. Get blogging!

New blog by James Surowiecki  Oct 16 2008

James Surowiecki, who writes the biweekly financial column for the New Yorker, has started a finance blog on the NYer site called The Balance Sheet.

Finding good stuff on the web  Oct 15 2008

Learn how designer Michael Surtees finds good stuff on the web without having to use an RSS reader.

The blogging houseplant  Oct 15 2008

When houseplants start blogging, you know the trend is on its way out.

The plant interface system, which is built around technology developed by Satoshi Kuribayashi at the Keio University Hiroya Tanaka Laboratory, uses surface potential sensors to read the weak bioelectric current flowing across the surface of the leaves. This natural current fluctuates in response to changes in the immediate environment, such as temperature, humidity, vibration, electromagnetic waves and nearby human activity. A specially developed algorithm translates this data into Japanese sentences, which are used as fodder for the plant's daily blog posts.

(via waxy)

Sergey Brin's blog  Sep 19 2008

Google founder Sergey Brin has started a blog. (via waxy)

Outside.in's StoryMaps  Sep 18 2008

Outside.in has launched a new feature called StoryMaps. When you sign up, they crawl your blog looking for mentions of places and then make a map of your posts. It doesn't work so well for my site (mostly because -- giggedy -- kottke.org is all over the map, har har), but for sites that post about a lot of local stuff, it works pretty well. See Gothamist's implementation, for instance. More on the outside.in blog. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to outside.in.)

Some recent Merlin Mann goodness  Sep 11 2008

Merlin Mann has been on a tear lately. He's been rethinking what he wants to do with 43 Folders -- a site he started four years ago to think in public about Getting Things Done (and other stuff) -- which rethinking has resulted in a bunch of good writing on weblogs, creative work, and online media. Some links and excerpts follow.

How to blog, the best and most succinct blogging advice I've ever read:

Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect. Edit everything, skip shortcuts, and try not to be a dick. Get better.

Going through my newsreader today, most of the sites I follow are written with those things in mind. Those that don't, out they go.

Better is a short account of Merlin's quest to remove the unpleasant and unproductive from his life. Worth quoting at length:

What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks - empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.

Don't get me wrong. Gumming the edges of popular culture and occasionally rolling the results into a wicked spitball has a noble tradition that includes the best work of of Voltaire, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, and a handful of people I count as good friends and brilliant editors. There's nothing wrong with fucking shit up every single day. But you have to bring some art to it. Not just typing.

What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it's making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me. So, I've come to despise it.

I've pointed to this one before...What Makes for a Good Blog?

Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It's not a blog: it's a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it's not really a blog.

And then a pair of posts that serve as Merlin's public declaration for 43 Folders' new direction and as a blistering takedown of the productivity blogs industry, reminiscent of Joel Johnson's classic takedown of Gizmodo and other gadget blogs published *on* Gizmodo. The first is Four Years:

At this juncture, I wish to apologize and formally atone for any role 43 Folders or I have had in popularizing "hack" as the preferred nomenclature for unmedicated knowledge workers dicking around with their "productivity system" all day. 43 Folders regrets the error.

And then Time, Attention and Creative Work:

If the work that really matters to you involves understanding a relationship between a handful of seemingly unrelated things and then figuring out the best way to portray, magnify, or resolve those relationships, then you're already doing creative work. Any time you make a connection between two or more axes that hadn't occurred to you 10 minutes ago, yes, you've done something creative. Seriously. This does not require your wearing a beret.

But, then -- and this is really important -- if you want to actually make something out of all that insight, and if you have the will and desire to polish and improve the execution of all the things you produce, then we'll have a lot to talk about.

Good luck with your new direction, Merlin. I never really read 43F too much before this summer -- spending a lot of time reading about all those little productivity tricks and whatnot seemed oxymoronic -- but I'm paying attention now.

How a Wired article comes to be  Sep 04 2008

Wired is keeping a blog that details the process of writing an upcoming story on, appropriately, writer/director Charlie Kaufman.

An almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature. You can see more about the design process on Wired creative director Scott Dadich's SPD blog, The Process. This is a one-time experiment, tied solely to the Charlie Kaufman profile scheduled to run in our November 08 issue.

We will post internal e-mails, audio, video, drafts, memos, and layouts. We reserve the right to edit our posts, out of sympathy for the reader or to protect our relationships with our sources. We will not post emails with sources or reproduce communications that take place outside of Wired.

Reading through, I'm not sure I want to know how the sausage is made. With the well-established processes and tropes that magazines follow in publishing each and ever month, stuff like this has a tendency to come off as cynical and overly mechanical (e.g. the piece is already mostly written...they just need Kaufman to fill in the details). I also keep thinking...what if Kaufman reads this before his interviews take place? Is it better or worse for the finished piece that he knows their whole angle going in? (via snarkmarket)

Update: Clarification from Jason Tanz (the author of the Kaufman piece) at Wired...most of the interviews with Kaufman have already been conducted and a rough draft of the story has been completed. They wanted to be at least this far along before they posted any of these materials so as to avoid complications with the interview process. Tanz says that they hope to be "pretty close to real time [on the storyboard blog] by the end of next week".

Digital Journalist photo blog  Aug 26 2008

The Digital Journalist has launched a photo blog modeled after The Big Picture. Well done. I've followed this site on and off for years but always found it too difficult to navigate through to find the photography, which is shot by top-notch photojournalists and is amazing. Nice to see the photography put front and center. Case in point: this wonderful selection of sports photos by Walter Iooss Jr., punctuated by stories of the athletes he was photographing (Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, etc.). Here's Iooss' account of photographing Jordan at the 1988 dunk contest:

The problem with shooting the NBA slam-dunk contest was that you never knew how the players were going to dunk, especially Jordan. In 1997 [sic, it was actually 1987] he had twirled and dunked with his back to me. But by this time I knew him a little better. As he sat in the stands three hours before the contest, I said, "Michael, can you tell me which way you're going to go, so I can move and get your face in the picture?" He looked at me as if I were crazy but then said, "Sure. Before I go out to dunk I'll put my index finger on my knee and point which way I'm going." I said, "You're going to remember that?" And he said, "Sure." So later, when they announced his name, I looked over to him on the bench and there was his finger pointing left. I got up and moved to the right side of the basket so I could see his face. He went left every time he dunked. On his last two dunks he ran the length of the court, took off from the foul line and slammed the ball through. On the next-to-last one he landed in my lap. On the last one I set up in the same spot. He looked at me as if to say, "Go left a little, give me some room this time." And that was it, the picture was made: 1000th of a second frozen in time.

BTW, I've heard that The Big Picture has spawned a number of copycats around the web, including this one from the WSJ.

DFL  Aug 22 2008

I always forget about the awesome DFL blog until right before the Olympics are over. The site keeps track of all the last place finishers during the Games. Here's the site's tagline:

Celebrating last-place finishes at the Olympics. Because they're there, and you're not.

China is leading with 8 last place finishes. (via matt's a.whole)