Red Links 13/09/11

Simon on RTE and aggregation.

Fred on keeping the logged-out user in mind when designing sites.

Joe Forkin’s Lebowski Cycle.

The Royal Observatory’s astronomy photographs of 2011. Via io9.

Do you like the Diet Coke redesign?

 

September 13th, 2011 at 1:40 pm • Add Comment • Filed in Links


Bet you are jealous

Facebook message
Someone should tell those Davis campaigners that setting up fake profiles is against Facebook TOS.

September 8th, 2011 at 2:37 pm • Add Comment • Filed in Politics


A hymn to making

Caterina wrote a really thoughful piece on making things. If there’s just one post you’ll read this week. Read it. You know sometimes how the word “make” has been claimed along with “game” and mangled into something that one feels dirty reading. Well, they shouldn’t be.

Caterina’s post has been swimming in my mind for few days, and it came to the surface yesterday as I read this tweet by @jessefarmer:

People don’t want to be convinced, they want to be inspired.

These both come from the same place. As human beans, we all just wanna be inspired. The things that inspire me to make things or make things better are not reading about Y Combinator deals, or going to enterpreneur- sandwiched meetups. It’s not baitlinkings. Or ebooks.

Sometimes the frustration of mangled double-speak on topic of technology makes me want to scream bullshit like I used to and run away like a seven-year girl. If someone is inspired, they’re probably hacking together something rather than speaking around it. They are probably investing their time in things they love making.

My day job necessitates me being a critic all day long. I enjoy this. But sometimes, the doing of trying to make things better gives one a sinking feeling, nay a hesitation, of making things from scratch. 9-5, I plan for gaps. Afterhours, it can be difficult to focus on the making things, gaps and all. It slows the pace of making, as I Hans Brinker my way through. Plugging gaps in designs proactively. And that’s something I have to deal with, and something I’m getting better at. But even then, I’m inspired and led to making things, by the things that made me. Kinda like Caterina alludes to.

In a roundabout kind of way, I suppose I’m saying that making doesn’t have to be profound or released to the public or a straight line or the subject of every greasy-till fumble. And the making of Silly is needed now more than ever.

September 8th, 2011 at 2:07 pm • 1 Comment • Filed in Culture, Geekery


On Yahoo’s 11th Hour

The Yahoo implosion is continuing at an alarming pace since Bartz was canned last night. What’s sad is that for many people, is that Yahoo was their first port of call on this long and interesting path to where we are now on the web. It’s directory was once a touchstone for a generation of web users. How many of use still use our first Yahoo mailboxes? It’s still got a touch of the warm and fuzz for me.

A lot of the problems I see Yahoo making over and over again stem from its failure to really embrace the spirit of its failed Brickhouse project and give levity and space to its engineers to invent. Yahoo aren’t the only company making this mistake.

Brickhousing
On establishment, Brickhouse was shaped to be a pocket monster of an invention studio. Set in the startup hub of central SF, its mission was to recapture the startup vibe in Yahoo. While it produced some interesting projects like Fire Eagle, it was for all intents and purposes, a phantom limb for nurturing innovation in Yahoo proper.

There seemed to be a lot of problems that stunted Brickhouse’s impact. Not being on the main campus was a massive problem. Not just for the Brickhouse imagineers feeling the beat of the HQ, but also for reinvesting that innovation and reenergising the body of Yahoo. It’s difficult to motivate people at the coalface of an organisation working on the mundane but shipping parts of a site, when you’ve created a special hip beast in central SF and annointed them as the engine of the org’s R&D effort going forward. Who wants to be shipping yesterday’s software?

Revolving Chiefs, Revolving Goals

Leadership was going in circles. A lot of tech vets ran through the doors of Brickhouse – Salim Ismail (now at Singularity U), Chad Dickerson (now head of Etsy), Caterina Fake (Flickr, Hunch). It all seems a bit chicken and egg. No doubt the exec bounce rate was inextricably linked to Yahoo’s existential crisis. A crisis completely characterised by the infamous Peanut Butter Manifesto written by the former SVP Brad Garlinghouse in 2006 just as the Brickhouse was was finding its feet. A crisis that included Yahoo buying Zimbra in 2007 for $350m, a company who’s mailbox architecture was seen by Yahoo as an undoubted opening salvo against Google Apps dominance

The acquisition of Zimbra will help Yahoo! to expand its presence in universities, businesses and through ISPs by enabling organizations to host e-mail on or off premises with their own domain.

Zimbra was then punted to VMware less than three years later, with Yahoo still committed to using its technology for its mail and calendar products. A double-whammy. Yahoo basically said we don’t want to architect Zimbra’s IP, but because of dependancies with our architecture, we’ll be at the mercy of your decision-making, Mr VMware. Basically.

It’s damn clear that rebellion was ricocheting at lots of levels of Yahoo – the manifesto, execs and key product people leaving. The effect was astounding. Acquisitions were bolted on hap-hazardly. Partnerships on roads to nowhere inked – search deals with Samsung and RIM etc while the iPhone quietly hoovered up marketshare.

But all of that is now in the past. Or is it? There’s a lot of commentary on the web saying that Yahoo needs to embrace its present company DNA and just decide it’s a media organisation rather than a technology company. Yahoo, the media org is at first-glance is an easier value proposition to understand. It has properties to drive – Yahoo! Finance and Mail are still well eyeballed but I fail to see the impetus to reinvent these properties if Yahoo decides just to be a media company. Yes, media organisations like the Guardian do very well – thank you very much. But Yahoo will never be the Guardian. And it probably shouldn’t try to be.

And stirrings of the impending sale of Yahoo shouldn’t come as a surprise. Packaging the whole company. If I’ve learned anything from Pretty Woman it’s that selling off a company in well-rounded units rather than a confusing maw of properties makes sense. Which is why I am intrigued to read reports of possible sale of the company is on the cards. Maybe going private is what needs to happen, but a private monster is still a monster.

September 7th, 2011 at 12:13 pm • Add Comment • Filed in Geekery


Yellow Ostrich ‘Whale’

August 27th, 2011 at 11:08 pm • Add Comment • Filed in Culture


Pronoun usage and college admission

Interesting piece in the Scientific American on a study of pronoun usage in society:

Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students’ major.

To me, the use of nouns — especially concrete nouns — reflects people’s attempts to categorize and name objects, events, and ideas in their worlds. The use of verbs and pronouns typically occur when people tell stories. Universities clearly reward categorizers rather than story tellers. If true, can we train young students to categorize more? Alternatively, are we relying too much on categorization strategies in American education?

 

August 19th, 2011 at 12:01 pm • Add Comment • Filed in Brainstrobing


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