How Many People Are In Space Right Now?

How Many People Are In Space Right Now?

Study paints Kindle e-reader a dark shade of green

According to a study by the Cleantech Group, you need to download 23 books for the Kindle before it breaks even in CO₂ use.

Also, as pointed out in the comments, Kindle versions are $9.99 compared to maybe $15 for a new book, but you need to add $299 to the price of the device. At that rate, you have to buy a Kindle and 60 books ($900) before the Kindle’s prices win out.

Frank Quitely's Daredevil, Superman, and More

Just wanted to share a few amazing Frank Quitely images. He’s one of my favorite artists, partly because he works with Grant Morrison so much, but also because, well, I think you’ll be able to tell why from this Daredevil he drew:

(click to embiggen)

How fantastically dynamic. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud discusses how a single panel, like the one above, can show both one moment in time and have a narrative. The drawing originally appeared in Daredevil 65 as a standalone piece of art. It wasn’t part of the issue, just a piece of eye candy by Quitely (along with other artists’ work), so there’s no story to go with this. Just a Daredevil vs. ninja smackdown. But it does have a story. Let me amateurishly draw in a few gutters:

Suddenly we’re not just looking at one moment in time, we’re seeing a story. Daredevil versus a sneak of ninjas, swords flying. We have three different things going on. At the top, two ninjas are prepared, ready, posed, jumping into the fray. In the middle, Daredevil is ably dispatching a few of their friends. And in the bottom, the ones Daredevil has already defeated, their weapons in freefall below them. All in one image. This is visual storytelling.

The piece also makes homage to Frank Miller, who famously wrote Daredevil in the 80s and more or less created the treatment of the character as a ninja. Compare the composition to this iconic drawing by Miller from 300 (along with its movie version):

Birds of Prey

Just for fun, Quitely’s cover to Birds of Prey 125:

All Star Superman

And to show some mood, and not just action, All Star Super­man 1:

This cover, drawn by Quitely, came from an idea Morrison had for his never-realized Superman 2000 collaboration with Mark Millar, Tom Peyer, and Mark Waid (which Tim Callahan and Chad Nevett covered extensively last year). Morrison met a fan dressed as Superman in the middle of the night outside of a hotel and had a long conversation with him, in character. Superman.nu covers the meeting, about which Morrison says:

The thing that really hit me, wasn’t so much what Superman was saying as how he was sitting. He was perched on a bollard with one knee drawn up, chin resting on his arms. He looked totally relaxed… and I suddenly realized this was how Superman would sit. He wouldn’t puff out his chest or posture heroically, he would be totally chilled. If nothing can hurt you, you can afford to be cool. A man like Superman would never have to tense against the cold; never have to flinch in the face of a blow. He would be completely laid back, un-tense. With this image of Superman relaxing on a cloud looking out for us all in my head, I rushed back to my hotel room and filled dozens of pages of my notebook with notes and drawings.

Look again at how Quitely draws this scene. See how relaxed Superman is as he watches over Metropolis. Now look at how much depth is in that picture. It’s easy to focus just on Superman, but there’s a fully-imagined city below those clouds. You can see The Daily Planet just peaking up by Superman’s boots, with Centennial Park just beyond. The plane of clouds Superman is sitting on is hundreds of feet up, where it’s calm. Quitely captures the scope of the entire world there, floating hundreds in the sky. The city under those clouds isn’t just background filler, it’s the real focus of the image.

More of his stuff at Comic Art Community.

Sending a Ping to PubSubHubbub from MarsEdit

MarsEdit is a handy Macintosh application that I use to compose entries for my website. Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t understand, when I publish a post with MarsEdit, none of Movable Type’s plug-ins seem to fire off. At present I use Multiblog to rebuilt my Debigulated URLs blog, which allows short URLs to work for all of my main blog’s entries, and I use MT-PubSubHubbub to ping Google’s PubSubHubbub hub when I post a new entry. If Multiblog doesn’t get triggered, the short URL I’m declaring in my page’s head won’t work because the .htaccess file at my link shortener hasn’t been rebuilt. If MT-PubSubHubbub doesn’t fire, the hub won’t get notified of a new post. I can work around the first problem using Bob the Rebuilder, and I’ve written up a sloppy AppleScript to deal with pinging the hub from MarsEdit.

I am absolutely certain that there’s a better way to do this, but here’s what I’ve got going for now. It works in testing using FriendFeed, which updates within seconds of a post that pings Google’s hub¹. Here’s the script:

tell application "Safari" activate do JavaScript "window.open('http://david. ely.fm/davextreme/')" in document 1 end tell  delay 2  tell application "System Events" tell process "Safari" tell menu bar 1 tell menu bar item "Bookmarks" tell menu "Bookmarks" tell menu item "Bookmarklets" tell menu "Bookmarklets" click menu item "Publish to Hub" end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell  delay 2  tell application "Safari" to close the front window 

I placed the script in my MarsEdit scripts folder (found easily by going to MarsEdit’s Scripts menu and selecting “Open Scripts Folder”).

The script requires that you have:

1. A “Bookmarklets” folder in your main Bookmarks menu in Safari; and
2. Google’s “Publish to Hub” bookmarklet in that folder, which bookmarklet can be found on Google’s site near the bottom of the page².

From there, I post an entry using MarsEdit, then select my “Ping Hub” script from the Scripts menu. It opens my webpage, waits two seconds for it to load, invokes the “Publish to Hub” bookmarklet, then closes the window.

My hope is that someone develops a plugin for MarsEdit that does this more elegantly, but maybe this will be helpful to people in the meantime. (Or someone can tell me why those plugins don’t activate when my xmlrpc updates go through.)

1. The only use I have for FriendFeed being testing this push stuff. ↩
2. Yes, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace, so I use “which” in new ways and employ footnotes too often³. Hopefully it’ll wear off soon. ↩
3. Also I go out of my way to point out that I’ve been reading DFW (and call him DFW). ↩

The Conversation

A few weeks ago, Khoi Vinh wrote “Conversation Pieces” about one of my all-time favorite movies, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Then it was playing in The Galaxy Hut last week when I was hanging out with @princeofwhy. And now Jim Emmerson’s Scanners blog writes an Opening Shots piece on it. See also, from a few years ago, “What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood”, which goes into how Netflix has allowed The Conversation to become popular again despite being relatively obscure (Long Tail and whatnot).

I first saw the film in a class called “Philosophy of Narrative Art” at William & Mary, taught by Professor Lawrence Becker. Aside from getting “When the Red, Red Robin” fucking permanently stuck in my head, we looked at how the film was inspired by Julio Cortézar’s short story “Las Babas del Diablo” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Blow-Up features a photographer who thinks he sees something in a photo (and also the first instance of full-frontal female nudity in British film), where The Conversation moves the concept to an audio technician who becomes obsessed over a recording (and also an amazing performance by Gene Hackman, a different and ultimately more lasting claim to fame than that of the preceding parenthetical). Coppola naturally doesn’t credit either influence, but he didn’t mention Joseph Conrad in Apocalypse Now, either.

Both The Conversation and Blow-Up are available from Netflix.

If/Whether

Here’s a finer point of grammar that I probably learned years ago. On page 763 of Infinite Jest, Mario is talking to his mother:

Mario: “How can you tell if somebody’s sad?”

Avril: “You mean whether someone’s sad.”

Not being able to recall the distinction between “if” and “whether”, I asked the question of the Infinite Summer forum and got this response from user isabella:

From Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (which DFW discussed at length in “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage”):

It’s a good practice to distinguish between these words. Use if for a conditional idea, whether for an alternative or possibility. Thus, Let me know if you’ll be coming means that I want to hear from you only if you’re coming. But Let me know whether you’ll be coming means that I want to hear from you about your plans one way or the other.

Copyeditors (I am one) generally try to maintain the distinction.

Voilà! The Wallace essay is online here.

THE WALKING DEAD MAP - Google Maps

Annotated map of all of the events of The Walking Dead (which I’m a bit behind on).

Mac OS X Over The Years

Mac OS X Over The Years

It’s neat to see how the interface has been refined over the years.

Project Runway Episodes (Barely) Online

Staci D. Kramer reports that Lifetime will not offer Project Runway on iTunes. You can watch it on Lifetime’s website starting two days after it airs, but that’s it. This quote by Lifetime Digital’s Dan Suratt shows, characteristically, that Lifetime still thinks of the internet as a nuisance that detracts from their real business of television: “I think what it really goes to is we firmly believe in the power of our site to drive people to our channel and that’s what we use it for.” Because clearly everyone gets Lifetime. And wants to watch your show on Thursday nights, and certainly would make time in their schedules if only they saw a glimpse of it online. Because while you can’t stop the internet, you can funnel traffic to your site where at least you can limit the damage. Forget Hulu, which offers a nice user experience with lots of shows from different networks. Forget iTunes, where people will actually pay you to download a show. Just build a site and force people who don’t want to/can’t watch Lifetime to watch your show on a tiny computer screen instead of their nice, big TVs.

So yeah, I’m bitter. I really like Project Runway. I have an Apple TV and prefer watching shows on my TV instead of my laptop enough that I’ll (gasp) actually pay for episodes, yet they don’t want my money.

Labeling Tie-Ins

For future reference, Secret Invasion reading order.

One of the things that annoys me about superhero crossover stories is that they’re very hard to reread later. Secret Invasion was a miniseries with tie-ins in New Avengers and Mighty Avengers. Many of those (horrid) tie-in issues respond to events in the main series, so it’s important that they be read in the right order. But how, a year later, am I supposed to remember that, say, New Avengers 47 comes after Secret Invasion 8?

DC’s solution has been to putting little “triangle numbers” on the covers of its Superman books that correspond to their placement in the larger storyline¹. This approach works, and DC has actually been very careful about making sure that each book in the line² can be read on its own, with each following a different subplot of the larger story. So you can just read Supergirl on its own, but if you’re rereading the whole Codename: Patriot story, you can look at Supergirl 44’s red “three” and know that 1.) it’s part three of the story and 2.) whatever book has a “four” on it is next. The approach mostly works, and it’s good bait for completists who can’t stand not having every issue of a crossover story.

Publishers need to be careful with the power they hold over fans in this regard. Serious fans will buy every issue of a crossover, but only as long as it holds their interest. It’s helpful that DC tries to clearly mark which of its Superman comics are part of a given storyline, and even more helpful that the label gives you the reading order, but it also means that DC needs to make sure that those issues really are important to the story. If there are other stories to tell that relate to the events of the crossover but aren’t needed to follow its plot, they shouldn’t be assigned badged numbers on their covers. Blackest Night: Batman, for example, might be of interest to people who are enjoying Blackest Night and want to see how it has affected Gotham’s heroes, but its events aren’t likely to lead back nor be largely important to the main Blackest Night story. Reading Blackest Night years later I might want to read the Batman tie-in issues, but I wouldn’t need to read them to understand the story and it largely wouldn’t matter if I read them out of sequence with how they were originally published. Issues of Green Lantern or Green Lantern Corps., however, that do directly follow events of Blackest Night are somewhat more “required” and should be labeled with a reading order (and are not). Something like “Blackest Night Week 5” would be fine.

While numbers on the covers are I think the plainest way to show a reader how to easily find the next issue of a crossover, another classic approach has been to print a checklist at the back of the first issue of a crossover. These checklists, though, tend to list every tie-in and not just the “crucial” stories. Not that I expect a publisher to say, “you can skip these ones”, and it’s easy enough to browse the list knowing that I don’t care about, say, Hulk, and decide to skip The Incredible Hulk’s miniseries. The initially-published checklists also rarely encompass all of the tie-ins that eventually get published, as more books get dreamed up during the course of the crossover. Civil War: The Confession, for example, was about best tie-in to Civil War and wasn’t on initial rosters. Finally, using a checklist years later requires that I find a book containing a checklist (usually just the first few issues of a crossover) and lay out all the involved issues ahead of time for rereading, or I’ll have to keep going back to reference the checklist whenever I want to read the next issue. And printing a checklist in every issue means the publisher has to give up a page that would otherwise be advertisements (though mainstream comics often contain lots of house ads, and a checklist is just an ad for their own products, likely more effective than any other house ad could be, considering it just means trying to convince people to read more of a story they’ve already bought into).

The best comic crossovers don’t just happen out of nowhere. Careful writers will spend years building up to an event, as Geoff Johns did with The Sinestro Corps War and Blackest Night and Brian Michael Bendis with Secret Invasion. As the craft of comic storybuilding has matured, with continuity stretching back decades, it becomes very difficult to trace these things. Secret Invasion is mostly an Avengers story, but contains major developments in the life of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. Their story started in Alias long before either joined the Avengers in New Avengers. Should Marvel go back and stick “Secret Invasion Precursor” stickers on trades of Alias and Pulse? Certainly not, but since they’re all part of the massive story that Brian Michael Bendis has woven throughout his work at Marvel, they are connected.

This is one of the very cool things about comics and their shared universe, but outside of comics, Stephen King did a similar thing with Dark Tower, weaving together many of his stories with characters who appear in other books. And going beyond direct prequels, homage plays just as important a part in understanding stories. Grant Morrison’s New X-Men doesn’t have any lead-in issues, but it’s impossible to decode without knowing the 70s and 80s Chris Claremont stories that Morrison plays up as tropes. Wolves of the Calla is Stephen King paying an extended homage to Seven Samuari, but it’s a western so we might as well mention The Magnificent Seven (and don’t forget that the villains look like Doctor Doom). Hamlet and The Iliad are everywhere, and woe to the discerning Simpsons viewer who hasn’t seen Citizen Kane.

Even then, I haven’t ever actually read the Claremont era X-Men stories, but they’ve been retold in cartoons and referenced enough times that I know what the key events in them are and can recognize homages to them. Someone who’s never seen The Shining could enjoy The Simpsons’s parody of it nonetheles. So much of popular culture depends on these touchstone stories that I think we’d helpless without the ability to turn into personal simulacra the ones we’ve never read out of their repeated appearances and parodies.

Anyway, to return to my initial point of how best to label superhero crossovers, there are, I’d say, five parts to any comics event:

1. Setup issues that establish the main conflict (ex. the New Avengers stuff with Elektra skrull, but not going back as New Avengers 1, despite Bendis having planted seeds that much in advance);
2. The main book (Civil War, Blackest Night);
3. Crucial tie-ins, usually written by the author of the main book (Superman Beyond);
4. Ancillary tie-ins, ideally that don’t require referring back to the main book once they’ve started; and
5. Aftermath stuff that shows how characters are dealing with whatever happened in the main book, or that play with a new status quo resulting thereof.

My preference would be that the trade dress of books in category one have some sort of label like “Prelude to Blackest Night” and maybe a countdown. Books in categories two and three should be numbered on their covers, either in a full sequence (Blackest Night, Green Lantern, and Green Lantern Corps would all have numbers on them) or by week/month (something like “Week 5”) that let you easily know which issue to read after the one you’ve just finished.

1. The triangle numbers originated during the Death of Superman storyline, which ran through Action Comics, The Adventures of Superman, The Man of Steel, The Man of Tomorrow, and Superman. Each book continued directly from one to the next, so you had to buy all five to be able to understand it all. ↩
2. Action Comics, Supergirl, Superman, Superman: World of New Krypton, and a few special issues and annuals. ↩

Popular Collective Nouns on All Sorts

I really love this: All Sorts, a Linguistic Experiment scrapes Twitter for new terms of venery. The game of venery, of course, requires a bit of linguistic finesse, so it’s fun to see others’ ideas.

See also, of course, An Exaltation of Larks.

Movable Type PubSubHubbub Plugin

Movable Type Plugin to ping Google’s PubSubHubBub when you post. I’ve installed it but don’t know of a good way to test it out.

Update: strike that. FriendFeed displayed this post faster than I could switch windows to watch for it.

PETA vs. Women

The Onion’s recent video Advocacy Group Decries PETA’s Inhumane Treatment of Women is a parody, but isn’t this a valid critique of PETA? My typical policy is just to ignore everything they do because I think their stupid stunts are harmful to the cause, but it’s always bothered me that they parade women around for publicity stunts. Says a fake Onion PETA spokesman:

We have no intention of changing our tactics until every last animal on the planet is given more respect than women.

30 Real Animals with Science Fiction Names

30 Real Animals with Science Fiction Names

Dive Into HTML 5

Dive into HTML 5, an online book by Mark Pilgrim, with illustrations from the public domain. Looks like it’ll be published in a few months.

Mad Men Spoiler Report

Rich Sommer hosts a heavily redacted tour of the Sterling Cooper set.

Also discovered: The Footnotes of Mad Men.

Lessn

Shaun Inman releases Lessn, a very simple URL shortener.

the impossible cool.

The Impossible Cool

World of Warcraft - Cataclysm

MMO Champion publishes leaked information about the next World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm. With the presumed the defeat of Arthas coming at the end of the Wratch of the Lich King expansion, Blizzard has played out most of the plot threads left over from Warcraft III. Cataclysm will let them move on to newer storylines that (more or less) started in WoW.

The Tech of Mad Men

I was just talking earlier today about how much cooler technology looked when switches, knobs, and lights all looked like airplane components or parts of complicated radio equipment. I think you could make some money selling retro wood console cases for HDTVs. Speaking of: The Tech of Mad Men.

Beach Boys on YouTube

Two great Beach Boys Pet Sounds links today:

1. A capella versions of the album, which really let you hear how cool their harmonies are.
2. Julia Nunes plays God Only Knows on a Ukulele

(Funny how YouTube has made it so easy to share media, please just upload music with static video. Surely there’s a better place to share music, but YouTube is easy and known.)

Onyxia raid in 3.2

My World of Warcraft account is inactive, but this news makes me want back in!

This permanent update to Onyxia will convert the dungeon into 10- and 25-player modes. We will be adding new items to Onyxia’s loot table that have the same model as some of the classic loot from this dungeon, like Tier 2 helms, with stats updated to match the current level of content. There will be a special new item too: a normal drake-sized 310% speed flying mount modeled after Onyxia herself called an Onyxia Broodling. We will also be updating the encounter mechanics to be more fitting for modern raiding, but we can guarantee players will get to experience the frightening horror of deep breaths once again.

Then for a limited time, after the 5-year anniversary event officially begins in November, anybody who logs in will receive an Onyxia Brood Whelpling pet.

Really cool. Onyxia is a great looking dragon. I’m assuming the 310% speed mount will be from an achievement.

Time to bone up on strategy.

Update: A Q&A MMO Champion reprints says the mount will be a rare drop. They also have photos of the new stuff.

Harmony Comes to the Nation

Harmony Comes to the Nation is a new, short Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic on Dark Horse Presents by Jane Espenson and Karl Moline (artist on previous Buffy book Fray), featuring Harmony and Stephen Colbert.

Project Retweet

Twitter will soon provide an official way to retweet. From the sketch they showed, I liked this implementation. Instead of junking up my timeline with the noise of “RT: @username”, I’ll just see the referenced post. Much better.

The Film Freak Central Blog: In Retrograde

Short Film Freak Central documentary on the cinematography of Mad Men. I love the point about the show not using steadycams to give it an older look.

Epitaph One

The 13th episode of Dollhouse, which Fox didn’t air, is now available on iTunes.

Steven Soderbergh on Aspect Ratios

Essay by Steven Soderbergh on how premium movie channels are showing anamorphic films in flat. Not ever having had HBO (nor even cable right now) I haven’t noticed this, but Netflix’s Instant Queue movies all seem to be 16×9. I haven’t bought any movies from iTunes, so I don’t know what they’re doing. See also An In Depth Talk with Leon Vitali, about Stanley Kubrick’s aspect ratio quandaries.

N00b Boyfriend - CollegeHumor video

What I like about this video, n00b Boyfriend, is how attractive the daughter and family are vs. the boyfriend. It would have been easy to make the gamer characters look like dorks, but the joke works way better making them look normal.

Using Movable Type as a Simple URL Shortener

With today’s news that tr.im is shutting down, I decided to take on a small project and write a URL shortening service within Movable Type. It’s probably not the most elegant solution, and could well break some best practices, but it works for now.

First, I created a new blog in Movable Type. With ely.fm I already have a pretty short address, so I have the blog at http://ely.fm/debigulated/ and will use ely.fm/u/ to redirect URLs from.

Next, I made a new index template that will create an .htaccess file. I set the output file to ../u/.htaccess. The content of the template I used:

<mt:Entries> Redirect 301 /u/<$mt:EntryID$> <$mt:EntryBody convert_breaks="0" encode_ampersands="1"$> </mt:Entries> 

This will use the entry ID of my posts as the short URL slug. It could be shorter if I had a way to convert it to hex or base-36 or something, but it’ll do.

Now, to debigulate a URL, I create a new entry in my new blog. The title is the name of the page I’m linking to, and its body is its URL.

In order to get the short URL I’ve made an index template that shows the short link and the long one. It also provides some semblance of a record of where the short links go if I ever shut down the service. So, edit the Entry Summary template, where it says <$mt:EntryBody$>, to something like:

<p>Short URL: http://ely.fm/<br /> Long URL: <$mt:EntryBody convert_breaks="0"$></p> 

My running list of debigulated URLs is here. (Note: it’s written in HTML 5, just for fun, and I’ve done almost no cross-browser testing. It may look like nonsense in some browsers.) The first set of links will be a running list of URLs I’ve shortened, followed by a list of links to my own blog posts, which also have self-declared shorturls. The short link for the post you’re reading right now is ely.fm/u/464.

I may also include some tracking by turning the links into Bird Feeder seeds. All of this works pretty well, but I’m sure a Movable Type plugin could do it better, or a stand-alone application one could install on a web server. Regardless, it was a good project for me to stretch my brain a little.

Grant Morrison's 18 Days

Bleeding Cool reports:

Liquid Comics and Perspective Studio are pursuing the property as a CGI drama as 18 Days: The Mahbharata Retold, for broadcast next year in multiple formats depending on territory and format—2×90 minute TV movies, 6×30 episodes, an extended 200 minute DVD release or 18×10 minute web episodes. There will be online and console games alongside the show and by the time it’s out you’ll probably be able to interact with it on your SuperNintendo.

Includes a trailer that looks Star Wars: The Clone Wars-ish.

Rough Draft - The Original of Buffy

Neat article on the original movie Buffy versus the series. There aren’t many other cases where you can see how a screenplay can get mangled as it becomes a movie and then compared it to a TV series where the creator was able to bring it to life. The American President and The West Wing come to mind. Comments are open if anyone has other examples.

Please Don't: Email and Tweet Your Bookmarks

To add to my argument that one shouldn’t clutter up one’s Twitter account with information that’s better delivered by RSS, del.icio.us now allows you to spam your Twitter account with every site you bookmark. If done (im)properly, I’ll now get to your bookmarks in my RSS reader, my Twitter client, and my del.icio.us network!

How many calories are in a human brain?

A health-conscious zombie might wonder, how many calories are in a human brain?

ThisService

ThisService is a handy MacOS scripting doohickie you can use to turn any Perl, Python, etc. script into a systme-wide service. I’m using it to convert older weblog entries from HTML to Markdown.

Wal-Mart Knocks Off the Girl Scouts

Wal-Mart is going to start selling knock-off Girl Scout cookies, which is completely messed up.

Daring Fireball: Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple

Apple forced the makers of a dictionary to remove “objectionable” words before allowing it onto the App Store. Waiting for that Steve Jobs blog post saying they’re changing how they’re going to run that any day now…

I’d been looking for a good iPhone dictionary and was unhappy with the Dictionary.com one, which I deleted almost immediately. Since I already know all my curse words, I’ve bought Ninjawords and will give it a try (link opens iTunes).

Update: Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller responds.

Timeline of Pepsi and Coca-Cola logos

See Pepsi and Coca-Cola’s logos over the years. The chart is a little unfair in that Coke changes its can design just as often as Pepsi, but not its logo. Still, does anyone prefer the new Pepsi logo?

Update: Brand New fact-checks the image, showing that Coca-Cola really has changed over the years.

10 Muppets and Their Mad Men Counterparts

10 Muppets and Their Mad Men Counterparts.

Netflix set to stream Watch Instantly flicks to iPhone, Wii

Netflix is reportedly going to start offering its Instant Queue streaming service for the iPhone and the Wii. This makes a great value-add for the Wii, which has been on the XBOX for a while now. It’s already plugged into your TV, which is likely placed in a better spot for movie-viewing than your computer.

"Going Google" with Google Apps

Hmm. Google’s launching a campaign called “Going Google” designed to get companies to switch to Google Apps from (though unstated) Microsoft stuff. I do think that Gmail provides about the best email experience there is, be it desktop- or web-based, I don’t think Google Docs are at all ready for real use as a primary authoring tool, bloated and annoying as Word is.

Misuses of Twitterfeed

Blogger’s website today advertises a “Tweet Your Blog” service from Twitterfeed, whereby you can have it automatically post a tweet whenever you write a blog post. In other words, you can fill up your Twitter account with crap more easily!

But let me back up for a moment…

I’m a firm believe that things have their place, even on the internet. One shouldn’t, for example, send an email requesting information one needs immediately. That’s what phone calls are for. We all pay $50+ a month to carry a cell phone everywhere we go so we can be reached immediately if needed. Email, Facebook messages, instant messages, etc. all require the recipient to be at his computer. Even with text messages and push updates, the user has to have a phone that supports them and has to hear the single beep announcing them.

Messaging in general has a hierarchy:

1. Immediate conversation: telephone.
2. Relay information quickly, but not the end of the world if they don’t see it: text message.
3. Semi-live conversation: instant message chat.
4. Information you don’t need them to get right away: email.
5. You don’t know their email address but need to send them a message, the more important part of which is, “send me your email address”: Facebook messaging. (Yes, I’m old.)

The thesis here being that various communication media have their positives and negatives, and working within the constraints of what they were designed to do tends to be the best way to go.

Weblogs have a companion system designed to help people find out when they’ve posted an update: RSS. If you like a weblog, you should subscribe to its RSS feed. If you don’t use RSS already, go sign up for Google Reader. It’ll keep track of the sites you like and show you their updates with an hour or so of them being published. No need to go check each website yourself.

So if I’ve done what I’m supposed to do and subscribed to your blog in my RSS reader, I’ll see your new post next time I check it. But if you’re using something like Blogger’s Twitterfeed recommendation, and I follow you on Twitter, too, I’m going to end up seeing your post twice. Though often criticized for being filled with useless patter, a carefully curated Twitter feed contains good information you want to read from your friends. Fill that up with “Check out my new blog post!” links to posts you’re already going to see in your RSS reader, and the signal-to-noise ratio starts to skew. (And all those retweets.)

Poor Twitter is already victim to too much misuse. It wisely kept its service very open at the start, which let people design some cool extensions and applications for it¹, but also left it open, like many previously useful services, to being ruined by marketers, companies, politicians, etc. Twitter’s greatest value is in being able to keep an open chatroom with your friends. You can also use it to read celebrity’s tweets, and that’s fun, but it becomes a thin, one-way experience if that’s all you use it for. Is there any reason you’d want to read a newspaper’s tweets? Shouldn’t you just buy the paper or go to its website? Yes, a corporation can try to get in on the hot new thing by creating a Twitter feed, but the chance that it’s going to provide anything other than a shallow marketing channel is pretty small. Twitter’s for sharing thoughts, and companies don’t have those. People do.

1. I should add here, way down at the bottom of the post, because I didn’t find a good place above to mention it, that I *do* think Twitterfeed, which Blogger is recommending people use to tweet their blog posts, is a great use of Twitter’s open approach. It’s great that there are lots of interesting ways to get information into and out of Twitter, and there are plenty of good reasons you might want to post the contents of an RSS feed to a Twitter account. I just don’t think a standard blog is an apt use. RSS works well with blogs because it’s a subscription-based concept, not a notification service (and [though that looks to be changing][ad], pushbutton RSS readers will still be the right place to read blogs, not Twitter). Twitterfeed, combined with Twitter’s ability to send text messages, can be used to notify you of eBay auctions, or sales on w00t, or new comments you need to approve on your blog, or post to Twitter that you’re going to be out of town via Dopplr without having to remember to do it yourself, and so on. ↩

Hiding the "n People Liked This" Thing in Google Reader

Google recently added some social features to Google Reader that I found to be terribly distracting. The footer of every post now has a button you can press to show that you “like” that post. Any post that anyone “liked” now has, at its top, a smiley face with “n people liked this”. Annoying because:

1. I don’t care how many people liked that post. I really don’t. I’ll read the post for myself and decide if I like it. Whether anonymous people like it doesn’t matter at all to me. That people I know might matter, but mostly that’s covered by them writing about it on their own blogs.
2. The “n people liked this” message appears at the top of the post! I can’t even easily ignore this useless information. It’s just clutter.

Fortunately, you can turn it off (mostly). In Google Reader’s settings, under “Preferences”, click “Only show ‘Likes’ by people you follow.”