links for 2010-07-16
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"When you commit to being your real self online, you discover parts of yourself you never dared to share offline."
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Loved this interview with Billy West, voice of half of Futurama.
This is the personal site of Derek Powazek. Deal with it.
links for 2010-07-15
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The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society, UX.
links for 2010-07-10
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Blizzard is forced to back down on their desire to change forums to real names. More proof that once a community has established norms, they're very difficult to change.
links for 2010-07-08
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Epic and wonderful thread of personal stories of "doing it wrong." We could build a whole Fray issue out of this.
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When old media meets new media. Or: How one tweet can get you kicked off cable.
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Or, put another way: "This phrase I heard once that I didn't bother to look up or research in any way is something I don't know anything about but have decided to tell you is bunk."
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Blizzard changes their forum policy to require real names. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. In general, requiring real names can reduce flameouts, but aren't games about escaping from reality?
links for 2010-07-07
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Looks exciting.
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I had the honor of being Leah's first interviewee.
Press the Magic Button
My “one strike” rule for Twitter/Flickr and why you shouldn’t be offended when someone blocks you.
I was walking down Haight Street the other day when it happened again. Some guy stepped out of a doorway and started talking to me. At me, really.
I wish I’d recorded the stream of verbal weirdness that came out of his mouth, because it was some real Grade-A crazy. I remember he had a strong concern about his soul being stolen. There was also some mention of aliens. It was hard to follow.
When I smiled and tried to step around him, he blocked my path and kept talking, louder.
Anyone who’s ever lived in a city of a certain size has had this experience. (If you haven’t, I suggest you move to a bigger city – just look at the fun you’re missing!) The causes are too complicated and sad to get into here, and not the point of this story.
The point of this story is that if I had a magic button that I could press right then that would have made him, or myself, disappear, I certainly would have pressed it.
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Life on the net can be hard. It’s human nature to want to be liked, and to feel bad when someone says something negative to you. And if it’s one thing we all know about the internet, it’s that at any moment, someone, somewhere, is saying something negative.
An easy solution would be to withdraw, to not participate at all. But the world is getting more digital, not less. Eventually we won’t have a choice: if we want any kind of social life, we’ll have to participate in the social web.
Another solution would be to develop a thicker skin. And while I’ve certainly done that over the years, I never want to become so callous that I just don’t care about anything. I want to be able to be myself in the world.
So the solution I’ve come to is this: I care a lot about a very small group of people. I maintain a hierarchy of who I need to be okay with. It starts with my wife Heather, my parents and my sister, and includes my clients and a very short list of friends. You know who’s not on that list? Anonymous internet commenters. For them and everyone else not on the list, I just try to remember a saying I heard once: “Your opinion of me is none of my business.”
If you’re reading this, chances are, you’re not on that list, and I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings. But the truth is, I’m probably not on your list, either. It’s okay if our hearts are not yet big enough to include everyone they deserve.
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I do a lot of public speaking. Gathered together in a room, most people understand the roles. I’m the guy onstage, trying to make them think. Or, at least, keep them entertained. And they’re the people who watch and wait their turn before talking.
But every once in a while there’s That Guy. The one who responds to everything I say. Or barks out a question when I’m talking about something else. He’s participating, he’s engaged. He’s just somehow opted-out of the social norms of the group.
There have been times when I’ve had to tell someone in the audience to shut up. I don’t say it like that, of course. I encourage them to hold their questions until the end. I have had to interrupt people, sometimes aggressively, because their question became a monologue. And every time it happens I feel terrible about it.
If there was a magic button I could press to just mute the guy so I can get back to my talk, would I press it? You betcha.
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If you use Twitter, you pay attention to your mentions – the tweets that include @yourusername – because that’s how you have conversations. And therein lies the problem, because anyone can tweet at you that way. Some of those people are batshit crazy like the Haight Street Guy, while others are just merely rude like the Conference Talker Guy.
The difference is, on Haight Street, you have to walk briskly away and hope you’re not followed. And at the conference, you have to de-escalate the conversation politely, in front of a crowd. But on Twitter, there is a magic button, and in one click, poof, the crazy is gone.
It’s a wonderful thing. A thing so lovely I often find myself wishing it existed in real life. So why is blocking such a taboo?
I think the Block function on sites like Twitter and Flickr is unfortunately named. There’s something about the word – Block! – that comes across as a personal insult. And that’s too bad, because it’s basically the only tool we have to effectively manage our social experience in those communities.
I propose that blocking people on sites like Twitter or Flickr should not be interpreted as an insult. I propose that it’s simply taking yourself out of someone else’s attention stream.
If I block you on Twitter, my tweets no longer show up in your timeline. If I block you on Flickr, my photos no longer show up on your contacts page. In these settings, this is the only way for me to remove myself from your attention.
Imagine for a moment if the function was called: “It’s not you, it’s me.” Or: “I just need a little space.” Or simply: “Engage cloaking device.” I doubt it would feel so personally insulting.
In my ideal world, choosing to sever a connection to another user in a virtual community would effectively make it so those two users simply never crossed paths again. They both should become invisible to the other. For each, it would be as if the other just left town without a word. No announcements, no blog posts, no “This user is blocking you and you should feel bad about it” server messages.
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I have a “one strike” rule when it comes to Twitter. Here’s how it works.
If you post a tweet that bothers me for any reason, no matter how small or petty, it’s extremely likely that you’ll do it again. It’s so likely, in fact, that I’m going to save myself the annoyance and just unfollow you now. After all, you’re not on My List of People I Must Be Okay With, and I’m not on yours. I’m just choosing to have one less brief annoyance in my day.
If you @reply to me on Twitter and it’s a stupid joke, or a dumb retort, or something you could have just asked Google, there’s an extremely good chance that you’ll do it again. And why sign up for a service that annoys me every time I look at it? And if my choice is between knocking you down in front of everyone (like Conference Guy), or simply removing myself from your attention, I think it’s more polite to simply disappear from view. And the only way to do that, is to block you.
Note that in all these cases, the thing that annoyed me was probably posted with the best of intentions. It may not have bothered a man with more self-confidence and patience. But the intent doesn’t matter, and I am who I am. So I unfollow, and I block. A lot.
This is not about passing judgement on others. It’s about using the tools I’m given, in the social web we have, to find a way to participate that makes me mostly happy, most of the time. Or, at least, keeps me from wanting to jump off a cliff.
And every once in a while I go back and remove old blocks, or follow people I once unfollowed, just to give it another shot. We’re all somewhere on our path to 2,500 hours. Sometimes people just need a few more hours to not suck at it.
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After reading this or anything else I’ve written, if you’re feeling annoyed, I strongly encourage you to take my advice and unfollow or block me. I promise I won’t be offended. In fact, I’ll take it as a compliment.
And I place this open call to the designers of these social spaces we’re building: Block is a necessary tool, but it’s like setting the dinner table with only chainsaws. Communities need more nuanced tools to enable members to really manage their attention streams. What else can we build to help people manage these weird virtual connections we make in humanistic ways?
And if I could finally get that magic button for Haight Street, that’d be just great. Thanks.
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What do you think? Just keep the one strike rule in mind and … Tweet me!
links for 2010-06-26
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"The more abundant our media, the less specific value we’ll place on it, and, therefore, the more generally valuable it will become."
links for 2010-06-24
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I agree that Rolling Stone lost an opportunity to be the center of the conversation, but we should not be measuring success by the number of comments. Most people would rather read 25 excellent comments than 25,000 crappy ones.
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Great writeup of MagCloud in the San Jose Mercury News.
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The Rolling Stone article that cost Stanley McChrystal his job.
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Note to self: study this.
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Beautiful work.
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This is a huge win for all of us that rely on the safe harbor provision of the DMCA.
The iPhone 4 Camera Rocks
The iPhone 4 is the first decent cellphone camera I’ve ever owned. I’m just stunned by the image quality.
Below are three photos I quickly snapped minutes after opening the box. On the left is the sized-down original, and on the right is a portion of the photo at 100%. Click each for the original file.
Just look at the detail and clarity. I’ve owned digital cameras that took crappier photos.
And that’s not even mentioning the HD video.
All of these were shot casually, handheld, in available light, with no post-processing.
Worth the ticket price alone.
More iPhone 4 photos and video on Flickr.
They Don’t Complain and They Die Quietly
When I was young, I knew two things for sure about my dad. The first was that he was weird. He wasn’t like my friend’s dads. The second was that he loved plants.
There were always plants in our house. A vegetable garden in back, and plants in every room. I didn’t think anything of it, really. I thought it was normal for a dad to come home from work and spend an hour in the yard, watering. It’s what dad’s do.
I remember planting seeds in the vegetable garden with him. He taught me to put two seeds in every hole, because sometimes plants didn’t make it. Understanding plants means understanding death.
This was in the 80s when my dad was working at City of Hope. My dad’s a psychologist who did groundbreaking early work to prove that cancer treatments had cognitive effects. To do this, he worked with kids who were dying of Leukemia. He watched them die, one after another. And then he came home to his kids, who were about the same age.
So he stood in his garden, still wearing his work clothes, tie loosened around his neck, and watered his plants, crying when no one was looking.
My dad was not like other dads because he watched kids just like his die for a living. I always wondered why my dad so often told me that life was fragile, temporary, and precious. Now I know.
In the 90s, when I was about to move away to college, I finally asked him why he had so many plants. He answered, “They don’t complain, and they die quietly.”
Now I’m in my late 30s. I’m married and have my own house. My life is incredibly different from my father’s. He’s worked at a handful of hospitals over the course of his entire career. I’ve worked for dozens of internet companies, most of which don’t even exist anymore. He got a single family home in the burbs and two kids. I got a condo in the city, two dogs, and a cat.
But the one thing we unquestionably have in common is the plants. The vegetable garden I built in the back yard is not unlike the one I built with him in the 80s. He’s got a whole greenhouse for his orchids, but mine seem happy by the window in the kitchen. And everywhere, in both our houses, are houseplants, big and small.
We bond over it. He praised me for getting orchids to reflower and seemed particularly impressed at the Elephant Ear I’ve got growing inside. We mail each other digital snapshots of our yards. When one of my African Mask plants sprang baby bulbs, I mailed some to him, and now they’re growing in his house, too.
I know why my dad grows plants. It has something to do with watching all those kids die. When you can’t use your hands to stop death, you have to use them to make life instead, and just hope that the balance works out.
I don’t have nearly as dramatic a story. But I can draw a line that connects all of my life’s work. From the high school writer’s club, to the college papers, to the early websites, all the way through to today … everything I’ve done has been about giving people tools to use their voice, growing community, making media. It’s all connected. And it’s all very noisy.
Usually, I love the cacophony. The swirling mass of comments and retweets and internet craziness. I thrive on it. But there are times when it gets to be too much. Times when I’m full and I just need to take care of something that doesn’t talk back.
Plants don’t blog. They don’t post stupid comments. They don’t have follower counts and they don’t care how many followers you have.
All plants want is a little water, a little sun, and a little company. And in return they’ll grow and change and reward you occasionally with explosions of beauty.
These changes don’t happen at internet speeds. You’ll hardly know they’re happening at all. This is one of the gifts plants give me. They remind me to slow down, to take the long view, to breathe, relax, and just wait for what happens next.
After a day spent moving pixels on a screen and typing words that will never see paper, plants give me the opportunity to get soil under my fingernails, play in the dirt like a kid, to create something real.
And in the end, dad’s right. Plants will teach you what they can, and then they leave this world the way they came into it: without a single word.
In this hyper-modern age of real-time always-on location-based info-overload, perhaps a moment of true peace and quiet is the greatest gift one can receive.