Derek and Dad, 1975
Happy father’s day.
This is the personal site of Derek Powazek. Deal with it.
links for 2010-06-18
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Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.
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Scott Rosenberg: "The typical blogger has more experience dealing with criticism — measuring a reasonable response, managing trolls and restraining the urge to flame — than the typical newsroom journalist."
links for 2010-06-17
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How weird is it to see the President of the United States of America ask to be retweeted?
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Utterly terrifying and depressing and horrible.
links for 2010-06-16
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Impressive. I love seeing how tablet interface conventions are creeping into the web.
Your right to comment ends at my front door.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted a response to critic who took him to task for not having comments on his site (skip down to “As for Wilcox’s arguments regarding user-submitted comments”). My humble site has a tiny fraction of the traffic of Daring Fireball, but in this latest incarnation, I also decided to go without comments. Here’s why.
I agree wholeheartedly with John that the decision to add comments to your site begins and ends with the site’s owner. I also agree that his site is a “curated conversation.” Conversations have been happening between weblogs since the advent of the permalink. Joe Wilcox, who obviously has a bone to pick with John, has no right to pick that bone on John’s site.
The wonderful thing about the web is that anyone can contribute to it. If you have something to say, there are plenty of places to say it. But your right to post to someone else’s site rests with that someone else.
This is so painfully obvious, anyone who doesn’t get it must simply have an axe to grind. It’s like assuming you have the right to go inside any house you can see from the street, and pee on the carpet.
I differ from John in one way. I get the sense from his post and his comments elsewhere that he sees no value in comments at all. John Gruber is to online comments as Steve Jobs is to Flash.
But I’ve seen incredible communities form in the confines of comment forms. I’ve seen funny, helpful, informative, intimate, amazing conversations. I’ve seen groups of people come together using the crudest of tools to form intense personal bonds. I’ve seen it literally change lives for the better.
Of course, I’ve also seen comments on YouTube.
I don’t think the problem is that people are stupid. I think that people, when given crappy tools, with almost no oversight, no incentive to behave, and no semblance of real identity, often behave stupidly.
The choice is not really to have comments on or off. The choice is: What is the level of community interaction you want to foster on your site? What’s the purpose of the site, and is community interaction part of that purpose? Too many people don’t think about these questions as deeply as John Gruber clearly has.
I turned off comments in the last redesign of powazek.com because I needed a place online that was just for me. With comments on, when I sat down to write, I’d preemptively hear the comments I’d inevitably get. It made writing a chore, and eventually I stopped writing altogether. Turning comments off was like taking a weight off my shoulders. It freed me to write again.
I may enable comments again someday. But what I really want to do is fundamentally redesign the commenting experience. Most comment systems are practically designed to create stupidity. I know there’s a better way. But that’s another post.
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Update: John Gruber responded: “It’s not that I haven’t included comments on DF because I dislike the concept of comments; it’s that comments would not fit with what I have in mind for DF as an experience.” I stand corrected. (And hey! Look at us having a conversation without comment forms. Ain’t it grand living in the future?)
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See Also: 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments
links for 2010-06-15
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A rare glimpse into the writer's room, the "sleazy hotel room in which stories are conceived."
links for 2010-06-13
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Danah Boyd on 4chan as hackers of the attention economy. My two cents: Early hackers were about exploration of virtual frontiers. 4chan has a more giddy darkness about it. Less Cousteau, more Borat.
links for 2010-06-12
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"Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience."
5 Days of Growth in 35 Seconds
I left the PlantCam on my window plants when we were in Canada. Here’s what they did in 5 days, one shot every 15 minutes, 5am to 9am. More in The Secret Life of Plants.
Why Everything Sucks, Why That’s Awesome, and How It’s Changing Us
I think I’ve finally figured out why everything sucks. And it’s actually kind of awesome.
I bought my first guitar when I was 16 with my own hard-earned dishwasher money. It was a crappy classical 6-string. I thought the muffled plunking it made sounded like an orchestra. It didn’t.
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master anything. The Beatles played for 10,000 hours before they really became The Beatles. Before that, they were just another band with potential.
I never got to anywhere near The Beatles, but I improved over the years. I played in coffee shops and open mics. I wrote songs. I sold tapes. I even figured out how to play a decent finger-picked “Blackbird.”
Of course, not everyone who practices something for 10,000 hours becomes a master of it. I didn’t. But almost no one becomes a master of anything without putting in the time.
We all love the story of the childhood prodigy who picks up a violin for the first time and plays flawlessly. But that’s just a story. A one in a billion exception. For most of us, doing anything new, we’re going to suck at it. For a long time. And we may never not suck at it.
Suppose Gladwell is right and it really does take 10,000 hours to master something. Let’s set the bar lower. Let’s say that it takes half that time to be merely good at it. And just to be generous, let’s say half again just to not suck at something. That would mean it takes 2,500 hours of practice to just not be awful.
Now ask yourself, what have you done for 2,500 hours? That’s 104 days. 14 weeks of constant practice. Just under four months of nonstop repetition.
Very few of us have spent that much time doing anything besides sleeping or watching TV. I’m sure I’ve spent that much time reading, writing, making photos, doing design, and playing guitar.
But there’s one thing we have now that The Beatles didn’t have. I didn’t have it, either, back when I was making those sad plunking sounds.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have the internet – the biggest no-experience-required open mic night ever created. It connects us all, whether we’ve put in 10,000 hours or ten.
It’s only because of extremely fortuitous timing that the world was spared my 16-year-old Beatles impersonation. I put in those hours before everything was digital and duplicated for free, forever. Make no mistake, if MySpace had been around when I was 16, my furtive recordings would still be haunting me.
Maybe it’s only because of fortuitous timing that we even expect anyone to be good at anything now. We were spared hearing The Beatles when they were new. There’s no record of Shakespeare’s embarrassing early attempts. No MP3s of Bach’s school choir. Maybe if we were more used to seeing people suck before they get good at something, we wouldn’t expect perfection from day one.
Just think about the millions of people on the internet, each in their own timeline of learning something new. Most people will never get to 2,500 hours. They’ll never not suck. It’s not personal, it’s just math.
So that’s why the vast majority of everything on the internet sucks. It’s because most of the people doing it, most of the time, just haven’t put in the hours yet. And most of them never will. So only a small percentage of all the people online will ever be vaguely good at whatever it is they’re doing.
But here’s the thing: I think this is beautiful. People are out there, trying new things, learning the hard way, and sharing their experience. That gives me hope.
I’d rather have an all-inclusive network that everyone can contribute to, than a network that’s closed to everyone who isn’t perfect. How else will anyone ever learn to do anything?
And here’s the really interesting part: What if The Beatles had the internet? Sure, we would have had to endure their early sucky years, but they would have been able to learn from everyone else as well.
There are studies that show connecting to the internet changes our brains. And getting feedback is how we learn. Maybe all the sharing we do online is actually accelerating the learning curve. What if, once we connect online, we can actually lower that number even more? What if the tradeoff is between keeping the early embarrassing work private, and getting better at your new skill faster in public?
I know which one I’d choose. (I’m doing it right now.)
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UPDATE: As usual, Clay Shirky said it better.