I loves me some Threadless, so it’s a thrill to collaborate with them on Fray. Along with our buddies at Blurb and Stephen Tobolowsky, we’re sponsoring a design competition: Threadless Loves True Stories. In addition to some great prizes and a pile of cash, the winning design will appear on a Threadless shirt and on the cover of Fray Issue 3.
For our third book, we’re doing a special double issue tackling two of the biggest themes in life: Sex and Death. We’re looking for illustrations that take on one or both of these themes in a breathtaking design. Submission tips: The best designs don’t literally illustrate the theme, they play with it. The cover of the “Busted” book, about getting caught, featured a red hand. (Get it?) You can include words (sex, death, Fray), but it’s not necessary. The design can include both themes or just one. If you need inspiration, just think about a time in your life when you lost someone, or got some, and go from there. And most of all, have fun!
I know, we’re behind schedule with Fray issue 2. We’re working on it, I swear.
In the meantime, here’s a little snack to tide you over. Fray’s Wild Life is a special mini-issue about the pets we love with stories by Heather Armstrong, Lance Arthur, Ben Brown, Heather Champ, Jessica Donohoe, Susan McNeece, Derek Powazek, and Magdalen Powers, and illustrations by Goopymart. The stories are also online here
We’ll be sending a free copy to all our subscribers to thank you for your patience waiting for issue 2. Everyone else can buy one here.
Saturday is the longest day of the year. When Heather told me this today, I thought it was a setup for a joke, like “your momma’s so fat.” We then spent the next 30 minutes making up punchlines.
Saturday is so long, you can see it from space!
Saturday is so long, Sunday had to buy a convertible just to feel adequate!
Saturday is so long, pants! (Look, pants are always funny.)
Saturday is so long, it could stretch to the moon and back and still kick you in the nuts!
Short attention span version: For the last year, I’ve been working with HP Labs on a very cool new project. It’s called MagCloud, and it’s the future of magazine publishing. Go see.
Longer attention span version: If you know me at all, you know I’m obsessed with publishing. My mom tells a story about me, in elementary school, having to write a paper about confederate times. Instead, I wrote and designed an entire newspaper, right down to the editorial comics, that took place during the era. This was before I’d even learned the word “procrastination.”
Since then I’ve worked at newspapers and magazines, big and small. I even started a few. And they all had one thing in common: You had to print a giant pile of them, and then hope you could get rid of them all. In college, we once made a giant throne out of undistributed copies of the newspaper I worked on.
The web has changed our thinking about media in ways we’re still figuring out. Now we can make media without the bother of putting ink to paper. We can distribute it planet-wide in an instant. And the content can be customized to your tastes, personalized for each reader. It’s so obvious now, but it’s important to remember what a revolution this has been.
But there’s still something about paper. It’s not just because screens suck to read on (they do, but that hasn’t kept us from doing it all day). There is an intimacy about a good book, a pleasure to the glossy pages of magazines, and, ironically, a permanence to paper. (How many times has a website you really loved simply disappeared?)
So what if we could combine the best parts of the web (no waste, personalized content, open to all) with the best parts of print (sexy print quality, permanence, no batteries required)?
For the last year, I’ve been working on a project with HP Labs called MagCloud. The idea is simple, really. MagCloud enables anyone to start a magazine - a real printed magazine - with no giant pile.
If we were in my office right now, I could motion over to the giant pile of Fray Issue 1s. I’m so proud of the book. It’s a beautiful object. But every morning when I see that pile, my heart sinks.
With MagCloud, there is no giant pile, because every magazine is printed to order. Of course, there are other print-on-demand companies out there, but MagCloud is the only one designed specifically for magazines. And it’s the only one created by HP, the company that makes the Indigo printers that power the print-on-demand industry. (The guys behind the scenes here are smart … and I mean like white-lab-coat smart. They blow me away.) It’s also the only one designed by mister James Goode, who also designed Pixish, and did a brilliant job.
When I look back at all the publishing endeavors I’ve undertaken, one thing stands out. While I was working so hard to change the way content gets made (enabling people on the web to participate in the creation process), I still fell back into the traditional model of magazine distribution. And the traditional model sucks.
Did you know there are just a handful of companies that control which magazines get into which stores? And even if you do get in, you give them all your hard work for free and they only have to pay for the books they sell. How do you know how many they sell? They tell you.
Did you know the average sell-through rate for a magazine is about 30%? The sell-through rate is the rate which a given issue of a magazine will sell from a store. That means 70% of all printed magazines are just stopping by the newsstand on their way to the garbage dump or recycling center. All that time, work, and energy, just to make trash.
There must be a better way. And I think MagCloud is a step in that direction.
There are caveats, of course. The site is a pilot program within HP right now. And it’s in beta, which means things will break, get fixed, and change. And, of course, we have very exciting plans for how to expand the service. The site you see now is just the tip of a very big iceberg.
But after working on it for almost a year, it’s very exciting to see it take its first baby steps on the web. If you’re interested in the future of magazines, if you want to help make it happen, give MagCloud a look.
You don’t need an invite to join - just sign up - but you do need an invite to publish something during the beta. Got a magazine you want to publish? I’ve got a few publisher invites left. Just email me and I’ll hook you up if I can. (Email address: Sew is to sewing as fray is to _______@gmail.com. Yes, it’s a test. I know you can do it.)
If you read this site via RSS, you may notice that now you can only read the first couple lines instead of the whole post. That’s because apparently, amazingly, we still have not figured out how to use RSS and abide by copyright law on the web.
Let’s be clear about a few things.
Outside of fair use provisions like parody, duplicating a whole creative work is a copyright violation, period. That means you can’t take a whole blog post from one site and put it on another. (Take a portion, link to the rest. Duh.)
The DMCA’s “safe harbor” provision is not a license to go all douchebag-Napster-crazy. Safe harbor protects sites from getting sued for copyright violation only if they do some very specific things, like having a way for copyright holders to report violations and taking down any infringing materials once reported.
Your work is protected by copyright no matter what format it’s in. Syndication formats like RSS do not invalidate copyright. There’s a big difference between one person reading a feed in a reader and republishing content on a public page.
I was putting the full text of my posts in this site’s feed because I wanted people to be able to read it in a feed reader if that was their preference. But some site creators think that gives them permission to republish my work on other websites - sometimes without even attributing it or linking back to the original.
That’s not just a copyright violation - it’s also highly uncool. If you’re running a site that hosts other people’s creative work, you should know better.
I’m sick of explaining this, so to avoid the problem, I’m only putting excerpts in my feeds now. I’m sorry if that means you can no longer read the site in your favorite RSS reader. Blame the current crop of crapware sites that think everything on the web is theirs to monetize. I do.
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UPDATE: I’ve discovered a few WordPress plugins that might help the situation.
AntiLeech, which allows me to turn off RSS to specific IP addresses or User Agents.
RSS Footer, which puts a link back to the original post at the end of the feed item.
This might be overkill, but what the heck, I’m experimenting.
So I’ve reenabled full-text feeds. To make full use of the plugins, I also had to delete my FeedBurner feed and use the local one instead. So if you want to stay subscribed, please use this feed (FeedBurner should redirect for the next month).
I consider this an experiment. Let’s see if technology can solve the problem that it started. Thanks for all the email, y’all. It’s always nice to know people give a shit.
There’s been a lot of talk about Apple lately, and the iPhone, and how much people love them. And usually when this happens, people throw around words like “cult” and “fanboy”. The implication being that Apple is undeserving of the adulation; that it’s somehow random or inexplicable.
But it is indeed explicable. Here’s just one recent example.
After using my iPhone every day for a year, I started to notice that its touch sensors at the top of the screen were getting a little less, well, touchy. I had to tap a couple times to get it to notice. Everywhere else was fine - it was just at the very top of the screen. Unfortunately, that’s a pretty important spot, as most of the applications have controls there.
Yesterday, when I couldn’t get it to open the search field in the maps application, I decided I had to do something about it. I went to the Apple website and made an appointment for the Genius Bar in the San Francisco Apple Store.
Today I walked in and showed the guy at the bar my problem. He said, “Looks like the sensor’s going out. Let’s get you a new phone.” Just like that.
He transferred my SIM card from one to the other, erased my information from the old phone, and I walked out of the store. When I got home, I docked the iPhone and it restored itself from the previous backup. The whole transaction took about an hour, including subway time. Now I have a perfect iPhone, exactly as I set it up. Every email, MP3, and photo in its place, right down to the order of the icons on the Home screen.
It was a perfect harmony of beautiful hardware (the iPhone), smart software (automatic iTunes backups), a helpful website (appointment-making), and real world service that treats customers like human beings.
Compare this experience to the last time you had to return a product anywhere else, or, heaven forbid, you actually had to interact with your phone company.
This is why Apple has a passionate following. It’s not just one thing - it’s everything.
I loves me some Threadless, so it’s a thrill to collaborate with them on Fray. Along with our buddies at Blurb and Stephen Tobolowsky, we’re sponsoring a design competition: Threadless Loves True Stories. In addition to some great prizes and a pile of cash, the winning design will appear on a Threadless shirt and on the cover of Fray Issue 3. 
