Sacha Baron Cohen, civil rights scholar

“Baron Cohen made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Martin Luther King while doing research for his dissertation in Cambridge. Entitled ‘A Case of Mistaking Identities – the Jewish Black Alliance,’ the thesis examines the nature of cooperation between the African-American and Jewish communities and suggests ways of how to improve relations in the current day. His professor describes it as a major work of importance on the civil rights movement and is suggested reading for history students in Cambridge.”

DropSend for sale, opens kimono

“How much profit does DropSend bring in each month? Revenue: $9,041.81 per month (and growing by 8.6% per month) Costs: $2,100 per month (Servers at 365main.com + maintenance) Profit: $6,941.81 per month.”

BusinessWeek: Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet

“Bezos wants Amazon to run your business, at least the messy technical and logistical parts of it, using those same technologies and operations that power his $10 billion online store. In the process, Bezos aims to transform Amazon into a kind of 21st century digital utility. It’s as if Wal-Mart had decided to turn itself inside out, offering its industry-leading supply chain and logistics systems to any and all outsiders, even rival retailers. Except Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business, from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that.”

Internet Addiction Test

“How do you know if you’re already addicted or rapidly tumbling toward trouble? The Internet Addiction Test is the first validated and reliable measure of addictive use of the Internet.” [tx wax]

Django Book: Comment on text blocks


The Django Book offers an inline commenting system where you can offer comments on a specific block of text. Top screenshot shows normal view, bottom one shows what happens when you click on the “1” comment icon. More details at jackslocum.com. [tx Collin]

Cre8d: Equal billing for comments

Comments are at the top of the page at cre8d — post top left, comments top right — so visitors can catch up on thread action without scrolling.

Bats Blog: Reply on the spot

At The NY Times Baseball blog, the editor responds to commenters at the spot of the original comment instead of later in the thread.

For our latest Fireside Chat (a group chat conducted using Campfire), we talked with Mark Fletcher and Marc Hedlund.

The chatters
Mark Fletcher is a successful serial entrepreneur, software developer and investor, with over 20 years experience in software development and high tech. His creations include Bloglines and ONElist (which evolved into Yahoo Groups).

Marc Hedlund is an entrepreneur working on a personal finance startup, Wesabe, where he is Chief Product Officer (still pre-launch but there’s blog at Wheaties for Your Wallet.) Before Wesabe, Marc was an entrepreneur-in-residence at O’Reilly Media.

In part 1, they discuss startups, cookies, and why you should “shut up and ship.” (Moderated by Matt and Jason from 37signals.)

Choice quotes
Hedlund: “I’m learning to appreciate luck a lot more.”

Fletcher: “What’s been successful for me is just building stuff that I needed. I’m not a good salesman, so for anything I do to be successful, it has to be a good idea (the power of the idea wins).”

Hedlund: “I think a lot of what has worked for me is not what I decide to do but how I decide to do it. Who do I hire? What do I tell them is their job? Even, as DHH says, what tools do we use? A lot of that adds up to the daily ritual being right. When the ritual is right, it works. And that set of answers probably differs a lot from person to person.”

Fried: “It seems that a lot of folks get innovation and execution confused. Execution is the key, innovation is not. Innovation is nice, but execution is the secret weapon.”

Hedlund: “I tend to run into a lot of people — myself included — who latch onto cool ideas before big needs. I talk to a lot of engineers, so that’s their common problem.

Hedlund: “One guy I pitched, Bill Gurley, said it well: ‘There are a lot of walls around the size of the market.’ People needed to fit a bunch of constraints before they needed the product…Cool engineering idea, not necessarily a good business.”

Transcript
The full transcript is below.

NFL coaches use laminated cheat sheets to sort through 100+ plays organized for every situation a team might face. It’s interesting to see how they cram all this info onto one sheet of paper.

Red Microphones have pretty lines.

Penguin covers desktop collects a bunch of retro book covers in one image. Related: Penguin’s Great Ideas = great design.

College Humor is looking for a Developer/Senior Developer in NYC.

Zappos.com is looking for a Web Developer in Henderson, NV.

Weill Medical College of Cornell University is looking for a Enterprise Content Management System Developer in NYC.

Tortus Technologies is looking for a Web Applications Developer in Western MA (Springfield).

Classified Ventures (Cars.com) is looking for a Web Developer in Chicago, IL.

DirectTV is looking for a Graphic Designer in El Segundo, CA.

National Public Radio is looking for a Design Director in Washington, DC.

JSTOR is looking for a Interface Specialist, Code & Design in Ann Arbor, MI.

Planet Propaganda is looking for an Interactive Designer in Madison, WI.

Federated Media Publishing is looking for an Author Technical Services Engineer in Sausalito, CA.

Tourism British Columbia is looking for an Market Development Manager, On-Line in Vancouver, Canada.

PixelMEDIA, Inc. is looking for an Senior Web Developer in Portsmouth, NH.

We’ve talked about the importance of alone time here and in Getting Real but I think offline time is worth a mention on its own.

See sometimes just being alone isn’t enough. You can work from home or put headphones on and still be distracted by the online world.

Going offline gets rid of those distractions. No email. No chat. No RSS. No web. That leaves you with only tasks. Things that you need to do. Action you need to take. 

See, there’s an inherent problem with always being online: you’re too connected. You wind up in the role of passive observer. Things come to you. You react instead of act. You can easily spend too much time “marking things as read,” reading RSS feeds, watching YouTube clips, or whatever else.

When you go offline, that equation changes. You have to be active. Since you can’t input, you output. If you don’t do something, nothing happens. 

So turn AirPort off. Or go to a coffeeshop without wifi. Resist the siren song of being connected (for a couple of hours at least) and watch your productivity skyrocket.

In The Imperfectionist, interior design guru Dan Ho says, “Perfection is a cheap caricature of style.”

Style, in Mr. Ho’s view, is unstudied, capricious. Specifically, it is a rubber ducky placed on a plain wooden table, a loop of twine hanging from a bathroom sink instead of a conventional toilet paper dispenser. It is the good sense not to replace chipped heirloom china with something flawless and new, and the wisdom never to waste countless hours building a trellis when a plant displayed in an old sausage tin, or whimsically in a child’s sand pail, will do.

Reminds me of some of the recent discussions about boring, boxed-in web design (see Blahg or Boxes or this chat). In the quest for perfectly aligned grids, are designers missing out on the subtlety and charm that comes from things that are imperfect but human?

Shabby chic web design
Of course, there’s always room for good, clean design. We’re champions of it. But perfectly aligned grids aren’t the answer to every design challenge.

It depends on what you want to communicate. Are you aiming for clean, useful, and functional (say, a project management app)? Then simple, usable elegance is a great solution. But what if your goal is to speak with a unique voice (like at a personal blog), be more human (a small company trying to emphasize intimacy), show off a distinct style, or stand out from the crowd? Then some rough edges and discord can work wonders. Consider it a shabby chic approach to web design.

There’s a great side benefit to this approach too: You get to work with what you’ve got on hand. You don’t need to wait for the ideal ingredients or set aside tons of time to pull it off. You can jigsaw together elements that wouldn’t fit in a “perfect” layout. You can use images, fonts, and copy you have instead of waiting for things you don’t have. You make it work and accept the resulting disjointedness as part of your unique vision.

Visual rhythm
Let’s Ho it up some more. One thing he values is visual rhythm (i.e. you can place unrelated items together as long as they visually match the “beat”). A sidebar offers an apartment owner’s description of a Ho makeover (see photo above too):

Wrigley’s new Big-E-Pak is a really smart product.

The package is a stand up tub with 60 pieces inside. You can pop the top and grab as many pieces as you’d like. Or, you can pop the little “share” flap, shake the tub, and drop a few pieces into your friend’s hand.

It’s perfect for anyone who wants to have some gum around but doesn’t want to have to keep buying boxes, dealing with wrappers, foil packs, etc. 60 pieces in a self-contained, upright Big-E-Pak fits nicely on your desk, counter, or in your car.

Since the beginning, gum packages have been optimized for the pocket or drawer. Wrigley finally asked “why does gum need to be that portable all the time?”

This is really a great example of innovating through utilitarian package design. The product is the same inside, but outside it’s different.

Smart thinking. Well done.

The birth of the iPod

“[Jon] Rubinstein made a visit to Toshiba, Apple’s supplier of hard drives, where executives showed him a tiny drive the company had just developed. The drive was 1.8 inches in diameter — considerably smaller than the 2.5-inch Fujitsu drive used in competing players — but Toshiba didn’t have any idea what it might be used for. ‘They said they didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe put it in a small notebook,’ Rubinstein recalled. ‘I went back to Steve and I said, “I know how to do this. I’ve got all the parts.”’ He said, ‘Go for it.’”

Also features this quote from Steve Jobs on design: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Viral video vs. Super Bowl ad

”’Dove Evolution,’ a 75-second viral film…has reaped more than 1.7 million views on YouTube and has gotten significant play on TV talk shows ‘Ellen’ and ‘The View’ as well as on ‘Entertainment Tonight.’ It’s also brought the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com, three times more than Dove’s Super Bowl ad and resulting publicity last year.”

Jon Stewart on YouTube

Jon Stewart: “We get an opportunity to produce this stuff because they make enough money selling beer that it’s worth their while to do it. I mean, we know that’s the game. I’m not suggesting we’re going to beam it out to the heavens, man, and whoever gets it, great. If they’re not making their money, we ain’t doing our show.”

Microsoft spins negative assessment into positive blurb

Microsoft took just the first sentence of this quote and used it out of context as a positive blurb: “If you’ve never used anything but Internet Explorer, you won’t be able to wipe the grin off your face. But next to rivals like Firefox, Opera and Safari, IE 7 is a catch-up and patch-up job. Some of its ‘new’ features have been available in rival browsers for years.”

This presentation slide titled “Iraq: Indications and Warnings of Civil Conflict” lists factors that are destabilizing Iraq. This index has been a staple of internal United States Central Command — the military command that oversees the Iraq war — briefings for most of this year.

What are the odds that this mess of a slide makes it into Edward Tufte’s next book?

Some links for Central Command…
PowerPoint Does Rocket Science—and Better Techniques for Technical Reports [Edward Tufte]
The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint [Guy Kawasaki]
What is good PowerPoint design? [Presentation Zen]

Update: Tufte posted this slide at his site and called it “especially lousy.” [tx Bob] And a commenter there offered this analysis:

The slide is largely (enitrely?) data-free: a series of qualitative assertions, that masquerades as quantitative analysis. What is the “Index of Civil Conflict (Assessed)? ” Are “ROUTINE,” “IRREGULAR,” “SIGNIFICANT,” “CRITICAL” parameters on a continuum, or unrelated descriptors? If so, why are they coded in colors that suggest a progression)? What does “I&W” mean? Why is the slide framed with color gradients? Why is everything bold (or all-caps)? Is an up arrow increased sectarian conflict, or less sectarian conflict which indicates an improved situation? What are the numbers behind “unorganized spontaneous mass civil conflict” etc.?