Part 2 of our chat with Mark Fletcher and Marc Hedlund (read Part 1 or Part 3).

Choice quotes
Fletcher: “People thought Bloglines had a lot of employees, when I was really the only full-time person up until 3 months before the acquisition (I don’t recommend that, btw. Too stressful)...Another reason to not go it alone, I think, is that in the case of an acquisition, the company is more valuable to the acquirer if there are at least a few employees (to avoid the hit by a bus syndrome, etc).”

Hedlund: “I think there’s hardly ever a bad time to start a good company that really helps people…In ‘bad times’ you have lower rents/salaries, and in ‘good times’ you can’t spend the easy money fast enough to get the stuff you really need.”

Fried: “The biggest mistake I see people making is raising their expectations too high too early by raising money. Obscurity is a very good thing when you are getting started.”

Fletcher: “Money is oxygen for startups, you never want to run out of it.”

Full transcript below.

A collection of graphics shown at news sites at 11:20pm (EST) last night as election results were coming in…

The Washington Post tightly integrated the headline with the graphic (most of the other sites had the graphic sitting on its own with no text explanation). Also, the color blocks moving left or right to the line in the middle was an effective method to display the “prize” and how far away each side was from it.

USA Today also did a good job of providing text context with a headline. But it confusingly stacked color bars (one for this race on top of another for current seats) and used poorly placed labels to try to explain it.

The NY Times made visitors choose between House and Senate graphics. And the blank white area made it look like a few states in the northwest had disappeared (or been taken over by Canada).

CNN used different colors within blocks but didn’t explain what they meant.

The Chicago Tribune offered this plain jane graphic.

The LA Times version was also pretty plain but at least provided context by showing the net change in addition to the current numbers.

While we’re on the subject, let’s pause to remember the glory days of Tim Russert and his trusty whiteboard.

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.

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):

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.?

What’s with all the social bookmarking icons at the bottom of every single friggin’ blog post out there?

Given the Ebola-like spread of these things they must be really effective, right? Not so much. Zero out of Technorati’s top 10 blogs feature those icons. And only two out of the 15 entries in the current crop at Digg’s Top Today page offer “Digg me” icons.

This focus on campaigning over content seems like a classic case of misplaced priorities. The reason posts wind up at Digg, Delicious, or elsewhere isn’t because the authors made it easier to vote for them (it’s already easy). A post winds up at these sites because people respond to its content and quality.

So think twice before badgering readers with “vote for me” pleas. The hectoring is tiresome, it results in extraneous visual noise, it makes your site look cheap, and the benefits are dubious at best. Instead, focus on delivering great content. If you do, people will figure out how to spread the word just fine.

Cheap Thrills Cuisine is a culinary comic strip. [tx KB]