Wanted: Bud Nippers

I took a long walk yesterday, and on Dave’s recommendation, listened to the great Skepticality interview with Pro. Philip Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Experiment, The Lucifer Effect, etc) on how “normal” people turn “evil”.

Answer: Baby-step by baby-step in an environment encouraging exclusion.

While my initial reaction to the blogosphere drama of the last couple weeks is to ignore it in hopes it’ll go away, right when I think it does….it morphs into something even more fucked up.

Zimbardo’s recommendation to prevent bad things from progressing: the bystanders (there always are some) are responsible to stop it. Immediately and continuously.

“To defend the people who no one wants to defend. That, imho, would be a very positive first step.” – Dave Winer

Yes, this means you. And me.

Elsewhere:
J’s 5-word code of conduct

There’s No Accounting for Taste

From my perspective, transparency is about being up front about biases. Objectivity is an unachievable. Covering all sides of anything equally and without a subjective adjective is not only futile, it makes for a boring read. The prerequisite for making anything interesting is a perspective, a slant, some reason to care. Without that reason, why bother?

I like pizza.

One of the most popular posts here is my two year-old review of Punch Pizza. As you can glean from the title, I didn’t have a great time. I said so. Nine people came by, some agreed, others disagreed, ‘CDSIII’ wrote a very lengthy piece arguing Punch was the best pizza in the nation. While I’m very grateful for the comments, they don’t change my less than superb experience that evening. Nor did that single experience keep me from giving my money to Punch in the 2 years since.

I don’t search out objectivity. Nor do I expect it from anyone I read. Whether I’m looking for the best French Toast in the Twin Cities, a good wine for dinner, or anything else. I only care about really good or really bad experiences, and I search out lots of them (objectivity through aggregation).

So Tim, rate and review what you’re interested in. I know you like fruit-forward wines. If a wine you’re involved in isn’t fruit-forward, I trust you won’t rate it very highly.

I’m Demoing The FeedSeeder Project @ MinneBar 07

If you’re on the fence about attending MinneBar, I’ll be demoing the FeedSeeder Project. Maybe that’ll tilt you either way.

I’ve got a stack of index cards listing features that should be implemented by then. 16 features, 16 days. Tick tock.

Update 11 Apr 2007:
I’ll also be leading a session on ‘Designing for Use’. Bring your UI design problems and we’ll work through them, getting them to a place that’ll make people smile.

This Song is a Commerical

“This Song is a Commercial” by Wonderlick

“The future is ad-supported music. Not that the idea is new idea but it is reality.” – NVTS, Evolving Trends

The future is music as ad and the future is already here. Recorded music is an ad for the live performance (always has been). Recorded music is an ad for a musicians expertise – a marketing tool to get ever more interesting projects, gigs, whatchamacallits. Same as blogging and podcasting and book writing.

Aside from that, if advertisers aren’t excited about supporting podcasts and video blogs, I can’t see them excited about supporting individual tracks.

Elsewhere: 23 April 2007

“The trick to making money in these spaces isn’t to saddle the content with some annoyance no one wants — but to make it more valuable in a way that people are willing to pay.” – Mike, Techdirt

Doing Something About Carbon Offset Arguments

Like the NYTimes, a month ago, today’s Strib gave carbon offsets the hairy eyeball.

As they confirm, being carbon neutral is super cheap ($6/laptop, a dime/gallon of gas). It’s so cheap, that I see it as the 2nd easiest way to be more environmentally & energy conscious. The first – buying all your energy through your energy company’s renewable energy program (like WindSource from Xcel Energy).

I buy both. I don’t buy Joel Makower‘s argument:

“I’m concerned this will simply be a guilt-free way for consumers to do as they please — to drive their Hummers as far as they want, just so long as it’s carbon-neutral.”

100% offset whether a luxury auto, a Tennessee mansion, a Dodge Neon, a Prius, or your daily bus commute is better than any of those without the offset. Doing something is always better than doing nothing. Being carbon-neutral is better than not.

So what if the biggest violators continually and repeatedly buy the most offsets. Isn’t that the point of offsets? If everything we used was completely carbon neutral from the start, we wouldn’t need offsets. But they’re not.

Sure, dramatically changing to a lower-impact lifestyle is even better. Quantifying and understanding your carbon footprint is a good, easy, approachable starting point.

After offsets, next step is better understanding the biggest violators in your lifestyle; your car, your appliances, using the Kill-a-Watt to find the others.

Then, reduce where you can, offset the rest.

Elsewhere:

“It seems that some environmentalists are more interested in producing guilt than in reducing carbon.” – Alex Tabarrok

Follow My iTunes via Twitter

Thanks to Doug Adams’ script, Current Track to Twitter v1.5, if you follow me via Twitter you’ll get continual updates on what I’m listening to.

I’m digging Twitter as way to automatically publish in the background. I can keep my flow and we can stay connected.

I see this quality that’ll keep Twitter from being Pet Rock 2.0. If more and more people can ‘tweet’ without thinking about it (via the API, not the browser) Twitter fades into the background, like the internet itself.

Productivity Tip: Quicksilver Not For Long, Slow Scripts

After reading LifeHacker’s excellent Beginners Guide to Quicksilver I thought I’d try somethings I haven’t asked Quicksilver to do before. Like shell scripts.

I know I’ve got one lying around – here’s one – my backup script.

Bad idea.

Quicksilver is unresponsive while the script is running and completely ignores my increasingly frantic key invocations. Forcing me to actually use the dock and Finder. Blah.

I noticed this briefly when I was playing around with adding Twitter support to qspress. In the end, I decided to use Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin because the Quicksilver (via qspress) -> WordPress -> (via Twitter Tools) Twitter publishing flow made more sense than sending to WordPress & Twitter simultaneously.