Thank God

“The church I focus on in my article attracts 10,000 West Michigan suburbanites each Sunday. It meets in what used to be shopping mall. They’ve converted over the WHOLE MALL–with shops now serving as Sunday school classrooms and meeting spaces for events throughout the week.” – Zack Exley

Deserted shopping malls and Super Wal-Marts are the scourge of our time. The great thing about yesteryear’s warehouses were the huge windows and the convenient locations. Big boxes are an altogether different animal.

Giant parking lots. No windows. Hundreds of thousands of depressingly, lonely square feet.

It’s great to hear about community-focused organizations trying to solve this problem.

Monday, March 12, 2007 2:19:18 PM

While I haven’t posted about it, the All-Star Amazing Race is well underway.

Last night was the first evening this season I felt it was good and engaging. Uchenna and Joyce helped another team reach the pitstop to eliminate Rob and Amber.

That’s how the Amazing Race is different. As I’ve mentioned many times before – gaining inches in TAR isn’t helpful, things turn around too quickly. Unlike almost any other reality program on, competitors cooperating and brining out the best in each other is what makes it fun to watch.

Stranger than Fiction: Best Movie by 13 Minutes

13 minutes in, I declared Stranger than Fiction the best movie I’ve seen in 2 years. A result of the crisp cinematography, the “Pop-up Video”-esque info-graphics, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-esque narration, a storyline in the vein of Being John Malcovich or Fight Club, and engaging performances by Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhall, and Emma Thompson.

This is also the first film in memory that discusses the very bloggy theme of the author being changed by their work.

This Close to Unsubscribe All

“You might wonder why you subscribe to all of this information with no immediate context.” – Aaron Mentele

The whole reason for the Feedseeder Project is that current feed readers aren’t cutting it and I don’t see them set up to change. I’ve talked about this is a number of posts. In fact, I actually think the models behind NetNewsWire, NewsFire, Google Reader, (not to mention much less useful readers like PageFlakes, My Yahoo, and Google Homepage) are stagnant. And, as much as I of a Dave Winer fanboy as I am – the OPML and Userland Radio haven’t clicked with me either.

I’m actually thiiiiis close to ignoring the entire current crop of feed readers. Yes, I’m threatening to uninstall NetNewsWire, just so I can focus on a more appropriate model without being sucked into the current email-based models. As a colleague pointed out this afternoon, it’s even worse than email – at least in email, it’s easy to forward items. For me, feed reading, like podcasts are rarely about immediacy – much more about long term. Constantly gather everything I’m interested in….and make it easy to find relevant things over the long term. Something between the River of News and Google models. (It’s not a far jump to connect this thinking with my interest in hyperlocal journalism).

“Adding someone to your feed list is a relatively big decision.” – Chris Saad

I disagree with Chris here. Adding someone to my feed list is a very small decision. The actual question I ask is: ‘does this writer have the potential to provide me with something interesting?’

Since most of the new feeds I add are referrers from the people I already read, the answer is almost always: Yes.

Related:

“Now imagine walking into your local grocery store, and you notice all of the traditional taxonomies have been removed because product classifications are a form of metadata. The aisle signage has been removed.” – Chris Saad

Based on my customer research experience – this is how people shop. Signs are only read when there’s a problem with the organization of the products.

Update:
Over the weekend, I left NetNewsWire.

Amazon Unbox + Tivo vs. Netflix

Yesterday on a whim, I connected baby Tivo to Amazon’s Unbox service…the things I’ll do for $15. Unlike Tim, I haven’t purchased or rented anything, yet. While the prices are competitive (and more convenient) than purchasing DVDs it isn’t that competitive against our Netflix subscription ($15/month/rental vs. $18/month ).

I see Amazon + Tivo perfect for impulse purchases – when I can’t adjust the Netflix queue fast enough – or Target’s closed. That said, I’m not much of a impulse purchaser.

If I find something that looks interesting, I’ll let you know – at this point, Netflix wins.

Looking through Amazon’s current Unbox selection, I had a clash-of-rating-systems moment: I kept clicking the customer star rating expect it to change. It didn’t.

UPDATE: 20 March 2007
Tivo was empty last night and we’re between Netflix. Hmmmm. Seems like a great time to try out Amazon Unbox. After scouring the selection to find anything interesting – I bought the Bones pilot. Unfortunately, Unbox doesn’t stream. Simultaneously, Jen and I disappointedly exclaimed, “Aweeeeeee.”

We called it a night before hitting play. So much for impulse buys.