Garrick van Buren – Page 146 – About time. And product. And being more deliberate.

Lineage

Darrin points to the MIT SIMILE project. The lifeline/timeline visualization is similar to something I’ve been working on for the Genealogy Namespace for OPML project.

While it’s cool to see a single person’s timeline, far more interesting to me in the intersection and relationship between multiple people (a marriage isn’t just one-sided, a birth has at least 2 people involved, etc).

Luckmaking in Place

“Placemaking takes time and sometimes just plain dumb luck. No planner envisioned it all, first laying out the grid of streets and creating a zoning code for Dinkytown, then deciding precisely that an alley was to be converted to become the location of a breakfast counter and a legendary, delicious business.” – Sam Newberg

A nice reminder that things like MySpace, CraigsList – while not ‘designed’ – are more valuable places than some of the more ‘planned’ places.

Postponed Due to Lack of Vision

I’ve been fighting with one aspect of FeedSeeder for quite a while now. None of the approaches I’ve taken ended up solving the problem in a useful way – many of them just mucked it up worse. The imaginary screen in my head that tells me ‘what it should be’ was blank and it was sucking up all the energy.

So yesterday, I dropped the feature. For now.

Removing it made everything else fall into place much easier. The imaginary screen flickered back on.

The need for this feature will still be there and I’m pretty sure it’ll sort itself out quite nicely when the time is right.

LATER:
Oh, so this new approach is called ‘procrascipline’.

First Crack 95. Darrin Homme on Improving Local Competitive Bicycle Racing

Darrin’s raced bicycles for probably half the two decades+ I’ve known him. Inspired by Darrin’s USCF My Way post, I asked him to unpack the problems in local competitive bike racing that his points would solve.

Listen to Darrin Homme on Improving Competitive Bicycle Racing [24 min].

Congrats to Tekdiff – Reaching 100th Episode

Congrats to Cayenne Chris and Tekdiff in reaching the 100 episode milestone. One of the longest running and still the funniest comedy podcasts around.

Back in First Crack #45 – Cayenne and I talked about Tekdiff.

First Step’s the Hardest

“Success comes when you create something you want and need — and then find other people like you who agree they need and want it also.” – Rex Hammock

iTunes Music Store Replies – More than Two Years Later

Dear Garrick Van Buren,

Thank you for your interest in iTunes.

After careful consideration of your application, we believe that the most efficient way to get your content up on iTunes in a timely fashion would be for you to deliver the content through one of the several digital service providers with whom we currently work.

For your information, below is a list of several companies that can encode and deliver your music content to iTunes. Should you be interested, please determine which digital service provider is appropriate for your particular content. For Audiobook content, see below.

Please note that the companies listed below, regardless of their location, may be able to deliver content for global Artists and Labels
…

Huh, where the did this come from?

The best I can figure:

Sometime between October 2004 and June 2005 – before iTunes had a built-in podcast directory – I filled out an browser-based iTMS application to sell the First Crack Podcast through their store.

Not getting a response in a timely fashion – say, within 27 months – I forgot about it. Completely.

As you see, the email give no context (i.e. ‘RE: your the application – submitted on Nov 23,2004’) and it even has a ‘do_not_reply’ in the ‘Reply-To’ field.

My opinion of iTunes has dramatically decreased over the past year and getting bizarre emails like this don’t help.

I wonder if I’d feel the same if Apple bought Audion instead of SoundJam.

Consciously Overlooked

“There are lots of topics I want to track but I don’t care if I see every item.” – Steve Rubel

20th Century Phonecasters

“To listen to the music, a subscriber had merely to sit beside the telephone and hold the receiver to his ear.” – Popular Science, September 1933

What Do You Think I’ll Like?

Aaron, one of the masterminds behind FeedRinse, asks that all RSS Reader provide feed-recommendations.

While I agree there is value in RSS readers making it easier to add relevant sources, my experience with the recommendation engines like Netflix and Amazon has them batting .30. It’s rare that I purchase or rent anything either of those engines think I should. It’s far more likely that I’ll be inspired by another person providing a recommendation.

It’s not the engines fault. Star-rating, past purchases, and high-level genre categories don’t provide enough information to generate a quality recommendation.

That said, RSS is a pretty good recommendation engine itself. Nothing like email, but still pretty good. It could be better sure, and I’ve got some ideas around that.

LATER:
I just received an email from Ben Moore pointing me to Tim O’Reilly’ s post about Yahoo’s new Pipes service. Ben thought there might be some similarities between Pipes and some of the projects I’m working on. Ben’s probably right (the site’s down right now).

While Pipes sounds interesting (“Pipes opens up mashup programming to the non-programmer” – Tim’s words). What’s more interesting to me is that Ben pointed me to it. A relevant, personal recommendation.
Thanks Ben.