Balance in the Air

A couple very recent quotes on balancing your life from two of my favorite bloggers:

“5. People have only so much toleration for novelty in them; no one embraces novelty consistently and in all fields of life. Spend your tolerance for novelty wisely.” – Tyler Cowen

23.”Running a startup is full of extreme ups and downs. Which is why so many successful and happy entrepreneurs I know lead such normal, stable, unglamorous, “boring”, family-centered lives. Somehow they need the latter in order to balance out the former.” – Hugh MacLeod

RSS: Rude Screen Scrapers?

“I hate it when RSS scrapers steal my content” – Thord Daniel Hedengren

Yes – crediting the source is polite. I make a point of linking back and crediting, and expect the same those of you that find what I write interesting. That said, spammers are inherently rude. They don’t change their ways when asked politely.

If a publisher doesn’t want their publication re-published (w/ or w/o credit – the come together) then they shouldn’t be using RSS.

Or the internet.

Or anything that can be digitized and uploaded.

Or the publisher could put a block on any site they don’t want accessing their site, something in the .htaccess usually works pretty well.

Fun for the Comments: Re-state the quote above without using the blacklisted buzzwords.

Something’s Burning

My 2 most recent pet peeves:

  1. Permalinks that are actually Feedburner redirects.
  2. Feed links that are actually Feedburner landing pages

Anyone else or just me?

LATER:
Some elaboration as requested by Jake Parrillo from the Publisher Services Team:

Jake,

Thanks for the note.

To start, I use NetNewsWire as my aggregator.

By redirects, I mean the tag of an item being a Feedburner link redirecting to, rather than being, the item’s permalink. When I’m quoting and linking to the item, I want the actual permalink. Today, to get it, I need to load the Feedburner link into a browser and wait for the redirect, then grab the permalink. Artificially inflating pageviews and generally slowing me down.

Yes, by ‘landing page’, I was referring to the “Browser Friendly” pages. When I clicked the feed link, I expected the feed url to be passed to NetNewsWire. With the “Browser Friendly” pages; I need to first realize that I need to take an action, then make a selection, then the url gets added to NNW. Again, slowing me down and not what I expect to occur.

iTouché-ing

I believe it’s been said many times before; while there are many other tech companies out there – Apple is the only one worth complaining about.

If Apple was actually interested in short-term value and a simple, highly-constrained, highly-polished experience, the iPhone wouldn’t do 2/3 of this things it’s purported to (still being vaporware and all) and it’d be 1/2 the price. But wait – OS X has BSD underneath it, responds to AppleScript, Automator, I can create all sorts of custom software on it, and is quickly turning into the choice development platform for developers – because of the integration of elegance and underlying access. Apple can do both – their pedigree is in making it easier for regular people to make things – while encouraging consistency.

“…it’s what user interface guidelines did in the early Mac…making all applications adhere to certain conventions so users would have a predictable method of working applications…” – Steve Borsch

On top of that, the iPhone is being positioned as the replacement for the Treo and the Blackberry (if only in price point). A new closed system will dramatically slow adoption. Adoption by a highly vocal, discriminating, influential, and well off group of people.

Did I mention, the majority of my developer friends have switched to the Mac? They expect to have access to their devices. I know I do. Lots of organizations sell controlled experiences. From Disney to our state penal system. While lock-in may have been a feature 10 years ago (AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe), today it’s a bug. Walled gardens – no matter how pretty – are simply less fulfilling on the second visit.

Oh, and Scott, by the way, all my clients are welcome to post to the Work Better Weblog. And if you want to change the layout, feel free to parse the RSS feed into something that works better for you.

Lastly, where will Apple get their next great interaction idea from – if not their own developer community?

Take 40% Off the Top

“Trees must be cut down, hauled to factories in trucks, and pulped into rolls of paper, which themselves must be transported to other factories, where they are chopped up, covered in ink, folded, stacked, and loaded onto a third set of trucks. These trucks then fan out across the region, dropping bundles at distribution points, to be transported yet again to stores and homes. It’s an enormously expensive process, constituting as much as 40 percent of newspapers’ costs.” – Michael Kinsley

What would your business look like if you cut out 40% of the overhead – while improving your customer relationship?

LATER:
40% – that’s like an entire business itself. Reminds me of the old adage, goes something like: “I know 50% of my income is from my business, I just don’t know which 50%.”

Feeling Temporarily Secure

I’ve been to handful of airports – the underlying architecture of them all is: open, flowing, permanent.

The ironic exception is the airport checkpoints – like pop-up stores in malls. Foldable tables, movable queue markers, equipment on wheels – makes it feel so temporary. Like it just might packed up and gone tomorrow.

“The tables aren’t quite at the right height to smoothly enter the X-ray machines, bins slide off the edges of tables, there’s never enough space or seating for putting shoes back on as you leave the screening area, basic instructions have to be yelled across crowded hallways.” – Matt Blaze

Demanding Markets in Absolutely Everything

“The next logical step, then, would be to make this all personally competitive. The rise of the multi-billion dollar fantasy sports industry — where people bet, or simply compete for bragging rights, by predicting and tracking statistics in everything from baseball and football, to supreme court decisions and Congressional voting — demonstrates how eager people are to compete in their idle time.” – David Hsu

‘Surrender’ Has Such a Negative Connotation

“What is killing newspapers, as I’ve written before, is…their antiquated distribution system…Dropping newspapers on driveways and putting them in corner boxes is cumbersome, compared with internet distribution.” – Shel Israel

Not to mention theft-prone:

“I didn’t want to cancel the paper because that would mean a complete surrender to the Internet and admittance of the fact that a printed newspaper is no longer necessary.” – Dmitry Kiper