Moose and Sadies Almost Best Coffee Shop in Warehouse District

A couple years back I spent a good chunk of time in Minneapolis’ Warehouse District. Aside from convenience (it’s right between downtown and NE) it’s got a nice comfortable, creative vibe to it. Unfortunately, there’s not a hands down winner for a good cup of coffee.

If you prefer coffee mixed with single speed bikes – the Go Coffee inside the 1 on 1 bike studio has free wifi, great service, great people, and decent espresso.

If you’re looking for a quieter place with plush seats and perhaps a glass of wine instead of their on average coffee, then walk across the street to Marysburg Books.

Then, a block north, there’s Moose and Sadies. My memories of it are dark, cave of a place emanating 50 years of cigarette smoke and stale pastries. When I needed a hit of second-hand smoke, I’d pop in there.

Not anymore.

They’ve completely remodeled the place. Today, it’s bright, sunny, place that’s easy to move around, with a good looking breakfast menu. I was stunned. Impressed. Amazed at the transformation. The coffee even tastes better. Still not free wifi though.

UPDATE 28 Friday 2006:
There’s a Dunn Bros in that neighborhood now – 228 Washington Ave North specifically. So, the race for best coffee shop is fully on.

Who Listens If Everyones Podcasting?

Local NBC affiliate KARE11 came by this morning to talk podcasting and we continued the ‘who’s the audience when everyone publishes?’ conversation.

I don’t think this is a question about too much stuff to pay attention to, it’s a question about ownership of the publication process.

Traditionally, recording companies, television stations, newspaper publishers had an iron grip on the voices that were published. Their whims determined which perspectives received airtime and column inches. They kept the amount of information published down to what their capacity could support – an no more. They were gatekeepers not filters.

I’d much rather have the problem of too much to choose from than gatekeepers preventing things from being published.

Our Memories Are Poor, Measure in Context

“It isn’t as astonishing the number of things I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so” – Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 1912

This Sunday, the Vikings are playing the Lions. I’m confident they’ll be keeping score throughout the game. Yard by yard, play by play. Rather than having the refs remember who played better and declaring an arbitrary score on Monday morning,

There’s a huge, often un-acknowledged difference between what people say they do and what they do. This delta widens with time. If you’re looking for accuracy – metrics need to be captured in context. If you’re looking for fiction – then making up what someone did two days ago is as valuable as asking them to remember (making it up just might be more interesting).

PodcastAlley, Podcasts.Yahoo.com, and a number of the other podcast directories offer ranking and voting for “your favorite podcast”. There are three problems with this;

  1. The metrics at different sites don’t know about each other – diluting the value of each of them. For example, what does it mean to be #8 at PodcastAlley and simultaneously #23 at Podcasts.Yahoo.com?
  2. All these systems rank unrelated podcasts against each other – just like Arbitron or Nielsen Ratings. The only people interested in how, for example, meatloaf ranks higher than lawn mowers are advertisers. This ranking doesn’t help the listeners’ enjoyment or the producers improve (in fact it could be detrimental to both).
  3. I still have to remember to vote, at one site or multiple (just like Arbitron). The action of voting and ranking is separate from listening, so I don’t.

I’ll let Mark Ramsey wrap this one up for us:

“The diary methodology is woefully inadequate to meet the challenges of measurement in our industry going forward.”

“If we want the advertising community to place any credence whatsoever in our measurements, then we are obliged to use measurement methodology which inspires credence.”

Amazing Race 8 – Episode 6

We’re just past the first commercial break and nothing interesting to report, other than the bickering irritation of road-weary families. Blah.

Wait, they’re visiting Costa Rica’s Doka Estate Coffee Plantation. Totally makes up for it.

Roadblock: Find the red coffee bean
Jen: “Digging through 800lbs of green coffee beans, that’s all you babe.”

Detour: Relic or Ripe?
We’d harvest bananas – the pulley system seemed interesting and it’d be nice to know the story of my morning fruit. That, and I’m not in the mood for a vertigo-inducing bridge walk.

Rather than the great armchair travel adventures previous Amazing Races have been, this season is turning out to be the worst family vacation ever.

Current Standing of Garrick’s Favorites:

  • Lintz – #2

Sex And Podcasting Replaced With 43Folders

I got word this weekend that Mike O’Connor has closed up shop on this community podcasting site – Sex and Podcasting. I’ll miss S&P – haven’t listened to the Geezercast, and love the premise. This means there’s an opening on my gPod.

No worries, it was quickly filled by Merlin Mann’s 43Folders podcast. Merlin had me laughing with tears while on the freeway this afternoon with his Telephone made of Human Ass and Weekly Wrapup 2005-10-21.

MNSpeak is the New City Pages

The Star Tribune’s Jon Trevlin writes a FUD-mongering piece on “the City Pages’ parent’s possible merger“. In his first 2 sentences there’s; an ‘if’, a ‘may’, and two ‘mights’.

As a sign of things to come, Rex at MNSpeak pointed me to the online article. I read MNSpeak 2-3 times a day, during my regular NetNewsWire skimming. Don’t remember the last time I picked up a City Pages. I do remember that the last time I did, the entire second half was page after page of phone sex ads. Didn’t inspire me to pick it up again – no matter the investigative cover articles.

We went to a movie this weekend – historically, we would have gone to Citypages.com to check their listings. This time we decided their site was far to difficult to navigate and we hit imdb.com instead. Ended up at the Hopkins $2 theater for the Wedding Crashers. BTW – It’s one of the best movie theater-going experiences I’ve had in a long long time. The staff was friendly, the seats comfortable, the audience quiet, the tickets reasonably priced.

If my current habits are any indication, as long as the City Pages is a printed publication – it doesn’t matter who owns them. As long as they have a printing press, MNSpeak.com will eat their lunch, and review it.

The Niche is You

There must be something in the air, Seth Godin picked up the ‘who’s the audience when everyone publishes?’ argument.

Seth is of course right – the cost of the production is quickly reaching zero. Fantastic blog software like WordPress is free – just the cost of implementation. Other hosted services are free. Once a blog is up, it’s one step away from offering audio or video. Hurrah.

I’m unclear about what Seth is asking here:

So there’s more, but is there better?

Better than what? Than mass-media? Than what doesn’t exist today?

From my perspective, having more voices is better than having fewer. Knowing that everyone I have a personal relationship with can share video, audio, or text with me (and everyone else in their circle) easily is better than not. I’m recalling Dan Gilmor‘s quote,

“Everyone will be famous for 15 people.”

A while back, Eric Larson from the Ericast asked what his niche was. I responded, the niche was him. If people want to hear what he has to say – there’s only one place to go.

Coincidentally, I think Godin proves this point in his last paragraph.

“It didn’t matter if it was the best movie Walt [Disney] ever made, because it was the only one right now.”

Replace “Walt” with your nephew, with your best friend, your sister, with Seth Godin, Dave Slusher, Garrick Van Buren, or anyone you’d like to hear from regularly. It doesn’t matter if anything from them is the best ever (on any scale) it’s the only thing from them.

In the choice between an expensive, high production-value, special-effects laden, movie and one from someone I have a personal relationship with like Chuck Olsen, I’ll pick Chuck every time. If I’m looking for tips on choosing a good bottle of wine, I’ll choose Tim Elliott over Wine Spectator every time.

The bar is a lot higher – for movie studios, broadcast radio, television networks, and newspaper companies. For now they’re competing with your nephew, your best friend, your sister, and everyone else that doesn’t have to make millions of dollars in profit to continue – just something to say and people that care about them.

“We are people with hearts, lives, families, aspirations, hope and something to say. That’s by far the more interesting story, and it has legs, it’s going somewhere, unlike the tail, which is a vestige of times gone by, when you could count on people to be idiotic couch potatoes, ready to be harvested by advertisers with their intrusive and mindless ‘messages.'” – Dave Winer

So, yes – More is Better.