Now I Don’t Need To Write This Myself.

Generation X is beyond all that bullshit now. It quit smoking and doing coke a long time ago. It has blood pressure issues and is heavier than it would like to be. It might still take some ecstasy, if it knew where to get some. But probably not. Generation X has to be up really early tomorrow morning.- Mat Honan

This my response to OccupyWallStreet.

I’ve got three kids. A house in the burbs. Working for myself.

And not that long ago, society, and my student loan provider said, “we don’t believe in you.”

Even then I had no idea what that meant.

Today, I don’t have time to camp out in a public park – I’ve got work to do.

Like but Verify

“Now the fascinating thing about the Internet is that it has in theory made it easy to take a verification step and check source information instead of cascading based on others’ actions….But the Internet has also made it that much easier to spread unverified information with a single click (reblog, retweet, like). The state of the art today is that spreading is easier than verifying which means that we are getting more, not fewer information cascades. That is especially true because with social networks we are observing the actions of friends or at least people we know (instead of random strangers) and are thus more likely to copy their actions.” – Albert Wenger

Unfortunately, the metrics used in measuring success conflict with the notion of verification. Verification slows down the number of “shares”. Worse, the interfaces within the sites offering these voting gestures (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Hacker News, Google, etc) make it far more difficult to verify and the make the gesture – than to just make the gesture.

Then again, this issue only exists for people using these sites. In the same way, the MPR interrupting regular programming with a pledge drive is only an issue for listeners.

DiveIntoMark Opts-Out

“Gone

The requested resource
/
is no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource.” – diveintomark.org 10 Oct 2011

Breaking inertia is hard work. It puts up a good fight, has the upper hand, and knows when you’re not serious.

This is why the Atkins diet starts with an Induction phase and the U.S. Army starts with bootcamp.

Want to make a big change? Want to break inertia? You gotta seriously fuck shit up right from the start. And hold it for 30 days.

Go Vegan.

Deactivate your Facebook.

Turn off the radio.

Unsubscribe.

Stop engaging that person that makes you feel badly about yourself.

Disengage that aspect of your life that no longer makes you profoundly and annoyingly giddy.

Drop 410s on your websites.

Opt out.

Mark Pilgrim’s work was inspiring. His departure should be equally inspiring.

(Mark – if you’re interested in providing background material for the Opt Out book – my email’s in the right column. Thanks.)

For the Win?

Back at the beginning of my career, my then creative director decided the best way to bring in new business to our nascent agency was to win design awards.

Not knowing any better – we all cheered and put our collective nose to the grindstone. Developing the concept, the interactions, the flow, all for a award-winning, self-promotion piece. I was responsible for programming the Director-based CD-ROM (yes, that’s how long ago it was). Once we all sufficiently tested the CD-ROM, it was duplicated and entered.

And, to all but our creative director’s surprise – the piece was included in the design annual (‘bronze’ or ‘notable mention’ or something like that). Yet – the phones didn’t start ringing and the desperately-needed new business didn’t materialize. I left about 6 months later. Then the creative director left. The shop itself folded by year’s end.

Remembering that project brings a stale and empty taste to my mouth. Like finding out a joke you’ve been retelling was offensive. It changed how I measure winning and the types of projects I take on.

To this day – it pains me to see so many professionals distracting themselves with contests rather than the hard work of making something meaningful that lasts.

Fire – Amazon Launched Their Sputnik Today

At the beginning of the month – before I knew anything of today’s Amazon Fire announcement – I announced that Amazon (along with Mozilla and Samsung) were going to be tomorrow’s tech innovation leaders.

Scanning through the Amazon Fire page I was immediately struck by how it neatly integrates everything Amazon has been working on to date; eBooks, streaming media, frustration-free packaging, Amazon Prime – it’s all in there. (I’m sure local.amazon.com will be there next week)

Undoubtedly, this is a Sputnik from Amazon to Apple. The iPad was once the most vertically integrated, commerce-oriented, mobile device. Today, it’s the Amazon Fire.

Every single interaction with the Amazon Fire is a commercial one. Even just browsing the web..

“…Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here….In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.” – Chris Espinosa

Which means the Amazon Fire is also a Sputnik to Facebook and Google. There’s no need to encourage web publishers to include +1 and ‘Like’ buttons on their websites when every single request goes through your servers. There’s no need to get called on the carpet for dropping more cookies when someone logs out when – again – every single request goes through your servers. There’s no need to announce redesigned, more marketer-friendly page layouts when – lastly – every single request goes through your servers.

Many years ago, I smiled when I was crunching server logs and all the traffic seemed to come from northern Virginia. Tomorrow it may come from a small handful of EC2 zones. Maybe Amazon will be generous enough to forward the geolocation data in the Silk browser requests.

Yes – I have one on pre-order.