This weekend I made some significant head way on one of my key 2009 projects: Kernest.com.
Right now, Kernest is also the most likely candidate for my 5 minute Ignite Mpls presentation.
What the Hell Happened?
I’m confident the past couple years will be discussed and dissected by economics students for decades to come.
Here’s just two graphs visualizing the monetary movement that have made my jaw drop:
In both of them, there’s little to no movement for 5 years. Then…WHAM!
It doesn’t really matter what these graphs measuring – the shock is obvious.
jth’s Fed’s borrowing from May 2008:
Kedrosky’s 30-day commerical paper rates:
If this continues to fall, returning to 2006 rates in the next quarter or so, there will be as much discussion on the quickness of the recovery as there will be on the suddenness of shock itself.
Blame the Entertainer?
I was baffled by uproar from the Stewart v. Cramer bit a few days ago. I got the sense that I misunderstood what Cramer did on his show (attempt to time the stock market). Stewart made it seem like Cramer was driving the ambulance, rather than simply chasing it.
Then I remembered that Stewart’s show “followed sock puppets making prank calls” and Stewart’s show, Cramer’s show, like online dating is a great percentage of pure, value-free, entertainment.
Why CNBC should inherently be considered any more or less credible than Comedy Central is really the pre-requisite question to ask.
Kindle 2 as a New Electronic Medium
I do an awful lot of reading that isn’t on “books”[1] and Amazon Kindle has quickly become where I send PDFs by default – just like audio and video files get sent to iTunes by default.
And, after a couple weeks with the Kindle, I’m confident it is a new medium requiring a new interaction model [2]. An easy measure of this – I’m dusting off my Marshall McLuhan collection.
On McLuhan’s Hot & Cool Media spectrum, the Kindle 2 is cool (biasing maximum participation) where the iPhone is hot (biasing minimal participation). Meaning the Kindle makes it easy to get swallowed up for hours where as the iPhone is better for short engagements [3]. This is why Amazon’s Kindle iPhone App is only a win for selling more Kindle-formatted books – the iPhone’s brightness and glare makes it a horrid reading device.
Jakob Nielsen just published his thoughts on the Kindle.
I agree with two of his points:
“UI is not up to managing the realistic-sized book collection” – Jakob Neilsen
My Kindle currently contains 75 titles. That’s 60 more than the interface would prefer [4]. The page-based title management interface is clumsier than the iPhone’s page-based app navigation – simply because the Kindle doesn’t allow arbitrary grouping or support scrolling, so there’s no way to arbitrarily organize your electronic publications for easier navigation.
“For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle.” – Jakob Neilsen
Yes, as I mentioned up top, the Kindle is a unique device with a unique interaction model – for publications to communicate effectively within the Kindle – they should be designed for it. Until publications are designed for the Kindle, the best experience will be reading publications that are not typographically significant, e.g. straight paragraphs of text.
I disagree with Neilsen’s argument that the Kindle doesn’t work for non-fiction [5]. While it may not work for the conventional back-n-forth pagination he describes, that’s no reason to dismiss an entire category of writing. Especially, when we already agree that the most usable publication on the Kindle is one that takes advantages of the Kindle’s strengths – search, hyperlinks, etc. Additionally, non-fiction books have a greater chance of becoming obsolete than fiction books – making the easy updating feature of electronic distribution to the Kindle very attractive (Pragmatic Programmers, call me and let’s talk about your Beta book program).
For example, after my initial reading of them, the bulk of my interaction with physical non-fiction books is scanning the index for the topic I’m looking for and turning to the corresponding pages. The Kindle searches across its entire library, easily saving quite a bit of time.
The Kindle 2 feels very much like the early days of podcasting – or even web design – where we’re all figuring out how to maximize this new medium. I like it.
UPDATE 20 March 2009:
I just realized telephones were never designed for long periods of use. In fact, early telephone carriers wanting their service to be used for emergencies only – actually discouraged long term use. One more way the Kindle is more like television, less like iPod.
1. More than anything, I think the Kindle will force us to redefine ‘what a book is’ as much as HTML did (concidently the .mobi format the Kindle recognized can be written in HTML).
2. The iPhone/iPod Touch are new extensions of the existing mobile communicator models – not new mediums themselves.
3. Makes the Kindle more like television and the iPhone more like film, intriguing given Steve Jobs’ ownership in Pixar.
4. The traditional iPod navigation has the exact same problem – finding any individual track becomes difficult and time-consuming within even a modest library.
5. 85% of my Kindle library is non-fiction, technical PDFs.
Bull Markets are a Lazy Way of Measuring Happiness
Bull Markets are a Lazy Way of Measuring Happiness
RE07.US Update: Expiring URL & Widgets
RE07.US continues to make me smile. Last night’s update added a couple neat things;
- URLs now auto-expire after 5 minutes, yes, there’s also a timer.
- Usage data; referer, user agent, etc is now being captured.
- and finally, I’m testing out the RE07.US javascript widget for displaying the RE07.US link on your blog.
I’ve got some ideas on where this technology could be useful, if you do as well, leave a comment.
Pro Chair-sitter and Whiteboard Drawer
PREFACE: This post was sitting in my drafts since July, and it seemed to go nicely with the co-working post, so I hit publish.
After we returned from a refreshing holiday weekend1 at the in-laws, Cooper asked why we came home.
“Grandma, Grandpa, and Papa all have to go to work on Monday.”
“Where is Grandma’s office?”, he replies.
“Remember we drove past her office on the way to the petting zoo and car show?”
“Why isn’t her office in her house?”
I’ve worked at home since before the kids were born. I prefer it to an office outside of the home for a number of reasons. Primarily, I have greater control over my personal comfort (temperature, lighting, chair/desk/table heights) in my home office than I do elsewhere. Secondarily, considering how abstract my work is, having a home office makes me feel like the kids have some notion of what I do2 (even if that notion is limited to ‘drawing on whiteboards’).
Related: Merlin Mann’s The Richard Scarry Book of the Future [mp3]
1. Including a late evening pontoon ride, a chilly swim in the Wisconsin River, and a fantastic dinner at the recently opened Red Eye Brewery. I highly recommend all three.
2. My dad’s work took him away from the house for the entire work week – I know my a good portion of my attitudes about work are a direct response to that.
Twin Cities Co-Working Conversation Re-Ignited
UPDATE 27 May 2009
New url for this effort: TwinCitiesCoWorking.org
Earlier this week, I had a fairly thorough conversation with a St. Paul-based serial entrepreneur exploring starting a co-working business.
I’ve been writing about the “co-working” / “work club” concept off and on for a while now (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Bonus) and there hasn’t been any blips on my radar for more than a year. So, I was pleasantly surprised to hear from him.
The notion of having access a low-cost office-y space with some of the amenities of ‘bigger’ offices is attractive. Unfortunately – like flying cars and carbon trading markets – there are a number of reasons why it hasn’t caught on. Some of those reasons are obvious (Herman Miller decor) others are less so (How is it different than Kopplin’s?).
In one of my earlier posts, I talked about these third places as transitional places.
I predict 2009 and 2010 will be banner years for small business starts and a transitional space is exactly what these new entrepreneurs need.
If you’ve got interest in or experience with a temporary, shared office space, leave a comment or drop me a line.
Wonderlick “Topless at the Arco Arena” – Name Your Pre-Order Price
For nearly decades, I’ve been a big fan of anything by Jay Blumenfield, Tim Quirk, Sandy Smallens, or any combination thereof.
So, yea, I’m pretty excited about the new Wonderlick album available for pre-order.
Here’s the interesting bit:
Wonderlick isn’t suggesting a donation, so the average won’t be known for awhile. Pretty neat. Yeah, I gave them 50% more than I otherwise would have.
Update, according to Mr. Quirk himself:
“Average donation for Wonderlick album after 24 hours of pre-orders: $17.90”
Introducing: RE07.US – The Greenest URL Shortener
According to a recent post by FuelInteractive.com, a link in Twitter is clicked for 5 minutes, then completely ignored.
That got me thinking about all the wasted short urls out there. So many tinyurl, culld.us, is.gd, et al, links just collecting dust after all that initial clicking.
Seems so wasteful considering “the current economic climate”. Maybe, we don’t need all those URLs. Maybe we should tighten our belts and limit ourselves to 1 short url – and continually reuse it.
With that in mind, I built HTTP://RE07.US. It’s 1 short url that we can all share.
All long URLs get shortened to the same link: RE07.US. And, it will be shortened to that – until someone else shortens their long URL to RE07.US. And so on and so on.
REDUCE. REDIRECT. RECYCLE.