trenchant.org

One of the nice things about the ascendance of the iPad is that people are experimenting with ways to present collections of content beyond the overused “transplanted newspaper layout” and the reverse chronological “river” that has come to be the defining organizational and presentational mode for the web over the last few years.

Many of these experiments are dead ends, but they’re dead ends in the experimental way that early web sites and Macromedia Shockwave presentations shoved onto CD’s were — this is the way we develop new modalities.

This is how we get to the future.

…

Though subtle, I believe the biggest innovation in rivers has been the transition from “what’s new pages” that merely listed and pointed new content on a site to “wee’-blogs” which actually was the new content in reverse chronological order.

The river is the thing itself, not a mere reflection.

Twitter got this from the start and it’s the source of its coherence — Facebook’s take on it has always made their site infinitely more complex.

There is room for innovation as we think more seriously about moving from short item/pages as the fundamental entity to new river/collection oriented interfaces for web content.

(Flipboard and the like are just the beginning of this, not the conclusion.)

Fox Woods wrote in response to Suggested Apple Mail Preferences in Lion

Why do you regret shifting to Gmail?

The bigger principle is depending on a corporate domain name I don’t control for my email identity vs. one on a domain name I own.

I would never abandon my web URL for a *.tumblr.com address — I’d alias it if I ever chose to use a hosted service.

I should have kept adam@trenchant.org or adam@adammathes.com as my “primary” email address for everything even if I was using Google servers and their interface. Which you can do now (and I’m setting up) but I don’t remember if it was a feature offered when I signed up in ‘04.

The near term annoyance is I just hate the new UI, and there’s nothing I can do about it (other than ceasing to use it.)

I don’t think that harvesting user generated content and wrapping it in ads and Facebook comments — I don’t think there’s value there. I don’t think they’re returning value to this ecosystem.

— Chris Poole on the rise of meme aggregator sites

The whole talk is great.

The point is true beyond the particular example of memes and “mainstream” aggregator sites.

Similarly, the “deal” that search engines struck with web sites was that crawling their sites, excerpting them, and putting ads on search results pages was a fair deal in exchange for sending traffic.

But when the companies behind search engines start running competitive sites and services themselves — and link to them — that deal is in some ways fundamentally broken. (Portals were the logical conclusion of this. Portals have now morphed into things called “universal search” and “social networking platforms.”)

With the long web page often now supplanted by the single paragraph, image, or 140 character unit of content an excerpt is the whole thing.

Though it would have seemed crazy a few years ago to think this, opting-out, severely limiting, even charging access to search engines may be a critical and savvy business move for some companies now. See: Facebook, Twitter. You don’t want to be Yelp.

(Related: not giving Facebook any data about your users or application usage may also be a key competitive advantage for some companies now.)

When aggregators present other people’s content in such a way as to remove any need to view the aggregated content in its original context, the same basic deal is broken. (See: Pinterst, and I’d argue, a lot of what goes on in Tumblr.)

“Traditional” blogging generally does not have this problem. There’s no doubt that sites like waxy or kottke create and return immense value through their writing and links back into the ecosystem.

(Side-note for further analysis: while we closely associate search engines with the rise of the Web and being the antithesis of the walled gardens like AOL that proceeded it, search is itself an intermediator. And the internet is generally a force for disintermediation. The free and independent web and commercial search engines may over time have conflicting interests.)

Due to increasing displeasure with the GMail product and interface, I now use Apple’s Mail App on my Mac as my primary email application.

(Also, I now sincerely regret ever switching to using GMail in the first place, but it’s a hard decision to revise. But that’s another story.)

Despite some issues with previous incarnations, I’ve found Apple Mail on Lion is really nice, especially after you change some of the default options.

Before

After

Preferences

Layout

Check Show To/CC label and Show contact photos.

This greatly aids in scanning an inbox quickly. Things addressed to you are more easily discerned.

The contact photos add a lot to the experience. A lot more than I expected, actually.

Since it’s using your Mac’s Address Book, photos will only appear for people you’ve actually added to your address book and properly set a photo for, aiding scanning. If someone is important, give them a profile photo.

It’s also a photo you choose, which is nice, and Address Book now ties into iPhoto to make it pretty easy to choose one using facial recognition when possible.

Privacy

Uncheck “Display remote images in HTML messages” — you can still choose to view images but they won’t be loaded by default.

Loading random images in email is a bad idea — it opens you up to all sorts of privacy violating things. People don’t need to know the IP address and time you opened their email. (You can still choose to load images on a per message basis if you need to.)

Conversation View

The checked options in the “view conversations” settings make the behavior of conversations a bit more reasonable — viewing a thread marks all messages in the thread as read, viewing a thread views the whole thread, even if you archived a message or two.

I have a lot of books.

I’ve been trying to overcome my packrat nature and have been slowly getting rid of excess things. It’s hard.

But books? Books are so great! Why would I ever get rid of a book?

What I’m saying is I’m all out of shelf space. And have been for a while. And have been doubling up the books on the shelves. And things are piling up.

Something had to be done. So I created some new rules.

Shelf space is now precious. It must be earned.

To earn a place on the shelf a book must be:

• Read
• An object I want to keep for decades

Books that are unread go in the unread stack. Pile. Two piles now that it fell over. (That part didn’t go that well.)

The point is books that are unread can not go on the shelf.

Half-read books that have been sitting there for years must be read or gotten rid of.

Books I never intend to read: to be donated.

Books that I do not intend to keep for decades must go.

I ended up donating a lot of books.

Yesterday I discussed how I am trying to cut down and eliminate advertiser supported free services related to my personal publishing.

This is my progress (and lack there of) after 5 months.

trenchant.org

I vowed to publish here every day and have. It has been just as hard and rewarding as I remember it being when I committed to regular updates years ago.

I refined my publishing setup so that it’s more or less entirely frictionless though I have not properly documented this setup for anyone else’s usage as I had thought I might.

ekko

A month ago I wrote a detailed analysis of my usage of these services to understand what was going on and released the software behind it.

The other aspect is my data is backed up and ready to be published to my site if I so choose.

I have an exit strategy.

delicious.com

Gave it up for pinboard, and have been incredibly impressed and much happier with it.

Google Reader

Considered reblog and rss lounge and newsblur but didn’t like any of them. I began working on a replacement that needs more work but shows some promise.

Tumblr

I still read things on the Tumblr dashboard, but my posting has nearly stopped.

I have redirected my image posting to my paid mlkshk account. I love mlkshk. But it is fundamentally an image sharing site, tumblr is much broader and a lot of great content still flows through it. My Tumblr dashboard is still on my daily surf list.

I fear over time that experience will decline as tumblr seeks revenue.

Instagram

Deleted from my iPhone after the Facebook acquisition.

Path

Deleted from my iPhone, because, I mean come on. Seriously. Give me a break.

Twitter

No change. If anything my usage has increased. Not sure what to do about that.

Flickr

I have a Flickr Pro account, though it seems like being a customer of Yahoo may not be viable in the long term. I made a brief attempt to use 500px but was unimpressed.

I really should just host these things myself. I set up the new trenchant.org/photos using galleria but don’t have a good iPhoto/Lightroom to web workflow as convenient as the Flickr support in those apps. I may try and remedy that.

I really don’t take photographs so they can be “favorited” or invited to be added to “groups” and “pools” by random people on Flickr. And it’s clear the audience of people I know which was such a key part of Flickr’s appeal has left and isn’t coming back.

Google Analytics

I removed the Google Analytics from most of my sites and plan to remove it from the rest. Who needs stats anyway?

I forked mongol and am in the (slow) process of creating something that does what I want. I have not done much, because I probably should find an open source tool and use it instead, but didn’t find anything I liked.

What’s Lost

Centralized services are where audiences increasingly live now. The tools for non-verbal feedback and republishing there are better and easier to use.

So giving that up means (usually) less feedback and reach. For someone like me with a small readership and and a small social networking presence, it doesn’t really matter. Obscurity is obscurity!

For others, it might be an actual sacrifice.

But even with a small audience, there’s a lot more feedback than I get for things published here. Of course, that was on purpose. I never had comments here, though there used to be a whole discussion board on trechant.org that has been mothballed. But the sort of cross-linking that happened more regularly across blogs I read seems to have diminished and moved to Twitter.

But writing for sentiment expressed through little star icons isn’t why I’m here.

On the bright side, I don’t have to worry about mediators interfering with my publishing!

For photography, unlike my writing, the feedback I’d regularly get on instagram and seeing things as they happen to my friends seems like something with no viable alternative.

Oh well. You’ll all have to show me pictures in person.

What’s Gained

The beauty of posting to your own domain name that you control.

The satisfaction of being a customer for businesses you want to succeed and last, rather than feeling like an unpaid worker for more questionable companies.

Freedom, autonomy, and a (totally unjustified) sense of doing something the “right” way.

At the beginning of the year I wrote a long rant about how I would stop posting my words, pictures, and life to advertiser supported web services and instead would use paid ad-free services or host things myself.

I never posted it — partly because it’s hard to change habits like that and I was skeptical I would actually follow through on any of it. (I’ve made some progress, more on that tomorrow.)

My thesis was that advertiser supported web services in the long run have interests that probably do not coincide with mine.

This isn’t just about “if you’re not paying you’re the product being sold” though that’s part of it.

I have a different philosophy of why we create things and put them on the internet. And that philosophy is incompatible with having my words and thoughts and life become real estate for advertising.

If people want to donate their time, copyrights, intellectual property, and personal data to companies and whoever else so they can sell billboards on it in exchange for heart and star icons, that’s fine.

That’s the internet they deserve.

This is something I care about. These are not one-time transactions for disposable commodities. This is not like having a disagreement with a company that makes my socks. (Which is a lot less likely because now I buy socks made in Wisconsin.)

And not all advertiser supported things are bad. I treasure metafilter. decommodify is essentially marketing for products I think are outstanding supported (not really) by affiliate links.

But it seems sometimes we forget that we used to call our personal sites “home pages.” Most people don’t want their home plastered with ads and containing hidden constant corporate surveillance.

So I’m trying to deal with it and remove most of it from my life.

I’ll share a progress report tomorrow.

Lisa with a custom m&m made in celebration of Rise, which she edited.

Like an iPad, it’s an object that must justify itself. And it does. It really does. The X-Pro 1 is the modern camera for people who love photography.

Fuji X-Pro 1: A Camera For Photography Lovers

Ian recommended Galaxy On Fire 2 to me due to my love of Wing Commander. I rarely play iOS games because I find the lack of physical controls a problem but decided to try it. And while today’s retina graphics have come a long way compared to low resolution sprites of yesteryear, my inability to control the ship significantly hampered my enjoyment since I kept getting blown up.

How do you ever keep your thumb in the right place? How can you even see with your hands covering the screen like this?

…

I remember exactly when my family got a Nintendo Entertainment System and my father said it was “too complicated” compared to the Atari 2600 due to all the buttons.

How would anyone know what button to press? How can you react that fast? He was flummoxed.

So apparently I’m getting old and am unable to as quickly adapt to new interface paradigms, and I should have expected this, really.

…

The previous entry was a two week late birthday message to myself. Happy birthday, me.

Coffee time with Patrick, 5/1/2012

Greg: that’s it, a 3x5 screenshot?

Adam: slow news day?

Greg: NO!

Adam: look you know i said i’d update every day

Adam: i didn’t say it would be good

Adam: this is probably going up for tomorrow

The RSS reader replacement I’ve hacked together is called “neko.”

Because I believe focusing on cat ears would be more relevant for the reading experience than much of what has done in the past 5 years for RSS.

Concept

Delayed personal publishing.

Context

We are nearing the logical conclusion of tools optimized for the “stream” — small bits of disposable information posted without editing (Twitter, instagram, pinboard.)

Innovations have been focused on lowering the bar for posting frequently (starting with Blogger in 1999), creating an audience through asymmetric subscriptions on-site (Delicious/Flickr ~2003 as pioneers then Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr ~2007 taking it mainstream), moving away from quantitative analytics like pageviews to non-verbal qualitative feedback (favorite/like economy). Little focus has been put on the editing process, introspection, timing, or refining ideas.

Create a writing environment/community to encourage creation of more substantive output.

Mechanics

One post published per week per author. Author can edit it throughout the week. (Social network attached gets early access and edit privileges?) Gets “published” at a specific time later in the week.

No edits after, only delete.

(Notes for another site I haven’t gotten around to making yet, but it was one of the possible directions I was thinking of for vllm.net.)