Epistemographer

(credit to someone on the Rendezvous network for the title)

Another SXSW Panel: How to make big things happen with small teams

Reducing mass

Making things manageable

Lowering cost of change

Staying out of debt

When you write bad code, make bad decisions, you’re building up debt that you’re going to have to pay off later (one way or another)

Advantages of small teams:

• Close to customer


• Less distortion when passing information between different organizational layers


• Change is easier

Important thing isn’t having more people, but the right people

Build half a product, not a half-ass product.

• Say “no” by default – whenever someone requests a feature (including yourself), say no. If they (or you) keep asking, then consider it.


• Listen to the product


• Every decision is temporary


• Ignore details early on


• Ignore features

Build less software

• Lower cost of change


• Less room for error


• Less support required


• Encourage human solutions

Give people just enough to solve their own problems their own way. Build general, rather than specific, and get out of their way.

Sunk costs: Just because you spent money on something doesn’t mean that you need to use it. The money/time’s already spent.

Feel the hurt: people who design software should have to do tech support for it. By sharing the annoyance, you’ll fix the most urgent problems first.

• Chefs become waiters

Release:

• “Feature food”: little features that everyone wants to eat, pass on and talk about. (Essentially, appeal to vocal minorities)


• Promote through education


• 30-day major upgrade: hold back a few key upgrades, upgrade in 30 days. Makes you look on the ball and continually upgrading.


• Transparency = Trust


• Bloggle: Google + Blogs = lots of new traffic

“Code Smells”: when you write something and think “I never want to touch that again.” BAD!

At a SXSW panel on Uses and Abuses of History in the Education of Designers:

Miodrag Mitrasinovic: the history of “contexts” is crucial to design education – “history is the history of artifacts in context; if you remove the artifact from its context, then you don’t get it.”

Meikle: Design history has traditionally been a sort of ‘great man’ discipline where the thing (rather than a given person) is the object of analysis; shift in emphasis toward process and larger context is useful from the perspective of history as a discipline.

I’m bringing it at Anil Dash’s kickball game:

(Thanks, Sandy)

Weed, just introduced by Steve Turnridge in a SXSW panel:

The concept is pretty basic: Weed rewards people who share files and respect artists’ rights.


You can play a Weed file three times for free on any PC. After three free plays, you’re asked to pay for the file. You can use any current Windows Media-compatible player software to play the file. The Weed software, which keeps track of your account information, is used to purchase files.


Once you purchase a Weed file, you’re free to play it all you want on up to three PCs. You also can burn the file to CD and play it on your stereo system, or transfer it to a portable device like the Creative Labs Nomad, the Rio S10, or any current Windows CE PDA.


Best of all, you can share Weed files with anyone you like, as long as the files remain in their original form as Windows Media files. And if someone you share a file with purchases that file, you’ll earn a payment for helping to distribute it.


Specifically, the artist always receives 50% of each sale, and the rest goes to those who helped distribute the file. You get 20%, the person who shared the file with you gets 10%, and the person who shared the file with that person gets 5% of the sale price. Weed receives the final 15% for service and software maintenance costs.


All purchases and distributor payments are made into your Weed account through PayPal. Deposits and withdrawals from your Weed account cost 50 cents, but all other transactions are free. You must have a PayPal account to make deposits to your Weed account.

Like I said before, enlist your users to evangelize for you…brilliant.

Waiting in the lobby with Dave, listening to an Audioblog post by Kevin saying that he’d just gotten a call from us and was on his way to the lobby to meet us.

Let the mammothly navelgazing overuse of technology commence!

A few days ago, David Weinberger posted about something that’s afoot at the New York Times:

The NYTimes.com site is re-fashioning itself, launching in April. That’s what Robert Larson, director of product management and development of NYTimes.com, told me when I interviewed him for the issue of Release 1.0 that came out last week. (Here’s the article’s first section.) They’re doing something bold and important, which I think may mark a turning point…but perhaps not the one NYTimes.com envisions.


The NY Times famously moves stories from their original links to new ones in the for-pay archive after a week. As a result, important stories exit the public sphere, and the newspaper of record becomes the newspaper of broken links. [See “Note on Links” at end.] So, starting in April, NYTimes.com is going to publish thousands of topic pages, each aggregating the content from the 10 million articles in its archive, going back to 1851, including graphics and multimedia resources. [NOTE: They are not opening their archive. The content will likely be descriptions created for the Times Index; you’ll still have to pay to see articles in the archive.] Topics that get their own page might include Boston, Terrorism, Cloning, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Condoleeza Rice. News stories will link to these topic pages. And — the Times must hope — these pages, with their big fat permanent addresses, may start rising in Google’s rankings.

Let’s call a spade a spade – these topic archives aren’t about adding value to individual NYT news stories, but rather are about marketing those stories to more targeted audiences. Not to join the legions of bloggers lining up to gripe about this, but man oh man is this not what they need to do to stay relevant in the digital age. I’m sure that there’s a ton that I don’t know, and I’m not privy to the economics of newspaper production, but drawing on a lot of time studying the history of media/business as well as my own experience working at washingtonpost.com in the heady days of 1998, this seems like a seriously missed opportunity:

• First off, $2.95 is still a hell of a lot to pay for a news story. Consider the fact that $2.95 buys you three songs at the iTunes store; is the labor involved with the production of one news story equivalent to that required to produce three audio tracks? Moreover, the costs of producing those archived news stories have already been covered by a combination of past subscription/newsstand fees and advertisements…the actual costs of providing a NYT story from 1910 lie in the realm of data preservation and migration, and while not insubstantial, I’m dubious about the business model.
• Another point about the price, in the form of a thought experiment: who exactly is going to pay $2.95 for a single news story? It’s not a casual reader, by any means…the NYT is betting that there will be people who either don’t care about the expense, or who need a given story enough to shell out. Essentially, this boils their market down to the wealthy (probably with institutional affiliations) or the desperate, and in both cases the buyer in question finds herself in a classic adversarial relationship with the seller. The NYT sees its stories as having a fixed value ($2.95), and isn’t going to part with them for less.
• Enough about the price – here’s my bigger point: there’s nothing new here as regards the NYT’s relationship to the larger information ecosystem. Any new NYT initiative doesn’t come in a vacuum; they’re struggling to remain relevant in a new blog-driven digital culture that is structured to value free and freely-linkable information, while at the same time trying to extract some sort of value from the content they’ve gone to the considerable expense to migrate online. What’s a media company to do? Easy answer: don’t antagonize your consumers, befriend them. Don’t clutch so tightly to your product – instead, understand that the more an article is linked-to, the more it’s discussed, the more valuable it becomes. Set up systems to encourage linking – permalinks are a good start, but a really radical system would go even further in 4 easy steps:
  • Drop the price to something that someone will pay without thinking twice – my instinct is somewhere between a dime and a quarter
  • Micropayments are still expensive to process, so don’t deal with credit cards on a per-transaction basis; require users to set up accounts funded with an initial deposit of $10, which will automatically replenish from your credit card when you drop below a certain threshold (like my highway EZ-Pass). Make the transaction as invisible and frictionless as possible.
  • Create an associates system like the one that drives massive amounts of traffic to Amazon every day; every time someone “buys” an article through a post on my blog, I get a cut of the proceeds. This not only gives bloggers (the early-adopters and mavens of our current digital landscape) incentive to buy into the system, it harnesses their diverse expertise and audiences as marketing for your own articles (think The Long Tail meets James Surowiecki).
  • Only allow referral associates to cash out in high enough increments (think $50, for example) that the vast majority will simply leave their relatively meager proceeds in their accounts, using them to buy access to other articles (again, much the way that most bloggers tend to use their Amazon Associates proceeds to buy – you guessed it – more things from Amazon).
  It’d be a risky-seeming strategy, but one which would fit with one of the dominant trends in the online world (toward partnering with one’s customers and breaking down the hard-and-fast categories of producer and consumer), and which would go a long, looooong way toward reversing the erosion of the NYT’s stature as a go-to source in the increasingly fragmented online world.

So, I moved to DC about eight months ago. For the most part, it was a quick transition, but there’s one lingering thing that’s been hanging over my head since moving; getting a DC drivers’ license and registering my car in the District. It’s not a sentimental thing; yes, I kept my Maryland affiliation through college and grad school, but that was more a matter of convenience than anything else.

Nope, it was a sheer, stomach-clenching dread of dealing with the DC MVA that kept me from fulfilling my bureaucratic obligations. Virtually every DC resident with whom I’ve spoken has offered horror stories of cranky clerks, regulatory catch-22’s and the purgatorial feeling of waiting hours for service, and it didn’t help that when Jenny went to get her DC license a mere week after moving here, she had an experience that was positively Kafka-esque (suffice it to say that she wound up having to find someone to notarize her signature on a copy of our lease – note that I didn’t say a notarized copy of our lease, but rather a notarization for her signature on the back of a photocopy of our already-signed lease!). From the look of the website, registering my car in DC looked like a potential nightmare.

However, I’m damned sick of getting parking tickets for parking in the neighborhood on the days that I work from home, and a few months ago I got a creepy note on my windshield that informed me that the DC Police had observed my car parked overnight in my neighborhood twice in the past 180 days, and that I was thus warned of possible (and unspecified) penalties.So, today I gathered together every scrap of documentation I could find relating to my identity, my place of residence, and my car, and taking a deep breath, dove in headfirst.

Within two hours, I was done.

That’s right, in less than two hours, I was able to drive to the vehicle inspection site in Southwest, get a clean bill of health for my car, drive up to the Brentwood MVA office, wait in the “Information” line, show the clerk a folder full of documents, get the appropriate forms, have my number called before I’d even finished filling out my application for a license (!), get a new license, register my car and get new plates, drive home and swap my shiny new new DC “Taxation Without Representation“plates for the old MD ones.

I’m utterly flabbergasted. DC’s supposed to have the worst bureaucracy in the country, even the world, right? The civil servants are supposed to be cranky, mean-spirited people who delight in making their poor petitioners jump through hoops (repeatedly, if possible). This was supposed to take me several days, involve repeated trips to the same MVA office, and just plain suck. Instead, everyone I interacted with, from the guy at the inspection station who called me “chief” to the unbelievably friendly woman behind the counter at the Brentwood office, this was actually a pleasant process.

I’m still in shock.

A friend passed along a link to Yahoo!‘s 10th birthday “Netrospective.” Great interface design, intriguing use of comments to both foster dialogue and actually collect some history – seems like a really great exhibit, though one thing left a bad taste in my mouth. I know they’re your competitors and all, Yahoo!, but really – no mention of Google in the 100 canonical moments during the past 10 years of web history? Please.

Update: Ahem. Janet’s right. #17 is in fact a reference to Google, using the keyword “backrub” as a way to avoid putting the competitor’s name front and center. Please consider my above comment retracted.