If you’re upset, confused, alarmed, and/or concerned about Twitter’s new policy of censoring tweets at a country-level, this is worth reading: Why Twitter’s new policy is helpful for free-speech advocates .
Paul Graham’s Y Combinator request for startups #9: Kill Hollywood.
…What is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people.
Adam really said it better than I was able to say it. He even uses a word that was on the tip of my tongue but I could not find: “spectacle”. Here’s a portion of his post:
The implicit, underlying assumption of much of journalism is that reality isn’t interesting enough, or comprehensible enough on its own. It needs to be reinterpreted through storytelling with a bias towards conflict, personality, stereotype, conventional wisdom and other tropes that make what is boring and unfamiliar to the writer more palatable to a large audience.
YES. That.
After my post yesterday I received some nice email and question about what exactly I do think a tech site should be covering. I have a lot to say on this, and I don’t have a ton of examples right now, but I thought I’d write the first ones that come to mind here and then just reply with the URL to this post.
In short two things interest me: the first is small teams or businesses that have managed to bootstrap themselves without angel or VC money. There are SO MANY ways to fund a company that knowing someone did it with a product that people actually wanted is so much more valuable to me as a reader. I think one could spend a year chasing down the people who have bootstrapped or overfunded their idea on Kickstarter and then went on to deliver another great product. A weblog with a hard requirement like that would be a daily read.
Look at Wirecutter on The Awl network. Did not take funding. A one man operation. Makes money with ads and Amazon referrals. Hell yeah! That’s a great story.
The second thing that interests me is actual emerging tech ideas, not manufactured ones. I am talking about the sorts of people who tinker with APIs and services to come up with a new way to publish or share.
This year I think the big thing will be taking back your data from the cloud. I think owning your own data and having file-level control of your photos and blog posts and personal relationships on your computer is going to become much more popular than it is now.
OpenPhoto was a Kickstarter project that successfully funded an open-source solution to managing your photos through Dropbox or S3. It was built with $25,000 of supporter’s money. I mean, look at this!
Jekyll is a “blog-aware, static site generator” that has been around for over three and a half years. The idea is that you don’t need a centralized blog posting service to generate and host your static files, you can have them generated locally and pushed to a static web server. Quite a few people have been thinking about this for a while now. Brent Simmons has been working on one since 2009, Marco Arment just pushed the source to Second Crack on Github. I just saw a new one yesterday that looks great but is extremely custom and probably won’t be released any time soon, but the need is there.
These “own your content” apps are still in the toothpick and wad of gum stages, but someone is going to get this right and it’s not just going to be a great story but a new way of thinking about how we publish and own our content.
What’s boring: $10 million in funding to make a new Facebook. Yes, you can hire a ton of people and make perplexing videos on someone else’s dime for quite a while it seems. I thought the first version of Color was actually cool if not cold and a bit cumbersome, but since then they haven’t done very much worth posting about yet we get new blog posts and profiles about the founder every few months.
All that said, and given I linked to a quote about PandoDaily in the previous post, I also think posts like this are absolutely worth discussing. Anyone up for a stop Jimmy Wales protest avatar?
Tim O’Reilly on SOPA and lobbyists (emphasis mine):
The mismatch between Silicon Valley and Congress isn't just that Silicon Valley isn't engaged enough with lobbying Congress, but that Silicon Valley has this outmoded idea that your ideas succeed when they are right, as proven in the marketplace, rather than because you were better at making a backdoor deal than the next guy.
Tech Industry Buys Itself a Mouthpiece
"It's a long list," Lacy conceded in the announcement. "And there is a simple reason we spread the syndicate widely: This is a news site built for the startup community, so the more of them that are a part of it, the better."
I know where Tim was going with that paragraph and his posts on SOPA/PIPA are must-read thoughts on the problem, but I think that sentence reflects for me the thing that is a bit discouraging about Silicon Valley.
I still want to see an independent tech weblog that covers the many startups and subjects I never see listed on the current tech blogs. I hate seeing a glowing post about some new startup and know the writer and CEO regularly joke with each other on Twitter. I hate when a popular startup is given a pass because most of the writers attended the founder’s bachelor party or got an exclusive on a new feature.
This is the game that goes on and the righteous belief that there isn’t one bothers me.
A long time ago, when people dialed (as in telephones) into Unix machines in some closet or college campus, they used a command called ‘w’ to see who was also on the machine.
You can use this command now if you’re on a Unix-derived operating system. Open terminal enter ‘w’ and you’ll see your login name and any command line tools you might be running. (Likely just ‘w’.)
In those days ‘w’ was used to not just see who was logged in, but what they were using (pine, vi, irc, ftp, lynx) and for how long they had been signed in.
There was a joke about getting ideas for making new apps in the late 90’s: just pick a random Unix tool.
- Talk and IRC begat ICQ, AIM, GTalk, Campfire, Convore.
- Usenet is at the root of Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, and the multitude of PHPBB communities.
- Finger influenced the creation of weblogs and the idea was further refined as Twitter. (This is a forgotten history of weblogs: video game bloggers were at its birth, they took the .plan and .project updates of people like Carmack and Romero and posted them reverse chronologically. I will fight anyone on this.)
But there was something special about ‘w’ for me. In those days of shared servers I would auto-run a shell script that would parse ‘w’ and highlight my friends and see what they were up to and if they were available to talk. If they were in Pine of course you wouldn’t bug them, but if they were just idle in a shell or working on homework, they were probably up for talking or helping you find some new warez site or want to meet up for a slice of pizza.
This past week, like many of my friends, I jumped with two feet into Path. I’ve been pretty selective about who I will share with on Path because of that 150 person limit, but also because I am drowning in Twitter and RSS subscriptions. I like Path for the ability to clearly see my friends’ statuses in a way that Twitter and weblogs no longer provide.
Path is not a remake of ‘w’. I think AIM had and still has the ability to be the ‘w’ of the modern internet. But Path has done so much right with its latest release, I think I miss ‘w’ a little less than before.
I pulled my head out of MLKSHK the last two months and had a bit of a revelation about the future of web apps—at least, any web app I work on in my future. I present to you my new starting markup:
<html> <body> </body> </html>
Well, throw a <head> tag in there pointing to some JavaScript (generated by CoffeeScript of course) and perhaps a DIV with an id of “app” and that’s about it. I just don‘t see a need to manage “page” markup when so much of my markup is now in jQuery templates/snippets I can swap out very easily.
I resisted hash-bang paths and client-side apps for so long until I started working on a project where it made perfect sense. Since then I’ve just gotten more comfortable with the idea because:
- It’s easier for me to think about the server-side app as an API with your browser-view one type of client. Side-effect: your mobile app just got easier to make.
- This divides testing into server side and client side. Working on the UI doesn’t mean you have to flip over to the server-side tests to ensure it’s working.
- I think I love CoffeeScript.
- Marshalling data for a specific view is tedious.
I feel like separating these clients from the back-end means less time tinkering with data as it moves from your db out to your views. There is so much traversing code when you build a site and I now think if you can cut your trips into smaller loops you‘ll spend less time wrestling with data, markup, and CSS (boring) and more time writing useful functionality (fun!).
Sorry I uncircled you on Google+. Hell, I uncircled everyone and closed my account. Boop dee boop!
Facebook was never my thing, and Google+ filled with the 300 or so people I interact with on Twitter + 1,000 or so people I have never talked to (mostly dudes) was really not my thing either. I'm on Twitter. I love Twitter. I don't need anything else to keep up with what people are doing.
It's nice to see Google finally getting a clue about how to make a social media site, but as someone remarked on Twitter, "Twitter and Facebook were indie rock bands that made it big, Google+ is a manufactured boy band."
Plus that anonymity thing is so much bullshit. It's cheating by forcing accountability rather than fostering it.
I switch browsers every year or so. Last year Chrome was my default browser after switching from Firefox (which had become achingly slow), and I switched from Chrome to Safari because it supported 1Password. While Chrome now supports 1Password integration, I am happy with Safari and don't see a reason to change.
The only thing I miss from Firefox is the Merge All Windows function. You could hit “⌘-SHIFT-M” and all your windows would be gathered in one window with tabs. (Though, now I can't find this feature and I'm wondering if it was a plugin I'd used.)
Safari has this feature, but not accessible with Keyboard Shortcuts. Here is the menu as it looks before you do this. The option is there, but you have to grab your mouse and select from the menu.
By the way, this also doubles as a tutorial for adding command keys to any application's menu (as far as I know) in OS X.
Open up System Preferences and choose "Keyboard" and then hit the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab.
Select the little plus sign in the center of the window and in the popup select Safari for the application and type "Merge All Windows" (the wording is important) for the Menu Title.
For the Keyboard Shortcut box, simply type the shortcut “⌘-SHIFT-M” and it will fill it in for you.
Click "Add" and now head back to Safari. Your new Keyboard Shortcut is now in place.
I never understood NY's envy over Silicon Valley's tech culture.