To: Freddie (re blogging)

There’s something annoying about the chronological ordering and about the flat, endless chattering of blogs. Blogs feel disorganized to me…there’s no selection and emphasis between entries, it’s just someone’s core dump. I like the word blog because it’s so close to blob. Eno had a solution for this in his diary: There were regular day entries, talking about things like scrubbing the shower or having dinner with Elvis Costello, which is fun in it’s own right, but after the diary entries, in the last 1/5 of the book, he organizes all of his current (and recurrent) projects/ideas with background and details on each, alongside significant letters he wrote that year, etc. That’s the meat of the book in a lot of ways, because gets beyond all the day-to-day bullshit.

So when I started a blog, I decided not to make it public until I knew I’d take it seriously and have something to say. Too many blogs out there just say “I’m hungry and I have a headache and I just finished brushing my teeth, and I talked to my mom on the phone…”

As for the popularity, we’re the me generation. We all want to be rock stars. So we want everyone to listen to us and see how cool we are. Plus blogs are easier to set up than a home page. And there’s the theraputic quality of diaries in general…

(this is going on my blog, btw)

I was talking with Greg and Max today about social networks, thinking of ways the Friendster model could solve all the worlds problems. We went down a few paths….

Media Recommendations:
I want to get into new music, new books, etc. Amazon has gotten me part of the way there, but I have a problem with their algorithms.. if I buy a jazz CD, I’ll see lots of jazz CDs in my recommendations… until I buy a polka CD, and then it’s all polka.

Here’s what I might want out of a good recommendations system:

- A human should make the recommendations by revealing their likes and dislikes to the system.

- Once you have these rankings, show me individuals within the network who have the most overlap with me. (Amazon says: people who bought X also bought Y, but that is averaged out and therefore not as interesting.. I don’t trust the averages as well as I might trust one person I like the taste of)

- Let me build up a trust relationship with other individuals based on how well I like what they recommend. The strength of these relationships will decide the likelihood that some new item of theirs will be recommended to me.

- Understand that music recommendations != book recommendations != electronics recommendations. I trust different people for different things.

What I think we have here is a mesh network. It’s sort of peer-to-peer instead of Amazon’s more centralized averaging system. Amazon may have attempted to do something more like this (something more “human”) by adding those recommendation lists, but the flaw is that I don’t want to know what some random dude who liked this one item I’m looking at also liked. I need more than one data point.

My current solution to the recommendations problem, at least for music (which I go through a lot of very quickly), is a simple mix CD swapping club. The other members just happened to have fairly congruent tastes with mine, and there were enough things I’d never heard of to keep me excited about it. We meet once every week or 2 and dicuss (for an hour!) a mix CD someone made. I’ve been around for 2 CDs worth so far and its opened me up to about 5 new artists I like that I’d never have heard of otherwise.

Amazon doesn’t do that for me.

Alumni Networks: Why isn’t Friendster-style networking sold to schools for alumni (or even current student) networks? Rather than providing a list of alumni who graduated in 2000, why not allow a Friendster network within the class. Then when I ask “Who was Agnus Beef? Where do I remember her from?”, I could see that I knew Agnus through my friend Chuck… etc.

Edward Tufte, in his recent PowerPoint slam, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, complained that a simple list of items is uninteresting because it provides no relationships between items… and this is one of the fundamental problems with PowerPoint’s list-based presentation model, he says. If you could have arrows between list elements, to show relationships, you’d add an entire dimension of information.

But I’m getting off topic. Time for sleep.

Came home from work with a lot of thoughts. brimming with thoughts.

Where is America (USA) now? I don’t see it in Boston, I’m too used to Boston. But I see glimpses of it in New York and when I visit Nashville. I saw it on the interstate when I was growing up, every summer on the family trip from Nashville to New England. I saw it moving to Boston in November 2000, with my dad in his pickup truck… leaving a Virginia motel at 6am, watching the sun rise over the Shenandoah mountains as we sped down the interstate. And at a big truck stop in Kentucky where truckers sat at a long row of poker machines and NASCAR racing video games. Sometimes I see it when I get off the highway for gas and have to drive a couple miles to find the station.

Chris Alexander, from The Timeless Way of Building, got me thinking this way:

Isn’t it true that the features which you remember most in a place are not so much peculiarities, but rather the typical, the recurrent, the characteristic features: the canals of Venice, the flat roofs of a Moroccan town, the even spacing of fruit trees in an orchard, the slope of a beach towards the sea, the umbrellas of an Italian beach, the wide sidewalks, sidewalk cafes, cylindrical poster boardings and pissoirs of Paris, the porch which goes all the way around a plantation house in Louisiana…

What could be more typical than the interstate?

This might be your shower handle. It’s a lot of people’s shower handle, at least in the USA. Do you remember the first time you encountered one of these? I do. I had no idea what I was doing. It turned on full blast. I was intimidated. I think I had to ask for help. What’s wrong with this thing?

The problem is that there are two controls for water volume, and only one makes sense. When you turn the big handle on, you get to vary the volume of scalding hot water. When you adjust the lever at the bottom, you choose bath or shower and the volume of either. I’ll wager that most people don’t know about the volume function (even though it says “LO” and “HI”) because they’re used to the standard bath/shower as a binary switch (pull up for shower, leave down for bath).

My solution would be to make “OFF” the middle position between bath and shower, and to make the temp knob control only temperature. An added bonus: The temp knob now has memory between uses.

Why didn’t they design it this way? My best guess is that it was somehow more difficult, mechanically; more expensive to produce. But perhaps they mangled this thing on purpose. What might they have been thinking?

A little over one ton of concrete is produced each year for every person in the world. What will you do with your ton?

I tried out Reason this evening out of curiosity (Daniel kept talking about it) .. though the demo is very limiting, I get the idea of it. If you had a $10,000 G5 with all kinds of audio cards and a modicum of skill, you could do some serious damage with this program.

To Freddie:

I finally visited CafePress this evening and was impressed. I love the idea of personalized, one-off goods. I like being able to charge whatever I want.

Here are the downsides:

• CafePress doesn’t allow limited editions. I want scarcity, and they don’t have it.
  
• Almost every product is white. Maybe I should consider this a blessing. But I really wanted to make a line green T-shirt with white lettering.
  
• The products are also pretty cheap. Where’s the super soft Italian cotton t-shirt, with nice stitching, etc?
  
• You’re limited in where you can print. No special messages on the bottom of the beer stein. etc.
  

But I can find “flaws” in anything. Overall, I must say I’m pleasantly surprised. Here’s my store. Do you think my prices are too low?

In the morning, I drafted an abstract for Boston Secrets:

Boston is chock full of secrets, and it keeps them closely guarded. It’s a city rich in history and culture, with endless resources for everyone, provided you know where to go…

This book is not for tourists. You could fill a library with Boston travel guidebooks, but once you’ve visited Quincy Market as a Boston resident, you’ll understand that those books show a limited picture. Tourists are herded to and fro within their own part of town. But behind the Market, behind Hanover Street and Harvard Square, and beyond the city limits, if you know the right alleys to follow and the right doors to knock on, you’ll find the local side of Boston. This is the realm of Boston Secrets. I hope this book will be of interest to newcomers and long-time residents alike.

This book could be expanded in a couple ways: horizontally, into a series of Secrets books for different cities, and vertically, into a web service for sharing secrets and selling the book.

Feeling inspired in the afternoon, had the rare pleasure of sitting down and listening to music through headphones in a quiet room. Everything sounds beautiful. Noticed some interesting new production in David Gray’s “Nightblindness” — the reverb on his voice is very prominent, definitely a style in itself.

Played bass along with Radiohead (“Optimistic”, “There There”) and old James Taylor. Found Oblique Strategies on the web.

I’m hoping writing this blog (also inspired by Brian Eno) will improve my writing.

I think we place way too much stock in newness. I wonder if design innovations might be informed greatly by looking further back into history. What’s left of the past gives us simplicity and durability of both ideas and goods. “Those were simpler times,” they say.. and maybe that clarity of thought can really help us out right about now. If we want to look deep into the future, perhaps we should dig deep into the past?

Newness is probably one of the biggest selling points in retail.. second only to coolness. Coolness might be a good thing in some regards, because there is an appreciable relationship between popularity (coolness, in my mind) and quality, but I don’t see a great argument for newer = higher quality. Of course there are always great new things coming around, but old things are so much better filtered in retrospect! What if you walked into the record shop and they had a rack right up front of great classic records? And you have to wander toward the back to find the new stuff, the stuff which hasn’t gained enough respect to come up front yet.

Of course, so much of newness is about adapting the old stuff to the palate of a new generation or culture… and while that’s important because it redistributes the meme nicely among a larger, younger audience, it doesn’t always add quality to the original meme… I might even argue that this kind of cultural “distillation” takes something away from the original form.

So I think it’s vital to recognize and understand the original form.