DefinitiveInk

Over the weekend we played with the scvgr app and tried to win an ipad by completing the Come Out & Play Trek. It actually felt antisocial walking around with W & B, checking in, taking photos, and answering questions. It was distracting and even though we were all together we weren't really together, I like the concept of bringing attention to our surroundings through a game but in practice it needs work or both B and W need iphones too.

B is threatening to make a peanut butter pie and has been secretly acquiring the ingredients.

Know Your Shit: Ten Years of Twitter Ads - Anil Dash

There are dozens more examples, but if you are going to compete or succeed in the Twitter ecosystem, shouldn't you know exactly what choices these men made when in nearly identical circumstances a decade ago? Because I'm friends with these guys, I can just ask them. But none of the developers I've talked to at events like Chirp seem to know this legacy, and they don't have the access and privilege that I do to ask questions directly. That's not really a criticism — a lot of them are young or inexperienced or simply arrogant and don't think history matters, so they are disinclined to listen to an old-timer like me rant about ancient times when they were in junior high school.

And while the brashness of youth can be a powerful driver of innovation, a blind devotion to the narratives as presented by today's tech press is incomplete at best. Without the whole story, today's startups are going to be sitting around surprised when industry cycles repeat themselves. It doesn't have to be that way. All you have to do is Know Your Shit.

via dashes.com

Ah, some history and context. Nice post by Anil who keeps in his grey matter past activities of the twitter's creators and who uses that to provide some insight into their decision making. I love this post and the examples he uses to illustrate it.

Eddy - Twitter Visualization from Stamen

 

via eddy.stamen.com

Cool new twitter  visualization product from Stamen. It is powering the MTV movie awards and a neat NBA playoff thing for Nike.

The market is likely to shift into two tiers, "branded/high-quality" and "cheap/good enough," predicts author and lecturer Seth Godin. Mainstream publishing houses have long depended for much of their profit on selling backlist titles, books in print for more than a year. In coming years, there will be adequate substitutes for many of those works at a quarter of the price, he says.

"Not for the books of J.D. Salinger or George Orwell, but for a book on stretching, certainly," he says. "And books on stretching have long helped pay the bills at many publishing houses."

via online.wsj.com

True, there are also lots and lots of web pages on stretching.

Interesting overview of "vanity publishing" in the WSJ. Seems to me that term "vanity" is one of those that the establishment likes to throw out to dismiss work much like they use "blog" to denigrate competing forms of journalism. Not to long ago in the scheme of things, all books were self-published as authors used to pay booksellers to print their books. To finance those often subscriptions were sold. It was an entrepreneurial venture and could have used a service like Kickstarter. In a way more and more my friends who are published by big houses are taking part in that same system as they hire their own publicists, pay for the photos, copyediting and websites, in order to help their books succeed. It is true that they are not taking on the risk of printing and are getting advances rather than taking the risk. Some of them have expertise and reputations in their subjects that they might do better publishing on their own and distributing their books via Amazon and B&N directly but I think they like the status of being published by a Publisher and won't try it.

What Could Make The Gulf Oil Spill Worse? How About a Hurricane. | TPMDC

via tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com

Kind of a must read at Talking Points Memo.

Found a site that let's you customize a firetruck eztruckbuilder.com.

Leroy Stick – the man behind @BPGlobalPR (aka a guy in his boxer shorts)

I’ve read a bunch of articles and blogs about this whole situation by publicists and marketing folk wondering what BP should do to save their brand from @BPGlobalPR.  First of all, who cares?  Second of all, what kind of business are you in?  I’m trashing a company that is literally trashing the ocean, and these idiots are trying to figure out how to protect that company?  One pickledick actually suggested that BP approach me and try to incorporate me into their actual PR outreach.  That has got to be the dumbest, most head-up-the-ass solution anyone could possibly offer.

Do you want to know what BP should do about me?  Do you want to know what their PR strategy should be?  They should fire everyone in their joke of a PR department, starting with all-star Anne Womack-Kolto and focus on actually fixing the problems at hand.  Honestly, Cheney’s publicist?  That’s too easy.

BP seems to only care about maintaining their image so they can keep making money, two things we have blatantly avoided.  I don’t have an image and I’m not making any money AT ALL for myself.  Every penny we make from the t-shirts goes to the Gulf Restoration Network.  Just a few hours ago, we made our first official $10,000 donation to healthygulf.org from the money we’ve made selling free “bp cares” t-shirts in one week.

via streetgiant.com

Lucinda Williams Covers “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”

Generations of young people have grown up on Shel Silverstein’s poetry, but many may not know he was also a prolific songwriter. When not churning out classic anthologies like Where the Sidewalk Ends, he penned hits for Johnny Cash (“A Boy Named Sue”) and Dr. Hook (“The Cover of the Rolling Stone”). Twistable, Turnable Man: A Musical Tribute to the Songs of Shel Silverstein cements Silverstein’s songwriting legacy with fifteen new covers by artists old (Kris Kristofferson, John Prine) and new (My Morning Jacket, Andrew Bird). Cover Me is proud to premiere a selection from the compilation. Three-time Grammy winner Lucinda Williams spins an alt-country yarn in “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan.” A hit for Marianne Faithfull, in Williams’ hands the song becomes an atmospheric country weeper. The sparse production and ominous bass drum propel the bored housewife’s tale towards a haunting ending. Stream it below, then tell us what you think in the comments!

via www.covermesongs.com

Great cover by Lucinda Williams. Cover Lay Down a favorite blog of mine has another mp3 off this album, Queen of the Silver Dollar performed by Sarah Jarosz and Black Prairie.

Disney Puts Movie Tickets on a Facebook Site - NYTimes.com

“The whole idea is that no friend gets left behind,” said Oliver Luckett, senior vice president and general manager of DigiSynd, a Disney subsidiary that manages the entertainment giant’s social networking presence.

Disney Tickets Together, which has been in development for months, works with ticket-buying sites like Fandango.com and covers the majority of the movie theaters in North America, Mr. Luckett said. Facebook receives no percentage of the ticket sales but does, in theory, get more visitors on its site.

via www.nytimes.com

The Wired iPad App sounds like it could have been made in 1994

Deconstruction of the Wired iPad App ★

Speaking of the Wired iPad app, Layton Duncan has a good analysis of how it’s built:

At its core the app is a simple XML driven layout engine. Content is split into “stacks”, each horizontal swipe in the app loads a new stack. Each stack has associated meta data such as title, description, tags etc. Each stack has an ordered list of “assets” which are essentially 1024 × 768 pixel static images of the pages which are displayed while browsing.

That explains why text isn’t selectable. (I wonder if they could switch to PDF for the stacks?)

via daringfireball.net

Wow - kind of reminds of Director and CD-ROm's of books. I remember scanning in page after page...

bunny

bunny
Originally uploaded by niznoz.

Let me in please. I really got to go.