The Verge’s Ben Popper has a fascinating look at the self-destructive atmosphere of Groupon. What shocked me is that Groupon apparently has around twelve thousand employees. How do the day-to-day operations of a glorified coupon website require the equivalent of the population of Malibu, California? It is completely nonsensical.
John Moltz, in a column for Macworld:
Apple makes a smaller number of devices to maximize economies of scale in design and manufacturing. This also has ecosystem benefits, such as making things easier for third-party manufacturers and developers. Apple doesn’t chase niche categories.
Sometimes four inches is just enough, and people don’t need five or six inches to make them happy.
You wrote the dick joke in your own dirty mind.
Good collection from Sean Mitchell. Acronym, Landmark, and Trola are all stunning specimens.
The New York Times is beginning to roll out a (much-needed) redesign of their article pages. It’s beautiful, and much less cluttered than their current layout. Untouched, so far, is the home page — oddly enough, I think this is the page that requires the most work. But it’s also the most difficult page to redesign, given the vast number of links, images, text, categories, and so forth that must be shown on it. This is a great start.
Be sure to download the press kit for full-size screenshots which you can drop into your web browser.
Harry Marks usually posts really smart stuff, but this is simply misguided:
But the #50tips hashtag bothered me. It’s one thing to say, “She’s not a good writer and I don’t like her books,” – In fact, E.L. James will be the first to tell you she’s not a good writer, but what transpired on Twitter was not well-reasoned criticism using multiple points of logic and proof to make a point. This was destructive and an abhorrent illustration of mob mentality.
Shorter version: juvenile mockery isn’t always pleasant.
No shit?
So, to all those “authors” who spent their day tweeting and retweeting vitriol, how much writing did you get done? Were you able to squeeze it in between bouts of smug laughter and grammatical gymnastics? Does calling James a plagiarist make your book any better?
No. I didn’t even participate in this Twitter smugfest, but does it really matter?
I’m sure some people will dismiss #50tips as merely harmless ribbing.
Yes.
After all, she’s got millions of dollars. She can take it. And if she didn’t want all this negative attention, she shouldn’t have become famous.
That’s not the argument I’d use. Rather, I’d point out that human beings are, in general, capable of resisting a little bit of jesting. I walked into the side of a door this morning and someone broke out laughing. Embarrassing? Sure. Funny? You bet. So long as people aren’t mocking minorities for being minorities — that’s cruel for obvious reasons, and usually mean-spirited — it’s usually meant in good fun. It’s not to be taken personally.
But take those words and apply them to an eleven year-old who might have written a best-selling fantasy trilogy that, while technically wasn’t good at all, told a fun story people really liked and made him a lot of money in the process.
How the hell is this a comparison? An eleven year-old is eleven — young, without experience, without significant education, and lacking any broad sense of composition. Marks could use “mouse” or “tree” in place of “eleven year-old” and create just as apt of a comparison. It’s so “not even wrong” that it’s impossible to logically disprove.
This post comes in the wake of a SXSW session regarding the culture of Reddit. The difference between what Marks is describing and the misogyny and racism of parts of Reddit is that the latter is mean-spirited and spiteful. The mocking of E.L. James’ books and writing is generated as a byproduct of its success, and is generally lighthearted. No reasonable person is mocking James for being a woman — that’s completely different, unfunny, and such behaviour should be condemned.
Which brings me to Marks’ closing statement:
If you’re a maker, focus on what you’re making. Don’t worry about what someone else is doing. E.L. James may not be a great writer, but she is published. She’s not writing pithy tweets about “lesser” writers and she certainly doesn’t deserve the horrendous things people are saying about her personally.
Writing a jokey 140-character tweet is hardly considered “worrying” about what someone else is doing. That she is published means her work is commercially viable; it’s not a measure of quality. And, as I mentioned before, no reasonable person is mocking her personally. Jokes at the expense of someone’s work may not be to your particular tastes, but they are not personal. Considering how self-aware E.L. James is about the quality of her writing, it’s unlikely that she would take personal offence to the tweets in question. With regard to the more serious accusation of plagiarism, well, there might be something to that.
Maybe this post comes as a product of art school. Enough harsh critiques about your work will require you to learn to separate someone’s opinion about what you made from an attack of your person.
General life tips: don’t be a dick, and don’t be a prude. don’t write things you wouldn’t want to defend in person, whether for positive reasons or negative reasons.1
In keeping with the spirit of criticizing the work instead of the person, I have retracted my previous statement and revised it to be more considerate. My apologies to Harry Marks. ↥︎
Rene Ritchie, iMore:
In tick years Apple has leapt ahead with technology like Retina display. But in tock years like this one? Markets are fickle and sentiment can gain momentum. And the fear facing some iPhone users is that, in the face of all this, an “iPhone 5S” simply won’t be enough.
Oh, this is good.
Brian Suda has written a great article for A List Apart about those fancy new ligature-heavy symbol fonts like Symbolset and FF Chartwell:
Think about all a web page’s little details that could be symbol fonts. Open your mind to the possibilities. Everything from bullets and arrows to feed and social media icons could be bundled into a single, tiny font file that can be cached and rendered at various sizes without needing multiple images or colors.
Marco Arment nails it:
If [Google] really cared about being so “open”, they’d open up a nontrivial part of their business that hasn’t already been commoditized, like their searching or advertising algorithms.
Brad McCarty:
Tell me this – Do you want to go to a site, click on something that looks like a story and instead have an ad fed to you? Because that’s what Mashable just “invented.”
I’ve seen something similar on Fark, but at least it’s from a website (Buzzfeed) that is already popular on Fark (not to mention that it’s clearly marked as an ad). Still, it’s misleading — at a casual glance, it looks just like a regular story.1 As readers are getting more accustomed to not clicking on ads, Mashable and Fark appear to be going for tricky clicks.
This is doubly irritating for someone, like me, who is a “TotalFark” subscriber. ↥︎
The Onion reports:
“The great thing about South By is that practically everyone here is talking about the newest cutting-edge ideas, but the whole scene still has this super-chill underground vibe,” said the 33-year-old who went to business school, makes a six-figure salary, and develops marketing strategies for a living.
Dr. Drang:
I like Daylight Saving Time, and the advantages it brings more than make up for the slight disruption in my schedule. In fact, the most annoying thing to me about the DST changeovers is hearing people complain about them.
So many great and quotable parts of this article. The reality, for much of the Northern Hemisphere, is that the advantages it affords outweighs the minor inconvenience of changing the few manual clocks you have left in your house. Would you instead prefer a 4:00 sunrise in Chicago in June? How about an 8:00 sunrise in December?
In fact, where I live, these effects are amplified further. According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, we wouldn’t see the sun rise until nearly 10:00 in December, or we’d cope with a 4:00 sunrise. This daylight saving time malarky actually works quite well.
The verified iBookstore Twitter account retweeted Alison Agosti:
“Let me suck a dick and tell you how much I love introspective novels.” @scottsimpson
The funniest part of this is that Scott Simpson used to work on the iBooks team at Apple.
Hell of a scoop for Ars Technica.
Liz Gannes, AllThingsD:
Google will soon settle with the attorneys general representing more than 30 U.S. states over its Street View cars collecting data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks, multiple sources said.
Paragraph six:
The Wi-Spy incident has taken years to play out. The actual data collection happened between 2007 and 2010. At first, Google denied that it had collected any payload data; then it admitted it had collected data “mistakenly.” Then, last year, it came out that the system was built knowingly by a “rogue engineer,” but even so, it had been approved. Later, Google said it found that a bunch of the payload data that it had said it deleted was still in its possession, and started giving it back to governments for their investigations.
Paragraph four:
Google has said it never did anything with the data collected. A company spokesperson said today, “We work hard to get privacy right at Google. But in this case we didn’t, which is why we quickly tightened up our systems to address the issue.”
Uh, okay.
Paragraph two:
Google is to pay $7 million, to be distributed among the attorneys general, according to a person familiar with the matter. That person said the agreement is close to being finalized, and should be announced early next week.
For comparison, Google books nearly $7 million per hour in revenue, so I’m sure this will teach them a lesson.
Rob Sheridan shares some of the artwork he created for “Bleedthrough“, before that record changed and became “With Teeth”. I love the album artwork so much that I have two rips of my CD copy of “With Teeth” in my library, just so I can use it.
Stephen Hackett is going to spend the next few months walking people through the rise and fall of the much loved brushed metal interface.
According to ad network Chitika, iOS 6.1.2 — an Exchange bug fixing update — is the most popular version of iOS just a week after its release. In fact, the most recent major version, iOS 6, comprises 85% of all versions of iOS in the wild.
Meanwhile on Android, the latest version — 4.1 and 4.2 Jelly Bean — sits at 16.5% of all Android users. In fact, all of Android 4.x installations represent just 45.1% of all users, only slightly edging out Gingerbread at 44.1%, which is now well over two years old.
Update: David Smith is seeing nearly 87% of users on iOS 6.x.
Rebecca Greenfield, The Atlantic:
For the users trying today’s rollout of the new News Feed, the bigger images all over the homepage are obvious, but it’s the super-sized ads that are truly impossible to ignore. On a test this afternoon, the following sponsored post from Rosetta Stone popped up as the second item in my News Feed. It takes up massive real estate in the main feed, and when combined with the other right-rail ads, that’s a full two-thirds of a computer screen of advertising, which accounted for 84 percent of Facebook’s revenues last quarter.
Two-thirds of the screen area is consumed by advertisements, but entirely all of the content on screen that is not basic navigation is advertising. The new News Feed is beautiful and engaging, but it desperately pushes ads to the absolute forefront.
You may remember John C. Dvorak from his infamous prediction of the failure of the iPhone; that’s a Macalope link — it’s funnier, and it provides this great quote:
Gosh, which John Dvorak do we believe? The one who says he deliberately trolls Apple fans just to gin up hits, or the one who blames Apple for his lousy analysis?
Well, Mr. Dvorak has written an article regarding Apple Maps. This should be a doozy:
On Monday I had a meeting at Apple with podcaster Leo LaPorte, TWiT CEO Lisa Kentzell, and marketing guy Glenn Rubenstein. We were in three separate cars, each with a different navigation system, and we had several places to stop, including 1 Infinite Loop at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino.
Unbeknownst to everyone else, lest they race around like madmen, this was a battle of the systems.
Oh, let’s all laugh at Apple Maps. I thought this had died out?
Glenn, who actually inspired my idea for the test, was using Apple Maps, which he switched to after iOS 6 dumped Google Maps. “I don’t have any trouble with it,” he said. “It works fine.” In fact, it worked better than Google.
Glenn arrived at least five minutes ahead of me. I gave the nod to Apple and now wonder what the fuss was about.
Don’t we all?
John Moltz clarifies the idiot’s ramblings.
