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The worst part about being sloppy is not the low grade work that you produce, but rather the perception
of yourself that you build. The more mistakes you make, the greater your reputation grows as someone
who just doesn’t pay attention to the details. There’s nothing earth shattering about this fact, but
it’s something to think about because it really does not take long for someone to label you and the
work you do as sloppy, that’s the scary part.
I don’t have an Amazon Kindle so I really can’t comment intelligently on the device, but I just wanted to press down some thoughts on the subject.
There have been alot of good comments and some bad, mainly about the device’s design. Some claim that this device is ushering in a new era of reading, some claim that it will never replace the book. I don’t know whether or not this device will be the preferred method of consuming the written word in the future, but something tells me that books are still going to be around for a very long time.
The people who tout Kindle as the next big thing tend to use the iPod alot in their arguments. They say what the iPod did for music, Kindle will do for books, but I disagree. What is the great thing about iPods and books? portability. I could be wrong about this, but I believe portable music has only been around in the mainstream since about the early 80’s with the advent of the “boom box” and other smaller tape players, so I believe that we were still primed and ready for a device like the iPod to arrive and disrupt the market when it came out. The iPod serviced a need and that was to have more music available at your side, this was something that everyone wanted. Music differs from the printed word in the fact that it can be consumed at much larger amounts without much thinking, so having a large amount of music with you at all times makes sense.
Now let’s talk about books. First off, the book as we know it today is already portable. I would make the argument that the majority of people out there do not want to have 200 novels with them at their side wherever they go, perhaps maybe students and teachers would want this, but not your average consumer. Reading is also a much more time and brain consuming task, so you’re only ever really going to want to be reading one book at a time, at least I feel this way.
I don’t say this with any pride, but overall reading levels are down…way down and I don’t think it’s going to get any better. Technology is speeding information up at astounding rates, information is being fed to us in bite size chunks all over the place, this is still a relatively new occurance right now but in another 50 years it will be considered as norm. For this fact I don’t see the future of the book as getting any brighter, therefore I don’t see why a device like Amazon’s Kindle makes much sense. I’d like to end this post on an slightly naive and optimistic note and say that I applaud Amazon and their commitment to a device like this, if they do say they want to try and get more people out there reading, that’s great and I wish them well, but something tells me this device was released for other reasons.
The real estate market in South Florida and I think the rest of the country is pretty rotten right now. Although I dig our agent, I’ve come to the conclusion that agents don’t really do all that much for you, they come in handy when the deal is ready to be done and can navigate you through the final waters of the deal, but that’s about it. I’m waiting for the web to really take a bigger part in the process of selling a house, what Zillow is doing is awesome and I’m hoping it’s but a glimpse of what is to come. The MLS system is dated, bloated and needs to just die, it was probably a great solution back in the day, but with the web I would seriously question it’s usefulness. We all need to stop taking money out of houses and realize that the equity in our homes is really the only form of savings we have. The tools and resources exist (Craigslist, Google Base, Trulia, RealEstate ABC)to give consumers more power and freedom in selling their house, so why isn’t anyone using it? Is it because we all need to have real estate agents to hold our hands throughout the whole process? Can we create some sort of new profession which consists of somebody that will essentially close the deal between both parties? Maybe like a mix between a title company and a real estate agent? That’s it for now, maybe once I sell my condo I’ll have more positive things to say about this whole process 
Increasingly I’m seeing alot of people that run personal blogs admit the fact that they are just too busy to write and maintain them anymore. They either slow down and stop writing entirely or post apologies about unfrequent updates and “try harder” to keep writing with more regularity.
“Life streaming” is increasingly gaining more popularity because we don’t want to necessarily stop posting because we enjoy the act of self-expression but we feel a little restricted with the whole format of blogging. Post title, excerpt, tags, etc. In other words, sometimes we just want something quicker and a little looser.
We’re busy in other places like Flickr, Del.icio.us and Youtube posting content, these can all be forms of self expression and we want a vehicle that will aggregate this content in a cohesive way. So this brings me to the question of just when someone is going to create a tool for this to happen? A tool like Blogger or WordPress to give us this new form of expression.
We’ve seen some attempts like Jaiku, Lifecapsules and even what Vox is doing, but there is yet to be a tool to gain large audience. This is a great opportunity for a company with the right mindset and resources and a great challenge for designers, to come up with designs that present content from all over the web in an effective and digestible way.
This post by Steve Rubel got me thinking again about my post on reviving the newspaper format.
It is nice to see papers embracing new mediums, but it just seems like someone needs to do something new with the whole newspaper format and turn the medium upside down.
Can’t we have customized versions of the paper delivered to our door yet? Does the technology and hardware exist yet to facilitate this on a large scale? I would love to log on to my local paper’s website and create a customized version of the newspaper with the content that I want to read and have it delivered to my door.
“The last piece is that user-generated content has made it possible for consumers to own your brand, and if they don’t, you’re not doing your job. The brands that are adopted, blogged about, and parodied the most are the ones that are going to win because they’re involved in the evolution of pop culture. If you’re scared to have your brand played with, you’re going to be left behind.”
Jeff Hicks in the new issue of Business 2.0 talks about users owning your brand.
It’s no secret that the newspaper as a format is dying. Circulations of major newspapers are dropping all over the country… quickly. I’d like to pose the question, “Can newspapers borrow ideas or concepts from the web in order to revive the format?”
Maybe newspapers could run “premium” articles inside the paper for a week and throw teasers up on the site. If a reader on the site is interested in reading the rest of the article they can they can pick up the paper and for at least 7 days, have the chance to read the rest of the article or run free classifieds and target ads within the listings that would run longer and provide more value for the cost.
I could be way off on this post, because admittedly I’m not a regular reader of my local paper, but it just seems that newspapers need to do more than the occasional redesign and start coming up with big changes to the format to revive circulation.
It’s funny, every time I read or talk about Starbucks I come to find out that most people either love or hate the coffee chain. If you live in a city with good coffee shops readily available to you, you tend to believe Starbucks is the evil giant moving in and pushing out the little guy. If you live in the suburbs, every time a new Starbucks pops up you rejoice and diverge into thoughts and discussion about how you wish one would be built closer to you.
It’s interesting to see how different opinions are manufactured based on the many variables in a person’s life and in this case it tends to be location.
“Fast paced environment”, “Salary based on experience”, “Cutting edge agency”
Why does every job listing description have to contain so much static? I often wonder why people can’t just be real, tell us what position you’re exactly looking for, what your budget is and what kind of experience you’re really looking for.
I’ve been on the other side and I understand that people in HR or managers want to protect themselves, if potential employees know you have a large budget for the position they’re going to demand a higher salary, but it just seems that if we all just got a little more “real” we’d save ourselves some time and money in the end.
It’s just typical, every company is looking for the most amount of talent for the least amount of money, but that does pay off in the end, when your designer or developer isn’t happy.