My Problem with Reading Online

There was too much noise. Even with the relatively small number of feeds to which I was subscribed, almost none of it was interesting to me. I realized that, for some reason I couldn’t quite recall, I felt obligated to stay abreast of new developments in technology and such.

– Brett Kelly, Reading Intentionally: Why I Quit Reading RSS

When I left for Las Vegas, I knew I would be going without one component that has been with me for years: reading online.

The cost for the wifi at the hotel I was staying at was around $20 a day, which I wasn’t willing to pay because I wasn’t 100% certain that the connection would be reliable enough to use. The data plan my cellphone carrier has for travel in the United States is even worse: $1 per 1 Mb. The combination of the two high costs forced me to be offline and to change my reading habits from RSS feeds, Twitter, iPad apps, shared links in Facebook to a few magazines and eBooks on the iPad.

When I returned home and logged into Google Reader for the first time in four days, it was a bit overwhelming. The number of unread items was well over 1,000. The number didn’t drop significantly even though I was hitting “Mark All as Read” as quickly as I could. Eventually, I marked everything as read and went to the websites I really wanted to learn about.

Being faced with that problem made me think deeper about the issue. Like Brett, I felt a certain obligation to follow several authors, regardless of whether the content was 100% interesting or relevent to what I was doing at the time. But the real problem was why I started following sites with RSS feeds to begin with.

Before I discovered RSS feeds, I did what everyone else presumably did: bookmark favourite sites, store them within folders in the browser or Delicious-like services. What drove me to use RSS feeds was the not only the ease at which I could follow a site, but also that it was a form of clean reading – no ads, no share buttons everywhere, didn’t need see the comment feeds underneath, and no temptation to click thru the blog rolls that were common on the side.

Compared to when I first came across RSS feeds in 2003 or 2004, site design has become better and worse at the same time. The proliferation of Google Ads and sidebar ads has grown exponentially, but the number of simpler sites is also on the rise. Applications like Instapaper have improved the readability of the web, as have WordPress themes like Basic from Themify or a CMS like Kirby. I have a suspicion that as the web continues to become more mobile, designers will strip down websites so they function properly on mobile devices.

With these ideas dancing around in my head, I came across Jeffery Zeldman’s site and his manifesto for web design. He had recently did a redesign of the site that is a bit dramatic, but it works better than most of the other sites I have seen. As he explains:

This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers might soon not be designing for anyone.)

– Jeffery Zeldman, Web Design Manifesto 2012

The full manifesto is a must read for anyone interested in design, or creating for your own site.

Knowing that I tend to follow too many blogs, and I would rather follow the clean sites, is their solution that cuts down on the number of blogs while providing meaningful content?

Thankfully, there are some options available that will satisfy my hunger for knowledge without being too overwhelming.

Read and Trust is a network of about 20 quality authors, some you may have read in the past: Matt Gemmell, Marco Arment, David Sparks, David Chartier, Shawn Blanc, and so forth. There’s a simple download link for their RSS feeds, or a list on Twitter to follow. I’m giving it a few weeks to decide how many of the authors I should follow or whether it is better to follow on Twitter.

SVBTLE is another network of authors, but most are from the startup world. People involved with Justin.tv, Twitter, Zynga, The Verge, Kickstarter, Mashable. I’m finding it’s a good site to pop in once in a while to do some reading, but you can follow the individual blogs.

The Feature is a collection of the most popular articles saved to Instapaper, or there is Longform which is another great source for stories.

5by5 is a podcasting network, which I have written about previously, but has such a variety of topics covered on their shows that I can easily listen to a few a week and be satiated with knowledge.

70 decibels is another podcasting network that I have only started to explore. Some of the topics are similar to 5by5’s shows, but most are quite different.

There are three great iPad apps that I use, as well:

I think the combination of using the iPad apps, listening to more comprehensive podcasts and cutting down on the number of sites I read will provide me with a lot more free time to create, rather than consume.

Our reading habits have definitely changed with the dawn of RSS readers, Twitter, smartphone apps, etc. I thought this episode of [Write for Your Life] summed up my thoughts about the topic better than I could. Have a listen to "How We Read Now | Write for Your Life

I hope people can suggest other great podcast networks to explore or blog networks to consider.

Sunday Reading May 20th, 2012: @inkedmn, @jdalrymple, @gruber, @villagevoice

A blog isn’t about the feelings of the company, but rather a personal look at the writer. You can’t assign a blogger a story and hope the audience doesn’t get the fact that they have no idea what they’re talking about or worse yet, they don’t really care.

– Jim Dalrymple, the loop

This post by Jim, also the host of Amplified on 5by5, is currently being spread around by a lot of the writers I follow on a regular basis. There are a lot of tidbits to take away from it, but I wanted to highlight the personal aspect of blogging because it relates to the next story that may interest people. Jim talks a little more about how the blogger connects with his audience, they feel like they know the writer, and they share the conent more. Eventually, this leads to a writer being known for writing great content and a great person, as well. I suppose there are exceptions to this, but I can’t remember following a writer even though they came off as a bit of an asshole.

I bring this up because of the reaction that happened when it was learned that John Gruber had moved his podcast, The Talk Show from 5by5 to Mule Radio. Doing a search for “@gruber” is pretty revealing, the people who are bewildered by the move, the ones who are upset, the ones who don’t care. Because The Talk Show was more open and personal (i.e. episodes of John eating on the air, mic problems, talking about the Yankees after a discussion about Apple, etc), the listeners had a more personal attachment to the show. When Dan Benjamin is removed from the show, hearing another voice with John’s is rather alienating even though the content is still solid.

When PandoDaily was started and writers started to jump ship from TechCrunch, I didn’t get the same sense of emotional reaction from the audience. This may be because the writer is the one that makes the content, not the site. Putting the same writer on a different site still allows for the same great content that people expect. The TechCrunch exodus never provoked emails like this:


Quick Update: Dan Benjamin put out a short special on 5by5 to share what happened with The Talk Show. He shares a lot of the same thoughts I did above. Worth the 4 minutes if you’re interested: Special #6: Regarding The Talk Show

Speaking of podcasts, I have been following a relatively new one called Home Work on the 70 decibels network. It’s a podcast for people who work from home, whether freelancer or telecommuter and has been quite interesting for me. The episodes are a good length, as well, no two hour marathon shows here.

Worthwhile reads:

 The Village Voice was founded in 1955. It is one of the most successful enterprises in the history of American journalism. It began as a neighborhood paper serving an area about a tenth the size of the Left Bank, in Paris, and it became, within ten years, a nationally known brand and the inspiration for a dozen other local papers across the country. By 1967, it was the best-selling weekly newspaper in the United States, with a single-day circulation higher than the circulations of ninety-five per cent of American big-city dailies. It survived the deaths of four other New York City newspapers and most of its imitators, and it has had a longer life than the weekly Life. But, in books about the modern press, it is given a smaller role than it deserves.
– It Took a Village | The New Yorker

At the end of April, Paul Miller made the bold claim: I’m leaving the internet for a year. Imagine my surprise when I saw this other headline: Author Paul Miller on The Digital Workplace and the evolution of the office. Turns out, it’s a different Paul Miller talking about his new book, The Digital Workplace, which is about “how technology is liberating work.” The video interview is short and the book sounds interesting to me. Add another one one to the digital bookshelf for me.

The history of sports is the history of difficulty, and we value those things highest we think hardest. Which is why we’re suckers, every one of us, for a run at the Triple Crown.

I’ll Have Another wasn’t supposed to win Saturday.

– I’ll Have Another restores our faith, ESPN

I ended up watching the Preakness Stakes, only because I’ll Have Another is owned by a Canadian, and if there is something Canadians love more than their beer and hockey, it’s beating the United States at anything[1]. I liked Jeff MacGregor’s coverage of the race, and now look forward to the Belmont on June 9th.

For owners of an iPad, you may want to check out David Sparks’ Paperless which is all about developing processes in work to eliminate the need for paper, using a combination of iPads, iPhones and desktop/laptops. David Sparks is also the author of iPad at Work and is a host of the {Mac Power Users](http://5by5.tv/mpu/ “Mac Power Users | 5by5”) podcast. The latest episode is about Paperless – MPU.

Speaking of going paperless, I was rather blown away by this street artist using the app Paper on an iPad: Street Artist Lawrence Hosannah with Paper App

Finally, Reading Intentionally: Why I Quit RSS by Brett Kelly.

That fabricated obligation led me to routinely scan big lists of headlines and, more often than not, mark the whole mess as “read” and go on to something else. Imagine this happening 2–4 times per day and I was spending between 10–30 minutes per day skimming or ignoring stuff that, for the most part, wasn’t what I wanted to read.

This is starting to make the rounds, and I have more to say about the subject but wanted to make sure people had a chance to read the blog post. Brett also has an ebook covering Evernote Essentials, which may interest some.

  1. When I say anything, I really mean anything.  ↩

Sunday Reading – May 13, 2012

No edition for Sunday Reading last week, because I was still recovering from my trip to Las Vegas and couldn’t find time to prepare anything.

I’m flattered to join the ranks of Barack Obama, Elvis Presley, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Tupac Shakur as the subject of a great American conspiracy theory! (I would have added Biggie Smalls to the list, but I’m westside ’til I die.) In any event, I’m either an alien life form brought to Earth to keep track of Jose Canseco, or I’m a woman named Sarah Phillips who writes sports-related columns and blogs. You decide. In the meantime … taaake meee tooo yooour leeeadeeer.
– Is an ESPN Columnist Scamming People on the Internet | Deadspin
A fascinating read into the background of an ESPN columnist and her rise from being an unknown commenter on a sports gambling site.

I have always been drawn to New York City and love the mix of culture and history found there. Here is a good read about the Village Voice: It Took a Village: How the Village Voice Changed Journalism

Mark has done two things in his twenties,” a colleague of Zuckerberg says. “He has built a global company, and he has grown up.” The second one made the first possible.
– The Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man | New York Magazine


Everyone who has been following Twitter, Facebook, etc. knows that Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys passed away. Over at kottke, there is a great roundup of the posts around the internet about MCA

Finally, the world also lost Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are. Wired Magazine has a good collection of photographs from his life and a biography of the man for those unfamiliar with his work: Remembering Maurice Sendak | Wired

iPad for Work

iPad for Work

It is not a sacrifice to use the iPad as a primary device.
– Shawn Blanc, Why the iPad is My New Laptop

Shawn writes about how he’s using his iPad more for regular tasks without missing a beat without using his laptop. I wrote about this earlier when I talked about how I am Changing My Workflow. After I wrote that, I started to explore more ways to push my work onto the iPad and migrate away from my MacBook. The iPad has essentially become my main device[1] for many of the same reasons Shawn outlines in his post.

The main reason I enjoy the iPad more for work than the MacBook is for focus.

Shawn writes:

The iPad, however, comes with a natural anti-distraction software: iOS itself. The iPad makes a great multi-use device because it doesn’t distract or beckon away from the task at hand.

I find this to be extremely important to me now. The Mac OS makes multi-tasking extremely easy, while it’s slightly more cumbersome in iOS (double-tapping the Home Button vs CMD-Tab. Because it takes me slightly longer to switch apps on the iPad, I tend to stay more focused, in my writing especially.

On my Mac, I would open a new tab to check in on Facebook, switch over to email when a new message arrived, dabble in iTunes to find the right type of music to listen to, etc.

On my iPad, I don’t open new tabs or the Facebook app to check in, I’ve turned off notifications for mail, and rarely listen to music while working on the iPad now.

The one thing Shawn doesn’t mention is how quiet the iPad is in comparison to the laptop. Right now, I have the MacBook running iTunes, and Safari, and the fan is still humming quietly. On the iPad, the only noise I hear is of my iPad keyboard clicking away. It’s rather Zen-like, looking at Byword and listening to the keyboard go clack-clack-clack.

Shawn also mentions iCloud backup and restore, which is great, and has made me much more aware of backing up my data on my computer in the cloud. I’m currently migrating all my work files into Google Drive to back them up and to have them readily available in case I need to work on them from the iPad. I do a full backup via TimeMachine to an external drive already, but I don’t think I need to backup everything to the cloud[2]. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Apple made TimeMachine iCloud-ready for the next version of MacOS X, in which case, I would backup to the cloud since TimeMachine is so simple to use.

The final piece of the puzzle for my workflow has been solved. PocketCloud allows me to not only connect to a remote desktop, I can easily log into my own computer to access the file system. I will do a full review for next week, but if you need to access a file system remotely, it’s well worth checking out (it’s free for all platforms).

  1. My two yearold daughter loves it even more than I do, I think. ↩

  2. Famous last words.  ↩

Death of Facts

Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion.

Facts, 360 BC – 2012 AD | Chicago Tribune

In a mock obituary of the death of Facts, Rex Huppke shares how “facts grew up” from being about “universal principles that everybody agrees on,” by Aristotle, to “empirical observations,” by Francis Bacon.

Although this obituary focuses on the political issues that Facts have survived, it could have easily talked about any other areas in life, especially those that involve stories being shared in the media. News stories based upon the same press release can display two different sides to a story, twisting the numbers around to mean whatever they want, without backing up their stories.

I was reminded of the word Stephen Colbert coined,[1] truthiness, which means “a quality characterizing a ‘truth’ that a person claims to know intuitively ‘from the gut’ or because it ‘feels right’ without regard to evidence, logic or intellectual examination.” I think truthiness still happens frequently alongside facts, but facts has been morphed into something different. It’s no longer an “empirical observation,” but an observation made through a lens of emotion.

Gone is the context of the observation. More important is how that fact makes a person or people feel, and use it to increase those emotions (generally fear).

In baseball, people may see that a player is hitting .200 and conclude that he is a lousy hitter, and the commentators will continue to push the argument that the batter may need to be benched and replaced. It’s rare for people to dig into the numbers and discover that the guy is just unlucky (making contact but hitting the ball right at someone). Student Unions are very proficient at using facts to their advantage and rallying the troops to fight their fight without presenting a defense for the University.

I grow tired of the one-sided attacks and opinion pieces that ignore the other side of the story. I wish there was more balance in life which displayed facts in a fair manner without bias.

  1. Wikipedia mentions that the word had existed in the Oxford English Dictionary before Colbert used it, but I think his usage made it much more popular.  ↩

Sunday Reading – April 29 – featuring @siracusa, @kickstarter, @msfitbc, @fitforakingtv

For Us Nerds

If this is the method you have used in the past to calculate then I would have to contend that your entire list is flawed. First of all, as pointed out before, you have grossly underestimated the size of the dragon. As for the true reason why your estimate is off you stated “There are certainly other valuable items in Smaug’s hoard – rare suits of armor and so on – but the point of the exercise is to establish a minimum, conservative, net worth and the total value of a pile of ancient weaponry is probably no more than a rounding error in a fortune measured in the billions of dollars.” which is your greatist mistake. If you are going to base your research on AD&D, which was itself based on LotR, then you have to consider that all of those weapons and armor are worth ten times their weight in gold, and thousands of times that for the “ancient” variety.

You opened up a can of worms on this one sir.

This quote is from How Much is a Dragon Worth, Revisited, an article that demonstrates both the power of the internet, and the ire of nerds. Michael Noer had worked out an estimated value for Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit, for the series about the 15 richest fictional characters. People wrote in to nitpick every aspect of the article, so he took the time to recalculate the numbers. Both the article and the final amount are impressive.

Cargo-Bot is apparently the first game to be made entirely on an iPad. It involves programming a robot to move boxes into different sequences. It’s free on the iTunes App Store, and a fun puzzle game. The link is to a story on Cult of Mac for the backstory.

Podcasts

Hypercritical #65 – Look Right into the Eyes of Your Sweetie

Hypercritical #63 – Talking to the Bear

Build & Analyze #73 – One Cell Taller

Three episodes of the shows that aired in the past few weeks. Hypercritical is hosted by John Siracusa who writes at Ars Technica who goes on some lengthy discussions about the new Gmail interface, gaming as a form of art, paid upgrades in the App Store, and other stuff. Marco Arment on Build & Analyze carries forward some of John’s ideas into his show, sparking a conversation about whether a customer will pay more than an advertiser for something (i.e. will people pay for Twitter to remove the advertisements). I would listen to Hypercritical #63 before Build and Analyze #73.

Home is where the heart lies

The first season of Fit For A King is currently in production, being filmed entirely in the Okanagan Valley (in the heart of Western Canada’s wine country), in British Columbia.

In each episode, hosts James Blonde, and Lisa Kilgour, leave their “home” at picturesque God’s Mountain Estate, in search of an outdoor adventure nearby, featuring and exploring the beautiful surroundings the Okanagan has to offer.

Fit For a King – Official TV Promo Spot

Some Treats

Chocolate Peanut Butter Protein Cups – @Angelique Kronebusch

Gluten-free Pizza Crust – @YourLighterSide

Kickstarter Campaigns

I have been aware of Kickstarter for a while now, but these are the first projects I have actually backed.

Battle of the Bulge is a turn-based iPad game in the style of gameplay like the tabletop game Axis and Allies. I’ve long been fascinated with those games, but never had the network of friends to play them. Now I can! (after the game is finished, that is)

Shadowrun Returns – I discovered this extremely late, only a few hours before it was going to close. Shadowrun is a RPG based upon a cyberpunk world from William Gibson, Neuromancer. I first got in touch with it as a teenager playing the game on the SNES and have fond memories of the game-play. When I heard that the original developer was returning to do a new game, well, I clicked on “back this project” fairly quickly, and I wasn’t alone. The original goal was $400,000. It’s going to receive $1,836,477. Here’s a World of Shadowrun Primer PDF for people who want an introduction to Shadowrun

And, finally

A Ford commercial, but rather funny.

Previous Sunday Reading editions.

Thoughts on Google Drive

Thoughts on Google Drive

On Tuesday, Google launched Google Drive, their cloud storage service.[1]

From what I have read[2], it appears to be a quite useful and powerful tool that binds the Google App suite together. It will be great for people who enjoy working within Google Docs and collaborate with a team. It will also be great for people who want a simple way to backup their files to a system that’s easily accessible to them.

In Om Malik’s write-up about the service, he includes this quote from Sundar Pichar, SVP of Chrome and Apps:

In this post-PC world the file systems don’t matter.

Om continues:

Instead, what matters is data, which follows the flow from apps to devices. Pichar says that the key here is to provide context and add contours to all the information stored inside the Drive.

When people say the term “post-PC,” I tend to think about Steve Jobs introducing the iPad to the world, and people will quickly be comparing Google Drive to iCloud. The two services have the same mission, eliminate the need for local storage, but they have two opposing philosophies on how to approach that mission.

Apple attaches your data to an app, trapping it within that world. Your iCloud data is not accessible outside of that app[3] (i.e. this document I’m writing in Byword can’t be accessed by Pages without exporting and then re-importing it from Pages), and there is no way to collaborate with a file in iCloud with a team (unless you have the same Apple ID on each machine). In addition, it is only accessible through apps in the Mac/iOS ecosystem – Windows, Linux, Android, are out of luck.

Google attaches your data to your account, and will be accessible by any device through the web. Data is independent of both app and device, unless it is associated with a certain app (a Google Doc can only be edited within Google Docs). This allows for easy exportation of data and importing it into a new system (setup Google Drive on a new computer, download the files you want, copy to the main drive, and remove Google Drive from the system).

Some people are going to speak out about not trusting Google with their data, but I believe they are taking the right approach with this. How I access my data and how I want to share (if I want to) should be up to me, not some app or company. With accessibility in the user’s control, other products can be developed to display your data in different and better ways. An interesting example that I discovered yesterday while reading about Google Drive is Primadesk.

Primadesk allows you to access your data in 31 different services, including Facebook, Dropbox, Box, Gmail, Skydrive, etc. You can backup your data to the Primadesk servers, as well. With not too much hassle, you can easily move all of your Box files to Dropbox, and presumably in the near future, move all your Dropbox files to Google Drive. A service like Primadesk allows you to get around some of those limitations that are in place with cloud services (file size, capacity, bandwidth caps), and it is accessible via dedicated apps, as well.

After all my reading about Google Drive, my mind drifts to three thoughts:
1. Will Apple crack and open up access to iCloud to other devices (non-iOS/Mac), and allow apps to share iCloud data in the future?
2. How will Google Drive be tied into Google Project Glass (the eyeglasses)? Will I be able to view my files within the glasses, view an old picture of a location or do a quick search and discover I didn’t take a picture of the Eiffel Tower last time I was in Paris?
3. What new kinds of applications will be able to be developed using Google Drive’s API?

I am starting to think that the future is just getting started.

  1. Here is a quick resource guide for Google Drive with links: Google Drive  ↩
  2. My account wasn’t ready yet, so I haven’t been able to try it out.  ↩
  3. The exceptions would be Calendar, Contacts, and iCloud Mail which can be accessed via web browser.  ↩

Forget About Facebook, Let’s Move On

For at least five years, we’ve been working with the same operating logic in the consumer technology game. This is what it looks like:

There will be ratings and photos and a network of friends imported, borrowed, or stolen from one of the big social networks. There will be an emphasis on connections between people, things, and places. That is to say, the software you run on your phone will try to get you to help it understand what and who you care about out there in the world. Because all that stuff can be transmuted into valuable information for advertisers.

That paradigm has run its course. It’s not quite over yet, but I think we’re into the mobile social fin de siècle.

Alexis Madrigal – The Jig is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future

This article is a definite must-read for people interested in the web and the future of technology. It was published just over a week after Facebook announced they were purchasing Instagram, and that news flooded the various tech blogs and Twitter streams. People were making a big deal out of it since the purchase price was a billion dollars. John Gruber pointed out during The Talk Show that Instagram was worth more than the market cap of the NY Times (which was just under a billion dollars).

It makes me wonder where the world is heading when we place such significance on how we share photos (Instagram, Pinterest) that it can be valued as being more important than a media outlet that has been around for 150 years. I also think about how when Google shows off their concept of the Augmented Reality glasses, the idea gets laughed at and parodied instead of generating some excitement over a new idea.

Instead of generating new products that take the next step, companies and developers are more keen on duplicating what exists already, tweaking something in how it operates or how it’s styled to increase its popularity. To make matters worse, the University of Florida is gutting their computer science department.

When a major University decides that its athletic department is more important than an academic one that researches and designs the future, and developers are more focused on getting fingers to click ads, what kind of world is that going to develop?

Keys to Success by John Gruber

John Gruber’s Keys to Success

  1. Fussy coffee drinker
  2. Clicky keyboard
  3. Soda Stream

The Talk Show #87 | 5by5 Network

Few quick notes:
* in order to qualify as a fussy coffee drinker, you must grind your beans on a daily basis before making the coffee.
* the more popular examples of clicky keyboards that I keep hearing about are the Das keyboard and Apple Extended keyboard
* the Soda Stream is meant not to make carbonated water, but to overcarbonate the water.

These keys to success are for anyone, doesn’t matter what field of work you are involved in. The best part is that according to Gruber, you don’t even need a laptop, iPhone or iPad to succeed. Only the above three items.

Daring Fireball
Gruber on Twitter

A trip to watch Wrath of the Titans

A trip to watch Wrath of the Titans

Perseus (Sam Worthington) would be talking to Zeus (Liam Neeson) about what Hades (Ralph Fiennes) said to Ares (Edgar Ramirez) about Phrygian dating sites, when suddenly Worthington (Perseus) would be snatched up into the air by a two-headed fire-breathing demon-dog (MacBook Pro) and hurled into a marble column (Doric).
A Trip to Watch “Wrath of the Titans” | Grantland

The movie Wrath of the Titans doesn’t sound all too great, but I loved Brian Phillips review of the movie, from BOB the only other person in the movie complex to quotes like the one above and this one:

The heroes are mainly demigods, which is like being on oxycodone at least. They’re anesthetized by their own awesomeness.

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