Matt Legend Gemmell gives us SEO for Non-dicks:

The key thing to understand is that the rules of SEO aren’t magic or arbitrary. They’re based on the goals of a search engine, which is to find relevant results. Relevance implies genuineness, and genuineness implies trust. So, shockingly, you should try to make your site’s content trustworthy, genuine and relevant. All of the rules have come about due to their utility in detecting those three positive metrics. Good SEO is a by-product of not being a dick on the internet.

via daringfireball

Dan Lyons has been hit and miss since retiring his Fake Steve Jobs shtick (ok, mostly miss), but I liked his reaction to Facebook’s F8 Conference:

And now suddenly we are living in that future. That future which only yesterday was the future now today is the present. Just like we mark eras using BC and AD, now we will have BF811 and AF811. Where were you on Sept. 22, 2011, when the world changed? I, unfortunately, was holed up in my grubby little office in a small town in Massachusetts. Nevertheless, I will never forget this day. Never. Ever. How could I? This is the day when Timelines was introduced. Timelines! It is, in a word, profound. Deeply, profoundly profound, in fact. “Facebook Just Schooled the Internet. Again” is how MG Siegler put it on TechCrunch. Which is a pretty amazing feat, coming as it does just a year and a half after “Facebook Just Seized Control of the Internet” as MG Siegler wrote in April 2010. It is pretty amazing, after all, to seize control of the Internet. That was bad-ass enough. But to then school the Internet that you’ve seized control of? Who but Facebook could do that? Good Lord I have to sit down and just think for a minute because my mind is reeling …

Yes, he lays it on extra thick, but it made me laugh. Probably because I’m a wise-ass too.

The lovely new Magnolia typeface by Eimantas Paškonis.
via @khoi

Neven Mrgan has a great idea for a movie:

So, fun-lovin’, irresponsible manchild, still searching for his true character, blah blah blah, inexplicably hot girlfriend, she gets fed up and dumps him, he now has to clean his stuff out of their shared storage unit. Ok, I’ll give you one scene for free. (The rest are $90,000 per day, haha haha ha.) Gosling – yeah, I’m thinking Ryan Gosling; he’s like the new John Cusack, or will be when we’re done with him. Oh it’s an 80s movie, I’ll get back to that – so Gosling, looking like crap after the breakup, pulls up to this storage unit in his crappy old Hyundai, super-sunny day, storage-unit door opens, dust, cobwebs, maybe a random cat meow in the back Big exaggerated sigh, a box tumbles down. That’s how the trailer opens right there, there you go.

Read the whole thing. I love it.

Electronista: Dell CEO claims post-PC era is ‘complete nonsense’

Michael Dell in an interview Sunday [free reg. required] took a stance that there was no such thing as a post-PC era. In spite of struggling PC sales, he argued to the FT that the PC industry was still growing, particularly in developing countries like China. Smartphones and tablets weren’t “necessarily” replacing PCs, and long-term forecasts suggested that would stay the case for years to come, he said.

“There are a billion and a half PCs in the world and while Gartner change their estimates here and there, they also estimate there will be two billion PCs in the world by 2014,” Dell said. “So when I look at that, I think the idea that the PC is no longer here is complete nonsense.”

Isn’t this the same douchebag who said Apple should shut down and give the money back to the shareholders?
Michael Dell doesn’t seem to understand that “post-PC” doesn’t mean “no PC”. As Jobs said on stage at D8 in 2010, PCs will still be around and provide a lot of value in the post-PC era, but they’re not going to be the primary machine people will be using to check email, read, look at pictures and browser the Internet.

As I’ve been listening to people from Microsoft in the news over the last couple months I’ve noticed a recurring theme – they like playing games with semantics. Sometimes I think they get cutesy but sometimes I think what they say aligns with their business philosophy.
The first time I noticed this was when Steve Jobs described us as being in the ‘post-PC era’ at the D8 Conference in 2010:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars.

PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.

I think that we’re embarked on that. Is [the next step] the iPad? Who knows? Will it happen next year or five years from now or seven years from now? Who knows? But I think we’re headed in that direction.

The next day at the conference, Ballmer responded:

I think people are going to be using PCs in a greater and greater numbers for many years to come. I think PCs are going to continue to shift in form factor. PCs will look different next year, the year after, the year after that… I think the PC as we know it will continue to morph form factor… Windows machines are not going to be ‘trucks.’ They will continue to be the mass popularizer of a variety of things that people want to do with information… I think there’s a fundamental difference between small-enough-to-be-in-your-pocket and not-small-enough-to-be-in-your-pocket. There will be some distinct differences in usage patterns between those two devices.

So here we have Ballmer getting all philosophical. What is a PC? What is PC-ness? If we were to remap Jobs’ truck analogy for Ballmer, Ballmer would have probably said everything is a truck. Scooters? They’re just trucks without the flatbed and only 2 tires. Sedans? Sedans are trucks that are lower to the ground and have a trunk instead of a flatbed.
Fast-forward to Microsoft’s BUILD Conference that happened last week and we can see that Microsoft’s leadership is truly aiming for a PC experience everywhere with Windows 8. If you want to work within the Metro UI, go for it, but if you need that nasty, overly-complicated experience of the ‘traditional’ Windows, you can always jump back to it.
According to Steven Sinofsky, you never have to compromise:

Why not just start over from scratch? Why not just remove all of the desktop features and only ship the Metro experience? Why not “convert” everything to Metro? The arguments for a “clean slate” are well known, both for and against. We chose to take the approach of building a design without compromise. A design that truly affords you the best of the two worlds we see today. Our perspective rests on the foundation of the open PC architecture that has proven flexible and adaptable over many significant changes in hardware capabilities and software paradigms. This is the flexibility that has served as a cornerstone through transitions in user interface, connectivity, programming models, and hardware capabilities (to name a few).

And this leads me to the other big area I see Microsoft getting creative with semantics – their use of the word compromise.
A compromise is something created to appease people with opposing views on a topic. Each side has given up certain demands in order to come to an agreement. In my mind, when you compromise each side usually end up with something less than ideal.
John Gruber wrote a great post in response to this ‘compromise’ a few weeks ago:

Like I wrote yesterday, Microsoft and Apple are going in two very different directions, especially when you compare iOS to Windows 8. Apple has embraced compromise. The compromises in iOS are, for many people in many contexts, what makes the iPad better than a Mac. The compromises enforce simplicity and obviousness in design, and at a technical level they lead to iOS’s excellent battery life.

Now I don’t disagree with Gruber’s core argument, again I disagree on the use of ‘compromise’. If Apple’s goal is to create the best tablet experience in the world, compromises can’t be made, because compromising implies negotiating down from some ideal vision. If desktop-level applications aren’t needed or appropriate for a tablet, then not supporting them is not compromising.
Giving a motorcycle two wheels instead of four doesn’t mean you’re compromising. What you’re doing is giving a motorcycle the thing that makes it great.
Microsoft wants to have it’s cake and eat it too by creating the Metro UI while holding on to the Windows (desktop) legacy UI. It’s appeasing both sides of Windows. It’s like driving a truck around with with a scooter attached to the side like an escape pod. Microsoft is compromising.
I think the big reason for this all-in-one approach to Windows 8 lies both in Microsoft’s dependance on the Windows/Office franchise for the bulk of their revenue as well as their late entrance into the tablet race. It’s too late to capitalize on the newness of the tablet market (they’re 2 years late already) and they’re afraid to put all their chips in on a Metro-only mobile UI. What they do have is the largest install base for PCs so they’re backpedaling into the tablet market by way of the desktop PC.
Notice during the demos at the BUILD conference, how it’s been a macro focus at the Metro UI on all devices, rather than a micro focus at just one form factor, the tablet. I think Microsoft feels that a Windows tablet can’t stand strong on it’s own, because, by extension, Windows Phone has not been able to stand strong on it’s own.
Apple can do the iPad without their desktop business because it has an ecosystem grown from the iPhone. Conversely, as Windows Phone hasn’t really taken off, their biggest ecosystem is on the desktop. So we end up in fun game of semantics where “everything is PC” and you can have “Windows everywhere” and compromising on your operating system becomes not compomising.
But let’s be clear – not everything is PC, just as not every motorcycle is an automobile.
And when you’re making concessions on the mobile side and desktop side when developing your next operating system, you’re comprimising. You’re not not compromising.

via TWOV

This Is My Next on Windows 8:

If we’re going to be totally honest though, we’d describe Windows 8 right now as incoherent and contradictory. Touch response in the Metro UI is stellar, Contracts sound seriously useful, and snapping apps can make you more productive on a tablet, but whenever you want to get down and dirty with a traditional program, it’s back to the traditional desktop interface. There are two Control Panels, two versions of IE, and core apps are nowhere to be found (i.e. Mail, a camera app, etc.) Meanwhile, if you want to do anything with the desktop interface (save things you’ve actually planted on your desktop) you’ll probably find yourself thrown back to Metro since the traditional Start menu is gone. The whole Human Experience feels schizophrenic, with users having to jump back and forth between the two paradigms, each of which seem like they might be better off on their own.

Incoherent, contradictory, schizophrenic. You didn’t let me down, Microsoft.
Well done.

It seems artificial intelligence is gaining some serious momentum.
NYTimes: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 … . “

Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.

And over at IBM Watson is offering medical advice to doctors:

IBM has inked a deal with health insurer WellPoint that will let the latter use the technology behind “Jeopardy”-playing computer Watson to suggest patient diagnoses and treatments.

IBM claims the Watson technology can process about 200 million pages of content in less than three seconds, which no doubt makes the system intriguing when it comes to reviewing various medical literature. The WellPoint system will display excerpts that identify the data sources behind the particular suggestions the Watson technology offers up, the Journal reports.

Where are we headed?

Harvard Business Review: You Can’t Analyze Your Way to Growth
Roger Martin on why analysis sucks:

The fundamental reason is that analysis of data is all about the past. Data analysis crunches the past and extrapolates it into the future. And the past does not include opportunities that exist but have not yet happened. So, analysis conspicuously excludes ways to serve customers that have not been tried or imagined or ways to turn non-customers into customers.

Why not focus on appreciation:

If instead, the core tool is not analysis but rather appreciation –deep appreciation of the consumer’s life — what makes it hard or easy; what makes her (in this category) happy or sad — there is the opportunity to imagine possibilities that do not exist.

For instance, suppose your consumers have to clean floors. It’s easy enough to appreciate that mopping a floor is a fairly miserable task. Think about what it involves: getting out and filling a bucket, dragging the bucket around and repeatedly jamming the mop in and out of it, and then dumping out and cleaning the bucket. If you appreciate your floor-cleaning customers, you’ll be looking to help them avoid having to go through this experience every time they have to clean a floor — because not every floor will need such a heavy-duty approach. It was out of this appreciation-triggered insight that the electrostatic Swiffer anti-mop was born and produced massive top-line growth, approaching $1 billion in sales in a decade.

This why analysts are completely useless gamblers. Betting on what could be based on the past. Analysis has no room for the curve ball that is innovation. Innovations are what come out of appreciation. Henry Ford said if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
Analysis can only imagine faster horses, they can never imagine cars.
via Clayton Christensen

(possible?) Banksy piece on Spring Street near Mercer, NYC.

A new feature at Scouting NY, called ‘New York, You’ve Changed’:

“New York, You’ve Changed” is a new Scouting NY site feature in which the New York depicted in movies is compared with the city of today. This is not the usual list of shooting locations and addresses to visit next time you tour the city. Instead, this is a full shot-by-shot dissection to see what New York once was and what it has become, for better or worse. I’ve tried to recreate the angles and framing as best as possible, and have presented the shots (more or less) in the order they appear in the film.

Awesomeness.
via Michael Surtees

Back in June, Andy Baio of Waxy.org shared his tale of being sued over the pixel art album cover for Kind of Bloop.
Long story short, everything is a remix.
If you’re a creator like me, you already know this.
In the spirit of remixing and stealing, I’ve come across some beautiful Mona Lisas:

via fubiz

via kottke

via Le Container