Yesterday Amazon announced their new ad-supported Kindle. They didn’t called it the Ad-Supported Kindle. They wrapped it in a cute little euphemism – Kindle With Special Offers.
Kindle With Special Offers (KWSO) – it’s like a Friend With Benefits – except the benefits are ads in your face. Awesome. But it’s cool, because your friend is a cheaper date because of the ads. Instead of the regular price of $139, the KWSO is only $114!
I say Amazon goes balls-out, Morgan Spurlock styley.

From the NYTimes.com (via daringfireball)

The Ford Crown Victoria served as the mainstay of taxi and police fleets. Its close cousin, the Lincoln Town Car, could reliably be found idling outside Lincoln Center or waiting to whisk a Wall Street type home for the evening.

And:

But in a little more than a year, both models will go the way of the Checker cab. Ford Motor Company plans to shutter the Canadian plant that manufactures the cars and discontinue the recognizably bulky frame that gives them their shape.

From a lecture Kurt Vonnegut gave in NYC in 2005 called, “Here is a lesson in creative writing.” (via my brother):

Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. You will see this story over and over again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted. The story is “Man in Hole,” but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again [draws line A]. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.

MacNN: GQ records extremely low iPad magazine downloads
VP and publisher Pete Hunsinger doesn’t seem to get digital:

Hunsinger defends the iPad edition, claiming that it costs “nothing extra,” given that there are no printing or shipping costs. The iPad app is $2 less than the print edition, and GQ is also charging just $2 for back issues. The VP says he expects the iPad to eventually become a “major component” of circulation; one boost is anticipated with the June issue, which will feature Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr.

First off, I would argue that the iPad version should cost as much, if not more than the print version. From my experience, most people don’t understand the costs that go into building products/experiences/tools for the web. There’s an incorrect assumption that because this product isn’t physical and ‘real’, it must be cheaper to make.
The truth is that it should cost a lot of money to create an iPad version of GQ magazine if they truly exploit everything that makes experiences on the iPad great. This doesn’t mean you have to go overboard when using a new medium, but it does mean creating an appropriate experience.
And that’s what we’re talking about when talk about building for iPads and iPhones – experiences. I’ve read a number of stories in the press about the iPad being a device for passive consumption, but that’s a premature dismissal. If GQ is simply digitizing text and making image galleries that you can flick through, they’ve missed the point. That’s easy.
My second point is that the iPad is not and should never be ‘the savior’ of the print industry.
Every company is responsible for their own fate. Whether you’re Conde Nast trying to convert your print publications into digital experiences, or Adobe trying to make Flash relevant to mobile computing, blaming or praising Apple for your failure or success is to sell your company short.
Conde Nast is moving their properties onto an amazing platform. They’re responsible for creating an amazing experience.
Evolve or die.

I have to say, since they redesigned their site in 2009, there’s absolutely no heirarchy on the homepage of CNN.com.
Apparently a spotlight on Facebook games is more important than the biggest recall in automotive history by Toyota.
Unless you were looking at the advertisement on the right first.

I just received this link from Nicolas Felton on the progress of the Annual Report I ordered.
I can’t wait.

Despite Microsoft’ recent attempting to improve fix their products and their product design through mimicking Apple’s retail stores as well as superficial interpretations of Apple’s operating system style, there’s just something soulless about everything Microsoft does.
Somehow they manage to make whitespace feel like dead space. It’s the same feeling I get when I walk into a Walmart:




All 3 of these screenshots just blend together. There’s nothing unique about any of them. No heirarchy, no details. Nothing.
This clip of Steve Jobs must be at least 20 years old, but it’s just as relevant:

The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste …I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way …In the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product. And you say, ‘Why is that important?’ …Proportionally spaced type comes from typesetting and beautiful books, that’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac they would never have that in their products.

The word ‘blog’ carries a stigma with it for some people. It’s a cutesy word, sounds a bit childish. It’s one reason I call Daily Exhaust my online journal. Online journal is just as accurate as blog (if not more) and it carries more professionalism to it (The next step down from ‘blog’ would have been ‘diary’, and I would have sounded like a 13-year-old girl writing about My Little Pony).
But never underestimate the power of the blog. Blogs are capable of so much. And by ‘so much’, I’m talking about success and money. While most blogs consist of nothing more than a log of thoughts, quotes, images, videos and anecdotes, some venture into the territory of obsessions and thesis projects.
Case in point – Footnotes of Mad Men. The premise of the blog is very simple: to explain all the historical references shown and talked about in the AMC series Mad Men.
The creator of the series, Matthew Weiner (of Sopranos fame), is obsessed with details. We the viewers are the ones who ultimately benefit from this obsession. We get a show that sparkles – from words, to clothing down to the size of the fruit on the table (for more on Weiner, check out Vanity Fair’s profile on him).
And so, from a creator obsessed with details, we get a blogger obsessed with documenting those details and a readerbase obsessed with learning about those details.
Quality begets quality.
It’s no surprise then, that Footnotes creator Natasha Vargas-Cooper revealed news in September that Harper Collins will be adapting her blog into a book.
Think beyond your labels.

Do Google and Microsoft understand what Human Experience is?
Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. They’re both companies run by engineers, so that’s bound to happen.
Google has launched Fast Flip and Microsoft has launched Visual Search – both of which are search-related tools. Both of which are confusing.

Google Fast Flip

Google explains Fast Flip on their blog:

Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

The problem is, Fast Flip doesn’t make scanning headlines any easier or enjoyable for me. Just because something is visually rich, doesn’t guarantee it’s easier to understand. When I want to scan news headlines, I, uh, scan news headlines. I don’t need screengrabs of websites to act as training wheels for me. Google News is more than sufficient for me.
I concur with Richard Ziade’s thoughts over at Basement.org:

What’s interesting about this tool is that it’s the anti-Readability. Instead of helping us get rid of the junk around what we’re trying to read, Google fossilized the layout – junk and all – in images.

Microsoft Visual Search

Then we have Microsoft’s attempt to make search results engaging by making them pictures. My co-worker Rob calls them ‘glorified image galleries’. The novelty of Visual Search wears off quickly and makes me pissed that I bothered to install Silverlight in the first place.
If Visual Search was integrated in some other Microsoft properties, it might add some value and move beyond a one trick pony.

I was in Chicago a last month for Roundarch’s annual company event. Over the weekend I had no plans so I decided to explore the city. I texted my brother who, like me, lives in New York, but spent the summer in Chicago last year.
I asked him, ‘What’s the equivalent to the East Village in Chicago?”
He said, “Wicker Park”
Coincidentally, my coworker RJ lives in Wicker Park so he gave me a tour. He introduced me to the super awesome bookstore Quimby’s (For New York designer-bookstore-junkies, if you dig St. Mark’s Books, you would love Quimby’s).

You will travel far, my little Kal-El. But we will never leave you… even in the face of our death. The richness of our lives shall be yours. All that I have, all that I’ve learned, everything I feel… all this, and more, I… I bequeath you, my son. You will carry me inside you, all the days of your life. You will make my strength your own, and see my life through your eyes, as your life will be seen through mine. The son becomes the father, and the father the son. This is all I… all I can send you, Kal-El.

—Jor-El aka Marlon Brando aka The Greatest of All Time, Superman

Art tends not only to discover the truth but to exaggerate and finally distort it. And, maybe in this distortion lies the essence of art.

• Matthew Nowicki
  via NOTCOT

I wacked most of my information on my Facebook account and then deactivated it today.
I don’t find Facebook that useful anymore.
Ok, I never found it useful, but now I find it just plain annoying. It might be that I’m all growns up and have evolved my digital self. Or I could just be turning into a grumpy old man. Probably a little bit of both.
The status updates from my friends and my “friends” have been driving me postal lately. Most are updates in their lives. I guess this is good and appropriate, but I’ve been hitting the “See Less” link on my friends more and more, so my homepage feed is a tiny subset of all my friends.
My brother Mark published a great book a few years ago on the art of the away message, ‘Where There’s a Will, There’s Away… Messages: A 21st Century Guide to the Art of Absence‘. He wrote it in reference to his instant messaging methodology (back when we posted our status on AIM), but it’s just as relevent to the world of Twitter and Facebook.
Mark’s thoughts on posted his actual life status:

…Now there are two reasons I chose NOT to post Away Messages like those. Ever. The first is out of consideration to any onlookers; it’s boring. And the fact is, no one really cares where I am at any given time, they just want something to do while they’re bored or distracted. So I thought, “Why not give people something to read? Entertain them!” So I got into the habit of creating a new Away Message every day. I never repeated a Message. And each one had to be interesting in some way, so that there was a payoff for checking it. Clever, witty, funny, curious, ironic, familiar… as long as it was a nice diversion for all of 10 seconds, it was fair game.

Take some notes people, this isn’t just a plug, it’s good advice.