A List Apart: Articles: Web 3.0: Yeah, I read Zeldman. Most of the time, I don’t understand him. In this case, I don’t understand him.
Until the end. Then it all comes together and affects me. If you are wondering what AJAX is, this isn’t the piece for you. If you’re wondering whether it’s OK to keep going to work in the morning and serve your customers with integrity even though you haven’t stumbled on the next Pet Rock, give it a read. That Zeldman. Good guy.
Sophie’s in school, if I haven’t said anything about that already. She’s attending the Goddard School in our neighborhood four days a week. So far, we’re thrilled about the experience. Sophie loves it, she’s making some good little friends and the program brings the world to her, right in the playground: everything from the Oregon Zoo’s petting zoo program to the Children’s Museum.
Each week, the kids work on one letter of the alphabet. They write it, the bring things to school that begin with that letter, etc, then they bring homework that consists of tracing pages full of dashed glyphs of that letter for them to trace.
This is good stuff.
The Myth of the Product Adoption Lifecycle
One of the giant insights of the new marketing is that the only way to introduce a new idea is to move across the curve. Sell to the little tail, they tell the next group, which passes the word on to the mass market. That’s why the little tiny green tail is so valuable… these are the people who are listening, these are the people who will become your marketing force.
So, where’s the myth?
The myth is that marketers think these people actually care.
People don’t care, certainly not about marketers.
There was a time when bots were all the rage. I remember instant messaging with bots a decade ago through the university research departments that were attempting to simulate human intelligent conversation. They were charming enough, but you could always stump them with curses.
Soon after, the major players started using them to help customer call flow and voice response systems. Annoying little beasts that can’t understand the slightest hint of Jersey accent still pick up with Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, you name it — the list goes on.
But check this out. John Battelle writes a bit about the MakeBot, and instant messaging search utility that links the RSS of these particular sites with a back-end search function allowing access to site updates through your IM client of choice — providing, I assume, it’s AIM compatible. I’ve signed up to get the boingboing.net feed update every two hours and so far it works swimmingly.
But wait, there’s more! To see this really take off, add MovieFone to your AIM buddy list and type a bit. This bot allows you to search the MovieFone database by title, location, theater, whatever, all through your IM client. I find it faster — far faster — than checking the site through the web. All I need to do is type 1 – 4 – Y – 1 to see a list of movies and times at my favorite theater in my neighborhood. It’s the Century Cinemas over at Cedar Hills, the one that serves warm KettleKorn instead of lameass movie popcorn. Of course, the bot remembers the last time I ran a search and so my zip is still cookie’d somehow, which cuts down my keystrokes.
The implications of this sort of connectivity are huge. It has the potential to have the same impact on customer service than online billpay had five years ago: it eliminates a simple problem with an elegant solultion. With billpay, it eliminated the hassle of managing checks and stamps with a few mouse clicks and auto-payment schedules. With MovieFone, it eliminates the interactive voice response program on the phone and the graphical nonsense and ad programs of the sites with a convenient and unobtrusive “buddy.”
Would advertising play? In a heartbeat. As John mentions, Google is probably salivating over this program. For me, the more interesting implications are in teaching remedial programs to university students. For example, we’ve completely automated our grammar tool online with 90+% accuracy. What if students could open their IM client of choice and paste in a paragraph to the GrammarBot, and receive a near-instantaneous response with corrections, suggestions, tips, and tools? More important, what if a student could submit passages to a PlagiarismBot and get a Google search return of the top ten sites with 85% or greater likeness?
Ah, the heady odeur of success.
Or, whatever.
This year, as my Christmas present from the office, I got promoted. That’s right, it’s the best Christmas present ever, if you’re on the look-out for a bright new pair of golden, fuzzy, warm, vibrating handcuffs.
When Sophie was gestating (I *heart* gerunds), I kept a fairly rigorous blog on the whole becoming a father process. I was a complete nut about it and thought, somehow, others would be as interested in the inner-workings as I was. In hindsight, the whole thing was clearly more for me which is, I think, as it should be.
Things are officially changing again. Kira is now 20 weeks along with our second child, heretofore referred to as “Seed2″ (sic) and today we saw the pictures. (Note new banner text on this page. It is so very 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
Some background. If you’ll recall, the last time we did this whole baby thing, it was a pretty traditional birth. Kira got herself knocked up, we went to class, we did the homework, we scheduled the birth, induced, and Sophie exploded from between Kira’s legs like a live turkey in hot oil. That’s the Cliff’s Notes version, anyway. Short story shorter: we had a doc in a hospital.
This time, we’re going water birth. What does that mean, you ask? Excellent question. I don’t know much, but what I hear is that they give birth in a bathtub and the baby comes out smooth and happy and doesn’t cry. That’s what it says on the brochure anyway. Thing is, I remember the last birth. Don’t get me wrong because I’m all about the whole earth birth process, but there was a whole bunch of thrashing and tossing about, not to mention the gallons of *mess* involved. Doing this in a tub… isn’t there some danger of drowning?
Clearly, I have a lot of research to do before I weigh in on this one way or another. Which, of course, will do me no good whatsoever since Kira’s already made up her mind and last I checked, I’m not so pregnant, myself.
We’re doing this whole thing up at OHSU. That’s the Oregon Health Sciences University high up on Markham hill here in Portland. Imagine Hogwart’s, but a hospital that houses thousands of doctors, nurses, students, and sick people with all their cars all pouring off of a hill. It’s not entirely dissimilar from the Cistine Chapel on the head of a pin, though the Cistine Chapel is smaller. We’ve been there once so far and when we finally made to the actual office, it was great. There was some walking, tunneling, shimmying, and sneaking to do it, but we made it.
Today, we had to start on one end of the campus with the Ultrasound people. They put us on this super cool, super new Phillips(TM) Sono-Wonder 9000 with this perfectly clear high resolution display and many wires and buttons. It also had a trackball, which I see as an homage to devices gone by: heart-warming, that.
They lubed Kira up with the warm jelly and started the procedure. And there it was. Seed2.
I’ve been having a hard time, honestly, getting my head around having a second child. I’m an only child, you see? I was pretty used to having my folks all to myself and since they didn’t have a whole lot of choice either, they had me to hang with. The relationship we’ve established over the years has come to be very powerful and important to me, and I’d always imagined that I’d be able to establish the same with my only child.
Kira has a sister.
Sitting there, looking at that screen, brought the whole thing back to me. The late nights, the logistics, the money, the diapers, it was all so crystal clear at that moment. The first time I caught Sophie standing up in her crib. The first time she smiled. The first time I got to take her to a movie.
I remember talking about kids with my boss. He has four. He told me that I’d be surprised when the second one comes around because I’d find that I wouldn’t have to split my love between them; somehow, somewhere, more love appears.
All these moments with Sophie, they were gifts, every one of them. And today, I caught up with them all while looking at that screen, at Seed2, and somehow, somewhere, love appeared.
The technician was fantastic. She showed us the face, the legs and arms, the little hands opening and closing. For what they could see, the baby is in fine shape. Spine is closed, brain is closed, lip is non-cleft, the world is all put together. With as much “Grey’s Anatomy” we’ve been watching, we’ve been starting to wonder how these little things get put together in one piece; word has it, they come together more often than they don’t.
We didn’t want to know the sex. I’ve been telling people that it’s because the whole experience of telling the world that “It’s a Girl!” was so spiritual the first time around. Then, we were in that room and it all changed. I wanted to know. I wanted to know something awful. I tried to talk about it out loud, my change of heart, but I got the smackdown from Kira. So be it.
After the ultrasound, they have one of the doctors from the high-risk baby unit come in and debrief us. We had Dr. Trosos, a nice generically foreign guy who tells us that the baby is fine. With all they could see, there were no problems. That by the time we get back to the midwife, his comments would be in the computer and that we could review the detail with her. Again, so be it.
We hike back to the midwife. She’s nice, new to us, but charming. She introduced us to a cool new pharmacy with naturopathic pharmacists. I didn’t know they made those.
There’s the midwife, reading through the results from Dr. Trosos. “This is fine with that. This is aligned with this correctly. The baby is developing this and that fine, and all of this is aligned with her this.”
Catch that? I’ll repeat the salient point: “… all of this is aligned with her this.” Then she says, “Oh, so you’re having a little girl!”
Yeah, the midwife read that part out loud and confirmed it. Kira remained calm. I was, oh, boiling over inside that fate was on my side with this one. Kira says, “Well, we didn’t want to know that.” Then, the back-peddling began. The poor midwife was dancing. “Oh, I’ve never seen this before, I’m sure he didn’t mean it, back-peddle, back-peddle, back-peddle, it’s probably wrong.”
And there’s room for that, too, of course. Before you get all hung up on the fact that it must be a girl, like I am, there’s a good chance that the good foreign Dr. Trosos did not actually know the gender. After all, he didn’t see the whole ultrasound. The only way he would have known is if the tech actually told him, right? And according to her, she doesn’t remember gender up to five minutes after the session. And you know, the doctor could have been referring to Kira.
So, could it have happened? Could she have walked out, handed the file to the Doc and said, “So, this is for a little baby girl in exam room two.” I like to think there’s room in this reality.
There it is. There you have it. That’s the story. I’m sure there will be more in the coming weeks. That, and I’ll have to get some good Sophie updates here before too long. She’s three, and a
ll she really wants me to do any more is check her poop before she flushes it.
So be it.
With great humility, he climbs to the top of the hill, into the valley, and higher still to the crest of the great peak. He tears his shirt from his back, musculature throbbing, nee pulsing and twitching excitedly. He rears his head back far and, choking just a bit, he wails: “I HAVE DONE IT!”
Yeah, that’s right, after four years of failure I’ve finally beat the damned beast on my shoulder and cranked out 50,000 (more actually) words. And the craziest thing? Not that hard.
Getting started, hard. Words 10,000-18,000, a bitch. Then the story discovered itself and cranked on through to the end. Took a decidedly strange twist about half-way through when I realized that the characters were not so much being written as they were living right through me. It’s a bizarre experience, actually, and one I’m anxious to repeat.
I just returned from our Thank God It’s Over party at our illustrious local coordinator’s place here in Portland. Apparently, we as the Portland crew came in 11th worldwide, an auspicious accomplishment considering our group beat the New York group.
What’s next? More writing. One of my fellow participants told me her New Year’s Resolution last year was to collect at least 12 rejection letters. I thought that was fantastic, rewarding activity instead of just success in a sort of “glass is almost getting to half-empty” way. She failed, actually, collecting only nine rejections and two successes. Damned successes — snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, that.
I’m shelving the book for a few months. I’l probably start editing in February and see where it goes from there. At a minimum, I’ll drop the $500 bucks to self-publish through iUniverse so all my friends can buy it for themselves on bn.com.
Because that is the coolest thing in the world ever, ever, ever.
The last class I taught at University of Phoenix, I caught two students of the twelve enrolled cheating flagrantly in their online work. I’d heard that academic honesty was an issue of growing concern in online education but to date, I’d had no experience with any student violations of University policy.
Now, the process for reporting violators is particularly stomach-churning. You have to thoroughly document each infraction which, for one of the students, amounted to 18 specific incidents in a 5-day period. I managed to submit my treatise and the response I recieved from the administration was a prompt thank you and notice that each student had received their first warning with a letter placed in their files. First warning. The class I was teaching at the time comes with only four classes left to the end of the degree program. With violations this vast in scope, I find it difficult to believe that these students happened to choose me as the only subject of their violations through their entire academic careers.
Still, I read articles like this one, from the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and I can see the hope for online education, if only from the demand side. It’s a general piece, but if you want an good update on the state of online growth as we close out 2005, here’s a good place to start.
The Motorola ROKR phone has quickly become the stuff of legend. Launched as the first real convergence of entertainment and culture — music and telephony — the implementation of iTunes has all but been drowned in the hysterical hype of the iPod Nano and the new iPod with video.
Motorola chief Ed Zander had this to say in a post-earnings announcement interview reprinted in Bloomberg:
For pics that go along with Day 3-4, click here.
Woke to the usual tricks: juice, coffee, and carbs by the pool. Dodge and Sophia had a meeting and left most of us to our own designs today. Since we have precious little direction, we were all thankful with John, resident expert, whips out his bad brain and convinces us that we need to pile in the car and go see us some old stuff.
For pics that go along with Day 2, click here.
Mr. Nikos runs the villas where we’re staying and appears to do all the heavy lifting. When I say heavy lifting, I mean this guy’s a pack mule. He runs up and down the stairs of this place without breaking a sweat, carrying heavy luggage, groceries, laundry, whatever, all hoisted up on his back. We’re embarrassed to be around him. he makes us feel small. This is, of course, not to dismiss his (what I have to assume is his) daughter Georgia, a cute little hyper-tensive that keeps the books and shows us to our rooms. She also brings us Frappes by the pool. She’s a dear.
So, our first morning, day 2, starts with breakfast by the pool. The kind Mr. Nikos delivers a basket of bread, a selection of butter and jams, two cups American coffee and OJ, and sets it all out for us with tablecloth on the small table in front of our door. He’s a real gentleman, this Mr. Nikos, obviously trained at the Empress.
Then, it’s time for a walk with the groom.
What a stupid idea that turned out to be. Intentions were good and all, with a little window shopping on the promenade and some more general beauty included, but mostly, it ended up with a lot of pain. I’ve talked about the stairs, right? There are a lot of them. And you think this isn’t a big deal — we’re young and virile men. You think, we’ll just stroll down to the water. “I hear there’s a marina down there!”
“Really?”
“Really!”
“Gosh! We should go see it!”
“Marina? Are you kidding? That’s why I’m HERE!”
Smile. Hug. Begin whistling.
At the top of this little town, where the stairs begin, we run into Dr. Doug. His shirt is off and he’s purple, pacing back and forth across a stone veranda. His first words as he points, “Those people over there think I’m dying. I don’t think I’m dying… I don’t think so…” He sits.
Doug had gone down the stairs. He’d taken the trip to the marina on a jog (which, it turns out, you shouldn’t actually take on a dare) and he recommended we not follow suit. Stupidly, we follow suit.
The trip down was not so bad. My knees were killing me just a little bit, but overall we were feeling strong. What better time for a full plate of fried squid, double-order of french fries, Greek salad and Mythos Hellenic Lager Beer!
Dodge’s brother Ben has been to Santorini. Since he couldn’t make it to the wedding, he sent Dodge this wonderful card and a set of pictures taken on the island. They were all part of a series — a pictorial treasure map to what Ben says is the most beautiful place he’s ever been ever in all his life. I’m taking some liberties with the language here, but the intent was right along those lines. Dodge and I had taken some time that morning to look through the pics and left it at something like, “sure would be cool to find that if we have time.”
There we were, eating our squid and fries when it hits me. We’re sitting in the restaurant that was in the first picture of the map! I could see, up around the bend, the out-cropping of rock where he must have been standing to take the picture. Giddy as a school-girl, I grab Dodge by the nipple and illustrate my discovery. We share great joy, pay, and follow the path.
Turns out it wasn’t much of a hike. About a hundred yards up around the corner we see a bunch of tourists snorkeling and voila — there’s the most beautiful place ever: a mini-Alcatraz about 30 yards out. Apparently, if you swim out to the other side, there’s a church there, and some cliff diving. It was really beautiful, to be sure, but I had my camera with me and no swim suit… and there was that thing about the four pounds of fried starch in my gut. So we snapped some pics and headed back.
Back to the stairs. Not to belabor the point, but if we were feeling strong coming down, we were feeling like idiots coming up. We were passed by donkeys. That’s right, a whole team of monkeys figured out that you can take DONKEYs up and down the hard stuff. An hour later, we were back at the villa, passed out by the pool.
Yeah, rough life.
That night, dinner and baklava. Often-naked Dr. Doug splurged for the duty-free Johnnie Walker Blue so we indulged in some good scotch by moonlight and played some guitar. Nice way to round out the day.
For pics that go along with Day 1, click here.
It’s Dodge’s wedding. As the sole representative of “the old crowd” hoofing it across the pond to the island of Thira in Greece (AKA Santorini), it’s my solemn duty to chronicle the adventure here. I’m tired and not making a lot of sense yet, but I’m here and ready to go.
Technically, day 1 never happened. I left Portland at 7:30 in the morning on Tuesday, 9/20, and arrived in Greece at 4:30 in the afternoon on Wednesday 9/21 local time. Highlights of the actual travel? Most importantly, I managed to make all the connections around the world to get here, from Chicago to Zurich to Athens with little difficulty. I met up with the rest of the Nashville crew in Athens, sleeping in the airport. Besides Dodge and Sophia, I knew none of them. While sleeping they appeared to be reasonably normal people.
To be fair, I did zero research on the island — or on Greece for that matter — before getting here. What I knew of Greece, and all I felt I really needed to know of Greece, was “Gyro” and “Baklava.” The rest was prayer. Prayer that more people spoke more English than I speak Greek (reference my only Greek words: “Gyro” and “Baklava”). Prayer that my whole packing light regimen wouldn’t be foiled by hot, sweat-enducing weather. Prayer that the hotel really looked as cool as it did in the promotional pics.
On point one: Gyro and Baklava are winners. Strangely, so is Pizza. We had a couple of great pies for dinner last night, though in a strange turn of the menu, it doesn’t matter what you actually order, you’ll always get green pepper on your pizza too.
Point two: So far, the packing light thing has been working out, mostly because I’ve been sleeping and swimming. This will really be tested in the days to come.
Point three: Turns out, our room is the room from the promotional pics. The very room. With the very balcony with the “infinity pool.” Not sure what the infinity pool is? It’s the pool that goes right up to the edge of the cliff so that when you’re in the thing, it feels like you could keep right on swimming to the ocean. Swimming right to the ocean were it not for the more-than-two-foot drop off the sheer cliff that you’d have to endure first.
I woke this morning at about 4:00, restless and ready for the day. Jet lag is so confounded annoying. I dressed and snuck out with my camera to take some night shots around the place. It’s an Escher painting, Oia. It’s a village of these wonderful cave villas built on top of one another in a cascade of abstract arcitecture careening off this volcanic cliff. The whole mess is strung together with the most convoluted mess of stairs leading all the way to the docks below. One wrong turn and you find yourself in someone else’s appartment in the middle of the night. In the dark. With your camera. Not that it happened to me, but it could have. I get the feeling so far that the Greek people are far less parochial about certain things that we are, but I have to imagine they have lines, too. That’s one I’m not willing to cross.
Three hours and 150 pictures later, I was at the top of this cliff in the parking lot of the Santorini water station watching the sun rise over the mountains. That was the part that hurt — for the first time this trip it hit me that Santorini is the Island of Love to the locals. It’s where you go as a couple. It’s where you go to Honeymoon. And here’s me, standing alone on a cliff face in the water treatment parking lot, arguablythe most romantic place on the Island of romance, alone, a third-wheel to someone else’s wedding.
Sorry honey. It would be better with you here.
There is a wonderful German couple in the studio next door to ours, Richard and Ericka. Seems we have many of the same impressions of the US political situation. It’s mighty entertaining hearing my own opinions with a German accent. I even got Richard to call Bush “Yosemite Sam” … YO-sem-EH-tee … We’ll be sharing a Bier later to celebrate Oktoberfest with them. Which they’ve chosen to miss this year for a trip to Santorini instead. Note: These Germans are missing Oktoberfest to come here. THAT’s how freaking cool this place is. It’d be like all these Nashvillians missing NASCAR by concsious choice. It’s that cool.
Does anyone else find it interesting that with all the hubbub around iTunes 5 and the updates to the iTunes music store today, that Apple appears to have snubbed Audible.com by going straight-to-source for the Harry Potter series?
I was under the impression that all the audiobook content was released through iTMS in partnership with Audible. Yet another sign of Apple co-opting partnerships?
Huh. Maybe it’s nothing. My spidey sense is up on a count of the release of Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Well, this is a tough one. Guy on a Honda racing along, minding his own business, slams into a VW at 250 KM/HR.
Cut to: these pictures… of the bike found IN the car. Note: these aren’t gorey, just graphic. If you so choose, you can go ahead and imagine what this collision did to the three people involved. I tried not to.
