Welcome to Post-Election Geek Normal. It’s been a while for Everyman, mainly because I’ve been focused on getting Sueetie off the ground. We’re definitely back to Geek Normal. Marketplace and IT Conversations podcasts have replaced MSNBC, visits to TechMeme instead of Memeorandum. Emails from barackobama.com sit unopened in my inbox. Time to get to work.
Goodbye Delicious, Hello Magnolia. Delicious pushed me over the edge with their two-week login requirement. I started using Ma.gnolia.com a month ago and haven’t had to login since. Here’s a screenshot of Magnolia’s toolbar bookmarklet. It works really well. The Magnolia web UI seems a bit cumbersome though, so I’m not locked-in yet.
Zune HQ is looking out for me. I like how Zune Marketplace reminds me my monthly Zune Pass credits are available to purchase the music I’m downloading. Here’s a screenshot.
Up the Yangtze. My wife and little girl are very tolerant of my Netflix Queue choices, though I have to be sneaky when I slip them into the DVD player. Films like Up the Yangtze, a completely absorbing documentary on the Three Gorges Dam Reservoir as the rising Yangtze River displaces 1.2 million Chinese. Here’s a map for perspective. I did some follow-up research on the dam and didn’t realize it was such a potential ecological disaster. Here’s a 1997 CNN piece that summarizes the issues, with this Scientific American article providing the scary details.
MacWorld MacDull. The Newsweek coverage of MacWorld wasn’t all too kind. On the keynote, “How bad was it? Let me put this as politely as possible. It was awful. Almost unbearable. Hacks in the press pool were sighing, groaning, checking e-mail on their BlackBerries and iPhones, not even paying attention. One of my fellow journalists sent me a message from across the room: ‘Shoot me now.’”
Seth on New Year Opportunities. From Happy New Year, “Everyone expects you to get in line and follow, not lead. The opportunity this year is bigger than ever: to lead change, to create a movement in a direction you want to go.”
Everything is an option. Another stellar post from Chris Brogan titled “The Optional World.” I liked the description of his conversation with a Walmart employee on a plane, “What struck me was that I noticed he watched my face intently the first time he said the word ‘Walmart’ to see if I was a hater.”
Lots of early love for Windows 7. Huge praise for Windows 7 Beta from this CNET “First Impressions” article. But this statement, “Windows 7 had no problem…on our modest 2.8GHz Pentium 4, which has only an 80GB IDE hard disk and 512MB of RAM.” That CAN’T be right, can it?
Retweet the holy hell out of this post. Chris Brogan here urging people to change their Twitter password in light of recent phishing. Something about “retweet the holy hell out of this post” struck my funny bone.
A superbly-written blog post. Joshua Porter’s “What Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers can teach us about interface design” is one of the most well-written, interesting blog posts I read in a long time. If you don’t feel like reading it through, scroll down to the instructional screen image on some quality Netflix UI work.
Clay Shirky on 2009 trends. Insights from Clay Shirky in this Guardian interview. On copy-on-demand, “You could say ‘Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers looks good’, and out pops a brand new copy. Why does a bookstore or a publisher have to be in the shipping and warehousing business?” Or this Jeff Jarvis quote, “If you can't imagine anyone linking to what you're about to write, don't write it." LET THE LINKING TO EVERYMAN BEGIN!!! Or not…