Thinkcorps

• Just checked out Listas preview. In awe of what constitutes simplicity in world of MSoft. Oy! http://listas.labs.live.com/ #

• why fail often? bc success is capital you need to spend quickly. protecting the "brand" is like hording confederate $ under your mattress. #


• that’s what bugged me most about my last job. others holding so tightly onto past successes, while i’m trying to launch a new biz unit. argh #


• if businesses really cared about being "green," they’d make it easy to cancel their damn catalogs. #

I spent about 4 hours on Flickr this weekend, searching for photos to illustrate a presentation for SMITH’s new six-word memoir book. If anyone you know doubts the future of participatory media, have them dig around for 10 minutes. Yes, most amateur photos are probably crap, but so many are incredible. Couple that with Creative Commons licensing, and Flickr suddenly becomes “important” to the mediascape in a whole new way.

That being said, Flickr, you have a major design flaw that needs immediate (and super easy) correction. On search results pages, the cursor is focused into the search input. This is a no-no. Automatically focusing the cursor assumes you know what I want to do. But how can you know on a page with several possible activities?

In fact, the primary purpose of a search results page is to browse lots of results. By focusing the cursor, you’ve broken my keyboard control (arguably the more important of my two input devices) and I cannot page up or down. I have to click (sometimes double-click) the mouse to unfocus and get my pageup/pagedown working.

In fact, on a typical web page, with all the options it presents: why assume anything when the page just finished loading?

Like I said, I was on the site for 4+ hours this weekend and I was about to ring someone’s neck over this.

It’s long overdue that I write something up on A.D.: After the Deluge, the webcomic we’ve been producing on SMITH since early this year. I’m tremendously proud of how this story is coming together, and it’s great to be a part of something this good.

A.D. is the story of 6 Hurricane Katrina survivors, written and illustrated by Josh Neufeld, a tremendous artist, and produced by Larry and myself for our webzine, SMITH. It combines an original webcomic, presented in monthly installments, with in-chapter hyperlinks, along with audio & video shot by us with the characters from the story.

If I’ve piqued your interest by now, then by all means, go—read the story! Otherwise, I figured I could go into some of the behind-the-scenes action detailing how we’ve put all this together.
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Despite our grumpiness, or perhaps because of it, I received a happy text message this morning—we got Stephen Colbert’s six-word memoir for our upcoming book.

All is right with the world. (This book is gonna rock, btw.)

Our story begins with a photo essay on our ezine SMITH, Iraqi Graffiti: The Photos of Todd Bowers.

Our pals at the NYPost picked it up for the Page Six article “Thigh Anxiety”:

July 29, 2007—WHICH genius thought the war-torn women of Iraq would be in need of the ThighMaster? U.S. Marine reservist Todd Bowers told Smithmag.net, “We were getting humanitarian aid sent and we got in a bunch of ThighMasters – official, made-in-Taiwan, Suzanne Somers ThighMasters.” Page Six learned the exercise gadgets came from the Defense Department, not Somers, in a bulk aid shipment. The Web site also shows GIs goofing with the dubious “aid.”

And then, a few days later on August 2, here comes Senor Colbert! I’m gonna pretend I’m too psyched to mention the lack of credit to either us or Todd! Seriously, TV people! Come on now! Pretend for once you actually understand how journalism works! Ah, forget it.

Things that are great about living in Portland: getting up on a Saturday, walking into a quiet Apple store, waiting for 2 minutes at the back of the store before purchasing one of the plentiful iPhones, and walking out within probably 5 minutes. Oh yeah, and no sales tax.

Things you need to understand:

It’s so not a logical decision. I don’t care how much I paid, in fact, the number doesn’t even register in my brain somehow. I refuse to sink to those depths, at least for a week or so. :)

I’m not a fan-boy. I usually wait a year before jumping in, so this is new territory for me. However, I have faith in Apple, given it’s track-record with the iPod, OS X, etc. All mature product lines that clearly influenced the iPhone design. I feel pretty comfortable.

Removable battery? Whatever, dude.

I don’t like ATT/Cingular, in fact, I was on the verge of throwing $150 at them simply to give them the finger. I hated my Sony Ericsson phone. It was complete crap and I’m pissed Cingular even carried it and sold it to me.

Because I already had a plan, it was a $20/month proposition for me. Not too bad, given the all-you-can-eat simplicity of Apple’s approach. I have been waiting for someone to straight-talk me. It’s not the ultimate cost, but the attitude that matters most to me. The cell carriers’ nickle-and-dime approach may finally be over.

Signup was easy (I knew to download ITunes 7.3—it showed up when I ran Software Update). Syncing all that music took a while, like it always does.

The camera is OK, the interface is amazing, the keyboard was better than I thought.

Youtube was a score. Once they convert more video into Apple’s format, it will be even more awesome. One more reason Youtube kicks any video search engine’s ass. Youtube is the new network. ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox—you have been warned. Maybe Google is now a media company in the way Yahoo always wished it was?

Integration with all the iLife apps is great. I’m now ditching all other options for Mail and iCal.

Google maps is great. Search for a business, save it as a new contact, click to call, click address for map. Maybe i’m a n00b, but wow.

Mail can be checked every 15 minutes, which seems like a decent compromise to me. This idea that you “need” push email (Blackberry) just makes you more annoying to everyone around you, believe me.

What may change the most is the general idea that a shiny flat piece of glass isn’t supposed to have fingerprints on it. Mine is a mess, and it’s all the more awesome for it.