Talk Funnel

I recently came across this fun bit of distraction at the local Library — a book called The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie of Blackadder, Fry and Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, and now House fame. It looks to be something he did back in 1996 while he was still a wee young lad. It’s fun and breezy and apparently got some good reviews at the time (“A James Bond for the 1990s… with much better jokes” says the Daily Telegraph).

Fortunately for the legion of House fans, it wasn’t enough to get him side-tracked from his acting career.

So I’m zooming through this when all of a sudden my reading is interrupted by what is, for all intents and purposes, an early form of highly localized micro-community:

Apparently, Reader-A decided that the plot action wasn’t sufficiently realistic and chose to augment it, first with a:

Then follow with:

In case it’s hard to read, it says: ‘No serious guerilla or “terrorist” would reveal such a [sic] important name (except on a need-to-know)’.

I won’t bore you with the whole plot background, but the protagonist is pretending he’s an assassin and has infiltrated one of those European proto-anarchist groups (a la Red Brigade). At this point in the story he asks the head of the group point-blank who the group’s chief financial backer is and the head-guy just blurts out a name.

So on merit alone, Reader-A should be commended for his/her astute observation. But the mode of delivery — having permanently defaced a book from a public library in order to deliver this opinion — tends to detract from the force of the argument.

In comes Reader-B, with a counter-argument:

“Well DUH dumbass. I think it’s apparent these guys aren’t a) serious or b) smart. Shut up and keep reading.”

The ‘dumbass’ bit gives us an early glimpse into one of the lasting features of social communication — the rapid descent into name-calling.

But what the interaction reveals most is the desire by people to inject their opinion and build a ‘micro-community’ in the most unusual places (bathroom stalls being another one). Back in 1996 (or whenever these comments were made), there weren’t too many places you could hold that sort of discussion and especially in such a localized context (i.e. on page 261, line 6).

Going forward, I think publishers — especially those of the E-book variety — ought to consider offering such a feature as part of their product. Not only will it be a good differentiator but it will hopefully stop the next generation from having to deface public property just to get something off their chest.

And for the record, I totally agree with Reader-A. There’s no way Cisco would just come out and give Lang the name.

The iPhone doesn’t have a real e-Book reader (at least none that don’t require jailbreaking). Reading scanned images isn’t much fun either.

In the meantime, there’s an easy built-in way to get there — good old PDF attachments:

• Download an E-book as a PDF file. Multiple small chapters work best. There are a few free classics available at Planet PDF. Here’s one I’m currently reading: The Future of Reputation.
• Email each chapter as an attachment to an email account you can check on your iPhone. A .Mac address or anything with IMAP support works best.
• When the chapter shows up, click on the download button.
• Enjoy.

The easiest way to read is in landscape mode (tilted sideways) after adjusting the zoom so it fills the screen. You page by flicking up.

The nice thing is that fonts, images, and most page-formatting is retained and scale up very nicely. I actually like being able to read a book using the printed font instead of a fake e-book smoothed one.

The one hassle is bookmarking where you left off so you can return to it. But then again, balance that against the convenience of being able to read a book on a nice screen when you’re stuck somewhere.

Paul Graham: Six Principles For Making New Things (via Daring Fireball).

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

The key point of that list, the ‘pivot’ if you will, is item (c): that actually need to be solved. That’s where people part ways. One person’s perception of need is another’s state of ennui — or worse. And that, I honestly believe, is why products fail.

Not because the solutions are hard, or obvious, or delivered formally, or polished, or left uniterated. But because it did not merit, in the minds of enough people, that the problem needed to be solved.

Randomly searching through Amazon, you may came across:

In case you missed it:

Which makes you wonder, in the context of the item being sold…

But here’s the kicker. If you let the page completely finish loading, the text of that link magically morphs to:

It’s like a virtual AJAX-y Miss Manners coming through and taking out potentially offensive wording.

Hmm. Wonder if they do the same thing for any other product:

No.

No.

Gosh, why even bother.

Universal Truth: The business-savvy Karaoke DJ must sing worst than the average customer, if only to make them feel better about their own singing talents.

Corollary: If you are not one of those customers, you may want to finish that drink quickly.

I’ve been noticing an interesting phenomenon lately. You do a Google search for a term — something unique, like a medical condition or the Latin name of a flower. Google returns a bunch of results. In some cases the returned result turns out to be completely irrelevant. That’s fine. Such is life.

But here’s the kicker.

If you do a page search for the unique term, sometimes the only place the term occurs is inside the Google Ads injected into the page!

Let’s walk this through.

The Google search spider comes knocking. It scans the entire page on a site and indexes it — ads and all. A while later you come along and do a search which leads you to look at the page. There’s nothing relevant there except for the irrelevant ad Google Ads stuck in there as filler when its own spider stopped by to scan the page.

By looking at the page, you the user got nothing of value. Google got (at least) two page view hits. One by its own spider and one by you being led there by the search — to someplace completely unrelated.

I bow before the brilliant recursiveness that is integration of search and advertising.

Music I like enough to keep track of — meaning I regularly search for them to see if they have new releases and try to see them in-person when they visit the area. (There are a lot of others I listen to regularly, but these are the ones that are alive and/or active):

• Amelia — Sweet jazzy sound out of Portland, Oregon. Have a new album coming out this year.
• Amplifico — Great sound out of Edinburgh. Also have a new album coming out soon.
• Bitter:Sweet — Techno/retro out of L.A.
• Camille — French solo act.
• Ceu — What Bossa Nova would sound like if it was modernized.
• Emiliana Torrini — Sweet Icelandic voice, minus the screechiness of Bjork.
• Hapa — First thing we listen to every time we visit family in Hawaii.
• Imogen Heap — Frou Frou was a great one-shot experiment. Imogen keeps going. Lovely stuff.
• Jason Mraz — All-around feel-good music.
• Jorge Drexler — Makes you wish your Spanish was better so you could understand half the references.
• Madeleine Peyroux — Great background music for cooking.
• Manu Chao — Crank it up high in the car with the windows closed.
• Pink Martini — Another great band out of Portland.
• Sufjan Stevens — hard not to get hooked after listening to Illinois.
• Thievery Corporation — Electronic + Jazz.

Of these, I’ve seen four live and I’d happily pay to see the others, especially if they played small, intimate venues like Bimbo’s in San Francisco.

Some artists have web-sites with their own mailing lists or push you into signing up for their forums, but it’s rare that I hear anything afterward. I’ve found the people who are the most diligent about keeping in touch with their fans are stand-up comedians. Musicians could learn a thing or two from them.

Someday I’d like to implement an artist tracking service in Palchemy. The whole ‘follow’ model — but made super-easy for artists — to let fans hear about new albums, nearby concerts, and appearances.

Dang! Can Marc Andreesen write a rant or what?

While reading his takedown of tomorrow’s birdcage liner the New York Times and its board, I kept thinking: Good thing he’s not selling to the enterprise.

Oh, wait.

Still, my inner radical was cheering him on heartily.

Go, dog, go.