37signals has a really cool footer design. Great way of visually indicating the end of a page.
Month: April 2011
Status
Insane video of Ueli Steck climbing the north face of Eiger in under 3 hours. When I worked in Yosemite I remember talking to guys next door at the mountain shop about people speed climbing El Capitan. (via Kottke)
WordCamp Seattle Slides
I posted my slides from the Edit Flow talk I gave at WordCamp Seattle the other weekend. The talk was a 5 minute Ignite presentation. It was a lot of fun condensing a plugin like Edit Flow to 5 minutes.
The Twisted Psychology of Bloggers vs. Journalists
For people in the press, bloggers vs. journalists is an elaborate way of staying the same, of refusing to change, while permitting into the picture some of the stressful changes I have mentioned. A shorter way to say this is: it’s fucking neurotic.
Jay Rosen in The Twisted Psychology of Bloggers vs. Journalists.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk0hSeQ5s_k&w=540&h=334]
This is a beautiful and moving talk by Merlin Mann at this year’s Webstock. (via Swiss Miss)
WordCamp and journalism conferences
This weekend Alex and I drove up to WordCamp Seattle. It was the third WordCamp I’ve been to and while driving home I started relating those WordCamps to the journalism conferences I’ve been to over the past few years.
WordCamps ground themselves in software, so an iterative approach is a natural fit. They are about answering the question, what are you working on right now to make things better?
That question is not limited to code. The writers in attendance focus on concrete tips for making their writing more engaging, their communities more active, and their publishing business more successful. Aaron Hockley, for example, gave what sounded like a really great talk about the basics of making money with your blog.
The code-focused speakers were covering everything from approaches to using AJAX in plugins to Swiss Army Knife-style theme options pages. Each talk gave you a tool you could take home with you and implement in your next project to make it better.
The journalism conferences I’ve been to have been decidedly different. In the past couple years I’ve been to the Associated Collegiate Press Conference, a couple of SPJ conferences at the University of Oregon, and other smaller conferences and presentations around Portland.
With the exception of the talks Marshall Kirkpatrick gave at the SPJ conferences, these journalism conferences are far less about doing things. They are filled with self-referential discussions about news. I’ve come away with a strong sense of what’s broken but not a good feeling about what is being done to fix it.
When you speak at a journalism conference I want to hear about what the top idea in your mind is. I want to hear about what experiments you are trying, how you are measuring them, and how they are affecting your success.
At the end of the month I’m heading out to Philly for Bar Camp NewsInnovation. I’m excited, it should be a great WordCamp-style journalism conference. We need more of these discussions to iterate and make the news information business better.
Fail Bigger Cheaper: A Three Word Manifesto. By insulating businesses, particularly the large ones, from failure we’re limiting our future opportunities. If we let things fail we can learn how to make them better.
Tweeting and Writing and Deflating Like a Balloon
Really writing forces us to lock the words into whatever contraption is being used to write. I like typewriters because it’s hard to take out the paper and crumple it up while writing. The easiest movement is FORWARD. Typewriters are momentum machines. Real writing pushes forward. Tweets push in every direction at once. These are not value judgements, these are just some observations.
Frank Chimero – Tweeting and Writing and Deflating Like a Balloon.
Vocational Wheel
The only way I have time to do nice things is to not do everything. It makes sense to me, other people think that makes me a dick.
Merlin Mann in Episode #7 of Back to Work.
WordCamp Seattle
I’m driving up to Seattle early this morning for WordCamp Seattle. There’s a great set of speakers lined up for the main part of the day.
At the end I’ll be giving an Ignite talk about Edit Flow. You should catch the live stream of talks throughout the day.
Looking forward to meeting everyone and catching up with Andrew, Max, and more.