BASEMENT.ORG

Posted by Richard Ziade on June 30, 2008, 03:03PM

Beautiful Photography : Alexey Titarenko

Check out Alexey Titarenko's beautiful (mostly) black and white photography. Don't miss the City Of Shadows series - long exposure shots of crowds. Pretty eerie.

| TrackBack

Posted by Richard Ziade on June 27, 2008, 08:28AM

14 Simple Ways to Super Charge Your Brain

As if your awesome brain isn't already turbo-charged, here are 14 simple ways to super charge your brain.

| TrackBack

Posted by Richard Ziade on June 24, 2008, 10:46AM

"I've Got A Great Idea! Now What?"

Ideas are what make any organization evolve and adapt. Whether large or small, new ideas challenge the status quo and aspire to a better of way of doing things. The germination of an idea is an oddly singular, individual experience. Yeh, you may pitch something to your office neighbor and a furious brainstorming session may ensue, but in the beginning it's just you and your idea.

In any organization today, it's tough to get ideas out. Yeh, you may blurt out an idea at some company meeting (even though it's slightly off-topic) or you may let one fly at the tail-end of an email thread, but let's face it: sharing ideas is hard.

Antenna And the bigger your organization, the tougher it is to share your ideas. Only the most arrogant and presumptuous among would hit up the all@yourcompany.com email address. So how do we get our ideas across today? Well, the brave among us will politic and plot subliminal propaganda campaigns to insinuate our idea into an organization. The reality is that most of us will do nothing. And that's too bad, for both ourselves and more importantly the collective good of the organization as a whole.

Introducing : Kindling!

imageI'm very proud to announce Arc90's very first product endeavor: Kindling. Kindling is a web-based idea harvesting tool for groups and organizations. Simply sign up, invite some users and start sharing, voting up and acting on ideas. You can learn a bit more about Arc90's daring foray into the Wild World Of Products by reading Tim Meaney's post on the Arc90 blog.

Instead of hearing me ramble on about how much cuter Kindling is than all the other kids, just watch this brief intro video:

We're now accepting invites to our public beta. If you'd like to set up your group, company or organization with your very own instance of Kindling (e.g. mycompany.kindling.com), don't hesitate to request an invite.

Update: ReadWriteWeb has put up a quick review of Kindling.

Comments (2) | TrackBack

Posted by Richard Ziade on June 20, 2008, 02:03PM

How Do You Solve Yahoo's Indigestion? Pass Some Gas!

(I apologize in advance. This is one of my less appetizing metaphors.)

Anyone that follows tech news has undoubtedly heard about the mass exodus out of Yahoo. The departures are a mix of startup-acquired leaders (Flickr and delicious) as well as executives from the Old Guard.

At first glance, it's a pretty shocking to watch the large swaths of Yahoo's leadership disappear. Watching it all from the outside, you'd think the whole company was imploding. The end is near!

old-yahoo Then again...what were all these people doing? I get the funny feeling that nothing will materially change at Yahoo with all these people departing. That's not meant as a knock to the talent that's on its way out. I'm sure they're all very capable people. It's really more a statement about Yahoo's all-over-the-place strategy and how 95% of it is going nowhere.

Yahoo, and Google for that matter, are their very own Internet bubbles. They are, in and of themselves, their very own environments for incubation. They have a handful of revenue-generating businesses that effectively provide "funding" for all the other "startups" that spring up inside their walls. And like most startups, most of them fail. Except that unlike the real world, where running out of money means you stop existing, within a large organization you can politic your way into daddy's pockets to keep subsisting. This leads to the inevitable dragging down of the entire business.

Google is in precisely the same situation. Youtube is wildly popular yet monetization is still a puzzle. Gmail, Google Apps and many other initiatives are themselves ventures that amount to a tiny fraction of Google's revenue. The key difference between Yahoo and Google is that Google's search business is wildly successful, providing significant cushion for these other initiatives (for now at least).

Alka-SeltzerOrig20 A bubble bursting is a good thing in the long run. It displaces talent and focus and resets expectations. The first wave of Internet startups needed a reboot in 2001. Google and Yahoo are really just bubbles in and of themselves.  think it's good for the organization to revisit the value of its various initiatives.

Diverse organizations like Yahoo and Google don't really "burst" per se.  Nonetheless, it's healthy to let out some gas every so often. While it may seem like an unraveling to everyone else, it could well be the healthiest thing for Yahoo.

| TrackBack

Posted by Richard Ziade on June 17, 2008, 09:50PM

Google, Corn Syrup And Treadmills : Our Boundless Desire For Achievement And Inconvenience

Last week, I pointed to an article by Nick Carr in this month's Atlantic magazine: Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nick talks about how the Internet is having a dramatic effect on how we think. In short, he asserts that the Internet, with all its bite-sized chunks of content, is conditioning our minds such that our ability to focus for longer periods of time and our ability to think more deeply is compromised.

I tend to agree with Nick's theory, though I'm not sure what Google has to do with it (other than making for a snazzier article title). The measurable unit of information is undoubtedly dwindling. From 30 minute sitcoms to two-minute videos. From ten page articles to a two paragraph blog post. From a feature-length album to .99 cent songs on iTunes. I will be the first to admit that I don't let songs finish these days. I also find myself having a lower tolerance for giving a movie a chance. I tried watching Semi Pro (the new Will Ferrell movie) on the plane. I couldn't get past the first 15 minutes (then again, that may be because the movie sucks).

I think there's another dimension to the Internet's impact on our minds that Nick hints at but fails to focus on. As technology and the Internet has evolved, we've outsourced a lot of the mental labor we used to do "in house." Some examples:

the psychologist So beyond the pummeling of our attention spans, we're undoubtedly offloading a lot of mental labor to machines. And the machines are getting more and more powerful. The real magic of Google isn't just finding you what you're looking for, but surmising your intent and then finding you what you're looking for. In other words, as Google gets smarter it requires less and less explanation from us as to our intent. Drop a UPS tracking number or an airline and flight number and you'll see what I mean. Google isn't just searching web pages anymore. Its aspiring to be an extension of our will.

So the real question remains: is this bad for us? Whether we're talking about conditioning our brains to only tolerate 100-word blog posts or offloading any sort of mental tasks to machines, are we setting ourselves up for mental atrophy?

90050473 To help try to answer this question, it's worth looking at what's happened to our physical well-being as technology, modern conveniences and most notable the automobile came into our lives. It turns out that dream car culture we all sought after just made us less active and sedentary. Combine that with the mass availability of all kinds of contraptions (people drive lawn mowers) and the mass production of corn syrup-inspired food stuffs, and you end up with an obesity problem. In other words, the conveniences ended up being crutches. We became fat and lazy.

So how do we respond? Well, for the most part, at least in the United States, we haven't formulated much of a response. We've just now started to acknowledge obesity as an epidemic. Still, we're consciously aware of the need to stay fit. So how do we make sure our physical body stays in shape in a world where physical activity has been deemed unnecessary? Well, our answer is to simulate worlds of inconvenience. Say hello to the treadmill.

treadmill_2full A treadmill is a ridiculous contraption. It serves no real purpose at all. Imagine how a 16th century farmer would respond to the sight of a treadmill. He would demand to see the real ends of such a machine. Does it create electricity? Does it churn butter? Does it power a mill? Your neighborhood gym (you know, the one you signed up to but rarely visit) is a Museum Of Human Inconvenience. It's our way of staying healthy and feeling good in the midst of the luxuries of modern living.

Google is corn syrup for our brains. It's a man-made invention that tastes really good. It's cheap. And it's damn convenient. Just as our modern physical conveniences led to physical atrophy, our informational conveniences will lead to mental atrophy. The question is whether we'll become consciously aware of our fat and lazy brains and invent the equivalent of a modern exercise club for our minds.

In the end, I think we'll be OK. Just as we can't help but stay active in the physical world, many of us will feel compelled to "fill up" all that newly-available mental bandwidth with new exercises and fresh thinking. Our circuitry is already wired for us to seek out goals and then go after them. We can't help it. While these luxuries (or crutches) will continue to permeate our lives and potentially make us dumber (or softer), our innate desire to seek out, pursue and achieve something does not go away.

Even if that "something" may be six miles on a treadmill.

Comments (11) | TrackBack

Posted by Richard Ziade on June 11, 2008, 02:06PM

You Say You Want A (Web) Revolution?

A revolution is all about a mass uprising. To cook up a revolution, you need a few key ingredients:

belgian-revolution The last bullet is key because it's not enough to just pass off some fantastical scheme to change the world. The way out needs to make sense and be somewhat grounded in reality. In other words, you need to enable and empower the masses. The status quo can really suck but if the masses don't see a way out and feel confident in it, you're not going to get that mass uprising.

Notepad.exe Is Mightier Than The Sword

icon_5 Fifteen years ago or so, the Web showed up and almost immediately, the masses were armed. Just about anyone could quickly make sense of HTML. You could create an experience...with graphics! Soon after, you could add sound (.wav files!) and animation (animated GIF's!) to really create an amazing (at least it felt that way back then) experience. Let's forget for a second that anyone in the world could visit your creations. Let's go back to...oh I don't know...1989. What would it take to create an entire interactive experience that included content, graphics and sound? Forget word processing documents. You can't really interact with those. You needed development tools and a computer science degree.

After the Internet landed, the only prerequisite was notepad.exe. The creation of software was wrestled away from the object-oriented C pseudo-aristocracy and handed back to the masses. The masses were given a way out, and a true revolution ensued. The brave among us even dipped their toe in Javascript.

The content explosion that became the Internet eventually would evolve even further as non-programmer types slashed and hacked their way through old-school Active Server Pages. Other technologies like Coldfusion and PHP sought to take the masses even further. You didn't need a computer science degree to change the world.

Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

Fast forward to 2003 or so, and we start to see glimpses of something exciting happening to the Web again. People started to hang around an obscure back alley of Javascript that would eventually redefine the Web experience for good. Google Maps was born ("whoah, what is this?") and Jesse James Garrett (insert Ennio Morricone music here) slapped a label on it: Ajax.

Before you knew it, really exciting things were happening on the web. Web applications were starting to feel like real (i.e. desktop) applications. And the line between the browser and the desktop was getting a whole lot blurrier.

Throughout this Second Coming, various technology leaders began putting forth technologies to truly marry the power and reach of the Web and web services with rich, powerful clients that run on your desktop. In addition, frameworks like JQuery and Prototype have made rich web building a lot easier (thought it's still pretty hard).

george3britain And so the race has begun to convince the masses to yet again join another revolution. There's just one problem: there is no way out this time. The scepter has been handed back to the former ruling class. To really create exciting things, you need a computer science degree. Actionscript 3, the backbone of technologies like Flash, Flex and Adobe AIR is a full-blown strongly-typed programming language. Microsoft's Silverlight and WPF simply arm the masses that are already building .Net desktop applications.

Even Javascript, once the playground of curious hackers, has been hijacked by computer scientists. People are actually programming properly on Javascript today, which sucks for everybody else.

Webmasters Unite!

I'm not going to be delusional and presume that all this new stuff doesn't require some additional skills. The interactions are undoubtedly more complex. Yes, the brave among us are free to venture forth and learn these new skills. What I'm asserting here is that the keepers of the Web platforms of the future: Adobe, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple and others have failed to think through making their platforms accessible to the non-programmer types that made the Web what it is today. In other words, they've failed to enable and empower the masses. The guy who knew how to edit HTML and fiddle with Javascript is completely turned off by the Web of today. There is no avenue of empowerment.

How important is empowerment? Why not just let the computer scientists do their thing? It's important because when you empower the masses, you discover new conduits towards invention that you would never otherwise reveal. The Web today is a great example of this.

"Take Everything You've Learned And Chuck It Out The Window"

So what can lead to empowerment? Let's revisit the good'ol tags that got everybody giddy in the first place. Here's how you drop an image into a web page:

I'm of course excluding a whole bunch of optional attributes (width, height, etc.). Now let's see how you drop images in Adobe Flex:

Microsoft's XAML is a real beauty. At first it seems somewhat innocuous:

But it turns out this is the bad way to do it (i.e. it uses up more application memory). Here's the proper way (comments are Microsoft's, not mine):

Now here's the near-miss from Mozilla's XUL:

So problem number one: the masses have a already invested a ton of knowledge in an existing markup language. Yes, we'll no doubt have to augment it to accommodate all the new fancy stuff, but why mess with what people already know (and technical reasons do not count)?

Weapons Of Mass Adoption

Beyond leveraging what people already know, the real damage is caused by abandoning the philosophy that made the web so accessible to so many in the first place. Let's play God and create a few new tags:

You get the idea. On top of this, you could implement existing web code to do some new and exciting things. An RSS feed? It's a perfect alerting system. Just add a couple of attributes that turn on intermittent desktop alerting as new updates.

IZMIR-DEMONSTRATION-749159 There are many other examples. I'm sure programmers will scoff at the "gross oversimplification" of these suggestions. But guess what, that's what the Web 1.0 revolution was all about: gross oversimplification. The brilliance of the invention was not some algorithm or infrastructure change. It was the handful of readable instructions that made the web accessible to a much broader audience.

The Adobe's and Microsoft's of the world should take heed. If you really want a revolution to happen, start paying attention to the masses that do not know a lick of object-oriented programming and start handing them the weapons. Yeh they'll fumble at first, but before you know it you've got an army.

Comments (6) | TrackBack

Posted by Richard Ziade on June 10, 2008, 04:00PM

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Nick Carr (great blogger) has the feature article in the upcoming Atlantic (great magazine) : Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Comments (3) | TrackBack

Posted by Richard Ziade on June 4, 2008, 11:03AM

The Right Thing vs. The Status Quo

When Arc90 was founded nearly four years ago, the motivation was clear: create a cool environment where smart technologists and designers can create powerful, innovative tools for our clients unencumbered by the typical nonsense associated with large, bureaucratic organizations. We strive to create a place where the best and smartest ideas always win out and where politics, jockeying for territory and positions and status amount to very little.

That vision has mostly come to fruition. We've been fortunate enough to have the leeway to create some incredibly powerful, innovative tools and applications for our clients...sometimes. As I think about the things that frustrate us today, I've come to realize that Arc90 is a slow trod towards independence. The sequence goes something like this:

  1. You work in a company where you deal with bullshit, politics and all sorts of nonsense that gets in the way of doing the right thing. If the right thing is disruptive in any sort of way, the status quo quickly starts to bear down on you. Frustration ensues and you eventually quit...
  2. You break out on your own and quickly enjoy the liberating feeling of not being surrounded by morons. You engage a few clients and revel in your newfound independence, for awhile...

Eventually, even as an independent entity, you're sucked into your client's world of spectacular bullshit. You assess their world and cue up some valuable feedback (i.e. the right thing). You show up for meetings and enthusiastically share your strategy that will get them to a better place.

Welcome back to bullet #1.

Ah, there lies the rub. You thought you'd found independence but alas to really make a difference for your clients, you need to live in their world. And the Battle Royale between the Right Thing and the Status Quo begins again.

So what to do? At Arc90, we often talk about the "strategic entry point." Going in at a high level and collaborating with our clients to formulate strategies together. As an external entity, our vantage point (which is devoid of history, politics and organizational inertia) allows us to focus on the problem at hand sans the typical bullshit that can pollute a strategy. Nevertheless, in the end we still have to play within that same arena. We still must step into that same history, politics and organizational inertia.

And so we're left with an interesting dilemma: do we take our clients' money anyway and just "play along" or do we tell them to go to hell because it's not the right thing? The leadership at Arc90 has a responsibility to keep Arc90 afloat and prosperous so it's hard to just brush off what we may view as "bad work." On the other hand, bad work can badly impact morale and diminish the brand value of Arc90. A firm like ours will rarely come out looking good if it just bows down and does bad work.

http://www.mozes.com/blog/uploaded_images/Far%20Side--gifted%20school-726975.jpgSo what to do? For Arc90, we've been fortunate enough to have had a good amount of autonomy to date. As for the rest, the struggle goes on. We navigate stealthily to somehow drop the right thing in anyway, all the while stroking the necessary egos at play. Any organization worth its weight should on occasion audit themselves to see just how much they do to neutralize the tyranny of the status quo. Do good initiatives make it? Are the right people heard? Do you have a mechanism that makes it easy to call out bullshit? In the end, it's about getting personalities out of the way. The right thing has very little to do with personalities.

There's a great saying. I can't recall where I first heard it but I repeat it often :

The right thing is easy, unfortunately people are involved.

Comments (6) | TrackBack