We’re really excited about the new Readability. It’s a massive leap from the 150 or so lines of javascript that snuck out of the Arc90 lab almost two years ago. The response back then, both by the development community (Readability is baked into Apple’s Safari browser and the Amazon Kindle, among other places) and users in general really blew us away.

About six months ago, we were sitting around wondering what to do with this thing. We could’ve just left it alone and moved on, but the sentiment surrounding the tool and reading in general was so powerful that it just didn’t feel right to just move on. And so, we gathered to brainstorm what to do next with it. We tossed around features and various ideas around how to make the “product” better. Amidst the brainstorming banter, partner and Arc90 lead strategist Tim Meaney went ahead and dropped the proverbial bomb on the conversation. His pitch was essentially this: let people pay and give the money to the writers and publishers. The features are great, but let’s use this as an opportunity to wrap a great reading experience around the web we all know and love. No apps. No walls. No micropayments. No hardware requirements. Build it on the web and let’s put forward a mechanism that connects the money readers give us with the people who create all that great content that flows through the web every day.

I’ll be the first to admit that this approach hasn’t been without its fair share of anxiety and heated discussion. There’s not a whole lot of precedent to lean on for comfort. We’re putting out a service that asks people to pay money on the web (challenge #1), that asks people to pay more if they can afford to for the same suite of features (challenge #2) and we’re effectively providing a service that, in its current incarnation, presents no new or exclusive content of any sort (challenge #3).  There are probably other challenges, but there are also a lot of reasons to head in a new direction.

We believe the time is right to try something bold and innovative on the web. And “on the web” is what this service is all about. Our goal is to create a platform that embraces the web without compromising it. It’s rare that you find an opportunity to create something that embraces the openness, the fragmentation, the mayhem of the web. We believe Readability has that chance.

We also believe that quality content is worth paying for. The rat race for page views and impressions has not only led to an oftentimes painful experience on the web, but also to a diminishing of quality content on the web. Today’s reality isn’t anyone’s fault but ours. We won’t hesitate to spend $4.00 for our daily cup of coffee (that’s $80.00 a month if it’s part of your daily routine) but we’ll balk at even a modest attempt at supporting the volumes of content we consume on the web. Readability represents an opportunity to show all the great publications, writers and bloggers out there that we care about quality and we’re willing to pay for it.

We’ve got some amazing plans and announcements lined up for Readability. Be sure to follow @readability on Twitter to stay in the loop. If you have thoughts or feedback on the service, don’t hesitate to contact us.

If you peek back into the 1950’s, you’ll see a world that promises salvation through automation and mass production. The Anything-o-Matics of the world would free us from the mundane, allowing us to reach new levels of enlightenment. We didn’t have to worry about cupcakes going stale because they would never go stale.

As we look back today, things didn’t exactly turn out that way. The past fifteen years has seen a backlash against mass production and a migration towards personal, artisanal, hand-crafted anything. We’re pushing technology out of the picture. You can spend $75 for a generic laptop bag or you can spend $250 for a hand-crafted, made-to-order laptop bag. The message is clear: give me less automation and more humanity.

It’s no wonder. We don’t want item #349853 off the assembly line. We want the limited run. We want to feel special. We want to pick up the scent of another human being that poured their care and attention into this thing that I just acquired or purchased.

The Automated Web

The web’s march is in many ways is a march towards optimization. You can publish in seconds. Others can find it within minutes. Google will index it soon after. The web, as its own entity, can’t help but optimize itself. And we, as pedestrians, can’t help but lock into its speed. And as we lock into that speed, we lose our way.

As I stare at my Twitter stream, I don’t feel like I’m staring at anything more substantial than data. Yes, it’s humans creating bits of information, but it’s humans behaving more like individual APIs than humans behaving like humans. By imposing constraints and reducing the overhead to post to near zero, Twitter tempted us with a whole new way of communicating – and many of us embraced it. As a consumer of Twitter, I find myself staring at that assembly line as product whizzes by. It’s nearly hypnotic and rarely impactful.

When someone puts hundreds or thousands of words into a blog post, we get more than just a blog post. We get a bit of that person. Their tone, their intent, their mood, a glimpse into their intellect and the things that shape their thinking. We get something hand-crafted. It’s becoming more significant for someone to pause the web and write something of meaningful length.

The Human Search Algorithm

Google has been under fire of late. The effectiveness of search has undoubtedly gone down. I’ve noticed this for a few months. The first page of results is often cluttered with results that don’t serve to inform but rather treat content as a sort of Trojan horse, carrying a mountain full of ads in its belly.

In the race to make money on the web, the intent and thoughtfulness behind content creation has been hijacked. A blogger’s intent to share an experience with her new digital camera has been replaced with the need to produce something, anything to match up to search terms for the purpose of serving ads. The result is higher velocity production of content to keep up with the flow of queries trending on Google. The outcome: hastily produced, low quality pages that are driven by the wrong motives.

When people say “Google is broken,” they’re really saying that Google has been fooled. We expect Google to sift through and separate content that is produced with “pure” motives and content that isn’t. Put differently: we want Google to prioritize and bump us up if we’re behaving like humans. If we’re behaving like machines, we should be punished for it.

Google, the governor of the web’s information, is being asked to get the house in order. We, its constituents, are demanding this icon of technological progress  be less technological and more respectful of our own humanity.

“So which is it young fella?”

Of course, this isn’t Google’s fault. Just as it isn’t the fault of Hostess Cakes to sell highly processed snack foods. When technological advances are introduced, we become enamored with them. Eventually, we awake from the trance and seek out authenticity and purity. We’re growing sick of highly processed, artificially flavored stuff. We want the real deal.

We want more human and less machine.

Let’s take an example: the digital camera. The idea of taking film to your local pharmacy and waiting a few days for photos to develop seems silly today. On your typical $100 camera (or phone for that matter), you can take hundreds of photos and enjoy them instantly. In minutes, people around the world can enjoy them as well. Many smartphone apps bake in Twitter, Facebook or Flickr integration.

We undoubtedly gained some amazing new capabilities which lead to new possibilities, but we also lost some things:

• The moment. Rather than being somewhere and enjoying an experience, we feel compelled to stop experiencing that moment to document it. We’re so motivated to share beyond the current company, we forget the moment itself as we momentarily depart. When others witness this, it’s disorienting. It’s as if you momentarily disappeared and returned soon after.
• The need for judgment. A $15 smart card can hold hundreds, possibly even thousands of photos. There is no need to weigh and consider whether that next photo is worth taking. We just snap away. The real work comes later as we glare at photos that all look alike. All that abundance steers us to lazily snap away without much care or concern. Scarcity motivates and sometimes inspires. 
• Anticipation. At the tail end of my teenage years, it was still necessary to go develop film. It usually took 2-3 days until the 24-hour development shops kicked in. By wedging some time between the experience itself and getting the pictures, the photos became so much more satisfying. It was a new moment to enjoy and talk around. Today, we’ll take a photo, pause real life, stare at that LCD and edit on the spot, then move on. There is no distance. It’s a gimmicky pausing of the live experience.
• Exclusivity. Growing up, my aunt amassed a bigger collection of photos of my own family than we ever had. She loved sharing them with us but warned us never to take any for ourselves. They were hers. She cherished the time we’d spend sifting through them together and she didn’t want to lose that. Today, we share with everybody everywhere. Nobody is special enough to afford exclusivity. Everyone is special, which means no one is special. By “publishing” we forego the intimacy that can come from sharing something with someone else.

This all may sound a bit quaint and nostalgic. It isn’t meant to be. I’m a designer and technologist myself. I love the possibilities of technology. Still, I think we will seek out what we lose in other ways. We still want to look forward to things. We still want to make others feel special when we share something with them. Hopefully, we’ll continue to think about the human context as we innovate, and be wary of what’s lost as much as what’s gained.

As a partner at a consulting firm myself, I’d add one more thought: the cost of your time is speculative. Yes, your competitors and your prior work will steer the conversation towards a particular range, but don’t be fooled, those factors are hardly reliable.

Near the end of his post, Greg finally gets to the dance that inevitably ensues:

The prospect says, “We’re accustomed to firms charging $75/hour”. That’s fine. I’m accustomed to my martinis slightly dirty. Just because you’re accustomed to something doesn’t make it a rule. Explain why your services cost what they do. Explain what truly differentiates you from your competition.

Let’s translate:

“You’re not that beautiful.”

“What? Of course I am. Look at me.”

“I mean…you’re moderately attractive, but not beautiful.”

“Well I don’t agree. I think you’re wrong. Look! Look at my eyes! My lips!”

“Yeh. I don’t know.”

That prospective client isn’t negotiating pricing. He’s telling you, in a not-so-roundabout way, that you aren’t worth what you think you’re worth. It’s a perception tug-of-war.

So what to do?

Here’s what you do: move everything else around except what you believe you’re really worth. Maybe they get less. Maybe they don’t get your senior people. Maybe it’s six components instead of nine. All those variables can change except your worth. That can’t change. It’s an undeniable fact beyond subjectivity and beyond the reality-bending rhetoric of your client-to-be. You are worth what you are worth and unless you’re feeling charitable something else has to give.

Now, I realize competition can get heated and this may be the marquee client you’ve been dying to work with. If that’s the case just understand that perception hasn’t just been shifted for pricing but for who you are, what you deliver and most importantly, what you are worth. In a sort of automatic process, perception leads to real, objective valuation. You may sell low now, but know that the market is listening and pricing accordingly.

Youth is to all the glad reason of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

- Thomas Carlyle

I want a new iPod Nano.

I saw an ad for it. I’m not really sure where. It might’ve just been a billboard or a bus stop or something. Soon after, I decided I wanted one.

I don’t need one. Not only do I not need one, I can’t even put together a case for how I would even make use of one. I already own an iPhone 4 with tons of memory. My entire music collection is already in my pocket. The iPhone 4 is a far better experience for listening to music.

So why do I want one?

I wanted one because it’s new. Amazon lists it precisely as:

Apple iPod nano 16 GB Graphite (6th Generation) NEWEST MODEL

Generations of iPod nanos have lived before this one. They’ve all died before this generation. They paved the way. This sixth generation will die soon as well, probably in about a year.

I want this new nano because it represents something beyond storage size and sound quality. iPods flattened out in terms of core features years ago. It would be nothing more than a burden for me.

So why do I want one?

I want one because it’s newness represents new life. We are willing to spend money on useless, frivolous objects because they represent immortality and renewal. They represent youth and freshness. They are our own feeble attempts to defy time and find new hope and possibility.

In a warped sense we’re all grandparents, clamoring for our sons and daughters to get on with it and get us some grandkids already. As we face the inevitable march of time, we crave these opportunities for renewal.

iPods. Cars. TV’s. They all tap into our basic primal desire to live forever. We don’t want a rugged, upgradeable iPod. We want the illusion of starting over.

Since time is short, we’ll share some thoughts for a few minutes then open it up to questions. We’ll also probably hang around to chat afterwards. If you’re at the conference, try to stop by.

Content, the Web and Death

The first is a panel called The Content Economy and the Web’s Rumored Demise. I’m joined by an amazing group of people: Jeff MacIntyre, content strategist and freelance journalist, and principal of Predicate LLC, the infinitely entertaining Paul Ford, contributing editor to Harper’s and consultant for Predicate (and the man behind Ftrain), Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and finally TED alum Jennifer 8 Lee, former journalist for the New York Times.

We’re going to talk about content, reading, and the presumed death of the Web. If this talk makes it through, I think it could be one of the better panels at SXSW, and I’m not just saying that because I’m involved.

SXSW Talk = Laboratory Experiment

The other proposed talk is a bit out of left field. We’re going to use one of the presentation slots at SXSW to debut our next Arc90 Lab experiment. It should be interesting (or catastrophic, depending on how things go). The talk is entitled: Toss the Projector: Redefining the Presenter/Audience Dynamic. We’re going to build a service that attempts upend the way presenters and the audience interact. You can get a sense of what we’re going after by reading this blog post on the Arc90 blog. Also, don’t miss Tim Meaney’s post on attention for a great background.

So if you can find it in your heart, please take a minute to vote:

• The Content Economy and the Web’s Rumored Demise
• Toss the Projector: Redefining the Presenter/Audience Dynamic

</endOfShamelessSXSWPanelPitch>

I’m a big fan of the Family Owned Business. I’d personally jump on any chance to experience the distillation of years of experience, knowledge and just that indefinable family-ness of a business. You can manufacture history, nostalgia and authenticity or it can be real.

And it doesn’t get any more real than Sam’s Bakery. The Cafe at Sam’s Bakery is located in Brooklyn, New York. Sam is my mom, short for Samia and…how do I say this subtly:

SHE MAKES THE MOST INSANE BAKLAVA YOU WILL EVER TASTE.

I’m no food critic, but you really have to experience it to fully appreciate why Sam’s baklava is so special. It isn’t soppy or doused in honey. It’s a subtle, rose water-infused flavor that plays between flaky, crunchy and moist. It’s an old family recipe that is under 24 hour lockdown in my mama’s mind.

If you care about eating awesome things, go order some. As a special promotion to my loyal baklava-loving readers, enter coupon code BASEMENTBAKLAVA to get 30% off any order. There’s other tasty stuff on there as well. It makes for a great gift too. We’re talking marriage-saving gift here folks.

To all the Brooklynites (which seems to be just about everyone I meet these days), I highly recommend visiting the cafe in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It has amazing wood roasted coffee from  Millar’s Coffee, shipped all the way from Washington state, a communal table for making friends and of course, free organic wifi.

If you order some or visit, I’d love to hear your feedback. In fact, you can email my mom directly. She’d love to hear your feedback too. Just be warned, she’ll email you back…every day…forever.

It’s the article itself.

In the never-ending quest to get page views, the choices writers and editors are making to attract eyeballs and drive traffic are creating a new breed of low-brow, gimmicky disposable content.  At its best it adds little insight and at its worst amounts to a slimy bait-and-switch (catchy headline, nothing to say in the article).

It’s the new clutter. The article itself has devolved into a flashing, animated pile of fluff. The casualty of the rat race towards ad impressions isn’t just crappy layout and thoughtless art direction. It’s awful and useless content. The formula is pretty straightforward: catchy headline, hot topic of the day, add a dash of controversy, stir into a gooey mixture and bake for ten minutes. Even better: take a jab at someone who’s on top: Apple, Facebook, etc. People love to shoot Goliath (or at least shoot in his general direction).

So where’s the good writing on the Web? It’s everywhere else. The interesting new perspectives and provocative thinking isn’t coming from Gizmodo and Silicon Alley. It’s the blogger I’ve never heard of that is blowing me out of my chair these days. They’re not writing with a hidden agenda. They’re not following a Gawker Media Formula For Success (internal guidelines that must exist).

This type of clutter only goes away if business models change and the mechanisms for determining success change along with them. There are too many good writers producing clutter on the Web today.

I’m proud of my cookies and I look forward to sharing them and hopefully getting a few compliments in return. I put the bowl forward for all to share and enjoy. As soon as someone reaches for one, I grab their hand by the wrist.

“$0.75…please.”

That’s not nice. In fact, it’s rude. This is why I think paywalls will fail on the Web. They’re not nice and they’re rude.

For us, it’s about doing it on the Web. It’s about elevating the Web providing amazing experiences around content. It will require great tools and a fair amount of discipline, but the Web can become the premium place to explore and consume quality content.

Look out for where we’re taking Readability this summer. It’s going to be fun.

The Pulse iPad app gets pulled because the New York Times put the squeeze on Apple to remove the app from the iTunes store. The key text from the New York Times legal:

The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.

So be warned, Netneswire, Reeder or any other feed reader out there. Hell, anybody that is pulling in content via RSS into an iPhone or iPad app be warned. This is big news. Consuming content freely available on the Web crosses a line, a brand new frickin’ line that didn’t exist yesterday.

Now, this can’t be real right? There has to be some nuanced fine line that Pulse crossed. The New York Times cease and desist letter goes on to say:

I note that the app is delivered with the NYTimes.com RSS feed preloaded, which is prominently featured in the screen shots used to sell the app on iTunes.

Emphasis mine. Ah, now I see. It’s because the Pulse reader preloads the New York Times feed as a default. If a user pulled it in, then that’s OK (I guess) but if Pulse preloads it, they’ve crossed a line?

Guess what else crosses a line? Apple Safari on the iPad or iPhone. By default it comes preloaded with the New York Times among a host of other news sources.

This is an incredibly dangerous precedent. I predict the New York Times will come to its senses and reverse their position. I can’t imagine this sticking.

Update: Position reversed. I’d love to hear an explanation behind what happened.

Update #2: Wait, The Times Company still wants it out. Stay tuned!

The typical snubbing goes something like this:

• You’re introduced to someone in person or you reach out to someone that you think is worth connecting with. You send an email.
• They respond and thank you for the note and convey that they’d love to meet up some time for a drink or lunch or coffee or whatever.
• You follow up with them and they never respond. Ever.

I can attest that this has happened to me. I can also shamefully attest that I’ve done this to others. I promise a follow-up and I never actually follow up.

Here’s the ugly reality of email overload: the outcome isn’t just a cluttered inbox. It’s countless people waiting to be acknowledged and – dare I say – respected. But we simply can’t do it. We can only handle so much at a time. The incredible efficiency of email and other communication tools have far outpaced and blown out our own expectations of how we should respectfully and properly communicate with one another.

As I stare at my countless emails, I know for certain that there are senders in there that deserve a response and probably won’t get it. Many times a day, every day we send the following signal to those waiting on the other end:

“I haven’t gotten to you because there are others that are more important to me right now and, I’m sorry to say, you just haven’t made it up the list.”

Doesn’t it sound awful? This is exactly what we do when the flow of emails come in. We prioritize in real-time. The chosen few will get a response. Some will get one almost immediately. The rest? They get nothing. They don’t even get a “sorry, I’m very busy right now” response. They get silence.

When we do run into someone we’ve failed to respond to, we usually pile on the “…I’ve just been so slammed with work and the whole conference thing that I just haven’t been able to catch up!” The other person usually just smiles and looks away. They understand where they’ve landed on the priority list.

Everyone applauds the hyper-connectedness we’re experiencing today. The truth is we can’t really leverage it in a very meaningful way. There are a chosen few that get proper attention, the rest just end up in a sort of long tail of human connections. They’re relegated to an almost trivial status – only acknowledged as a scored point on your “friends” or “followers” tally.

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion of late about what the Internet is doing to our brains. Nick Carr is leading the charge with a recent Wired feature and a new book called The Shallows. In short, the barrage of information that comes at us via the Internet is rewiring our brains. We’re optimizing ourselves for short, fleeting bursts of information. The capacity to focus and think deeply is under threat. I agree with much of Carr’s thinking because I’m experiencing it first hand.

Carr makes a compelling argument on the psychological impact of the Internet. What’s most unnerving to me is that some of the “content” I’m consuming (or expected to consume) isn’t a book or an article. It’s people. My diminishing ability to focus and give due attention is actually having a social impact on the people I know and the people that attempt to connect with me.

A new social protocol is emerging. We’re starting to sense that we can’t really give one another due attention. The outcome is a dilution of the basic building blocks of social mores. Words like “friend” or “connection” have been watered down and our expectations around them have diminished as well.

Take each of us in this shallow state that Carr describes and put us in a Petri dish. How will we connect? Do we just buzz around occasionally bumping into another? Can we connect deeply? Will we give one another the chance to form the subtle but deep roots that connect people in a meaningful way?

I don’t think anyone can predict how we’ll adjust and tweak our behavior to deal with these changes. We’re flooded with information today, but it doesn’t linger. It doesn’t stick around and age. The best social connections we can make are the ones that we keep around and cultivate. I hope we don’t lose that capacity to give worthwhile connections their due attention. As the writer and critic John Leonard said: “It takes a long time to grow an old friend.”

Nick Carr recently wrote an interesting post entitled Experiments in Delinkification. The premise was simple: the lure of hyperlinks are a distraction from the reading experience. A heated (and I mean heated) debate ensued and many others chimed in.

Well, we decided to do something about it. Today, we’re releasing an update to Readability that adds the option to turn all hyperlinks in long-form text into a set of footnotes. You can learn all about this update by visiting the Arc90 blog.

This clever little update would not have been possible had Tim Meaney not clamored for it and had Chris Dary and Dan Lacy not built it. We hope you find it useful.

Fundamentally, what makes Wired so good is the content. It’s a good brand because its content is good. This app is the equivalent of Wired taking its content, throwing it in a pit and pouring cement over it. It’s an instant fossilization. The content is mummified. Never to be touched or dissected or shared. I can’t even circle a paragraph on the fucking thing. 

With technology, shit is supposed to move forward. You’re supposed to be able to do stuff and experience stuff that you couldn’t before. This app is more like a tribute to magazines than a reimagining of where publishing can become.

It’s anti-Web, anti-sharing, anti-copy/paste - anti-everything. It’s a disservice to what was created. On the Web, content lives and breathes. This isn’t a digital magazine. It’s a tomb.

One final thought: there’s an odd irony about the whole experience. The iPad brings us closer to content – physically – than any technology to come before it. The whole experience is almost a tease. You’re swiping and touching all these “pages” and you can’t do a single thing with them. Welcome to the Museum of Magazine History.