Picking up smoothies from JuiceLand
Somewhere over California
Last week’s Sting concert
Exploring downtown this morning
Yesterday’s hike with the dogs
Dueling pianos
Trail of Lights 50+ years
Thank you Tim Duncan
Marketing, mission, movement
As I was writing some documentation this week, I kept thinking about what makes great marketing copy. 37signals used to say that copywriting is a form of user interface design. That’s true but I think there’s more to it. The best products don’t just have marketing copy; they have a mission statement. They don’t just sell a tool; they sell a movement. When I stare at my product wondering if it’s too confusing — if it’s too different, and tries to do too many things, to be immediately understood by new users — I try to remind myself that it’s an opportunity.
Future-safe weblogs
Future-safe weblogs It’s a common theme for Dave Winer to write about preserving our writing on the web. Today he outlines some criteria for judging whether a web host will last: “The concern is that the record we’re creating is fragile and ephemeral, so that to historians of the future, the period of innovation where we moved our intellectual presence from physical to electronic media will be a blank spot, with almost none of it persisting.
Not progress over Twitter
Medium is really interesting, and beautifully designed, but it’s not progress over Twitter unless you’re annoyed about the 140 character limit. It’s still totally centralized, has no API, and works against wanting to host and control our own content. Basically a step back for the open web. (Although I think there’s real value in mirroring content here.)
Write locally, mirror globally
Write locally, mirror globally The Atlantic has an interesting essay on whether Twitter is on a slow decline, less useful and meaningful than it once was: “Twitter is the platform that led us into the mobile Internet age. It broke our habit of visiting individual news homepages first thing in the morning, and established behaviors built around real-time news consumption and production. It normalized mobile publishing power. It changed our expectations about how we congregate around shared events.