droidMAKER

Social Marketing

2012-02-02T21:58:00.000-08:00

Second day in the Amazon store. After a wonderful effort today (i mean, come on - it's Groundhog Day), we got the book to the top of a couple lists. In the top 20 of Arts & Entertainment (a very large category)... and I'm happy to say, #1 in Movies. Thank you to all our friends on Facebook and Twitter who helped today, and all the folks out there watching GHD tonight who invited Danny to their parties and tweeted questions and thoughts with him.

Enjoying it while we can...

The (Self) Publishing Revolution

2012-02-01T10:35:00.000-08:00

I've been involved in book publishing since 1974. That was the year that my mother became so tired of watching my retinal-surgeon/ophthalmic educator-father have his textbooks published from academic presses that she started her own company to do it herself. Their first book, Optics for Clinicians, became an industry-wide best-seller, and I not only learned about layout and waxers, but I learned about stuffing envelopes and the importance of niche markets.

A few years later she purchased a desk-sized computerized word processor, to make writing and editing easier. It would be a decade before most kids grew up with computers in their homes.

When I was absorbed by the videogame craze of 1980 I decided the market was ripe for a book. So my natural instinct was to write and publish it at home. A summer job. Defending the Galaxy was written on a word processor but published quite traditionally. That was a good project and the first of a couple of books i would produce and market myself, while in college.

Lucasfilm

My first "real" job, however, was 4 years later, working for George Lucas, who believed that technology applied to filmmaking would liberate it. He shared a vision of creative independence with his big-brotherish buddy, über geek Francis Coppola. They dreamed of being free from the yoke of the Hollywood studio system, not all that different from my parents wanting to be free from publishing industry baggage. In the '80s Lucas and Coppola pushed the vision, spending millions. I became an expert on the introduction of computer workstations into filmmaking, for editing, sound, graphics, and so on. Steve Jobs understood this perhaps better than anyone, but as Moore's Law dragged down the cost of the technology (and improved its power), growing numbers of people could afford these tools. It was Lucas who imagined (in 1970) that someday every kid would have access to a camera and editing system, and wondered what that would do to our culture; but it was Jobs who delivered it.

I wrote a textbook in 1991 to help introduce the established movie and television industries to the computers, tools and concepts that would revolutionize them. Its title, "Nonlinear" helped coin the term for the new type of editing systems being introduced. Like my father's Optics, it was an industry-wide best-seller and I produced four versions over the next 15 years.

Disruptions

Once the tools of production were liberated -- for making movies, writing songs, publishing books, and so on -- digital tools got integrated into established production chains. You'd use an Avid to edit a movie, or build a book in InDesign, but you still released in theaters or sold in Borders. It's a new phenomenon that the tools of distribution are also being liberated. These things always start sort of crappy compared with established methods. And the Establishment is always quick to point out their (very real) failings. But as with all disruptions, they move too slow to keep up with the technological improvements which render these failings obsolete. They never catch up.

I watched YouTube emerge from the swamp of lousy web video sites, and like an Avid in 1990, it hardly seemed viable through all its limitations. Netflix was approaching the problem from a different angle. I watched Netflix closely as it formed. I joined at the end of 2005; they weren't in the DVD business, but in the distribution revolution surrounding movies (and any long-form narrative content). This was the last piece of the dream that Lucas had infected me with. I had been so caught up in democratizing the production tools, I had almost forgotten about the liberation of the distribution channels.

ePublishing Now

Which brings us to today. After publishing Danny's Groundhog Day book, and revisiting Droidmaker on the Kindle, Nook and iPad (and their respective public stores where individuals can sell books) I recognize these as the somewhat crappy first versions of the future of publishing. For the next few years these devices will get increasingly good at reproducing the features of printed books that makes them highly legible and useful, as well as add features a physical book could never do (hyperlinks, video, etc.). They'll co-exist with bookstores. Until suddenly (whether you like it or not) bookstores will go away.

As they say, it's groundhog day all over again... there is a terrific market opportunity just starting to 'hockey stick' as books are liberated. There will be about five years of converting publisher's old titles (to get every old book accessible in the new medium -- just as happened when CDs and then DVDs were invented); there will be tons of new talent who need to learn about new publishing tools as well as understand what old publishers have learned. It will involve skill sets that book compositors have never had to understand -- about user experience (UX) and usability. And a new breed of authors will rise up who might never have published in the old world. Yes... yes... much crap will be created, and tools will be necessary to sort through the crap to find the rare gems.

Blogging was the first step. Content that a decade earlier would have been "self published" was able to show up online. Webpage ads create the possibility of meaningful revenue, although only for a very few (each web reader generates but a few pennies in most cases)... and few individuals are set up to manage a subscription business... but by allowing the creators to self-package their content and sell it directly -- generating dollars, not pennies -- their target audiences can potentially support their efforts.

Besides creative freedom, the best argument for self-publishing is economic: in rough numbers, an author might make $1 for every book sold through The Establishment. Self publish a book and you might make five to 10 times that per book. If the audience is niche enough, and you have a realistic idea of how to reach them, then it might be worth the financial risk. It's a small start-up!

For decades, self-publishing was akin to vanity publishing, where somewhat nefarious publishers would take advantage of the ego-driven author who needed a physical book in hand, even if it couldn't be sold. It was sort of like the Who's Who ego publishing scheme ("you've been listed in this distinctive important book -- would you like to buy a bunch?"). But real self-publishing is just blogging with a different monetization path. And knowing something about traditional publishing tends to help, although not completely. I'm sure that traditional publishers are going to move more slowly than you can imagine. So the opportunity is now. As Steven Spielberg said in 1982, the first time he sat down at a high powered computer and drew photorealistically on the screen, "it's a great time to be alive."

Doesn't everyone love the combination of creative freedom and market opportunity?

Another Video Birthday Present for Groundhog Day

2012-01-29T18:37:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to make a birthday video for Danny, my brother, that is a compilation of a bunch of media uses of the term "groundhog day". I found a dozen or so - but i would love help if you've seen some good ones. Add URLs to the comments here. His birthday is Feb 13 so i'd like to have it done by then. Here's the first batch that i have:

BTW: this isn't the first GHD birthday video I've made for Danny. In 1993 when the movie came out (on Feb 12), i went to the Cineramadome in Hollywood and interviewed folks coming out and saying happy birthday. I forgot about it for awhile, but in 2000 I cut it together and gave it to him. Here's that one.

New Books from the Brothers Rubin

2012-01-25T14:39:00.000-08:00

After a good few months of fraternal effort, Danny and I are about to release our first eBooks. Coming out this week is Danny's How To Write Groundhog Day, a journey from his idea to the big screen. According to the description:

Follow this uniquescreenplay’s exciting journey through agents, directors, studios, stars and thewriter’s own confused brain to emerge as one of the most delightful andprofoundly affecting comedies of all time. For movie lovers and screenwritersalike, HowTo Write Groundhog Day includesthe original screenplay, notes, scene sketches, and a personal tour of theHollywood writing process from this popular screenwriting teacher.

Soon thereafter I'll be releasing my hardback DROIDMAKER. (It's crazy that the monochromatic two pound $40 hardback is about to become a wonderfully portable, color $10 ePub.) Better AND cheaper. How often can you say that? Just being able to search it for topics of interest is remarkable. Seeing the color photos alone is worth the price of admission. Getting the whole shebang.... priceless! If you are interested in movies, technology or startups... you're going to love this.

In the meantime, read "How to Write Groundhog Day." It's funnier.

"Shit People Say" Meme Spiking Today

2012-01-24T13:13:00.000-08:00

UPDATED 4pm - A “Shit People Say…” video came out today thatcaught my eye. It was about LA and, I’m sorry to say, it had me laughing. Atleast smiling. There has been a rapid proliferation of “Shit People Say”videos recently; it’s a viral meme that has been building and exploded today. Where did itstart and how has it expanded?

It seems that the meme started from Justin, a twitter user, who posted as #shitmydadsays. According to his bio "I'm 29. I live with my 74-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says". Justin starting putting these out there around Aug 2009. He has around 2.9M followers. He has posted less frequently in the past year. I'm not sure how many little offshoots his tweets created, but eventually it led to a twitter feed from #shitgirlssay. Kyle Humphrey and Graydon Sheppard started tweeting and retweeting great one-liners after April 2011… – #shitgirlssay presently have 909K followers. They're funny. But tweets are just tweets. These guys pulled the idea out and changed the presentation.

They created a youtube channel on Oct 9, 2011. Shortly thereafter, on Dec 12, 2011, they posted their first video: “Shit Girls Say – Episode 1”. It has 12.5M views over the past month.

A smattering of variations showed up slowly. My hip NYC pal Nar sent me “Shit White Girls say to Black Girls ”, on January 5. (It had only been uploaded to YouTube on January 4^th.) In the past couple weeks it already has had 7.2M views.
"Shit Asian Dads Say" came out on Jan 15 and rapidly hit 2.6M views.
"Shit New Yorkers Say" released on Jan 18. It's up to 2.4M views now, a few days later.

Every day for the past week about 4 pages of new versions have been posted to YouTube. But today, by noon, there were more than 13 pages of new YouTube videos.

I noticed that a small business has created a "Sh*t Web Designers Say" video a couple hours ago that is promoted in the search results. I don't like that they couldn't even write out "Shit" in the title like every single other video in this meme they're trying to surf. Really? You didn't want to offend?

Individually, most don't hit the radar. But the rush to make another hit is on. The LA one i just saw has only 300 views. And 1000 more the next hour. Will it reach 1M?

In the past 24 hours there have been versions for: skipping gym, people in wheelchairs, Mexicans, Barack Obama, andSaudis and hundreds more.

Yes, something is hockey-sticking today. The spike is now - and then quickly it will be tired (my friend who posted the LA video was already apologizing for doing so...). What's your favorite?

POST SCRIPT:
It took 2 days for the LA Video to reach 1M views.

Wired Wrong. (In honor of B Week at Sundance)

2012-01-23T06:30:00.000-08:00

I'll never forget Sundance 1993. A whole bunch of us rented a little house on Park Avenue. I had just come back from one of my first screenings, Robert Rodriguez's debut "El Mariachi" when I found a stack of magazines being given away for free at the Festival Headquarters on Main Street. It was called WIRED and I brought it with me back to the rental and I sat down with it and read it cover to cover. I loved it. "This is going to be my generation's Rolling Stone," I told one of my housemates (a professional magazine editor, who examined the magazine and ads and suggested it would never make it). Everything about that first issue spoke to me. I subscribed on the spot. I've subscribed ever since.

It's had good years and bad years, odd changes over the decades... but I still tend to like WIRED, in spite of its success. So it was strange today as I was cleaning out some piles in my office, when I sat down with a stack of issues, before I threw them out (why do I save these things?) and flipped through them. Sure the topics were still interesting, but I was shocked to discover just how wrong so much of what I read happened to be. Yes- I could pick out the occasional gem - some comment or article that was amazingly prescient. But i have to say, on average, so much was wrong it made me sick. Products and companies that never materialized. Prognostications that were embarrassingly off... things to watch and things that were hot that - perhaps hot in 2004 or 2007, were utterly gone.

Perhaps this would be the case with many magazines -- if you went back even 10 years you'd find just absurd predictions and warnings, more wrong than right... but I always liked WIRED and continue to find it nice for trendwatching and futurethinking. When it says X is hot, or Y is the company to watch... I tend to care. But maybe I shouldn't. My romp down memory lane was sobering. Hard to pick winners. Even for the experts.

The Netflix Post That Reed Should Have Written

2011-09-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

Dear Subscribers,

I know you hate it when we do this. But here goes...

For 5 years we have integrated the DVD and streaming businesses -- and for those of you who used it you've gotten used to the really cludgy way we fit them together. Yes, there are many aspects that fit together well (one movie - multiple ways to view it) but there were other ways it was goofy (two queues, two or three play-type buttons). We experimented for years with making this easier and clearer. But over those years a few important things have happened. The people who use the site for DVD-only or Streaming-only has surged - growing way faster than the people who use us for both. 75% of all new customers only want streaming. That number is growing fast. The number who want both is dropping. Additionally, we've expanded to Canada and Latin America -- and no one anywhere else in the world is going to get DVDs - we can't ship them. So, for our entire future, our growth opportunity, is entirely in streaming. And finally, the economics of DVDs and streaming are totally different. Deals are complicated.

What to do?

While I have been consumed with this problem, I've also been critically aware of a basic business principle: it's very hard to shift a company from something they're great at (for us, shipping DVDs) and something new (for us, Streaming). These "disruptions" as they are called, tend to kill established companies. Almost always, the industry leader simply moves too slowly to adopt the new path, and once they do, they play catch-up until they fail. My biggest fear for these years is that we'd move too slowly into streaming. The problem for established companies is managing the existing users. In order to protect the business and the current user experience, a company moves very slowly. Not to do so would seem heartless and suicidal: screw up the user's experience in some way? are you crazy?

I'm not crazy, and i really do love our users. But Netflix isn't helping anyone by failing to lead the way into streaming. We're not helping our users if we stand by them to the point that we kill the company. For better or worse, today, i'm taking a stand and shifting our focus into Streaming. Everyone wants a simple website, everyone wants tons of great content. I believe we can better deliver on the things most of our current users want (and ALL of our new users), by separating these businesses.

It's going to be a little painful and you have to trust me that I feel the same pain. Inside Netflix virtually all of us use both services - discs and streaming - and we know that we're introducing something that has drawbacks. Needing to go to two different sites to manage our entertainment content... two accounts... all that. I could point to the fact that each site will be easier to use, or that the DVD site will finally be able to offer GAMES, but it really doesn't matter - the truth is there is going to be some disappointment and pain.

Qwikster will have its full attention on diminishing those difficulties as much as possible. We'll work with customers and iterate the website and service to make it increasingly better. We've done this in the past and you know we're pretty good at it. It takes some time, but we do get there.

There is no escaping the fact that NOT to do this would kill Netflix over the next decade; and as much as some folks are going to be bummed, I also don't believe you'd want me to make a decision that would do that. I'm sure many of you will quit the service in anger. We have raised prices over the past few months (to be fair - many people see a price DECREASE, and for those who use both services, it's really just a fairer price for what you get - but i suppose that isn't the point).

I'm sorry if this change feels heartless, or that i'm throwing some subscribers under the bus. These are not easy decisions, but truly made with ALL our customers in mind. In the past i've not been as communicative about these kinds of changes as i should have been. I seriously believe in corporate transparency, but i've not been willing to expose my concerns about the path we were on or the steps necessary to evolve through the difficulties. Our competitors are huge, and the opportunity is too. I don't believe the service will be worse for this, but i do believe that some customers are going to feel abandoned and unconsidered. I feel terrible about it. But i know it's the right thing to do and all I can say is that i promise we will work to win back your trust and your excitement in using the service, at a really attractive price, with the best content available.

Thank you for caring. I'll try to answer as many questions as possible.

Albert-Szent-Gyorgi, Google, and the Meaning of Life

2011-09-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

"In my hunt for the meaning of life, I started researchin histology. Unsatisfied by the information cellular morphology could give meabout life, I turned to physiology. Finding physiology too complex I took uppharmacology. Still finding the situation too complicated I turned tobacteriology. But bacteria wereeven too complex, so I descended to the molecular level, studying chemistry andphysical chemistry. After 20 years of work I was led to conclude that tounderstand life we have to descend to the electronic level, and the world ofwave mechanics. But electrons are just electrons, and have no life at all.Evidently, on the way I lost life; it had run out between my fingers."

I first heard this quotation in college, and it stuck with me. The guy who said it, Albert Szent-Gyorgi, discovered vitamin C and won a few Nobel prizes, but you don't hear too much about him these days. That's why I was particularly happy to see him honored in the Google doodle today. It's his 118th Birthday. Thought it would be a good moment to drag out my old notebook...

Push Beyond...

2011-06-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

Paul O'Bryan came over this evening and we tweaked up the ol' kissing video -- this time losing 45 seconds and adding a great song by Beck ("Debra") that sexifies the whole thing, as if that was possible. I decided not to make it an advertisement for Pingster or anything -- just thought it would be fun.

Why men start companies.

2011-05-10T18:43:00.000-07:00

My startup is a few months old, and i'm just not getting much sleep. There's a lot of day-by-day ad hoc management. Shit comes up. Ugly unpredictable stuff. Fears. Uncertainties. But then there are moments of real excitement. Private pride. I've seen this before. Oh right. It's a baby. A start-up company is a newborn and it's no wonder no one is getting much sleep. It's 6pm right now and i'm still unshowered, unshaved -- i kept almost-starting my day but thing after thing came up, and i never made it out.

Men start companies because they cannot gestate babies. It is as close as a man will come to making something from nothing, procreation, nursing it along, creating something lasting that matters. A company also provides the kind of short-term rewards that men particularly like. I think women are better at the unrewarded outcome. Motherhood is often thank-less. A company offers rewards that are more tangible, visible, and potentially short-term. These are good man-type rewards. Yes women start companies too, and men share in the joy of parenthood... i'm just saying...

... oh, time to go change the baby. Catch you at 3am.

No more free lunch...

2011-03-16T22:57:00.000-07:00

Effective this week, I'm shutting off the free flow of droidMAKER PDFs. I'll leave part 1 here, because if you're thinking about the book it's nice to have access to a good enough chunk to make a decision. I'd say in general it was great to offer the book to so many readers. Since I first made it available in the summer of 2009, my calculations are that the book was downloaded about 55,000 times.

So here's the link again to the first third of the book...
Act 1: Intro plus Chapters 1-6 [1.8MB]

And here's a link back to Amazon, where you can always buy it.
Droidmaker on Amazon

mapOmatic

2011-02-27T10:05:00.000-08:00

I can't believe i'm starting another company. The odd path that began with consulting for PublicEarth, then being Chief Product guy, to CEO... to moving it to Menlo Park... changing the website focus from PublicEarth to PlaceBook, then, necessarily, from PlaceBook to TripTrace... and now, forming a new company called TripTrace, Inc and launching a new product called mapOmatic... well... i'm reminded of a Monty Python skit ("Rock Notes") from decades ago...

Dead Monkeys are to split up again, according to their manager, Lefty Goldblatt. They've been in the business now ten years, nine as other groups. Originally the Dead Salmon, they became for a while, Trout. Then Fried Trout, then Poached Trout In A White Wine Sauce, and finally, Herring. Splitting up for nearly a month, they re-formed as Red Herring, which became Dead Herring for a while, and then Dead Loss, which reflected the current state of the group. Splitting up again to get their heads together, they reformed a fortnight later as Heads Together, a tight little name which lasted them through a difficult period when their drummer was suspected of suffering from death. It turned out to be only a rumor and they became Dead Together, then Dead Gear, which lead to Dead Donkeys, Lead Donkeys, and the inevitable split up. After nearly ten days, they reformed again as Sole Manier, then Dead Sole, Rock Cod, Turbot, Haddock, White Baith, then Places, Fish, Bream, Mackerel, Salmon, Poached Salmon, Poached Salmon In A White Wine Sauce, Salmon-monia, and Helen Shapiro. This last name, their favorite, had to be dropped following an injunction and they split up again. When they reformed after a record-breaking two days, they ditched the fishy references and became Dead Monkeys, a name which they stuck with for the rest of their careers. Now, a fortnight later, they've finally split up.

What does it mean when real life is the same as a Monty Python skit?

Go sign up for the beta iPhone app of mapOmatic (http://www.map-omatic.com)
And go get the rapidly evolving iPhone app for Pingster (http://www.pingster.com)

Best iPhone apps at AppStoreHQ

Droidmaker on Facebook

2011-01-04T13:24:00.000-08:00

I dunno why I didn't post this before. It's a fine way to keep up with items of "Droidmaker" interest - whether that's digital video, Star Wars, start-ups, or media...

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Droidmaker/18858274520

The Life of a Start-Up: "Nauseous Optimism"

2010-11-09T09:39:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure why I like this part of the start-up experience: raising rounds of capital is tiring and generally considered an emotional rollercoaster. But I like talking to people about what we're building and the vision, and there is something rather fun in the whole endeavor.

In the past few months I've spoken to dozens of the most successful venture capital firms in the Bay Area and beyond. They have invested capital in start-ups that today are household names. Outside of the "Investment Community" no one has heard of these people, perhaps, but their ability to "get" someone's vision has made a host of web services available to you today -- from Facebook to eBay, Foursquare to Mint. These guys have seen it all, and sit on boards of a remarkable range of companies any of which you would think have changed the world (or, at least, a big part of it...). Entrepreneurs are central, obviously, but someone had to look at a piece of paper or a dodgy website in a particularly crude state, and make a real bet of millions of dollars. Sure they bet on a lot of dogs. Mostly. But they bet on winners too.

The process is standard: All of them give you an hour or so to make your case, and then they make a quick decision as to whether this is worth their time to think about it any longer. It's not science. It's not even art. It's more like falling in love. It's chemical. Maybe something like business-pheromones? So far all of the partners I've met have given me some instantaneous feedback. They are a smart and experienced crowd, so you'd think their insights are crucial, but you frequently get mutually exclusive kinds of advice -- like "whatever you do, turn RIGHT" and "If I can leave you with one thought, in all my years of experience, just don't go RIGHT." Hmmm.... the fact is, they're not giving me instructions, they're giving me IDEAS, and I tend to look at their feedback as "clues" to the right solution. Anyway, if you talk to enough of them, you'll realize that while giving you well-meaning advice, you still have to do what you think is best. Meetings get progressively better, of course, because you learn as you go - what trips them up? What wasn't clear enough that you can get better at explaining? By the fourth meeting your business hasn't changed, but your ability to articulate it has.

But invariably, like dating, you will often find the right fit. A handful of them will totally get your vision. They'll like it. It will resonate with them. You can sit there with them gazing off into the fuzzy darkness, both seeing the sunrise that will come tomorrow. With this group you move to the next step. Digging deeper.

This goes on until the terms of a deal start getting discussed. At any stage of the process a VC could drop out. So even as your optimism grows and the project is totally on track, there is this nagging knowledge that "it isn't over until it's over." And the closer you get to closing the deal, the more excited everyone becomes and the more terrible it would be if the deal fell apart.

Every single one of my friends who have been through this process relish to tell me stories of projects that in their darkest moments -- about to run out of cash, about to file for bankrupcy, with all the VCs deals starting to get bleak -- inexplicably turning around in the 11th hour and closing with remarkable success. They also tell me stories of projects where everything was going perfectly -- money lined up, investors excited, the project in full steam toward certain victory -- when something turned on a dime and the deal went south -- the term "train wreck" is tossed around, with projects at full velocity hitting a wall and just imploding.

And until a start-up is actually generating more income than it burns (and this is itself a moving target because even as you make money, there is pressure and/or motivation to spend FASTER to grow more quickly) a company is almost always looking for new capital. In short, even once you raise money, you're still looking ahead to raising more money. It doesn't really end, at least not in these early days. It ends when you're solidly profitable, when you go public, or when some bigger company acquires you. And so you get used to this.

So here you are on a train moving faster and faster, the excitement of approaching the goal, and the accelerating fear that some tackle is going to hit you from your blindside.

"Hey Michael! How's the start-up going these days?"
"Oh, I'm nauseously optimistic!"
The daily life of a start-up.

Everyone's a Publisher...

2010-09-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

Remember when "desktop publishing" was delivered? There was an unbelievable outpouring of bad design, and the professional community grumbled. Just because everyone CAN design and publish doesn't mean they should... then there was "printing on demand", desktop video, YouTube... these are all technologies that lower the barrier-to-entry for the production and distribution of content. It's not that everyone can do it, but if you are suitably motivated, in general, nothing is stopping you. Authors are no longer subjected to the whims of capricious corporate publishers; filmmakers don't need to woo a studio, and so on. I'm a big fan of these changes.

Blogging is a further step down this path: You want to write? You have something to say? Now anyone can open up a little storefront and put their writings out there for the public to consume. Or not. And just as when desktop publishing arrived, there are countless examples of people who probably should not blog. They may have little to say or bland insights. Luckily, the natural ecology of the web buries their content - no harm, no foul.

I had a radio show in college; i'd get up at dawn and go down to WBRU-AM and broadcast and banter to, I believe, no one. It didn't matter. For me it was about the process. Blogging is about the same. If you walk into a bookstore today you'll see a ton of books -- who is reading all these books? Most seem utterly forgettable, and yet, these are the successful authors - the people who made it through every filter thrown at them and still managed not only to get published, but to land in a national bookstore chain. Trust me, that's a lot of obstacles surpassed. For every book in the store, there are hundreds or thousands that didn't make it. In many cases, these are what blogs have become: unpublished books.

Twitter is the bleeding edge of this phenomenon. Now it's even EASIER to have something to say and broadcast it to your followers. Like blogging, like desktop publishing, it just gets easier and easier to stand on your soapbox and hope for an audience. Maybe the speaker doesn't care much if no one is listening (like me at WBRU), and perhaps most of the people speaking really have nothing to say ("I had eggs for breakfast! Another beautiful day!") but the ability of anyone to shout simply gets easier all the time.

So everyone is talking and shouting, even. But few are listening. I'd suggest that all these technologies -- desktop publishing, YouTube, blogging, Twitter -- are utterly liberating and fantastic for those who are already broadcasters of sorts, people with niche audiences (small or large), who have something to say and have created a channel. Grandpa can broadcast wisdoms to his dispursed family. Scoble can critique technologies to the geek crowd. Gaga can engage her fans in her daily tribulations and political agenda. The system is self-filtering. Anyone can step up to the mike, and maybe you get an audience and maybe you don't.

The real problem that every production medium has to face is how to find your audience. It's true for book publishers and website developers. A publishing company needs maybe 10,000 book readers to break even on making a book; and 50,000 might make it a best seller. A website might need 1 million users every month to pay for development and operations. By leveling the playing field in terms of access to production tools and distribution channels, everyone from grandma to Foursquare has to figure out how to get people to come to their product. It's still the hardest and most expensive part of the process.

PlaceBook vs Facebook

2010-08-12T17:52:00.000-07:00

Improv Anywhere: Star Wars scene

2010-07-14T16:21:00.001-07:00

How could I not post this???

30 Years Since PacMan? Holy Cow...

2010-05-21T08:58:00.001-07:00

That means: almost 30 years since DEFENDING THE GALAXY (the complete handbook of videogaming)! *Google cracks me up...

Why Facebook Can’t Handle Privacy Correctly

2010-05-17T10:54:00.001-07:00

It's almost impossible to open a newsfeed today without someone else realizing that Facebook privacy is lacking, or that Facebook itself is taking another stab at getting it right. [e.g. New York Times, PC World, WSJournal...] I’m confident these efforts will be futile.

It’s not due to lack of caring on the part of Facebook; I’m sure they care about individual privacy (Zuckerberg's passion for openness notwithstanding). And it’s not for some sort of technical incompetence – those guys are smart and savvy. So why the ongoing nightmares?

There are two forces at play that I propose are mutually exclusive and cannot effectively be resolved. First, and foremost, Facebook is a social tool. It is THE social graph. Everything about its structure – from concept to engineering – is designed to make social connections natural and simple. Social connection is a powerful (and valuable) force and Facebook handles it all with ease. Anything that is NOT supposed to be social and shared is going to run directly into a basic disconnect. Yes, we can hide the things we don’t want to share, and we can take efforts to select who sees some things and who does not. But sharing is simple, and hiding is harder.

The more sensitive the information we post into the Facebook “system” – the more nervous we are that it might be getting shared in some way we cannot fathom. I would suggest most people aren’t entirely clear about what is being shared and with whom. Confidence and control over Facebook privacy is not going to be simple no matter how technically sophisticated the user, and with 400+ million users, most are not “sophisticated.”

The second force is about user experience design, and most of my background here comes from Netflix. Even with only 12 million users – a mere fraction of Facebook -- it was always a continual challenge to simplify the Netflix website enough that a wide audience would find it clear and useable. We learned that people don’t read much on the screen, they don’t spend a ton of time figuring out features, they don’t understand things that might seem “obvious” and so on. Small increases in the number of options/functions available at any given moment, and usability suffers. We used to have in-house opinions like “take all the cool sophisticated tools and put them under a drop down menu called “advanced features”…. And then don’t build them.” It’s not that advanced features aren’t good and cool, it’s only that very very few people will ever discover them let alone use them, and simple always wins over sophisticated. We tested these principles and we knew them to be true.

And so we return to Facebook: most the privacy controls fall into the domain of “advanced features” – they’re the exception to a social tool; they’re complicated no matter how hard you try or how smart you are. With an audience the size of Facebook’s, users will predominantly never be able to grok them and thus will screw up privacy-- and blame Facebook.

Facebook will never truly be able to deliver appropriate privacy because at their core, they are all about social and sharing. Uber privacy will never and cannot ever be their strength. Nor should we demand it be. Facebook isn’t where we should manage our medical history or genetic code. It isn’t where we write our diary. We should probably stop blaming Facebook for failing in a domain where they shouldn’t be expert, or asking them to effectively solve for every privacy concern. Instead we should use Facebook for what it is – a social graph. At some level, Facebook and strong simple privacy are mutually exclusive, and, when we accept that, we will all be much happier.

Netflix on the iPad

2010-04-06T22:33:00.001-07:00

I'm as excited as the next guy about having Netflix on an iPad. I saw my first iPad today and messed around with it, and - i dunno. It's pretty interesting. I think what it does is introduce a kind of advanced media websurfing that we "early adopters" (folks with high-powered laptops and always-on internet access) take for granted, but that a lot of Americans still don't fully experience. As Netflix subscriber numbers go up, start to think about how the audience of the product has grown from niche to mainstream. Instant watching is great and the service generally provides fantastic value. Putting it on the iPad further indoctrinates a broad market into getting movies streamed to them where ever they are.

I heard the announcement on April Fools Day and didn't think much of it. But quickly I heard it was true, and eventually started seeing articles like this: http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/netflix-application-coming-to-the-apple-ipad-01-04-2010/

Someone pointed out to me today that the screen being shown in the product launch is of the movie "2 Days in Paris" - which i rather enjoyed. The top review of the movie shown on the screen, oddly enough, is one I wrote; and there's my unfortunate little avatar up there... what a crack up.

Worthy Short Film

2010-03-12T18:12:00.001-08:00

Memoirs of a Scanner (Martinibomb Version) from Damon Stea on Vimeo.

The Endorsement: Tosh.0

2010-03-11T17:39:00.000-08:00

I've seen glimpses of Daniel Tosh for years, but not having a television these past many months I never took the time to watch his (not quite so new) show on Comedy Central -- Tosh.0 -- until yesterday. What a wit! I think the thing that strikes me is that his content is sort of the modern evolution of "Americas Funniest Home Videos" but it's not soppy and cuddly with a laugh track, it's crass and unrepentant presentation and (frequently) commentary on online video. Fantastic!

Here's a link to some online show clips: http://www.comedycentral.com/tosh.0/tosh-0-aired-march-3-2010/

And here's a particularly funny clip, the first I had watched yesterday, which got me interested in seeing more....

Tosh.0

Video Breakdown - Brick to the Nuts

www.comedycentral.com

Web Redemption

2 Girls, 1 Cup Reaction

Demi Moore Picture

Quotations...

2010-03-03T23:07:00.001-08:00

I can't think of a time when something I posted on a blog offhand was actually called out and shared as a... you know... quotation. But I found this online tonight and it mostly cracked me up:

The Road More Often Traveled...

2010-03-01T21:51:00.000-08:00

I'm going to admit something here. I often take the road more traveled, and I don't like that about myself. I seek the path of least resistance; it feels like giving in, but I cannot fight it. I have a short attention span; and like any handicapped individual, I do the best I can to compensate with other strengths.

We are supposed to teach our kids to be hardworking and focused, but I am easily distracted and desirous of down time. I think about things a lot.

My career is in building things for people like me. I'm passionate about having computers make my life easier. As my friend, industrial designer Lisa Krohn once taught me, the computer is a prosthetic device -- it makes me from a bad speller, slow writer, bad drawer, a lazy designer, incompetent film editor -- into something quite different, and apparently capable. I want to help people like me. I don't make games. I'm more of a toolmaker: tools to make work easier. I like easy.

Easy is hard to do. It takes work -- it's sculpture as much as data. When I edited movies I was apprenticed for a time to the great filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci and his film editor Gabriella Cristiani. They shot maybe forty hours of film to make The Sheltering Sky. After many months of work they elegantly demonstrated to me that editing a movie isn't about throwing out the bad material. It's about throwing out the good material to make the remaining material better. This is the essence of product design.

Netflix has millions of customers from which they can analyze data to improve their website. It's consumer science. Even with numbers it's still hard to do well, and few do it as well as they do. A start-up, my start-up, however, doesn't have enough users yet to allow anyone to make statistically relevant decisions about product features. So over the next few months, my work is to systematically cut and shape the product into its essence, some kind of delightful simplicity and clear function. Today it is still 40 hours of film, a block of marble, chopped ingredients on the counter. Next comes the fun part.

On Airline Crashes and Becoming CEO of a Start-up…

2010-02-21T09:19:00.000-08:00

I hate reading about airplane accidents. I know that statistically planes are safer than cars, but I fly often these days and stare out the windows on take off and decide to trust laws of physics and ignore the vagaries of life involving hung over pilots, underappreciated maintenance workers, and metal fatigue…

When there is an accident, particularly a deadly and tragic accident like last week’s Tesla motors Cessna crash, I am unnerved. I’ve watched numerous documentaries and news reports about airline crashes – and the same story repeats itself. It goes like this:

"Accidents occur when a chain of unfortunate events all line up exactly right," said Paul Weihs, an FAA Safety Team representative for the San Jose region, whose company, Aviation Training Curriculum, teaches pilot safety at local airports. "One thing rarely causes a crash. But when you line them up, something is going to happen."

Crashes are totally improbable. There are systems, and backup systems, and the odds of a random set of bad things lining up in just the wrong way are astronomical. But apparently, it happens. Try as we might, you just can’t protect from every odd permutation of events that can lead to a crash. According to flight statistics, the odds of being killed in a plane crash are somewhere between 1 in a million and 1 in 10 million, depending on airplane and airline…

Now that I’m leading a start-up company, I’m beginning to imagine another completely improbable event: utter success. From another body of research, the likelihood of a start-up company becoming an “out-of-the-park” success is also about 1 in a million. Most start-ups fail. Survivorship bias makes us all think that if you’re just smart you can build a Google or a Facebook. But the restaurants of Palo Alto are littered with the bodies of dead start-ups. Talk to any entrepreneur and the story is vaguely familiar:

Successes occur when a chain of remarkable events all line up exactly right. One good idea or one great employee or even an incredible product doesn’t always lead to financial success. You can do a lot of work to line up the right elements to improve your odds. But in the end, there is an enormous part that is luck. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, describes in researched detail how unexpectedly random events and environments tend to make the difference between outrageous success and typical failure. It’s not just genius of Bill Gates or John Lennon. It’s a little genius, hard work, and a lot of other crazy stuff: Who you went to school with. The year you were born. An odd law on the books that suddenly made one set of opportunities viable.

Venture Capital firms will often bet on an untested management team with a killer idea, or an accomplished management team with a sketchy idea… but rarely both. The odds just get uncontrollably bad when you don’t have some basic things lined up.

I tend to think of entrepreneurial ventures as a roulette game: there are lots of spaces on the wheel, only one leads to success, and you have maybe one spin or, if you’re lucky, two, in any given game. All you get to do as an entrepreneur is cover over some of the spaces with tape to reduce the chances of a miss. Got a great idea? Cover over two spaces. A fantastic CEO? A couple more. A lucky break in the press? A few more. Bit by bit you do what you can to control the things you can control, lower the number of spaces on the wheel. And when the spin comes, while it’s still going to be luck, at least you’ve moved the odds more and more in your favor. That’s the best you can hope for.

Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, (and considered one of the top CEOs in the country) occasionally will describe the lucky moments in the past that helped get Netflix where it is today. No matter how famously strategic and innovative as Hastings has been, it was luck that Blockbuster didn’t realize the opportunity in DVD-by-mail one year sooner, even after tiny Netflix tried unsuccessfully to convince Blockbuster to work with them. That inadvertent Netflix head start made it impossible for Blockbuster to catch up. This, like numerous other little elements that no one could imagine or control, just fell into place; and when combined with vision, competent strategic thinking and a good team, lead to the multi-billion dollar business Netflix has become.

So whether it leads to a good outcome or a tragic one, those extremes are results of the same kinds of improbable lining up of events. Perhaps an entrepreneur should be no more confident of success than he is terrified of flying. (Ironically, however, fear of flying is somewhat pointless. But confidence in the successful outcome in your entrepreneurial venture, well, that is actually one of the attributes necessary in the lining up of random items that builds to success. It IS causal, or at least a positive contribution.) In the end, I try to be realistic and measured – both in my fears as I board the plane, and my expectations of changing the world with a company. But hey, come on… hope springs eternal. Buckle up, and cross your fingers.

Serendipity vs. the Act of Will

2010-02-01T00:26:00.000-08:00

What are the relative merits between being a master of serendipity and the opposite: making things happen for yourself that you want to have happen - of goal setting and producing desired results from a superhuman act of will.

It is a rare skill to surf the natural energies of life, (of business, of everything) – with deft grace and Zen-like acceptance. If the world gives you lemons, make lemonade. From my home I can watch “real” ocean surfers paddling out to put themselves in just the right position with respect to how things are moving around, being patient and watchful, and then knowing how to move themselves to quickly capitalize on an unimaginably enormous surge of energy, leveraging it for their own purposes. You don’t control the wave. At best you just get to ride it, not to be afraid of its power, balancing on an unstable surface in motion, gliding wherever it’s going, and perhaps dropping off when you don’t want to go there…

Knowing when to let go. That seems to be key too. I have long been inspired by the simian locomotion called brachiation. Swinging through jungle canopies, new world monkeys let go of a branch and fly through the air, hoping to catch something safe on the other side. They’re built for it, not only with prehensile feet—feet that grab like hands--but prehensile tails. And yes, occasionally they actually miss and hit the ground. But not often.

Personally, I like this serendipity camp and try to be a full-brachiator in my life. Watching the forces swirl, looking for a rising wave and enjoying a ride. Often this is manifested where two remarkably improbable events coincide, making an even more unlikely event spontaneously feasible. There is an adage that what appears as “luck” is simply the union of preparation and opportunity. To me this is where entrepreneurship, like surfing, resides – those who look lucky are simply highly skilled, they put themselves in the right place, they are unafraid of trying multiple times and unafraid of failing… and they know how to wait…

To some being a master of serendipity looks like magic. And we think it’s easy mostly because of a phenomenon called “survivorship bias” – where we tend only to see the winners, and all the monkeys that fell to the dirt disappear – and we are left with the false impression that all who play will win. To others a trust in serendipity seems lazy, unfocused, and unambitious -- as if you were adrift on an ocean, going wherever the winds might blow you. A vagabond, a drifter. But sailors can also tell you that regardless of where the wind blows, you can go wherever you set your sights.

And even gamblers, those people who roll dice and put their trust in the universe to deliver for them, tend to “fish their wish,” and try through an act of will to change the chaotic order towards their goal. Impossible, certainly – and yet when my dice "crap out" with an 11, I’ve been chided more than once that I wasn’t focusing…

The killers of serendipity are inertia and fear. Inertia is the tendency to move because you’re moving, or stick because you’ve been stuck. The first law of thermodynamics is powerful on our molecules, and seduces all evolved humans to behave more from habit and less from instinct. We tend to do what we’ve always done. We settle into routines. We prefer familiarity. Similarly it is fear that keeps us in bad marriages (fear of loneliness) and out of start-up companies (fear of poverty), or more generally, a fear of the unknown –jumping from a dull stable job to an exciting risky one has such an unpredictable outcome, the uncertainty is unnerving. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. So people stay put, they don’t let go of vines until they have another vine firmly in hand. In the animal kingdom, this is known as semi-brachiation: old world monkeys and apes move this way. Clearly, we are evolved from them.

So this brings up the opposite lesson: to pick a goal, and drive toward it. You don’t improvise building the pyramids or painting the Sistine Chapel. Plan your work and work your plan. Persistence in the face of adversity. Sailors go where they set their sights through skill and work. They leverage the powers of the wind but aren’t a slave to them. They make the winds take them where they want to go. The adage that always motivated me here was “Success is largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.”

I know many writers and they’ll tell you that as much of an artform as writing is, you cannot only write when you’re inspired. You’re not always inspired. When those magic forces coalesce and a great work is produced, it’s nothing short of spiritual – the writer often feels just a vessel for some creative product that seemed to come from somewhere other than their own mind. But professional writers will simply tell you that writing is a discipline, it’s work, and you do it every day whether you’re inspired or not. Writers write.

So where does that leave me? Am I a serendipity ninja? Floating through the decades in a practice of preparation - and watching for all the trajectories of opportunity, calculating subconsciously where to stand to catch the ball. Am I the architect of my future? Where fate cannot be trusted to get the right supplies and right workers aligned to build that wonderful edifice – where to the greatest degree, each detail must be worked out in advance, and built on plan. I feel both, and neither.

And what of love? Is it magic, effortless, transformative art? Powered by serendipity, of chance meetings and funny coincidences telling us to pay attention? Or is it work, of patience and understanding and frequent pain, with some far off goal that we must apply ourselves to. When is it time to let go? and what is the goal?

And so perhaps there is a lesson.
We plan. We dream and design our lives, and we work tirelessly to construct them… but we learn not to pound square pegs in round holes, we learn to notice resistance when it occurs, and to stop pushing: we are sensitive to the forces that even we cannot control, and when we feel the wind coming around from the other side, or the wave rising that would be foolish to imagine we could divert, we have to know how to let go of the vine, flex like a tree in a storm, and drift naked and unknowing into a future, draped only in confidence in ourselves, in our ultimate impotence, and simply try to enjoy the ride.

Happy Groundhog Day!

2010-01-30T00:41:00.000-08:00

Back from EG. Looks like all of us were inspired. Danny has a new blog post: http://www.dannyrubin.com/blogusgroundhogus/2010/01/28/entrepreneurs-of-the-animal-kingdom/

Another "Powers of 10" Type Illustration

2010-01-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

Interesting.

Astronomically Accurate View of the Known Universe

2010-01-07T10:51:00.000-08:00

I love this stuff, particularly if also watched with David Bolinksy's cellular video work...

The Inner Life of the Cell « XVIVO

Funny.

2009-12-27T08:58:00.000-08:00

PublicEarth is Live!

2009-11-16T19:32:00.000-08:00

Well, tonight we launched our new website, PublicEarth. Launching a wiki is no small task, and getting this product developed was a remarkable experience for me. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to use this space to go into the product development issues that came up during my first 3 months here, and hopefully initiate a dialog about UX in much the way I used to at Netflix.

So go visit PublicEarth... and then come back a little while later and see what's changed. It's a living thing. It gets better every time you use it.

Larry Lessig from TED 07:

2009-10-15T22:00:00.000-07:00

I enjoy this talk every time I see it, and on a whole range of levels. Check it out:

Why I Joined PublicEarth

2009-10-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

Just over a month ago I virtually disappeared from my normal life, and took a position as the Chief Product Officer at a start-up called PublicEarth. PublicEarth is in Boulder, Colorado - and has been in "stealth mode" for more than a year. In the next week they will expose the beta site to view, and about a month after that, my "consumerization" of the product will begin to roll out.

A new job, very different from nonlinear editing, different from Petroglyph, and different from writing DROIDMAKER. The question arises: why did I join PublicEarth?

I joined for one reason: i continue to dislike my alternatives when it comes to researching places online. I don't think there are really any GREAT travel sites. And I don't think anyone has come close to understanding me well enough to help me get ideas for new things to do, even around where i live. I joined because Google is really really great for many things, but the enjoyable act of exploration and discovery is not one of them. Neither is Yelp. I like them both very much. But this isn’t that.

I don’t think I’m stupid, but frequently find myself frustrated when I’m trying to prepare for a trip. The consequences of bad choices are sometimes high. The website alternatives are complicated, and the features I need are either not present, or available if I can navigate through the interfaces to use them. So I don’t. I don't have the patience or the stamina. How can that be? I'm a professional geek. But tell me to do research for a trip and I groan. To me that means there is room for improvement.

I joined because I met a guy, Duncan McCall, who was not only passionate about mapping and geography, but he was a true explorer... the kind of guy who goes places dangerous and far, comfortable with discomfort when accompanied by adventure... a guy who has actually worried whether his vehicle would strike a landmine, and struggled to cross international borders. I am not a person like this. I wish I were a global adventurer, but honestly, i'm not. My adventures, while often risky and scary, are less muddy. I joined because I liked Duncan's vision -- for creating this public wiki, and gathering rich data on all those unusual places in the world, and helping people share and discover these places.

I joined because I think a few of my work experiences might help him take that vision and make it useful on the web; in particular, working at Netflix; there they innovated continuously, delivering an award winning website. I learned a lot there: a website based on consumer science with a culture of simplicity. Netflix's mission was "to connect people to movies they'll love" and i think PublicEarth's mission is to "connect people to places they'll love." See? I've been training for this job for years.

So I joined PublicEarth. We’re just at the dawning of the Consumer-GPS age (I have enjoyed a number of these ages dawning and I suggest this is a nice place to be); there is still an opportunity in terms of user experience and product innovation, and finally, Duncan and his team have been laying the groundwork for more than a year – It's easy to arrive in time for the fun part. This next 12 months are going to be interesting.

There you have it: the one reason I joined PublicEarth.

Performance Art: Pretty Cool!

2009-09-18T21:18:00.000-07:00

Aaron Hendricks uncovered this really interesting artist today.

Droidmaker and Kindle

2009-09-07T19:43:00.001-07:00

I am often asked why there is no Kindle version of Droidmaker. The community of Kindle lovers even kindly offered to help get the book into a format that would be appropriate. But here's the deal: the book is more than text that can be flowed nicely into a Kindle format. I worked very hard to interweave the body of the book with carefully placed sidenotes. Photos -- very rare photos at that -- are embedded in the text where they are important context. I had considered having a folio at the end of the book that was full of photos. But i rejected it. I made dozens of difficult decisions -- the form factor of the book, the weight and color of paper, the layout -- that would maximize the clarity and entertainment value of the story. So, when it comes to the Kindle, the only way to get the text in is to utterly deconstruct the format; it kills the sidebars, the call-outs, the photo positions, and I don't want to do that.

So while I have been prepared to distribute the book for free in PDF form, a format that is identical to the physical book, I'd rather do this than profit from a Kindle version that removed that layout. I understand that some Kindles can take in PDFs. I imagine that in the future new versions of the Kindle may maintain the formats better, but until then, I am not going to produce this. Okay?

Notes on the DROIDMAKER freebie

2009-08-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

Well, I think that went well.

On September 1 I'm going to remove the links to PDFs for Parts 3. I'll leave Part 1 and 2 online - because they're good readin' and because they give you a good feeling for the book and all that. But the removal of 3 is simply a gentle reminder that if you're reading that much of this thing, i really would prefer you go get a hardcopy. If you read the first two and cannot afford the Amazon price for part 3, I will send it to you directly -- please don't go fishing around the web for friends to give you theirs.

I've recently taken a position with a start-up company and (as happened in 2006 with Netflix) I'm too swamped to focus on Droidmaker right now. But keep enjoying the book, and downloading (most of it), and let me know if you'd like anything else and i will help you with that.

May the force... uh, you know.
r

Super LoiLoScope.... editing innovations

2009-08-16T21:12:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I was in the editing interface business... but honestly, this is the first real innovation i've seen in a decade or more. From Japan (also unusual in the UI innovation department: historically the editing software from the Japanese companies - like Sony -- has been relatively lackluster as compared to the CMX, Avid, Final Cut Pro-developers.) Anyway, i recon this is the way things are going... Super LoiLoScope

The Culture of Netflix

2009-08-04T20:46:00.000-07:00

Netflix is a remarkable place to work. Reed Hastings posted this the other day - it's a refined version of stuff that everyone who works there knows (almost by heart). It's a mantra. It really seems to work. And it was one of my favorite things about working there (i mean, besides the work itself!)

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

The Birth of "Avatars"

2009-07-30T00:27:00.000-07:00

I could illustrate the entire book with video clips readily available on YouTube -- case in point: Chapter 24 ("Stay Small, Be the Best, and Don't Lose any Money") talks about Lucasfilm's new Games Group, and some of their experiments in applying technology to entertainment. A company called Quantum Computer Services asked Lucasfilm to develop some unique product that would utilize the new consumer modems and their online service. Remember, THIS is what online home computing was like in 1985 (watch 30 seconds and you'll get the idea):

Chip Morningstar came up with a new kind of game, one where people online had a virtual character in the game, which he called an "avatar." The community he created was Lucasfilm's HABITAT, and it represents the original MMORPG. Here is a promo tape of Habitat (1986) put online by another Lucasfilm alum, and online community pioneer Randy Farmer:

Quantum didn't stick with Habitat, but a few years later, they changed their name to AOL (America Online). Morningstar, while perhaps best known for this pioneering work, teamed up with another Lucasfilm Games alum Doug Crockford, and developed JSON - key software for stuff that makes webpages cool. Here's Chip's website.

Lucasfilm, Fractals and Videogames: Rescue on Fractalus

2009-07-29T22:10:00.000-07:00

With all the interest in Vol Libre, I thought it would be interesting to show some of the connections going on behind the scenes that I discuss in the book. For instance, in 1982 the Lucasfilm computer guys were moving around the Lucasfilm "complex" trying to make room for some new guys that were hired to start to develop videogames after a deal was struck between Lucasfilm and Atari. David Fox, one of the three initial developers on games, found himself sharing an office with Loren Carpenter, who was still exploring the fractal algorithms he had pioneered. In their first day in the office, Fox and Carpenter wondered if there was a way to combine their interests. From DROIDMAKER, Ch 18 "A Hole in the Desert":

"David Fox grabbed Peter Langston and they wrestled up a spare Atari 800 computer and a couple of ring-bound volumes on programming the 6502 chip. Loren Carpenter went home again. Three days later he came into the office beaming.
"I want to show you something," he said to Fox, who pulled his chair over to Loren's computer. He had done it. He had recreated, in primitive form, the fractal generation of mountains, just as he had done in Vol Libre, just as he did as an element in the Genesis Effect, but in real time."

He was generating shapes and handling the hidden surfaces in real time on the tiny tiny CPU in an Atari videogame console.

"Do you think we have a game?" asked Fox.
"Absolutely," Langston replied.

Their experiments worked and Fox went on to design a game around the idea*, one of the first two games from the new Games Division at Lucasfilm (a team that would eventually become Lucasarts Entertainment): presenting Rescue on Fractalus (watch and compare it to Vol Libre):

* Carpenter and Fox were eventually separated at least in part because they continued to enjoy distracting each other (chuckle) and mostly because their office space in E Building was ready...While Fox was developing Fractalus, Loren Carpenter was inventing and refining his rendering software, a tool that eventually became Pixar's "Renderman."

For more on Fractalus, check out David Fox's website, Electric Eggplant.

1984 Pool Balls, by Pixar

2009-07-29T19:25:00.000-07:00

I remember being in college and seeing the cover of a magazine with this photo on it. It had a headline "This Photo is Fake" and it proceeded to explain that it was made by a computer. I looked as closely as I could, at each detail, and it was utterly realistic. I was stunned. (I also had no idea that a year later I would be working with those guys.)

Recently I found a very cool posting in the FXGuide about a podcast they did with Rob Cook, the "author" of this photo, and still a scientist at Pixar. "This year is the 25th Anniversary of the Pixar 1984 pool ball shot," the posting noted. The post reads in part:

With the release of the critically acclaimed film UP by Pixar, we acknowledge that 2009 marks 25 years since the famous Pool Ball shot 1984. In this week's fxpodcast we talk to Rob Cook of Pixar about the some of the history surrounding that landmark shot, his own career and the industry today.

Chapter 21 of Droidmaker is called My Breakfast with Andre and it tells the back story in this era, and puts that photo in the larger context of the birth of Pixar. If this part of history resonates for you, check out Act III from DROIDMAKER. And if you're a 3D artist, you might enjoy the efforts depicted in the FXGuide posting about re-creating that image.

"Vol Libre" 1980 Pioneering CG Film

2009-07-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

Vol Libre from Loren Carpenter on Vimeo.
In Chapter 11 of Droidmaker I discuss the hiring of one of the key members of the original Pixar team - Loren Carpenter. He had heard about Lucas' new computer braintrust that was starting at Lucasfilm in 1979, and he wanted to be a part. As an employee of Boeing, he spent his spare time putting together one of the pioneering uses of Mandelbrot's new fractal mathematics on computer graphics. "Would it make things look real?" Carpenter made a short film to demonstrate his new concept. It was called "Vol Libre," and he showed it to a packed house at SIGGRAPH 1980. He was hoping to attract the attention of Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, who everyone knew would be in attendance. They were. Loren was hired on the spot.

Loren Carpenter is still at Pixar -- the Chief Scientist. In honor of the upcoming gathering in New Orleans for the 2009 SIGGRAPH, I asked him if he'd make this very rare film available. Here it is. Vol Libre, "Flying Free."

Skywalker Sound, 1987

2009-07-26T20:50:00.000-07:00

Here's another blast from the past. My last year at Lucasfilm was the company's 10 year anniversary (1977-1987) and there were a range of festivities, some of which i crashed... anyway, Skywalker Sound (which back then was "Sprocket Systems") made an anniversary/demo reel which i just saw online and decided to re-post here for your enjoyment. (Personally, i would have preferred it without the orchestral theme, and let the sound work speak for itself... but whatever.) If you like this sort of thing it's a worthy 6 minutes. As I have said before here, my book DROIDMAKER (Act I, in particular) will provide a great deal of context for the moments you see illustrated here, and the people in the shots.

TRON

2009-07-25T08:49:00.000-07:00

I'm sort of glad to see a new look at TRON. I loved it as a kid - and pushed the release of my book Defending the Galaxy (1982) so that I could include some screen shots of the "new" videogame that was released along with the movie (a first, i'm pretty sure). Back then I thought the effects were cool. Writing Droidmaker, I got new appreciation for the movie - and the technological "arms race" between Lucasfilm (working on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn) and Disney (and their tech outsiders) working on Tron. Lucasfilm won - both in releasing first, and in having a far more successful movie to try out their seminal computer graphics. (The full backstory of the Genesis Effect in Star Trek and the simultaneous work on TRON, you'd read Ch. 16 of DROIDMAKER, called "1,621 Frames.") Still, TRON holds a special place in geeky boomer's hearts.

At ComicCon this week, geeks got a first look at the long-awaited TRON sequel, Tron Legacy.

Olympus ALMOST Gets It.

2009-07-20T13:22:00.000-07:00

This is the wave of the near-future. True story. Last April a young Japanese animator (dokugyunyu, aka Taijin Takeuchi)* produced a really original, interesting, idiosyncratic video on YouTube: Stop Motion with Wolf and Pig (aka "A Wolf Loves Pork"). Just watch a minute and you'll get the idea, if you don't want to commit to the whole work.

As of today it's had almost 2.1 Million views. Today I was just forwarded a link to another YouTube video. It looks like this:

It's called the "PEN STORY" and it also sports a home-made folky quality. Except it's REALLY good. Quite brilliant in many ways, nicely executed, and if it weren't for the glaring ripped-off quality of the original, it would be a wonderful experience to watch. I recommend this video. It's really good. Still, it's sometimes hard to enjoy when you have seen what it borrowed from. (The new video text credits sincerely acknowledge Taijin Takeuchi's "brilliant work," but it still bugs me.) Anyway, this isn't my real problem. My problem is that the video is an advertisement for the Olympus PEN camera. And unlike the more subliminal Geiko insurance videos, they plaster their banner across the end of the video in such a way as to make me feel a little gross for having enjoyed this so much.

It's clearly labeled as an advertisement, sort of. Unlike the sneakier unmarked ads from Geiko, at least they are upfront about it. But Geiko was so sneaky they didn't even put a logo on it. It made the video fun, and I'd suggest, particularly viral. I feel like Geiko did this 21st Century Ad thing right: quiet, fun, subtle. It got people talking and you had to be a geek to even know it was an ad; Here it is - almost 2 million views.

I'm just guessing, but I'm pretty sure this was what Olympus is hoping to create with the PEN video, and... I don't think they'll do it, or maybe I just hope they don't do it. They've got 700 thousand views since July 2 (I suppose i'd kill for that kind of attention for Droidmaker!), so I guess we'll know soon enough. Hell, I'm blogging about it. Maybe that's all they want.

Anyway, if you're going to experience the ad, at least tip the hat to dokugyunyu*.

POST SCRIPT: http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com/dailymotion/pen_story_stopmotion?id=x9supt

DROIDMAKER FAQ, pt 2: Independent Publishing in 2009

2009-07-19T23:24:00.000-07:00

There is also another Droidmaker story here, a second story. A story about writing an independent “mostly unauthorized” book about George Lucas, Francis Coppola and Pixar, three enormously private “organizations” with common history. There is no way to write about such ferociously independent spirits as Lucas and Coppola, and not want that level of creative control myself, for my work. The story itself is about how they invented technology to give themselves that kind of control. And now I was going to use technology to create and market a book about them, and maintain a comparable kind of creative control. Of course, you cannot get that kind of “final cut” in book publishing from an industrial publishing machine any more than Lucas or Coppola could get it from Warner Bros in the 1970s. I understood that to have full control of my work I had to publish with a small independent publisher.

DROIDMAKER was published by Triad, an academic press in Florida. This book was handcrafted by me – author and illustrator, photographer, page designer. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, used to quip that I would have ground the pulp and made the paper too, if I had thought of it. Hand pressed each page. I didn’t, but it often feels like I did. I committed more than two years to pulling this story together with an dedication to accuracy and critical inquiry. Lucas had said he didn't care what I wrote, as long as I did my own interviews and used direct sources and avoided secondary sources like the existing (small) array of books and print articles.

So in 2005 I was producing an "important" book, but I had two significant crosses to bear: First, by publishing independently I didn’t have the distribution clout that a major publisher had in terms of access to sales reps, bookstores, and media. Second, in exchange for the remarkable transparency and trust I received from Lucasfilm, Zoetrope and Pixar, and the other individuals with whom I worked, the powers-that-be politely insisted that they play no role in the promotion of the work. Not only because these are businesses that profit from this sort of intellectual property, and are not comfortable with giving that equity (and control) away; but more importantly, because this was their history, and a company cannot write its own history. Not really. Lucas understood this, and I understood this. It would be, perhaps, unseemly and self-serving for the range of individuals I interviewed to “promote” a book that sets them in the pantheon of history. Not Lucas. Not Coppola. Not Catmull, nor Lasseter. None could help promote the book.

I was starting to feel a little like Cassandra: Blessed with unprecedented access, and cursed not to be read.

Over the next year I sold perhaps 6,000 books and over the subsequent years maybe 10,000 in total.

Then there happened to be an unusual series of events at the end of June, 2009, when a couple interesting Lucas stories were emerging. An old home movie from ILM in 1977. An older interview with young George Lucas from the BBC in 1972. My book gives some context to these items.

On June 30 I got a wild hare and generated a PDF of the entire book. I posted it on my blog and I made two public-ish announcements: I posted it on my Facebook page, and I emailed a note about it to a blogger in Copenhagen, Denmark, who had just written something nice about Droidmaker a few days earlier. So I emailed “Binary Bonsai” – he posted it. And that was it.

The word spread globally in a few moments, and in 24 hours there were around 2,000 downloads of the book. A few weeks later there was another spike of interst, bringing the total downloads to about 13,000. In 14 days, more people have read my book than in the prior 4 years. I'm still letting that sink in.

$600M Deal with Exxon

2009-07-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

Craig Venter from last year's TED, and now this phenomenal deal with Exxon. Read it here at Reuters. (Nice work Steve.)

I think my favorite bit from Venter's talk was afterward, when Chris went up and sat with him...
Chris: "Do you get accused of playing God?"
Craig: "Oh... we're not playing."

1976 ILM "Home Movie" RARE

2009-07-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

I don't know where Michael Heilemann finds this stuff... but here is an EXTREMELY RARE Super8mm home video shot put together by David Berry in 1976-1978 from inside the original Industrial Light & Magic facility in Van Nuys during the making of Star Wars. It shows the work and fun (and the 50th Academy Awards, where they went on to win a bunch of Oscars), and is obviously a Who's Who in the special effects field. Cameos (if that's the right word) of Ben Burtt, John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Joe Johnston, Dennis Murren (with hair!) and the rest of the original crew. (And yes, read my friggin' book, or any of a number of good Star Wars histories, if you want to get some more context!)

I think the most interesting parts are just seeing them working, and probably the sense that no one had a clue of the historical magnitude of what they were all contributing to. It's simultaneously silly and of historical value. Certainly worth a look for any true Star Wars fan.

Cannot be embedded. Here's the link. 5757, a peek inside ILM.

Really Cool Video

2009-07-09T08:40:00.000-07:00

Nothing in any of my books could ever explain how to do this...

Droidmaker FAQ

2009-07-08T15:36:00.001-07:00

Strange when you end up with new attention for projects that were on your plate a few years ago. Actors have that when they are out pimping their movies. It's not always obvious, but they are promoting work they did months or sometimes years earlier. And they are often working on some other movie while they're talking excitedly about last years production.

But i've recently received a few emails about DROIDMAKER things and I thought i'd just post a couple quick general answers. I'll paraphrase the questions, and try to be on point.

1. Why did you write DROIDMAKER?
Actually, I had a reasonable answer in this interview at Unidentifed Sound Object. The shortest answer is - I thought someone else would, but they never did. And it seemed like time.

2. What does "George" think of this book?
It is my understanding that Lucasfilm feels like I did a good job, and while there are decisions i made and things included that they would have preferred i not, in all, I think they're okay with it.

If this sounds like I'm dodging the question, i'm not -- but it does demand a bit of background. In researching this book, almost no one currently employed by Pixar (and no former executives of Lucasfilm) were willing to go on record and cooperate, as much as they wanted to, if I didn't have the blessing of Lucasfilm at some level. Lucasfilm, for their part, almost never cooperates with outside projects like this, and as of 2004 had been denying journalists access to Lucas for eons. I had a challenging pitch: I wanted Lucasfilm's cooperation, and I wanted to interview George, but I wasn't willing to give them access to my work. Needlesstosay they were all exceptionally uncomfortable with this deal. In the end, and not without some degree of discussion, George agreed with me: for the book to have any journalistic integrity, Lucasfilm not only couldn't publish it (they asked) but they couldn't have any say-so about the content. The company cooperated in unprecedented ways, and the people I interviewed came out from every corner to share. Lucasfilm was the picture of transparency and without that this detail and accuracy would not have been possible.

But there was a down side to this openness: Lucasfilm would do nothing to promote or endorse the book. Even acknowledging its existence would be a kind of tacit endorsement. I wasn't allowed to present at the Star Wars fan events, and none of the company-owned websites (e.g. starwars.com) were willing to review or comment or alert the millions of fans. And ultimately, George himself would never comment - because whether he liked it or not, that too would be seen as endorsing something, and attract attention. Thus: they have privately confided that I did a fine job, but neither George nor the company will go on record. One has to understand they have numerous complicated rights agreements, where even a single image sometimes has enormous financial strings, targeted market segments, and so on. Promoting my book might expose them with regard to others who have paid for certain content rights.

Anyway, most of this is in the past and I think the academic and historical merit of the book have become evident, and the b&w low rez images in the text don't pose a real threat at this point.

So -- I have no idea what George thinks of the book. But i can't imagine he doesn't like it. I'm pretty sure all the Pixar guys feel good about this (I was met warmly when I presented it at a big event at Pixar in 2006).

3. Am I still touring and giving presentations?
Yes and no. I did a hectic 20 city tour back in 2005-06, but since then I only give a few presentations each year, usually to larger groups: at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, at Yahoo!, at the Commonwealth Club of Silicon Valley, at the VIEW Conference on computer graphics in Turin Italy... and yes, if you have a cool group and you'd like me to come present, I'm told it's an entertaining talk -- send me an email or leave a note and we'll see if we can work something out.

4. Did I work on Star Wars?
No. I am not sure why this comes up so much. No, I was 13 years old when the original Star Wars movie released, and I was neither a technical advisor nor an expert on anything at that point. And I didn't work on the prequels either. I have friends who did, but not me. But it's true that Lucasfilm launched my career in film, and was responsible for my subsequent status as an "expert" on digital video and editing.

DROIDMAKER book now downloadable, FREE!

2009-06-29T15:55:00.000-07:00

JANUARY 17, 2012 POST SCRIPT

If you've just arrived here, i suppose you've heard you could get a free PDF of DROIDMAKER here. That was true until yesterday. I posted the book here a few years ago and have given away many. But tonight I wanted to announce that I'm creating an affordable ePub for the book, and will release Kindle, Nook and iBook versions very shortly. I've been busy recently helping my brother out by publishing his new fantastic book "How To Write Groundhog Day" (which will be available on Kindle on, obviously, Groundhog Day -- Feb 2, 2012). Like Droidmaker on Facebook and i'll let you know the moment the digital Droidmaker is available. Thanks.

---------------------------
I'm not really sure how this will go over, but i've decided to make my book DROIDMAKER downloadable in its entirety, effective today. It's a long book (518 pages), and I still recommend going to Amazon and getting yourself a copy (it's how you can pay for this "shareware"), but below are links to get PDFs of the book: I've divided it into the three "acts" that makes up the saga.

Act 1: Intro plus Chapters 1-6 [1.8MB]
Act 2: Chapters 7-17 [3.7MB removed 3/16/11]
Act 3: Chapters 18-26, Index [removed 11/11/09]

(UPDATE 3/16/11: The time has come to take all the freebies down except for Act 1. Act 1 is both great and nicely representative of the book. If you like it, please head to Amazon for a copy!)

I don't know how long I can keep these links available, so get it while you can. I hope you'll enjoy it - Droidmaker is really the only work of its kind - and I hope you'll feel free to share it with like-minded Star Wars/George Lucas fans, computer graphics folks, videogamers, movie geeks, and technophiles. The reviews on Amazon have been quite wonderful (both Alvy Ray Smith AND Ben Burtt rave there) but your feedback is always welcomed.

Thank you, and enjoy!

JULY 2 POST SCRIPT --

Amazing! In just a couple days the book has been downloaded thousands of times, and i've decided i'll leave this accessible at least through the holiday weekend. Other than a short note from the publisher asking what the hell I was doing, the only emails i get are from you readers submitting typos and errata you've found. THANK YOU. Months of professional proof-reading and fact-checking, and years of book readers, and in a single day you've found more little errors than all of them. I have now made corrections to PDF 1, but will let you know if i adjust the other sections...

JULY 22 POST SCRIPT --

Over 15,000 downloads. Wow. I mentioned that "donate" button on the left, yes? Leave me your email address along with any donations so I can thank you personally. BTW: to answer some of your questions here - no, i don't plan on attending Comic Con nor Siggraph, but i am often available to give presentations to groups. Leave me a note about that as well.

New Petroglyph Website -

2009-06-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

After a couple months of efforts, we're launching the new Petroglyph website today (not without considerable help from the talents at the LMN Group). We've had a website continuously since 1996, but this is the first "professionally" executed one, and i must say, it should have happened years ago. I'll still be updating, tweaking and adding over coming weeks, but it was time to dump the old one. Enjoy.

Video Information for Consumers

2009-06-25T23:55:00.000-07:00

Hmmm... the MSNBC article is sending folks researching digital video over to this blog - so i thought i'd add a couple resources here for those interested.

First, of course, is get yourself a copy of the latest edition of The Little Digital Video Book (2009). If I had one word to describe this book, it would be "useful." It's also cute and small and exceptionally non-intimidating. It will get you going, inspired, and on track with minimal technobabble. Here it is on Amazon. I also maintain a blog about digital video - projects and examples and it is also a good resource. The Little Digital Video Blog.

If you're an ubergeek, of course NONLINEAR (4th edition) is a fine handbook. It was designed for professionals and students, and it launched many a filmmaker's career with this technology. Here is Nonlinear/4 on Amazon.

(Another) MSNBC Article...

2009-06-25T23:24:00.001-07:00

These guys work fast. I got a call last night for information for this article. Here it is today: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31528254/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

George Lucas: Maker of Films

2009-06-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

I found this interview in the Lucasfilm archives and it was a resource for some of the early chapters in Droidmaker. It's a PBS interview Lucas did with film theorist Gene Youngblood (best known as the author of the seminal "Expanded Cinema"). Honestly, I never thought i'd see it posted online, but here it is:

*Note. It was posted on Vimeo, but removed after this blog went live, so here it is from Binary Bonsai.

Achieving Media Balance

2009-06-21T18:56:00.000-07:00

My life is a constant battle between enjoying shooting videos, spending time editing videos, and being the creepy guy who is always lurking behind a camera... quietly watching....

I know how invasive shooting video can be for many people, and I try not to make my presence synonymous with everyone being documented. Camcorders are mostly invasive because of the sound recording. While a still camera can make you feel a bit like paparazzi with your friends, it's not like you're spying, as you are with the camcorder. A camcorder, you have to admit, crosses a line into surveillance. So while I cherish our family videos, I put the paraphernalia away frequently. I edit with sensitivity and respect requests for "radio silence" graciously. And I don't videotape everything.

I love still photography as well. It isn't the same as video and this is good. Video can tell a story one way, but well-chosen fractions of a second, frozen, are magical. Sometimes one image can capture an afternoon, or a vacation, far more elegantly and poetically than 30 minutes (or 3 hours!) of videotape. And sometimes one short edited video can be a memento from a trip or event better than hours of raw footage.

And sometimes, I leave the cameras all behind. Go commando, as it were. And participate fully in my life, without that third-person detachment that often accompanies the documenting process. Sometimes I have an even more special, more magical recollection of a place or time precisely because I don't have any physical evidence documenting its occurrence.

So learn video, enjoy video, but be mindful: with new hobbies one can tend to be zealous about overuse. I know. I've been there. Don't think you need to shoot everything, and don't forget that still photography is not only a great artform on its own, but good practice for the seeing, framing and composition that is required for good videography. And finally, put the cameras away from time to time and chill out. Media Balance. Good luck.

(reprinted from The Little Digital Video Blog)

MSNBC article

2009-06-12T11:54:00.000-07:00

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31209359/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

Ode to Santa Cruz

2009-05-16T07:42:00.000-07:00

Her dog dodges neoprene legs
To get a better sniff of the kelp,
pungent and abandoned;
Tribal backbeat, distant,
Perhaps from the market downtown,
Perhaps from the woods
Or just in the crisp air, mixed with
Incense and
Salt.

She comes here each day
To watch the sun slip under the bay,
To let Bodhi run illegally in the field.
She watches for rangers like a spy.
The eyes of visitors take her in,
Snap her photograph,
As she deftly climbs the cold statue
To place a living wreath on the crown
Of the bronze surfer. Which makes her smile.
“Two crimes,” she says to Bodhi.
“Two crimes in one afternoon.”

She gave up her car when she was younger;
She gave up meat after college;
She gave up on men around the same time.

And she came to the edge of the land, the rocky point,
Where the shrouds of cold sit lightly on the houses
And the plaintive barks of sea mammals
Are a counterpoint to gulls and light traffic.

She can’t say that she likes it here.
But it suits her well.
Sticking tight to her body like
Their semiporous neoprene--
Letting in the cold
but mysteriously leaving her
Feeling warm
Outside, and
Inside.

(The Sentinel had a poetry contest last week: an "ode" to Santa Cruz. The winner was read onstage by Garrison Keilor. Needlesstosay, it wasn't this one.)

Magic, Teller, and the EG

2009-05-08T09:32:00.000-07:00

Before this year, I always felt Penn and Teller were over-rated. Yea, it was an unfair badge to place on them: I had seem bits of their routine over the years, and have never gone to their Vegas show. But all that changed at the last EG Conference. Teller, the short silent elfish dude in the suit, was a "speaker" at the conference. Now this is unusual, because Teller NEVER speaks. I believe it's important to their act that he never drops character in much the same way that Mickey Mouse (and friends) at the Disney theme parks NEVER remove their costumes in public. We know this is a guy in a mouse suit, but by never speaking and never shedding the costume in public, something magical about the illusion is maintained. Anyway, Teller doesn't speak, so i was pretty curious what he was going to SAY at the conference.

He came on stage, and asked if all cameras and recording devices be turned off. What he was going to do was so so off record, it could only be experienced live. Once. Normally, at TED and EG there are lots of speakers who have proprietary presentations that are revealed with surprising candor, but they are all recorded. Sharing these talks is part of the ethos of these special conferences. But Teller needed radio silence.

And over the next 40 minutes he proceeded to tell a wonderful story of how a certain trick was done. He showed the trick. (Remarkable magic.) Then he told a tale of how the trick was invented, how he refined it over years, showed video of the process, and how he worked with Penn's feedback (who didn't like the trick at first) until it was really something far more amazing than it had been at the start. And after a half hour of taking you behind the trick in every way, he did the trick again. It didn't lose any of it's wonderment and my admiration for him (and Penn) grew exponentially.

(This is NOT that talk, obviously. But it's a cool explanation of "the seven principles of magic...")

As an aside, there is so much of "magic" in editing. I mean, the expression is tossed around frequently (the "magic of editing") but quite literally, editing is much about hiding the edits, hiding the CAMERA -- the mechanism of movie creation -- such that the audience (knowing full well this is a trick) can suspend their disbelief (as the saying goes), and enjoy the movie as a contiguous whole. Misdirection, controlling the focus and attention of the audience as they look at a screen, moving the story along in what could be a set of disjointed images, but ends up being a smooth faux reality - this is the magic in editing, and thinking about Teller and some of these recent articles on "magic" and "psychology" bring it all up for me.

This is an interesting article on magic from this month's WIRED. The guest editor of the issue, by the way, is J.J. Abrams - who gave his own remarkable presentation at TED a few years ago on these topics. It was one of my favorite TED talks of that year. Enjoy that as well.

Tom Lehrer Videos

2009-05-07T09:06:00.000-07:00

In the summers when my family would drive from Florida to Maine, we had a small plaid bag full of cassette tapes that we'd listen to in the car; my parents' favorites, they became our vacation soundtrack -- Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon & Garfunkel, the musical HAIR, and my personal favorite "That Was the Year That Was" - the classic album by Harvard math professor and musical satirist Tom Lehrer. At age 9 I often sang these songs around the school yard, much to the consternation of my teachers. They were edgy for the time, funny (in ways I sometimes didn't get) and occasionally profane ("Vatican Rag"?) Then, as now, I knew them all by heart. Then Tom Lehrer dropped off the radar, left Harvard, and never performed again. In the '80s he was re-popularized in a Broadway review called Tomfoolery, but he still never surfaced. It didn't dawn on me until today that I had never actually seen him perform. I didn't even know what he looked like. Here he is in some rare (Ampex!) video performing live in the late 60s.

I did find out, however, where he went when he disappeared from the public stage: he moved to Santa Cruz, California. For more than a decade, I've lived only a few miles from him, apparently. He has taught math here in town, not performing, but going about his way quietly, it seems. Anyway, he's fantastic. Here are a few more songs from this British television show performance. Watch them all at YouTube Enjoy the videos.

Wind Energy, and the Swine Flu

2009-04-27T18:02:00.000-07:00

Next week is the AWEA Conference in Chicago, the American Wind Energy Association, and man I want to be there. I've been working with a company I like very much, Rope Partner, and they offer something really cool to the Wind Energy Industry. Eco-Wind Farm Maintenance. They (we, since this is what I've been working on this year) have a new website and a booth at the AWEA Conference. But this is day three of what the news is mumbling is a pandemic, something I'd really rather not have to contend with in my lifetime. Granted, the images of spreading biological disaster are only etched in my mind from movies, but even knowing that, i'm convinced it's not good.

Do I want to leave my small coastal town and spend a few days moving from here to airport to O'hare International, the crossroads of the friggin' world -- to McCormick Place, a convention center that I am familiar with?? I'm thinking about entering a room full of handshakes and thousands of strangers bumping into each other in public spaces. I am at least convinced that whatever the odds are of getting this thing, astronomically small at this point, they are multiplied to some large degree by going mobile.

Frankly, as badly as I want to be in Chicago, I just can't think of a better time to stay close with my family, close to my home. I can do plenty of work in this way. It is absolutely inferior to meeting in person. But the cost / benefit is creeping me out.

On the other hand, I'm convinced that every day will bring enormous new information about this thing. In five days it's either going to be terrifying, or totally not as bad as it could have. At best this will be a wake up call about globalization, and with luck, a bullet missed.

I'm certain that in the next few days, either large things will be canceled, or safety will be established to a credible degree. I hate being so last minute in important plans, but of all things to bet your life on, is this? And then I think of the guys at Rope Partner. Not the executives but the kids who climb those windmills and fix the blades. Unlike me in Chicago, at a convention, they sit high in the air, almost totally alone, listening to the wind blow by for hours, as they are suspended, working quietly. I haven't spent any time up there, but I can imagine it is the absolute antithesis of McCormick Place, Chicago. It's often cold for them out there. But I think, out there, they're at least safe from the flu.

(Keep an eye on Swine Flu News here)

(Photos Courtesy of, and © 2009 Rope Partner. It's unbelievable what they do.)

The Susan Boyle Talent Video

2009-04-17T18:30:00.000-07:00

My dad sends me stuff he finds online, stuff his friends email him. He's 75 and does not have a Facebook account nor does he peruse YouTube. Still, he sent me this the other day. It had already been circulating by email through his friends:
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE, AT YOUTUBE (one of dozens of sites online showing it.

If you're reading this than you are probably one of the 47 million views of this during the week. There is a fascinating discussion of the popularity of the Boyle video here, at visiblemeasures.com. If viral effects online are of interest to you, it's worth a click. I think the thing that struck me most was that this isn't only a popular viral video today, but this is the MOST viral video ever. The next three most viewed videos certainly spiked at some point, but none were views in one week, as this was.

I find it sort of interesting that the other three videos on the list were political in nature (one satire, and one self-satire, but still); and not only political, but surfing the waves of pro-Obama spirit in the last year. It took that kind of force to push videos to these levels of virality. By contrast, Boyle's video is infectious and by being non-political, totally socially benign with a very wide appeal. It's not edgy, it's safe, but still fun to send along. It's sort of a perfect storm of attributes that makes it appealing... Anyway, read the article (here's a graph that highlights the relative degree of popularity of these big viral stars):

The death of the keyboard...

2009-04-16T21:46:00.001-07:00

I was messing around on my iPhone the other day, and i had this notion wash over me in queasy moment of clarity: hardware keyboards are not only heading towards extinction, but that moment is probably closer than i had realized.

Let me back up here. I used to design editing systems, and the best ones had customized interface devices that you placed your hands on. They had an array of buttons, but also great tactile nobs for shuttling video forward and backward. The EditDroid had a console that mimicked a KEM editing table; the Lightworks had one that emulated a Steenbeck. These devices made editing far more nuanced (and fun!) but that elegance came with a price: they were custom designed, expensive to own, and hard to manufacture. Ultimately, a keyboard won out. Keyboards were ubiquitous, and they had so many buttons you could map virtually all functions to one of them. Editing could be like typing at some level. Film editors rejected this style when it was associated with videotape editing, but when nonlinear film editing eventually arrived on a keyboard, it wasn't quite as bad, and in time beat out all the custom devices invented for editors. I was a snob. I hated editing on a keyboard when I had tasted what an elegant interface device could do. But I couldn't argue with the economics, or the efficiency. I had seen the problem from both the manufacturer's side, and the editors'. I loved those consoles, and I watched them rapidly disappear.

But I'm not only an editor, i'm a writer, and I love a good keyboard. I like them when you have just the right kind of feedback when you press down. Pianists might describe the nuances of pressing a key and the sound produced... the attack, the decay... pianists for years have debated the pros and cons of electric keyboards and how they miss so much of what real pianos offer in terms of "user interface". Typing is about the same. I don't really think literature will suffer as keyboards evolve, but there is no doubt in my mind that they will be missing something.

Keyboards, for all there ubiquity, are manufactured objects with many pieces, complex connectivities and wasteful materials. As computer screens get more tactile, it is simply too advantageous to put a keyboard on a pane of glass. You may type on your laptop, but the future is the iPhone, and its ilk. And not today, but soon, one manufacturer after another is going to stop building these hardware keyboards and start replacing them with hardwareless customizable softkeys on touchscreens. I don't really like this. I like the click of typing. I like feeling the edges of the key, of the letter, with the tips of my fingers and it allows me to type quickly and confidently. Will a virtual keyboard ever produce the wonderful feedback of a real one? I doubt it. But that isn't really the point, is it? Old timers will always tell you about what is being lost with the newfangled devices -- of the yummy pops and clicks of their old albums, of the joys of shifting gears in a sportscar, of the warmth of light projecting through celluloid onto a screen, of the taste real farm fresh eggs or, perhaps, of classic Coke...

And in all cases the argument is rarely that those archaic attributes aren't great, but rather than the benefits of the new technology (speed, access, freedom, safety, cost...) outweigh the nostalgia of the old. Kids don't miss record albums, and I don't suppose they're going to miss keyboards either. I'd say inside the next half decade, keyboards as we know them today will be gone, and i'll adjust. But i don't have to like it.

For Sale: One Old Kid's Desk...

2009-04-06T19:36:00.000-07:00

It’s just an old desk and it’s cute and worn. I bought it for $25 and that’s what I’m going to sell it for. I was just going to put it out on the street, for anyone who wanted a cute little desk, but I wanted whoever took it to know its story. The little desk has been with me since I was just out of college, and I always really liked that little desk. So...

I purchased the desk the summer I arrived to Marin from the East, at a sort of yard sale at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. It was 1985 and I just started working at Lucasfilm at the time, and the Ranch was still being built. I had never been there before, and I was interested in going to the sale mostly just to see what I could of the newly forming Ranch. I believe they were unloading a bunch of old furniture that had been in use prior to the “getting fancy” years, or perhaps it had been in one of the ranch houses of the BullTail Ranch property, which Lucas had purchased in 1979 to build Skywalker Ranch. I don’t know. I’m reasonably sure that George Lucas himself never used this desk. He probably never even saw it. Anyway, It’s too tiny for him. Nothing famous was written on this desk, unless you count "Nonlinear", and I don’t think you would. It’s just a simple desk, nice for kids, messy and stained. I’m selling it for $25. But if you get it, you have to keep its story.

I hope it finds a good home.

Future of Advertising

2009-03-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

Take a look at this. My 9-year old cannot get of enough of this. Now I enjoy Numa Numa as much as the next guy, but I actually like it MORE with the addition of the Geiko gecko in the background. No phone number. No web address. It's the most gentle I've seen this form of product insertion.

Numa Numa Guy with Gecko, Somebody's Watching Me:

Brandweek talks a bit about the advertising strategy and the agency that put this together.

So Dark The Con of Man: The Economy

2009-03-06T10:39:00.000-08:00

Is it too simplistic to say that the central element of our economic system is a con game, a “confidence game,” where it only works if people believe in it, and it simply doesn’t work if they don’t. All of banking is about projecting a veneer of solidity, of being established and immobile – think of those heavy columns and marblesque floors, of vaults and 18th century or greek revival architecture. Hell, half of what I learned about banking I learned from Mary Poppins:

A British bank is run with precision
A British home requires nothing less!
Tradition, discipline, and rules must be the tools
Without them - disorder! Chaos!
Moral disintegration!
In short, we have a ghastly mess!

Money by definition is a con – a piece of paper that we all have to simply agree has value. Sure, there was a time when bills were exchangeable for gold. But Nixon nixed that. Now if you’re nervous about this paper’s value, you’re stuck with “In God We Trust.” Bills are made formal and engraved and cool looking to inspire confidence and trust. Americans for years were rather snarky about colorful currency and stamps. If they looked too fun, whimsical, fashionable they’d be disregarded as transient and cheap. It took a unique combination of technology and public outcry, and I believe an act of Congress, to get stamps interesting and get our money just a hair less blah. “Blah,” I’m sure they’d have told me, was the asset.

So if people don’t think the system works, that money has no value, that risks to loan money are too great, and to borrow money enormous, and so on, we (the people) create a massive negative cycle that ends in the dissolution of our economic system. The answer, it would seem, is simply (and simplistically) to believe. Trust that money has value, that things will get better, that investments will grow…and it begins the wheel’s spin in the other direction. When naysayers say the economy is in the toilet, they are not so much predicating it as fomenting it. Similarly, Obama and the administration isn’t being Pollyanna to say that this will end, this will be our best hour, that it’s a simple - but dramatic – readjustment. It too is laying the groundwork for it all to come back online. They’re both right. And the more you believe the negative tales the longer this will go on.

I don’t know what it’s called, but it is some kind of flocking principle that I most often see illustrated when people arrive at a Southwest gate to take a flight. I get to the gate 45 minutes early and no one has started to line up. So I take a seat and look at my magazine. As time creeps by, finally someone stands up and gets in the front of the line. He stands there alone, and the rest of the waiting room eyes him. There’s still 20 minutes, and everyone would rather stay seated comfortably in a chair then start standing in line. Heck, the first 30 people are all going to get good seats in group A. But everyone is watching, ready to move. A few people get fed up with the game and get in line. Now people are getting nervous. Why wait in the chair and NOT be in line, when they can wait in line, 10 feet away, and hold their own spot. Seems a shame to be early for the plane and still end up last in line to get a seat. So a few more stand, and now everyone is edgy, calculating… and something happens. When there are maybe 4 or 8 people in line, the group sort of explodes into action, moving quickly to take their places. In just a minute the line goes from a half dozen to 30. That’s the moment. If no one had gotten up in the first place, they all could have remained comfortably in seats for another half hour. But now they’re standing (or sitting) in line. Trust, justice, panic, effort. Some combination of effects makes this happen.

This is where we are. The slipping trust, the eroding economy is temporary, but no one wants to get in line too quickly. We sit back, watching the markets fall, the prices drop, knowing the longer we sit back the worse things get for everyone, but unwilling to trust again these institutions we had trusted for so long. We trusted banks and Wall Street and mortgages as safe the way we trust elevators in sky rises: initially some people knew how they worked, gears were exposed both to insure trust and to keep costs low… but as time progressed the elevator box made the workings invisible to the user: we didn’t want to see ourselves hanging in a heavy box suspended hundreds of feet in the air by a cable. Very creepy. The mechanics were hidden and we just trusted that it was well made and safe. But I tell you, when those boxes start to drop the public will want to see how they’re made, know who is inspecting them, and maybe have a few friends learn enough about what’s going on to be a trusted voice and these matters.

The system fell apart because our trust was abused. We are a beaten spouse, probably never to trust our partner again, or now always a little on guard, a tiny bit defensive. We’d leave, but there’s no where to go. So we’re still in this damaged relationship, all options seem untenable. What Obama is doing is simple: he’s trying as fast and hard as possible to get the public to trust – him, the administration, the institutions. He’s trying to be transparent. He’s trying to get trustworthy leaders. He’s speaking from his heart and he is a charismatic and passionate individual. I don’t know a lot about politics, but I have a feeling that this is precisely the thing we need.

The con is on. “So dark the con of man”? Naww… it’s the underlying principle of economics.

I love it when this happens...

2009-03-02T14:54:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's provincial of me, but I still find it such an odd and wonderful sense to see something I've written or written about me in another language - particularly one with an cool looking alphabet. The Korean or Chinese translations of my books are fun (particularly the captions of images from Santa Cruz), but Cyrillic fonts are really dramatic looking, and even this blog posting from yesterday in the Czech Republic makes me smile.

I have no idea what this says, btw; I hope they aren't panning the book!

POST SCRIPT: Here is a Google.translate (free) translation of the article. It's fascinating in its own right. (I present it here unedited, as google.translate produced it)

Before Christmas I ordered a book from Amazon Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution. On Wednesday, I finally opened it and gobbled weekend enthusiastically last page. It is an excellent book and other books on the phenomenon of George Lucas and Star Wars (and that they are!) Clearly protrudes. He has not no big fan of Star Wars, but Lucas great respect, as indeed any visionary who goes umanutě upstream and succeeds with something that others deem crazy, foolish and impossible. Or as stated a famous cinematographer Haskell Wexler (quote from the epilogue book): "George Lucas was able during his life to beat Hollywood at its own game, according to its own rules as films from the formation of the pleasure. You achieve total success in the capitalist system, while retain their level of artistic integrity, which is unprecedented in this business. "

Droidmaker is not the only book on George Lucas - it's a very detailed description of the history of computer division Lucasfilmu. Soon you will find that Lucas was not the only firm and brain function more as visionary, who had ideas, formed films and managed to encircle the right people - especially Cadmullem Ed and Alvy Ray Smith, who "led" the technological revolution in filmmaking, and in many different levels. It's very fascinating, though in places a lot of professional reading, and if the Lucasfilm and his films just a little interested, we strongly recommend! Here (PDF) you can read free first chapter, you will find blog author.

One whole chapter and a few pages up, incidentally, is dedicated to the gaming division Lucasfilmu (for which George Lucas seems to have cared too), but in this direction rather recommend a fantastic book Rogue Leaders. This is undoubtedly nezajímavější book theme video games, which when published - contains a number of hitherto unpublished material and insiderských information on developments in one of the most famous game company. I have written about it briefly, but next week it is back.

Synthespians, redux

2009-02-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

Back in 2005 I wrote a post about the digital scanning of actors and its future value. Watching Ed Ulbrich at TED brings that post to mind. In honor of their awards at last night's Oscar festivities, and for all Benjamin Button fans, this is remarkable:

Here's my original post from Dec 2005.

And true to Moore's Law and other predictable changes in technology, I'm certain that the work Ed did with hundreds of people over two years will be somewhat commonplace during the next decade, and the use of that skill will be applied across multiple fields, and not just entertainment. Something to think about. Want to keep your young body in your files, just in case?

What Sundance Can Learn From TED

2009-02-20T14:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-galloway/what-the-sundance-festiva_b_167908.html

Sundance and TED. It’s funny to see these two in the same sentence. Both are big interests of mine, having gone to Sundance since 1987 and TED more recently, since 2004. Getting to attend both is a sincere privilege, and makes for one fantastic Q1, which ripples throughout the rest of the year.

But Sundance has been getting more and more problematic for me over the years. Getting passes was done by a strange sort of lottery that meant that even after ten years, there might be the odd year where you simply couldn’t get a pass. This struck me as absurd. So the very people who helped spread the word and build the event into the popular festival it is could be randomly rejected to the point that no one could plan accordingly. In a town where you need to rent a room a year in advance for the festival, not knowing if you have tickets a few months prior is untenable. For Sundance, this would serve to keep the attendance varied, and make it possible for new folks to get in, which is good. But at the expense of the relative few who are the die-hard fans or professionals who want to make this part of their year. Are they (we) necessary? Maybe not. But Sundance grew and became fashion and a venue where the films were only the backbone, and where the side-events were as important as the movies. I would say Sundance was a victim of its success, growing to accommodate the interest and take advantage of the exposure. Like our economy, it’s all good when everything is growing, but the risk is perhaps when things turn around, and attendance drops, and the festival has alienated its core, and forced them to find other avenues to enjoy new films. Will they return should the festival contract? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Growth is natural, unfortunate for the early adopters but great for the latecomers and the organization itself.

TED too went through this radical growth. From its long decade as a tight, idiosyncratic forum for new ideas and passionate creators, even at its exclusive worst, it continued to grow. It added a “simulcast lounge” to give members a chance to drift, which then became a forum unto itself, not entirely unlike “Slamdance”, the ecosystem that grew in the Sundance shadow. With the creation of these second tier spaces there was a class system of sorts, and eventually – under new management – TED took its expansion seriously and moved to a larger hall, restoring the single (high) class. It was always impressive to me that they not only provided DVDs of all the talks which they made available to all attendees, but that they encouraged the sharing of these talks. The web presentation of videos made this an order of magnitude more viral.

So both events are reasonably exclusive and both have grown in popularity and influence since the ‘80s. Both are forums for insiders to discover new talent as well as get inspired in their own work. And as an early adopter of both, I have sometimes bristled with their increasing internal resistance and apparent bureaucracy.

But other than the random cautionary tale inherent in the risks of growth, tales common to hundreds of successful companies that expand their markets, I’m not sure there is much Sundance can truly learn from TED. The best I could come up with was this:

Perhaps if Sundance wanted to make its films available simultaneously (or nearly so) on the Sundance Channel (or Netflix!) for devoted fans to watch and enjoy (receiving the festival catalog in the process), they’d take an appropriate step to allow access to the exclusive content in an appropriate way. Sure, it’s not the same as overhearing Weinstein rant in the corner booth at Chimayo, but it remains true to the festival’s roots, to give independent filmmakers their first audiences and help them find larger ones. The web is good at exactly this kind of effort, and could be utilized better. If the festival films were all instantly available online, sharable (in the network), Digg-able and so on, in a limited time window, hits could be found and directors could still reap the rewards of getting into theaters. You’d go online to sign up just like you do today for Sundance Ticket Passes, pay your $50 or whatever, and get a software key that lets you watch all the film online for 2 weeks. Like TED simulcast, you’d be privy to the exclusive content, and have online forums to chat and share. The more concurrent it was with the real festival (and films could even have similar limited availability), the better. People might form salons to watch, having watching parties, or even do these in addition to being in Park City (it can be impossible to get tickets to everything you want to see).

Anyway, TED and Sundance are both great brands, very cool, and lots of fun. But I’m not convinced that Sundance can learn something important from TED anymore than it can learn anything from other organizations that have successfully navigated the tricky waters of success, grown and maintained their brand value in the process. Just my two cents.

WISDOM

2009-02-19T14:07:00.000-08:00

A fine, insightful and inspirational talk by Barry Schwartz (at this years TED). I have to say that much of his talk speaks to why Netflix is such a remarkable company - internally the business operates on many of these principles...

Reuters, and Hollywood, Doesn't Get It.

2009-02-18T23:52:00.000-08:00

I just read an article from Reuters called "Hollywood struggles to find wealth on the Web"* that begins:

"After more than a decade of hype about the Internet being the next great stage for mass entertainment, it remains dominated by amateurs with most Hollywood stars watching from the wings."

I shout at the screen "Of course it is! That's the point!" I can barely get myself to keep reading, and yet I can't stop, it's like I'm watching a train wreck. And all I can think of are those apocryphal tales of how, when television was new, people just turned a camera on folks performing a radio show. They couldn't really imagine what television was if not just radio with pictures. And Hollywood cannot imagine what the Internet is except in how it just keeps failing to support the archaic economic and creative model on which the movie, television and music industries are established.

Point one: There will be a role for expensive movies and television. Internet media will deeply change, but not erase, the existence of Hollywood. Hollywood will just scramble to higher ground as the flood waters rise, producing big budget content, using star power, and probably an assortment of new expensive presentation technologies (simulator rides? 3D? IMAX?)

Point two: What the Internet does best, and uniquely, is connect individuals, and democratize voices and information. You can use online tools to "broadcast" in the traditional sense, but you only have to understand that in doing so, you're turning a camera on a radio show. Similarly, for more than a decade webdesigners have argued that webpages are not newspapers, no matter how we are often forced into that visual presentation paradigm. News online is not consumed in that way, it is not necessarily best presented that way.**

If you're going to make a very expensive product--a movie for instance-- which needs to be distributed through an expensive process--theaters and broadcasting--there is a great deal of risk involved for the investors. You cover your risk by using "stars", people whose name or image will draw people out to pay for the product. If the product costs tens of millions, it's worth paying a star a few million to improve the odds of an audience. And if you're not a star, you're out of luck. It sucks trying to get discovered in Hollywood. Very few people will take a chance on new.

The Internet is just the opposite: it's very inexpensive to make product and even less expensive to distribute. Tons of content is created and distributed every second, and the Internet famously leverages the connections between people (plus zero costs) to sort through the enormous pile of crap to discover the hidden gems. Wikinomics, and all that. Most people--the vast majority in fact-- do not get discovered, however, but it is absolutely true that some people do. Once discovered, it's easier to utilize that notoriety as Hollywood starpower, and pass through the semi-permeable membrane that surrounds the "industry."***

But Hollywood is probably never going to get the system to work the other way: they'll be able to put stars onto the Internet, but the content will be vetted just like every other bit of content, without regard to cost. If it is good or funny it will spike, and if it isn't, it probably won't. Hit or miss, it still will never generate the kind of revenue stream (from pageviews and ads) that it would in another medium.

And in most cases, no pageview economic model will generate enough cash to make productions that are "star-based" viable. In some cases it will pay the production costs for typical quality content, but the very best actors and writers will simply make more going a different path. SAG has it backwards: forget trying to collect royalties for content online. Online it wants to be free, or mostly, and the labor and resistance associated with this will hardly be worthwhile. On the other hand, if you want a piece of new action, make every Tom, Dick and LonelyGirl online a SAG member just for being in online media, and demand your piece of the pie when the random individual really does join the ranks of the bankable. Now I don't think this will work, but the opposite seems pointless.

So when Reutuers reports that it was only hype that the Internet would be the next great stage for mass entertainment, they're missing that it already IS a great stage for mass entertainment: what else do you call the DAILY HOURS absorbed on Facebook and Myspace, genuine portals in their own right to an array of media -- news articles, videoclips, even product endorsements -- all by the people for the people. The Internet promised and delivered: it wasn't hype. The irony is that the industries that have the most to lose by the meteoric rise of Internet entertainment continue to fail to see what is going on.

* Posted on Wed Feb 18, 2009 11:32PM EST
** I tend to think of online news as ideally a cross between DIGG and Twitter, augmented with a side of Facebook Wall, and mediated by a rheostat. Broadcast news is more like CNN. If CNN wanted to do news online they might use the DIGG model, but instead of use the teaming millions to vet and promote, simply use a smaller set of qualified news experts to do the DIGGing, what you lose is breadth you make up in weight and veracity.

***Actually, I tend to doubt this will happen frequently. In much the same way that daytime television actors, directors, technicians tend not to migrate to primetime dramas, and television stars are often looked down on by movie stars, I think web stars will be considered a class below television, and have difficultly transitioning.

Skills for My Kids

2009-02-17T21:19:00.000-08:00

I am always talking about "video literacy" and how I think it's important for kids to understand how media (in general) and video/film (in particular) are used to communicate and especially to persuade. I talk to my kids often about how shows make them happy or excited or tense (not THAT the programs do this, but how they do this: using music, certain camera shots, certain kinds of cuts and juxtapositions, etc.) Obviously this is important to me. I write books about video and introducing novices to the fun and use of media.

But there is another skill I think would be particularly useful for my kids to have: Computer-based 3D Modeling. Now I was never that good at 3D modeling tools over the decades; they were always too hard for me, too technical and in some cases, not WYSIWYG-enough. I had friends of course who made careers out of building and moving objects in 3D - some of them at Industrial Light & Magic or Pixar or where ever. While I was editing in my earlier career, they were modeling. Most still are. And I had often wished i could do it. Building and sculpting in 3D on a screen. The skills have uses in architecture, of course, but also many kinds of product design, industrial design or visualization. The skills are doubly important in entertainment fields like videogame design or film/video special effects, or animation. But also in many more less obvious fields, like law (forensic analysis), pharmacology and medicine (molecular modeling, antiviral drug creation...) and on and on...

Modeling had historically been too complicated, too computationally complex, too demanding on computer technology... but not anymore. This is great for professionals who need these tools and products for their work, but it's also fantastic for amateurs and novices, for kids and parents, who might embark on simple 3D modeling projects using simple tools.

So back to where I began. In addition to video literacy, I would like my kids to have comfort and familiarity with the basics of 3D modeling. They don't need pro tools, they need to start to learn about x-y-z coordinate space, about moving and manipulating an object, pulling and pushing its dimensions to build shapes, merging and joining shapes to make more and more complicated forms... Left to my own, I would never be able to imagine what a good kid-appropriate 3D modeling tool would look like. I had watched my Lego-addicted son jump into Lego's really cool "Digital Designer" software, for constructing novel Lego objects. But it was actually a little hard and missing some intangible element such that it didn't crystallize for me. It didn't make ME want to play too. It needed to work on both levels, kid and adult -- both novices.

In Turin last November, at the VIEW Conference (a forum mostly dedicated, i might add, to the arts associated with 3d modeling) I was introduced to two men who had developed different tools that both addressed this for me. I had long heard of both of their products, but had limited interaction with them myself.

SketchUp had been an independent project that eventually was purchased by Google for allowing regular people to build 3D buildings and monuments to augment layers in Google Earth. I met Mike Springer, one of the software developers of SketchUp and was finally inspired to give the tool a shot. I really fell for it. For free modeling software, it's remarkable. Not all that easy to be skilled, but really easy to play with. My kids were immediately interested in it. And I encouraged this.

At the same time I finally met Will Wright, famous as the inventor of SimCity, and now the popular creator of SPORE. I had seen prototypes of Spore over the prior years, at SXSW, at TED, and now again at VIEW. It never really did much for me. But the game was now released, and Will's presentation was really exciting; he spoke at length about the creative tools he had made available to the public. I purchased Spore for my 9 year old son's birthday, and gave it to him recently. We've both been hooked. The game is fun, but i'm particularly enchanted with the 3D modeling tools he's created, and watching my son experiment with them. One could easily create a course of study in evolutionary or comparative biology using the modeling tools here, but I guess I just love that my son has finally got his hands on something he is thrilled to be experimenting with. It's got the mojo that the Lego software couldn't approach.

Anyway, I think the foundation of my new media curriculum is coming together.

Nice Ad: BarclaysUK

2009-02-16T10:31:00.000-08:00

good find, dad

"The People vs. George Lucas"

2009-02-15T11:29:00.000-08:00

No comment.

But if you're into Star Wars, I believe this will interest you.
http://io9.com/5153077/the-prosecution-apparently-doesnt-rest-against-george-lucas

Over the Top Geek Moment Today

2009-02-13T23:33:00.000-08:00

I'm almost too embarrassed to write about this, but in a pure expression of my utter geekiosity, I am drawn to it. In 1970 a counter was turned on at the center of a computer system and it started counting upward in seconds. Today, at precisely 3:31pm (and 30 seconds!) that counter hit the number: 1234567890. It is called "Unix Epoch Time" and engineers, computer scientists and geeks of all sorts WORLDWIDE took a moment to stare at the counter as it rambled by. A friend at Netflix shot me a glimpse of the festivities in the company theater for a few moments, as the counter was celebrated on a giant screen, more satisfying than any silver ball in Times Square.

I hope yours was a good one.

For more information on festivities...click here.
(photo by Tim Roach - a few minutes before zero hour)

A Letter I'd Like To See (But Won't)

2009-02-13T22:38:00.000-08:00

I was just going to post the link to this (and the original has interesting hyperlinks), but I wanted to put it here too.

http://www.theagitator.com/2009/02/01/a-letter-id-like-to-see-but-wont/

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Dear America,

I take it back. I don’t apologize.

Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months per year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.

I put myself through hell. I make my body do things nature never really intended us to endure. All world-class athletes do. We do it because you love to watch us push ourselves as far as we can possibly go. Some of us get hurt. Sometimes permanently. You’re watching the Super Bowl tonight. You’re watching 300 pound men smash each while running at full speed, in full pads. You know what the average life expectancy of an NFL player is? Fifty-five. That’s about 20 years shorter than your average non-NFL player. Yet you watch. And cheer. And you jump up spill your beer when a linebacker lays out a wide receiver on a crossing route across the middle. The harder he gets hit, the louder and more enthusiastically you scream.

Yet you all get bent out of shape when Ricky Williams, or I, or Josh Howard smoke a little dope to relax. Why? Because the idiots you’ve elected to make your laws have have without a shred of evidence beat it into your head that smoking marijuana is something akin to drinking antifreeze, and done only by dirty hippies and sex offenders.

You’ll have to pardon my cynicism. But I call bullshit. You don’t give a damn about my health. You just get a voyeuristic thrill from watching an elite athlete fall from grace–all the better if you get to exercise a little moral righteousness in the process. And it’s hypocritical righteousness at that, given that 40 percent of you have tried pot at least once in your lives.

Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.

So go ahead. Ban me from the next Olympics. Yank my endorsement deals. Stick your collective noses in the air and get all indignant on me. While you’re at it, keep arresting cancer and AIDS patients who dare to smoke the stuff because it deadens their pain, or enables them to eat. Keep sending in goon squads to kick down doors and shoot little old ladies, maim innocent toddlers, handcuff elderly post-polio patients to their beds at gunpoint, and slaughter the family pet.

Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll apologize for smoking pot when every politician who ever did drugs and then voted to uphold or strengthen the drug laws marches his ass off to the nearest federal prison to serve out the sentence he wants to impose on everyone else for committing the same crimes he committed. I’ll apologize when the sons, daughters, and nephews of powerful politicians who get caught possessing or dealing drugs in the frat house or prep school get the same treatment as the no-name, probably black kid caught on the corner or the front stoop doing the same thing.

Until then, I for one will have none of it. I smoked pot. I liked it. I’ll probably do it again. I refuse to apologize for it, because by apologizing I help perpetuate this stupid lie, this idea that what someone puts into his own body on his own time is any of the government’s damned business. Or any of yours. I’m not going to bend over and allow myself to be propaganda for this wasteful, ridiculous, immoral war.

Go ahead and tear me down if you like. But let’s see you rationalize in your next lame ONDCP commercial how the greatest motherfucking swimmer the world has ever seen . . . is also a proud pot smoker.

Yours,

Michael Phelps

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 10:49 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under General Drug War.

"Eat, Pray, Love" Author Elizabeth Gilbert

2009-02-12T16:14:00.000-08:00

Jennifer read Eat, Pray, Love (at least twice) and while I don't directly credit that with her Fiji expedition, it also wasn't entirely coincidence. I didn't read it. But I had heard that Gilbert was wonderful at TED and so I checked out her talk. 18 minutes later I wanted to read her book. I don't think you can NOT like her after hearing her speak.

Jen isn't going to loan me her copy. Do I have to go buy this now?

Enjoy. Elizabeth Gilbert, on Creativity and Genius.

I laughed, a little tear in the corner of my eye...

2009-02-11T14:46:00.000-08:00

Jeff sent this to me... and I had to post it.

The Gainesville Sun

2009-02-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

I wonder if some measure of success is when you show up in your hometown newspaper?

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20090128/MAGAZINE01/901280934

My mom tells me there is something similar in the printed version of Gainesville Magazine.

As I read it now I am struck by two things. The first, the petty one, is how many little facts got mis-stated between the interview and the final result. It's strange but it mostly reminds me to be marginally cautious about things I read in print. When I was working on Droidmaker I remember being surprised that Lucasfilm requested only that I get first person accounts of events, and not rely on what was printed. And I'd read of things in the archives of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal that just had to be true, and I sometimes started to use those as sources only later to find, in fact, that important details were incorrect.
The second thing is simply that the article really captures a moment in time a few months ago, when I was in the midst of a transition. I can feel that undercurrent in the mood the article captured. Jen and the kids were still in Fiji but about to return, and I was at the end of months of deep career introspection. When I read that interview, I was all about that shift.

It's mostly right, of course. I've been consulting a lot recently for a company in the wind energy business. Wind Energy. I know so little about it, and yet I'm left with the feeling it's the dawn of an era that will be defined by wind energy, and other renewable energy options. Moving into that world feels foreign and exciting, like the first moments of reading a new book you purchased by an author you love, unsure of what you'll find, but excited in the not-knowing and slow-reveal.

More on that as I turn the pages.

Facebook Privacy - for Newbies

2009-02-02T22:48:00.001-08:00

This is a must-read article on how to protect yourself if you use Facebook.

http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/02/facebook-privacy/

Moving On

2009-01-22T13:16:00.000-08:00

It first really struck me in high school. I was in school with people I had largely grown up with, and they knew me a certain kind of way. Neither good nor bad, I suppose. This may have happened to you: you were a kid who was short. Or fat. Or slow. Or whatever youthful trait that was outgrown by adolescence. But it was hard to see yourself as changed when your friends pretty much saw you the way they always had, fit you into a particular position in the social order of things. I went away for the summer to camp when younger, and summer school when older, and at those new locales the other kids saw me for who I was right then. And I recall it as being somewhat liberating, particularly when i wasn’t all that thrilled with every part of the status quo. It was possible to be a geek in high school, and move past that to being a little more cool at summer school.

College again provided an opportunity to “move on.” Your “high school friends” knew you one way, and your “college friends” knew you another. This process could continue, most effective when you actually had an opportunity to grow: either in maturity or wisdom or in some odd dimension.

High school reunions were moments to sample “how folks turned out” or “who they became” – always somewhat interesting in the context of who they were then (e.g. the stoner becoming an executive; the bully becoming a nice dad. At my 10 year high school reunion I was voted "Most Improved" which i found a dubious distinction.) But for the most part, it was always easy to move on, just by moving. Time and distance did their natural trick to erode links, and thin lines of communication. There were no overlaps. There were clean breaks. I was always grateful for this.

And now there is Facebook.

For my generation, there is this slow and somewhat conflicted reconnection with our past life – with relationships long ago evaporated, now reconstituted with an eyedropper of Internet. Here are my high school friends… and my camp buddies… and my freshman hall… and my old flames… and my distant relatives… and former co-workers… as if decades haven’t transpired in the interim. Not since my wedding have so many diverse and disparate facets of my past come colliding together in a sort of pastiche of biography. I remember that wedding day, seeing my cousin having a drink with my college roommate, joined by my last boss, and finding the whole thing fun but still disquieting. And yet every day I scan through names, the Facebook friends, that are entertaining to read in list form, from each corner of my history. The reconnecting has been fun, like standing at a greeting line at a fantastic reunion. But I’m not sure about the ongoing swirl. I’m reminded of a line from Jurassic Park, when the characters are debating the merits of bringing back dinosaurs made extinct naturally eons ago. “You know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps like extinct animals should be left extinct.”

Old old friendships are a double-edged sword. Reconnecting starts with curiosity, and honestly, I’m not entirely sure where it leads. So far it’s cool, mediated by Facebook, privacy settings and actual geography. I hope I’ve evolved in maturity in such a way as to get some of these relationships right the second time around.

Kids today won’t know the effect of really losing touch with “old friends,” and may stay connected with their babygroup or kindergarten class continuously for their entire lives. The simple idea of “reconnecting” might become as quaint as “dialing” a phone. Still, they are losing that all-empowering option to “move on,” of growth and change without the constant tug of who they were and who they left behind.

Voyeurism, Exhibitionism and Facebook

2009-01-13T16:48:00.000-08:00

I know that “voyeurism” and “exhibitionism” are sexually charged terms, but I can’t see any way around using them here: the powerful dynamos that are the engine of Web 2.0 in general, and Facebook in particular, are this dyad of voyeurism and exhibitionism. Being in any online community, at some level, feeds a desire to see into other people’s lives, or be seen.

There is no getting around the fact that I embrace these things: I feel like a trained voyeur: a photographer and videographer, historian and editor, I like to watch, I like to explore that way. I’m also an amateur exhibitionist, as are all teachers and bloggers and authors and entrepreneurs, who routinely stand before small or large groups and have something to say. I am certain in my grade school I excelled at “Show and tell.”

The people who are drawn to online communities have given in, to some degree, to their inner exhibitionist. This is my life. These are my friends. These are my books and favorite things. Your Facebook life is the inside of your high school locker: semi-private, but still often a statement about who you’d like to be, how you’d like to be seen. Rather than simply rely primarily on your own self-descriptions—like a resume, posted photos, or personal statements—the crux of social networks lies in dynamic self-definition through associations: who are you friends with? what groups do you support? What networks are you in?

I believe that the best thing about these relationships is that, for the most part, they are “pulls” of information, not “pushes.” We post. And that news can be ignored or not. But this is so much different from “pushes,” like phone calls and emails that are directed, bang on our doors and demand receipt. Instead, these are passive announcements, received only if your audience tunes in, and absorbed at a rate of the recipient’s choice, not the broadcaster.

In a way all this reminds me of a radio show I had at my college AM station: It was a wake-up show, and I was there at the station, my brightly lit glass booth, broadcasting at 5am, but I don’t really think anyone was listening. Still I went through the exercise for a few months. Social networks are like that. On Facebook there are people out there. Your friends. Or maybe some of their friends. Watching. In the lingo of the online communities most people are “lurkers,” they click through links to see what (or who) is there. Look around a little bit, maybe amusing themselves in the process, and ultimately go back to pruning the little garden that is their profile. A rough number I’ve heard thrown around is that for every person who leaves a note or communicates with you via that online network, there are more than ten who pass through and leave no sign of their exploration. It might even approach a hundred. At Netflix, my community work often involved balancing the exhibitionism and voyeurism* without becoming creepy. That creepy line is all important.

Actually, there is a subtle kind of pushing. As marketers understand, the key to getting in front of people (if that is your goal) is through novelty – and thus the fine art of frequent updatings (status, blogs, photos) without crossing into spamsville. Facebook’s success is and will continue to be the ease with which they provide the ability to throttle up or down the noise coming from any particular member. Which brings us back to voyeurism and exhibitionism. Sure they’re charged terms, but they aren’t extremes. I'm pretty sure that the rise of social networks rides on our increasing comfort with these two experiences -- both in balance and degree.

* I tried not to use these terms, btw.
** I saw this at the Sundance Film Festival too, btw. It seemed that there was a large segment of the attendees who where principally there to be seen (actors, studio execs, posers and B.Ps) and hoards there to see (journalists, photographers, fans); I made a short video documenting this phenomenon.

Instant Watching

2009-01-09T07:25:00.000-08:00

Remember the food processor on Star Trek? You just told it what you wanted, hit a button, and a fully prepared dish appeared, almost instantly. It was almost comical if it weren’t so darn appealing. In the 1970s, Francis Coppola, the hippest creative cat in San Francisco, was so connected and sophisticated that he could pick up a phone and shortly thereafter he could watch a 16mm print of many classic movies on his home projector, ordered from the collections in the Pacific Film Archive. Almost no one in America could really do that. For a film fan, it was a remarkable luxury and privilege.

Today almost every bit of moving video content ever created over the past 100 years is now archived and available on DVD. The majority of it is in warehouses of Netflix. For a few dollars each month, any person in America is a couple days away from any movie ever created. But increasingly, each of us is within an instant from watching this collection. Today only maybe 10% of the theatrical filmed content is on demand (whether from Netflix or from other sources as well). That number will increase a little more every year, until in three or five or whatever years, so much of that enormous library will be instantly available that further increases won’t matter at all. Already, last night, I had an evening where I wanted to watch a film, and the options were paralyzing. The joke at the earlier part of the 1990s was “57 channels and nothing’s on”* (which rapidly grew to thousands of channels with less and less quality content)**, but it is just as debilitating to have a queue of dozens or hundreds of things that you’d actually kinda like to watch- -- not, as it has been in history – limited by availability or the whim of some corporation with an agenda, but unfettered. New-found freedom and new burden of responsibility. It’s all my decision: a documentary about Bach, a classic like The Maltese Falcon, a mindless end-of-the world sci-fi flick… and so on… there are hundreds of really good options, not at all like wasting an evening with whatever moronic sitcom NBC cranked out for me to waste this part of the evening. Now I’m choosing that moronic sitcom not just over all the other moronic sitcoms on the other stations at this hour, or the mediocre recorded options from the past few days, but I'm saying I want to watch this moronic sitcom more deeply than ANYTHING ELSE ever made. Time shifting that crap starts to feel foolish when there is so much quality content all over the place, finally. So do I go for the Twinkies now that mom is out for a bit? Or do I at least try to have a balanced meal?

* 1992 song by Bruce Springsteen.
** LA Times, October 11, 2005 “4,000 channels and nothing’s on”

A Pernicious Trend: Massimplification

2009-01-07T17:27:00.000-08:00

It hit me first with Apple and iMovie a year ago. They took a pretty good, pretty simple editing system (iMovie HD) and they took out the editing features to make it even simpler (iMovie 08). It was rebuilt from the ground up, based entirely on the assumption that most users, in spite of the product's name, don't want to make movies. They shoot bits of video with their cameras or phones, and want to share them. Trim off the edges maybe. But nothing like "editing." All that crap about reverse shots and cut-away shots and timelines was for video geeks, maybe a small percent of their users. From a business standpoint, it was the right move. Just because I happen to be in the "fringe" that wanted those features, I'm sure that making the software simpler will improve its use and their business objectives. Sigh. So I moved to Final Cut Express to do my basic editing.

Then there was my experience at Netflix. The Community, in particular, but in many other features of the website as well, there were lots of things we could design and build that would be really really cool for movie fans, from playing in social networks, to half-star ratings, to letting people search in their queue when they couldn't find something they knew was there. But it was clear that these were features that only appealed to those who were geeks (folks who loved social networks AND Netflix, or for people with so many movies in their queues that they lost things there). The fact was that these things mattered to only a tiny fraction of the subscribers, and there were a lot more important things we could do to add value, in particular, simplify the site. Less is often more. I know, i know -- I'm a movie geek -- and the cool moviefanish things I'd love to have don't always make good business sense. So I created a ning community for movie fans, and Netflix users in particular.

So at Macworld I was excited to see the new features coming out in many products, in particular, Intuit's QUICKEN. I've been using this product for eons, and while I don't upgrade every time there is new software, I keep my eye on it for when improvements seem to warrant the effort. I was excited, then, to see what was about to roll out. GASP. To my dismay I found that they were pulling a Netflix on me! They are removing a number of features I have come to rely on in my QUICKEN (its simple way of working was a nice little brother to the small business software we use at Petroglyph, Quickbooks...) but the new version seems all different. I'm still in shock, but i remember someone rationalizing the loss of many standard reports, and also explaining to me that they were changing finance "categories" to something more like tag clouds.

Tagging has its place, and i used to urge my partners at Netflix to use the more modern notion of tagging and move away from the archaic (Dewey-decimal-like) genres of classification, but this makes me uncomfortable in my accounting software!! Their simplifications struck me as hip but in the wrong direction. Still, one cannot escape their logic: only a small percent of their customers use QUICKEN to track their finances, balance accounts and follow portfolios. Most use it very lightly, and find most the features of little use or, worse, in the way. Just getting America to balance its checkbook would be a push, categorizing expenses across various accounts... face it, once again I'm in the unfortunate fringe.

INTUIT hasn't released this new version, and things might change before it comes out, and they certainly will add features over time. But I'm feeling the pain i often feel in the consumer space -- as these products are first released they are created for people more like me: early adopters, technically savvy and exploring of features. But over time, as markets grow, my needs represent a smaller and smaller portion of the products' direction.

Product success often leads to (and comes from) "massimplification," the focused simplification (or dumbing down, if you must) of a technical product to make it more useful to the largest number of people, often nudging out early adopters and creating niche product opportunities in the process. I don't like it. But it's better, I suppose, than the alternative: feature-creep. Microsoft, like many developers, tends to continue adding features to their products with each release, features that appeal to smaller and smaller numbers of end-users, their installed base of users, further and further alienating new users. I used to call this the Peter Principle of Software Development, which goes: a company will continue adding features to a product until it is almost unusably complicated; this inadvertently creates an opportunity for a new product to pick and choose which features are necessary, and who then can better optimize for new users. Both extremes are lousy, but when i write it out here, it looks like both ultimately create new product opportunities.

But I don't have to like it.

Macworld '09

2009-01-05T12:48:00.000-08:00

I'll be at Macworld '09 on Tuesday and Wednesday. If you're there, come by the Peachpit booth where i'll be making my base of operations. I'll be doing at podcast at 3pm there on Tuesday, if you have questions or want to meet up. See you in the city.

Good-Bye DVD Collection...

2009-01-04T21:59:00.000-08:00

Today was a day that goes in my calendar. It was the day where I took my collection of DVDs and placed them in boxes. Not moved to the garage just yet, but I have that nagging suspicion I’m going to be needing less and less access to these discs. I remember the day about a decade ago when I did the same thing with my CDs. I had taken a week or two and transferred my entire music collection to a hard disk. I uncabled my CD-player, inserted my iPod, and moved cartons of CDs to the attic. How long before I dump them? Let’s see: I left college 25 years ago with my cassette tape collection, mostly labeled, and a small stack of vinyl. I never used the record player again, really, but I needed a cassette player in my car until my last car a few years ago. I took those dusty cassettes to the dump around the time I boxed the CDs. VHS tapes are already in the garage, and I’m starting to toss those as the DVDs move in.

I still watch DVDs, of course. But my motivation to buy is beginning to wane. That urge to own is ameliorated with the supple balm of Instant Access to almost anything, and 48 hour access to everything else. NETFLIX!! I’m enjoying the simplicity in my home that includes no shelves of records, no racks of cassettes, no boxes of CDs, and now no stack of DVDs. Sigh. Books really can’t be all that far behind, can they?

rick's picks: i'm wrestling with the idea that i agree with Martha Stewart...

2009-01-02T16:19:00.000-08:00

A lot of food gets put in front of you at a conference: some of it is good, some is bad, but some is memorable. It has been a month maybe since the EG, and i'm oddly haunted by these pickled green beans that were handed to me at some point. I wouldn't think of myself as a "pickled" guy normally, but i was drawn to these appetizers at one point in an evening. They were different but familiar. This was (ironically) the way George Lucas and Ben Burtt agreed the sounds of Star Wars should be, and Burtt combined and distorted real animal sounds to invent those Wookie voices and space ship zooms. But I ramble. I remember those green beans that way. I liked them and they made me feel a little satisfied with myself as I was enjoying a green vegetable, which i think is good. I am always tempted towards something that is a lot more fried, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, after devoiring a few little cupfulls I found i was hunting for the person wandering around with the tray, to ask them what I was eating and if there were more. I was directed to this guy. Rick. These are his pickled things. He offered an array of really interestingly pickled things, but as i said, i'm not really a pickled guy, and they didn't have much appeal to me (although I believe i know people who will really dig the "phat beets"). I was eating both "windy city wasabeans" and "mean beans" and I went online to order me some more.

I'll let you know when they arrive and if they deliver on the memory i've got. I'm really looking forward to these.

rick's picks >>

When I went to their website, the first thing I saw gave me an odd rush: Martha Stewart had featured him on her show back in September. I guess i missed that, not really paying much attention to Martha Stewart. But here she is, and I agree with her, these pickled vegetables are worth trying.

POST SCRIPT (1/13/09): My memories did not disappoint! The package arrived today and I dug into the entire set. They are really excellent, and while a bit pricey for some veggies, they are truly unique and tasty and worth having from time to time to spice up special events. For me, the special event happened to be a Tuesday afternoon, but you could hold out for something worthier...

POST SCRIPT (2/2/09): The Mean Beans are just a little zesty for my general enjoyment, but the Windy City Wasabeans are fan-fuckin-tastic. When my supply ran out recently, I kept the jar of "sauce" and debated what to do with it (toss it? it just seemed so wasteful.) So on a lark I cut up a zucchini and dropped the raw pieces into the wasabean jar. 24 hours later I tried one. WOW. Like magic those veggies are Ricked, and i have a new hobby. Lots of things to try.

In the same vein as Elf Yourself...

2008-12-30T16:44:00.000-08:00

Here the BBC is using a viral video (its got 2.7 million views on YouTube so far in December), to get their message in front of people. Clever. Unfortunately, it took me another five minutes to figure out what the "ONE THING" they really wanted me to do was, and, once I discovered that was sort of a mcguffin, what a "breathing place" was; this was work which few would ever do.

(For the record: "You know that bit of land you walk past every day and think someone should really clean that up and make it wonderful for all the wildlife and people round here. Now’s your chance to do it yourself." I guessed, however, it was going to be something green, eco and maybe had something to do with gardening...

I don't particularly like the video, but it has a kind of charm. I wonder if this campaign is working for them.

Predictably Irrational: Notes

2008-12-28T08:55:00.001-08:00

I had a really great evening of conversation with Dan Ariely at EG last week, so that almost guarantees that i have a significant bias to enjoy his book. (I'm certain his research would support that.) I hadn't read his book as of that event, but he was fascinating and I was interested in reading this only after laughing and sharing stories that night. I received it recently, and read it in maybe three sittings over two days. It was wonderful. There is a tendency to compare it to Gladwell's works (I also just finished "Outliers" a few weeks ago, which began strong but finished more weakly) but it's important to remember that Gladwell is a creative writer with interesting observations, and Ariely is a scientist and researcher. Ariely has a familiar style which is totally accessible, but the best part is simply his path of observations and new research to defend or overturn various hypothesis. I recommend it to anyone with curiosity about human behaviors; it's practical both for self-educating business folk and for people working on regular ol' relationships.

Now: I wouldn't normally do this, but I was having trouble convincing one friend to read it, so I humbly offer my personal notes/outline on the chapters/observations as a sort of shorthand. This cannot really replace any part of the book -- because you have to read it to really understand what these notes suggest -- and if you don't agree with what I've written, you'd need to read Ariely's supporting research. But here are some of my observations.

SHORTHAND NOTES FROM
PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL

1. Relativity (why everything is relative, even when it shouldn’t be)
a. We are always looking at things in relationship to other things, both physical things and ephemeral things.
b. We compare things that are easily comparable, and avoid comparing things that cannot be compared easily.
c. Compare A to B, difficult; but compare A, -A and B, and people will disregard B, and select A because it’s better than –A. (the decoy)
d. Downside: comparing things breeds jealousy and envy; move from larger circles to smaller circles to boost relative happiness
e. Useful applications in retail/marketing, general efficiency, and relationships

2. Myth of Supply and Demand ( why the price of pearls, and everything else, is up in the air)
a. Imprinting/Arbitrary coherence: “although initial prices are arbitrary, once those prices are established in our minds they will shape not only the present prices but also future prices. (“Anchors”)
b. Initial anchors have long-term effects, but can be reformed (starbucks). “Our first decisions resonate over a long sequence of decisions. First impressions are important.
c. Herding, self-herding
d. Starbucks did everything possible to make the experience FEEL different from regular coffee places. To create a new anchor.
e. Demand is not a separate force from supply.

3. Cost of Zero Cost (we often pay too much when we pay nothing)
a. A cost of “zero”/free is an emotional hot button, and people will select free things even if other options are a better value. When something is free we forget the downside of having it.

4. The Cost of Social Norms (why we are happy to do things, but not when we are paid to do them)
a. We live simultaneously in two worlds: one where social norms prevail and one where market norms make the rules. Social norms include the friendly request we make of one another (help me move the couch..) they are warm and fuzzy. Instant payback, or reciprocity, is not required. Market norms are different. They are sharp and clear: rent, interest, wages, cost-benefit… keep these separate and life flows easily. Mix them, and trouble results.
b. Ask people for a favor, they do it gladly. Tell them you’ll pay, and everything changes, depending on what they get paid.
c. Gifts can exist in social norms, and not turn things into market norms, unless price is mentioned.
d. Once market norms have been introduced into a social situation, it is very hard to undo it.
e. Interesting challenge for businesses – with both staff and customers – hard to have both ways.
f. Money is an expensive way to motivate people. Social norms can be better.

5. The Influence of Arousal (why hot is much hotter than we realize)
a. Being in an aroused state (like any strongly emotional, even primitive state) will cause people to behave in ways they would not imagine likely in a “cold” state. Talk to people cold and their ability to predict how they’ll behave “hot” is very bad. Even with experience.
b. (we systematically under predict the influence of the id on wiping out the superego)

6. The Problem of Procrastination and Self Control (why we can’t make ourselves do what we want to do)
a. “how much do we lose when our fleeting interests distract us from our long-term goals?”
b. we do best when rules restricting freedom come from above, but we do pretty well when we have tools to pre-commit to deadlines.
c. While almost everyone procrastinates, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for pre-committment and help themselves overcome it.
d. We have problems with self-control, related to immediate and delayed gratification.

7. The High Price of Ownership (why we overvalue what we have)
a. We fall in love with what we already have
b. We focus on what we may lose instead of what we may gain
c. We assume other people will see the transaction from the same perspective as we do.
d. The more work you put into something, the more ownership you begin to feel. (“the Ikea effect”) – we even begin to feel the power of ownership before we really own it (bidding on an item); trying it makes us feel close to it, and some ownership.
e. Ownership is not just of material goods but points of view

8. Keeping Doors Open (options distract us from our main objective)
a. We are compelled to keep options open, even at great expense. Why can’t we commit ourselves.
b. We want to try everything, keep options open, until we’re spread too thin.
c. We need to start closing doors. Doors tied to dreams are hard to close. So are relationships. small doors are easy to close, but big doors are not.
d. Even when you’re down to 2 doors, it’s the hardest thing to do. – being indecisive to the point of paying for our indecision in the end (donkey and hay); quick decisions between relatively similar things can be better than the cost of thinking about them.

9. The Effect of Expectations (why the mind gets what it expects)
a. When the ambience looks upscale, “the coffee tastes upscale”
b. Information first changes people’s actual experiences, much more than information after.
c. Don’t underestimate the power of presentation
d. Stereotypes and expectations affect behaviors (Asian women test)
e. While stripping away our preconceptions and previous knowledge is not possible, we can at least acknowledge we are all biased; we are trapped in our perspective, which partially blinds us to the truth. Third party is important.

10. The Power of Price (why a 50 cent aspirin can do what a one cent aspirin cannot)
a. Placebo effect

I stopped my notes at chapter 11. Go read the book.

Ephemeral, Part 2

2008-12-27T19:19:00.001-08:00

I woke up this morning to see an email from a friend who reported her house pretty much burned down last night; the second person I've known who has lost their home in a fire in the past year. In taking some photos for her insurance, I ended up with a few that still affect me.

I believe this is the house equivalent of having a stroke.

Ephemeral Culture

2008-12-26T18:59:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reported recently how “more readers are picking up electronic books.” In response, on Facebook, a few friends politely debated how with a Kindle they’d miss curling up with a good book. A guy with a Kindle replied that he liked having more space in his house, and felt good about saving trees. But all I think about is how ephemeral our entire culture is becoming. I’ve already had this debate with my wife, who simply doesn’t enjoy the admittedly beautiful and efficient iBooks I’ve been making, noting that the weight and texture she finds in scrapbooks is important. “They are bits of your life, collages of papers, mostly, photos and notes and tickets. The iBooks are rather clean, bordering on sterile.” Of course I love them, but I understand what she means.*

Today my entire record collection, which became my entire CD collection, is now a folder on my laptop, poorly archived on a couple hard disks tossed around the utility drawer. With the purchase of my digital camera a few years back, all film record and prints disappeared into iPhoto. I’m grateful I don’t have to go to the film archive to rent a 16mm movie to watch on a projector in my livingroom, and I love Netflix.

But bit by bit, every bit of our culture is moving from physical to electronic. My library, my scrapbooks and negatives, my records and CDs, my cassettes and DVDs, the keypads of my phone and eventually, my computer, and every other device. There is just such a great benefit to be had it’s hard to imagine clinging to the tangible for nostalgic reasons. I’m not a Luddite. But I am a little paranoid. And I can’t tell you how uncomfortable I get when the power goes out, and I can’t look at a phonebook or a photograph, or when software changes and I can no longer open some essay or presentation because its become unreadable or incompatible. If the power goes out, not today but in ten years maybe, we’ll be crippled – missing a decade or more of history: writings, images, videos, that either never had an analog version, or whose physical original was finally discarded when the storage seemed redundant and inefficient.

And each of us will be old someday, and like our own grandparents today, we’ll cling to the one or two documents and images that somehow survived as a crumpled image, stuffed into an unused bookshelf.

In the end, I only think of Nick Taleb’s book “Fooled By Randomness” – and the case where you win a million dollars every time you play a round of Russian roulette and survive. The upside is great. The odds are significantly in your favor. The problem is only in the unlikely, but plausible, downside. And the downside is BIG. I know that even after a massive war, or economic collapse, people will still be able to generate some kind of power, and we will not be living in caves. Still, I cannot warm to the idea of discarding all forms of media and culture, replacing them entirely with the warm hum of bits flowing around in magnetic devices, fueled by a pacemaker. Most the media might be crap, but maybe we should go a little slower into that future? I’m keeping photo negatives in a box in the garage, and my old CDs are hidden away in my attic. And scrapbooks: they’re pretty fun. Maybe they can coexist with my iBooks for a few more years…

The Future of Online Ads: Elfyourself

2008-12-23T14:53:00.000-08:00

There are few ads that work for me online. But this was the right combination of effects such that I think OfficeMax nailed it: it's sponsored (by OfficeMax) but produced separately (JibJab), and it's both personalized and viral -- you customize this weird "card" and you send it to your friends, which gets them to do the same. Better than banners, better than product placement, better than a ton of other ad models online, I think these guys did a great job.

Holiday Cards

2008-12-20T13:36:00.001-08:00

I sat down today to mess around with my address book and figure out how I was going to get holiday cards to the people I’d like to have ‘em. This whole holiday card thing bothers me. I have a feeling it was invented in a time when you wanted to ping some old friend who you no longer saw often, but wanted to stay connected. Showing pictures of your growing kids seemed like a good way to mark the time. The holidays were a perfect moment to wish them well, in the spirit of the season. Maybe a hint of forgiveness tossed in there somehow, begging a pardon of sorts for having been out of touch for many months or an entire year. The seasonal timing is good for that sort of thing. I don’t remember holiday cards when I was a kid, but that doesn’t mean anything.

Nowadays my wife and I kinda use the project to make a little family art. We try to mix up the hand-making part with the tools of computers and graphics. Over the past decade it’s been getting easier and easier to personalize cards, get mass printing done via the internet, and print databases of friends in standardized label formats. Technology has just fertilized an explosion of opportunity in that field. This year was the first we designed the card entirely online and had them printed and shipped to us in quantity (via Zazzle). Now we’re up to the addressing part, and there are various options – from handwriting, to printing labels, to printing directly on the envelope. Sometimes I’m sure the work I do in typing and formatting and updating fields to get everything printer-ready is greater than the simple work of taking a pen and writing the address myself. But my handwriting sucks and by card four completely illegible. The only thing worse than writing them is getting those cards returned in the mail for “address unknown.”

I jammed my otherwise pretty good printer in trying to print directly on the non-standard card size (curses!)

That left the address label.

But as I perused my address book, it dawned on me that I was Facebook friends with some quantity of the people I wanted to send cards to. Sure there are friends who aren’t online, and relatives, and people over 50… anyway, I have been sitting here all afternoon deciding why I would send a card to someone I’m connected to online. I mean, half theses people already get moment-by-moment updates of my status. Most have perused my various vacation photos and have been following the saga of my work and life as it appears online. There is almost nothing I could say or show them in a holiday card that they haven’t felt a hundred times more online. The photo we put in our card we PURPOSELY didn’t put online anywhere so it would be “fresh” when they got the card. This means something, but I think is a bad sign.

I don’t like holiday cards on principle. Many are not that heart-felt. Most are tossed right after the holidays (although a few are treasured, that’s true). They’re expensive to produce, print and mail. There is the trash created, and trees destroyed, somewhat frivolously. And now we add in this one final nail in their coffin: they’re obsolete. I’m more connected now online, and see no need to waste the paper and effort required to make this physical object.

But then I pick up my holiday card and look at it, and glance down at the growing assortment of cards that sit beside me in the living room. They’re fun. I wish more of our friends would show themselves and not just their kids; I like seeing how all of us are growing up. I like the tactile nature of these things. I like flipping through them, it’s different from (and better than) doing a comparable thing on Facebook.

Okay, I’m sold. The cards are a good family project, and it’s fun to make a little something for people, even if the little thing you make is just this tiny photo album, this eloquent booklet. I hope they don’t go away. But it would be great if it was easier to print my labels through Facebook (maybe even interface directly with zazzle, transparently). I’ll look for it in 2009. It might just insure the future of the Holiday Card.

Enough procrastinating. Happy Holidays.

Unidentifed Sound Object

2008-12-16T15:31:00.000-08:00

When I was in Milan, I was contacted by Matteo Milani, a post-production guy who runs a popular blog/community of like-minded post folks in Italy and elsewhere. He and I met before my flight home, and he asked questions centered on my Droid Works experiences. It was funny. I'm often asked about DROIDMAKER, as the researcher and author, but i'm far less often asked about my own personal adventures in those early days.

Mr. Milani contacted me today to report that he has posted excerpts from our conversation on his blog, UNIDENTIFIED SOUND OBJECT: http://usoproject.blogspot.com/2008/12/interview-with-michael-rubin-pt1.html (You'd need to care about post-production history to get much out of this...)

Other EG Snaps...

2008-12-15T23:03:00.000-08:00

Adam Savage. I had seen him on Myth Busters, but I never really thought about who he was or what he was like. I’ll tell you what he’s like: he’s wonderfully and perhaps frighteningly obsessive; like compulsive obsessive. Seriously. He gave us a little tour of his passion for the sculpture/movie prop of the Maltese Falcon – a tale you cannot believe. I took the Falcon from his hands later on; it reminded me somewhat of wandering into the a C Building office once at Lucasfilm in 1985 and secretly picking up an Oscar statuette and rubbing it’s head momentarily while it’s owner was out of the office. That was fun. This was just as fun. It weighed a ton. Savage is really unusual and very friendly. Seemed like a really likable guy. And here’s his mcguffin.

Waiting in line with Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar. Always great to see Alvy. We spoke in Vancouver together last Spring. Behind him is Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. Get it? Pixar and Apple are pretty much owned by one guy, and here are the other guys who… oh, you get it. Anyway, it was Woz’s wife's birthday. Here he’s kissing her, I think, for someone’s camera. Hard to be sure from this angle.

Jacques d’Amboise. I have to admit I hadn’t ever heard the name d’Amboise before. The EG materials said he was a “dancer, choreographer, educator” but I couldn’t really imagine what that meant. I met Jacques first when he came to hug Alvy. He approached with such an enthusiasm! He was electric. I now recognize him from the classic Time/Life photos of him. It was really a pleasure to meet him and hear about his passions. I was particularly interested in watching him teach dance. Watching him, along with hearing about Tim Ferriss’ tango education, stick with me still. Interesting stories in presentations about dance. I didn’t like any of my shots of Ferriss, unfortunately.

Bello Nok. I saw his hair first. I didn’t know what he did or who he was, but I saw his hair. He wandered around chatting with people for hours, and I couldn’t take my eyes off his hair. I got it out of my system with a half dozen shots of his head from various angles, head on, silhouette… everyone always came up to him, I mean, no one is friendlier than a real live clown. Particularly one that’s seen his family in the circus for GENERATIONS (I’m talking 300 plus years). Most often when I saw him in the various rooms and venues of EG, I saw him like this.

Breakfast on the first day.

Updates: Zazzle and Blurb

2008-12-15T09:13:00.000-08:00

ZAZZLE: I had previously reported that I gave them a gold star for customer service even though I had had some probs with the print job. As of today the job is completed. It looks wonderful, and it was not without a significant effort on the part of Zazzle. They ended up running the job two times (printing 150 cards each time), and still not getting the color right. They contacted me about the problems and after a little discussion, they gave it a third shot -- and nailed it. I cannot imagine a company working that hard to please a customer over a small job. So there it is: the job is done, it looks great; sure it would have been better if there had been no problems, but you can't only judge a company on flawless execution - you find their true essence with how they handle problems. Zazzle gets 5 stars.

BLURB:I raved about Blurb when I discovered them. I liked their software and service, and was excited about getting my first Blurb book. When the book came out of lesser quality than I had expected (compared primarily to the Apple books I had been making for some time), I bailed on them. But this week I saw a host of completed Blurb books that far surpass the quality and creativity range I have seen in Apple's. Really superb, beautiful works. I have decided, as I did with Zazzle, not to discount them immediately but to see how they work through the problems. So far they have been remarkable and open and communicative. So i'm going to try again. I'll keep you posted on the results.

Highlights and Observations, EG 08: Session 2

2008-12-14T13:05:00.001-08:00

I'm going to skip over fairly expected glowing comments about Gallo & Lange from Woods Hole (although i don't think i will ever forget the image of a lake -- with waves lapping on the shore -- that they found a mile or so under the ocean), and of wilderness photographer Frans Lanting (I'm simply too biased -- he lives in my town and he and his wife Christine are great people). Photographer Dana Gluckstein was one of only a couple bad presentations. Decorum might keep me from railing on her, but I have to be candid: I think she has a chip on her shoulder or something. She spent most of her talk showing a documentary short about herself, presenting evidence that she was a great photographer (interviews with folks who said it, letters from distinguished critics to verify...) and worthy of collection. I dunno. She just didn't get it. She has nothing to prove. Just show the work and let the cards fall. It was painful to watch. Promotion of any kind - whether self aggrandizement or pimping your company - are the kiss of death at TED and EG. Wurman in his day would have given her the hook. Mike Hawley is just too nice. I might suggest a good cop/bad cop for those two, to handle just such occasions.

David Macaulay was fine. I spent years with a poster on my wall from one of his books "Cathedral", and he's pretty famous now for his "Way Things Works" books. What he said that resonated for me was how he writes these books as a way of answering questions for himself. This is my M.O. as well. Some folks write books as "experts", but Macaulay (and I) write as novices. The book is an exploration of some subject until it is made clear. The exploration of his process was thrilling to see. He went through the work it took to make a book about the human body, and he's such a great illustrator (with a sense of humor I enjoy) that his talk was entertaining but more importantly, deeply revealing about the creative process. Once I shot him autographing some books I realized that I could do an entire photo essay on folks autographing things...

Cameron Carpenter. Ahhhh Cameron! If I told you he played the organ, you might change the channel. The organ, and organ playing in general, are mired in some very bad PR. (He described this problem articulately, btw). And just as Anderson & Roe reframed the piano duet, Cameron utterly thrashes whatever you might think of the organ. He's rather like Liberace in appearance (well, the sequins have to bring that comparison to mind), although the similarity really ends there. He's a trained dancer, and for him, playing the organ is a whole body routine, creating music through movement. I never had thought of it before, but the organ has got layer upon layer of keyboard rows, and then a massive array of foot pedals which are really just another keyboard, and then panels of switches that change the sounds along each keyboard. I am reminded a little of the 3D chess board in Star Trek. It's piano in three dimensions, and he's built for this. Now I must say, although he is entertaining, and a once-per-century talent (based on comments from authorities smarter than I), organ music still isn't my preferred milieu. But forget that if you can, and see him perform live if you get a chance. He's super-self-confident and I'd swear he was carved out of a block of alabaster--which makes him really really easy to photograph; i doubt anyone would argue that he was a cornerstone to adding music and whimsy to this years EG. I'll save you the sequin sparkly images; here's one from a calmer moment in the bookshop, talking with Miru.

Okay: I'm compelled to embed a video of Cameron playing...

Highlights and Observations, EG 08: Session 1

2008-12-14T09:59:00.000-08:00

I'm not doing a blow-by-blow of EG. But I have a few photos and a couple introductions to pass along. "Introductions" means there were some folks i met or heard speak that I think more people should know, so consider yourselves introduced. "Photos" were generally not shot during the presentations themselves - there were dozens of folks shooting there. I really only shot at the casual gatherings outside of the theater, where i could do better capturing more personality and more of the vibe.

Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe. A cute young vibrant couple (okay, they are NOT a couple, they're more like siblings) who play piano duets. Sounds boring, I suppose. They are not. They are to piano duets what Fred and Ginger were to ballroom dancing. They're just so damn FRESH. Maybe that's what i liked the most about EG this year: there was a lot of stuff you thought you knew about, or had an opinion about, and then you saw things and people who were just so "out of the box" that it reframed everything. These are out-of-the-box kids who met at Juilliard and are fun and entertaining. I'd like my kids to see them perform. It might make them get into their piano lessons.

Rick Smolan. It seems like everyone knows and likes Rick. This is a good guy, a fine photographer, and an inspiring entrepreneur. I think i cannot separate my positivity towards him with the fact that he is married to a Jennifer Erwitt, daughter of one of my favorite photographers. I've met her at past TEDs, and enjoyed meeting her sister this week. As I've said somewhere, there were no photos in my home growing up of our family, but there were many photos by other artists, sometimes of THEIR families. I believe I grew up with pictures of these Erwitt kids in my house. This picture of Rick shows him snapping a shot with his tricked out iPhone of Adobe Photoshop inventor Russel Brown.

Miru Kim. I've seen her photos before, but I loved meeting her. In short, she explores the most extreme urban ruins--from long-abandoned factories to unknown tunnels below the NY subways to the rarely seen catacombs under Paris--takes off her clothes, and models for herself. Let me just say that she gets naked in places you wouldn't dare take off your shoes or touch a wall. Broken glass and rusty debris. Dark and rats. Freaky stuff. She puts herself there. I was touched by her quiet discomfort with speaking; she really seemed like a woman who preferred to be somewhat solitary. Meeting her made me enjoy her images more.

Matt Harding. An affable young guy, almost exclusively known for his unprecedentedly viral video "Where in the Hell is Matt?" aka "The Strange Guy Dancing All Over the Earth". He's funny and quite nice, but what was most enjoyable perhaps was watching him begin to navigate his life after having this surreal "success". (His tales of dealing with the music rights associated with that YouTube video are also a worthy cautionary tale for would-be video entrepreneurs.) More interesting than hearing him now will be hearing him in 10 years. I'd like to know what he did from the platform he now stands on. Of course he led the audience in a bit of his wacky dance. PS: I just re-watched his video as i added the link here... it really is an amazing thing to see...

TED vs. EG: an analysis

2008-12-13T23:24:00.000-08:00

It’s very hard to be dispassionate about these things in the days following either event. As anyone who attends can attest, it’s reasonably difficult even to describe what it’s like there. I’ve only been home a few hours, but my brain is still sore, and will be swimming for at least the next week. The phrase tossed around in Monterey is usually something like “a mental workout” or some such thing. After years of TED, and being a staunch evangelist for the event, deciding to switch to EG is somewhat akin, I believe, to being a Mac fanatic and somehow, inexplicably, moving to a PC. They are too similar and cost too much to really do both. So I had to consider this carefully. But I have no doubt: the EG is my preference.

First, by almost all metrics, there is no substantive difference between TED and EG. EG is TED, after all. It has the same format, it has the same founder, it has the same vibe. It is TED that has evolved recently into a new form. The EG is simply maintaining the original, and I might add, the successful essence, of TED. They are close enough siblings that even though this was my first EG, it was absolutely the same feeling of “return” that I would have had at this years TED. In addition, I understand that the videos of the EG talks will be available at the TED TALKS website. So there you have it. Practically the same conference.

But they’re really not the same. TED is special, no doubt, and worth the bucks for those who attend. But as of this years EG – the third – I’ve found a better and happier place. In the next few paragraphs I’ll make my case. But going to either is fantastic, and if you have an opportunity to attend, by all means, take whichever you can.

So here goes:

TED and EG are a smart and rich person’s summer camp. It’s an odd club of artisans, super achievers and intellectual seekers. Many of the speakers cannot be described with a simple title like “CEO of” or “architect” or “musician,” and tend more towards labels like “designer and technologist” or “microsurgeon/explorer” or “philosopher-comic”. Being a person who has trouble explaining what I do, it was very comfortable for me to be around people who are an assemblage of seemingly unrelated hyphenates.

The Venue. When I first wrote this post, I sincerely believed it was unfortunate that the TED organization chose to move from Monterey to Long Beach. After thinking about this, I agree with Chris Anderson that given the size of the group (>1000) the move was necessary to maintain (or improve) the community aspects of the event. There was something magical in the size/location combination in Monterey; and I don’t believe you can really separate the place from the event. But short of reducing the numbers who can attend, I don't believe there was really another option. I had also said that the small size of TED --it's intimacy -- was part of it's allure, and that a larger TED was somewhat incompatible with what made TED so special. This isn't totally the case.

When everyone fit in one theater a number of positive things happen.
Yes, the 400 seats in the John Steinbeck theater provide for a wonderful audience experience, but it’s more than that. Everyone is in the same hotel which maintains a kind of collegiate environment. Everyone attends the same talks in that small, comfortable theater, close to the stage, often looking the speakers in the eye. Because of the small size, you have numerous points of contact with the speakers, and with the generally very high caliber attendees. Everyone bumps up against each other all the time. You see each other in the lobby after the sessions. And walking around the hotel. There is so much familiarity built up over the few days that very quickly these become friends or – seriously – campmates.

When TED created the luxurious ‘simulcast lounge’ --- a comfortable second space where you effectively watched the talks on monitors while lounging around (or chatted on your phone or surfed the net…) – they created a second KIND of TED experience. It’s good as far as that goes, but it is different and allows for some people to have a different kind of experience from other attendees -- your TED and my TED might be different. And that serves to somewhat divide the group. By having so many people in attendance, there is a general sense of “crowd”-- one can feel almost isolated. In the last few years of TED, I noticed that many people drifted in cliques (speakers hang together, Chris Anderson’s inner circle swirls in and out, sometimes attending private gatherings, etc.). When you face so many people, there is a tendency to stick to those you know, where you cling to an island in the chaos. I’m not saying there was a class system at TED (because it was all pretty high class), and I’m not saying you didn’t get to bump into and chat with all sort of folks, including speakers and their ilk, but I am saying that the increase in size combined with the simulcast lounge were negative forces on the intimacy and connectivity of the earlier years.

It should be noted, however, that it was Wurman who increased the size of TED, and it was Wurman who created the Simulcast Lounge. And with the EG, while it now has the intimacy (and location) of the old (old) TEDs, there is no reason to believe that should attendance grow it might face the old issues again.

Anyway, the EG has taken over the old TED location,(at least for now) with no simulcast lounge. The audience all fits into the wonderful little auditorium, and the “summer camp” effect was remarkably strong, the way TED used to be. By the third day you really have spent a fair amount of quality time with a large percentage of the group, probably chatting with all the speakers. And when those “TED moments” occur – those spontaneous magical real life events where you look around at those nearby and gasp in collective unison that you just experienced something special that you’ll never forget – you know that EVERYONE there had that moment – no one was on a phone, or watching on TV downstairs. Soppy, yes. But true.

Kudos to EG for not having internet access around the conference. Imagine a hundred high functioning geeks without laptops! I loved it, and that’s not easy to say. I loved not being distracted by the outside world. There was nothing I wanted to interfere with the private magic in that bubble. It would be gone soon enough. At TED I would have been blogging the entire time. I was happy to be forced into total presence.

Then there is the content. For the most part, the speakers at both events are identical in quality, style… even the hit/miss ratio of good to bad speakers is about the same. (Yes, there are rare lousy presenters at both camps.) TED stands for “technology, entertainment, and design,” but as Chris Anderson’s TED had grown, so has the overarching mission of changing the world for the better. This is a wonderful and laudable objective. The TED prize is powerful, and I take pride in what that has become and made possible (how can you not be thrilled to have been associated with the creation of E.O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life?) But the world changing agenda is omnipresent – from lunches set up to work on the TED prize goals, to an ever-increasing number of speakers who really are there to address and educate us about a range of global problems. The result of that was a subtle erosion of the “Technology, Entertainment and Design” agenda, and I guess I didn’t like that. I wanted MORE artists, more designers; the audience at TED was always replete with venture capitalists, executive teams from top-tier corporations, and multi-millionaires. Now I like millionaires as much as the next guy, but I have to admit feeling a little marginalized next to hundreds of folks like Bezos, Brin, Gore, Kamen, et al. I really liked these guys, and if you need the kind of ego gratification you get by having lunch with them, being photographed with them, having a little debate with them or giving them your business card, by all means, you’ll never see such a high power audience anywhere outside of Davos. But I like technology, entertainment and design, and in 2008 – the EG is more of that, and TED is less.

Because of the posh nature inherent in these events, it’s all comfy and nice. TED has it all over EG for the corporate sponsorships, the plush goodie bags, the really REALLY cool parties created exclusively for us each night. I remember them all fondly– I was made to feel like a movie star at the Academy Awards, red carpets and all. At EG I missed the ritual of digging through my TED bag like a kid after Halloween, sorting the great stuff (my KEEN shoes, the Vosage chocolate, the original copies of Cradle to Cradle) from the crap (a block of Lucite with some model of car miraculously etched into the center; some icky new organic candy bar; a stuffed animal with the Target logo on it). But the bags were always cool.

And I’ve missed the TED bookclub! Now THAT was something I looked forward to all year: getting books hand picked for us, usually by TED speakers (past or upcoming), and sent every month or two… I never gave a crap about Oprah’s picks, but Chris Anderson nailed it with those books. EG doesn’t have any of that. If you want or need it posh, you’ll have to stick with TED. I don’t. Like TED, the EG is off-the-charts high in talent density but it’s low on fluff. Now perhaps that was mostly just this year, and this bad economy. But I think it’s probably the ethos of the event.

The parties at the EG were just simple parties. There were good appetizers moving around. The music wasn’t so pounding you couldn’t talk with the Nobel laureate nearby (okay, I didn’t talk to any Nobel laureates, but plenty of authors, inventors, scientists and really interesting people). I guess it was simple, and almost humble, and it felt home made and oddly sincere.

Wurman was often caustic in old TEDs – he’s found a calmer gentle side I guess, but it didn’t matter; Mike Hawley was the MC, the host, the architect and artist who assembled the event. Mike seems to be friends with – and liked by – everyone. Me included. The entire conference was some perverse family reunion at times, but you always felt close to him. I never really got that feeling from Chris Anderson, although I have friends who do. Anderson has a great heart, but he’s a business tycoon. He’s rich. Hawley is a scientist, educator, artist and humanitarian. Before any of this conference stuff, he was friends with folks like Steve Jobs, Michael Crichton, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Amy Tan… and for reasons I can’t explain, that difference shapes the conferences differently.

The other worthy difference is this: EG is a for-profit venure, as TED used to be; but TED today is the face of a non-profit, the Sapling Foundation, and this also affects the tone, content, and mission of the conference. But in the end, when I want to be inspired by technology, entertainment, and design, EG works best for me.

While I’m no Mike Hawley, I’m more like him than I am like Chris Anderson, and perhaps that lends me to find more of a home in a place like the EG.

Mike's weak suit (at least this year), was the D (Design). There were many photographers at EG, but i would have enjoyed more designers, a couple innovative architects, and just a smattering of scientists. It wasn't bad, but maybe Chee Perlman or Wurman himself can assist more in attracting those folks...

So there you have it. I love both conferences, but effective this year, I’m switching from a long-standing love affair with TED and landing comfortably in the warm embrace of the EG. I’m looking forward to reports from Long Beach in February, and maybe Anderson will still nail the delivery. He’s got a lot of this right, after all. But my endorsement is that if you want to experience this kind of mind-expanding conference – and if you’ve got the money you won’t be sorry – sign up for the EG in 2009. It’s small and still exclusive so sign up soon. I’ll write about my experiences at this years' conference in the next posting, and add some photos I took. If you attended EG, I’d love to hear your feedback as well. Cheers.

The EG '08

2008-12-10T20:26:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I'm off to Mike Hawley's "EG" Entertainment Gathering. I'm really interested to see how this feels as compared to TED, which has now moved on to larger, greener pastures. The EG is the UN-TED. Or Proto-TED. TED Classic. I'm not sure of the elevator pitch. Regardless, it really should be fun. I'll be taking photos and posting them here or to Flickr. I'll be here and there over the next few days if you're looking for me.

Here are my early thoughts concerning EG and TED.

And the EG schedule: