First, a caveat: I’m not doing this to pick on Wavii. They are no different from myriad other web companies who like to run extra vowels and consonants together. I’m sure they are magnificent people whose dogs love them. However, they have the misfortune of having hit my email box at a moment when I [...]
Rapturous tunes for the Crapocalypse
Been fun knowing ya’. As we all know, the Holy Billboard of Religious Cults with Poor Design Aesthetic has spoken, and the jig is up on Saturday. It’s a shame, because I had so much more that I wanted to procrastinate around writing here. Anyway, I’ve responded to this calamity the way I do most [...]
EQV, illustrated
This morning I discovered 50 and 50, a cool art project in which 50 artists illustrate their state’s motto. One of the first — and best — is Matt Stevens‘ rendering of Our Favorite Home State’s motto:
Some not-so-loosely connected thoughts
In the last couple weeks, I’ve hit a number of articles that bubble around a lot of the business ideas I’ve been poking at lately. If you’re attentive, you’ll probably see the common thread and how that thread might relate to this very-alpha early-stage project I’m thinking about. Steve Denning on the shift from delivering [...]
Win the game by playing a different game
Fred Wilson posted a great story from his grad school days today. I won’t spoil the tale, but it’s one of a genre that I’ve long enjoyed — the rogue who wins a difficult or unwinnable game by refusing to play in a traditional fashion. The best known version in geek circles is Star Trek’s [...]
Things people don't say about advertising
I’d usually just tweet an announcement of an uproariously funny Tumblog lampooning advertising suck. But this one is so on target with the sort of advertising facepalms that made me buy the domain “justbeamazing.com” for some sort of future anti-suckage pro-awesomeness enterprise.
What's an eyeball worth?
Sarah Lacy has a Twitter-focused post on TechCrunch that touches at the heart of the struggle for most media businesses today, whether you’re talking about the almost nauseatingly fast-rising Quora or the soon-to-be-paywalled Dallas Morning News. The money quote, emphasis mine: But it’s been a few years, and it’s clear that the bloom is once [...]
When ugly gets the job done
While cooking our monster turkey the other day, I had occasion to go to the website for Mary’s Free Range Turkey (the brand of our Tom.) No Web 3.0 design awards to be won there, but as a customer, I was thrilled with the experience. I wanted to figure out how best to remove the [...]
You can't play the game if you aren't on the field
A confluence of different sources has brought similar thoughts to the front of my mind today: I had lunch with someone working to create a niche local web community and we were discussing the hard work of gathering, curating and maintaining relationships with content partners. I remarked, almost involuntarily: “Free content is the most expensive [...]