silencematters

I am making some changes to reading, scanning and sharing patterns for 2013, effective immediately.

I deleted all 174 of my feeds in my Google Reader.

There are a handful of feeds (blogs) that I end up subscribing to year after year, but the majority of feeds I subscribe to over the course of a year are only interesting for a short period of time, or worse, turn out to be just average. And reading many things that are only mildly interesting leads to sharing average quality things. What goes in, goes out.

Starting fresh with Google Reader and other social services is something that I have been doing for a few years now, and I find that it keeps the process of discovery alive and interesting for most of the year.

There are two apps on my phone, where most of my reading is done, that provide me with more than enough high quality reading material at any point in the day — The New York Times and Byline (Google Reader app).

As for Twitter, last year I chose to un-follow everyone I had followed over the previous five years and start over, when the time was right. So far the time is not right to go back to using Twitter. I have yet to figure out a way to use Twitter that doesn’t lead me down the path of:

1. self marketing
2. drowning in other people’s mildly interesting updates
3. wishing I had spent that 20 mins differently
4. being guilty of putting out a mildly interesting feed to the people who follow me

If I do go back to Twitter, I have a feeling it will largely be for distribution reasons and brand building. I highly doubt I will have a turn of heart and leap into the family of good vibes and high fives anytime soon.

There are three needs I am seeking in a social service.

1. More freedom. I want freedom to say the things that you can actually say to friends. I want the freedom to post an unfinished thought.
2. I want freedom from the drivel of inspirational quotes and happy family photos, until I am ready to see them. And I want to be able to share my own drivel of happy family photos and updates to family and friends.
3. I want to share a handful of thoughtful ideas and links and maybe have a conversation around those ideas (more on this in 2013).

On Facebook, I am going to try setting the default audience to “friends” for everything I post. While all of my public subscribers will only see posts that I specifically mark as public. This does create an additional step when I want to post public items, but I think that is fair given that I want my public items to be well considered.

For photos, I am going to make a more conscious use of Flickr, less use of Instagram. And when I use Instagram, it will be largely to post images to Instagram and not use it to feed other things like Flickr and Facebook. Facebook photos are really for family and friends, but I need some place to put 35 photos of sandstone from Moab or a large set of photos from The Rockaways post Hurricane Sandy, and Flickr is the place for that at the moment.

And lastly, in 2013 I am hoping to release a few things that I have been working on.

May your 2013 be interesting!

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why words, names, and labels matter.

A conversation with Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand about the start of The WELL almost 30 years ago and what they learned about building community, managing trolls and helpful worrying about the future.

I am officially on App.net as @jz, for those of you who have an account. It is really refreshing to be part of a something small-ish again, and enter into a global stream where you know few people, and the majority of the conversations are about making something great.

A lot of (mostly positive) chatter going around about the standards that Adobe is proposing.

David Kimmelman — Pictures of Parisian taxidermy artist, Mathieu Miljavac, with a Q & A by Autumn Whitehurst.

“It feels like a bubble, but it’s really just a hot market.” — Launch

Or to put it another way — the inside of a bubble feels a lot like a hot market.

Dave Winer — It’s definitely a bubble.

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself… Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”- Chuck Close

Matt Gemmell posted a thorough tutorial on how to set up your iPad 3 with your Mac and preview how OS X may look on a retina device. If anything, it is worth definitely worth following these steps just to set up your iPad3 as a second screen off of your laptop.

Domus interviews lead designer Nicholas Felton about filtering the noise of social media and mirroring personal memory.

The Scale of the (known) Universe.

Also, I have an IFTTT task set up to send me an e-mail each day from their feed.

Startups, this is how design works.

Wonderfully rendered watercolor and toner map tiles for use on OpenMaps and Google Maps.

How to Hire a Programmer — Advice that goes well beyond just hiring programmers.

Your system needs to jitter to avoid the thundering herd:

If your system doesn’t jitter then you get thundering herds. Distributed applications are really weather systems. Debugging them is as deterministic as predicting the weather. Jitter introduces more randomness because surprisingly, things tend to stack up.

1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then — that’s it. Don’t hang around.

— from Billy Wilder’s tips for screenwriters, (via A List of Note)

How to play Calvinball. Brilliant game. Well played.

In the future….

I will visit the New York Times site, and you will visit the New York Times site, and at the same time in the same day we will see different news depending on our interests and what our friends have read.

I highly doubt this.

A running list of assumptions about the future.

Move the Web Forward – You can make the web as awesome as you want it to be.

Little Printer – I can think of a thousand better uses for this around the house and in the office.
Coming in 2012.

Backyard and Beyond — Matthew Wills writes about the hidden nature within New York City. Everything from the bugs, to the trees, the flora, the fauna, the rats and the how the seasons affect this hidden ecosystem in the city.

A blog about textiles from the Design Center at Philadelphia University. They house 200,000+ objects related to textiles and fashion.

Amazing. A script for grabbing the dominant color or color palette from an image. In 2006, Joshua Davis gave me a php script that pulled dominant colors out of images and it changed my life and the way I incorporate color in a design. This script looks to be a little more applicable to web applications.

Wow, not only does The Smithsonian have a music archive, but they have a store too, where they have a number of of albums recorded by Tony Schwartz for purchase, both digitally and in hard copy.

Tony Schwartz is a perfect examples of a life lived under the influence of curiosity and wonder, and I want to be reminded of his work on a daily basis.

Beginning in the 1940s, Tony Schwartz made tens of thousands of recordings of the sounds and people of New York City. Schwartz’s “endangered sounds” were included in numerous WNYC radio broadbcasts and record albums over the years

Sam Roberts on City Room has a really outstanding post that helps to detail more of the accomplishments and cultural impact that Tony Schwartz had on media and telling stories with sound.

Mr. Schwartz recorded tour guides, singing children, fire engines, fog horns, merry-go-round calliopes, cabbies and other urban folkloric sounds that produced the city’s collective voice now archived at the Library of Congress and collected in his albums. He defined the sound of speech as “the body language of the written word.”

You can see and hear more of Tony’s work in a retrospective this Wednesday:

Mr. Schwartz’s advertisements, 30,000 folk songs, poems, conversations, stories and dialogues that he recorded, along with his 27 years of radio programs on WNYC and WBAI will be the subject of a retrospective Wednesday at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Matthew Barton, curator of recorded sound at the Library of Congress will conduct an illustrated exploration of “Tony Schwartz and the Sounds of His City.”

Cory Doctorow — There is no copyright policy, only Internet policy; there is no Internet policy, only policy.

There just isn’t such a thing as ‘‘copyright policy’’ anymore. Every modern copyright policy becomes Internet policy – policy that touches on every aspect of how we use the net.

And as we make the transition from a world where everything we do includes an online component to a world where everything we do requires an online component, it’s becoming the case that there’s no such thing as ‘‘Internet policy’’ – there’s just policy.

Worth reading.

Simplify. Don’t give your users the shit work. (via Brent Simmons)