Quick Hit: Good bye, TWiT

We've posted on our more personal blog about how we've grown a little disillusioned with This Week in Tech (TWiT). The broader points are still there. TWiT episode 191 sealed the deal, and with a heavy heart today we are clicking "unsubscribe".

The issues with this podcast were myriad: Most people attribute it to the wine that they consume during the podcast. This is a dodge, and something that Leo is using to deflect from the real problems with the show.

The first is that Leo, bless his soul, is producing too much. He likes to brag about how many hours a week is broadcasting, but because of that the points in his shows are getting muddled and unfocused. He's not sure where he talked one issue or the other, or with whom. Points are being made over and over, and even when he has been corrected on one podcast he will make the same accusation on another. The quality of the shows themselves has suffered: Instead of planning them he just reads a bunch of talking points with no real idea where the discussion is going to go. We've said this before and we'll say it again: he should check out the Slate gabfest podcasts (both political and cultural) to see how a podcast can be both informal and have a structure AND finish in a reasonable amount of time.

Secondly, most of the people on the panel are NOT interested in what others have to say. TWiT 191 was a prime example of that. While Lisa Bettany and Shira Lazar were trying to discuss their take on the issues at hand, Dvorak and Leo were more interested in teasing, joking, and interrupting. Constantly. It was insulting and frustrating. But wine or not, this happens on almost every podcast.

Thirdly, and this is the most painful one, Leo's attitude towards female panelists if so markedly different from his attitude to mail panelists that it's distressing. For example, he would never introduce Wil Harris as "the handsome Wil Harris", but he will talk about the "the beautiful Molly Wood", as well as spend a good part of a podcast talking about how he was intrigued that she had a tongue piercing. Often when he does talk to them, they rarely get the chance to interact on the same level as the men. TWiT 191 had a prime example of that when Lisa (we believe: we have difficulty with voices, male or female, when we can't see faces) discussed her issues with blogging. We're paraphrasing, but it wasn't much different than this:

Lisa: And then, after a while, when you start getting compliments, you start to pander
Leo: Like "You're so beautiful, and I love your picture"
Lisa: No, I mean in terms of what you write and how you treat your subject matter.

To ANYONE seeing the first point, the only way you could get to the second point is if you thought what that person brought to the table was their looks. We actually had to pause the podcast at that point, because it just seemed so odd that in a conversation about on-line writing THAT would be the topic he'd grab on to: What's it like being pretty?

We are still going to listen to MacBreak Weekly, because that podcast is a little more focused, though even the quality of that has gone downhill since Merlin Mann left despite Andy Ihnatko's attempt to keep it more focused. We will probably check in from time to time, but right now we have too much to do in a week to spend almost two hours listening to something unfocused, simply parroting news we can get somewhere else.

It's in the can.

The Invention Tournament: Low-Tech Division

We're trying to lose weight. We don't ever expect to be skinny, but we want to at least be proportional. We want to live and eat and have an all around healthier lifestyle. In short, we want to leave a beautiful corpse.

A big part of that is fresh fruits, especially if those are replacing junk food either brought into work or bought while at at work. A nice bunch of grapes and an apple...so much better than a bag of chips or some fruit candies, and they fit nicely in our lunch bag. What does not travel nicely, though, are bananas. Bananas are nice and healthy snacks that give a lot of energy, especially after a good workout. If the banana is all bruised and broken, then we don't like it, we don't eat it, and then we get hungry and buy a bad snack.

But how? How can one bring a banana into work and make sure that it can be transported safely so that it can be consumed as a delicious, nutritious snack later in the day.

Enter...THE BANANA GUARD!

The Banana Guard is a great example of a simple solution to a simple problem. It's two pieces of molded plastic on a hinge. You open the guard and put the banana in, like so

It fits almost every size of banana. The most we've ever had to do to make it fit is to trim the stem a little. Then, when it's in you close it and your banana is in a hard, plastic breathable case. It can take a great deal of punishment in your backpack or purse, and still keep your banana fresh and blemish free for lunch. You can get them at http://www.bananaguard.com/

We think that the Banana Guard, with its simple design and effectiveness is a worthy entrant in our search for Simply the Greatest, Most Revolutionary Invention Ever.

And here's what the banana guard looks like closed.

Don't buy it in pink

The Shiny: Twitter gets all schoolyard.

Imagine you're watching the news and a story comes on where the lead anchor says he wants to get 100,000 emails into his BlackBerry so that people can find out what he's doing every day. Now imagine that the person he's interviewing who is promoting his new sitcom about parenthood called "Formulas for All" says that he wants to get to the same amount, and can do it faster.

Your first thought would be "When did Global News Night Network become grade six?" and then move on to something else.

So why was everyone falling all over themselves to help Ashton Kutcher and CNN get to one million followers on twitter. Because that's what happened, and that's what everyone did. People talked about the milestone that this was, and wondered who would win. 

That wasn't annoying enough. What was annoying is that CNN covered it like a real news story. They tracked the numbers, had people re-tweet, gave links to their feed to get people to join. We won't go into the list of things that weren't covered, because we're not sadists.

The most compelling stories, the most interesting ones, have a certain element in them that keeps you reading. We're certain there is an actual term for this, but for now let's call it the "Now What?" factor. It's why serialized movies were so popular, and why Charles Dickens published his books in installments. What makes a story compelling is that element, the element that makes people sit in their car or miss their subway stop to find out "What next?". Maybe the term is "The Stakes". What are the stakes, what happens if our hero meets his goal, or if he is vanquished by the villain. Will he get all he wants, or will there be consequences to his actions and desire that he did not anticipate. 

The Kutcher/CNN ego stroke had NO STAKES. None. It was very schoolyard: I can get more friends than you can. No you can't. Yes I can. Well I double dog dare you!

So they all went and got their friends, and some of their friends brought friends and they filled up the playground. People who weren't interested, or doing something else got wrapped up in it all. Meanwhile, the kids who were trying to organize a litter clean up on the ball field had to do all the work themselves. Both teams counted their friends and their friends of friends, and then one was declared the winner.

Now what? You have all your friends, you proved your point. Bravo. Here's a cookie. 

Now what are you going to do with them? Since you were both more concerned about quantity over quality and proving that you are a really popular guy, you now have a rag tag bunch of people with little or no investment in what you were doing in the first place. Most will scatter, some will stick around, but the quality that you brought will be minuscule in the end because there was no message, no investment, no cause. Just "I have more friends than you".

Meanwhile, the kids cleaning the part of the playground, the part that most people will live in? They'll keep doing it. That's just what they do. That's what they believe in. They'll get annoyed that all these new people keep messing it up, but they'll keep cleaning it so that other kids someday will have a schoolyard, and maybe then they won't be interested in counting so much as being accountable.

Ten Commandments For Not Being a Jerk on the Internet

We've been around the Internet a long time. How long? We were on it when we didn't even know what it was. We thought it was just some little connection for universities to use.

In that time we've seen a lot of things rise and fall, rise and fall, fall some more and rise again. We've seen many chat clients, message boards, and communications formats come up.Seeing them all has convinced us that there are certain patterns, certain behaviors that manifest themselves over and over again. With our wisdom and experience we have distilled these observations down to Ten Commandments for Not Being a Jerk on the Internet.

These are in no particular order. Enjoy.

1) Only use LOL if it's funny
This goes for twitter postings, Facebook statuses, emails, anything. There is nothing inherently funny about it snowing, so why do we see postings like "It's snowing again LOL"? LOL means "laughing out loud". It does not mean "cheerful resignation in the face of things that we cannot control" (that's called "CRITFOTTWCC"). If you HAVE to use these acronyms, or some other way to make sure that no one else can possibly interpret anything you say without you having to make an effort (more on that later), please use them properly.

2) Don't be too pleased with yourself
Everyone loves their own writing. We'll admit that we sometimes read our own stuff and think that we're mighty clever. Just as often, though, we'll read something that we thought was clever and cringe. Everything you write has that potential, so treat it as such. Don't send a link to something you wrote, or tell someone a story in an email or on a board and frame it as "This is SO interesting!". Let them decide. Just tell the story the best that you can. If it is funny, or interesting, it will come out that way. The corollary to this: posts about the medium you are posting on are the equivalent of wearing the band's t-shirt to the concert.

3) A comma, a period, even a dash all go a long way to making a sentence readable
Take a second, read your twitter post /status update/text message/email back to yourself and take a small breath with every comma and a longer one with every period. If you find that you're losing your breath as you read it, break it down a little bit. We know it's only 140 characters (or a little longer if you're writing a Facebook status, or as long as you want in an email), but there's still room to clarify your point. If it's easier to make sense of what you're saying more people will read it and reply to it.

4) Consider your context
When you write something you know the whole story. Assume that effectively 99% of the people reading will not know anything about you or your story. If only a few people can fully appreciate it, it's an inside joke and you should just send it to them/post it to their feed. An inside joke can be something serious, but if only a few people understand your context the effect is the same: it becomes noise, and then the rest of your postings become noise also.

5) Don't use/overuse smileys
We at The Times have a mission statement: Smiley Free Since 1993. (Actually, it's more like 1995, but things that rhyme are true). We noticed that a reliance on smileys was making us lazy writers. Some people might not get a joke, or know that something is a joke, or that something is "ironical" but the onus is on you as the writer to think about what you're writing. Smileys were used because people maintained that you could not read things like tone and inflection online. You know where else you can't read things like tone and inflection? Shakespeare. He's done okay. If you are clear and communicate well, even in 140 characters your intent will be understood.

6) Realize that what you say WILL have unintended consequences
No matter how hard you try, someone will get offended or misread you at some point. For the love of everything, do not take the attitude that you're "keeping it real" or say something like "it's your fault that you took it the wrong way". You're giving yourself an excuse to be lazy and selfish. Yes, there are times that people will just get offended for the sake of being offended, but that doesn't give you license to be rude or ignorant. You have a few minutes before you have to hit send, read it over as if you were someone else. If it does offend someone, try to understand why it did to see if it's something you said or the way they took it, and sort it out.

7) Don't tell people to forward what you've said.
If what you've written is good, or informative, we'll do that. Please don't tell us to forward it or retweet it unless it's crucial. Otherwise we just feel like we're being used. (We also know that in the past we have asked people to do so, and have also realized what a selfish gesture this is. Don't expect to see it again).

8) Say something once, why say it again?
This ties into the second commandment. The way we see it, for example, you can post two notifications about a blog post: one in the morning and one at night to cover the market. After that, it's like you're trolling for bass: it's slow and boring and no one really cares anymore. It's good to have a theme, a vision, a voice, but don't tell us the same story over and over again.

9) A list or link doesn't tell me as much about you as you do.

Sharing information is fun, sharing links is fun, sharing quiz answers is fun also. But if we're following you, or friends with you, or talking to you, show some of you. Share an opinion on something from time to time, otherwise you're just another RSS feed to us. We follow and read people that we find interesting. People, not articles.

10) Don't be first
Elvis Costello said "I don't want to be first, I just want to last". It's tempting in this world to want to be the first to comment on something. But resist that temptation. If you're in a rush to say something before someone else does, that means that even you recognize that what you're going to say isn't that original. Let the dust settle a bit.

(There's a corollary that we'd like to propose and which we've already written about: please stop using FAIL as a verb noun, (ed note: We confused a verb and a noun We hate ourselves as much as you do right now). or as a catch-all for the things that you don't agree with.)

Like the Biblical Ten Commandments , the Ten Commandments of the Internet can be boiled down to two: Think about what you're going to say and Make it either useful or interesting.

The rest, as we say, is noise.

Must Haves That Never Should Have Been

A few weeks ago (has it been that long already?) we wrote a little story about PointCast and how it was an idea not so much ahead of its time, but an idea living in a completely different timeline. PointCast required so many resources and so much investment in time and energy from the user that it could never fulfill its promise. Something much simpler, the RSS reader, did the same thing and with less overhead and it is now the defacto method for getting push data.

This got us at The Times to thinking: What are some other "great" ideas from the early days that in retrospect were complete wastes of everyone's time.

1. Animated GIFs
   Yes, animated gifs are still with us, or at least the concept of an animated image. Now they are usually flash advertisements or embedded movies, but the fundamental concept is the same. They're all about making a logo more interesting and interactive. When we were working our first real job, our employer would charge extra for an animated gif on the site. We're not sure, but we're convinced that the an animated gif really didn't encourage people to click on a logo any more than a static gif, considering each had the same placement on the page. Still, we'd invest the time into creating one. (Ed Note: The best one we ever saw wasn't for a client at all. We had a gif that was on fire that said "Hot jobs". Above it was the "Search" button, unrelated. Our graphics designer created a version of the search button that would slowly grow darker and darker until it was completely charred, as if the fire from "Hot jobs" were burning it. It was up there for months until one day our manager had left the page idle over lunch. When he came back he had a minor coronary wondering where the search button went. Good times...)
   
   
2. Blink tag.
   Yes, we know the blink tag is the punchline to every early HTML joke (well, that and the marquee tag, and nesting one inside the other), but there was a time when it was crucial. All it did was blink the text (the marquee tag made the text scroll across the screen; now imagine them in tandem). If you didn't close the tag properly, your entire site text would blink. For that reason it was dropped, and we're not even sure any browser supports it anymore. But it was there, and people used to ask for it. We'd have requests to make a link blink, or a piece of text blink in a posting because this would get people's attention. We think this rationale might have been the first time we heard the phrase "sticky eyeball", which still makes us squirm.
   
   
3. Frames
   The iFrame still exists, and it is very useful and very handy and very necessary. But the original implementation, the frame, was horrible. Imagine a part of the page that doesn't scroll while another part does. Great idea. Imagine that this part that doesn't scroll still has a big ugly border around it, and if improperly coded or designed it also has scroll bars. Now imagine two or three of these on a page to provide sub navigation. Imagine also that a 15" screen is considered HUGE and not many people have them. What you then have are a whole series of ugly, unreadable pages that people considered bleeding edge. And yes, we had requests from clients to put "those frame things" on their pages. Thankfully, as with the blink tag, something better came along.
   
   
4. Javascript in the status bar
   When JavaScript came out, it really changed the way most people saw and used the browser. Now instead of just being a reader, you could script it, make it interactive. The "Hello world", the little script that showed what you could do with JavaScript, included the ability to put a scrolling message in the status bar at the bottom of the browser. This is the area where you can look and see what page a link leads to, or the status of the current page (if there are errors, etc). This script was meant to be used for communications of that nature, but everyone thought it would be cool to put extra little messages there. Our company thought the best thing to put there was information on how to contact the sales team to buy advertising on the site.
   

   US: But people won't want to sit there and wait for this message to scroll to get the information. Also, if they move their mouse over a link it will break the scroll and they'll wonder where their information went. You're asking them to sit and look at a page for information they might not be interested in. Couldn't you do the same thing by just having a link that says either 'Contact sales department' or 'About us'?
   THEM: No, silly webmaster. We put the scroll here to show what the site can do, and then we'll use that to sell advertising. In fact, we might even sell that area for ads.
   US: How do you plan to sell advertising on something that people have to stare at instead of getting their work done?
   THEM: Just do it. We prepared a work order. These tech people don't understand what the Internet is for.
   

   What do you see on sites now? "About us" and "Contact us" links. What do you not see? Crucial information about a company in a little status bar, slowly scrolling.
   
   
5. Music.
   It used to be that be taken seriously, you had to have MIDI music playing when you loaded your site. If you wanted to really show off, you had a pause button on the screen as well. Forget copyright issues, it was just annoying and added nothing to the experience. While this still exists in Flash websites, at least it's not as prevalent as it used to be.

Five things that once every site had to have, which have thankfully either been improved or done away with. There's also DIVX, but that's for another time.

We're sure there are ones we're missing, so use the comment link below to share any that you might remember.