Ex Machina: Jack Graham's Blog

Hey, this Apple wireless mouse on my desk uses plain old AA batteries! I was expecting something needlessly proprietary. Thank you, Apple Mouse Battery, for not existing — and may you continue to exist only as a fever dream visited upon mid-level Apple marketing executives.

I finally got 9.5. BBEdit with autocomplete is like having ninjas for backup.

I’m currently checking out Compendium, a blogging and social media platform. It’s a nice piece of work, but what’s interesting about it is that it takes a totally different approach to blogging from the content-centric run of the mill. Instead, it analyzes your content, automatically tags your page by keywords, and then tells you if your post is sufficiently key-wordy. As a content admin, you’re encouraged to create as much content as possible in an effort to saturate your chosen keywords with links to your content in search results. The tactic is a powerful one in the near to mid term, but what does it do to search results over time?

What’s happened on the corporate side of the blogosphere is interesting. We create content for the sake of raising keyword relevance. I haven’t found a lot of competitors to C0mpendium (I’m looking for them, to compare), but I have a strong feeling their approach will become widespread. Will search engines respond? If every company that can afford it uses high-relevance blog posts to brush aside things like Yelp reviews, will they change their algorithms in response?

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Hypothesis: The move to downloadable content hurts burglars, because CDs & DVDs, once easy to sell, are now less common & fetch a lower price.

I’ve been doing a tour de e-mail preference centers the last few days. I just returned from a seven week leave from my job, and I’m unsubbing from a lot of lists I’d put myself on for research purposes in an effort to clean up my e-mail.

I came across this amusing mistake from Urban Outfitters.

The site doesn’t recognize me, so it flashes up a SUBSCRIBE TO E-MAIL pop-up… On the e-mail unsubscribe page!

Oops. Don’t do this on your site!

Augspace is growing!

Today, Shareable.net ran Five Ways Augmented Reality Is Making Your Life More Shareable, part one of two guest posts I wrote on augmented reality. Part one focuses on present day AR applications. Part two (running tomorrow) speculates on applications we could see over the next two decades.

These posts are part of a series called Shareable Futures. The other guest posters include science fiction luminaries such as Corey Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Paolo Bacigalupi. I highly recommend checking out their posts, too.

I realized today that it’s been several years now since that last time I worked on a major project that didn’t use Basecamp. This isn’t just because we’ve come to favor it where I work now. I’ve done a few side jobs in the games industry and found that my collaborators were already using Basecamp. Vendors I work with regularly suggest it, too. Some even look a little downcast when they find out they don’t get to initiate me into its many joys.

Still, there are people out there who still think Gantt charts painstakingly rendered in Microsoft Excel are the only way to do things. Old school project documentation has its place, to be sure, but it can’t touch some of the ways I’ve used Basecamp. A few examples of these uses will explain why I’m a huge fan of 37signals.

• E-mail Papertrail. “I said, and then the vendor said, and then I said…” …and then there’s a gap in the correspondence right where you thought the vendor had agreed a given feature was in scope. Oops. Even with modern e-mail clients, keeping track of all of the conversations that fly around during a project can be nigh impossible. My solution for a while now has been to have these conversations in Basecamp, and if they don’t start there, to move them there as soon as they look  important. Having important discussions in a threaded, searchable repository is much better than keeping them in e-mail, especially when you go looking for them two years later.
• Bug Tracker. For some projects, there’s no substitute for an industrial strength bug tracker like Bugzilla or Mantis, but sometimes you don’t need the level of detail provided by Bugzilla. It can even make the QA process more cumbersome. Basecamp can be a nice alternative. My approach is to create a new project specifically for tracking bugs, then create categories corresponding to bug status.
  For example, on a recent project where I was tracking issues in a large batch of e-mail campaigns, I created one category for “open” and another for “resolved.” I further divided them by the subject matter of the e-mails, and I ended up with something like this:
  • Finance e-mails/open issue
  • Finance e-mails/resolved
  • Call Center e-mails/open issue
  • Call Center e-mails/resolved
  • etc…

  I then opened a message thread in the relevant category each time a new bug needed to be addressed. The beauty of Basecamp in this role is that you can change the category of a message thread. So once I had an issue resolved, I just re-categorized the thread to the relevant “resolved” bucket.

• Face Book. The “People” feature in Basecamp does something awesomely simple that you don’t get from e-mail or business cards: it lets you put in your picture. I love this feature, and I wish everyone would use it. On big projects where one company or both might be quickly introducing large teams to each other, you’ll probably remember the people from the other side whose roles dovetail with yours. But it can be hard keeping track of everyone else, and it’s not as if people automatically exchange LinkedIn profiles. I’m good at remembering people, but I’m sure this feature has helped people remember me a few times.

Finally, I love 37signals’ commitment to keeping this product simple. If I need a Gantt chart, a list of resources with billable hours, or some other feature Basecamp lacks, it’s easy enough to supplement what it does with documents produced in other products. Meanwhile, the core app remains fast and easy to use.

Basecamp isn’t just a tool. I’d say it’s more like a secret weapon, but most smart people with big projects know about it by now… and that is all to the good.

I totally did not get this xkcd strip from 19 May 2010 -- and that's awesome!

I have a lot of feeds on my Google Reader account, but one of the few that I read religiously is Randall Munroe’s xkcd.

I’m going to risk some major geek cred here to make an embarrassing admission: I don’t always understand the punchline in xkcd strips.

It’s like that old game show, Win Ben Stein’s Money. Just about every episode is an intelligence test disguised as a joke. When I get it, it’s funny — and genuinely funny, not funny in an arch, “Oh, aren’t we so smart because we get this?” way. When I don’t get it, I always google the punchline. Invariably it’s something interesting, even if it’s not related to my field or my interests.

Today’s strip inspired this post. How IP addresses are assigned isn’t your usual fodder for comic strips, and like most punchlines, it’s not as funny if you have to do research to understand it. But I do get the punchline in xkcd strips often enough that it makes me want to figure out what I missed in the ones where I don’t.

I love it when comedy works hard at making us smarter. I wish there were more comic strips like this.

I recently did a series of guest posts for Latitude Research on AR. In general, I highly recommend checking out Latitude’s blog, Life Connected. They post on a lot of interesting stuff, mostly but not exclusively in the interactive marketing space. Their writing tends to be thoughtful and a lot more forward-thinking than the average marketing blog. It’s become a regular read for me.

I also just turned in a pair of longer posts on the topic which have a more speculative angle. These will be appearing on another blog in March. I’m looking forward to being able to link to them.

Thank you once again, Google.

A month ago, I was fretting over the semantic fate of augmented reality, a technology which I believe passionately has critical implications for the way we learn, play, do business, and interact with other people. The first month of AR’s life as a tech buzzword had involved it being co-opted to describe what I call pseudo-AR. Esquire‘s AR issue and the toy line for Avatar aren’t true AR; they’re more like at-home greenscreening using fiduciary markers.

Was AR in danger of being identified with a bunch of limited scope parlor tricks, things that only scratch the surface of what this technology is really about? This is a dangerous place for an emerging technology, so I devoted the first part of my talk to Social Media Club Boston last month to disambiguating true AR — the stuff that overlays digital information on your perception of the real world — from pseudo-AR.

Well, I guess I needn’t have worried. Sure, there were already some dynamite true AR apps out there, like Super Pages, Layar, and Wikitude World Browser, but, well… they weren’t made by Google. The conversation was being dominated by the gimmickmongers — until Goggles reared its Googly head and set the conversation back on course. Those who’ve already used Goggles, which I’ll be talking about more in a coming post, might point out that it lacks some of the real time qualities of other AR apps. That said, the essence of true AR is there: a device, in this case your Android phone, takes your perceptions and enhances them with data from the Net.

So, now that we all know that AR is not about pointing your web cam at an action figure and watching it flit around on your computer screen, I can concentrate on writing about why it’s so important and how it will change our lives.

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts about the state of augmented reality technology and likely future developments.