I forgot to mention that my birthday was yesterday. But the fact that I’m now 30 isn’t important–Halloween, on the other hand, is. Being born the day before Halloween means October 31st becomes a very important moment in time every year.
We’ll be trick and/or treating this evening. But prior to that, even though yesterday was my birthday, I have a present for all of you. It’s a drawing I did of Frankenstein’s monster. Enjoy!
And HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
(click for larger image)
Between grinding on Maple Story and drawing comics, I’ve been pretty busy lately. But I haven’t forgotten all 27 of you dedicated readers. Well, yes I have.
I was going to say I hate Google Docs, but that’s a bit strong. Anyone who had documents with Writely prior to the big server shift yesterday will know what I mean. Writely had a sexy, lean, smooth, web 2.0 interface. The ajax was slick, the usability was high.
Then, Google got their hands on it.
All the sexiness of the Writely interface is gone, replaced with cold text links and unappealing, flat colors. Now, it looks like Gmail. I may like how Gmail works, but I hate how it looks. It’s the same look that Google Spreadsheets had, which has now been merged with Writely to create the abhorrent beast that is Google Docs.
I’ll likely get used to it, but after spending so much time in the friendly Writely environment, moving into the harsh, abrasive Google Docs world will be a drastic shift.
Where are all the designers in Google? Why aren’t they making sure this stuff looks good, in addition to working wonderfully? Isn’t design just as important as usability?
Well, it is to me.
So, Mike talks to the Online News Association at their annual conference about how they’re becoming obsolete, and wonders why they were so suddenly so antagonistic towards him? Please. It shouldn’t be a surprise to you, Mike, that you were treated as the young, energetic upstart to their aging dinosaur.
You can’t wait for the dinosaur to change, and you can’t tell it how to adapt. A giant meteor is heading towards the mainstream news organizations, and it’s high time they just died out peacefully.
The best thing to do is not point out the fact that they don’t get technology and never will. Let them believe they are the industry leader, and when the world comes crashing down around them, new leaders will emerge. Leaders that have the will and capacity to take what works and keep it functional.
You did everything you could, Mike. You warned them. You told them how they could go about making better decisions. You even did it for free. Now, it’s up to them to take action. They won’t, and that’s not your fault. Now, if they die out, it’s their problem, not ours.
This is all coming from a guy who hasn’t opened a newspaper in two years.
Looks like popular photo site Shutterfly had a very successful opening on the stock exchange. Good for them! Marshall does an excellent job of pointing out why people (like my wife and I) use Shutterfly. The best advantage? Holiday cards. We’ve used Shutterfly to send out our holiday cards for the past three years, and it has been phenomenal. Load up a photo, design a card, throw in all your addresses, and let Shutterfly do the laborious part of sending all the cards out for you. Sure, it’s more expensive than doing it yourself, but the benefit is in the fact that A) it actually gets done, and B) you get more time to enjoy the holidays instead of stuffing envelopes. And really, it’s not all that expensive at all. Just more expensive than manual labor.
Let’s hope this is a first step to an even more successful future for Shutterfly.
Evidently I didn’t miss the boat on Bordee. It’s only recently launched and is getting noticed. I’ve been playing around with it, and there’s something magnificent that I’ve discovered.
I went to the Bordee homepage and looked around at the Bordee topics posted there. I wandered into one post about a new Weebl’s flash. Someone had posted saying basically “take a look at this, it’s pretty cool.” I was trying to find a link to whatever it was he was pointing out when it hit me like a ton of bricks.
The Bordee post itself WAS the link. It was attached to the site. I could click on the accompanying URL displayed at the top and go directly to what the poster was referring to.
I thought Bordee was a slick tool when I understood it to be nothing more than an off-site virtual messageboard. But it isn’t just that. I can go to the Bordee site, grab their RSS feed and see every topic that is placed in conjunction with any website. Which makes Bordee part digg, part del.icio.us, and part virtual messageboard. It’s actually like an aggregated messageboard. No, it’s not like one — that’s exactly what it is, and I just couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
Maybe everyone else understood this from the start, but it just now clicked for me, and it makes Bordee infinitely more extraordinary that I had originally conceived it to be.
I have to learn not to underestimate web 2.0 these days. My borders are expanding at a rate that I can’t seem to really keep up with. Do you have days like that? I’ll bet Mike Arrington doesn’t.
Is the Press Start podcast dead before it even had a chance to live? I suppose that’s a fairly leading statement. I guess I should just ask the question in the subject: where has Press Start gone? The phenomenal alt.NPR offering was the only gaming podcast I regularly listened to (aside from the excellent Evil Avatar Radio podcast, which isn’t a podcast to me, per se, since I listen to the show live every Friday evening).
I tossed an email in Kyle Orland’s general direction earlier today because it finally dawned on me this morning that the podcast had simply gone AWOL. There were two new shows every month for June, July and August. September? Absent.
Come back, Press Start. Robert Holt, Ralph Cooper, Kyle? The laughable gaming podcast market is sorely in need of your focused discussions and engaging conversations.
I just discovered a slick new web 2.0 tool that most of you have probably been using for months now. I don’t know how this slipped under my radar because it’s something that I’ve been looking for and think should get more widespread attention.
I was doing some searches for ajax-based free messageboards to join up with Nerdflood for open discussion that isn’t related directly to specific posts on the blog. What I discovered was Bordee.
Bordee is a basically a virtual messageboard that works via a Firefox extension (also works for Flock, which is my browser of choice). You install the extension and then receive a handy little icon in the top-right corner of your browser that indicates when you run across a page that has a Bordee messageboard attached to it. Any user can begin a Bordee discussion on any webpage. The Bordee page is not created on the website server, but on the Bordee server, and then discovered through the extension when you visit the site. It’s a truly amazing little piece of functionality, and I really hope this catches on. Right now visiting various high-tech traffic websites like Techcrunch, digg, and Flickr only show a couple of “hello, world” type of posts. I see tremendous potential with this kind of system. So much, that I went ahead and created a Nerdflood discussion page! The page exists on its own, but if you download the extension and visit this site, the page will become available through the extension interface, which is slick and easy to use.
As with any social system, it only works if people actually use it. So, with that, I encourage you to go to Bordee.com and install the plugin and get talking! It takes very little effort to have quick and easy access to discussion that can occur at a whole new level within the context of an existing website. It’s fantastic, and I really hope it gets more use.
I’m the large geek boy-in-man’s-body on the left.
The guy on the right is an immensely wonderful friend of mine who spent two years in the Middle East serving as a missionary with his wife.
I truly, truly enjoy having fellow nerds as friends.
Have a good weekend. =D
Fellow Nerdblog Network member, bapenguin, has a vicious rant posted on Evil Avatar today, mercilessly attacking publishers (read: Electronic Arts) for their feeble attempts at passing minimal or non-existent “upgrades” as “next-generation content”:
One of the hottest topics with next-gen games right now is the price. $59.99 sucks. But what sucks worse is when games are $59.99 and you get LESS than the current gen counterparts. And the current gen games are typically $10-$20 cheaper to boot. The biggest offenders of this by far are the sports games. FIFA was just revealed to have about 30% of the content of the current gen AND handheld versions.
This is a fantastic and heartfelt rant. Digg it here. Too bad EA and Take Two own their own respective licenses (NFL and basebal) so they can do whatever they want with their games and not face competition. The collective voices of angry gamers should be loud enough to stave off the greedy fingers of high-profile publishers who think they can get away with stuff like this.
