Thoughts and essays from the guy who coined the word "blog."
Two weeks ago I was interviewed by a producer from NPR about coining the word blog. It was for a piece on the 10th anniversary of the word “weblog,” which they ran today. (When you get to the page, click “Listen Now” — I can’t seem to find a direct link to the audio file itself.) You can hear me in there — they used about, oh, 20 seconds of my stuff. You hear me explain how I derived “blog,” and you hear me “link” to Justin Hall.
I’m using this holiday time to clear through some old links I set aside and never visited. One of them pointed me to the 1982 short film Arcade Attack. It starts off as a documentary about the rise of video games and the glory of classic pinball, and then, well, it gets weirder. Much much weirder. You can watch it online: Part I, Part II.
I don’t want to give too much away… Give yourself the 20 minutes or so it takes to complete. Don’t let the clunkiness and slowness of the filmmaking deter you — STICK WITH IT.
Resoundingly mediocre. The movie was made because we now have the technology for a convincing and interesting abandoned Manhattan. Such shots in the trailer draw you into the film, which, sadly, isn’t able to deliver much more than that.
Driving home, I shared with Stacy my frustration that, because this was a big budget Hollywood film, it sadly couldn’t be darker, and thus more interesting. I’ve never read the original novel, but this film review (which spoils the novel, but not the movie), showed me that the novel’s author recognized the importance of a truly dark and twisted scenario in order to make the story honestly compelling. Instead, the writers play it safe with cliched monsters, mindless battles, and an ending with redemption and hope.
By far, the best post-apocalyptic film about a loner and his hound is the 1975 cult classic A Boy and His Dog, starring a pre-famous Don Johnson. It’s a remarkably twisted story, and definitely worth seeing on DVD and listening to the director’s commentary track.
…how Stacy will spend the holidays. Visiting the Paleo-Future!
I had the distinct fortune and pleasure to spend an hour chatting with Don Norman, which you can listen to (mp3). Don has come up a lot in the posts on peterme.com, going all the way back to my first months of writing, in 1998, when I asked, “Whither ‘User Experience’?” (this comes up in my talk with Don). As such, I’m thrilled that he’s joining us for Adaptive Path’s UX Week 2008 conference, where I’ll get a chance to talk to him more on stage.
Speaking of our events, we’re holding an end-of-the-year sale. Next year, we’ve got three events coming to San Francisco, and all three feature special pricing through December 31st.
There’s our tried-and-true UX Intensive, February 19-22, four days of hands-on activities on the core subjects of user experience.
That’s followed by the return of MX San Francisco (April 21-22), our conference devoted to managing experience and what it takes to get great design out into the world. Though the site doesn’t yet say it, we’ve already lined up Peter Coughlan from IDEO, and we’ve got discussions going on with some great folks.
And next up we’ll have the aforementioned UX Week. The program is still firming up, but we’ve already got Don Norman, Scott Griffith (CEO of Zipcar), Adaptive Path alums Jeffrey Veen and Mike Kuniavsky, and a host of Adaptive Path staff members already lined up. This will easily be our biggest and best event yet.
I just visited the SFMOMA for the first time in about a year, and walked out drunk on art goodness. I only made it through two of the four exhibit floors… Good thing I re-upped my membership for unlimited visits in a year!
The Olafur Eliasson exhibit was revelatory — someone I knew nothing about producing fun and strange pieces that immerse you. The Jeff Wall retrospective is fine — he’s a great photographer and seeing so much work in one place is visual gluttony. I considered dipping into the Joseph Cornell exhibit before I realized I should simply give that it’s own day.
Anyway, if you’re in, or visiting, SF any time soon, do yourself a favor and head to SFMOMA. And if you know me, have me take you there and you can get in free!
On Thanksgiving, we took advantage of the holiday mellowness to see I’m Not There, the Bob Dylan “biopic” known best for having 6 people play different aspects of Dylan’s character and career. I’m no Dylan aficionado (I don’t own any of his albums), but I’m definitely aware of him and his milieu — raised middle class Jewish in Minnesota, remade himself into a Woody Guthrie-like folkie in the West Village (and squiring Joan Baez), then remade himself again as a plugged-in rock-and-roller, before flaming out, finding Jesus, etc. etc.
Unfortunately, such general knowledge doesn’t seem to be enough. From what I can tell, I’M NOT THERE is a treat for aficionados, packed with references and allusions to Dylaniana, but as an “interested layperson,” it struck me as a very ambitious film whose reach exceeded its grasp. Todd Haynes clearly had distinct ideas as to how he wanted to express Dylan’s life, and he should be commended for attempting something poetic and challenging, but it simply doesn’t come together as a good, engaging, lose-yourself-to-it film.
The disjointed nature of the narrative renders the film as a series of set pieces, some fun and/or interesting (particularly those with Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger) and some not (Christian Bale, Richard Gere). As a view, this narrative approach also kept me at arm’s length from the story, making me an observer, as opposed to a member of an audience, which limited my ability to engage emotionally… You get too caught up in the way Todd Haynes is telling the story that you don’t get caught up in the story itself.
Anyway, I would say for most folks, they can simply pass on this film — you’re not missing out on anything major or important from a cinematic standpoint.
The blogosphere is all het up with talk of Kindle, Amazon’s new e-reader, and most of what I’m reading, in the design and tech blogs, is not positive.
What I find most interesting is all the hype around Kindle, as if e-readers are new. Like, does it really warrant the cover on Newsweek? (And, hey, look familiar?)
I’ve been working near “e-books” for nearly 15 years. In 1994, when I joined the Voyager Company, they had “Expanded Books,” a line of electronic books on floppy disks. They were remarkably well suited to reading on the initial Mac laptops, particularly the PowerBook 100. We had stories of people curling up to their laptops in bed. The Expanded Books also included much of what makes “e”-reading worthwhile — searchable text, bookmarks, annotations, etc.
In the early days of this blog, I wrote a lot about the form of the book. On September 14, 1999, I wrote a long-ish passage on what makes a book a book (before I had permalinks). An excerpt:
Just what makes a book a book? It’s not its form–magazines and other periodicals often match a book’s physical properties, but would never be labelled “book.” And electronic books, which have no physical form beyond the device through which they’re viewed, still qualify as books.
Is it the content? To some extent. Unlike a magazine, a book’s content has an aura of permanence and timelessness, and delves into more involved thoughts.
Still, though, the form is important, and electronic books highlight this. I could take the exact same content, and present it either in a form like a Voyager Expanded Book, or in a single long scrolling Web page. The latter would not be called a book. The notion of page-turning is essential to the category of book, again, even if that page-turning is only being done metaphorically on a computer screen.
So, a book, at it’s core, is an object containing content of permanence presented in a page-turning medium.
And there’s this passage from John Updike’s review of the book The Book on the Bookshelf:
Our notion of a book is of a physical object, precious even if no longer hand-copied on sheepskin by carrel-bound monks, which we can hold, enter at random, shelve for future references and enjoy as a palpable piece of our environment, a material souvenir of the immaterial experience it gave us. That books endure suggests that we endure…
Materiality is central to our relationship with books. And I think this gives a clue as to why Kindle (nor any e-book reader) will never resonate the way iPod has. We’ve been able to move from analog to digital to and from atoms to bits with music because music is ephemeral, and because we don’t lust over the plastic discs (we might lust over their covers/jackets, but that’s a different manner). Whereas people *lust* over their books, smell, hug, annotate, manipulate, and that’s key to the “book experience.”
What I find my dispiriting about the discussion around Kindle is the focus on books. The Newsweek articles spends the bulk of it’s time talking about what it means to read books on a screen, though it mentions
“The Kindle is not just for books. Via the Amazon store, you can subscribe to newspapers (the Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Le Monde) and magazines (The Atlantic). When issues go to press, the virtual publications are automatically beamed into your Kindle. (It’s much closer to a virtual newsboy tossing the publication on your doorstep than accessing the contents a piece at a time on the Web.) You can also subscribe to selected blogs, which cost either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog.”
I find the promise of that far more intriguing. For many, if most people, books require some degree of permanence. Newspapers, magazines, and blogs do not. If you think of the world of documents, books comprise a very tiny portion of that, but such readers could really change our relationship with those documents.
I’m also excited about the opportunities that such readers have for hypertext (no e-book reader matches the hypertext capabilities of the original Voyager Expanded Books), and comics (easily portable infinite canvas!).
