Category: Internet (Page 1 of 40)

Straplines

August 27, 2024 /

Making good things great. Digital innovation, product strategy, coaching. Family man and Yankees fan. I like minor chords and chocolate mint.

It’s been a year-plus since I’ve posted on Twitter, and today I updated my bio to just send people to my Threads account.

Because I’m @netwert on Threads (a username I really don’t like anymore, cf. this web domain, but what can you do) my bio there simply says, “I should be werty.”

I rather liked my long-time Twitter bio, though, so I saved it and am posting it here for posterity.

These things are by their nature ephemeral, of course. My Twitter bio occasionally also housed pithy commentary, including, “Ask me about my new front teeth,” and, “Charter member of the DJ LeMahieu Fan Club.” Alas, just as with LeMahieu’s batting prowess, that era has come to an end.

An incomplete list of things younger than the comp sub that gave me full access to wsj.com until its cancellation today after 24 years

July 15, 2024 /

3G cell phone service
the George W. Bush presidency
Carlos Alcaraz
Verizon
iPod
Beyonce’s solo career
Fall Out Boy
Olivia Rodrigo
9/11
Myspace
Blu-Ray
the AOL-Time Warner merger
Fandango
“Gilmore Girls”
“Monsters Inc.”
USB flash drives
Montenegro
Chrysler’s PT Cruiser
Real Simple magazine
The South Beach Diet
Mile High Stadium
West Elm
Spanx
The entire 21st century

Thank you, Joy, wherever you are.

Great blog posts

June 11, 2024 /

The Story of Etak, on Map Happenings.

Now that is a great blog post. Unexpected subject matter, in-depth research, surprising twists, a deep yearning to share it. Cross-posting it on my own blog is the right thing to do.

In this post-peak social media era, it’s gratifying to see the gradual re-emergence of blogs, and of newsletters, which I’ve taken to importing into Feedly and treating the same way. (Because really, a newsletter like Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends is really just blogging with a different delivery mechanism. In an RSS reader, they all feel the same.)

I’ve been trying to add new blogs to my circuit in recent months, while also rediscovering some old-timers who do it well. Caitlin Dewey, as mentioned above, obviously. Ironic Sans is even better now than it was in its earlier incarnation. Halfman has been a wry delight. I declared RSS Zero this morning, but I’ll try to revisit this topic with more suggestions… perhaps even a blogroll.

My default apps

November 8, 2023 /

A blog meme! I recently discovered that early blogger Chris O’Donnell is still at it, and now we’re reading each other again, and he pulled together this list (which I’m guessing started on yet another blog) so I thought I’d join in the fun.

My phone, remember, is an iPhone 13 mini.

Mail Service: whatever Pair is using, and Gmail
Mail Client: Mail app (iPhone), Gmail in the browser (desktop)
Notes: Notes app and/or BBEdit, depending on circumstance
To-Do: Due
Calendar: Calendar app (iPhone), Google Calendar in the browser (desktop)
Contacts: Contacts app (iPhone)
RSS Service: n/a
RSS Client: Feedly
Launcher: N/A
Cloud storage: both Dropbox and iCloud
Photo library: all local, baby, 33,000 images and videos clogging my laptop hard drive
Web Browser: both Chrome and Safari
Chat: Messages and WhatsApp
Bookmarks: Chrome
Reading: Magazines, the New York Times and the internet
Word Processing: Word, usually
Spreadsheets: Excel and Google Sheets, depending
Presentations: PowerPoint, mostly
Shopping Lists: Pen and paper
Personal Finance: a mishmosh
Music: iTunes, streaming subscription + local files
Podcasts: Podcasts app
Password Management: Chrome, despite buying a 1Password subscription
Social Media: Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Slack
Weather: Weather app (iPhone) and NOAA Weather (desktop)
Search: DuckDuckGo (iPhone) and Google (desktop)
Code Editor: BBEdit

“One of the world’s oldest continually publishing blogs”

November 1, 2023 /

I have had this self-congratulatory fact in the Ideapad sidebar for some time now. On November 1, 1998, I started the Ideapad. So this marks a full quarter-century of posting my thoughts online.

When I began blogging, the community was small enough that Brigitte Eaton was able to hand-compile a list of all of them. I remember there being 500 or so when I first came across it; the farthest we can see in the Wayback machine shows 1285 weblogs, including this one. The web has come a long, long way since then, and while innumerable blogs have come and gone, the Ideapad endures.

I’m not a real milestone guy, and I covered this lightly when the blog turned twenty, but I do want to acknowledge the moment.

When I reflect on what twenty-five years of blogging means, mostly it’s the persistence: my blog is still here, still publishing new content, at the same URL as when it was launched, and with almost all of the archives intact and readable. It’s not hard to do, but few do it, and when I’m blogging I’m continuing my commitment to digital longevity.

I revisited the bookmarks file referenced in 2018 to see who is still blogging, and oh, the linkrot. Let’s pause to appreciate those who keep at it. Jason Kottke, who inspired me to put up my own weblog, blogs for a living, of course. Peter Merholz, coiner of “blog,” is, blessedly, still maintaining his. Journal-bloggers like Jessamyn and Cat are still journaling away. A tip of the cap also goes to those who stopped blogging but keep their sites live, so their contributions to the formative era of the internet aren’t forgotten. I hope some of these folks see this, and I hope they realize the value of their efforts.

And to you, dear reader: I’ve long stopped looking at my site metrics, and for all I know, my only regulars are me and my mom. (Hi, Mom.) But I’m glad you stopped by, even this once, and I hope you enjoy exploring everything I’ve shared with the world these past 25 years.

Counterpoint: Music has become a ‘just-in-time’ economy. Good

October 16, 2023 /

Over on Music Industry Blog, Mark Mulligan argues that today’s streaming platforms have created a just-in-time economy for popular music, with algorithms pushing artists and labels to release a song once a month to maintain relevancy.

Mulligan’s thesis is that this is bad for creators, and in turn the industry, and it’s going to hurt musicians who need to crank out songs and feed the beast.

I have a countervailing opinion to this, which is that while Mark may be right, the shift is also fantastic—for fans.

The phenomenon of musical acts taking years to craft an album is not consistent through the history of recorded music. Indeed, it only dates back to 1983, when Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was such a phenomenon that Epic released seven of its nine tracks as singles, drastically extending the active shelf life of the most popular album in Top 40 history.

Before that, albums were thought to have a six- or eight-month sell window in record stores. So artists made a lot more music. Pick any artist from before the disco era and the volume is amazing.

Jimi Hendrix released four albums of new music in the three short years he was a solo artist.
Kiss famously recorded eight albums (including two live double LPs) in less than four years; when Pearl Jam followed up “Vs.” with “Vitalogy” after a little more than a year in the ’90s, the band went on record as saying they wished they could keep up Kiss’s pace.
The Supremes released or appeared on so many albums from 1965 to 1970 that my web browser choked on the Allmusic page.
Even Steely Dan, who were famous for their perfectionism in the studio, put out an album a year from 1972 to 1977.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers taking four years to perfect an album is not a “normal” music routine. It is the result of record labels manipulating album release cycles to maximize the return on investment of expensive studio recordings. The Chili Peppers are proof: their fourth album came out just five years after their debut, and after they got popular and major-label marketing kicked in, it took another thirteen years for the next four to come out.

Now the pendulum has swung the other way, with release cycles condensing for the same reason they expanded—maximize ROI, this time of the artist’s visibility—and artists adapting accordingly. And as a music listener, this is great news.

Most fans will be thrilled to hear a new song from their favorite artists every month or so. This harks all the way back to the 1960s, when people couldn’t get enough of the Beatles, and they locked up the top five slots of the pop chart (and twelve of the Hot 100) at the same time. Perhaps things will get further contorted, and we’ll go back to the pre-rock era, when an artist’s albums were often compilations of songs people already largely knew. This may further antiquate the concept of an album as a cohesive artistic statement, but then, MP3s started that process decades ago.

So yeah, maybe the Spotify effect is changing music release cycles, the same way it’s shortening song lengths. But hey, bring it on! More music sooner is a good thing.

iPhone 7 Plus, my personal media server

September 18, 2023 /

Last week [sic], my boss scoffed at my iPhone SE and told me to get a bigger phone, so I picked up an iPhone 7 Plus just for work. Its 5.5″ screen creates a different productivity profile than my SE, and I’m excited to see how it plays out, as I’m now carrying both devices around the office. (The SE is still my main device, and retains my phone number and core suite of apps.)

But I also maxed out my 7 Plus with a 256 GB hard drive, and I’m testing whether I can finally bid a fond, loving farewell to my old iPod Classic.

While I enjoy streaming music services, I love having all my music ready for travel, impervious to drops in network connectivity. For years, the iPod Classic, with its hearty 160 gigabyte hard drive, has been my go-to device for the car, train, plane and hotel room, and allows me to drag around nearly 20,000 songs wherever I go. While the screen and clickwheel are in good shape, the battery is starting to give out, sacrificing some of its portability.

More importantly, I have a lengthy car commute these days, and my car’s touchscreen head unit does a terrible job navigating a music library of this size. I bought a bluetooth dongle instead, which has worked well, but now I’m constantly reconnecting and managing the battery life of two gadgets, three if you include my phone.

The 7 Plus should solve much of this. Its bluetooth will connect seamlessly in the car, as my SE already does; I’ll be able to use Siri, keeping my hands and eyes focused on driving; and the big hard drive ensures I have lots of runway to add more music. (I’d been considering an iPod Touch, but they never got past 128 GB, and I couldn’t bring myself to downsize.)

I’ve been joking about the goofy system profile of my new gadget all week: half a dozen work apps and eighteen thousand MP3s. I think I have a win-win on my hands, though. I’m looking forward to trying it out.

Drafted 2017/02/16 at 1:22 am. Published unedited. I still have the iPhone 7 Plus, and it’s still my main music hard drive, keeping up with my Apple Music library adds.

Chasing the conversation

July 6, 2023 /

A number of years ago, I made a conscious decision, based around privacy concerns and ad trackers, to minimize my time spent on Facebook and Instagram. It wasn’t especially hard; I deleted the Facebook app on my phone and diverted my attention elsewhere, and that was that. A little bit of righteous indignation goes a long way.

I have largely stuck to my decision and I’m no worse off for it. I’m not a Meta heathen; my accounts are active, and every now and again (a couple of times a month, I’d guess) I look through my feeds. I occasionally post to one or the other, when the moment is right. (And I use WhatsApp, because every group chat that’s not immediate friends now defaults to WhatsApp.)

Mostly, though, I’ve chosen to keep current on the news and chatter of the day, rather than the personal posts of social media. And for a long time, getting the best information of the moment meant hanging out on Twitter.

For the past nine months or so, the once-vibrant Twitter community has watched with concern as its new owner has put the service on a path of self-destruction. Competitors are now rushing to take its place, from grassroots distributed platforms to scrappy startups to, now, Instagram, in the form of Threads. Like many others, I have accounts on all of them.

Perhaps in a few months or years one of these systems will be our collective hangout like Twitter used to be. In the interim, though, it’s all rather overwhelming. I find myself completely at a loss as to which short-form posting platform to open. I’ve been flipping indiscriminately around all day without rhyme or reason. And still in muscle memory is that Twitter search is best for in-the-moment breaking news, so I’m still there, too, quieter but not gone.

What to do? We have so many decision points now. For one, where are my friends? My business colleagues? The interesting journalists and pundits I follow? The push news from the sources I trust? The fantasy baseball content? Darth?

Then: who do I want monetizing my feed? Elon Musk, on a site where he’s pushing extremist views? Or Mark Zuckerberg, whose platforms I so deliberately left not long ago? Or Jack Dorsey, whom most people blame for this situation existing at all? Or no one at all, via Mastodon, but leaving so much behind?

Or maybe—just maybe—I should just let go?

It may be time, at least for me, to stop chasing the conversation. It’s not really a conversation, anyway, not most of the time; you post, I post, they post, once in awhile someone replies, and once in a great while an actual conversation ensues. We’re all so used to this cadence that we don’t realize we don’t need it. But I know I don’t: my time away from FB/IG proves it. I just need to extend that motivation.

Giving up a 15 year short form posting habit would not be easy. I enjoy having an outlet for sharing thoughts in writing (see also) and with social media there’s a built-in audience. But then, audiences are elusive; sometimes my posts get some attention, and oh the dopamine hit that comes from a retweet, but sometimes I float a thought at the wrong time of day, or that the algorithm doesn’t dig, and fewer than 20 people even see it. With the fragmentation of the landscape, it’s all a crapshoot now.

I’ve been carrying around an old copy of “The Power Broker” for a good while. This could be a great time to commit myself to it. And a hundred other things that don’t require a social media feed.

The blogging quarter-century

March 14, 2023 /

Jason Kottke’s kottke.org blog turns 25 today. Twenty-five years is a long time to do something. In Jason’s case, he has made a career out of blogging, and has been truly, wonderfully great at it for many years. I’ve been a regular reader of his blog for the entirety of his run and wish him many more years of success.

Kottke’s milestone is important around these parts because his blog prompted the creation of mine. Ideapad launched on November 1, 1998, eight months after kottke.org, heavily inspired by Jason’s successful start; my first blog post even thanks him for the font. I’d had my own website since 1996 but this is when I committed to writing online. (I copied Jason a second time with the Year in Cities, which he dropped some time ago but I have enjoyed maintaining.)

I’ve been thinking about the Ideapad’s approaching 25th a lot lately—I’m approaching the point where I’ll have been blogging for half my life. Keeping up with a hobby for so long is also something to celebrate.

Jason, cheers and congrats for reaching a quarter century, and thanks for getting me going, too.

Until the End of the Internet

February 8, 2023 /

It’s a catchy prase, “until the end of the internet,” isn’t it? The folks at what was then 37 Signals coined it back in 2015, as “a promise to our customers: we’re dedicated to supporting our products forever.”

This matters to me because, for the past four and a half years, I’ve been a beneficiary of this policy. I use Highrise, the onetime CRM counterpart to the Basecamp project management system. I’ve been on it since my agency business development days, and I’m still on it today.

When I first got a Highrise account, I was looking for a dirt-simple relationship management program. Highrise checked all the boxes (easy to understand, inexpensive, shared a billing account and login with an app we already used in the office) and was straightforward to integrate into my processes. I didn’t need it for much, and for what I did—centralized contacts, emailed reminders, bcc-enabled conversation tracking—it did the trick.

I kept using Highrise when I switched agencies, and when I left the business development cycle, I hung onto my account, as it contained many of my contacts. I spooled up an individual plan and discovered it was great for personal CRM, too. I began keeping reminders for staying in touch with colleagues and classmates.

My trusty Highrise account proved invaluable when I had to look for work: I had a repository of everyone I knew, when we last spoke or emailed, and my plans for future outreach. It kept me organized and kept me honest. It may be the only software for which I pay a recurring fee, and I’ve never questioned its value.

So when Highrise went end of life in 2018, I was grateful for the Basecamp team’s approach to longevity. Sure enough, the app still works great, despite going into maintenance mode back when Shohei Ohtani was a rookie. I’m in the app regularly, and its reminders are in my email all the time. I have a few changes I’d like to see, but they’re not major, and after 11 years I’ve gotten very comfortable with the UI. In an industry known for its ephemeral nature, a service you can trust to stick around is a revelation.

“Until the end of the internet” sounds coy, but it means something to the people it impacts. I’m grateful for it, and for as long as Basecamp keeps its promise, they’ll have me as a customer.