Five things, 11/27/2011

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Inspired by Rex’s apparent return to blogging, I thought I’d give a go at putting together a quick list of links and thoughts I collect throughout the day instead of tweeting them all into the ether without any context or losing them to the sieve of my brain. Look, I’m even stealing the name things as I’d just like this to be a generic framework for a post — whatever interests me that day and in however-many quantity. Anyway, I don’t think Rex can claim a patent on the bulleted list as blog post.
  1. Art & Copy. This 2009 PBS documentary about advertising popped up in my Netflix recommendations. An oddly out-of-place parallel story about a man who hangs billboards, peppered with the type of statistics and classic ad examples (Daisy, 1984, Lemon) you’d expect to be bombarded with in a Mass Comm 101 class, this honestly isn’t the most exciting 88 minutes you could spend in front of a screen. But the main feature — the one-on-ones with a handful of ad legends — is worth the time if you’re into that sort of thing.
  2. Shit That Siri Says has officially jumped the shark, like a month ago. Most single-serving Tumblr’s seem to fade away after only a few days, but I’ve actually had to take the unusual step of clicking unfollow on this one to save myself from the waterfall of unfunny screenshots. And does the superfluous that in the site title piss off anyone else?
  3. Stamped is a very simple iPhone app that lets you give recommendations on just about anything. No five-stars or bullshit 50-100 Robert Parker scale, just an easy pick-your-own-color stamp of approval. It’s a similar concept but different execution to Oink. I’m not sure where these apps go from here, but I’ve been surprised to actually see a handful of Twitter friends sign up for Stamped in the past week.
  4. TechCrunch takes a weirdly academic (or is it pseudoscientific?) look at Pinterest’s rapid growth and predicts the service will inspire hundreds of copycats and be a great success. Fine, but where is Pinterest for Men?
  5. iMeme is a handy OS X app for making memes without opening Photoshop. Pick from 50+ built-in templates such as the Pickup Line Panda or import your own image. There’s even a button to send your creation to Reddit. (I guess 4chan integration is forthcoming?)

Cheap wine

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Slate comes to the defense of cheap wine, pointing out that Germans spend $1.79 on average for a bottle. I’m jealous. And thirsty.

If hints of cassis, subtle earthiness, and jammy notes don’t interest you, you are not a lesser person. Wine is not art. There’s no reason to believe that aligning your tastes with those of a self-appointed elite will enrich your life, or make you more insightful or sensitive. If wine critics want to spend lavishly on the wine they like, that’s great. Leave them to their fun. Be grateful that you can gain just as much pleasure, if not more, without bankrupting yourself.

Google cuts search queries from web analytics in the name of privacy

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Google made a big, but little noticed, announcement today under the guise of making your search experience more secure and private.

Over the next few weeks, the default search behavior for users logged into Google will be to use a secure HTTP connection (https://) instead of a standard HTTP (http:// sans S) connection.

That’s all good and fine except one side effect is that analytics software on websites receiving the traffic won’t be able to see which search queries resulted in each visit. This has big implications on the ability to optimize site content.

The caveat, however, is what makes Google look bad: non-organic search referrals (that is, clicks from AdWords ads that advertisers have paid Google to display) will still include the search query. This has some people crying foul:

If Google really cared, the keyword data that site owners now no longer receive from organic queries would no longer be available for advertisers either. But that would hit their bottom line, because it makes it harder to show ROI from AdWords, so they won’t do that.

This issue didn’t seem to get much attention today, but I doubt we’ve heard the end of it.

Disrupting Craigslist

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Matt Mullenweg has a good post on what he thinks is next for Apple: everything from search and payments to TVs and cars.

But, what I found most interesting was this graphic of the pantheon of start-ups eating Craigslist’s lunch.

We tend to think of Craigslist as the disrupter, not the disruptee, but boy does this illustrate a dog-eat-dog world.

“That’s what I wear. I have enough to last for the rest of my life.”

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Walter Isaacson shares this excerpt by way of Gawker from his forthcoming biography on Steve Jobs about Jobs’ signature black turtleneck and jeans style:

Apple employees jeered their boss’s scheme for a corporate outfit. So he had to settle for a personal uniform, modeled on shirts he saw noted designer Issey Miyake wearing

“This is the guy that comes on a bicycle”

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What better way to spend Monday night than watching a documentary about a photographer? I just watched Bill Cunningham New York about the New York Times street-fashion photographer known for riding around on his bike for decades. I recommend it.

“This is the guy that comes on a bicycle.” —Bill Cunningham exuding modesty on the phone with a photography shop

 

What constitutes a sandwich?

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Good declared this week to be Sandwich Week, and I have been playing along on Twitter.

Yesterday as I was lunching on an open-faced crab and artichoke sandwich, I wondered if what I was eating was truly a sandwich.

Well, apparently Good anticipated my semantic confusion about those items that sometimes fall under the “sandwiches and such” menu heading and today tries to answer the question.

Here at sandwich week, we’ve spent the last five days celebrating the staple of the American lunch hour. But what are we really celebrating when we celebrate the sandwich? Is it filling spread between two slices of bread, as Locke claims? “Sandwich,” after all, is a verb as well as a noun. Must the filling be sandwiched between bread? Is an Oreo a sandwich? A quesadilla? Is a KFC Double Down a sandwich?

Can a food become a sandwich simply by calling itself a sandwich? Does an open-faced sandwich constitute a sandwich, despite the lack of sandwiching employed in its construction? If so, is bruschetta a sandwich? Buttered toast? Pizza?

These are the questions that will define our generation.

Innovation at The Boston Globe

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Earlier, I tweeted about the new BostonGlobe.com:

New BostonGlobe.com is probably the cleanest newspaper site I’ve seen. And use of media queries means no need for a separate mobile site.

Also, BostonGlobe.com will be subscription based, but The Globe will maintain Boston.com with blogs, some free articles and The Big Picture.

In fact, I think The Boston Globe just earned recognition as one of the most forward-thinking “old” news publishers, which maybe shouldn’t be a surprise given that its parent is The New York Times Company.

First, the design: it’s clean, it’s readable, it’s touch-friendly and it’s easily skimmable, as a front page should be. There are not an abundance of nuisance ads flashing and trying to induce seizure.

Speaking of The New York Times, the BostonGlobe.com design calls to mind many of the points Andy Rutledge made in his controversial blog post about The Times online design. I wonder if someone at the sister paper was listening and nodding as the brouhaha over Rutledge’s post unfolded a couple months back.

On a more technical point, the site make good use of media queries. Media queries are a feature of CSS3 (not to be confused, as so many things are these days, with HTML5) that allows web pages to be displayed differently depending on the medium where they are displayed. This isn’t a totally new concept. When I was making websites for the University of Minnesota in 2005, I always included separate style sheets that defined how the printed page should appear different from the screen. But media queries take a step further by responding to screen resolution and orientation. Check out this gallery of media query-enabled sites and resize your browser window to see what I mean. Media queries are slick and, while they’re not perfect, they obviate the need many organizations have for a separate mobile website.

Aside from not being perfect, the main reason I think we don’t see more media query-enhanced sites is that media queries are new and they are not widely understood. It will likely be years before many large organizations start embracing them. So good on The Boston Globe for not being afraid.

That lack of fear is a good descriptor for The Globe’s business model too. While everyone else seems to be either contemplating paywalls or staunchly rejecting them, The Globe has decided it can play both games. BostonGlobe.com offers full access to news about Boston, while Boston.com will still offer a handful of articles, blogs and photo galleries for free.

This makes perfect sense, and I’m not sure why it hasn’t been tried before. I, as someone who doesn’t have any reason to care about Boston news, am probably not going to subscribe to the former for any reason. But there are certainly national-interest stories published by The Globe every day, and I occasionally find myself reading them. These tend to be the type of stories that can get a big social lift from the likes of Twitter, reddit, Fark and StumbleUpon. The Globe benefits from selling ads with higher CPMs against these highly viewed pages. A story about a new business or neighborhood crime report will likely never get as much of a social lift, but as a Boston citizen, I’d likely be willing to pay for it.

It’s a simple, sensible strategy. Will it work? I have no idea. But at least The Boston Globe is trying something new. It’s innovating.

That’s more than I’ve seen from the entire news industry in the past seven years.

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

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Somehow I had completely missed until today that there is a documentary about the making of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot called I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. The opening credits are beautiful for both their rendition of film’s namesake song and the black and white photography of Chicago. I also caught myself nodding at this quote from the film:

We’re now in a culture, not just a business, but a culture in which we expect everything to happen [finger snap] like that. Ya know, you have people outside, standing around, talking on cell phones, ya know, the gist of the conversation is “I’ll be there in five minutes.” Who gives a fuck? Just be there in five minutes, don’t talk about it.
—David fricke senior editor rolling stone

Oh, and it’s available for streaming on Netflix.

Ed. Note: The above post has actually been sitting as a draft since Nov. 26, but I was just reminded of it as I was watching Ashes of American Flags, and thus finally remembered to hit publish.

Coincidentally, tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of 9/11, which is the date Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was originally set for release.