Extraface

To make more space in the house and regain some long lost focus, I’m working on paring down, removing clutter, and committing to moving on from old projects that have a lot of physical objects tied to them. Today I’m working on books. As I go through an overgrown bookshelf, it struck me how many collections of things I had started, all of which made more sense before digital publishing and storage and the near-limitless Web of information. Collecting and keeping books, other than those that are truly most meaningful to me for their enduring and relevant value, is no longer something I want to do. Here are some of the things I was collecting, thinking I’d want them later. Note, when I say “out,” I mean to donate, give away, or recycle:

• Crafting magazines – The O’Reilly magazines are beautiful, well produced, and probably useful. But I don’t craft much any more, and any time I miss it I have no trouble finding a project to do without the aid of old magazines and books. Out.


• Hardcover books on how to sketch – At one point I wanted to explore whether or not I could become someone who really draws. I wanted sketching to be one of the ways I could explore and communicate ideas. It was a noble pursuit, but it didn’t take. They’re great books, but as clay to be molded into someone who can sketch aesthetically pleasing things, I leave a lot to be desired. I may keep practicing, but I don’t need these books. Out.


• Vintage marriage manuals – I lived in Austin, TX for a very brief slice of a summer in college. I lived dangerously close to a Half-Price Books, which was just a joy to visit in so many ways. Everything was cheap and the selection was plentiful. At one point, perhaps in part because I was involved in an epistolary relationship of quite some time, I decided it might be interesting to collect vintage marriage manuals. I even thought I might develop a project around examining how the advice changed over time. Yeah, never happened. Out.


• Hardcover gardening books – I like to garden from time to time. But I don’t do it with enough fervor or consistency to have problems that need a book lookup to solve. Out.


• Novels I love and/or annotated – They stay.


• Lesser Graham Greene books that I didn’t love – Out.


• Books I picked up while researching topics for HowStuffWorks articles – Sorry, Ilustrated History of Rifles and Shotguns. Out.


• Sam Henderson graphic novels/comics – Please stay.


• Outdated business books – I never liked you in the first place. Who needs two copies of Naked Conversations? Out.


• Outdated computer programming and computer reference books – I have no lingering, nostalgic affection for you. Out.


• Gifted books that never took – Out.

It’ll be much harder to sift through and purge the books up in my attic, as many of those are college and grad school books and/or rare and only of interest to an academic studying a particular tiny niche. Although it’s unlikely I’ll be delving into the political history of the Confucian world, 20th century cultural analysis and theory, or the architecture of Bhutan again in this lifetime, it’s still hard to get rid of books that were so tough to find and are no doubt now unavailable.

• The Mega Man 2 Title Screen In Beads:
  


• Expired Domain Girl – A paean to the face that launched a thousand tabs, the girl who has “what you need, when you need it,” – the stock photography model used in the majority of generic domain squat pages.


• The Battle – The effect of the knowledge economy on the balance between tactics and lore.


• A Really Really (Really) Good Krang Costume:
  


• There’s No 404 For Print – And in print, it’s much harder to decline cookies.


• If You Miss Geocities, You Can Now Have It – Something like this was completely unfathomable in the era of Geocities’ heyday. Could be fertile ground for some fantastic research, or, you know, a surplus of laser rainbow horizontal rules if nothing else.


• I Love The Grackles – They are lovely this time of year.


• Walt Trouser Bonanza – One guy is particularly psyched for this new batch of pants from Epaulet.
  [selfheh]

I was an early and excited user of Swivel.com, as you might remember from this 2007 Extraface post about creating a chart there of the least popular Boy Scout merit badges. That chart is now gone from the internet, as Swivel shut down recently. Via FlowingData today, I found a really insightful interview with the founders about what happened and why it didn’t work out.

One of the kernels I took from this is that perhaps targeting passionate but low-skilled users is a very tough road row to hoe. I excerpted a piece of the interview and wrote a short bit over on Tumblr about this (apologies for the back-and-forth here and there; it’s the best I can do while I figure out how best to overhaul my presence(s) online):

“I think what we learned, like Roseman is saying, that the interface is not that important, that there are analysts who are really good at tools like R, SAS, etc. and prefer to continue to work in those tools to do powerful things with datasets. And people who are not inherently biased towards working with datasets, they are not going to do it. Except for what they see in the newspaper, like USA Today or the New York Times. That may be the end of it.” -Brian Milloy, former CEO of Swivel, from this interview

I think this is another way of saying what I’ve suspected when pondering other projects — that building an app for passionate but unskilled novices in a field that already has solid experts is very difficult. No tool or UI is really going to help a non-programmer/non-designer/non-statistician create compelling data visualizations; it can’t really make up for their shortcomings or lack of experience in those areas other than just giving them a glimpse at what the field is like. This also applies to that “drag n drop your way to an Android app!” tool Google created. If used by experts/intermediate developers as a fast prototyping tool, it makes sense. If marketed to non-developers as a way to make the process more accessible, not so much.

It seems to be that the struggle, sale, and refocus of Dapper, although certainly targeted to a very skilled set of ideal customers in tinkerers like Marshall Kirkpatrick, probably points to a similar lesson. I’d love to hear of spirited counter-examples, if you have them, of small companies that took on the challenge of making something experts do fluidly more approachable by well-meaning but low-skilled beginners, and succeeded for a good chunk of time. Maybe the iPhone photo manipulation apps might be an example. DabbleDB? Y! Pipes, though I’m not sure how well that’s doing any more?

Reserves are still a little low – this is hopefully just enough to get you through.

• Fallon And Timberlake Hip-Hop History Medley:
  
  [via Kottke and Gavin P.]


• The 25 Most Ridiculous Pen & Pixel Album Covers Of All Time – Every time I click, I keep expecting to see Jamarcus Russell wearing a giant diamond dollar sign pendant sitting on a diamond-shaped, diamond encrusted Escalade.
  [via J-Brizz]


• Tread-Walk Trumps Segway – How could this possibly be real?


• DIY Robot Laser Tag – I feel like someone’s mom must have invented this because she felt that full-contact robot combat was “just too violent for my tastes! Why don’t you just make the robots play a nice game of flag football?”

• Tablecloth Hour – A Japanese arcade game (or is it a sim?) currently in public testing that challenges you to upset a virtual placesetting by yanking a square of physical cloth.


• The Rosa Parks Of Blogs – “Absurd Comparisons By Real People Using Famous People.”


• A Brain Paper For The Mysterious Dr. Khoo – A case of mistaken identities stretched into an extended back-and-forth between Dr. Zachary and an emailer who thinks he’s a *different* Dr. Zachary. (NSFW: Salty, limit-testing language)


• Worst Business Idea Ever – He really thought he had something there.
  [via Gregg]


• Sincerity At The Point Of Contact – Love the bowing banktellers on this Japanese ATM “card declined” screen.


• How To Be Awesome:
  
  I knew I was missing something. It was the mushroom grips and the Tubes tee.