Do I love “Immigrant Song?” Yes. Do I imitate its opening vocal, Robert Plant’s reverberating war cry that gets as close to the heart of awesomeness as any lyric in the history of rock? Frequently. But have I listened to it 3,000+ times in the past couple of years? Roughly 5x per day?

I would say that there would be no way of knowing, but I guess that there is.

A community of practice. The practice of finding deals.

So, some industrious, deal-seeking shoppers have created LiveJournal communities in which shoppers can band together to save shipping costs from online retailers. These so-called “sprees” usually correspond to global shipping deals offered by a retailer, and they’re available until certain criteria are met — minimum amounts for the shipping deal, or whenever the spree-launcher decides to take care of the order.

In the above example, the spree is for a retailer called “Apparel,” it’s open, and there are 35 “comments,” many of which are actually “orders.” That’s right, you submit your order in a public space, so that others can see how close the spree is to being filled.

In order to build trust among their users, the community above provides a way to give feedback; they’ve created a separate community called “spreefeedback” where users leave comments about the trustworthiness of the users who launch the sprees. Hacky, but apparently effective. Pretty cool, huh?

On related notes, Jane Fulton Suri’s Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design is filled with intriguing examples of everyday hacks in the physical world. Last summer, I wrote about my friends Kristen and Rob and their Flickr UI navigation cues that helped the non-savvy folks in their family find their wedding photo albums.

If I were a derivatives man, I’d go to the Chicago Board of Trade and buy up some poetry futures. Sell frozen orange juice and pork bellies; buy poetry. Why? Because it is the perfect product for small screen reading. People are reading more and more stuff on smaller and smaller screens, everyone knows this, duh. War and Peace is available for the Kindle, but who wants to wrestle that monster through a keyhole? Anyway, last night, I downloaded the awkwardly named Kindle for the iPhone. I had tried to become a Kindle user (of the device — confusing, yes?). I failed at this, but I had some Kindle-ized books left over — Leaves of Grass and the Modern Library’s Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson — and I downloaded those. I didn’t really expect much.

Twice today, I found myself reading through sections of Leaves of Grass: “A PROMISE to California, / Also to the great Pastoral Plains, and for Oregon: / Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain, to teach robust American love.” Good reading as I watched the lunch crowd at Mixt Greens. The entire Leaves of Grass is available on Bartleby, by the way. Then, as I was waiting for a conference call to start, I read Emerson’s poem “Self-Reliance.” Hard to conduct a conference call with a mind thus expanded by poetry, but I think I can get used to it. Poetry on the iPhone! It makes a lot of sense, and Amazon did a nice job with the interface. Simple, to the point, no BS, just like reading should be.

With all that is going on in the story, I’ve always wondered how the producers keep track of the various threads. Well, as it turns out, there’s a person called “script coordinator” who is in charge of this. Gregg Nations, Lost’s script coordinator, described his role in a post to The Fuselage, described as “The Official Site of the Creative Team Behind ABC’s Award Winning TV Show Lost:”

A script coordinator creates the show bible, which is generally a summary of each episode and tracks the introduction of any new characters or important story points. However, on “Lost” it’s a little more difficult than usual. In place of a show bible I created a character bible, an island timeline and a flashback timeline.

In the character bible I track important facts about the characters or other elements in the show established in the episodes, either through what the characters tell each other or the flashbacks. I track how many survivors we have, who has died and their names, when we’ve seen the polar bears or the smoke monster, everything about the hatch, when we’ve had contact with the Others, etc. Again, it’s very detailed work but I think the writers appreciate having all that information at hand in a document so they don’t have to worry about it.

The island timeline is a record of how many days they’ve been on the island and what happened on what days. The flashback timeline tracks the events that happen in everyone’s flashblacks.

So, the next question is: How the heck does he manage all of those bibles and timelines? Needing to visualize interconnected timelines, you’d think that he’d use something like a Gantt chart — maybe Microsoft Project? Or maybe he has some proprietary TV production software that links the timelines with character information? As it turns out, his system is a little more low-fi. In a recent profile in the NYT, Nations briefly alludes to his methods for managing the details:

Had he a background in computer science, Mr. Nations now says, he might have approached the “Lost” project differently. “The best thing would have been to create a database where everything’s linked, and if we’re talking about Jack and what was established in his first flashback episode, you could click on something that takes you there,” he said. But as an accountant, he was more inclined just to make notes in a ledger. “I’ve just created these Word documents, and I just write everything down.”

Nooooooooo. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Even the fan-generated Lost wiki, Lostpedia, is linked up in a rudimentary way, making it roughly 1000x more wrangle-able than disconnected Word documents. Still, like any Lost fan, I’m curious to know what’s in the “bible,” even if it would be torturous to find anything.

When I got laid off in 2001, I did a lot of soul-searching, ate a lot of Cancun veggie burritos (they were $3.29; they’re $4.99 now), and did a lot of reading at Green Apple. One afternoon, I came across Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory. Now there was a guy who knows a thing or two about hard times. The title is deeply ironic, as Guthrie experienced a lot of hardship, but through it all he had deep confidence in himself and deep faith that he would do great things. Greed, incompetence and bad luck afflicted him, (and millions of others), but life goes on. And if you’re a person like Woody Guthrie, you take the hard lesson and you turn it into something like Dust Bowl Ballads.

[You should see a little Flash player below each song title; apologies if you don’t. Working on it].

Woody Guthrie, “I ain’t got no home” [Download]

Of course, I was never close to being caught out on a literal road with other literally displaced people, but this passage deeply affected me:

My brothers and my sisters are stranded on this road,
A hot and dusty road that a million feet have trod;
Rich man took my home and drove me from my door
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

2001 was no Dust Bowl, and I was nowhere near as destitute as Tom Joad. But the feeling of alienation and disillusion really rang true to me, the sense that “a million feet” have trod a much worse path gave me comfort, I guess. (Guthrie also hated Wall Street bastards more than anyone, which gave me a great deal of comfort).

So the next track is all about turning the corner, finding happiness, and being bound for glory. It’s from an incredible collection of music called Art of Field Recording, Vol. 1, a collection of recordings made in rural homes and churches over the past 50 years.

Lawrence McKiver and the McIntosh County Shouters, “Jubilee” [Download]

For me, this track is an excellent reminder that a few people with a lot of spirit and some knee-slapping can make something deeply affecting. It doesn’t take much. And that’s the first step, perhaps, to being bound for glory.

A selection of Twitter Shaquliciousness:

• His bio, two words: “Very quotatious.”
• Yesterday: “Last nite i told greg oden , ‘we r not the same, i am a martian’”
• Last week: “About to go to yoga, gotta get my stretch on”

Which reminds me of another star who has a way with words: Randy Moss, who recently launched “hellified” into the everyday sports lexicon. Back in 2002, he became a permanent fixture on my refrigerator when this passage appeared in Sports Illustrated:

The perception was that [recently hired coach] Mike Tice, after one game as interim coach, was given a three-year deal last January because he convinced McCombs he could control Moss. “No,” says Moss. “Mike Tice got the job because he and Randy Moss can get along. Nobody controls me but my mama and God.”

There’s something about that quote that sticks with me. Only controlled by his mama and God. @RandyMoss: It takes a special kind of person to even think in those terms. Keep it up.

This is the top shelf on one of our book cases. It’s comforting to have the books sitting there; they’re like a version of myself, sitting on a shelf, disassembled and re-arrangeable.

In August 1995, Harpers Magazine conducted a round table discussion with Wired’s Kevin Kelly, author Sven Birkerts, the Well’s John Perry Barlow, and Mark Slouka. The results were condensed in the magazine [PDF], and the conversation outlines the two ideologies that continue to converse today: Those who believe that the paper incarnation of the book is an irreplaceable arena for the delivery of its content, and those who don’t. Birkerts discusses the former in his 1995 book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts sent a shot across the bow in a paper called “Reading at Risk,” [PDF]. The researchers surveyed 17,000 people, and they concluded that the future of literary reading is bleak: “Literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young.”

Still, the total number of books sold continues to rise, so is the future really that bleak? The NEA thinks so. It released a follow-on to Reading at Risk called “To Read or Not To Read.” This study focuses on young readers, and links the decline in reading to “civic, social and economic” risks.

Last spring, Nicholas Carr discussed Google’s effect on literary reading in the Atlantic, provocatively titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” [I discussed this in a blog post at the Cooper Journal called “Dumb is the new smart”]. In it, he interviews a blogger who confesses the following:

“I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

The article also sparked a discussion on brittanica.com, collected in a forum called “Your Brain Online.” It’s got a lot of interesting stuff from folks like Kevin Kelly, Danny Hillis and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, who thinks that the “unprecedented abundance” of the web will function to break the vise-grip of the “literary world” on culture:

It’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting. This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream ... The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.

Ursula Le Guin disputes the notion that people have ever read War and Peace. (Well, maybe.)

Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems questionable. But I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

The title of her recent Harper’s essay pretty well sums up her position: “Notes on the alleged decline of reading.” It roars through the various aspects of the state of reading and publishing, quickly turning into a ringing indictment of corporate publishers:

The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere P.R. because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.

On that social note

I was just looking at my beat-up copy of “The Dharma Bums,” and I felt a sort Chris Matthews-esque tingle. I bought it during high school at Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas, and it sparked my fascination with the West Coast, years before I ever traveled here. Would I ever read it again? Probably not. In fact, just now, I could barely read even a couple of pages without feeling like Kerouac was on auto-pilot. But I like the idea that my bookshelf is a kind of externalization of myself, a collection of important influences and expressions. The future of my books appears to be not so different than the present: A combination of talismans, objects of beauty, and points of reference.

On the subject of reference, in (wait for it) a Harper’s essay called ““A Defense of the Book,” William Gass talks about the pleasures of not having the world at your fingertips:

I have rarely paged through one of my dictionaries (a decent household will have a dozen) without my eye lighting, along the way, on words more beautiful than a found fall leaf, on definitions odder than any uncle, on grotesques like gonadotropin-releasing hormone or, barely, above it — what? — gombeen — which turns out to be Irish for usury.

And holy crap, there’s a whole lot more Gass at Tunneling. Articles, links, thoughts. I love the Internet.

My fellow panelists were a murderer’s row of publishing insight. Rick Simonson is the co-founder of Copper Canyon Press and a book buyer at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle; Richard Nash is the publisher of Soft Skull Press; Patricia Wakida runs Wasabi Press; and, Michael Coffey is the Managing Editor at Publisher’s Weekly (and the author of an excellent baseball book, 27 Men Out).

When we got started, I suspected I’d been tossed in a shark tank wearing a meat necklace. I found myself rattling on about things in my frame of reference — technology, social media, iPhones, Kindles, stuff wanting to be free — and I worried that all of it was simply chumming the waters for my fellow panelists who (a) know a lot about publishing, and (b) clearly recognized that their business models are being eroded by technologies that offer new ways to read (i.e., everything with a screen) and supply chain disintermediation, i.e. Amazon.

Side note: The weather was beautiful

Whenever I take a picture of him, Fish (i.e., Chris Fischbach of Coffee House) tells me: “I better not see this on the Internet.” But I just had to take this one while he and Katie (of Graywolf and New York Times fame) took me on an excellent walk along the Mississippi just before winter arrived.

As it turned out, we had a series of productive conversations. My colleagues and the audience were keen to know about how companies go about determining the right way to conceive technological products, and to implement them appropriately. Meanwhile, I learned a lot about small presses, publishing, and the ways that editors at literary presses think about their work. Allan Kornblum, the founder of Coffee House Press, saw himself as “the inheritor of the Maxwell Perkins tradition” in creating deep and lasting relationships with artists, supporting them and providing a consistent venue for publication. Fish said that he wanted “to create art objects that last.” Both of those goals make a lot of sense to me, and they seem like a firm foundation for a business in transition.

So, what is the future of reading, anyway?

I’m going to put together another post about my thoughts on this topic, and in the meantime I’m going to be digesting some of the work that my fellow panelists referenced during our discussions; this list includes Ursula Le Guin’s “Notes on the alleged decline of reading” that I saw in Patricia’s pile of notes; Michael mentioned Bill McKibben’s new book, Deep Economy in making a comparison between regional literature and a larger movement toward regional and local economies; Richard spoke a couple of times about literary subscription programs, such as Soft Skull’s annual edition, and Powell’s indiespensable list.

¹ I was there because my friend Fish (the senior editor at Coffee House Press) thought that my experience with technology and online product strategy would complement the deep expertise of the small press luminaries on the panel. Or perhaps he just wanted to see what happened when I said the words “Kindle” and “free” around Michael Coffey. In the end, there would be no way of knowing.

Speaking of Internet-literate, this is our houseguest: Dave.

It started with Lil Wayne. I mentioned to Mara and Dave that Stereogum has an irritating post about Lil Wayne’s use of Auto-Tune on SNL. It was irritating because, to me, there’s a difference between using Auto-Tune to compensate for your own inability to hit the notes (e.g., Kelly Clarkson in “Since U Been Gone”), and using it to increase the funky quotient, as Lil Wayne does in “Lollipop.” Anyway, Dave recalled a Pitchfork interview with Neko Case in which she has some salty words on the subject of Auto-Tune. [tappity-tappity]

Neko Case: When I hear Auto-Tune on somebody’s voice, I don’t take them seriously. Or you hear somebody like Alicia Keys, who I know is pretty good, and you’ll hear a little bit of Auto-Tune and you’re like, “You’re too fucking good for that. Why would you let them do that to you? Don’t you know what that means?” It’s not an effect like people try to say, it’s for people like Shania Twain who can’t sing.

(It gets even saltier). Then the conversation turned to Auto-Tune’s first major splash, which was recently discussed in a Sasha Frere-Jones piece in the New Yorker [tappity-tappity]

The first popular example of Auto-Tune’s distorting effect was Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe,” produced by Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling. During the first verse, Auto-Tune makes the phrase “I can’t break through” wobble so much that it’s hard to discern.

Of course, then we had to hear “Believe,” so Dave suggested Favtape. [tappity-tappity] Bingo; briefly, we revisited 1998. Then, it seemed like it made sense to listen to Bedhead’s cover as well. [tappity-tappity] It features a touch-tone phone as an instrument.

So what’s the story with using Auto-Tune on “Believe?” Did the producers seek it out because Cher couldn’t hit the notes, or did they just want to get funky? [tappity-tappity] The Internet has your answer, sort of. It’s from a 1999 article in the British magazine Sound on Sound, but the problem is that the producers don’t admit to using Auto-Tune; it was still a trade secret at that point:

The ... obvious vocal effect in ‘Believe’ is the ‘telephoney’ quality of Cher’s vocal throughout. This idea came from the lady herself — she’d identified something similar on a Roachford record and asked Mark if he could reproduce it.

He explains, “Roachford uses a restricted bandwidth, and filters the vocals heavily so that the top and bottom ends are wound off and the whole vocal is slightly distorted. It took a while to work out exactly what it was that Cher liked about this particular Roachford song, but in the end we realised it was the ‘telephoney’ sound. I used the filter section on my Drawmer DS404 gate on the vocal before it went into the Talker to get that effect.”

Actually, we now know the truth. It was Auto-Tune.

All of this happened in about 15 minutes; we explored the arc of Auto-Tune in popular songs, with examples of early incarnations and deep discussion about how and why it was applied. Nice. [tappity-tappity]

Yes, I appreciate Flickr. After all, it allows me to store my photos online, share them with others, and display them on my website. Yay. Thanks for that. Still, it frustrates me daily. Here’s why:

Sequence of photo display is set in stone

If I drag a dozen pictures into the Flickr Uploadr, God only knows the order in which they’ll appear on the site. But I care about the order in which they appear on the site, because the LAST photo uploaded ends up being at the top of my Flickr homepage, and in that position of prominence it says something about me. It annoys me that I can’t control this more.¹

Little control over homepage layout; no way to make stuff sticky

So, if I can’t control the order of uploading, can I control what’s displayed on my Flickr page? No. Can I make a set sticky, so that it stays at the top of the list? No. Can I display only sets? No. Of course, Flickr has introduced new layouts, but all of them are simply ways of arranging the most recent stuff. Not helpful to me.

No concept of new-to-a-user

I’m thinking of my grandparents here. Wouldn’t it be nice if a meta-set (or something) was created of stuff that’s new to the viewer? I could just create a bookmark here, and they could check for new stuff.

Tagging is a royal nightmare.

Maybe no one has totally solved this yet, but here’s something that would work for me: I usually upload multiple related pictures at a time, and these pictures tend to share a lot of the same tags. So I’d like to create small groups of tags for a groups of pictures, and then quickly drag and drop, or multi-select and apply, a tag to a subset of those pictures. del.icio.us’s tagging interface is rudimentary, but it’s vastly more helpful than Flickr’s:

The navigation confuses everyone except geeks and experts

Collections? Sets? Archives? What’s the diff? As my mom once asked me, “Where are the albums?” At the risk of sounding irretrievably old-school, this particular set of grouping concepts is a frustration to cognition. (Also, if the distinction is made in this navigation area, why aren’t the things (sets) in the right column labeled as such?)

No record of blogged pictures?

When I create a blog entry from a picture, why isn’t there some kind of record that the image has been blogged? A link? This just seems so basic to me.

¹ Interesting side note: I bumped into some Flickr people at CHI, and I asked them about this. Their rationale: The photostream is what Flickr is all about, and the strictness of the sequence is a useful governing principle. Umm, yeah. Flickr people may think of uploading as a continual stream, but I upload photos in clumps — I don’t always think about my photos in the terms of the last photo uploaded, I often think in terms of the last group. I feel like I should have control over the way those clumps are displayed. If you force me to always show the most recently uploaded individual photo, shouldn’t you also give me some control over the order of upload in your Uploadr?

The UX Week program with my lucky cat.

Breaking it down

The sessions came in three varieties: (1) products and interface implementations; (2) design tools and processes; and (3) ideas and inspirations. Sarah Nelson at Adaptive Path organized the conference, and she recruited speakers who were not the usual talking heads.² The mix of backgrounds, experience, and subject matter kept things lively. I especially appreciated the discussions of process by AP folks like Indi Young, Kate Rutter, and Jesse James Garrett during the panel discussion of CNN.com. All of these opened my eyes to new design tools and techniques, and exposed the fact that there is a lot of innovation going on out there. In terms of the flashy products on display, I’m inherently too inquisitive and skeptical to believe what people tell me during product demoes — I need to get immersed in them myself, and ask: How did you get there? Where did that come from? What need is that addressing? How did the design evolve? Because I’m a nerd.³

Design is story-telling

As Leisa Reichelt pointed out during our panel, a lot of speakers addressed the topic of story-telling in one way or another. Kevin Brooks of Motorola Labs led a workshop on storytelling techniques; the folks behind the recent redesign of CNN.com described the way in which they crafted the story that they told their internal stakeholders; people from BestBuy.com and Sachs discussed the use of videotaped customer stories to make a case for a redesign. Of course, story-telling and design are intimately intertwined — two strands of a businessy double-helix. I was inspired by the variety of ways in which designers are telling stories about the problems to be solved, and the techniques and nuances involved in their approaches.

UX is real

I go to fewer conferences than I should (so I may be a bit sheltered), but I’ll say this anyway: at the conference, I got the feeling that UX was much further along to becoming an actual profession. UX practices are no longer outposts in the Wild West of digital products; our work is now identifiable territory in the business landscape. Not long ago, there were very few things that wouldn’t be considered within the purview of user experience; now, the boundaries of our problems are a little more clear, and our experiences as practitioners have more commonalities than differences. I feel like Tom Hanks in Big.

Now, if only I could explain what I do to my parents ...

¹ From one of my favorite movies of all-time, Freaks, i.e., one of us, one of us, we accept you, one of ux.
² Okay, except Jared Spool, but it’s always good to hear what he’s thinking.
³ I admit: The interface for One Laptop Per Child is elegant and intriguing, but I’m politically ambivalent about the project itself. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of creating an information pipeline the developing world, but I guess I’m not enough of a tech evangelist to believe in the idea that distributing laptops is better than distributing more immediate aid. Maybe I’m not thinking big enough.

Our place is the yellow two-story walk-up that is bustin out of the top of the frame. I love that it was captured on one of those semi-sunny days where little wisps of fog drift through. So nice to not live in the fog belt. Incidentally, here’s the Chronicle’s fog forecast. Doesn’t look good.

Street Level seems like useful functionality, esp. for fancy mobile devices, which I don’t have. The controls are pretty straightforward and easy to use on a desktop, but I wonder about the ease with which one could navigate up and down the streets with those teeny arrows on a Palm or Blackberry. This is really nitpicky, but I think it would be effective to introduce more map navigation into the image, i.e. skipping to the next intersection, returning to the original destination, etc. Future-wise, it would be awesome to be able to do stuff with the images — easily insert them into other things, string them together in connection with directions, etc.

What I want to know is: How the heck did they do it?

Thx, kottke.

So apparently Google and Earthlink are teaming up to provide free WiFi service to all of SF (via Gizmodo). While we’re still a ways from knowing what this will actually mean — mainly, will be accessible at 14th and Valencia, third floor apartment? — it is intriguing to me that Google is involved. Unlike Earthlink, Google has never gouged me, or failed to provide service that I’ve paid for, or sold my name and home address to direct marketers.

So I guess you could say that I’m hopeful. Maybe someday soon I’ll be able to work from Pac Bell (er, I mean, SBC ... er, I mean AT&T) Park, or Buena Vista Park, or the little redwood grove outside the Transamerica building.

Or from my roof. (See the photo).