Overheard at the Pelican Project.
Book Cover Dialogue
October 4 08
Notebook Reviews
September 2 08
For all the dorks like myself who obsess about notebooks, this post is for you.
Full disclosure: I tend to be partial to notebooks of the pocket-sized, reporter-style, durable, flexible, wirebound and blank variety, but I use and sample all kinds. To my mind there are two types of notebooks: portable and desktop. Portable notebooks should be easy to carry around and fit comfortably in your pocket. Which pocket you use, and therefore which notebook, can depend on the season. In the warm months I require a slim, flexible notebook for my back pocket. In the winter, a harder-backed notebook can go into my inside coat pocket. Many notebooks that are marketed as portable—hello, Moleskine—are actually desktop notebooks in my opinion because they don’t fit comfortably in your pocket. They have their place.
Let’s get this out of the way: Moleskines are vastly overrated. Sure, they look nice but how functional are they really? I like a strong notebook that I can bend back. Moleskines can be laid flat but won’t bend over backwards for you. They don’t fit comfortably in your pocket. And for those who have bought into the Moleskine brand mythology, note that Hemingway, Picasso and Matisse did not in fact use Moleskines. Dave Eggers, Neil Gaiman and countless bloggers do, to some folks’ dismay. Black Cover is an entire blog dedicated to uncovering superior Moleskine alternatives.
Pluses: Pretty. Moderately hackable.
Minuses: Unoriginal. Low-quality paper that can’t handle fountain pens, so pen nerds shun them (pen reviews is another post).
Muji—short for Mujirushi Ryohin, or “brandless quality goods”—has been taking the American notebook-nerd market by storm. As they say on their website, “Muji, the brand, is rational, and free of agenda, doctrine and ‘isms.’ The Muji concept derives from us continuously asking, ‘What is best from an individual’s point of view?’” Designer types are entranced by Muji’s intense minimalism. Their chrononotebook makes people giddy.
Pluses: Free of artifice. Also cheap! Many of their notebooks are $1.
Minuses: Very few. Available in New York at the MoMA Store, Muji Soho and inside the New York Times Building.
Rhodia is an iconic French brand of notebook whose design has been unchanged since the 1930s.
Pluses: Striking. Orange. Endorsed by poet-blogger Ron Silliman.
Minuses: Too clunky for portable use.
The tagline on this Japanese brand of notebooks says it all: “MOST ADVANCED QUALITY GIVES BEST WRITING FEATURES & GIVES SATISFACTION TO YOU.” Apica notebooks have a devoted cult following.
Pluses: Ultra high-quality paper.
Minuses: Their portable model, the CD5, is a bit too small for serious note-taking.
Barcelona-based Miquelrius notebooks first came to my attention as the platform for Bill Westerman’s paper-based time management software, above.
Pluses: Like Moleskine but much more flexible, with higher quality paper.
Minuses: Pages won’t lay flat. Owners of the most annoying website in the world.
Pluses: See above.
Minuses: Hard to come by. I recommend subscribing to his shop’s feed if you want in on the next batch.
Ecoteca was a sturdy and stylish Portuguese brand of notebook that now appears to be defunct.
Pluses: Rounded corners.
Minuses: Impossible to find.
Field Notes made a splash last year on the back-to-paper and get-things-done (GTD) scene, when they started showing up on blogs like Lifehacker. Launched by Coudal Partners, some people find the brand a bit cloying.
Pluses: Pocket-friendly. Heavy paperstock. Futura typeface.
Minuses: Seemingly designed with Urban Outfitters in mind. Tries too hard. Staplebound.
My current favorite, Rite in the Rain notebooks are 1.) sturdy as hell and 2.) can be used in the shower, where many people get their best ideas. Seriously, recommended.
Pluses: Waterproof authenticity.
Minuses: None.
Ciak is an Italian brand of notebook determined to take on Moleskine.
Pluses: Closes with a sensible horizontal elastic band.
Minuses: Too thick for portable use (twice the thickness of a Moleskine). A bit overzealous in their marketing.
The brand of choice for Japanese productivity junkies, Kokuyo makes hyper-functional notebooks for engineers and surveyors.
Pluses: Pocket-size. High-quality paper. Durable green cover.
Minuses: Only available in Japan.
Hailed by some as the perfect notebook, the Stifflexible was the inspiration behind the Black Cover blog, for whom they were resurrected after being discontinued. Two built-in creases on the front and back covers allow this handsome Italian notebook to be flipped through and searched without opening it. According to legend, Giuliano Mazzuoli got the idea after finding a book from the 1700s in a Florentine library with a similar design.
Pluses: Stiff yet flexible. Pages open flat. Back flap can be used as a bookmark. Made entirely in Italy. Not a Moleskine.
Minuses: The newer versions don’t have the creamy paper or colored page edges of old.
Search Datamob
July 31 08
Lauren got the search functionality for Datamob up and running, making the site about 1,000 times more useful. Adjustments are in progress but you can subscribe to feeds of search results.
Recent additions: NPR API, BBC Backstage, CrunchBase API, CrunchBase Map, TheMiddleClass.org, geophysically scaled economic data, Walk Score, Lee Byron’s San Franscisco Walkability Map, Toby Segaran’s Industry Browser and a number of resources.
Summer Remix
July 28 08
A personal announcement: After more than four years immersed in all things web-, blog- and ecommerce-related at the 92nd Street Y (new look/season/brand launching Thursday)—a place I love and have had the privilege of contributing to while working alongside some truly amazing people—I’m moving on to another amazing place: Etsy. Specifically the product team. And the busiest and Best Summer Ever continues.
UI Shopping with Pattern Tap
July 22 08
I’ve been separating out product- and UX-focused feeds from the tech business feeds in my feedreading. Great product feeds include Emily Chang’s eHub, Chris “factoryjoe” Messina’s Flickr feed of notable screenshots, Marshall Kirkpatrick’s custom meta-feed of app sources which includes the aforementioned feeds, Konigi, Dave Winer’s TechJunk and the venerable Signal vs. Noise.
But I think what I really wanted and just didn’t know it is Pattern Tap, which collects and categorizes screenshots of interesting interface elements and allows you to create sets of your favorites. It’s organized UI inspiration.
Back to Paper: Mind Maps and Sketch Notes
July 16 08
Before breaking out the wireframe sketches and paper prototypes, some back-to-paper web types get the juices flowing with mind maps and sketch notes. Then they blog about it.
Mike Rohde is kind of the king of these. 37Signals recently posted his sketch notes from the Seed 3 conference and they’re a pleasure to read. He’s done the same for SXSW, VizThink workshops and other web watering holes. Collect them all.
Paul Downey was inspired by Rohde to sketch-note FOWD London 2008, above. View the full size on Flickr and the sketch notes are even better with notes.
Austin Kleon creates mind maps of the books he reads when he’s not blacking out words in newspapers (for a book). Above, his takeaway from Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence.
As someone who keeps a filing cabinet full of old notebooks and sketchbooks organized by year and topic (if only I could tag them), I never tire of these web-head hand styles or their graffiti counterpart. But sometimes you need some mind-mapping software to get the job done. Lars Plougmann’s digitally rendered mind map above of Joshua Schachter’s 2006 Future of Web Apps talk contains a lot of relevant information. Check it out full size.
And if you don’t think any of this paper stuff is useful, consider Bill Westerman’s paper-based time management software. Or Adaptive Path’s sketchboard technique.
And We’re Back
June 26 08
Back up and running after a sudden barrage of generous linking from Joshua Schachter, Andy Baio, Jack Dorsey, Valleywag, Boing Boing, Daring Fireball, Download Squad, CNET’s Webware, UTNE Reader, Bub.blicio.us and other good folks.
Servers don’t hold up as well as paper.
Toynbee’s Resurrection
June 19 08
Many an urban internet meme collector can tell you about the 25-year-old Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles—embedded in hundreds of city streets throughout the Western Hemisphere, a cryptic message from an unknown crank: TOYNBEE IDEA IN KUBRICK’s 2001: RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER.
Researchers have traced it back to a handful of tantalizingly vague possible sources: a Philadelphia social worker, a 1983 David Mamet play, etc. There’s even a movie coming out about it, so the above photograph of a NEW Toynbee message which appeared in the middle of Ninth Avenue at 56th Street this morning in Hell’s Kitchen may well be part of a six-figure viral marketing campaign, but after reading about the filmmaker I tend to doubt it. It also doesn’t seem to be of the cheapo “new school” variety the Toynbee Tile scholars have mentioned. This one is very much in the original style, but with an entirely different message:
HOUSE OF HADES
SHOW NO MERCY TO
THE MEDIA MACHINE
IN SOCIETY ‘2008…
Framed by the words “PROLETARIOT’S AFFLICTION” [sic].
A message from the Jupiter Liberation Front? The internet offers no leads at the moment, so here’s a first submission.
UPDATE: Justin Duerr of the Resurrect Dead film reports that these “House of Hades” tiles were first spotted up in Buffalo last fall. Here’s a recent sighting.
Booksmooch
June 17 08
I mean BookMooch—have you tried it? It’s enough to send a book hoarder past the point of no return. You go and list the books you have that you no longer want and if they’re good ones, you’ll receive email alerts within minutes from people who have those same books on their wishlists and would love for you to send yours to them. Do that quickly and you’ll earn good feedback, which will build up points which allow you to acquire the books you want from other souls. No money is exchanged. It’s book wealth redistribution and it’s lovely.
There are other services like this, namely PaperBackSwap, but they feel more corporate. PaperBackSwap is gearing up to start charging, as they repeatedly tell you when you sign up, and rather than get out of the way of the book-love fest like BookMooch they seem bent on complicating things. First they pair you up with a veteran user who has volunteered to be your Tour Guide, which is a little awkward, then they introduce money into the equation—you can buy book-credits as well as “PBS Money,” which is used to pay for their branded delivery confirmation feature: a printable barcode scanned by the postal service for tracking purposes that ties into your PBS account and streamlines book-credit management. You can also buy printable postage with your PBS Money, or pay $8 for the privilege of exchanging boxes of books with someone (Box-o-Books™).
On the other hand, PaperBackSwap’s traffic is higher than that of BookMooch and they have more books available. They’re also out to become the Oprah of modern book exchange and could care less about the whiny book blogger demographic.
BookMooch is non-profit, has a bang-up API, hangs out with some great charities, plays well with LibraryThing and was created by John Buckman, Renaissance lutenist and founder of Magnatune among other good things. It’s also enabled some unexpected acquisitions like the early signed edition of a book by Thomas Flanagan (who shares my birthday and whose daughter’s work is a good conversation starter on the internet). In sum: BookMooch good.
NNDB Mapper: Beyond Lists of Links
May 21 08
NNDB Mapper from the NNDB (Notable Names Database) is a sophisticated visualization tool for the people—the kind of thing we’re starting to see a lot more of—and you can use it to uncover little-known connections between Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker contributors who have been parodied as Muppets and philosophers featured on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band who have had asteroids named after them, then overlay their zodiac signs. Or just see which big-name donors have contributed to the campaigns of both Obama and McCain. Fun stuff though I would love to be able to use this on top of other data sources.
See also: TheyRule, ExxonSecrets
Charticle Theory
May 6 08
-
usa
26
(52%) -
government
23
(46%) -
maps
14
(28%) -
language
7
(14%) -
business
7
(14%)
Recent blips: interactive Voronoi treemaps, basketball data visualizations, Watchdog.net.
Datamob-compliant APIs: MAPLight, GovTracker, AMEE, Project Vote Smart, Civic Footprint.
Coffee table: The Alphabet Abecedarium, Mashups, Miscellany.
New Project: Datamob
April 23 08
NEW on the internet tonight: a project I’ve been working on with Lauren Sperber, Datamob.org. Datamob grew out of an uncontainable enthusiasm on our part for projects that make innovative use of public data—sites like EveryBlock, MAPLight.org, OpenCongress, TheyWorkForYou and others. Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators podcast series, which often explores issues surrounding access to government data, is also largely to blame.
I always want to know where these sites get their data, and as I dug deeper I noticed that many of them pull from the same data sources. Open Secrets from the Center for Responsive Politics is an important data source—Follow the Oil Money, OpenCongress and MAPLight all tap into it in different ways. Datamob aims to highlight these connections and keep track of all the developer-friendly public data sources and corresponding interfaces. We’ve got feeds of everything (datasets, interfaces, resources, tags, comments, the whole ball of data) to help with that.
The site was built with Rails in coffee shops around New York City using Heroku, an amazing web-based, collaborative Rails development environment. Get the full WTF on the about page. We’re just getting started and there’s a lot more to come.
Glosses Through the Ages
April 17 08
“In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note is too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin, I commit it to a slip of paper, and deposit it between the leaves; taking care to secure it by an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1884
While I’m on the marginalia beat, let’s take a quick tour of glosses past and present.
People have actually been trying to get annotation right on the web for over a decade—see Diigo, SharedCopy, A.nnotate, Trailfire, ShiftSpace (”an open source layer above any webpage” from NYU’s ITP) and many others. But the tool that comes closest to enabling the freeform marginalia of olde is the one that doesn’t try to at all: Twiddla. An all-out hit at the April NY Tech Meetup (and some web conference in Texas), Twiddla’s a completely web-based “team whiteboarding” app ideal for marking up and defacing web pages. Try it out in their sandbox.
For a detailed history of marginalia, check out this book by H. J. Jackson.
The Marginalia of John Adams
April 7 08
At some point I’ll stop blogging about LibraryThing, but it won’t be easy with the amount of material they provide. Tonight’s discovery via this post on the LibraryThing blog is the transcribed marginalia of John Adams. Before blogs allowed people to offer comment on everything they read and tediously deconstruct arguments paragraph by paragraph for the world to see, people like Adams wrote witty remarks in the margins of their books. Lots of them. LibraryThing historical consultant Jeremy Dibbell has been working with Boston Public Library staff to transcribe these gems. This is a sampling.
Monde Primitif, Volume 4 by Antoine Court de Gébelin, page 56:
Phallus. I blush to write this word: but the meaning of it is so important in all ancient religions that it cannot be omitted.
Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind by Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, page 53:
When? Where was such a people? Where is their history, their tradition, or fable? This is all fiction.
All this we see in every commercial nation, however founded—and shall see it. Thou art a quack, Condorcet.
De la Législation: Ou Principes des Loix by Abbé de Mably, page 64:
The French are as much alike as the Indians.
Monde Primitif, Volume 1 by Antoine Court de Gébelin, pages 34, 90, 95 and 132:
Oh! the length, the breadth and the depth of etymology!
What a coruscation of metaphors, fables, allegories, fictions, mysteries and whatnot!
An immensity of truth in a few lines!
How neat!
How pretty! How ingenious!
Is it possible that all this could have entered into the heads of those old fellows? Yet it seems the most natural, plausible and probable solution of their riddles. Right or wrong? No matter. Salvation depends not on the solution of mysteries, ancient or modern.
There is wit in plenty here! And sense, for what I know or care.
An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution by Mary Wollstonecraft, pages 131-134:
Her beauty was chiefly the fiction of flattery.
I never could see it.
She was giddy with vivacity.
Miss Wollstonecraft is too fond of such words.
Where is the evidence of this?
This is no proof.
Those luscious words might have been avoided by a lady.
Ibid, page 522:
This word simplicity in the course of seven years has murdered its millions and produced more horrors than monarchy did in a century. As if all excellence and perfection consisted in simplicity. A woman would be more simple if she had but one eye or one breast: yet Nature chose she should have two as more convenient as well as ornamental. A man would be more simple with but one ear, one arm, one leg. Shall a legislature have but one chamber then, merely because it is more simple? A wagon would be more simple if it went upon one wheel: yet no art could prevent it from oversetting at every step.
There can be none more simple than despotism. The triple complication, not simplicity, is to be sought for.
Hints on the National Bankruptcy of Britain by John Bristed, page 65:
An eternal truth.
When love or wine get into the head, good night to ye, discretion.
A New System, or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology: Volume 3 by Jacob Bryant, page 28:
Americans! Have a care. Form no schemes of universal empire. The Lord will always come down and defeat all such projects.
Monde Primitif, Volume 8 by Antoine Court de Gébelin, page lix:
True! But what then?
Very true, but what follows?
Perfectly true! But no new discovery.
Ah! there’s the rest. We see not the end. We can foresee no end of the weakness, ignorance and corruption of mankind.
Bookshelves of the Deceased
March 27 08
The street booksellers of New York who haunt the estate sales of deceased book lovers know where to get the best books. Via LibraryThing’s I See Dead People’s Books group:
James Joyce, genius:
· The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
· The Book of the Land of Ire, Being a Record of Those Things That Were Done by the Men of Ire in the Days When the Men of Hun Made War Upon the Earth, by Alpheo That Is a Humble Disciple and Brother Scribe of One Artemas That Hath Recorded in Many Noble Volumes All Those Things That Were Done by the Men of Ire in Those Days
· More
Tupac Shakur, American MC:
· The Diary of Anais Nin, 1931-1934
· Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem
· The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
· The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
· More
Ernest Hemingway, adventurer:
· Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: A Novel by Angus Wilson
· Animal Navigation: How Animals Find Their Way About by J. D. Carthy
· The Backgrounds of Ulysses by Richard Ellmann
· The Changing Face of Beauty: Four Thousand Years of Beautiful Women by Madge Garland
· More
Benjamin Franklin, inventor:
· A General Description of All Trades
· True Contentment in the Gaine of Godliness, With Its Self-Sufficiencie, A Meditation by Thomas Gataker
· Astrologo-Mastix, or a Discovery of the Vanity and Iniquity of Judiciall Astrology, or Divining by the Starres the Successe or Miscarriage of Humane Affaires by John Geree
· More
F. Scott Fitzgerald, brilliant drinker:
· Apes, Men and Morons by Earnest Albert Hooton
· The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche by H.L. Mencken
· Poems of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood by Padraic Colum
· The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W. N. P. Barbellion
· More
Your favorite living authors have made their shelves public on bookish social networks as well, FYI—peruse the libraries of David Weinberger, Jami Attenberg, Ron Silliman, Mike McGonigal (Chemical Imbalance, anyone?) and more.