Global Moxie - Blog

The Future in Your Pocket, and Why I'm Writing Another Book

Josh Clark — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:32:10 UT

My elementary school in Minneapolis had the most mind-blowing student assemblies. Sure, sure, most schools of the era shuffled in guest speakers for their captive student audience, but they were usually the stock just-say-no and scare-em-straight folks, with a few career-day types thrown in. Not Harrison Open School. We got a swami. We got a Secret Service agent. I’m just saying: We had great assemblies. But one of them really stuck with me, and I’ve thought about it every few months for the three decades since.

It was 1977. I don’t remember the speaker’s name, but he made music. Electronic music. With big, heavy equipment. His gear filled the stage of our homely auditorium, and he sprang from machine to machine to make this weird music of blips and bleeps and eerie organ sounds. And he knew how to warm up the crowd; Star Wars had arrived in theaters that spring, and he used his outrageously fancy equipment to boom R2-D2 sounds at us, all chirps and whistles.

He owned us: He. Was. Awesome.

At the end of his show, he stepped to the front of the stage. “One day,” he said, “some day in the future, all of you will be able to have a machine that does all this, makes music like this.” Then he pulled out his wallet and held it up. “And it will fit in your pocket.”

I’ll never forget it: “It will fit in your pocket.” I was six years old, and that was the first time I really ached for a specific vision of the future. For me, the future wasn’t rocket cars. It wasn’t living on the moon. It wasn’t even R2-D2. The future was having my own little synthesizer, a computer in my pocket to make stuff.

So I waited for the future. At first, I thought it had arrived in 2001 with the iPod. Bam, music in your pocket, just like the man said. But that was just a player. It couldn’t make anything. It wasn’t a creative device. It wasn’t until 2007 that I realized that it was the iPhone I was waiting for. Apple’s fabulous device is the only thing that has ever resembled my childhood notions of the future. For me, it’s the very first time the future finally got here.

A computer. In your pocket. That helps you makes stuff. People are painting magazine covers, composing music, writing novels, you name it. And of course the phone can also do all the magical things that we’ve already started to take for granted: plucking any information or video from thin air; taking commands by voice or touch; mapping out the world around us. Now we’re talking. This is what the man from 1977 was getting at.

But the future came on so fast that it’s a little overwhelming. After a year of living and working with my prized iPhone, I’m still discovering and marveling at the things it can do. And I know plenty of people who are frankly paralyzed by all the options in the App Store.

So I’m writing a book about it. For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on my next book for O’Reilly: Best iPhone Apps: The essential guide for discriminating downloaders. The book is an authoritative guide to the best, most useful, and most entertaining iPhone apps. Full of colorful and helpful illustrations, this catalog of iPhone gems gives you the lowdown on each app, with brief tips on how to use it. It’s a wildly fun project, a professional excuse to play with my favorite toy and explore the possibilities of the most productive tool I’ve ever owned. And I’m especially excited that I’m contributing to the design of the book’s interior, a first for me.

That means I’m neck-deep in iPhone software, spelunking the App Store’s darkest nooks and crannies to find novel, clever, and generally indispensable apps. As I go, I’ll likely note some of them here on my blog, and probably many more via @globalmoxie on Twitter, before the book is published in late July.

But I’d also like to know what your favorite apps are. What apps convince you that the future's here, too? What apps make you unstoppable, or more productive than ever? What apps delight you most, or make you laugh out loud? What app has changed some fundamental way you do things? What app do you use to while away spare minutes (or hours)? Post a comment with the favorites that have earned a place of honor on your iPhone’s home screen.

And hey, this is important. This is the future we’re talking about, after all. And it fits in your pocket.

Tags: apple, books, iphone, technology

iWork ’09 Tips, Interviews, and Book Reviews

Josh Clark — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:49:33 UT

Photo by Felipe Bachomo.

I hit the bricks this month to spread the word about my book, iWork ‘09: The Missing Manual, and even managed to get a few folks to listen as I preached the gospel of beautiful software making our work lives more productive and creative.

iWork is Apple’s suite of elegant, get-stuff-done software: the Pages word processor, Numbers spreadsheet, and Keynote presentation software. It’s a terrific alternative to Microsoft Office, and my book details how to make the most of it—with lots of juicy insights about common-sense document design along the way.

Several kind journalists indulged me and my proselytizing:

Chuck Joiner interviewed me for the MacVoices podcast, and I really enjoyed it (notwithstanding my alarming tendency to say “you know” every few seconds).
Mary Rotman posted a Q&A with me, along with my favorite iWork tips at the O’Reilly FYI blog.
Garry Barker of the Australian daily The Age notes the necessity of The Missing Manual series for understanding subtle software like iWork: “Mr. Clark’s Missing Manual on iWork is full of good advice in easily absorbed form.” (Thanks, Garry! But please, call me Josh.)
Web Worker Daily’s review of my book wasn’t really a review of my book, but nonetheless called it “a great title for acclimatizing yourself with Apple’s lovely working environment.” Much appreciated!

And I’m especially flattered to see that the book is featured this week on the front page of Amazon’s Computers & Internet section, where it’s been bouncing around the list of top 100 titles for the past month. This has all been so much fun, and it’s great to see the book finding its audience. I enjoyed writing it, and it’s great to see people enjoy reading it, too. Thanks to all.

Tags: amazon, books, iwork, josh, podcast, press, software

Marathons, Makers, and Surviving the Dark Middle

Josh Clark — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:02:06 UT

Photo by Josh Clark.

The Paris Marathon swept through the city today, and for a few hours the town belonged to its runners. (See my photos at Flickr.) I live just a few steps from the marathon course, and on the morning of the marathon, it’s always my habit to slip down to cheer on the runners. I park myself just before the 25km mark, about two miles past the halfway mark. I clap, I yell, I smile, I shout their names.

When I was younger, I used to run marathons. I no longer have the time, energy, or legs for the classic distance, so I seek out my challenges elsewhere, off the road. But I like to think that I still understand what marathoners need from their spectators. And here, in the dark middle of the race, runners need encouragement, reminders that they’re strong, that the finish is ahead: plausible, real, within reach.

As the runners glide past my vantage point, they’ve already plowed through more than 15 miles (15 miles!) and still have 11 to go. For some, that means as much as two more hours of running. By now, many of them are already showing the effort (sometimes pain). It’s going to be 11 miles of fighting inner demons, of willing tired bodies to ignore the alarm bells. Mind over matter, mind over matter, mind over matter.

To folks who have never done it before, it sounds ridiculous, masochistic. Nope, it’s optimism. It’s nearly 40,000 people who came to the starting line believing this impossible idea that they can actually cover 26.2 miles at a fast clip. The start is all excitement and possibility, and the end is all accomplishment, joy, and relief. But in between, in the long middle, that’s where you find out who you are. That’s when the doubts creep in to gnaw at the optimism that launched you into this madness. And with 11 miles to go, I can already see it on some of their faces: Jesus, what the hell am I doing to myself?

Everybody’s got their own way of pulling through. The support of family at a carefully chosen point in the course; visualization of the finish; running for a cause; fear of failure; simple discipline; blind faith. Often, it’s all of them wrapped up together in a powerful motivational bundle.

Photo by Josh Clark.

Most of the runners finish, and before long, they forget the pain, let go of the demons. All that remains is the optimism and the accomplishment—the start and the finish. A huge number of these marathoners will even do it again. The thing that sticks with them is not the pain of the marathon’s late miles, but the thrill of possibility and the glow of accomplishment. Get me back out there, I want to do it again.

For reasons I don’t completely understand, I’m personally drawn to long, challenging solo efforts. Fifteen years ago, marathons fit the bill. Now, in my professional life, I similarly seek out big, complex projects to shoulder on my own. This always seems like a great idea at the beginning. But then there’s the long middle. The strain of the thing sets in, the anxiety about whether I’ve finally bitten off more than I can chew. When I rounded the 500th page of my book and realized that I had only a few weeks to finish the remaining 400, I felt like one of those runners. Wiped out, flagging, fighting the demons, painfully aware of the remaining distance. Same thing during the long construction of Big Medium 2. Jesus, what the hell am I doing to myself?

And like the marathoners, I eventually found my way to the finish—exhilarated, delighted, flush with accomplishment. This process repeats over and over again: I imagine that I can somehow complete an impossible project and, after some period of agony, actually get it done. Soon afterward, in spite of myself, I find myself looking around for the next thing, some new test, some new challenge. Before I know it, I’m in the thick of another long and agonizing middle, wondering just how I got here all over again.

Photo by Josh Clark.

Every single one of the makers I know finds some significant part of the creative process to be downright excruciating. And yet, like childbirth or a marathon, the pain’s memory fades, and we’re soon ready to tackle it all over again. It turns out that the marathon—every kind of marathon—is a creative process, an act of self-invention. That’s why it’s so oddly addictive despite the evident pain. Every maker is a marathoner and vice versa—powered by optimism and faith and a stubborn inability to recall the torture that’s come before. Without this convenient amnesia, we wouldn’t have writers, coders, or artists; their projects would never get started, let alone finish.

If you’ve got one of these troublemakers in your life, here’s how you can help them fight their demons: Stake out a position around 25km and remind them that they can make it, that the pain won’t last. There’s a finish line ahead. Lots of them, in fact.

Tags: creativity, inspiration, life, marathon, motivation, paris, running, work

Message from Beyond

Josh Clark — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:54:39 UT

I received this invitation from M. Salimou, a self-professed big medium.

Like most urban mailboxes, mine collects its fair share of flyers, hand-delivered by old-school guerilla marketers. Ads for locksmiths, menus for Chinese restaurants, vaguely desperate pleas from neighborhood realtors. This week, though, I was bemused to receive a flyer from a big medium.

No, not that Big Medium. This was a missive from another medium entirely, un grand medium to be precise. Click the flyer image to enlarge, but this is the gist in English:

Monsieur Salimou
BIG MEDIUM - AUTHENTIC CLAIRVOYANT - HEALER

Specialist in all things occult. Quickly resolve all your problems: Love, rediscovered affection, absolute fidelity from your spouse, immediate return of a loved one, marriage, luck, protection against danger, lifting of curses, tests, contests, work, success, sports, job search, business, etc...

Bring a photo or object. Serious, efficient, fast. Results guaranteed. House calls possible.

As it turns out, this is exactly the kind of big medium I had in mind when I named the Big Medium content management system... a medium to help mere mortals communicate with a mysterious (technical) realm. It's a nifty double entendre for the fact that the Internet itself is a fairly hefty medium itself. Alas, unlike M. Salimou, my big medium doesn't make house calls.

Tags: bigmedium, life, marketing, paris

David Byrne Never Stops Making Sense

Josh Clark — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:08:36 UT

Burning Down the House: David Byrne in concert (and tutu) at Olympia in Paris.

Last night I had the good fortune to find myself in the front row of a David Byrne concert, just a few feet from the man himself. The show was terrific, an amazing experience all around, and I had a huge, silly grin plastered on my face for all 120 minutes. Blissed out.

It wasn’t just that Byrne and his ensemble sounded so great. It wasn’t only that they threw themselves into the show with so much energy, spirit, and humor. Or that the choreography had such an endearing, almost homespun feeling (and... tutus!). No, the thing that made it such a great personal experience for me was that it was so evidently a great personal experience for David Byrne.

After every song, he seemed delighted and even surprised by the audience’s applause. He seemed buoyed, actually elated, by this exchange between musician and audience, and this enthusiasm reflected back into his performance, back onto us. The show was fresh and new and crackling with energy.

But here’s the thing: It’s not fresh and new. This tour has already seen something like 80 concerts in the last seven months. Many of the songs were from Byrne’s Talking Heads days, tunes he’s been performing for more than three decades. And yet the look on his face last night was as if he’d just discovered the pleasure of performance right then and there. He seemed at once thrilled and bashful. David Byrne has always glowed with a kind of boyish wonder, even when engaging in social criticism, and his boyishness hasn’t faded at 56.

David Byrne makes stuff, lots of it: songs, movies, books, photos, operas. I’m sure it helps that he’s, y’know, a creative genius. But no matter how clever you are, making stuff—inventing something new—is hard and challenging work. While invention always starts with passion and enthusiasm, it’s easy to lose both in the hard slog of bringing it to fruition. Add to that the relentless grind of on-the-road touring—the symphony of airline flights, hotel rooms, rental cars, long stints away from loved ones—and it must be tough to keep the thread of the original passion: Well, how did I get here?

Of course, making it seem fresh and effortless is the essential job of a performer. But not all performers can do it. I’ve seen concerts where the musicians seem completely indifferent to the performance and the audience, traipsing right up to the edge of outright hostility. Of course, that eventually happens to most of us in the work that we do, even when it’s work that we love: The hassle of the work sometimes overtakes the reason we started doing it in the first place. This is something that I often struggle with, spinning the words and code and designs that I make for a living. I have to step back from the work, remind myself why I’m doing it, why I got started in the first place. It’s a matter of self-preservation, sure, but more important a matter of maintaining creative momentum. If you conflate the dreary parts of your work with the creative payoff, you risk poisoning your inspiration.

After 35 years of performances, Byrne seems able to keep the two aspects in perspective. “After 10 days off the treadmill, we’re back in gear and it feels wonderful—we’re ecstatic,” Byrne wrote in his blog after the first show of the European tour, two weeks ago. “This is why we put up with the jet lag and the constant dislocation.”

David Byrne and company: “Ecstatic” after their show in Paris.

The cool thing is that this passion—this “ecstasy,” to use Byrne’s word—for making and sharing is contagious. When I return home from a terrific concert or an inspired art exhibit, I always have new energy for my own creations. There’s something galvanizing about seeing something created with care and presented with gusto: music, books, JavaScript code, paintings, meals, whatever. Seeing someone else’s creative payoff reminds me of the creative payoff in my own work; it restores courage and passion. And hey, that’s not a bad takeaway from a rock concert.

In the end, I suppose it’s about looking forward, remembering what you’re working toward. When Byrne introduced the show, he said he’d be playing some of his new stuff (applause) as well as some of his old stuff (applause). And then: “So there’s the present, and there’s the past. And then we have the future. And maybe we can give a little applause to the future, too. If we do that, if we think about it that way, maybe the future will be a little bit better.”

Tags: art, creativity, davidbyrne, inspiration, life, motivation, music, paris

My Latest Project: A Book

Josh Clark — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:11:31 UT

So I’m writing a book.

I signed a contract last month with O’Reilly to write a book about Apple’s iWork software for the publisher’s Missing Manual series. I couldn’t be more tickled. O’Reilly is hands-down the best there is when it comes to tech and computer books, and I’ve always loved the Missing Manual series. Created by New York Times gadget guy David Pogue, the series emphasizes friendly down-to-earth explanations and a lively editorial tone. I’m humbled and altogether delighted to find myself among the ranks of O’Reilly authors.

Both personally and professionally, the project is a nice fit for me. I make humane software for creative people; my professional mission is to help smart folks get clear of technical hassle to share their ideas with the world. Now I’m writing a book for a series with the same mission, focused on software that is itself incredibly friendly and elegant. It’s a nice evolution for me, explaining to the average Jane how to make her life easier with thoughtfully designed software.

Pages, Keynote and Numbers: a svelte software suite.

So, what is it? iWork is Apple’s productivity software, an alternative to Microsoft Office in a tidy bundle of three programs: Pages (word processing), Keynote (presentations) and Numbers (spreadsheet). I’ve griped and groaned about Microsoft Word in the past, finding it so miserable that I simply stopped using it around 2000. By contrast, Pages provides a lovely, sleek writing environment. It doesn’t have Word’s kitchen sink of features, but in a word processor, less is truly more. Pages’ slender diet of toolbars and other “window chrome” helps you stay focused on actually getting stuff done, and that’s what it’s all about. Hold the “Word art”—I’m happy to take a clean, intuitive workspace instead. Keynote and Numbers provide similar experiences in their particular domains.

The software is a pleasure to use, and it’s turning out to be a pleasure to write about, too. I’ve been working on the book for a couple of weeks now, and with over 100 pages behind me, I’ve discovered some distinct similarities between writing a book and spinning code. More on that over the next few weeks, along with details about the publication date etc.

In the meantime, forgive me if I’m a bit quiet here as my writing efforts shift to my offline project. I’m excited about this project, and I think you’ll like the result. Stay tuned.

Tags: apple, books, iwork, josh, software, work, writing

Dot Your I’s

Josh Clark — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:52:41 UT

Lawyers like to insist that you include ™, ® and © trademark/copyright symbols with logos and product names to mark your intellectual property. Unfortunately, these little legal symbols tend to swarm your logo like fruit flies, adding visual noise to the design.

I like the solution used by Jean Louis David, the French chain of hair salons. The designer smuggled the ® and © symbols into the dots above the “i” letters in the logo. It’s a great solution that gets the legalese into the logotype without cluttering its design.

Bonus trivia: The dot above the “i” is called a “tittle.”

Tags: design

Jacques Villeglé: The Original Mashup

Josh Clark — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:15:39 UT

Jacques Villeglé, Rue de la Biche, Saint Denis (1963).

I’m completely wowed by the colorful Jacques Villeglé retrospective currently on at the Centre Pompidou here in Paris.

From the late 1940s to the early ’90s, Villeglé stripped layers of torn posters from the walls of Paris, mounting and framing his discoveries as-is. Each of these found works consists of months of layered advertising, with portions ripped away by passers-by or by workers making way for the next layer of posters.

The geological strata of these shredded ads reveal the artistic history of the city’s graphic design. Villeglé’s works are kaleidoscopes of capitalism, literature, cinema, technology and social protest.

In one work, a pirate-movie actress gazes out from a barrage of ads for oriental rugs, concerts and TV sets. In another, a John Steed lookalike roars his motorcycle through an explosion of striped colors and flying cigarettes. A series of movie posters morphs into a happy jumble of whorled and happily illegible letterforms. A De Gaulle campaign poster disintegrates into chaos, the French president’s mouth and mind replaced by a vortex of commercial images.

The effect is oddly beautiful. The bright colors and random patterns somehow approach the intelligence and boldness of Pollock paintings. Abstract expressionism meets pop art.

Jacques Villeglé, Boulevard de la Chapelle (1965).

The exhibition struck me as fascinatingly relevant in an era of online mashups and user-generated content: Who’s the artist here? Villeglé presents himself as nothing more than collector and flâneur, an urban observer who stumbles upon the works fully formed. He instead assigns authorship to “le lacéré anyonyme,” the countless anonymous hands who tore the posters (not to mention the designers and typographers who created each one).

“I like to save myself the creative agony,” Villeglé told an interviewer. “The whole world makes work for me. I only have to collect it.”

Villeglé’s work challenges the dominance of the individual artist while elevating the role of the man on the street. For web workers, this reversal of creator and consumer should sound familiar. Is the ugly beauty of the typical MySpace page really so different from Villeglé’s torn posters?

If Villeglé were just getting started now, one could imagine him working from screenshots instead of ripped paper. The online flâneur certainly has lots to explore. My Facebook news feed is filled with tiny glimpses of my friends’ creations... blown up, atomized and reassembled just for me, the work of countless anonymous hands. As sites plaster more and more layers of user-generated content, advertisements and web widgets across their canvases, the original personality and design of these sites are swallowed up, peeking out through the information collage like Villeglé’s pirate actress.

Jacques Villeglé, ABC (1959).

For designers, information architects, and writers who are accustomed to having complete control of their creations, this can be disconcerting. Like the posters in Villeglé’s work, our content is likely to show up in entirely different contexts than the ones for which they were conceived, creating something that is at once more and less than the sum of its parts.

Right now, you’re reading a blog post that I wrote specifically for display on this page of my site. Yet the moment I published it, it also appeared on my FriendFeed page, my Facebook news feed and in hundreds of people’s feed readers. In those new settings, my words are layered with another site’s chrome and keyword-specific advertising, stripped of my own site’s design, and combined with other content. It’s transformed into part of some entirely other work.

This is the new creative reality (although Villeglé’s work shows that perhaps it’s not so new after all). The moment we put something out there, it becomes fodder for productive combination. In many cases, as creators, we’re the ones who are blasting our work out there like confetti. Phil Gyford recently shared a diagram of where his personal photos, status updates, blog posts and music preferences appear on the web. Most of it just gets published automatically without his participation, and the diagram of how it works is itself a kind of collage ripped from the web:

Phil Gyford's diagram of his personal content careening around the web.

A good proportion of those sites I almost never visit: Pownce, FriendFeed, Tumblr, Jaiku, Brightkite, LiveJournal and Fire Eagle (which is designed so you don’t have to visit it). They trundle along, getting updated by the ghostly fingers of APIs without me actively using them. Quite magic, almost scary, and possibly a little pointless.

My own blog consumes other sites’ content with those same “ghostly fingers.” The right column soaks up and automatically displays content that I post to Flickr, Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter and Fire Eagle. It all gets mashed into an information collage that roughly approximates the state of my brain.

That’s the beauty of the thing. As our creations get mixed, mashed and cast into unexpected contexts, they often take on new force and value. I think Villeglé gets it right: “The fragment of the poster that I collect doesn’t interest me by itself. It has to be constructed in the tearing before it accounts for something.”

Tags: art, community, design, history, paris

Winning the Uphill Battle

Josh Clark — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:55:57 UT

Parisians and their Vélib bikes. Photo by stttijn.

As any of my friends will confirm, I’m pretty much obsessed with Vélib, the public bike-sharing system here in Paris that makes it super-convenient to zip around the city on two wheels. It also gets my geek on: Vélib is a complex system that neatly tucks away its complexity behind a simple interface and some clever behavioral incentives.

Here’s how Vélib works: There are over 20,000 bikes distributed among 1,500 stations throughout the city. Pick up a bike from one station, return it to another. You purchase a daily, weekly or annual subscription, which allows you to ride the bike as much as you like in 30-minute chunks. The bikes aren’t for leisure rentals; they’re intended to be used for quick, direct one-way trips of 30 minutes. You have to pay for longer trips, and overage fees add up quickly.

As you might expect, these one-way trips are not evenly distributed throughout the city at certain hours. Bikes tend to clump in some areas and empty out in others. To address this, workers circulate in trucks, moving the bikes from full stations to empty ones.

It turns out that this is an uphill battle. Literally.

See, Paris has a handful of steep hills. The Montmartre neighborhood, for example, is perched at the top of a rise some 450 feet above the Seine. Taking a bike down the hill has a certain obvious appeal, but riding back up to the top... not so much.

The uphill penalty is financial as well as physical. The hills are at the outer edges of the city, so the extra time to get up a hill for trips from the city center can easily nudge you over the 30-minute free period. It can cost money to ride a Vélib bike up the hill. The result: In Vélib’s first year of service, bike stations in Montmartre were always empty. The brute-force method of moving bikes by truck couldn’t keep up.

Over the summer, though, the good people of Vélib added a simple behavioral incentive to the system: Return your bike to one of 100 stations perched over 60 meters above the rest of the city, and 15 minutes of free riding is added to your account.

Riding uphill is now a power-up.

They turned a hassle into a game, pain into points. Riding uphill is now a power-up. The free minutes are a bonafide reward, too, saving money on destinations that are often outside of the free 30-minute radius. More bikes make it back up the hill. Since the program was launched in June, over nine years of bonus minutes have been awarded.

As a software developer, I obsess over performance bottlenecks, inefficient areas of code that bog down the rest of the application. It turns out that the best solution often isn’t a brute-force route through the problem (“let’s truck the bikes up the hill”) but rather an elegant sidestep around the issue (“how can we get the riders to do it instead?”).

So the systems guy in me loves this solution, but even more, it appeals to something more playful. I love that this simple tweak made an uphill commute feel more like a game, where you earn points and reward for your effort. It reminds me of Jane McGonigal’s spirited encouragement to do more to “make the real world more like games,” which I wrote about a few months ago:

Her idea: By introducing game-like systems into our work and home lives, we can imbue otherwise tedious tasks with the spirit of reward and collaboration that makes gameplay fun. Jane pointed to a game called Chore Wars which turns housework into gameplay for families. (“Finally you can get experience points for housework!”) She also pointed to the Nike+iPod gizmo that transforms running into a community video game.

Vélib fixed a performance bottleneck by introducing a game into the system. What’s not to love?

Tags: community, life, paris, usability, velib

Future of Web Apps: Finding Light in Dark Times

Josh Clark — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:39:29 UT

Photo by Sakurako Kitsa.

I’m fresh from the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London, and it turns out that the future of web apps, like so much of the world right now, is not exactly certain.

Although most of the sessions focused on the shiny possibilities of new web techniques and technologies, the unsettling reality of plummeting markets outside the convention center’s walls was hard to ignore. (My commute to the conference passed the Bank of England, where I heard several snippets of mobile-phone conversations that were variations of, “the world is going to hell.”)

Keynote speaker Tim Bray was one of the few to give the market crisis more than a passing remark in his talk. “I’m turning my keynote from a bright, sunny talk about cool web technology into a dark, foreboding talk about getting through tough times.…I predict some really shitty times coming at us right now,” he said, as he moved to his first slide. It was titled, “I’m scared.”

Despite this ominous opening, I found the spirit of his talk to be essentially hopeful, outlining the opportunities a downturn might provide and the positive steps that individuals and companies can take to survive and even thrive in tough times. It’s worth a listen.

Ideas flow when money doesn’t

Photo by Sakurako Kitsa.

To me, the web was at its most interesting during the wilderness years between the dot-com bust and the Web 2.0 resurgence. Funding for new ventures was slim, and chances of getting rich from a new online property were remote. The money guys retreated, leaving behind the folks who were genuinely interested in making something new for little more than the simple pleasure of invention.

Web 2.0 archetypes Delicious, Flickr and Basecamp were developed during this period, all beginning as humble tools for internal use by the developers or their communities. This was stuff that the makers wanted to use themselves, and they built these apps first and foremost to give their users new superpowers. Business success was the side effect, not the goal.

The developers of all three of those apps were at the very first FOWA conference in February 2006. It was a very different event at a time when money was only just beginning to find its way back into the industry. It was a makers’ gathering, marked by an earnest community spirit, a sense of banding together to build something new and cool and useful. Talks were focused on techniques and discoveries, on how to make applications and websites talk to each other, how to make the web a two-way conversation instead of a one-way broadcast. No kidding, it was exhilirating.

To be sure, that spirit was still present at last week’s installment. I got a lot out of the generous, nitty-gritty talks from developers Matt Biddulph, Blaine Cook, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Joe Stump and others. But that maker spirit also competed with more mundane messages from venture capitalists, managers and business pundits.

I don’t have anything against making money or people who are good at it (alas, I don’t seem to be one of them), but I do think that chasing Benjamins too often kicks innovation to the curb. A gold-rush mentality means herds of copycats. It means putting a buck before the original notion of providing a great or useful experience. As evidenced by the current market crisis, a flood of money can blind us to good sense, corral us into the lowest common denominator.

In an interview at the Mavericks at Work blog, Arkadi Kuhlmann, founder and CEO of ING Direct, described the dangers and temptations of the herd mentality:

Every person who tries to do real innovation is going to be tempted by money, greed, acceptance, being in the middle of the action. But at the core there is one fundamental difference: I know why I’m here. I want to make a difference. If I was into this just for making money, being a big accepted banker, I would have been tempted. But that’s not why I’m here. I am trying to build something that changes the business, that allows me to stay on the right side of the discussion.…

When you run with the pack, what you generally see are other people’s backsides. We know why we’re here, and it’s not to copy other people’s bad ideas.

Back to basics

With cash for brassy new ventures in short supply then perhaps we can fill the void by discovering new ideas in old idealism. In this weekend’s New York Times, literary critic Harold Bloom reminded us of what Ralph Waldo Emerson said about hard times and the restorative opportunities they present. During the 1837 financial panic, Emerson wrote:

The present generation is bankrupt of principles and hope, as of property. I see man is not what man should be. He is the treadle of a wheel. He is a tassel at the apron string of society. He is a money chest. He is the servant of his belly. This is the causal bankruptcy, this is the cruel oppression, that the ideal should serve the actual, that the head should serve the feet. Then first, I am forced to inquire if the ideal might not also be tried. Is it to be taken for granted that it is impracticable?

...and two years later in “Self-Reliance”:

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

During the fallow years of the last dot-com downturn, the web’s idealists ran the show, and we did shoot the gulf. Something new and important emerged. Painful as it will likely be, this new financial reality may turn out to be another opportunity for folks building the web to revisit core values, to consider what it is that we really want to make. How can we make the web a better place? The right answers will put bread on the table, too. No matter what the economic conditions, there’s always a market for cool, useful, affordable.

I had the good fortune to chat with Kathy Sierra after her excellent keynote at FOWA. She told me about how she came to be creator of the unconventional Head First series of technical books and author of the celebrated but sadly departed blog Creating Passionate Users. First step: Getting fired from her gig at Sun Microsystems. “I was a single mother with no job, and I was terrified,” she said. “I had no idea what I was going to do.”

Kathy’s a coder, a former video game developer, who also happens to have a deep interest in community building and cognitive science. Plucking ideas from her personal interests and professional values, she created a new career by inspiring others to, well, inspire others. “There are definitely opportunities in tough times,” she nodded.

Doing well by doing good

Photo by Sakurako Kitsa.

So what are the good-for-the-web core values that might help us ride out the downturn? Tim Bray’s keynote offered some practical suggestions, and I’d like to riff on those and suggest a few more:

Make yourself useful. Build products and services that address the basic needs of individuals and businesses. Make stuff that helps people kick ass at the essential things that they do every day. This is no time for fluffy add-ons. Make something that goes to the center of what people want to do and create.
What would you find useful? There’s no better way to build something useful than to build something for yourself, something that satisfies your own practical demands. If you hanker for it, somebody else does, too. Find a market in yourself, satisfy that need, and share it with others.
Engage your audience. In a culture so rife with lousy customer service, it doesn’t take much effort to rise above the rest. Make it easy for customers to talk to you, ask you questions, offer criticism. Reward their faith in you by returning generous responses that actually help them. Put our many fabulous social technologies to work: start a blog, create a discussion forum, add a product wiki, whatever. Just encourage conversation.
Help others into the conversation. Create products and services that help others engage their audiences and communities. Nothing could be more valuable right now than helping companies to better connect with customers, and individuals to better connect with each other. In tough times, there’s shelter in community.
Save people money. With cash in short supply, inexpensive products and services that create new efficiencies will help people do more with less. Make a living by helping others make theirs.
Bootstrap. Don’t forget to save your own money, too. Credit and investors will be rare and expensive, make do with what you have. Find the other good souls making products meant to save people money, and put them to good use.
Be agile. The future is too uncertain for monolithic longterm projects. Develop your products and services incrementally, in small projects scoped to a few weeks at a time. Respond to actual demand, not to pie-in-the-sky forecasts.
Share. Be generous with what you know by sharing your skills and discoveries. Contribute to open-source projects. Share your ideas in mailing lists and online communities. Participate in local professional groups. Be visible, and build a reputation as a person who has answers that help others get things done. A bank of good karma is invaluable in dark times.

Me, I’d like to think that these values are reflected in the Global Moxie manifesto and in my own projects. I certainly plan to redouble my efforts in these areas, and I hope you will, too. It seems to me that this is the real future of web apps.

Tags: business, community, conference, customerservice, fowa, manifesto, work

“Future of Web Apps” in My Immediate Future

Josh Clark — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:13:26 UT

I’m zipping under the English Channel this afternoon to go to London for the Future of Web Apps conference on October 9 and 10.

If you’ll be there, too, please say hello. Seriously. It’s been way too long since we last caught up, and you look fantastic.

The gang at Carsonified knows how to put on a good party (including a healthy open bar at the end of each day and a live taping of Diggnation, which made for wacky fun last year). As usual, FOWA has a bright group of speakers this year, and I’m particularly looking forward to talks by personal heroes Kathy Sierra, Matt Biddulph, and Tim Bray.

Lots of other interesting topics and speakers this year, too, although it’s a high-churn format, with most talks lasting only 15-30 minutes. Looks like they’re aiming for variety over depth, and that works for me. I like the idea of getting exposure to lots of different perspectives and then diving into the ideas more deeply for homework. (While presentations are great for piquing your interest, they’re pretty lousy for sharing high-resolution info.)

If you can bear hearing my gears grind, follow me on Twitter to see what I’m learning (and, um, sipping).

Tags: conference, fowa, london

“Go Into Space”

Josh Clark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:56:50 UT

“Go Into Space” by Tom Gauld.

I recently picked up a limited-edition print titled “Go Into Space” by British illustrator and cartoonist Tom Gauld. I’m crazy about it.

The print features a humble little figure heading into an enormous rocket ship built for one. It pretty much perfectly captures the way that I feel when I climb into the Global Moxie machinery every morning. I suspect other entrepreneurs and small businessfolk feel the same.

For me, life running my own business is composed of roughly equal parts exhiliration, obsession, isolation, triumph, anticipation, danger, inspiration, anxiety and discovery. But through it all there’s always, always, always one constant: Adventure.

Every day I climb into a rocket ship of my own invention. Some days I think she’s about to blow. Other days the rocket takes me to delightful places where I never expected to go. In both cases, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Tom created the illustration in response to the question “If you could do anything tomorrow, what would it be?” And that makes it all the more perfect. Tomorrow, when I climb back into my rocket, I’ll be doing exactly what I want to do.

So thanks, Tom. I love the print.

(If You Could is a clever little site that features a different pair of prints every month on exactly this theme. I have to confess that I’m also charmed by Luke Best’s “Try Again,” one of the prints for October 2008.)

Tags: art, business, inspiration, life, motivation, work

Blissed out on On-Demand Printing

Josh Clark — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:03:15 UT

Photo by spackletoe.

Ten years ago, I ran a community website for runners. As the site grew in popularity, folks started clamoring for t-shirts that they could wear to races to show their membership in our online clan.

Very cool, I thought. So I called around to a few t-shirt printers in the city and ordered up 1000 shirts. Suddenly, my tiny New York apartment was crowded with beefy tees and running singlets. I set up an online storefront to take orders. I got myself a UPS account. And then, for the next several months, a bewilderingly large chunk of my day was consumed by putting t-shirts into mailers, printing shipping labels and waiting around for the UPS guy to show up.

Oh, the humanity. I used to be a guy who coded new site features and participated in the community. Now I was just a guy who stuffed envelopes.

Fast-forward to today, and this kind of hassle is behind me. Outfits like CafePress offer on-demand t-shirt printing, obviating the need to order hundreds in advance; you can even order just one shirt with no price penalty. Ditto for books. Print-on-demand publishing companies like Lulu.com and Blurb print books as they’re ordered, so there’s no inventory required for self-publishers.

Along the way, design and production considerations became dead-easy, too. Used to be that color-printing meant dealing with spot colors or four-color separation. Digital presses like VistaPrint now make it cheap and easy to print your own good-quality, full-color business cards just by uploading a graphic and clicking “buy.” Similarly, publishing a book at Lulu.com is as simple as uploading the PDFs of your text and book cover. Bam, you’ve got a high-gloss paperback ready to wing its way to eager readers.

Even better, these companies handle all the commerce and fulfillment, too. You get all the pleasure of making stuff for others without the headache of figuring out how to deliver it to them.

It’s hard to overstate how giddy this kind of thing makes me. Here at the mighty Global Moxie headquarters, I’ve used these services for short-run production of business cards and Big Medium t-shirts and, starting this week, for publishing and distributing the Big Medium book.

As a one-man show, time and attention are premiums for me. These convenient printing and publishing services cut out the distraction that used to weigh down the production of marketing collateral.

My apartment remains blissfully free of boxes. I can put all of my energy into code, customer service, and making stuff that helps my customers. Best of all, I can say goodbye to my career as an envelope stuffer. Good riddance.

Tags: business, lulu.com, marketing, pdf, self-publishing

Housekeeping: Support forum accounts

Josh Clark — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:24:23 UT

Photo by Daquella manera.

I recently updated the software that powers the Global Moxie support forum, and it has a couple of shiny new features that frequent visitors may find useful.

First, you’ll need to register an account. While you can continue to read and post messages without an account, registration gives you access to the following new features:

”New message” indicator. Previously, the forums used your browser’s built-in history of visited links to show you whether a new message had been added to a topic. This wasn’t terribly useful if you used more than one computer or if you clear your browser history. Now the info is kept with your account, so the forums now highlight updated topics from any computer.
Starred topics. Think of it as a kind of bookmark: click the star icon for any topic, and it will be noted for later reference. When you’re signed in, you can review your starred topics by going to the “starred” menu in the top right of any forum page.

What’s still missing

Man oh man, I’d love to allow you to subscribe to individual topics so that you receive e-mail notifications when a new message is added. I use FogBugz for the support forum (as well as for managing support tickets and bug tracking). Along with lots of other people over the last couple of years, I’ve submitted e-mail notifications as a feature request for the software. Hopefully it will turn up in the not-too-distant future.

Meantime, the new-message indicator noted above will at least make it easier to spot new topics when you visit the forums in person. Baby steps, my friends, baby steps.

Tags: community, customerservice, software

Keeping up with Updates

Josh Clark — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:55:55 UT

Spinning your wheels trying to keep up with software updates? Photo by J.M. Simpson, The Weekly Volcano.

One of the challenges of software development is settling into a release schedule that is sustainable not only for you but for your customers. You have to update often enough to keep the latest version free of known bugs and to keep your customers happy with a steady diet of feature improvements. (And not least: In the software business, version releases drive revenue and attract new customers.)

On the other hand, you have to beware of upgrade fatigue. Release too often, and customers will tire of the “download, install, rinse, repeat” cycle. The thing that you quickly learn, however, is that one customer’s “too often” is another customer’s “too slow.” The best you can do is try to strike a reasonable, happy medium.

Recently, though, I had to break my usual rhythm, releasing three new updates to Big Medium in a one-week period after the first update (v2.0.4) introduced new bugs that, alas, themselves required immediate fixes. All this update activity prompted a note from Karen Kaiser of Key West Webworks, a longtime Big Medium customer who uses the software to power her elegant designs. Karen let me know that even monthly updates present a business challenge for small design firms. I offered some suggestions about what to expect from Big Medium updates and how she might craft a realistic upgrade schedule for her clients.

I thought the exchange might be of interest to other Big Medium customers, too. With Karen’s permission, here’s the e-mail that she sent:

I so much appreciate your ongoing efforts to continue to upgrade and improve Big Medium. But this recent flurry of updates and fixes causes some business problems for us. It’s hard to charge your client for repeated updates within a short period of time. Clients expect annual software updates, and the fees that go along with that. Perhaps even a six-month cycle of updates would be something we could sell.

But I really just have to eat the time it takes to update web sites with this type of bug-fix flurry. Since I have so many clients using Big Medium, that’s a lot of time that I won’t get paid for.

Frankly, since I could not possibly charge clients for nearly monthly updates, I basically have to try to decide WHEN one of these upgrades is significant enough to implement, and hope that the day after I do it there isn’t another hasty bug fix.

Complicating this, I also need to monitor these progressive improvements so that when a version comes along that does offer significant performance enhancements that my clients really should have, that their version is not so out of date that it requires a complete reinstall or perhaps a series of retro-updates to make it compatible with the next greatest version.

I just wanted to mention this to you. During the beta period we all signed on for this type of continual upgrade, but once a product is released I think it would be more practical to release upgrades on some sort of planned cycle that would be understandable to clients so that the lowly web masters can get paid for the time it takes to keep the software current. :^)

Here’s my response:

Many thanks for your thoughtful note and, as always, for your support of Big Medium. Boutique design outfits like yours are very much my target audience, so I do take very seriously your concerns about how to keep up with a regular flow of updates.

Here’s a bit of background and, for what it’s worth, some suggestions about how you might construct a manageable update regimen.

“Double-point” updates (e.g. v2.0.1, v2.0.2) will continue to keep coming on a regular basis as bugs surface. Although these double-point releases often do include minor new features, their main purpose is to address bugs that have reared their heads. These are typically minor bugs that appear in relatively rare situations, but I think it’s only responsible to address these bugs promptly. I’m not sure that I’d be doing anyone any favors by artificially holding back fixes for a slower release schedule. Ethically, I feel it’s important to get fixes out there in a short timeframe; the pool of known bugs should be drained early and often.

Ethically, I feel it’s important to get fixes out there in a short timeframe; the pool of known bugs should be drained early and often.

My pace for these double-point bug-fix releases is typically once every one or two months. This past week, unfortunately, has been an exception. Two significant regression bugs were introduced in v2.0.4, prompting the fast release of v2.0.5 and v2.0.6. I’m not happy that there were three releases in such fast succession. That’s not the way it should work, and it wasn’t my plan. Unfortunately, these bugs were significant enough to Big Medium’s regular operation that I could not let them stand for another several weeks, or even a few days. Fresh updates were merited.

Ideally, of course, these bugs should have been found and fixed before the 2.0.4 update was even released. I tested that update vigorously for a week before releasing it, and I ran it through my collection of over 80,000 automated tests that check various aspects of the software. Unfortunately, I simply missed these bugs. I hope to do better in the future, and I’m continually improving my test framework.

I’m aware that this could be perceived as being sloppy, but I think it’s more fair to characterize these quick-turnaround fixes as “responsive.” Bugs are an unfortunate fact of software, and the best service I can provide is to get the fixes out as quickly as possible.

You wrote:

Since I could not possibly charge clients for nearly monthly updates, I basically have to try to decide WHEN one of these upgrades is significant enough to implement, and hope that the day after I do it there isn’t another hasty bug fix.

I think you’re exactly right. You have to decide when the upgrades merit the effort. But by getting fixes and minor new features out there regularly, I enable the decision to be in your hands, rather than forcing you to wait according to an artificial release schedule.

So, how to decide when and if to upgrade? I include a detailed list of all of the changes with every version announcement. For the double-point releases, the changes are typically going to be bug fixes and minor feature additions. Generally speaking, this means that if your clients’ sites are working well as-is, an upgrade isn’t strictly necessary. When an update is strongly recommended for all users -- in the case of a severe bug or security fix, for example -- that will be called out clearly in the announcement.

Apart from those cases, you should feel free to upgrade only when there’s a bug fix or feature addition that directly impacts your client sites’ operation. If you have any questions about the details of a new release and whether it applies to your clients, feel free to shoot me a note at support@globalmoxie.com. I’m always happy to field any questions.

If you can’t keep up with these monthly release updates, which is understandable, I recommend that you craft a schedule that is reasonable for you and your clients. Update every six months, for example, making exceptions for the (very rare) appearance of severe bugs or security issues. To avoid the “hasty bug fix” issue that you mention, you can wait a week or two after a double-point update. I obviously do my best to avoid introducing significant new bugs, as happened with the v2.0.4 release, but in the event that it happens, those new bugs should be flushed out within a 14-day timeframe.

You also wrote:

Complicating this, I also need to monitor these progressive improvements so that when a version comes along that does offer significant performance enhancements that my clients really should have, that their version is not so out of date that it requires a complete reinstall or perhaps a series of retro-updates to make it compatible with the next greatest version.

“Single-point” releases (2.1, 2.2) are for significant feature updates and will typically come out just once or twice a year. These releases include major performance and feature enhancements. There will be betas released in advance of these major updates to allow a period of public testing, and there will be plenty of lead time to see them coming.

These single-point releases will indeed typically involve re-uploading all of Big Medium’s files, but please rest assured that these versions, as with all Big Medium 2 updates, will come with an updater script that will handle any behind-the-scenes data changes. They will always be backwards compatible to all other v2 versions of Big Medium.

You might choose to peg your updates to the early double-point releases of these major updates (2.1.1, for example) so that you’re keeping your clients up to date with major feature updates, along with the early set of inevitable bug fixes.

I do apologize if you find the current flow of releases overwhelming, but I hope this background might help you to craft a maintenance schedule that works well for you and your clients.

Hope that helps, and thanks again for your enthusiasm and support!

Tags: bigmedium, business, customerservice, software, work