Closer To The Ideal

Americans are turning against brands:

Last week, Roy Street Coffee and Tea, located at the corners of Roy Street and Broadway in Seattle, opened. This is another one of those stealth Starbucks – Starbucks stores without the Starbucks name over the front door – the coffee giant has been opening in its hometown and in London as of late. Like the other shops of this new vintage, this one is appointed with antique-style furniture, retro lighting, and a distressed looking table top salvaged from an old ship.

The rough-hewed interiors of these not Starbucks Starbucks haven’t really mattered to the journalists and bloggers who have been writing about them. They talk only about the naming patterns in Starbucks’ most recent branding strategy.

To them, the names of the stores represent a brand crisis. Quite rightly, they point out, when a brand hides its own identity, it is in some ways admitting defeat, saying that its name – a central part of any brand – has lost value. When it comes to Starbucks, all of this is true, but the question is why? Why has the Starbucks brand lost so much value that it has to hide from customers and act like a small business? The answer to these questions rests with communities and consumers, what they care about and desire the most these days.

Over the last several years, a quiet but decided shift in buying patterns has taken place. Really, there is something of a velvet revolt or a quiet rejection of brands going on.

In the early years of this century, the then mayor of Baltimore Martin O’Malley begged Starbucks to come to his city. He thought these big name stores would lend his de-industrializing hometown a much needed upper-middle-class sheen. Same with the residents of Landsdowne, Pennsylvania. In 2004, the town had several mom and pops diners and coffee shops. One day, though, a team of local residents lined up in three rows of forty in an empty lot where a 7-11 used to be. When the photographer gave them the sign, they turned over the letters. Their message read: “Got Location! Need Starbucks!” Afterwards, the Greater Lansdowne Civic Association sent this “visual petition” to Starbucks headquarters. Landsdowne never got a Starbucks, but Benicia, California and a lot of other towns got plenty of Starbucks.

Every time a society is doing economically well, someone emerges to suggest that that success is based on innate differences that go back thousand of years. Meanwhile, when a society is doing poorly, someone argues that it is being dragged down by forces that have been pending since the beginning of time. The most notorious example was the preening that the West engaged in during the 1800s – Asians and blacks were naturally lazy, whereas white people were biologically superior. The grotesque reality is that such attitudes were used to justify genocide.

Anyway, now China is doing well and America is doing poorly, so David Brooks starts writing a eulogy for the US:

David Brooks: Asians place emphasis on context while Westerners place more emphasis on individuals. This seems like a gross generalization but it is robustly supported by hundreds and hundreds of studies. Richard Nisbett’s book, “The Geography of Thought” summarizes some of the evidence.

If you show Americans a fish tank, they’ll talk about the biggest fish in the tank. If you show Asians a tank they will make, on average, 60 percent more references to the context and the features of the scene. Western parents tend to emphasize nouns and categories when teaching their kids, Korean parents tend to emphasize verbs and relationships. If you show Americans a picture of a chicken, a cow and grass, they will lump the chicken and the cow, because they are both animals. Asians are more likely to lump the cow and the grass because cows eat grass. They have a relationship.

The mode of thought more common in Asia is better suited to the complex networks that make up the modern world. The contextual, associational style is simply more valid. The linear style we’ve inherited from the Greeks is less adaptive toward the modern age. I think the West may be doomed.

For my part, I think the hype about China is over done. The problems in the US economy were created by forces internal to the US, and they can be fixed by internal forces as well.

This is an unusual post by a stock market short-trader and investor, about a time they shorted Peet’s and almost got burned. For me, the most interesting part was the comparison of entrepreneurial culture in Australia and the US.

As an Australian the success of Starbucks (or Peet’s in San Francisco) puzzles me. Australia is blessed with a plethora of interesting and sometimes quirky, often very stylish cafes. For those who are interested here is a photo of my local (Bronte) strip of coffee shops. They are better than any strip I know of in New York, SFO or Chicago. The coffee is better too – and that is widely commented on by visitors to our shores.

It’s not that Australia is even a particularly coffee addicted country. Per capital consumption is not huge by developed country standards and is lower than the United States. We just have a better coffee scene.

It puzzles me why. There are awful lot of things that the United States does (substantially) better than Australia so this is an oddity deserving some explanation.

American coffee chains (particularly Starbucks but also some of the donut variety) have tried to break in and mostly failed. Starbucks closed most of its stores last year after multi-million dollar losses. They couldn’t cope with the Australian competition. Which is odd because in most things the US is a far more competitive market than Australia – and US senior management tend to be more battle hardened than their Australian peers (see my piece on the use of American CEOs in the Australian context). Its just the competition in cafes is far more fierce here.

I would love to be corrected – but I think the reason has to do with our wage structure. American low-end wages are very low indeed whereas Australia has minimum wages at quite high levels. Hiring unskilled labour to run a coffee shop according to a formula (and devoid of in-store entrepreneurial talent) works in America but does not work in Australia. Also entrepreneurial talent in America has too many opportunities to waste itself in a coffee shop – whereas small-time competent entrepreneurs will open a small coffee shop in Australia. [Maybe one of the good things about America is that it uses entrepreneurial talent well.]

Just saw this site referenced on the user mailist. Symfony-Check.org is a useful list of things to check when building a Symfony-backed website.

I like this post a lot. People who are asked to fake randomness overdue the “randomness” – they fail to include long sequences where the same result comes over and over again. People naturally understand improbable nature of the coin tosses in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (where one of the characters flips a coin throughout the play, and always gets heads up) but when asked to fake randomness, people go too far in the other direction.

The way to distinguish real random sequences from human-generated ones is to look for a place on the list where there are at least six heads or tails entries in a row. Almost everyone who tries to fake the tosses fails to include a run of such length, yet it is almost a statistical certainty that it will occur in a sufficiently large number of tosses. Using 200 flips, roughly 98% of the entries should have such a sequence of at least six consecutive heads or tails.

This is actually nontrivial to compute (see bottom), but a quick-and-dirty calculation that ignores any conditional probability is as follows: at any given point, the probability of getting six of the same side in a row is (1/2)^6 = 1/64. Thus at any given point the probability of not having such a sequence occur in the next six tosses is (1 – 1/64), and thus the likelihood of this not happening over the entire run is (1 – 1/64)^195 = approximately 5%. (We use 195 not 200, since it is impossible to get six in a row in the last 5 flips). So the rough probability of the sequence happening is 95%. The actual result is even higher.

Hence almost every time we can expect to get a run of six or more, but the near-certainty of this from a probability standpoint does not mesh with our psychological picture of what random coin tosses are supposed to “look like”. In fact, what most people tend to write down is a sort of pseudo-alternation of heads and tails, which is anything but random. If you look at randomness from a compression or signal analysis standpoint, it is equivalent to white noise, meaning that no patterns can be usefully extracted (and no compression can usefully be done). The more a sequence resembles H,T,H,T,H,T…. throughout, the more it becomes nonrandom because it contains the pattern of “H,T alternating”.

Caterina Fake has been reading a book about the life of the woman who took care of Proust while he wrote his great novel. She is shocked at how one of the book reviewers described the biography:

“Suicidal” “monstrous” “cold-blood” “revulsion” “deforming” “madman” — wow. I was reading it as a study in devotion, service and sacrifice. I tried to figure out where such revulsion had come from, and it seemed to me that people in Western society have a horror of selflessness, and what they perceive of as subordination and subservience. In some ways this book was a perfect and remarkable complement and contrast to the expendable warrior theme of my prior post on Dogfights and Gameness with their triumphs and heroics — here was a quiet, modest life, lived in the service of another. She took pleasure in warming Proust’s bathwater to the perfect temperature, fixing his coffee just so, and knowing exactly which hat he wore on which occasion.

How do you decide what you should devote your life to? Why would this reviewer feel such disgust at Albaret’s chosen path?

Clay Shirky is writing about algorithmic authority.

Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics.

First, it takes in material from multiple sources, which sources themselves are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness, and it combines those sources in a way that doesn’t rely on any human manager to sign off on the results before they are published. This is how Google’s PageRank algorithm works, it’s how Twitscoop’s zeitgeist measurement works, it’s how Wikipedia’s post hoc peer review works. At this point, its just an information tool.

Second, it produces good results, and as a consequence people come to trust it. At this point, it’s become a valuable information tool, but not yet anything more.

The third characteristic is when people become aware not just of their own trust but of the trust of others: “I use Wikipedia all the time, and other members of my group do as well.” Once everyone in the group has this realization, checking Wikipedia is tantamount to answering the kinds of questions Wikipedia purports to answer, for that group. This is the transition to algorithmic authority.

As the philosopher John Searle describes social facts, they rely on the formulation X counts as Y in C — in this case, Wikipedia comes to count as an acceptable source of answers for a particular group.

There’s a spectrum of authority from “Good enough to settle a bar bet” to “Evidence to include in a dissertation defense”, and most uses of algorithmic authority right now cluster around the inebriated end of that spectrum, but the important thing is that it is a spectrum, that algorithmic authority is on it, and that current forces seem set to push it further up the spectrum to an increasing number and variety of groups that regard these kinds of sources as authoritative.

There are people horrified by this prospect, but the criticism that Wikipedia, say, is not an “authoritative source” is an attempt to end the debate by hiding the fact that authority is a social agreement, not a culturally independent fact. Authority is as a authority does.

At some point I’d like to work on one of the dating sites. They seem to often make huge money. Lots of people meet their mates online nowadays. It is clearly one of the main things that people use the Internet for. And some really interesting sociology data comes out of it.

The interesting thing on the OK Cupid site was that the non-normalized responses from men looked as if they’d been normalized into a bell curve – the men thought most women were of average looks, a few women were rated good looking, and a few were rated ugly. Meanwhile the women rated 80% of the men as below average in attractiveness.

Also, GirlsAskGuys is an interesting example of crowd-sourcing brought to the dating world – got a question about the other gender? Ask the crowd.

A competitive eco-system is like an uber-mega corporation, loosely joined:

Something I’ve realised and have to admit is that while obviously the absolute pool of talent is smaller here in the UK/Europe than it is in the U.S. (and that cannot be disputed nor is it anything more than a function of population) another factor. It is one which I keep hoping will chang, because if it doesn’t it threatens to make a small pool even smaller. And that is a cultural and behavioural issue: work ethic.

As anyone who’s ever been there or visited will attest, in Silicon Valley everyone is working *all of the time*.

And while this might seem unhealthy, not scalable, obsessive, manic or simply ridiculous, from an ecoystem perspective it’s basically unbeatable. If you want to build companes and ride the wave of innovation, it’s a 24/7 preoccupation — not just a lifestyle business. By contrast, I am in London-based startups’ offices all the time and I am gobsmacked when they are nearly empty by 6:30 PM.

Where is the sense of urgency? Where is the need for speed? Where is the competitive and insanely obsessive drive to “kick ass” and kill the competition, status quo or the incumbent corporates?

I understand the need for work-life balance and keeping things in perspective but from an investor point of view, I’m happier and have more confidence in future success if I see entrepreneurs working their asses off.

And don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t have to be “in the office”, but I used the office hours as one measurement. I’m simply talking about working at all — and just being online, responsive and present (twitter, IM, email, updates on websites, releases, pushes etc).

This is just my [likely unpopular] view, but in silicon valley the thinking is usually along the lines of “why can’t we get that done now” or “let me just finish this off now, while I can, before I go,” etc.

You have to remember that the culture there is “launch and iterate”. By contrast, European startups (not the good ones I might add) too often depend on an old fashioned version/release model. That’s nice for a good lifestyle – but it doesn’t create fast moving companies. And fast moving companies require people to nurture them 24/7.

By contrast what I observe here is more along the lines of “it can wait” or “what’s the problem if we take care of that tomorrow” or “no harm done, no big deal, the world won’t end” and “yes it’s in the queue”. I’m afraid to say this is a huge difference in attitude.

And it’s not about when or at what hours people are in their offices (or even working out of office). In Silicon Valley, even when folks aren’t strictly working or at work, they are still working. Even when they’re out clubbing, partying, eating dinner or just hanging out … They are working because everyone they’re hanging out with is in the industry and related to their work.

Your best friends are co-founders, competitors, business development partners, your lawyers or your event co-sponsors. You date, hook up with or marry your co-workers, your business development managers, your PR reps. It’s all incestuous and a very small-world and quite possibly incredibly unhealthy (although it’s clearly worked for many otherwise the valley would have collapsed by now in an earthquake of divource and law-suits).

But from an investment and knowledge-enhancing-viral-feeding point of view it’s hugely valuable. It’s like one massive petri dish. An uber-mega-corporation of startups where people might circulate between Google, Yahoo! Apple and other companies in between startups. But it keeps everyone going, thinking and buzzing about their work all the bloody time.

Mark Pilgrim has written a fantastic article which looks back at the conversation in 1993 that lead to the introduction of the IMG tag, and draws conclusions about the evolution of HTML. He follows the conversation over the course of several months, as several ideas for new technologies are considered and rejected. Marc Andreessen, Tim Berners-Lee, Tony Johnson and many others participated in the conversation.

After reviewing the full history, Pilgrim concludes:

HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.

And then:

But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include> element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins.

That’s not to say that all shipping code wins; after all, Andrew and Intermedia and HyTime shipped code too. Code is necessary but not sufficient for success. And I certainly don’t mean to say that shipping code before a standard will produce the best solution. Marc’s <img> element didn’t mandate a common graphics format; it didn’t define how text flowed around it; it didn’t support text alternatives or fallback content for older browsers. And 16, almost 17 years later, we’re still struggling with content sniffing, and it’s still a source of crazy security vulnerabilities. And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway.

I notice Scott Meves linking to this great post which is critical of SEO:

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

First came the web, and it was a mess. Servers went up everywhere, the net connected them all, pages bloomed like flowers, and no one could find a damn thing.

Then came the search engines. First primitive indexes of dumb keywords, then Google with its rankings of most-linked pages, we were finally able to find the pages we needed, mostly.

The ascendency of Google has meant that, if your goal is to get the most eyeballs possible (as any ad-supported media business’ goal is), then prominent placement in the search engine results became a top priority.

And so, like the goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen before them, a new breed of con man was born, the Search Engine Optimizer. These scammers claim that they can dance the magic dance that will please the Google Gods and make eyeballs rain down upon you.

Do. Not. Trust. Them.

I’ve a new post up at Symfony Nerds, this one about the extent to which Drupal’s prominence limits the growth of PHP frameworks. I’ve seen a number of Django versus Drupal comparisons, which are a bit unfair, since they compare a framework to a CMS.

I went to WordCamp yesterday. Here are some thoughts about some of the speakers that I heard.

Dan Milward offered the best presentation we heard all day, about the WP-e-Commerce plugin. This is an impressive package that integrates smoothly with WordPress. From now on, when I do WordPress e-commerce sites, I’ll always consider this plugin first.

Scott Kingsley Clark was awesome. He spoke about his Pods plugin. This allows a dramatic expansion of the CMS abilities in WordPress. This could be the death knell of Drupal and Mambo and Joomla and Expression Engine. It seemed as if you could build a CMS of unlimited complexity, using the Pods plugin. It offers a GUI interface for creating new database tables, which allows you to add an unlimited number of custom types to a WordPress site.

I’m sorry to say that Mark Jaquith’s talk was weak. We caught his talk about making a living doing WordPress development. He had a handful of good insights, for instance, you should pick a specialty. He said he started off making $20 an hour but once he became a specialist in security, he was able to charge $100 to $150 an hour. But his good advice amounted to maybe 5 minutes of his 45 minutes. The rest was a dull list of slogans that I think most of us already know: keep your day job until you have enough client work coming in, once you go for it then really go for it, and if all of your clients agree with your prices then you may be charging too little. Also, he twice introduced an anecdote by saying “Okay, here is one anecdote…”. Public speakers should work anecdotes into their talk, but I think it is awkward to explicitly announce that you are doing so.

The session about the GPL license was extremely lopsided. There were 4 people on stage. Nominally, there were 2 people who represented the Automattic point of view, and then there were 2 developers of premium themes, and the issue to be discussed was how much those themes needed to conform to the GPL license (or, as Grant Griffins would say, to Automattic’s interpretation of the GPL). But only Griffins (of Headway Themes) disagreed with Automattic, so the session was 3 to 1.

I’m normally sympathetic to advocates of the GPL, however, I think some of the advocates do their cause harm with the stridency with which they advance their cause. Yesterday’s presentation about the GPL was an extreme example of this tendency.

The session had overtones of how the police might try to break a suspect. Of the 2 people from Automattic, one played the role of Good Cop and one played the role of Bad Cop. There was also the Convert – he used to be Evil, but now he is one of the Good, because he has seen the light, and now his interpretation of the GPL license is in sync with Automattic’s. Griffiths was setup as the Bad Guy – he does not need see the need to align his company with Automattic’s view of the GPL.

The Good Cop spoke in reasonable tones about how much happier businesses are, once they comply with Automattic’s view of the GPL – there were plenty of profits to be made even after complying with the community’s norms. The Bad Cop spoke in threatening terms about the selfishness of not complying with the community’s norms – how dare any company try to make money off the WordPress eco-system, without complying with the norms of that eco-system (and in the background was the threat of a lawsuit for companies that did not comply). The Convert said they had once feared the loss of sales that might result from complying with the GPL, but now that they had switched over, they found that their business was still thriving.

Mind you, the way the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine plays out is that the captive comes to think of the Good Cop as a friend, so when the Good Cop says something threatening, it carries more weight. Sure enough, the Good Cop eventually mentioned that his law firm had filed several lawsuits against companies for violations of the GPL. However, he added cheerfully, no suit had ever needed to go to court, because once his firm had filed suit, the companies they targeted immediately saw the wisdom of complying.

If they could have only held Grant for 24 hours without sleep or food, he too would surely have come to see the wisdom of aligning his business with Automattic’s view of the GPL. As it was, he continued to assert that his themes were not necessarily in violation of the GPL. He kept saying, “No one has shown me where we are in violation.” He also said that the GPL should not be treated as a religion. He also made the good point that the fear and ambiguity surrounding the GPL was probably bad for business (surely some businesses avoided GPL technologies out of concern for what the courts might find, regarding enforceability).

Mind you, I think Automattic is correct to strongly defend their interpretation of the GPL. The world has benefited a great deal from the GPL, and so it deserves to have strong debate regarding its proper interpretation. I want to be clear about my criticism here: it is good that Automattic strongly defended its point of view, but the workshop would have been much stronger if they’d had on stage more people who had disagreements with Automattic. In other words, the session would have been better if it had been more balanced. That the session was 3 to 1 had some of us feeling sympathetic to Grant, simply because he was so outnumbered. (And also, I thought he did a good job of defending his point of view.)

Also, there were some people in the audience (including a good friend of mine) who had questions that would have added much to the conversation, but the organizer of the session felt it was more important, at the end, to offer their own summary of the issue, rather than take additional comments from the audience. As I said before, sometimes the advocates of the GPL do their own cause harm through their stridency.

Grant got in the last word. He referenced a recent speech where Matt Mullenweg had apparently called certain premium theme sellers “evil”. Grant had reason to believe that the remark was aimed at him. It sounded like Matt owed Grant an apology. We should all work to avoid a situation where disagreements about the GPL are elevated to the level of Good and Evil.

After the conference, some of us went down the street to get some drinks at Tonic. I met Ramil Teodosio, who has been doing excellent work introducing WordPress as a project management tool. He has worked in some large, conservative corporations that need to innovate the ways they organize teams and resources, and he seems to be doing a good job of bringing agile methods and agile tools into such environments.

All in all, I am glad I went. I learned about 2 really great plugins and met some interesting people. I do think Automattic should consider investing in some public-speaking training for its employees. I think someone like Jaquith would benefit a lot if they had some coaching about how to deliver a talk. Other than that, a conference like this is always an interesting chance to get some sense of a community.

I am surprised to see how much corporate brands prefer either red or blue, and not much else.

I post this as a warning to others. I did some work for MyBailiwick.com this summer. Mostly I dealt with Miles Spencer of Vauxlesventures.com and Todd Carter of Tocarte.com. MyBailiwick still owes me $8,000 for the work I did during July and August (2009). I’ve tried to negotiate with them about this, however, they’ve been unwilling to negotiate with me. So I post this here as a warning to other developers. If you end up having business dealings with them, you may wish to be careful. (Miles Spencer is an investor in a number of companies, including Mojiva.)

An interesting (somewhat humorous) look at the kind of “power talk” that executives use in business.

Low-level utterance-by-utterance control is much harder, and the one thing you cannot do is engineer 7-8 meanings and calibrated amounts of power and leverage into every line you utter, through careful word choice. You don’t have the luxury of minutes or hours between responses (you can do that over email though). In most conversations, you have tenths of a second per response. In that time you must steer the tempo of the conversation — its rhythms, emotional subtext and energy level — to move the needle of mutual power the way you want. The only way I know of to do this is, well, Chapter 4 of my book, Tempo. Serious. I am not trying to be a tease here — it would take me another 4000 words to explain this. The few of you who have seen beta versions of this chapter of Tempo know what I am talking about.

Leah Culver is answering some questions about failure of Pownce relative to Twitter. She was lead developer. I’m frustrated by her answers, since she seems to give credit to Twitter for being highly focused and well-run, whereas anyone following the story is aware of how untrue that is. There was a lot of discussion last year about Why Can’t Twitter Scale? The lead programmer at Twitter, Blaine Cook, was either fired or quit. So how does that square with the praise Leah offers them?

Andrew: OK. All right. We talked about what you did well, what do you wish you did differently?

Leah: That’s a really good question. I really hated that the comparison to Twitter. I think, if I were to do a new start up or a different company, I would pick it in an area where there wasn’t such good competition, determined competition. I think there is definitely different levels of start ups and Twitter was definitely (laughs) a good start up, and it’s really hard to compete or be compared to.

Andrew: Why were they such good competitors? It seemed like they were down most of the time that you, guys, were up. It seemed like they weren’t doing that much on their site, it was just text. You, guys, did so much more, you are more alive. What made them such good competitors?

Leah: I think because the team is very focused, they have an excellent team.
Excerpt 2

Leah: You know, I feel like it’s really unfortunate that people saw it as that kind of rivalry because we never, that was never the intent. When we launched the site and we first got like they compare us to Twitter, it was like shocking because Pownce is definitely a very different type of a site, a different type of feel, a different type of community. I think that, you know, maybe the press jumped on it as an opportunity to write about something that just, you know, that rivalry was just never there.

Possibly, Twitter deserves praise for being more flexible than Pownce? Both companies started off thinking they’d be more like a CMS, Twitter adapted the most, into something different. Or perhaps this is a story about companies die once they are acquired by other companies? If Pownce hadn’t been bought by Six Apart, it would be forced to keep evolving itself.

A look at some common searches on Google. Small changes lead to big differences.

Bryan Caplan:

How much does increasing college-going rates matter to our economy and society?

Caplan: College attendance, in my view, is usually a drain on our economy and society. Encouraging talented people to spend many years in wasteful status contests deprives the economy of millions of man-years of output. If this were really an “investment,” of course, it might be worth it. But I see little connection between the skills that students acquire in college and the skills they’ll need later in life.

Daniel Lyons possibly the first article ever published in Newsweek that is both about the Internet and also true:

The past decade is the era in which the Internet ruined everything. Just look at the industries that have been damaged by the rise of the Web: Newspapers. Magazines. Books. TV. Movies. Music. Retailers of almost any kind, from cars to real estate. Telecommunications. Airlines and hotels. Wherever companies relied on advertising to make money, wherever companies were profiting by a lack of transparency or a lack of competition, wherever friction could be polished out of the system, those industries suffered.

Remember all that crazy talk in the early days about how the Internet was going to change everything and usher us into a brave new techno-utopia? Well, to get to that promised land, we first have to endure a period of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” as the Internet crashes like a tsunami across entire industries, sweeping away the old and infirm and those who are unwilling or unable to change. That’s where we’ve been these past 10 years, and it’s been ugly.

Let’s start with newspapers. You wouldn’t think that in an information age the biggest victim would be purveyors of information. But there you go. Newspapers are getting wiped out in part because they didn’t realize they were in the information business—they thought their business was about putting ink onto paper and then physically distributing those stacks of paper with fleets of trucks and delivery people. Papers were slow to move to the Web. For a while they just sort of shuffled around, hoping it would go away. Even when they did launch Web sites, many did so reluctantly, almost grudgingly. It’s hard to believe that news companies could miss this shift. These companies are in the business of spotting what’s new, right? Yet they were blind to the biggest change (and the biggest opportunity) to ever hit their own business. Watching newspapers go out of business because of the Internet is like watching dairies going out of business because customers started wanting their milk in paper cartons instead of glass bottles.

I’ve a new post up at Symfony Nerds, which looks at some of the bad coding practices which are common on some of the Symfony projects that I’ve worked on.

Chip Conley is facing major push back from his employees because he went to Burning Man, engaged in some activities that some found controversial, and posted the photos his Facebook page. I am fascinated by his case, simple because the scale of his operation is larger than what I can imagine running. I can imagine someday running a company with 40 or 50 employees. In that circumstance, I don’t think my behavior would matter much, since I would be in daily touch with all of my employees and I could reassure them that I had not lost my mind. But he has thousands of employees, most of whom will only see him a few times a year. The sheer lack of contact seems to create a pressure for a more formal kind of public persona.
First, a little bit about me. I run Joie de Vivre, a company that operates a collection of boutique hotels in California. I founded the business 22 years ago, when I was 26 and a freshly minted MBA from Stanford. The first property I bought was a pay-by-the hour motel in a seedy part of San Francisco. People told me I was crazy to buy it, but I transformed it into a world-renowned rock ’n‘ roll hotel. Today, Joie de Vivre is a $230 million company with more than 3,000 employees and 38 properties. From the luxury spa resort in Big Sur to the urban chic hotel in San Francisco and a surfer-inspired hotel in Huntington Beach, our mission statement is simple: to celebrate the joy of life.

And that’s precisely what I was doing at Burning Man, which, incidentally, I have attended twice before in the past decade, before this social media problem existed. I went with a close friend. She took a ton of pictures, and when I got home to San Francisco, I posted six of them, two of which show me shirtless. In one I’m wearing a tutu; in the other a sarong.

…I’m just not a blazer kind of guy. I consider myself a rebel. My first book —The Rebel Rules: Daring to Be Yourself in Business — preaches the value of authenticity in business, of being true to yourself. So a few pictures on my Facebook page that show me having a good time? I honestly didn’t give it a second thought.

I had, however, given thought as to how others at my company use social media, and this is where the whole thing gets a little messy. In fact, the issue of my pictures came up as we were creating a social media policy and seeking input from our cultural ambassadors. Our ambassadors are employees who are elected by their peers to represent each hotel; they work on such efforts as local philanthropy, employee recognition programs, and, lately, social media policies. It’s a role I instituted about 12 years ago after reading about how Southwest Airlines had cultural ambassadors who served as representatives between field offices and headquarters. Joie de Vivre was growing fast, and I was concerned about keeping our culture intact.

I learned from my head of HR that four of our cultural ambassadors had fielded complaints from young staff members who, odd as it sounded to me, looked up to me, almost like a father figure. And, well, they didn’t like seeing their father in a tutu. I also learned that staffers were concerned about some of my Twitter musings, in which I expressed anguish over the demise of an eight-year relationship. Somehow, all this seemed inappropriate for a CEO with thousands of employees.

Kevin Dewalt suggests that programmers with experience in large corportions are bad for startups, because the emphasis in corporations is on doing things the right way, whereas the emphasis in startups has to be on cutting corners so that you can hip quickly:

So how did I design the database for my most recent startup? Having been in situations where poorly managed database relationships resulted in months of rework, I used foreign keys. That was my experience, and I’m guessing the experience of the developers who made the comments above.

Unfortunately I found that foreign keys in my Rails migrations were a constant source of headaches. Moreover, I decided to migrate to Heroku during the project and had to re-write the foreign keys for Postgres instead of MySQL. What did I learn about customers in this process? Nothing.

In retrospect, I believe I followed bad practice for lean startups building working prototypes. Database integrity is an important issue when you have achieved some measure of success.

May I be so blessed to have these type of problems in my next startup.

For the last 50 years a small group of people have been worried about America’s economic decline relative to the other developed nations. President Eisenhower was the first to be concerned about this, and convened a special commission of economists to examine the issue. Starting in the 1970s, the pace of decline accelerated, and the decline began to erode the standard of living for the poorest 40% of all Americans.

Here is one more small article documenting a small part of that decline:

The number of companies listed on U.S. exchanges has dropped by more than 22% since 1991 and nearly 39% since 1997, even though that was around the beginning of the dot-com boom, Grant Thornton reports in a study that was two years in the making and was first reported by peHUB.

U.S. exchanges are losing ground to exchanges in China, London, Italy, Tokyo, Toronto, Australia and Germany, where listings continue to increase. In the U.S., meanwhile, there are not enough new IPOs to replace the number of companies that are being delisted.

Edward Tufte has argued that graphics should be information rich. A good graphic is one that people can spend 10 minutes exploring. If you ever go to one of Tufte’s workshops, he ambushes the audience with a graph that shows the history of Rock and Roll, which artists did what albums when. The room falls silent as people start looking at what music came out when they were a certain age.

“Do you hear that?” says Tufte. “Do you hear that silence? That is what you want whenever you present a graphic to a live audience. It means the graphic is genuinely interesting.”

Tufte is deeply critical of the newspapers. His books are full of horrendous examples of bad graphs that the newspapers publish.

To give credit where credit is due, the New York Times published a fantastic graph the other day, “The Unemployment Rate For People Like You“. This a graph that you can spend several minutes exploring, thinking about people who are similar to you, and people who are different.

This is a great list of things to avoid in your code. The focus is on making the code testable, but the rules are great no matter what.

Interesting post about getting young people to learn math:

Age-appropriate development and understanding of mathematical concepts does not advance at a rate fast enough to please test-obsessed lawmakers. But adults using test scores to reward or punish other adults are doing a disservice to the children they claim to be helping.

It does not matter the exact age that you learned to walk. What matters is that you learned to walk at a developmentally appropriate time. To do my job as a physicist I need to know matrix inversion. It didn’t hurt my career that I learned that technique in college rather than in eighth grade. What mattered was that I understood enough about math when I got to college that I could take calculus. –Joseph Ganem, American Physical Society

These sites that make a market are interesting to me, because I’m considering something similar. MFG.com makes a market for industrial parts. I’m thinking more about making a market for certain kinds of information, but still, I am impressed with what they’ve done.

This is a great interview between Bill Venners and Rich Hickey. Hickey is the guy behind Clojure, the new JVM language that brings Lisp to the world of Java. I have so far only heard good things about Clojure. Hickey makes the argument that what is needed in modern languages is the automatic management of time and concurrency issues. In the same way that, during the early 90s, Java introduced (to the mainstrteam) the idea of automatic garbage collection, now we need languages to automatically manage the problem of multiple processes accessing the same object at the same time:

Bill Venners: What do you mean when you say the problem of mutable state is a time problem?

Rich Hickey: If somebody hands you something mutable—let’s say it has methods to get this, get that, and get the other attribute—can you walk through those and know you’ve seen a consistent object? The answer is you can’t, and that’s a problem of time. Because if there were no other actors in the world, and if time wasn’t passing between when you looked at the first, second, and third attribute, you would have no problems. But because nothing is captured of the aggregate value at a point in time, you have to spend time to look at the pieces. And while that time is elapsing, someone else could be changing it. So you won’t necessarily see something consistent.

For example, take a mutable Date class that has year, month, and day. To me, changing a date is like trying to change 42 into 43. That’s not something we should be doing, but we think we can, because the architecture of classes is such that we could make a Date object that has mutable year, month, and day. Say it was March 31, 2009, and somebody wanted to make it February 12, 2009. If they changed the month first there would be, at some point in time, February 31, 2009, which is not a valid date. That’s not actually a problem of shared state as much as it is a problem of time. The problem is we’ve taken a date, which should be just as immutable as 42 is, and we’ve turned it into something with multiple independent pieces. And then we don’t have a model for the differences in time of the person who wants to read that state and the person who wants to change it.

…The time problem is not easy to see in today’s mainstream languages because there are no constructs that make time explicit. It is implicit in the system. We don’t even know that’s what we’re doing when we use locks to try to make this work. Because what we’re trying to do is partition time up to say, I’m going to get a portion of time when I get to look at it, and you’re going to get a separate portion of time when you’ll get to write it. That time management we have to do manually. We have to use locks and come up with some kind of convention, because it’s not automatic. So that’s why I’m saying, the problem here is a lack of automatic time management. We have to do that manually, just like we had to call delete before we had garbage collection. Somebody allocated something, and we had to call delete. It was our problem. It was manual. Now when we want to change a date or look at a date coherently, we have this time management problem that we use locks to try to solve.

This idea has been gaining strength for at least 2 years now. Automatic thread management was one of the reasons why Sam Ruby argued that Erlang would be one of the key technologies of the next 5 years.

While I usually like anything that danah boyd writes, I am a bit surprised and disappointed by the way she framed this post about feminism, sexism, and the way society values nursing and teaching:

When my mother was entering the professional world, there were pretty much three options for women: teacher, nurse, secretary. Many women did not work and those who did were highly motivated, passionate, and underpaid. When barriers were eradicated, women left these professions to seek jobs in other fields that were better respected. Nurses were often just as knowledgeable about medicine as doctors and yet doctors were more greatly valued. Not surprisingly, as the years went by, many women who wanted to enter medicine chose to become doctors instead of nurses because the professional rewards were so much greater. When the sex barriers collapsed, women sought out “men’s jobs” because they were higher paying, higher prestige, and more flexible.

…The problem is what has happened since then. I certainly don’t want to go back to the dark ages where women had no choice. But while we’ve opened up doors for women, we haven’t addressed how sexism framed nursing and teaching in ways that are causing us tremendous headaches in society today. Teachers are underpaid and undervalued because we took women’s work for granted. When teaching stopped being women’s work, we didn’t rework our thinking about teaching. As a society, we still have little respect for teachers and nurses and we pay them abysmally. This is deeply rooted in the sexism of the past but the ripple effects today are costly.

Is the problem really “deeply rooted in the sexism of the past”? Isn’t it, clearly, deeply rooted in the sexism of the present?

I am even troubled by the title of the post:

teaching, nursing, and second wave feminism

Wouldn’t it be more accurate to title the post:

teaching, nursing, and sexism

I mean, the problem isn’t feminism, right? The problem is sexism?

This sentence set off a strong reaction in me:

I get uncomfortable thinking about the societal consequences of second wave feminism, especially since I’ve personally benefited from it so much.

I get uncomfortable with supposedly progressive people who lack confidence about the benefits of progressive reforms. Either you believe it is good to empower people with freedom, or you don’t. If you don’t, then your politics are not progressive. If you do, then you focus on the need to continue to fight against oppressive practices that continue to operate in the present era.

Also, I think there is a larger context here, which is the erosion of wages in America from 1973 to 1995, and then again from 2001 to the present. It would be easier for America to complete its social transformation if only the economy could recover the vigor it enjoyed 1945-1973, when wages were rising rapidly for both men and women. America’s social transformation is likely to remain partial, incomplete and broken till such time as the economy recovers its health. And by “health” I am not referring to the short-term crisis of the current recession, but to the long-term crisis that has seen the broad collapse of America’s once secure middle class.