Howells.

I enjoyed this article by Chris Tacket in The Atlantic, which asks whether Pinterest and Svpply might in fact reduce consumption:

…counterintuitively, my experience with these services is that they actually help me cut my consumption and to direct my money at goods that more closely align with my values.

The crux of his argument is that adding a product to your profile is sufficient to kick in the endorphins:

…I have found that adding items to my Svpply page gives me a similarly pleasant rush of some pleasure-inducing chemicals

I agree with the sentiment, but for a much more simple reason that he doesn’t seem to touch on.

Fashion relies on consumers buying products as a proxy to convey an individual sense of style or taste to the outside world. But with services like Svpply and Pinterest, why would a consumer bother buying a physical product when they can simply project their taste to a vast audience at zero cost?

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This is an interesting essay by Paul Graham, particularly since it was published in 2008.

In the best part of 4 years, almost all of the 30 ideas he proposes have barely been exploited fully, nor any of the problems it raises have been solved.

It just goes to show there is still an enormous world of opportunities to be explored by technology and design.

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Someone described this article in the NYT as being inspired by an episode of Portlandia, but it’s an interesting thought nonetheless.

Giant e-commerce companies like Amazon are acting increasingly like their big-box brethren as they extinguish small competitors with discounted prices, free shipping and easy-to-use apps. Big online retailers had a 19 percent jump in revenue over the holidays versus 2010, while at smaller online retailers growth was just 7 percent.

The little sites are fighting back with some tactics of their own, like preventing price comparisons or offering freebies that an anonymous large site can’t. And in a new twist, they are also exploiting the sympathies of shoppers like Dr. Pollack by encouraging customers to think of them as the digital version of a mom-and-pop shop facing off against Walmart: If you can’t shop close to home, at least shop small.

“Folks are exercising their desire to support local stores where local is not just in their town, but anywhere in the country,” said Michael Walden, a professor who studies regional economics at North Carolina State University. “A large number of Americans have a general suspicion of bigness in the economic world — they equate bigness with power, monopoly.”

I can’t recall having ever bought anything from a “mom and pop” e-commerce site. If I have, I can’t remember, so didn’t make a significant lasting impression. I automatically resort to Amazon for any consumable, hardware, or book, since my experience with them is 100% satisfactory: I can barely fault a single aspect of their offering. It’s mainly because Amazon is far cheaper, and the online experience is smart. Smaller e-commerce players’ sites I’ve considered using are generally poor and rarely inspire confidence.

But it’s worth thinking about. What makes me venture that little further and spend more money at the lovingly designed Nordic Bakery, when I could easily get a coffee cheaper and more of it at the closest Starbucks, for instance? Sure, the coffee is better at Nordic Bakery, but I’m not really that much of a coffee guy: to me a coffee is a coffee when I want a coffee and have time to kill. (Sorry Lawrence.)

Maybe it’s the shiver of smugness at being at what is essentially a hipster enclave that appeals. Maybe there, the token “oh look at me” Foursquare/Twitter check-in is worth the premium you have to pay.

Okay, so coffee might not be a great example given we’re dealing with discrete consumer products here. But since this blog is a “using Apple as a case study for absolutely everything”-free blog, I can’t think of any examples.

Regardless, I’m struggling to think of any examples where buying a product feels better and more valuable at an independent – rather than “big box” – online retailer. How do you translate a carefully considered, small company retail experience online for quite pedestrian products, and has anyone succeeded in doing it?

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Some choice nuggets of common-sense from Noah Stokes. Here are my favourites:

• Hype on Twitter has a considerably small conversion rate
• Ideas are cheap
• Money isn’t everything but you sure can make more of it doing it for yourself rather than The Man
• Get into a career in a field that you love. If you don’t love your job, your entire life will reflect it.
• What’s easy for you, may be rocket science to someone else
• Reach out to your heros. You’ll find that most of them are really cool people. If they’re not, you probably want to remove them from your hero list.
• Most expensive luxury cars that you see driving around are leased

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A wonderful article by Steven Johnson in the WSJ on the origins of ideas:

…ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. We like to think of our ideas as a $40,000 incubator, shipped direct from the factory, but in reality they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.

The article is an extract from his book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Seven Patterns of Innovation, which has been sitting untouched in my Amazon wish list for some time…

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I’m not a Reddit reader, but I loved this gem in answer to a question “What are the small lifestyle changes you’ve made that have had big impacts for you?”:

I make sure to start every day as a producer, not a consumer.

When you get up, you may start with a good routine like showering and eating, but as soon as you find yourself with some free time you probably get that urge to check Reddit, open that game you were playing, see what you’re missing on Facebook, etc.

Put all of this off until “later”. Start your first free moments of the day with thoughts of what you really want to do; those long-term things you’re working on, or even the basic stuff you need to do today, like cooking, getting ready for exercise, etc.

This keeps you from falling into the needy consumer mindset. That mindset where you find yourself endlessly surfing Reddit, Facebook, etc. trying to fill a void in yourself, trying to find out what you’re missing, but never feeling satisfied.

When you’ve started your day with doing awesome (not necessarily difficult) things for yourself, these distractions start to feel like a waste of time. You check Facebook just to make sure you’re not missing anything important directed at you, but scrolling down and reading random stuff in your feed feels like stepping out into the Disneyland parking lot to listen to what’s playing on the car radio - a complete waste of time compared to what you’re really doing today.

It sounds subtle, but these are the only days where I find myself getting anything done. I either start my day like this and feel normal and productive, or I look up and realize it’s early evening, I haven’t accomplished anything and I can’t bring myself to focus no matter how hard I want to.

I just shared this video on Twitter, but wanted to capture it here too since I want to mark the beginning of end of humanity.

As Simon Whybray said, these are the last thing we’re going to see when humans perish…

David Carr in the NYT Mediacoder blog:

One night last week there was a late-night party at Sundance — one of many — this one hosted by an outfit that had helped finance 10 percent of the festival’s slate, 17 movies in all, including four that were in competition.

Kickstarter as a new model movie studio is insanely exciting, and chimes with Paul Grahams call to Kill Hollywood.

Now if only Kickstarter can work out how to handle payments in the UK (which I believe is the only hurdle for a launch here)…

I’m pretty thrilled to see that Eli Rousso launched NYPD, after telling me about it one evening last October.

With digital product designers a horribly scarce commodity in New York (and indeed, every major city), NYPD aims to be a finely curated list of the people involved with the most interesting product design in the city. And as far as I am aware, it will be the start of a series of meet-ups.

It’d be great to start something similar in London, but right now I fear it would be a very small list…

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I mainly ignored the commentary and madness surrounding SOPA and PIPA, because the proposal conveyed a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet worked and why it exists. It was totally unrealistic and malformed that I felt it was so unlikely to be passed that it didn’t feel worth worrying about.

However, I thoroughly enjoyed this TEDSalon talk by charismatic internet Batman, Clay Shirky. The issue isn’t SOPA, it’s the potential for SOPA-like bills to keep recurring until the entertainment industry gets their way.

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