Howells.

A little while ago I wrote about some of my favourite places in NYC (which I have now added to a Foursquare list). Having just come back from a week’s trip there I thought I’d add a few more places:

• Little Branch in the West Village swoops into the top-spot of my favourite cocktail places. I could quite happily spend all my time there and turn into a light-shy alcoholic. Delicious cocktails, and a (carefully designed) run-down ramshackle interior, make for one of the most “authentic” prohibition style bars in the city.

• Bareburger is a wonderful burger joint in Greenwich Village that Nitzan introduced me to. A myriad of meats, toppings, and breads make for a infinite array of burger goodness.

• Tipsy Parson in Chelsea. I’m not sure how they describe themselves, but contemporary southern American comfort food might be close. Fried green tomatoes, indulgent (and very garlicky) mac and cheese, and other meaty treats make for a really special dinner or brunch place.

• Smorgasburg in Williamsburg boasts a fantastic selection of foodie goodness from all over the city. Independent food stalls set up shop alongside more recognisable local outlets, and offer every cuisine you can imagine in cost-effective morsals, where you can start with a lobster roll, follow up with a taco, and finish with an ice cream sandwich. Someone described it as the sort of place people who like to take photos of their food like to go. That’s about right..

• La Esquina is by far the best dining experience I’ve had in a long time. Trying to get past the doorman into the main restaurant is a challenge in itself: I was laughed at having no reservation on a Saturday night, but one word from a plucky friend meant we ended up at the bar where you can eat the astonishing Mexican food and indulge in the terrific cocktails. If you don’t get in, try the cafe around the corner or even just the sandwiches upstairs. Eli suggested that the food at Tacombi is even better, but I’ve yet to try it.

More suggestions are always welcome, particularly since I’m going to be there in October for Brooklyn Beta. (You should come then too, even if you don’t have a ticket. There’s plenty going on that week.)

☛

I’m excited to see that Tina has pushed the button on a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to create a searchable archive of every talk from each of the 34 chapters of the grassroots event she started a few years ago. I haven’t been to as many as I would have liked but the two I have attended in London and New York were excellent: a chance to see very high quality speakers (I saw Michael Johnson and Oliver Jeffers) in an informal setting, with a full breakfast laid on, all for free.

I don’t see any reason why CreativeMornings can’t be the TED of creative-oriented talks, so I didn’t hesitate to contribute. Tina and Kevin work tirelessly to put on these events (and I’ve seen first hand some of the frustrations they have to deal with!) and so the challenge is in safe hands, so you should consider contributing too.

☛

In my last post I talked about the problem of communication on the web, and its subsequent fragmentation. All the activity I pertain to in the post suggests the need and want to write to communicate opinions and points of view is stronger than ever, yet the success of these new platforms relies on people using them effectively, and beyond Twitter, I know relative few people who dedicate time to writing and creating medium- to long-form content.

I asked a flippant question on Twitter: for those of you who want to write and keep a blog but don’t, why don’t you? What are the barriers to starting? I don’t think I have ever had as many responses to a single question, which was fascinating, and the responses were full of interesting points of view which I shall attempt to summarise here.

But firstly, what’s the big deal?

Within the design and technology community, the supposed importance of writing has never been discussed more. At the extreme I’ve seen some people beat themselves up over writer’s block, and some full-on arguments between blogging luminaries on the right way to write and post. Personally, I belief is that it’s important to share knowledge, opinion, and points of view that help shape our young and immature industry; we’re in a privileged position to be at the early to help contribute to its future. But writing doesn’t have to be about work: your more than likely going to share interests to those who have chosen the same career paths, and it’s nice to step outside the echo chamber and explore the cross-sections.

It’s more than this though: long form writing can be a sort of catharsis; a way of taking effortful action on something you believe in, that is ultimately more satisfying than writing a tweet.

And of course writing can help raise your profile if you’re self employed, and help new clients and projects find you. I’ve written about a range of things on this blog that have directly led to interesting opportunities. If you work hard enough on your writing, you can become a maven in your chosen fields: John Gruber and Jason Kottke are two of the most well-regarded and visible bloggers in our community who are now well-regarded opinion-leaders on Apple (and tech) and culture, respectively.

So why don’t more people write?

Now to the responses to my question, neatly compartmentalised into four recurring themes:

Time, and lack of it. By far the most common response was a lack of time. This response feels so multi-levelled it’s difficult to know where to start to understand why it’s valid. I’ve always said that if you want something, or want to do something you enjoy, you will always make time for it. You make time to run around the park; you make time to go to the pub. Of course it’s fine to prioritise everything else over writing, but make sure you’re doing that not because of any of the following other reasons…

A fear of failure. This response cropped up often. It takes a little bit of something–let’s call it balls–to make something and let it loose to the public. But as a community (if you’re a designer or developer), we do this all the time. Designers (both beginners and the more experienced) post their work to Dribbble, Behance and Fiftytwo to seek feedback. Developers release their work on Github for all to see and use. The cracks are exposed, yet this somehow Feels Okay. There shouldn’t be any difference with writing. If you want to give it a try, nobody can criticise you for doing it. Apart from the occasional troll, people are going to respond very well. It could help at first to write privately, or at least write without then sharing posts on Twitter. Get into the flow with a few posts, share them with friends whose opinion you trust, and see what happens.

Lack of skill. Writing comes more naturally to some, in the same way sketching and coding comes more naturally to others. But without actually doing anything, it’s impossible to hone and develop any skill. I read well-regarded bloggers’ posts with envy: their brevity, tone of voice, and content are all something I aspire to but I reassure myself that they have been doing this for a decade or two. It would be impossible to match their skill from the outset, so it’s not worth comparing your own writing with that of anyone else. Of course as you feel more confident and proficient, you can always go back and delete old, cringe-worthy posts: I certainly have.

What would I write about? It doesn’t matter. Write for yourself. Scribble your thoughts down that you find interesting. That problematic client you had? Might be painful for you but will be interesting for others to read about and learn from. That amazing burger joint not many people know about? Everyone loves burgers: tell people about it! It only takes a paragraph or two. Share a link that you find interesting, but write more than 140 characters as to why. Reference someone else post and expand on it with your own thoughts.

All these reasons smell very much like those that Matias Corea suggested are the barriers to starting your own business, which I outlined in a recent post.

Finally, a few responses talked about pragmatic technical barriers to blogging: existing hosted platforms are usually far from perfect, and self-hosting solutions usually demand technical nous to get started. In my next post I want to talk about this in more detail.

I’m fascinated by the recent startup activity that seems to addressing the “problem” of communications and discourse on the web. Within a relatively short time, we have seen the launch of Svbtle, Medium, App.net, and Branch. I’m not going to spend any time discussing the pros and cons of each since I’m not a member of any of them yet (I think my invitations are in the post, or something) [Update: I just got my Branch invite and it is very, very nice indeed.] but just say that it’s interesting that each have started to address a nuanced aspect of the “problem” communications on the internet.

That’s the second time I put “problem” in quotes because I’m not actually sure what it is, but here’s my attempt to characterise what it might be:

• Discussion is hard
• Expression is hard
• Discovery is hard

The frustration of trying to have a discussion with n+1 people on Twitter is widely felt, so I’m excited that Branch is a well thought-out, nicely designed product that aims to address this problem. You can take a conversation to Branch, and then publish said branch as a publicly viewable, carefully moderated conversation on a given theme. The use cases for individuals, groups, and even enterprise are obvious.

The second problem is one of expression, but can be sub-divided into two further issues: the medium itself, and on being expressive.

As with texts, the stilted terseness of Tweets mean they can be misconstrued and ineffective, whereas the wide-open limitless spaces of individual blogs can over-egg simple points of view, rendering them unheard and unappreciated. Platforms like Posterous sprouted up to cater for this half-way solution between the tweet and the blog post, but with Posterous having been acquired by Twitter we will have to wait to see what fills the space left in the middle.

The problem with expressiveness is that few platforms can really achieve the wet, spit-laden sort of conversation that is ultimately most effective. Forums are usually bloated and prevent flow; commenting systems feel inadequate, and hyper-threaded community platforms like Reddit and Hacker News feel overwhelming, especially to uninitiated. Branch seems to want to emulate real-time human conversation both in terms of turn-taking and small-group chatter and I’m excited to see how this feels in practice.

The third aspect of the communications problem is discovery of content. I am an extremely voracious reader of posts and articles that I find via Twitter, a small handful of bloggers (I’ll list them in a future post), and directly through subscriptions to my favourite magazines. All these are squirrelled away into my Instapaper account for some late-night reading or sweaty Underground ride, but because there’s usually some time between finding a link and reading it, Instapaper for me feels like discovery through quasi-serendipity. It works nicely for me but a great deal of trash ends up in the pile, and I forget why I saved them: often with context and comment having been stripped from a post, a quarter of its meaning is lost.

Despite having plenty to read I do fall into the trap of feeling I’m missing out. This is now compounded by the rise of Svbtle and Medium. I like them both but already feel overwhelmed by the wealth of material on them both. I need help sifting to find the gems. I’m not sure what mechanic needs to exist to help here. Medium rates articles by “goodness”, and Svbtle’s equivalent is “kudos” (but Dustin Curtis already has a “featured members and posts” section, which helps navigate the network). I’m unconvinced either are good measures of quality. They both fall into the trigger-happy like mentality of the Facebook Like; a mechanic laden with as much meaning as an ironic double-thumbs up. A share, a comment, a curated pick, or re-post by people whose opinion I respect are superior measures.

As a side note, the rise of the “curated link list” is a nice development. Readlists and lists in Kippt are both sources of reading goodness, but both have already exploded with content and the number of lists to work through are too numerable to handle.

Where does this leave us? I’m excited by the prospect of new channels of quality content, but nervous that the sheer volume and disperate fragmentation of platforms will diminish their true value, especially when they start to compete with each other. I’m hoping for competition on quality; not of users and pageviews. This is at odds with the economics of networks so it remains to be seen how the endgame might look.

In my next post I’m going to talk about the barriers people feel they have to writing content.