Howells.

I’d like a take a moment to introduce you to my blender:

It’s a Vitamix. It comes in black, red, or white. Or stainless steel for a few bucks more.

It has on it two big switches, and one knob. One switches the thing on with a satisfying clunk. One controls the speed from casual to brutal. The other switch doesn’t have a name, but seems to switch it into hyper-drive mode.

While I haven’t tried it yet, it would beat a Blendtec with no problems: it could definitely blend an iPhone with its 3.5 horse power motor.

It’s never not worked (apart from a time when we over-heated it whilst trying to make peanut butter and just needed to be reset with a simple flick of a switch). It’s annihilated anything we’ve tried to throw into it. Even if you wanted to break it, you’d have a hard time trying.

Essentially it’s the best physical, non-Apple product I own. It’s made me interested in cooking (even if now I’m mainly interested in soups and smoothies), and has opened up interesting cooking opportunities for Cecilia who is a far superior cook than I.

Yet it’s the ugliest thing in our kitchen, but still puts everything else to shame.

This is a convoluted way to say we have a lot learn from the brilliant but less than pretty things we use that haven’t got any sheen or gloss. I won’t name names since nobody likes their babies to be called ugly, but some of my most used apps–and ones that I actually pay for–are by far not the most shiny. They are beautifully engineered websites and applications at their core, but without any gloss so sometimes their technical guts spill out a little, adding to their charm.

Obviously I’m a massive proponent of design-led products and start-ups, but we should never forget the distinction between design and decoration, and always try to root for the ugly kid if it’s fast, functional, reliable, and ultimately superbly engineered.

I stumbled on a new UX testing approach which is drastically simple. My testbed was my network for creatives, Fiftytwo.

Firstly, I removed the Activity Feed because I (wrongly) suspected it of borking the server, and wasn’t sure how many people used it to navigate content. Almost immediately, lots of people emailed and tweeted asking where it had gone and how to get back to it. I reinstated the Activity Feed shortly after.

Secondly, I recently removed the “Things” functionality, which allowed users to share bits and pieces of content that wasn’t their own, but which interested them that during a given week. Absolutely nobody noticed: no emails, no tweets. Therefore, that piece of design and functionality should never have existed in the first place.

Instead of pontificating how to simplify your product to its bare essentials, don’t ask anybody and just get rid of aspects of your product; albeit temporarily (just remove links to the resource in your views, for instance). You’ll soon find out if was worth being there.

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Tweetspeare is a wonderful project behind the dev team of VoucherCodes.co.uk, which simply analyses tweets of popular trends on Twitter:

Every time a tweet about a trending topic includes three words that appear in that order in the Complete Works of William Shakespeare we’ll note it down along with the original tweet it came from. When all 810,153 words have been written the experiment will be complete!

An intelligently cheeky expose on the banality of the long-tail of Twitter users.

This is the best result of a hack weekend I think I’ve ever seen from a start-up or agency. Well done Duncan, Dan and the dev team!

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Yesterday one of my favourite bloggers/tweeters/curators Maria Popova announced a new initiative called The Curator’s Code as a method to standardise the way in which we attribute discoveries made when we re-distribute via the usual channels of twitter and blogs.

The code proposes the use of two shorthand codes:

ᔥ – indicates a via: a direct link of discovery

↬ – indicates a hat-tip: an indirect link of discovery

There are a few things I’d like to discuss first before trying to ascertain whether this is a good idea.

Missing attribution versus missing attribution

Missing attributions–especially from a deluge of a thousand Tumblr accounts–really frustrates me. A beautiful image showcasing a great product or piece of graphic design is often not accompanied by a direct link to the creator/studio/company/retailer that might want to sell or promote it to you. A post featuring an image like this is of zero worth to the individual who created it, but potentially worth a great deal of money to the publisher if they are yielding some ad revenue.

This mis-attribution angers me. I’m looking at you, Convoy. (But admittedly he’s yielding no cash, just Tumblr followers.)

The other type of missing attribution is where party A has found and shared a link, which party B subsequently shares. I share a lot of links on Twitter and here on my blog. Of course I try to do a via or ~ (I’ll come onto the nomenclature later) but sometimes I forget who I found it from due to the very nature of the sands of internet time.

I hope the person who found the link via someone else via an infinite number of other people doesn’t mind, but I have absolutely no idea. Of course, I have been on the other side. I run a fairly popular web design blog called siteInspire where I post sites I stumble across which I love. I then see people share the sites’ URLs without attribution to siteInspire.

But here’s the thing: I couldn’t give a damn about not being attributed.

Sure: a ‘via @siteinspire’ may mean one extra follower, but the point is the great piece of design was shared amongst our community; it doesn’t matter if I’m the person who found it first. Hell - I have seen entire blogs that repost siteInspire’s entire canon of content. I couldn’t care less–it just means I’m doing something right.

My point is, the former type of mis-attribution sucks to heck; the latter, we really need to get over, and just see the internet as a means by which to spread goodness freely.

What is a curator, anyway?

A curator used to mean someone who made specific decisions about which things to include in a specific collection in a museum.

I can’t think of anything I am less. At the very basic level, I’m a guy with a few blogs and a Twitter account, so I’m certainly not going to start making decisions about what to include in any upcoming exhibition at The British Museum.

I am, however, a voracious consumer of the internet and all the glorious nuggets within it. All I care about is finding cool stuff, sharing it, and hoping others find it as cool as I did (with varying results). Does that make me a curator? And as such, does that mean I am the audience of The Curator’s Code? I think no to the former, and no to the latter, which makes me confused about the whole thing. On @siteinspire I have just changed my bio to read “picked by @howells” not “curated by @howells”. I thought I was a curator, but because the term has suddenly turned quite mainstream and into something I don’t feel it is, now I’m unsure.

Let’s talk about process

To include the above symbols in this post, I had to visit The Curator’s Code website and cut and paste them. That will be the last time I will do that.

I know there is a bookmarklet to help me find the UTF8 symbol, but I have no fewer than 15 bookmarklets on Chrome that have me covered for every startup I could care to be involved with, and frankly that’s too many. If I can’t reach those symbols with some simple keystrokes, I won’t use them.

But this made me wonder, what is wrong with the conventions that have already (almost) been standardised?

Why is ᔥ superior to a ~? A tilde is being used by a huge number of people I follow to attribute a via. There may be a technical reason but right now I’m missing it.

I haven’t seen “hat-tip” used by many people I follow but I know what it means, so maybe subconsciously I have. My question here is what is the difference between a via and hat-tip? If we’re agreed that discovery if a factor of a chain of interactions between sharing people, then surely your share is the next link in a chain. I’d hazard it’s entirely impossible to trace the history of discover across platforms and blogging-islands, so I’m not sure an effort to try is worth a huge amount. Further I’d hope that all that is required is a visit to via source to discover the hat-tip source.

A final point I want to make about hat-tips is hat it is a very colloquial and possibly non-transferrable across boundaries. Via is a universal term in whatever language that makes more sense to a greater many.

So what do I think of The Curator’s Code?

I love the content that Maria shares along with a tiny handful of other folk I follow (Jason Kottke, Michael Surtees, Jason Cotterell, and others on my linky list). However I never saw these guys as curators: they’re just keen to share really great stuff, without demanding a title.

And these guys almost always share content using via or ~. That’s great, but in my mind not truly necessary. Their motivations are about disseminating great content without taking the credit for something that–at the end of the day–they didn’t create.

That said I would hate to think that someone I follow–who is therefore someone I respect–is offended by a mis-attribution of a resource so for that reason I’m in favour of the Code. But the actual process for doing this has to be be defined in the same way the @ symbol was defined by users of Twitter; organically and simply. If someone doesn’t want to use via, ~, HT (hat-tip) they won’t use ᔥ or ↬ either.

I really want to understand this initiative more so I welcome comments and feedback.

Update 1 – Lawrence in the comments below brings up an important point about the website. A simple idea demands a very simple message.

Update 2 – Matt Langer writes a criticism of the use of the term “curator” full stop. He picks up on some very important points not touched on here.

Update 3 – Marco Arment writes another excellent post, about this topic as does Michael Surtees as mentioned in my post.

Update 4 – take a look at this considered article by Rob at It’s Nice That, and Ben Stott just wrote a superb comment here:

What we are doing is sharing – posting, linking and blogging somebody else’s hard work. It is not our content, we didn’t create it, we don’t own it and we certainly don’t have any rights over it just because we think we found it first. We are not 5 year olds in the playground, it’s not finders keepers.

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I enjoyed reading Paul Graham’s latest essay, on ideas that are so frighteningly ambitious that they can almost repel.

Two of the ideas particularly appealed to me.

Firstly, building a new search engine to replace Google, which day by day becomes less and less useful (thanks mostly in part to SEO consultants ogres. Google is particularly useless for product and shopping comparisons, since the results have been manipulated beyond a point of them being useful. However, any new start-up building a new service to help here will have failed before they have begun if their business model includes offering some retailers or brands premium listings. I worry that almost everyone who is attempting to get into this space will have that plan in mind.

Secondly, ongoing diagnosis:

…I’m pretty sure that to people 50 or 100 years in the future, it will seem barbaric that people in our era waited till they had symptoms to be diagnosed with conditions like heart disease and cancer.

I thought I was interested in startups that aim to provide a way for you to record your wellbeing. For instance Tictrac is a very new startup that aims to help visualise various metrics in your life (not just medical; financial too) and have created a beautiful product (time will tell if it has been over-designed). But increasingly I don’t feel that these are ultimately the fixes for the problem because if I can’t be bothered to complete my data, I doubt many others will. There are also a huge number of privacy question marks over these services. If a service like this is free, where will my data end up (particularly if ruthless VCs get involved!).

I use (and paid for) 23andMe which is a fascinating service that analyses my DNA for any potential health risks. This is great for helping shed light on any potential problems and I feel okay about the team behind it. But I’d be very happy to entrust my data to a team of professionals for other vital signs.

Imagine a paid, monthly subscription service (associated with a private medical organisation like Nuffield) that sends you a blood and urine sample pack, and simple interface allowing to enter any other key metrics, whose professional analysis is presented to you shortly after submission, flagging up any potential problems (cholesterol, signs of diabetes, respiratory issues, and so on). Not many Techcrunch readers would pay for it, but I and thousands of others certainly would.

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A lot of people are concerned about the fact that Twitter are “selling” their tweets.

This seems to come as entirely surprising and shocking news to a great many, which in turn surprises me. Twitter is and has always been a free service, which has always been a very public conduit of information. Privacy arguments levelled against Facebook–which has always sold itself as a private network–don’t work here.

A few questions come to mind:

• Twitter are welcome to sell my tweets. Other than sharing a handful of interesting links since 2009 or so (whose value have probably diminished to zero), there is nothing in my archive that many marketing types would find particularly valuable.
• Because Twitter is a real-time, “zeitgeist” indicator, actually how much value is there in data mining tweets back from 2010? Sure, they could identify trends but these are published by Twitter anyway, and marketers won’t have the ability/capacity to localise trends to an individual user, let alone leverage trends in any meaningful way. Marketers barely understand what Twitter is yet, let alone what insights can be gleaned from it.
• Finally, why are objectors complaining about this… on Twitter? The best way to complain about something is to walk away from the service and close your account, but I haven’t seen any objectors do that yet.

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As soon as I started to think about prototyping a new product which aims to help people have proper discussions on the web, I start noticing a lot of people talking about the same thing.

Discussion is the new start-up zeitgeist.

Branch is exciting, and Pow/Wow just popped up (I don’t really know what it is). People suddenly recall Stellar.io (not quite discussions, but pertains to quality).

Ergo, does this mean a flight to quality connections and discussion that blogs, commenting (and commenting services like Disqus), Twitter and Facebook don’t quite deliver?

My idea is different to all of them, and I’m trying to wrangle it into some sort of sensible mock-up.

I love this story about a headwaiter who chose to use a system implemented for his restaurant in a way it was fundamentally designed not to be used: as a whiteboard. Because the system was so hard to used, every time a reservation was fulfilled, the headwaiter simply took a whiteboard marker and crossed off the booking directly on the screen. At the end of the night, the screen was simply wiped clean.

”Well, you know,” the headwaiter answered with a big sigh. ”The guys that create these kinds of systems … they have …. Well, you can’t do things the way you wanna do them. You can check off a reservation in the system, with the mouse, but hey, it’s at least four clicks away from this screen. And you can’t tell if the guests have been showed to their table or are waiting in the bar. So it’s much easier just to draw on the screen. (And when the evening is over you just wipe the screen with a cloth.) We’re very busy here, and this works just fine.”

The post leads to a number of conclusions and observations about what this sort of behaviour implies about application design and UX:

• Computer systems are not always used as the developers suppose. (I decided to title this post using “designer”; the criticism can be levelled at both, I imagine)
• People are creative. If they can, they will invent ways to simplify their everyday tasks.
• ”We’re very busy.” Users have a lot of more important things to do at work. The time to learn things, for which the value or purpose is not obvious, is rather spent on things we think are more important.
• Doesn’t the expense for a booking system seem all wasted here? A small real-world whiteboard would probably have solved the task at hand cheaper and simpler.
• There’s a possibility that the computerised booking system (as opposed to a real whiteboard) could generate some kind of statistics: number of guest per month, typical reservation profile for a week, percentage of tables booked for any given period … And the companies selling computer systems (of all kinds, in many businesses) usually push the possibilities to get such data as big advantages with their system. But is it worth the effort? In many cases, a headwaiter would probably know most of what really matters anyway from experience or rule-of-thumb. So the hassle of going through a time-consuming number of clicks, just to generate that data, is probably not worth it.
• And finally: to really find out what’s important to the users, and how a system is actually used, you need to observe real users, in the field.

I didn’t think I’d ever link to a TechCrunch article here, but I thoroughly enjoyed this funny post by entrepreneur and investor, James Altucher, who dispenses some sage advice about being an entrepreneur. Some of my favorite bullets:

• The economy doesn’t matter. Groupon started in November, 2008. The news media is always going to say the economy is in the crapper. For once in your life, and for the rest of your entrepreneurship, turn the TV off.
• You have no idea what’s going to be successful or not… a good entrepreneur probably has no clue what’s going to be good or bad. That’s not the key to success.
• Try to avoid meetings since 99% of them are worthless. And if you go to meetings, do this: no dougnuts and chairs in the meeting room. Then the meetings will at least be fast.
• When you are raising money, you have to be able to answer the question, “what if Google decides to get in this business?” The question is rhetorical. It’s like asking, “what happened to you the last time you were in the center of a black hole.” But, I don’t know why—everyone asks that question. Heck, I’ve asked that question. I’ve been asked it. It’s just something that happens. You need to answer it with absolute seriousness.
• Lying awake at 3 in the morning wondering how you are going to make payroll next October (note: it’s December now. But every three in the morning that October looms one day closer). It is critical to sleep through that anxiety. I’m not kidding. Better to dream about missing payroll than lie awake thinking about it.
• Calling your buddy and saying, “I hate this stupid company already. I wish I can sell it and start the other five ideas I have.” And, by the way, you might be right. Time to transform your crappy company into one of those five ideas.
• And note: Its ok to fail. We all make mistakes. We all crush the hope and spirit out of our friends, investors, and loved ones. It’s ok if you do it also. But be ready to start again and do it again. Avoid the shame. Crush them again and again. Until finally you squeeze juice out of them. Then it’s all worth it. Did that analogy just work? If so, then congratulations. You’re an entrepreneur.

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Today I met Carter Cleveland, the CEO of New York-based start-up Art.sy. At it’s core, Art.sy helps you browse and discover your taste in art, and if you are so inclined to buy it will connect you with the galleries that showcase the pieces.

To me, Art.sy is important for three things.

Firstly, it is one of the most beautiful web interfaces I have seen in recent times: dramatic in its black and white simplicity and careful typography, complemented with slick functionality that makes the site incredibly sticky. It’s a triumph of design and front-end development, such that unlike any other art site you can easily find yourself falling into a rabbit hole of beautiful content. You can jump effortlessly from a Dutch master to a hyper-contemporary sculpture, all tied together with a powerful taxonomy they term The Art Genome Project:

…an ongoing study of the characteristics that distinguish and connect works of art. Art.sy evaluates artworks across 800+ characteristics (we call them genes)—such as art-historical movements, subject matter, and formal qualities—to create a powerful search experience that reflects the multifaceted aspects of works of art.

Secondly, with stunning high definition artwork (supplied by their gallery partners) the site becomes an extension of the gallery experience. On a large screen, the images are huge, with a zoomable interface that allows you to explore a piece’s texture and detail. (And incidentally, the copyright protection that obviously is required for such a site is ingenious.) A particularly nice feature is being able to see a piece in context, hanging on a wall in a gallery. It sounds like a skeuomorphic novelty, but feels great and relevant. This also means Art.sy becomes an important educational tool; a perfect encyclopaedia for the arts.

Thirdly, you are able to curate your own taste. The social layer of Art.sy is in development, but from the initial wireframes that Carter showed me this is an exciting execution of the idea I posted recently. Your own profile can sit alongside well known individuals profiles: imagine jumping from Sofia Copolla’s curated collection to that of your friends. It’s a powerful discovery tool.

Finally, Art.sy will rip open the art industry. To outsiders the art scene is a closed circle composed of the privileged few. And to insiders, it’s all about playing political games with gallery owners. Art.sy will cut through this leaving traditional auction houses and galleries resisting engagement with the web to suffer. I like to imagine the site will inspire a whole new generation potential art buyers, previously shut out from the system.

Importantly Art.sy has a robust and obvious business plan. As well as taking a haircut from each referred transaction, they provide services to gallery owners who can manage their own inventory, and once payment processing systems are in place on the site, the model becomes even more clear. The benefits are not constrained to gallery owners: I’d like to see how an art advisor might leverage the site to help their clients.

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