in case you’re looking for something to do in your spare time, take a look the new mindset tool by Yahoo!. It’s slick, intuitive, Google-competitive and more or less useless. Which makes it art.
In other tech news, I noticed that my ol’ friend over at manoverboard.org is doing weird application science for Mac OS X. Pretty interesting little applications, too. It’s just too bad I never registered that darn domain name because Mindset put’s his site ahead of mine sometimes in the rankings.
Still more: I deleted all my sports bookmarks today. That was a good feeling.
Further: This looks kind of fun, although apparently Steven Johnson raves about it.

We’re going through some major growing/planning pains so bear with Deckchairs another few days while we sort out our lack of commentary.
In the meantime, here are some nice links on late technology fun:

• IBM and LAMP
• 456 Berea Street on Web Standards practices and recommendations
• An overview of “captology”
• Landing pages explained
• Fontographer owned by FontLab

Although I’ve purchased Apple’s new OS, Tiger, I ain’t upgrading until 10.4.1 comes out. For the braver souls who are upgrading, I did find a very useful listing of software vendors who have upgraded their applications for Tiger.
I’ve never had perfect success with upgrading an operating system as so many others (seem to) have had. The typical install for me takes 2 weeks of trepiditation and nervous stomach, 1 day of hemming and hawing, and 2 hours of teeth biting as the software loads. Then it’s about 4 hours of complete and utter FREAK-OUT, followed by 2 nights of resentment, anger, self-hatred and fear of technology and 4 days of quiet re-organization. This, in turn, is followed by general fear of OS failure for 2 months.

The good folks at 37 Signals have come up with another very interesting new web-based organizational application called Backpack. It would be great to have an online, sharable, nicely designed, and fast web-based tool to gather notes, ideas, photos, and to-dos together but, let me be one of the few to say: it’s lame.
Here’s why:

• Backpack, for the father-me, is best known as Dora the Explorer’s expedition friend who helps her find navigate the territories of the world.
• Backpack is basically a rehashed, genetically re-engineered Basecamp mixed up with Tadalist, both properties of 37 signals.
• Backpack is too smart for the average Joe and too dumb for the average Geek.
• Backpacks typically rot, get all beat up, and smell. I wouldn’t want my backpack, filled with old Kleenex, wet matches, and dirty socks to be shared with anyone.

Having said all that, I do love the 37 signals blog.

I’ve been writing to Deckchairs for about 1,000 years and now everywhere I look, blogs appear. It’s remarkable that weblogs, bloggers, blogs, blogging, war-blogging, etc. have taken on a life of their own and are not a component of the “Internet” or “Web design” or “Content Management.”
But blogs like Deckchairs are pretty old school. My intuition about blogging is that, as business blogs grow and more CEOs, personalities, and corporations use blogging on their sites, personal blogs will increasingly look small, petty, and possibly N/A. Everything technological today moves from the personal to the socio-political: cellular phones to ringtones, downloadable files to digital piracy, recycling to full-on green cars, pirate radio to podcasting and mixability.
A few mild moments in time to prove my point:
Business Week’s cover story is all about how blogs will change big business. I think they’re right. And one way I know they’re right is that because the online article is more interesting, comprehensive, and carefully formatted than the newstand edition, which looks like a bad Rolling Stone layout. In the online version, you can actually read the article, click to related links, and get a sense of the transition from the personal to the corporate. The magazine is also launching its own Blogspotting site.
A newish company called, sadly, Othx aims to pull personal weblogs into its fold. You can pay for being featured higher up in their search rankings and they act as a kind of oddly commercial warehouse for personality-driven blogs. Nice idea but you know that personal blogging is over when sites like this crop up. I signed up!
Yahoo has a new News interface that they’re trying out. It’s pretty great and one of the reasons is because it doesn’t look like a blog. It’s Amazon-like tabbed interface makes reading news easier and it will be a great tool once it’s fully RSS-enabled (which will be very soon) and corporatized.

Well, it’s official, Adobe bought Macromedia. I had heard rumors about it but now that it’s come to light – and it all makes some sense – I find it sad that competition is again being erased. There are many, many good, small design software shops out there but none of them will have the baby teeth to take on a behemoth like this new company.
So what? Adobe has done a good job of providing quality software over the past three years.
What does the design software community really need?
Here’s my wishlist:

• A stronger commitment to Web standards and Web standardization which would include promotion of accesssibility, good coding, and good usability.
• The ability to better customize software. Mozilla is of course leading the way with themes, extensions, and plug-ins. Photoshop and Dreamweaver have had extensibility for years but the barrier of entry is pretty of high.
• Less bloat. Software should have fewer bells and whistles when installed and the possibility of turning them on and off as needed.

For the second time in two years, I had to have my 20-inch Apple Monitor in for repair. It doesn’t actually bother me that much. The thing is basically on all of the time and the technology of LCDs is pretty new and, afterall, the thing’s a workhorse. (I’m always surprised when obsolescently-designed machines actually perform better than my withering expectations.)
What I found interesting was that I actually like working on a “little” 17-inch LCD monitor, my backup. It’s small, square, and stable and it’s a bit brighter, somehow, than the larger beast (now sitting on its side in some DHL depot between here and Florida). Sure, the visual real estate isn’t there and I can’t have four applications open at the same time. But I’m enjoying the new, clean desktop, the solidity of one window per application, and the confinement of focus that this visual reprieve has brought to my table.

I’ve been creating email newsletters either for myself or for clients for probably about 8 years.
I started designing these things back when I was heavily into promoting The Site at MANOVERBOARD and gathered steam with about 400 subscribers. I created simple HTML emails that would highlight the artist being exhibited on The Site and then I would send them out from my 14K or 56K modem 20 or 30 at a time until they were delivered. My ISP at the time (Interport, long live Interport) couldn’t handle more than 30 emails at a time.
The Site is now more or less kaput and has run out of steam on its own (my own?) accord. In any case, I’ve used a number of good to average online email marketing solutions to send emails for MANOVERBOARD and for many clients over the past 3 years. There has been mixed success. The statistics one can gain from tracking emails sent to your loyal followers is insanely detailed; what I mean is that an email sender typically knows a tremendous amount of information about the quality of the emails they are sending by looking at the “open” and “click-through” rates of those emails. Some server-side email software can also tell you what visitors clicked on what links, which is both scary and cool if you’re a senstive marketer like me.
Regardless, I’ve found a new email newsletter home at CampaignMonitor which seems to totally rock. I’ve had a few successes with it and I’m relaunching The Telegraph, a MANOVERBOARD newsletter that has sadly been in winter hibernation because of a project called Overload (see previous post). Long story long, Seth Godin wrote a short, cogent piece last week about email marketing and he’s spot on: good marketing takes time, knowing your audience, catering to their needs and whims, and being consistent. What more is there? I’m planning on re-applying this idea to all my newfound email projects with my new email newsletter application.
[For a future post: Commentary and explication of the dearth of solid, useful information on the Web about email marketing, email technologies, HTML vs text emails, email clients, and email delivery systems.]

Not enough commentators and news organizations have picked up on what I consider a big story: the near possibility of a $100 laptop that would allow billions of poor schoolchildren around the world to connect to the Internet. Journalist Kevin Maney, of USA Today, pushed this story a few weeks ago, driven by the Davos Forum and Nicholas Negroponte a few weeks ago. Large companies have rightly signed on to push the technology forward; they include Google, AMD and possibly Samsung and Motorola.
Slashdot, BoingBoing, and many others have noted the story weakly. To me, it’s a fascinating construct and one that could be more than confabulatory if all of the positives really came out. The standard reasoning among many promoters is that the $100 laptop would allow potentially violent young insurgents to see how “cool” the West is and forgo their anger and hatred of all things Western (this myopia seems contingent upon the seductiveness of video games for some reason). Others see the pure economic benefits of, say, a Nigerian woman being able to sell her handmade items on eBay. Still others focus on the educational aspect of the $100 laptop, allowing students in developing countries to learn more deeply than they could have before.
It also seems that there are many micro-economic effects that the $100 laptop could have on our global culture and economy as well:

• Because the proposed systems would be open source based (to save costs and ongoing fees), programmers in any country could join the front in creating reliable, strong, and usable software.
• Small high-tech firms could reproduce the product within their countries, providing jobs and social structures in small communities.
• Innovation would be pushed open across the board. Rather than one set of hard-drive technologies being focused upon consistently, for instance, other kinds of memory devices and systems could be explored.
• The need for new phone systems (mobile or landline) could essentially be eliminated in small, hard-to-reach areas as VOIP could be used among the poorest to communicate.
• Medical facillities and other information-critical organizations would be greatly assisted with the advance of ready-to-use technical assistance provided online.
• Whole economies could tie into the Web, providing new communities and financial bases for products and goods where there were none before.

The logic of this is so clear, so pure, that it’s hard to believe an NGO or major multinational hasn’t already been started to push this project deeply. Western and Asian businesses would of course reap huge benefits with new subscribers and new audiences — as would local news organizations and academic institutions. For a foundation or major corporation, $100 million dollars towards this project would go a long, long way.

The title of the email below, which came today from a spammer, is Good Idea. I’ve been tempted to call this person on their phone number (548-946-1628) or mobile number (961-650-1357) but perhaps I can leave that one for Monday.
Die land, divide. Big near when. About, describe begin want. I give little plan meet. Rock boy engine, receive. Build kind ocean. Young small among base. Car sun river, who self some. Travel drive surprise, perhaps group. Contain apple sent direct. Feel, come special effect. Equal listen team glass possible lay.