As I mentioned in the ephemera, Met life is selling Stuy Town and Peter Cooper Village for a proposed $5 billion dollars. That price tag would make it the largest real estate deal involving the purchase of a single property in America in modern times.

Nearly two-thirds of the apartments currently have regulated rents at half the market rate. This will be a definite blow to advocates of affordable housing in New York.

Amy Fox, my next door neighbor senior year of college, wrote a wonderful article for the New York Times on the battle her grandparents and other residents fought to integrate Stuy Town in the 1950s. The article is behind the TimesSelect wall, but a slide show of wonderful photos is still available with Amy narrating.

My friend Molly, one of the best writers I know who refuses to blog, (you listening Luke?) snapped these photos of Streetart while in Rome.

This post and the one before it stem from a post I read this morning by Charlie O’Donnell about the future of the calendaring industry. While Charlie raised many important points, I was struck by the quote below:

I hardly know anyone who uses any calendar other than one their job forced them to… and less than half of the Outlook users I know put personal items on their work calendar. (italics mine)

We have different identities based on the various relationships we have. And software isn’t designed to help us easily maintain these identities. It is painfully evident in the calendaring space but is a problem in many areas of digital life.

I have a Google calendar that tracks my birthdays, social engagements, doctors appointments, Browns games, and other goings ons about town. I will have a work calendar when I start my new job in a few weeks that will be dominated by meetings (and my secretary). And never the twain shall meet. This is primarily due to the fact that the existing software can’t easily handle the problems of trust levels and interoperabilty. It can be done, but not seamlessly.

I face the same bifurcation issue with email. In a few weeks I will have a new work email address to add to the host of personal addresses I maintain. Again, the software isn’t up to the challenge of easily handling correspondance with various constituencies from one interface. I want the work address and boilerplate to be used when I contact a client or a colleague. I want my personal address to be used when I contact a friend. And I don’t want to have to manually adjust these settings with each message.

When it comes to this blog, I feel the push and pull of these competing parts of my life. There are stories I would tell, thoughts I would share, if not for the fact that this blog is in the words of Stephen Dunn, “open on all sides, in cahoots with thin air.” Setting up a second blog would only make thebifurcation more permanent. I want to present a public blog and filter certain posts for friends and family. I am sure I can set up some sort of pass protected site, but no blog software has made it easy as far as I can tell.

I guess in the end, I want technology that works the way I do (and, I surmise, we all do). I may be asking too much, but any company that can create software that changes identities - seamlessly - depending on the relationship involved, will come out on top.

I customize my ringtones based on the relationship I have with the caller. Family gets one ring. Friends get another. Everyone else gets a third, more garrish, ring (I may have to add a fourth distinction when I start my new job in a few weeks). I do this for two reasons. First, I can make a snap judgement without looking at my phone as to whether the call must be answered or can safely go to voicemail. Secondly, I like to think that my brain gets a crucial headstart in preparing me for the the ensuing phone interaction. Like an early warning system, the different ringtones send a nearly sub-conscious signal to my brain that I need to cheer up, relax, or otherwise modify my demeanor to address the incoming party. This is purley conjecture, but I like the notion.

These classifications closely mirror three of my most central identities: that of son/brother, friend, and stranger)

Why doesn’t my phone allow me to have different voicemail greetings based on these identities? I have had the same bland professional voicemail greeting since I was 22. I have done this because my mom, best friend, and boss always end up with my new cell phone number. And would you rather get laughed at by your friend for your long, boring, professional message or have an uncomfortable chat with your boss about how “yo” is probably not an acceptable greeting for clients?

My phone already allows me to make these distinctions between my various relationships when it comes to ringtones. I don’t need separate messages for individuals (but how cool would that be!). I just want different messages for a few of the distinct relationships that we all have.

That way, I could say “love you” to my mom, “peace” to my friends and “thank you for your call” to the masses.

I switched from to del.icio.us to Yahoo’s MyWeb awhile back because MyWeb saves cached versions of each page I bookmark. I recently decided to switch back to del.icio.us (I wasn’t using the cached versions enough to sacrifice the ease of use of del.icio.us). However, when I imported my bookmarks they all defaulted to private. I was told by del.icio.us support team that I would have to share each link individually (the reason, which is fair, is that if the import tool, as it currently stands, allowed bulk sharing it would be abused by link spammers).

I have over 1700 links currently bookmarked.

Has anyone “found” a faster way to do this?

Update: According to del.icio.us support (who, I might add, are really quick to answer emails!) they are working on a solution to this problem.

The print version of Brenda Ann Kenneally’s photo essay in today’s NYTimes was spectacular. The online version is even more powerful and includes narration by the subjects of the photos.

Two quotes from Paul Graham’s essential essay What You Can’t Say.

One:

“In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. “Blasphemy”, “sacrilege”, and “heresy” were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times “indecent”, “improper”, and “unamerican” have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they’re mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force… In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that’s a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as “divisive” or “racially insensitive” instead of arguing that it’s false, we should start paying attention.” (emphasis mine)

Two:

“How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don’t matter– just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what’s inside this guy’s head with what’s inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can’t say.”

Update: Graham has a follow up to this piece.

I recently experienced Julian Montague’s Stray Shopping Cart Project at a gallery in Chelsea (the name of said gallery escapes me). Montague’s project is both beautiful and hilarious. Montague has developed a sophisticated classification system for identifying shopping carts in the environments in which they are found. There are eleven types of Class A: False Strays, including the A/2 Plaza Drift and the A/3 Bus Stop Discard. There are twenty-two Class B: True Strays including the B/7 Transient Imposter, the B/21 Naturalization (a cart resituated by natural forces), and the B/10 Plow Crush.

My personal favorite is the B/13 Complex Vandalism, which can be differentiated from Simple Vandalism by the degree of complexity and effort required to resituate the cart (in his example you can see a shopping cart inside an empty pool that is enclosed within a fence).

In addition to the entire classification system, Montague includes photographs of 160 specimens on the project website. Each is, of course, properly classified.

I am not sure which part of Montague’s project was more enjoyable - the informational graphics and photographs or the accompanying text. Something tells me it is the perfect balance of the two that made this work so memorable.

Update: Montague has a special Site Study: Cleveland and Environs Winter 2005 section. Yeah, I know. That is only of interest to me.

The BBC has an article on the Starbuck’s short cappucino. It’s not on the menu, but you can order it. They have the cups and an appropriate button on the register. I mention this because I was thrilled when I learned about the short cup last summer. It brought me peace of mind.

Prior to learning about the “short” I railed against the Starbucks naming conventions. I purposefully ordered larges instead of Ventis.

“I’d like a large coffee please. Thank You.”

“One Venti?” the barista replied.

“Yes. One large.”

I can handle pretentiousness, but it was really the fact that they deemed their small coffee a “Tall” that really got my goat.

I wonder if Tall feels vindication now that his little brother has been outed. Does he want to scream out at the top of his lungs “See I AM tall! And I DO have a girlfriend… she’s just… well… she lives in Canada.”

Yesterday I commented on a post by Seth Godin here on this blog. I did this because Seth chooses not to enable comments (which is totally cool by me). He has enabled trackbacks however. I drafted my thoughts and published the post. In Wordpress this is all one has to do to join a conversation. But when I returned this morning to see how the conversation had progressed over night, my post was nowhere to be found.

It took me several minutes to realize that my post hadn’t registered as a trackback because Seth uses Moveable Type (MT). Why is this significant? Wordpress (the platform that powers this blog) automatically handles trackbacks. When I publish a post, Wordpress attempts to notify the blogs I have linked to. If it is successful, then my post is registered as a trackback and the author I have linked to is notified. Similarly, whenever someone links to a post of mine, Wordpress notes this and includes the trackback along with any other comments that have been left on my blog. In short, whenever I want to join a conversation, all I have to do is post my thoughts. Like the good wingman that he is, Wordpress magically handles the introductions.

The same is not true for Moveable Type. Each post on an MT blog has a trackback url that is different from the permanent link of the post. Before I could join the conversation on Seth’s blog, I had to locate the trackback link of his post. Then I drafted my post - linking to the permanent link of the post for human readers - and then had to add the trackback link (the computer readable reference). The trackback link has to be entered into an obscure field in the Worpress Admin screen which, presumably, exists solely to trackback to posts on MT blogs.

It’s not a huge deal, but little platform quirks like this inhibit the natural flow of conversation. When I link to another blog, in my mind, the gesture has been made. Moveable Type’s trackback process is like telling a woman you like her shoes and then, upon returning home, drafting a handwritten letter to the same effect.

Update: And sure enough, I forgot to add the trackback to for this post!

I am in the process of integrating a few thousand photographs from Flickr into this blog. You can view my photos by most recent, tag, and by photo sets. I am porting my photos over from one Flickr account to another so it may be several days before they are all available on the site.

Go ahead, check it out.

I am joking, but I enjoyed reading that Seth Godin had come to the realization this morning that products - of all stripes - are too complicated these days (Seth tried washing his clothes in a washing machine with 125 different settings).

Seth ponders whether “good enough” might be the next big idea.

The team over at 37signals would certainly agree. They have staked their future on the notion. And it seems to be working.

One note though, “good enough” will smack of mediocrity to some. Perhaps “simplicity” gets to the heart of it. Very few would demand a complicated product. But every one thinks they deserve great (which is the perceived as the opposite of “good enough”).

Two guys at the coffee shop, laptops open, looking for jobs.

Guy One: Oh… here’s one. “Do you enjoy dining on haute cuisine?”

Guy Two: What’s that mean?

Guy One: I dunno. If I knew words like that I’d have a job already!

In the wake of David Foster Wallace’s piece on Federer in yesterday’s NYTimes, the paper is allowing readers to share their thoughts on whether Federer is the best tennis player ever to play the sport. Kudos to William Tapia who got the first comment in:

“I like to watch tennis and this is a beautiful sport, but this is not a proper or interesting subject for comment at a moment of turnoil and war in some parts of the world. A discussion on the Middle East would be more suitable and is on our mids [Sic] now.”

My Friend Paul Rieckhoff will be reading from his new book Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier’s Fight for America from Baghdad to Washington on Tuesday, Aug 22 at 7:00PM at The Strand in Manhattan. Paul is a veteran of the Iraq war and Executive Director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA).

Paul is as smart as they come and engaging speaker. You can see his recent appearances on Colbert Report, Fox News, and MSNBC’s Hardball.

This promises to be an insightful event and, if I know Paul, there will be a lively discussion following the reading.

The first person to tell Paul the name of the current Secretary of the VA will win a free signed copy of the book.

A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life
By David Foster Wallace
Ploughshares, Spring 1998

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed very hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one.

If you are looking for a good time, a few beverages, and an awesome DJ, get down to Madame X on Thursdays to see my brother spin old soul, funk, hip-hop, with a dash of everything else. He is still the only man I have ever seen seemlessly mix Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mos Def in a way where you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends.

For those that haven’t been to Madame X, it’s a lounge on Houston between La Guardia (West Broadway) and Thompson on the north side of the street.

If you stop by tell Jon I said hello.

(thx jon)

I was going to link to this archive of old cereal boxes cause it is totally awesome. But I thought a few of the boxes deserved to be highlighted.

Apparently Native American, Mexican, Chinese and Black folks didn’t eat cereal back in the day:

Jose The Monkey

Apparently his name is SoHi

“Rick Shaw Inside!”

The chopsticks are awesome

These cats didn’t even get names…

No comment…

A rip-snortin’ cereal, a rootin’ tootin’ snack?

I am making some slight design changes around here. Please let me know if the site acts or looks odd, or otherwise mistreats you.

If you are in New York, I can’t impress upon you enough how important it is that you get out to McCarren Park Pool for the Iron & Wine show on Thursday (8/17).

Same Beam might be the best lyricist I have come across in years.

Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made
and she’s chosen to believe, in the hymns her mother sings
Sunday pulls its children from their piles of fallen leaves

- From Passing Afternoon

Ok… if you’d rather see The Wu-Tang show at Webster Hall on Thursday I’ll let it slide.

According to Google Trends, it looks like we have been running neck and neck since 2004.

A few posts ago, I talked about how I struggled with Charlie’s use of the word vulnerable in reference to the relationships that are evolving between brands and their consumers. I was reading Tara Hunt’s wonderful blog this morning and lo and behold, she too used the word vulnerable in reference to marketing. I can honestly say that I never associated the word vulnerable with marketing, branding, advertising, and the like, before this past wekeend, but I am beginning to like it.

Tara uses vulnerability to identify a different part of the marketing process, but it is equally appropriate as Charlie’s reference was.

Where Charlie was referring to the vulnerability that comes with letting the relationship with consumers occur on the consumer’s terms, Tara analyzes the vulnerability that comes with open source. According to Tara:

“Open source is the most vulnerable thing I know… Making oneself publicly vulnerable is scary. Putting yourself ‘out there’, offering up source code, telling your ’secrets’, involving your community (which could include…your enemies!) - yikes. There is something to be said for surprise and delight - which is a whole other story, but my point is that community is built on trust and someone who puts themselves out there honestly has a leg up when it comes to community.”

And likewise, someone who puts themselves out there - honestly - will have a leg up when it comes to brand loyalty as well.

Vulnerability lies at the heart of both Charlie’s notion of MeVertising and Tara’s vision of open source. Companies must let go. Smart companies are realizing that in order to build a real relationship with a consumer, they must offer those things that foster meaningful relationships between people - namely honesty, respect, and the resulting trust. I am excited to see this shift in norms as corporations and consumers begin to reenvision their relationships with one another.

It makes sense. Think about your most healthy relationships with people. Likely they are founded on mutual respect, honesty, and the trust that arises from the first two. It might seem too much to ask of the folks that make your jeans or your browser, but should it be?

From Sesame Street

I saw Clerks II recently, and while I thought it was good, this post isn’t about the movie really. In one of the early scenes, Elias (Trevor Fehrman) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) banter about the upcoming release of the live action Transformers movie.

That got me wondering if there were other films that discussed or at least gave a nod to upcoming or contemporary movies. Sure enough, as I watched Big Fish last night, I noticed that Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) and his father (Albert Finney) drive past a theater which is showing Identity. Identity and Big Fish were both released in 2003.

Are you up to the challenge? Can you name any other films that hat tip contemporary movies or projects that are in the works?

The Transformer Trailer isn’t all that exciting, but I bet the intro credits to the film will be totally sweet given how they handle the transforming typography at the end of the trailer.

Charlie O’Donnell of Oddcast has a thoughtful post about the changing dynamics in branding and marketing that are afoot. According to Charlie:

When the brands woke up from being dazed, it seemed that they began to like us… to want to get closer to us. They wanted to be in our networks, to be friends with us.

At first, I started calling this phenomenon “Brand Association.” The things I buy wanted to be closer to me.

Then I realized that, even more than that, they wanted to be me, and me to be them… and to a large extent, I am them. I don’t drink, so when I’m out at bars, I’m Sprite guy. Its become a running joke, but ask any of my friends who they think of when they see a Sprite, its probably me. I am a Mustang and Jamba Juice, and Macy’s, too… I am self identifying with a number of brands. I have a relationship with brands that I am committing a part of myself to.

At first this sounded scary, reminiscent of Single White Female (Allie’s new room-mate is about to borrow a few things without asking. Her clothes. Her boyfriend. Her life).

Charlie notes that lifestyle marketing is not new, but that he is seeing a new trend where brands are “opening up and becoming vulnerable to form a stronger tie to consumers.” I struggled with the notion of a brand becoming “vulnerable.” It makes me think of lovers sharing intimate secrets with one another in a quiet whisper.

But he is on to something here. Brands have lost control. The dynamic has shifted. Brands once managed the terms of their relationships with consumers. You were cool because you wore Guess Jeans (do they still make those?). But that model is quickly being tossed out the window. A brand is now only as influential as its consumers. In that sense, brands are extremely vulnerable. You are no longer what you wear. But what you wear (the brand) is increasingly becoming you.

Charlie has come up with an interesting term for what he sees as a blurring of one’s own identity, brand association, consumption, and the like. He calls it “MeVertising.”

Google recently added a “all my services” link to the top of the Gmail page that links to a central page that catalogs (and links to) each of the Google services I am subscribed to. Before this move I wasn’t even sure if the Gmail folks new I was using the calendar, or the analytics package.

But from a navigational perspective, this solution is half-assed. Clicking on the link opens a new window which lists all of the services I use. Clicking on one of these links takes me away from the list to the requested service. If I want to go back to the list I have to use the back button. It’s easier to just type the damn url in the address bar.

How hard would it be to provide a common navigational scheme that spanned across all of the products that I am subscribed to? It needn’t be elborate. Even a drop down menu would do. For a team of geniuses, they should be able to figure out how to let me toggle back and forth between services - in one window - by lunch time.

My phone recently had an accident involving water. I waited for several days and, much to my surprise, after it dried out it began working again… Almost. A few of the buttons are difficult to press and battery saver is no longer relaible. While I have insurance and can get a new phone for $50 dollars or so, I was hoping to invoke the warranty. It’s been dry for months. There was no way they could tell it had encountered water right?

Wrong. Without knowing that I had dropped it in water, my friend opened the back, took one look and said, “Did you drop this puppy in water?” I looked at him, amazed, and confirmed that I had. He pointed to a red dot on the inside of my phone and explained that the dot had been white when I got the phone and only turns red when it comes in contact with water. Flipping over the battery exposed a second one of these red dots.

Tricky Verizon. Very Tricky. (actually almost all providers now use this detection system).

Before and after photo below:

My community here in Ohio has “Deaf Child” signs all over the place to warn drivers that the community has a deaf child in its midst. When I was a kid I remember wondering, how on earth the sign people knew that! I mean, you can see schools and intersections, and deduce that a warning sign might be helpful and appropriate. But deaf children (we had blind children signs too now that I think about it)? How on earth did the sign people know who was in each house, or more, how their health was doing?

I am older now and know that the sign people are merely public servants and that while the government might be considered all knowing these days, deaf children signs are had by petitioning the local department of transportation for one.

But I still have some questions:

I wonder if the sign is placed in front of the house containing the deaf child or is it positioned slightly before the child’s house so as to give the driver fair warning and the kid a running start.

If it is directly in front of the kid’s house, I wonder if the kid feels stigmatized - the only kid with his own sign - and a sign that brings attention to what he or she may perceive as a shortcoming? I could imagine how I would feel as a kid if there was a sign in front of my crib that preyed on my perceived inadequacies - “Dumb Dumb Child Area - Drivers Beware”

Finally, I wonder how the city monitors such signs. It is easy to make a judgement call when the flow of traffic is changed obviating the need for a one-way or stop sign. But how does the city know when a deaf child moves away or isn’t a child anymore?

Yikes… So This is what I think about when I am on vacation.

For those of you who actually view the site (as opposed to using a feedreader), you may have noticed a new feature on the site. You can see it right below this post. I call these links ephemera.

n. pl. e·phem·er·a: Printed matter of passing interest

I am using this space to link to things I find online that for one reason or another don’t warrant a full blown blog post. Each ephemeron (didn’t know until today that this was the singular of ephemera) will inlcude a link with a brief description.

I am still tweaking things so pardon my dust. The permalinks and archives aren’t working yet and I am working on a separate RSS feed for this feature.

I hope you enjoy.

Update: The ephemera RSS feed is now up and running.

I often link to articles about services that are in the works but then forget to actually go back and check them out after they are live. I came across an old post of mine about a service called In2TV that was to be offered by Warner Brothers in early 2006. According to a New York Times article (now hidden by NYTimes Select) over 100 shows would be made available with 4800 episodes.

Well, In2TV is live - and it disappoints on two levels.

The Content
In2TV certainly doesn’t offer 100 shows or 4800 episodes. That said, I was excited to reminisce while watching old episodes of Wonder Woman with Lynda Carter.

Wonder Woman (Note the Lasso of Truth)

Other old gems include Welcome Back Kotter, Alice and Eight is Enough. That said, the library needs work.

The Delivery
The site isn’t very user-friendly and the video service is poor. AOL offers both streaming and downloaded content. Before streaming, I was required to install an active-x plugin for my mozilla browser. Despite being on a T1 connection, the video had sync problems as it continually had to buffer.

I decided to download an episode to see how the video quality compared, but was rebuffed by AOL. Apparently you can only download the shows from In2TV if you use Internet Explorer.

Oh well. In2TV sounded promising. I am sure it is only a matter of time before someone gets this right. Unfortunately, AOL and Warner Brothers are likely in to deep to get their offering on the right track.