Just checking a message on facebook and saw the this ad. Initially it struck me as deeply absurd but I’m coming around to the idea that she might be on to something. A lot of people don’t really realize that if you want to do something difficult you can save yourself a lot of time and ensure success by simply asking people that have already done it. If you’re nice, generally grateful and ask interesting questions the people you ask will become mentors. It’s seems a lot of people would rather puzzle through a process the long and hard way while risking failure than simply doing things the easy way. Which is cool I guess but not necessarily smart or useful most of the time. Finding mentors is largely a numbers game so it makes a lot of sense that she just placed a facebook ad.

The interesting part is that the Ad links to her blog instead of some way to contact her. I did a facebook search and found 37 people named leslie bradshaw. I sleuthed around on her blog until I found enough info about her to do a relevant facebook search and send a query about the success of her campaign + advice on how she can get a better response. {have the ad link to the about page on her blog, place her email at the top of the page and then add a direct link to her facebook profile. I am continually baffled by people who don’t understand that making a task even marginally more difficult will substantially reduce it’s possible success. but whatever, it keeps me employed}

My view is that if you don’t have any mentors you’re probably not doing anything hard. Heads up, this is a possible sign that you are stagnating and becoming lame.

so sayeth pitchfork:

This stuttering instrumental pop tune with nicely harmonized guitar leads from Brooklyn remix mavens Ratatat is from their forthcoming LP3. Released simultaneously is a video that turns clips from an old Schwarzenegger flick into a tightly-choreographed dance of pyrotechnics, night-vision surveillance, and airborne bodies. Mp3 below the vid.

savvy users will note that I embedded the high quality with a small hack. You can link directly to higher quality youtube vids by adding &fmt=6 to the uri. The embed code just calls a uri for the video so I added &fmt=6 to the embed code thusly

Let me also add that I love the writing on pitchfork but hate the site and find it totally unusable because there’s no ability to sort music by genre (afaik). Since I despise 95% of the guitarded emorock they post, I never visit pitchfork.com. Except to snatch ratatat mp3s FOR EXAMPLE

The song makes me feel like I’m drowning in the best possible way, especially at the beginning. And that arnie flick is Predator you fools!!!

:: Ratatat originally keyed in via RE:UP mag {which is quite good} ::

Yes! I fully support this. AT&T shouldn’t be allowed to operate in public without constant public opposition like this.

:: Via boing boing ::

this is redonkulous

You probably know that RadioHead just released a new album that people can pay whatever they want for. You can check that out on the RadioHead.com website. This is what I call a “reality based approach.”

In reality, we have to understand that it’s very difficult to control what people do. Since the album is going to be downloaded for free on the internet anyway a reality based approach is to make it easy for people to give you money.

This has been a pretty solid success. A recent new york times article reports that the average sale price is $8. The same article also talks about how economists are baffled that people would pay anything at all, if they don’t have to.

ummm, just to be clear, people who don’t understand tipping are autistic douchebags.

Also, a lot of people are heralding this as the death of the music industry. I doubt it, but is anyone really surprised that both fans and artists are eager to get away from and industry that’s been a total dick?

Here’s another example:

…duh.

also, duh. Here’s an example of the Reality Approach from the same article

Also, people are going

http://mobile.paypal.com

should obviously be

http://m.paypal.com

if ur on a fone, xtra lettrs suk, duh.

If you ever surf around on the “blogosphere” or the “blagosphere” or whatever the kids are calling it these days you’ll notice that nothing ever blows up from a myspace blog. I’m not familiar with someone posting something so trenchantly insightful or fall off your keyboard hilarious on a myspace blog that it’s gotten 10s of thousands of incoming links in 48 hours. I’ve never seen slashdot, digg, or reddit link to myspace.

This doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, it seems like at least a few of the millions of myspace blogs should be saying something diggworthy. The first thing that comes to mind is that the highly personalized nature of blog posts has a limited appeal to any sort of greater audience (ie omg drama with the bf!!). That doesn’t really fly though because LiveJournal is also personalized but there are still fairly common blog explosions on the major aggregators. Given that Myspace has the largest userbase of any of the social networking sites (it’s the #5 most accessed english website on the internet according to alexa as of this writing) I have a hard time believing that myspacers aren’t writing brilliant and incisive blog posts about the state of the world. As the tagline of technorati says “70 Million blogs out there…some of them have to be good.” A view of technorati’s top 100 blogs shows that a few are hosted in blogger, typepad and wordpress the rest have dedicated domains but not a single one is hosted on myspace.

Closer inspection of my own blog on myspace may reveal the reason why. If you start at my myspace profile(myspace.com/titaniumdreads) and click on [view all blog entries] your taken to my blog page. the nonsensically long uri is

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID
=10085330&MyToken=5acd4cbd-b0f5-46e3-96bc-03d97574275cML

I did some logical inference hacking and discovered that I could get to the same page by going to
http://blog.myspace.com/titaniumdreads. However, there is no indication anywhere on the page that it can be accessed with a simplified uri. In fact there isn’t even a permalink the permalink is disguised as a link in the time I made the post.

The permalink is the mainstay of the blogger. If you expect to have people link to your posts you have to have a clear and concise uri. the permalink for my last entry is

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID


676-A9DD4FCF97E8C98552665480 =10085330&blogID=231822843&Mytoken=DF89AAC4-40C9-4

There is no fucking way that someone could type that. I believe that myspace is losing millions of dollars because they haven’t programmed their namespaces properly. If you could access my myspace blog through http://blog.myspace.com/titaniumdreads/?p=162 I might not have gone to the trouble to set up this website. Something this simple would be easy to forward around in email and on comments to other users. If you think that this isn’t a big deal you’re wrong. The weblogs inc network was the first to make over a million dollars in advertising with only a handful of blogs, myspace has at least 200 million users growing at a rate of 230,000 per fucking day (although most of those are probably like my friend ruthie). The creators of myspace sold it for 327 million dollars. Not long afterwards google paid 900 million for exclusive search rights. Myspace is currently working on expanding into the chinese market. this minor usability error is costing myspace hundreds of millions of dollars.

To me there’s a bigger issue here. AJ Liebling said that
Freedom of the Presses is for those that own one.” This minor programming error is holding back public discourse in a very significant way. The internet is destroying television and newspapers because *anyone* can have a voice not just the media monopolies that thrive on a cheap political system dominated by sound bites, fear-mongering, emotional appeals, and ad hominem attacks.

Myspace has the shittiest user interface but is the most popular social networking site because it gives users the freedom to create their own pages (myspace). Yet they’ve totally missed that most basic of points with their blogs. Give users the basic uri’s and the ability to embed html in blogs and myspace could make billions while invigorating the public sphere.

New Friend Requests!!!

If the profile no longer exists why do I have to deny their friend request?!?!? Shouldn’t this just disappear? gah!

dear ruthie, I totally think you’re a real person and not a porn fakesters* created by a sophisticated bot. what? you have a cam?!? only 5.99 a minute? I would have never guessed.

*see attack of the smartasses a great article from sf weekly when friendster was considered an “uber-chic” dating site.

UC Santa Cruz has a very cool bike coop that teaches students to build and maintain their own bicycles. It’s also a good place to hang out and meet people. Here’s a sticker that they gave me (I love stickers, please hook me up if you have any)

from my flickr photostream

The sticker serves ultimately as way to inform the student populace, especially incoming first years, about the bike coop. An important task considering that so many people never ride bikes simply because they don’t know where or how to get one that optimizes price and quality. The sticker scores high on the graphic design front with a sweet logo and good visibility of the name. However, it fails to mention the location of the bike coop which is tucked discretely yet conveniently into a little corner near the student center. It doesn’t mention a website either. Any information that gets put out into the world should necessarily provide the viewer with a way to get more information about the subject. Word of mouth is particularly crucial in this case. Even if the the primary viewer doesn’t want or need a bike they may be able to inform a friend who is in the market.

The Takehome Message:
I think it’s helpful to consider stickers, flyers, posters etc as a pointer to something bigger. Not putting a physical and web location on the sticker is like a pointer without an arrow.

the sticker lies on top of my biology of aids final study guide. Pictured are various proteins that are critical to the successful reproduction of HIV.