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Eos books, the imprint for the next Neal Stephenson novel . . . pause for a minute to celebrate that fact (which I didn’t know until this morning) . . . pause for another moment to celebrate the fact that it is not historical fiction (as opposed to his last three) . . . too many ellipses …

Eos books, the imprint for the next Neal Stephenson novel, had a nifty blog entry today announcing that Stephenson would be doing an interview soon and that readers could submit questions in the comments section. Stephenson has done a lot of interesting publishing things. When he released Cryptonomicon, a novel in which the importance of cryptography and secrecy to WWII and business today was prominent, he offered readers a code to crack. For the release of Quicksilver, the first volume of his Baroque Cycle he started a wiki in which readers could document the characters, events, ideas, and books covered in what turned out be a massive historical cycle. The release of In the Beginning was the Command Line, a book about software design and the predominance of the GUI in it, as a free downloadable was one of the early instances of ‘free’ in publishing. He semi-famously told the NYT that he wrote Snow Crash because programming it as a multi-media thing turned out to be too hard. He also used to provide soundtracks to the writing of the novels as part of his acknowledgements.

So this is another of those interesting things that Stephenson is doing to publishing. The questions and comments are awesome:

Stephenson has a fervent following, which cares deeply about his work and the subject matter driving his work, so it’s not entirely safe to say that every author can or should do this. But there are two points worth noting. First, Stephenson writes dense fiction that entertains but which also goes somewhere. He can write hilarious, memorable scenes, but they almost always occur in a setting that has depths the novel doesn’t have time to explore. Even his pen-name-written Interface, one of his more straightforward narratives, gets into how the brain works, how much we can manipulate people’s tastes, and, oddly enough, turned me onto a now decade old love of Mahler (along with Kundera . . . I read Immortality a month before Interface. Second, he is all about the “More…” dynamic of the internet era. Knowing that there is a feedback loop where his intellectual passions feed his fiction which fuel his and his readers’ passions, he participates readily and effectively in creating and pointing to content that deepens the reading and appreciation of his work.

Meanwhile, I’m just psyched that he’s doing a novel about monks. I love that s@!$.

Jon Evans’s new book Invisible Armies, has a trailer. (It’s also free for a month, and the author has travel tips and the publisher is running a GPS contest)
Better still, it has a blog-blurb-review-endorsement from Bruce Sterling that works for on an absurd number of levels.

(((That’s a pretty good book, actually. It’s kind of a tough-as-nails technothriller from a leftie Seattle 99er perspective. People who aren’t morons and like thriller novels ought to read this.)))

One of my favorite things about my Kindle (which I’m already quite over the top about) is the idle screen function. When you don’t hit a key for more than five minutes, it gives you these really nifty prints from old books, like so:

It’s like stuff out of bibliodyssey. I’m trying to figure out if Amazon loads new ones onto the unit (I really hope they do), and I will sometimes deliberately sleep the unit to see more pics.

What tickles me most about this, though, is that idling the screen is completely unnecessary. These screens don’t burn, and they don’t draw power by staying on (e-ink technologies don’t require screens to be re-drawn x times per second — once it’s rendered, nothing else happens until a button is pressed.

More pics of the idle screen on my flickr photostream.

One of the fun things to do with the Kindle is NowNow, a question answering service under the “Experimental” menu of Kindle. NowNow is based , I think, on the “mechanical turk“, a group of humans paid in a micro-fashion by Amazon to curate content and, under this program answer questions.

My first question to Nownow, sprang from a conversation with our CTO about gnostic and apocryphal scrolls (a very important part of our business of web marketing) and said that Mary Magdalene was the brother of Lazarus (the resurrectee). I didn’t know that, and while I didn’t doubt it either, I thought it was a good time to test Nownow:

Within 5 minutes, I had gotten three answers with varying shades of personal voice, exploration of nuance to the answer (”No … although it’s hotly debated”), and citations in the form of hyperlinks (you can use the Kindle’s wireless EVDO connection for web browsing).

This morning, while reading a trashy genre novel (I’ll do anything to get back in the fiction groove), the narrator described a character as “a real trouper.” Nice! Trouper! As in, the show must go on or do your part within a troupe/ensemble. I didn’t know that. I’ve usually encountered it as be a real trooper - soldier on, take your orders. Trouper felt right, but I ran it past the folks at Nownow.

My favorite answer comes from a person who I think I would like to have more chats with:

It’s definitely “trouper”, but “trooper” is taking over because so many people misuse/misunderstand the phrase. It seems likely the correct “trouper” will die off because it’s so neglected.

(In the same way “presently” is starting to mean “now” instead of “in the near future”, which is what it ACTUALLY means… just because people have been misusing it so much for so long.)

Anyway, a “trouper” means a member of a theatrical company (usually traveling, in a troupe) and has come to mean someone who keeps plugging away even when things go sour.

While both troupe and troop derive ultimately from the Latin troppus “flock”, one was adopted for military use while the other was applied to performers. However “a reliable, uncomplaining person; a staunch supporter or colleague” is, indeed, a trouper, likening someone to an actor or dancer who goes on despite hardship or impediments. It’s a compliment.

Troupe “group of performers” dates from the early 19th century in English, having come from French, and trouper “a performer belonging to a troupe” dates from the late 19th century. Trouper as in “she’s a real trouper” dates from the 20th century; it was already a cliche as evidenced by this quotation from 1959: “The phrase ‘she’s a trouper’ now has an old-fashioned and faintly derogatory air and is usually bandied about when someone continues to play with a high temperature or a shattering bereavement.”

Troop as in “a body of soldiers” is earlier, dating from at least the 16th century and deriving from Old French trope. A trooper is therefore a member of such a military group (1640), or, by extension, a certain type of law enforcement officer (especially in the U.S., where we have state troopers, who are state police. They’ve been called troopers since the early part of the 20th century). Calling someone a trooper in this way isn’t so much a compliment as a statement of fact: they’re a normal member of a group, nothing special.

This has been misused for a long time, though, and in the USA where the word “troop” is much much more common than “troupes”, it’s completely predictable that people would start using the “wrong” one. If you use the wrong one over and over again, over decades, it becomes acceptable, of course.

English is like that.

I hope this answer is good for you!

You can just tell this person enjoyed writing the answer, was glad for an excuse to dig into the mutual latin roots of both possibilities, and is sadly resigned to the way common usage overrides the richer, deeper original meaning.

I would, of course, be devastated to find out that this is a turing test and this was software generated:

if (question == usageOfWords) then

print “English is like that.”

endif

When I was in college, striving to be an evolved male, I bought a fair amount of Wyndham Hill music. It was all very groovy, trippy, good pot-smoking stuff with folk and burgeoning world overtones. At some point, though, it devolved into a sign of new age triteness — above the level of patchouli and wymmyn retreats — but it sank pretty low.
Imagine my surprise, then, to hear, in the space of a week, two Wyndham Hill artists being used on creepy crime shows, during creepy moments. A theme from Shadowfax’s only album is cop-cum-tortutred-serial-killer-of-bad-guys Dexter Morgan on Showtime’s Dexter. And a piece from Michael Hedges’s Aerial Boundaries is the chase music on Bones when they capture seasons-long bad guy Gormogon (a cannibal with dentures made of human canines). (On a sidenote, I very nearly wept tears of joy when it was revealed that Booth was not in fact dead, but was faking it so he could catch a bad guy.)

And on the subject of music, is anyone else bummed out that M.I.A.’s wondrous “Paper Planes” is being used as cheap trailer music for the new Seth Rogen film?

The Viking Penguin Bookclub has promise as an idea: a publisher curates its offerings, supports it with a blog, and allows users to do book club like activities around it. It starts out with a nice highlights/selections interaction:

(On a design note, I started out liking the entry note: tab key-accessible entry fields, with good coloring. But it kind of fell apart. For the second field, seen above, I forgot what field I was entering, and without a label, discovered that my fingers are used to entering passwords after the name, not email. I was also bummed when the tab-accessible state pull-down, didn’t support up and down arrows or first letter.) Starts out promising, highlighting three books that you wouldn’t find on the bestseller list and emerging authors.

But then, it got stupid:

This is an slightly shrunken image of a browsable bookshelf and, I fear, the future that I will be facing in Flash design meetings. These titles, with the exception of the (excellent translation of) Anna Karenina and (somewhat overrated) Collapse are unbrowsable. When you rollover the book cover, you still get precious little information:

I still can’t make out what the book is.

I can’t tell if the interface above is “pictures are always superior to text” or “recreational of physical reality always rocks users”, but I know that, as a CD/CD manager, I’ll have to suit up and deal with a lot of sad, silly, stupid, sucky interface ideas like this.

Link found via Konigi.

Our current Apple-besotted climate has focused many conversations on the critical, almost singular, importance of innovation in the success of an offering. My recent and regular struggles with Office/iWork, iPhoto/Aperture, Entourage/Outlook, skitch, and brightkite are making me think that we’ve fetishized innovation to the point that we’re overlooking more powerful dynamics that drive the adoption of new technologies or switching from one product to another.

EverydayUX has a post about how much web2.0 we can handle, which highlights a couple of adoption dynamics:

The biggest challenge is not only finding the ones that work best for you (or quickly recognizing the ones that don’t) but also trying to predict the ones that are going to be around for the long haul and stand the best chance of getting some uptake with your friends that might not roll in the same techno-circles as the Scobles and Winers of the world.

As I keep adding services to my day-to-day life, the challenge of integrating new ones becomes greater as they invariably begin to overlap (see dodgeball and brightkite).

Here, Alex highlights some key points:  will the product you’re considering be around; does the slight, even subtle difference between two products with overlapping features warrant a move?

I think there’s an interesting freako- micro- economic dynamic worth looking at here — in grad school, I learned it as “sticky downward.”

Mainstream economists love their maths (I love saying that) and they love smooth curves in graphs.  Smooth curves mean smooth tranfers into and out of self-equilibrating markets, the holy grail of economic policy.  Neo-classical economists like to kink those curves by reminding us that people aren’t perfectly rational price-seekers, and that many other dynamics drive even the simplest market choices.

In labor economics, a great deal of time has been spent arguing that smooth downward sloping labor demand curves are inaccurate.  In grad school, I had to learn multiple arguments against this shape, BUT the interesting one here is the argument that labor demand curves are “sticky downward”.  Take a look at the typical supply and demand curves (and ignore D2, that’s not relevant to this argument).

D1 implies that as the price of labor (P) goes down, the quantity demanded (Q) goes up.  Conversely, as the price goes up, the quantity demanded goes down.  The smooth, continuity of the curve implies that, in large markets, even the smallest shift in the price of labor will cause people to be hired or fired.

But companies don’t work that way, they are responsive to price in very lurchy, semi-rational fashions.  Many factors contribute to a ’stickiness’ that keeps people from being fired even as the cost of keeping them on increases: managers become socially connected to employees;  there are significant but hard to measure replacements costs; it’s just a hassle to can this person; no one wants to do the deed; you already have overhead; morale for the rest of the team etc. So, yes the increase in the price of labor creates a downard pressure on demand, but there’s a stickiness with labor that you don’t have with impersonal commodities like loaves of bread, widgets, screws, etc.

So what?  There’s a sticky downward dynamic for adoption of high-consideration, comlex products.  While I am sick of talking about Apple, my experience with the iPod highlights the sticky downward adoption dynamic.  I owned four MP3 players before finally buying an iPod. The hours I had spent ripping my CDs and labelling the tracks (80% of my music is classical or jazz, the worst parts of CD database information), were a massive stickiness factor. All my stuff was here, and I would have to move it there . . . is the iPod really that cool, the wheel really that nifty, the thing really that much better? In the end, I moved because iTunes seemed to have hit critical mass in its catalog and I tested a bunch of my classical CDs on a friends’ iTunes installation and saw that their CD database was much cleaner (and easier to clean) than any others. To drift into an innovation conversation for a moment, this does highlight Bill Buxton’s point that the success of the iPod goes waaaaay beyond our adulation of Steve Jobs and Sir Jonathan . . . it’s also the lawyers who negotiated the contracts for the music and the wonks who cleaned up the messy German names of composers and pieces, the complicated Kochel and Opus groupings, and the inconsistent movement notation, the people who made the data transfer faster, etc.

The point, though (I dream of the time when I can go a day and not talk about Apple or the iPod) is that the switch was very sticky . . . it took months to decide, and then weeks to actualy complete that switch, and it was a sticky, messy switch to make.

As always, the point must be made that this isn’t new. We’ve been aware of switch dynamics for years (and those of us in marketing and advertising are used to briefs that highlight whether this is a switch or join message). But there are a few notions embedded in stickiness  that make it useful for designers and design thinking people:

- sticky implies a tugging, ripping away process. It acknowledges the pains of those switches

- sticky gets us out of rational actor thinking and acknowledges the long, multi-centered process of decision-making
- sticky elevates the conversation back up to perceived value of the overall product experience rather than a mapping of individual features to something’s success

- sticky is a user-centered phrase, where innovation isn’t. To say that something succeeded because it was innovative isn’t nearly as informative, rich, or empathy-inducing as understanding how stickiness was overcome

Techcrunch providing compelling reasons for the Kindle.  Or rather Citi investment analysts are.  They estimate that Amazon will generate between $400 million and $750 million in revenue from the Kindle by 2010, or 1% - 3% of Amazon’s total revenue.  There’s a nice side-by-side comparison that opened my eyes:

The most important, and most interesting, one is that book selection.  I was under the impression, from where I can’t remember, that both were at about 90,000.  My regular tests of Amazon and the Sony store didn’t seem to unearth any differences — attempts to find test books on either store yielded identical results.  Weird perceptual thing on my part?  Bogus data?

Most important, though, is Jennifer Aniston’s endorsement, also in Techcrunch:

The city is replacing all the parking signs in Park Slope and will suspend alternate-side parking in order to facilitate the process.  The NYT has a funny tongue-in-cheek, ever-so-slightly-caustic piece about it.  My favorite bit:

Plenty of New Yorkers spend more time each week parking than they do in a house of worship, or visiting aging parents, or reading to kids. And nowhere is this truer than in Park Slope, Brooklyn, named not for the ability to do just that — park — but for the kind with grass and trees, useless to drivers. Even on a good day, parking is scarce: No-Park Slope.

I believe this came up while reading a link from a friend about laser etching my moleskine:

It points to this:

Feels like a stunt, but I dig it anyway.