kip/bot/blog

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.)))

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.

Comcast has a technical support person on twitter.  John Dvorak TWiTed that he is responding to people individually.

While it’s not a great movie, Walk Hard has some great moments that I can’t stop re-watching (the protest song phase, India, the Beatles(!), and the world music song in particular).  While obsessing about the movie’s attention to detail in spoofing 70s rocker career (the Dewey variety show interstitials are awesome), I found the Dewey Cox album covers below.  I love when movies put together these kind of artefacts (right down to the tortured punctuation):

“Join the stuggle while you may
The revolution is just a t-shirt away”

Just saw this while ordering some forgotten/hidden/kooky New York books.  It’s a customer review for Lost New York:

HBR has another good article breathing new life into stale concepts (the first one is blogged here).  Right now, it feels like that the “MFA is the new MBA” is stuck in a squishy or puddle-thin space.  For some, it’s a call to be a right-brained thinker — take a drawing class, learn an instrument, write a short story!  A little more intelligent, but kind of thin, is the argument that the MBA teaches you decision-making, the MFA teaches you synthesis.  Not bad, but it doesn’t unpack into actionable ideas.
Katherine Bell, who got an MBA, worked in business, and then got an MFA at the highly selective Iowa Writer’s Workshop, has a “conversation starter” that gets deeper into the skills and attitudes that MFAs can acquire.  It goes deep enough, in fact, that it feels actionable.  Her points, which are also covered in the ideacast, are:

• the workshop is an important management tool and cultural goal in a business that thrives on ideas — Bell’s MFA is in writing, and one of the biggest adjustments she had to make was to the workshop:  a class where your fellow students look at your work and critique it along with your professor.  Everyone has to develop skills for an effective workshop:
• the author needs to learn to accept criticism about very personal things, how to sift good feedback from bad, and how to incorporate it into her work;
• the students need to learn how to give useful feedback.  This one is particularly interesting because it goes beyond “don’t be negative” into “don’t give executional feedback.”  This is something a lot of design shops, clients, and companies trying to be more design-focused have trouble with.  Comments should be “the colors are feeling kind of flat to me, not as energetic as this”, rather than “can you make it more red?”
• the professor needs to set the right tone for the workshop, facilitate the critiquing, and give measured, but strong comments. 
  

• by writing fiction, you learn empathy — Bell spends a lot of time talking about how writing fiction forces her into her characters’ heads and out of hers.  Being able to get so far into a character that it acts in ways that surprise you is one of her litmus tests for empathy.  But she highlights that management is all about understanding who you’re talking to and feeling empathy with them.  (It’s also important for design, and Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change has a terrific chapter about what empathy is and isn’t and how to focus your work on building empathy).

Even if you can’t go to a workshop or don’t bother writing fiction, it’s a useful read and think as it highlights parts of work and types of thinking that MFA==MBA inclined managers should dig into.

Two screenshots unconnectable even on a blog that revels in the downside of apophenia.

The first it Four Hour Work Week Timothy Ferris twittering his peeps in hopes of hitching a jet ride:

Can this really be a Twitter behavior? I can’t help but cattily think he’s just looking for more ways to telling people he’s meeting with Warren Buffett. Or am I so low-rent that I overlooked this window into how the elite live?

Assuming the low rent theory holds, an even more pathetic screenshot is that I levelled 70 and got my mount on World of Warcraft! Level 70 is the highest you can attain (though there are many goals and goodies to achieve after the mere levelling). With 900 gold pieces (which took me several hours), you can also buy a flying mount. Flying around one of the coolest 3D experiences ever is one of the coolest 3d experiences ever. I haven’t found a great view yet. This will have to be my postcard moment in the meantime:

Its rainy, so the view’s not great, but it’s still cool.

Interesting design note: You can only fly in the expanded part of the world. The original/launch world has some weird geometry fixes that prevent Blizzard from being able to allow seamless flying between regions. Sounds intriguing . . . but sad. I wanted to fly over my hometown of Elwynn Forest.

I blogged an HBR article a while back, questioning, among other things, how innovative Google really is.  Some news stories today, highlight some overlooked areas where Google is doing some interesting, potentially innovative things:

• App Engine — NYT article today talks about Google’s plans to move App Engine into the enterprise space by opening it up to 10,000 developers.  It’s a small launch, limited to apps written in python in the beginning, and it’s a late entrant to a field where SalesForce and Amazon have experience, if not dominance, but it’s a real move, based on another innovation:
• GFS — not news, not surprising, and I can’t tell if it’s good or not, but Google File System can fall under the umbrella of innovation, or innovation-friendly.  (Taking control of the infrastructure.)
• SalesForce alliance — NYT article briefly describes how Google is tying its Office apps into SalesForce’s suite of offerings to compete with MSFT.  Whether Google’s productivity apps on the web will win out over MSFT’s client or server based apps is the big question, but I have to acknowledge that the apps are lightweight, clean enough to hook into other software, and scalable.

I don’t think this makes the HBR article less silly, however.  The examples above are reminders that there are other things going on at Google beyond the usual gmail, Google Earth, ad serving, and blogger acquisition that most articles talk about.

Google’s ability to develop them and wait years to monetize them, however, still comes down to cash flow.  This still means we have little to learn from Google about innovation.

Yet another immensely useful link from business thinking sherpa Todd, this time about how Blizzard software stays innovative. The list is interesting, if unsurprising:

1. Rely on critics
2. Use your own products
3. Make continual improvements
4. Go back to the drawing board
5. Design for different kinds of customers
6. The importance of frequent failures
7. Move quickly, in pieces
8. Statistics boulster experience
9. Demand excellence, or you’ll get mediocrity
10. Create a new type of product
11. Offer employees something extra

Blizzard is the creator of Diablo and World of Warcraft, two games to which I have given many, many hours of my life. They are also two games in which a sense of place has really taken root. Just last night I twittered:

Elwynn Forest is where I started my first character. When I bought a horse, at level 40, I travelled all the way back to Elwynn Forest for it, “local boy makes good” and all that.

A street sign that I saw with a fun graffiti prompted me to write “mmmmm, fresh meat”, a line from a character called the Butcher in Diablo (one which players often heard too often, since this was a tough, hard-to-beat, mid-game boss).

And finally, screenshots with amusing sense of places, like this labor dispute that I had walked into:

The article focuses on WoW, which has been the focus of the company’s efforts for several years. There were some fun bits, such as how the “Samurai panda” managed to put off both Chinese and Japanese players, the heavy emphasis on working with high level and low-level players (probably WoW’s greatest strength), and the way in which they specialize:

At Blizzard, small teams focus on narrow elements of the game. For example, different teams of artists specialize in trees, rocks, the game environment, and monsters, said lead producer Brack.

Multi-disciplinary “strike teams” serve as critics of how the different aspects of the game work together.

Point number 8, about the stats, is also interesting. WoW is constantly being tweaked to maintain game balance and players are keenly aware of, and generally glad for the game balancing. Blizzard has character class committees that meet regularly to decide if a character’s skills, equipment, and attributes are too strong or weak in comparison to other players. Patches, which happen with great frequency and remarkable ease, frequently “nerf” or weaken a class attribute that has proven too strong or easy in the field. Blizzard also spends a great deal of time watching emergent gameplay to see what players are doing that they hadn’t planned or expected . . . creating a nice feedback system to get creative ideas.

But, I think it’s really important to point out the level of focus Blizzard has. It has a very narrow range of game types and titles and works to make them incredibly good. Anyone who has played RPGs before WoW is regularly impressed at how they’ve improved nearly every mechanic of the genre — the quests are fun, funny, and interesting; resource collecting and skill acquisition are generally fun; major things like the introduction of a mount or a class item/skill come at just the right time; and exploration and paying close attention to things (like the plane crash in the fly-over to IronForge) always pays off. WoW is also does an amazing job of combining directed activity with emergent gameplay. They’ve picked a genre — RPG — and chosen to do it really, really, absurdly well.

A few other companies have hit the billion dollar mark with a similar focus. Rockstar Games started with the memorable insight that not all gamers read Lord of the Rings, some of them watched Goodfellas, and Bioware just wanted to bring the AD&D game system to the computer.