Several months ago a blogger by the name of Shaun Usher began a blog called Letters of Note. If you haven’t checked it out you really, really should. The concept behind the blog is that every weekday Shaun posts a scan of an old piece of correspondence, along with a transcription of the text. Moreover, the sender and/or recipient of each letter is usually a famous person that figures greatly into history.

I really enjoy the way that Shaun lets each piece stand for itself; at the beginning of each post he may give a small bit of context, but other than that we are left to read the letter and draw our own conclusions. It helps that almost every post is extremely outstanding, bringing history alive with emotion and drama. For example, here is a letter written by Mary, Queen of Scots to her erstwhile brother-in-law hours before she was to be executed.

What’s perhaps even more striking than the content of the letters is the image of the actual artifact: ink on paper. Hand written or typed, a formal script or a casual scrawl, always on a very distinct piece of stationery. These details add so much character to the story. For example, in the Mary Stuart example from above we can see the coarse canvas paper, the royal training of her penmanship, and the urgent hand with which she wrote that tragic letter.

What I’m getting at is this: where has the lost art of letter writing gone? All our correspondence is email, text message, etc. written in uniform text on a white background. No email will ever reach the level of expression and richness of story that these old letters portray.

However, I’m not here to bemoan the loss of an art form, I’m here to look for solutions. Because surely with all our technology and creativity we can make our letters more expressive again, no matter what medium they pass through. One of my hopes for the upcoming ubiquity of multitouch interfaces such as the iPad is that we will get a lot closer to the content that we create. With the immediacy of a touch interface, we will be able to directly interact with and design our correspondence in a more intuitive manner, instead of being constrained by a mouse arrow and a text field.

So this is a call to all the designers and developers out there (myself included): let’s get to work on making this a reality. And then, finally, one day our emails may actually be worthy enough to be viewed as artifacts.

Photo by a.drian

Fast forward to last week– I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Sound Opinions from Chicago Public Radio. It’s a great show, and at the end of each episode they invite their listeners to leave a message on the Sound Opinions answering machine, with a lucky few to be broadcast the next week. I decided to give the hotline a call, since I had just heard them refer to a similar trend as the one I outlined above, so on a whim I left a message on their machine describing Forest Rock. I was in New York over the weekend and didn’t hear the show, but I’ve been getting email from a few friends that heard it so I thought I’d pass it on. Enjoy :)

Sound Opinions: Show 220
(Show #220, about 55 minutes in)
Listen to the MP3 Stream: (link)
Download the Podcast: (Download the MP3)

Photo by lorentey

Anyway, here’s the list:

10. Chutes Too Narrow – The Shins

    I discovered this at the same time as Oh Inverted World, so the two kind of blur together for me. Catchy music, clever lyrics. That Zach Braff guy knows what he’s talking about.

9. Hot Fuss – The Killers

   Pop songcraft at it’s best. This album breaking was the start of the whole mainstream 80’s reincarnation that’s still going today. Everything’s been downhill since then for the Killers, in my opinion.

8. Is This It – The Strokes

   What a great divergence from all the high production pop crap that was in vogue at the time. The Strokes took it back to basics with a great slacker worldview to boot.

7. Give Up – The Postal Service

   Though it was eventually licensed out to every car company that wanted it for a commercial, this album started out as a decidedly non-mainstream side project of a band that itself was far from popular. Not just any artist can make electronic music sound so personal.

6. Funeral – Arcade Fire

   Wow, these scrappy Canadians came out of nowhere and helped redefine alternative music. Every song on this album is original and totally endearing in its amateur production and brazen creativity.

5. You Forgot It In People – Broken Social Scene

   Wow, these scrappy Canadians came out of nowhere and helped redefine alternative music. This band still doesn’t get the credit it deserves, probably because it’s such an amorphous collective of artists.

4. Cast Of Thousands – Elbow

   How can it be that still so many people have not heard of Elbow? They’re one of my favorite bands, and this album is a definitive classic. I love the gritty sound they lend to their instruments, and I love Guy Garvey’s coarse voice.

3. Parachutes – Coldplay

   This album is so phenomenal, track to track. Though I love the albums that came after as well, Coldplay was at their most warm and private on Parachutes, and with their subsequent stadium-filling popularity it’s unlikely that they’ll ever again write songs that feel so intimate…

2. Sea Change – Beck

   Much like my #1 choice, I bought this the day it came out, brought it home, slapped some headphones on and bonded with it. Holy shit, Beck. Way to go from disaffected junk culture to the most detailed, melodic melancholy brilliance I’d heard in a long time. I’m really hoping that his life falls apart again so he’ll write some more beautiful sad songs, produced again by Nigel Godrich (who’s also responsible for #1).

1. Kid A – Radiohead

   Oh Kid A! What else can I say about this album? Radiohead decided to follow up OK Computer (best of the last decade!) with a transcendent inaccessible masterpiece that blossoms further on each listen. It doesn’t matter to me that this album is #1 on many other lists. Honestly, I’m not really sure what this album is about, but I’m sure about what it means to me. I purposely don’t listen to Kid A very often, for fear that its powerful effect will diminish.

It really breaks my heart to leave off Spoon, Wilco, Bjork, The Flaming Lips, OutKast et al, but I suppose that’s what Top 10 lists are for… And then of course there are some great albums that I can’t include here because I never took sufficient time to emotionally bond with them, but I still think they’re truly great. Guess that leaves me lots of great stuff to go back and explore. If you’ve got any suggestions for me, leave them in the comments!

Though I’m not a T-Mobile customer, this episode did make me think about how much of my information I trust to the cloud. The advent of cloud computing has promised a new standard of data reliability and integrity, 100% uptime. But are we naive to think that this guarantee gives us license to never backup our information?

I’ve got data on Gmail, Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Yahoo, Hotmail and other services that I trust will last indefinitely. Backing up my information from these services isn’t encouraged, nor is it even convenient. As we transition from traditional servers to cloud-based redundancy, there are bound to be some hiccups along the way. My only suggestion at this point is to keep multiple copies of your most important files, and hope Gmail doesn’t go down for more than the few hours that it does occasionally.

More information on the Sidekick situation can be found at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10372921-56.html

Plunged back to the stone age, we had no way to get any information about the situation. No TV news, no internet, no land line. I did have an iPhone, but the power outage was too recent and too local to be on any of the mobile news websites.

At a loss, I considered my Twitter app. I use Twitter occasionally, but I continue to be skeptical about its overall usefulness. But here was a situation tailor made to show off the strengths of the medium!

Using searches for tweets that contained “power outage” and “Queen Anne” (the neighborhood in Seattle where we were staying) along with searches filtered by proximity, I was able to get a realtime stream of comments from others nearby who were experiencing the same thing. I found out that the power company was just becoming aware of the issue, and that there was no ETA for a resolution. I also saw tweets from the local news stations that were taking this news and retweeting it. I even had one of my tweets retweeted a few times.

If you know what retweeting is, please roll your eyes *now* and proceed to the next paragraph. Otherwise: retweeting is when others who read your tweet reshare it with the Twittersphere (and more specifically, those who follow them). This behavior, when repeated, can lead to a viral spread of your original message.

This was my first time being retweeted, and it was really fun to see how people commented on my message as they forwarded it on. Based on my experience, here are a few learnings on how to get retweeted:

Useful tweets articulately impart unprecedented information. Be clear and intelligent in what you write (a useful strategy for life in general, of course). Your at an advantage if your tweet contains up-to-date and breaking information, and possibly your take on it. The idea here is to convey information that people will want to relay instead of rewriting it or tweeting their own take on the event.

For example, when Michael Jackson died, the Twittersphere was flooded. Retweeting was probably much less likely in this case, because everyone was more concerned with tweeting their personal feelings about Michael Jackson and his music.

Limit your tweets to ~100 characters. The maximum tweet is 140 characters, but if you want to be retweeted you’ll want to keep it shorter. Why? When someone retweets your message, your original tweet will be repeated along with an extra 4 characters in the message to call this out as a retweet (“ RT”), as well as a repeat of your user name preceded by an “@” to indicate the source. Assuming you also want to give your retweeters some space to put in their own commentary, you’ll want to keep closer to the 100 character mark to avoid them having to truncate or edit your original tweet.

As our power outage in Seattle cleared up, we were able to see the resolution in real time as those who were getting power back tweeted about it. This was very valuable information since we were hearing nothing from the power company or the news stations.

All in all, it was a shining moment for Twitter, and I look forward to the next disaster when I can use it. Well, you know what I mean :)

I’m working on a new project in my few empty hours though. More on that later…

Continue reading for a link to some photos.

For some publicly available photos of our big day, check out the online portfolio of our photographer, Abbie Flynn. Our photos are under “Magic From India” in the Featured Weddings area.

In place of a post of my own, check out this this great site which will get you fit by training you to do 100 push-ups at once:

hundredpushups.com

I’ll be back next week :)

My Friendster account was stagnating…the only emails I would get from it were notifications of new spam messages from fictional vixens.

The Three E’s

Why wasn’t Friendster working for me? And more broadly, what makes a social networking site valuable to anyone? My view is that there are 3 behaviors that create value for members of a social network: expressing, engaging, and exploring.

• Expressing. Social networking sites provide a framework in which people can express themselves and their interests.
• Engaging. Social networking sites provide a forum for friends (and potential friends) to have rich conversations with each other.
• Exploring. Social networking sites provide a mechanism to discover new content by exploring other people in the network.

When solving a problem in a social networking context, I try to approach the solution using all three values.

Putting the end in Friendster

For me, Friendster ceased to be a place where people were expressing, exploring and engaging. The heart of any social networking site is the people who are there—and once the people leave, the party’s over.

Don’t count Friendster out though. The site is still hugely popular in other areas of the world, particularly southeast Asia.

Chris and I entered the contest last year and made the Top 50 with our story Black Thursday.  Though we didn’t move any further in the contest after that, I’m happy to announce that Chris and I have made the Top 50 once again!

As the next step, I will be putting together a video pitch which will be shown to the judges for the contest.  If we can make the cut to the Top 10, the contest will move on to rounds of internet voting….so we’ll be needing your HELP!

But no point in counting our chickens before they’re hatched…we’re currently working hard on getting ready for the pitch.  I don’t want to reveal too much about it at this point — but all the pitches will be available online after ComicCon.

Chris and I may be doing an interview or two as we lead up to the pitch, so I’ll be sure to link from here.  Good Luck to all the contestants, and Good Luck to us!