Hello there.
I’m Mike Davidson.
On this site, you’ll find some things I’ve designed and written.
I live in Seattle, work as a Design Executive at Microsoft, advise companies, and invest in startups I love.
There is more here.
We’re having a bit of a disagreement in the office about the meaning of the word “several”. Since such a vague term is only meaningful based on what the population thinks of it, I thought it best to put it up for a vote.
Without looking it up, please answer the question on the right.
Some possibly interesting items from the month of July:
I wasn’t going to say anything about Jason Calacanis’ announcement today that he was looking to buy Newsvine’s, Digg’s, and Reddit’s top link seeders for a thousand bucks a pop, but the fine folks at Reddit said it with zero words better than I ever could (note the logo):
It’s an interesting experiment for sure: whether you can take a user base of 12 million that isn’t a community in any way, pull their aging but comfortable portal out from under them, pay a bunch of users from other sites to entertain them, and then get them injected into a new community before they decide to go elsewhere. It hasn’t caught on yet, and I imagine that 99% of Netscape’s current user base has yet to vote on a single article, but it’s still very early in the game.
People like to point to Digg as a model that has clearly worked, and they are thus far correct, but one important thing to keep in mind is that other models may work as well and perhaps even better. There will never be only one winner in the community-driven news world. There will be many, and each will bring their own philosophy and style to the table. Our philosophy at Newsvine is to provide the best news reading, news writing, news gathering, and news debate possible. We’re only four months into our public launch and still have miles to go, but big companies trying to buy our best contributors isn’t what keeps us up at night… it’s continuing to evolve, continuing to innovate, and continuing to respond to what our community is telling us they want.
Pink Comic Sans. A perfect indication of how this process has gone so far.I live in a condo building with four floors and 40 units. The time has come to replace the carpet in the hallways and all common areas. It is a pretty big job that will cost $20,000 or so and obviously affects everybody’s living experience. It is slightly complicated by the fact that the walls are a light mauve and the current carpet is a dark mauve and painting the walls is not part of this project.
Certain things have happened already in the selection/replacement process which, in my opinion, have been an unmitigated disaster. So without revealing the details of the situation, I’d like to ask this question:
If you were either the president or a member of a condo board, what exact process would you undertake to select new carpeting? It can be one sentence or one paragraph. Dictatorial or democratic. Or anything in between…
The halogen torchiere. You know it well. It was the portable upright lamp seen in every living room, dorm room, and bedroom during most of the 1990s. Available for not much more than $15 at any home and hardware store during the height of its popularity, this ultra-soft source of light was a staple of urban living.
Has anybody noticed, though, how difficult it is to find one of these badboys today? Everywhere you go, it seems this bastion of illumination has been replaced by either an awful flourescent bulb version or a weak incandescent model, both usually with the dreaded “three-way switch” instead of the full-range dimmer. What gives?
I went into my local Lowe’s Hardware Store to find out.
As it turns out, there have been a rash of accidents over the last several years resulting from the use of these lamps. Apparently, the bulbs burn extremely hot and if the fixture tips over or some moron throws a shirt on top of it, a fire can start. Hmmmm, seems like a reasonable cause for alarm, but my halogen of 15 years just went out and I need a new one! How prevalent could this safety hazard really be?
After work today, I went down to the last place I knew of which carried something resembling my current model: Fred Meyer in Ballard. Fred Meyer is a combination hardware store/grocery store and they have a ton of stuff. Sure enough, I spotted a Holmes 300 Watt Halogen Torchiere with full-range dimmer!!! And better yet, it seemed to have all sorts of new safety features built in like auto-off and a cage around the bulb. According to the packaging, its “new technology and design exceeds new 1999 UL 153 Safety Standards”… whatever that means.
So I threw two of them in the cart and went over to the food section for some groceries. No sooner do I run into Keith’s wife and start talking about how Disneyland beats the crap out of Disneyworld, than a woman interrupts our conversation and politely says the following (pointing to the torchieres in my cart):
“Sorry to interrupt you, but my entire house burned down because of one of those lamps.”
Apparently it’s kind of prevalent!!!
I went on to explain that these new lamps were safer than the ones from the past but she didn’t seem impressed. I don’t blame her.
And so with that, I proceeded to the checkout to purchase my death torches. I’m taking the Holmes company at their word since they are a reputable manufacturer, but if my condo or the Newsvine offices catch fire and kill me, somebody please hack into my server and delete this blog post.
What a great ending to the 2006 World Cup. At least that’s what my friends tell me. Here’s a screen-cap from Comcast’s High Definition TV broadcast during one of the most important plays of the game — a missed penalty kick in the overtime extra time shootout:
I saw three kicks before the Comcast “crystal clear digital HD” signal cut completely out. No audio even. Not until the shootout was over and Italy was celebrating on the field did the picture return to its normal state.
Motherf…
I’ve covered the brutality of Comcast’s unreliable PVR service in the past, but this inability to hold a lousy TV signal at such a critical time is the last straw. I’m switching back to what I’ve missed since the day I got cable: DirecTV with Tivo.
Comcast, you gave me bargain basement rates for a year to lure me in. You even “bought back” my actual DirecTV dish so I wouldn’t be tempted to switch back to satellite. All you’ve done during that year is convince me that you are deserving of every negative thing anybody’s ever said about you.
Now get the hell out.
It’s about a month into grilling season here in Seattle, and after an unappetizing experience with MatchLight “Easy Lighting” (viz. “Soaked With Fuel”) Charcoal the other day, I finally decided to go out and get a proper gas grill for my deck. A couple of weeks ago, I had spotted an unusually cool clam-shaped barbecue at my friend Stephanie’s house so I decided to look it up on the interwebs.
After a few minutes, I determined it was one of the “Weber Q Series” grills. The problem was, there were three sizes and I had no idea which would be ideal. Luckily, Weber put together this extremely helpful diagram on their spec page:
Now that is some great information design. I don’t care if the grill is X inches by Y inches. I don’t care if it’s “small”, “medium”, or “large”. I just care what I can grill on it. Weber’s diagram tells me I can cook 10 hamburgers, 16 hot dogs, 55 shrimp, or 2 lobsters on it, and that’s all I need in order to determine that the 100 Series is big enough for me (I ended up getting the 120… it has flaps).
Anyway, great grill so far. I definitely recommend it. It’s small enough to throw in the back seat of your car as well so you can take it down to the beach or wherever you need to heat up tasty foodstuffs.
I don’t use Flickr a lot and every single message I’ve ever received through it has been something along the lines of:
“Person-You-Sort-Of-Know has added you as a contact!”
This morning, however, I received this message from susan1975 inquiring about a photo I (or Scrivs) took of Valleywag Chief Snarkology Officer Nick Douglas at SXSW:
“Hi there. Could you please add your photo called “CIMG0170.jpg” to my Male Butt-Crack Group? Thanks, Susan.”
Man, I totally would, but that would require me to actually join the Male Butt-Crack Group.
This is clearly another situation that Flickr is ill-equipped to handle. I would like to add my photo but am unwilling to join said butt-crack enthusiast group. Until this situation is resolved, the Male Butt-Crack Group shall be without my esteemed submission.
Are there any other unusual Flickr groups out there I should be aware of?
It seems like the question comes up at every conference, interview, or personal publishing powwow: Can you trust bloggers as much as you can trust journalists?
I always answer the question the same way: If you look at it in terms of “averages”, then no, you cannot trust bloggers as much as you can trust journalists. Looking at the averages, however, is the wrong way to answer the question. That would be like trying to answer the question of whether Italy or France makes better wine by dumping all the wine from each country into a vat, stirring it up, and then taking a sip from each.
Who cares about averages? What I really want is a few bottles of the best from each country plus maybe a sample of what one would consider “good table wine”. Armed with the best and the “typically good”, I can make a judgement as to who makes the better wine.
The same is true in the world of blogging vs. journalism. Since no one is going to settle for reading average journalism or average blogging once aggregation gets more intelligent, the real question to answer is “are the really good bloggers as trustable as the really good journalists?”
To answer this question, I always use three examples:
Om is a blogger and a journalist. The journalistic standards he upholds while writing for Business 2.0 are no different than those he applies to his blog, GigaOm. The man was a journalist before WordPress was even an apple in Matt Mullenweg’s eye. Om’s style varies a bit between his online and offline writings, and it is up to you to decide which you like better, but the unit you are deciding whether or not to trust in both cases is an atomic one: Om himself.
Walt is a longtime personal technology writer for the Wall Street Journal and his column is often a catalyst for new products entering the mainstream. He doesn’t have a blog but the opinions and research he pens for the Journal are entirely his. The question to answer with Walt is “Would you trust him any less if he were to quit the Journal and start his own blog?” I believe most people would say no.
Rafat is the founder of PaidContent.org, MocoNews, and the ContentNext network which acts as parent to these and other emerging properties. I’ve been reading PaidContent since before they had a proper RSS feed and I’ve found they break more stories than almost any traditional media outlet. Rafat is an example of someone who could quite easily have a plum job as a journalist for the New York Times but chooses not to because he prefers the rapid-fire format of blogging.
So in all of these cases, we have writers who are perfectly trained in the art and science of journalism but would (and in some cases do) succeed by being great bloggers instead. This is not to say that what Om and Rafat do is not journalism… it is. It just follows the format of blogging a lot closer. It’s much more atomic, and much more timely.
Read more…
It seems like the percentage of cash machines which still suffer from button/screen parallax is still pretty damned high. This design problem has already been solved in at least three ways (touch screen, angled display, and low-profile screen bezel) and yet it seems like 90% of all ATM machines still look like this:
Kind of annoying.
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