There are many kinds of people trying to make a living online. There are those who love retail and want to use the Internet to find efficiencies in merchandising and supply chain management. There are those who love the preciseness of search algorithms and want to do everything they can to figure out how to level up in that game. There are those who see the potential of selling “eyeballs” to advertisers and are desperately trying to grab enough of our attention to make that work.

Those are all perfectly fine ways to spend your days. But it’s not what drives me.

Then there are those who love the web. They understand that it’s people all the way down. That the real value of the things we make is in the shared experiences we get to have. They are passionate, critical, creative, opinionated, and cynical. Sometimes arrogant and not nice — but never apathetic. Never lazy enough to let something they care about get away with being less than great.

Those are the people I stand with.

We believe that the quality of what we put out there reflects on all of us. Flipboard and Clear make us all look good. Color makes us look like idiots, and we can’t stand it. When our own work doesn’t live up to our standards of quality for whatever reason, we lose sleep over it. We can’t shut up when we see the Internet being used as a game to be won, an endless well of content to “repurpose” for a quick ad buck, a way to trick people into clicking a link they don’t want to click on. It makes us obnoxious, yes, but we can’t just stand there and do nothing. For we will not have that sh*t. We will not have it.

To those who make a living online because they love the web: I stand with you.

If you secretly enjoy snarky writing as much as I do, you should read Paul Constant’s post called Yesterday, I Went to the American Idol for Startups. It Made Me Want to Die. It’s a scathing and funny rant about lazy, unimaginative use of language in business, and yet he ends with quite a poignant remark:

You can do anything you want with an idea. It can be as big as you want. It doesn’t have to solve a minor problem that nobody ever really realized was a problem. It doesn’t have to fit into something the size of a button crammed into a “folder” the size of a button on a screen the size of a playing card. But everywhere I look, I see tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality. And I come back to those cliches, and I think the real problem is in how little thought goes into the language these people use. When the language you employ to communicate your ideas is small and boring, your ideas are going to be small and boring. And when all your ideas are small and boring, your future gets dimmer and dimmer and more claustrophobic until it’s finally just a pinpoint of light on a dark screen, in danger of going out at any time.

Aaron Swartz discusses the possible problems of relying too much on scientific decision-making in Do I have too much faith in science?:

If you’re struggling with a decision, we’re taught to approach it more “scientifically”, by systematically enumerating pros and cons and trying to weight and balance them. That’s what Richard Feynman would do, right? Well, studies have shown that this sort of explicit approach repeatable leads to worse decisions than just going with your gut. Why? Presumably for the same reason: your gut is full of tacit knowledge that it’s tough to articulate and write down. Just focusing on the stuff you can make explicit means throwing away everything else you know—destroying your tacit knowledge.

My initial reaction was probably similar to yours. Something like this:

As expected, many commenters on Aaron’s post vehemently disagrees with him. Joe Blaylock asks:

You seem to take a narrow view of what science is and how it’s done. Is this rhetorical? Are you representing an extreme reductivist worldview to try to make a point?

gwern tells an interesting story to make his/her point:

‘One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.” God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”’

To bring this debate over into the world of design, I like Dmitry Fadeyev’s description of the different approaches as Primal (intuitive) vs. Cerebral (scientific). He concludes:

The best work is probably a combination of the two forces: restraining the primal force enough to yield a useful product that performs, but not ignoring it altogether so that the more basic human element is satisfied too, both in the creator and in the user.

Dmitri explores this theme more in his essay The Cerebral Designer:

Likewise, primal and cerebral design instincts are complements, not opposing forces. They are concerned with disparate goals which is why neither is better at achieving what the other sets out to do. If the design is driven only by the cerebral creative instinct, it will be too plain. If it is fully primal, it will not be very good at fulfilling its function for it would be more of an illustration or an ornamental piece than a design. Instead, if the primal is restrained by the cerebral but not yet fully killed, we arrive at a design that is functional, structured, pleasing to the eye and a joy for the designer to create.

I guess as designers we’re lucky. Instead of having to pick extreme points of view in an argument, in many cases the easy way out (calling for a middle ground) is also what’s best for our work. That is certainly the case here. We can combine things like A/B testing (within limits) with an intuitive humanity to design memorable, usable experiences.

I agree with Ian Storm Taylor¹ — stay away from #000000:

When you put pure black next to a set of meticulously picked colors, the black overpowers everything else. It stands out because it’s not natural. All of the “black” everyday objects around you have some amount of light bouncing off of them, which means they aren’t black, they’re dark gray. And that light probably has a tint to it, so they’re not even dark gray, they’re colored-dark gray.

Read his post for the very interesting full argument.

Dmitry Fadeyev reflects on the purpose of writing in Give Sight:

Meaningful writing has a purpose beyond that of simple entertainment or of generating conversation. Its purpose is to improve society, to improve our life, by teaching us certain truths that the author has learned. John Ruskin puts it well in his essay on books, Of Kings’ Treasuries, by saying that good books give us sight. By teaching us what to look for, and the value of those things, we learn to tell apart the good from the bad, to pass better judgements using our sharpened vision. We grow and become wiser. And that is the only sort of writing that ever improves us as people because all the rest, information and entertainment, it just passes by and leaves us in the same state that we are when we first come into contact with it.

I completely agree with this viewpoint, and that results in a constant struggle as I try to weigh the demands of long-form writing with the demands of, you know, having a day job. The compromise that many of us in this situation goes for, to keep the much-needed momentum of writing going (what Alex Charchar calls “act the pro”), is to share links and quick thoughts, interspersed with some long-form writing when inspiration and a brief excess of time collide.

I’m particularly self-conscious about the dangers of this approach after reading Marcelo Somers’s piece The Linkblog Cancer:

Our job as independent writers isn’t to be first or even to get the most pageviews. It’s to answer the question of “so what?”. Taken as a whole, our sites should tell a unique story that no one else can, with storylines that develop over time that help bring order to the chaos of what we cover.

That’s what I want to happen here, but I know I often fall short. I’ll keep doing it though, because I have hope that, taken as a whole, there is a thread running through the links I post and the essays I write, and that when I look back at it in a few years, that thread will spark some new and interesting ideas. We’ll see.

Jim Dalrymple in Apple’s motivation for suing Samsung:

I’m not going to say that Apple doesn’t care at all about keeping its secrets, but this is a case of dealing with the lesser of two evils. Sue Samsung now and show some old prototype photos, but stop them from copying future products; or let them continue copying. […]

Although none us know for sure what [Apple’s future] products are, if they are truly disruptive, like the iPhone and iPad, it’s in Apple’s best interests to stop Samsung now. This will effectively cut off the worst offender of companies copying its products in their tracks.

Jim clearly has a bee in his bonnet about the Apple v Samsung case, and it makes for some excellent writing and analysis. In fact, I think The Loop is by far the best site to stay up to date on what’s happening in this case.

I usually avoid articles called “What [X] can teach us about [Y]”, but despite myself I really enjoyed Maria Konnikova’s What Grown-Ups Can Learn From Kids’ Books. It’s a thoughtful essay that gets to the core of The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland, and Winnie-the-Pooh:

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” Piglet asks him as their adventures near an end, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” Pooh answers. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” responds Piglet.

Pooh thinks it over. “It’s the same thing,” he says. And as adults, we can at last appreciate just how right he is.

If I were to write an article like this, I would add two books to the list. First, I would mention how Where The Wild Things Are taught me that being king of whatever you’re doing isn’t what life is about:

And Max the king of all the wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all. Then all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat so he gave up being king of where the wild things are.

And then I’d talk about Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, and how it probably contains some of the best advice on life and business that you’ll ever read:

And when things start to happen, don’t worry. Don’t stew. Just go right along. You’ll start happening too.

Except when they don’t. Because, sometimes they won’t.

I’m afraid that some times you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ‘cause you’ll play against you.

But since I didn’t write such an article, you should definitely read Maria’s. It’s really great.

Duncan J. Watts in Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?:

The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.

Forget about that Justin — this finally gives us a satisfactory explanation for Bieber fever. Today, the universe makes just a little bit more sense again.