I've been watching the steady decline of journalism since the Internet began replacing print and television as the main provider of news, with a seething disgust.
Today's CNN top story put me over the edge.
Here's the title and article summary for those of you without images in their feed readers:
6-year-olds forced into sex for food, group finds
A poor Haitian girl could get $2.80 and some chocolate, she told a European charity. All she had to do was perform a sex act on a humanitarian worker. She refused. Her impoverished friends did not. Her story is one of many in a report titled "No One To Turn To" -- which chronicles allegations of charity and U.N. workers abusing children.
But if you read the actual article you see not a story about a 6-year-old being raped (it's a mere footnote in the article), but the following:
In the report, "No One To Turn To" a 15-year-old girl from Haiti told researchers: "My friends and I were walking by the National Palace one evening when we encountered a couple of humanitarian men. The men called us over and showed us their penises.
"They offered us 100 Haitian gourdes ($2.80) and some chocolate if we would suck them. I said, 'No,' but some of the girls did it and got the money."
This bait-and-switch is so misrepresentative as to be grotesque. The story changes from "Humanitarian workers pay teenagers for sex" to the more sensationalist "6-year-olds forced into sex for food."
The biggest problem with news being disseminated online is that there is no geographic isolation (as is the case with both print and tv), which means that every local news network is in competition with every other news site on the planet. Ratings are driven by attracting as large an audience as possible... and most people care more about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's married life than how many people vanished from a Darfur town this week (hint: all 30,000).
Blue = Angelina Jolie, Red = Darfur.
Newspapers can't help but take notice.
Accurate facts used to be the hallmark of professionalism in newspapers. Editors would strive for it. Now even the most respected newspapers on the planet are feeling the creep of ratings greed and with it, an end to an era of accurate, informative news.
I'm not the first to make this complaint and I have no connection to the journalism world except for some past memories of running my university newspaper. More important people than I have used larger podiums to disseminate the same message (and gotten flak for it).
I understand newspapers are a business to run and profits are driven by advertising. I also understand that newspapers are the fourth estate, keeping world governments in check through the power of disseminating information. With every sensationalist article they run, every inaccurate headline, every news story that breaks the papers' traditional format because of a previous story's high Digg count: they are relinquishing that power in the name of profit. There has to be a balance.
As maddening as watching reputable brands peddle sensationalism might be, I actually have a bigger worry: Newspapers are clearly noticing how much Digg traffic certain articles are receiving; a fact that is certain to play a role in influencing the editorial direction of future stories (or at least their headlines).
I predict a future in which USAToday announces America's next president with the formulaic made-for-Digg headline, "The #1 Most Elected President Ever, in the 2008 Election."
The following are some random tips that I've learned through my experience founding and working at several startups. Take the opportunity to learn from other people's mistakes -- the best advice is that which is learned on someone else's time!
I. Relax
Image courtesy of audi_insperation
Work time should end at a certain point during the day. Period. Just because you are focused and energized by a specific task doesn't mean that you should continue to work on it until you conk out on your keyboard at 4 a.m.. The rest of your productive week will be completely ruined. Instead, stopping work on a project you are really into will give you a jump start on your work the following morning, and your energy will hopefully last through the day. Finally, turn off your cellphone / blackberry and switch gears: kick back to spend some time with family, read a book or watch (something intelligent on) TV.
Now, obviously, this doesn't apply to deadline days. If you have a project due the following day, you should never blow it. But, as general rules to live by, budget your work and plan ahead so you don't work into the late hours of the night, and always set aside time for non-work related activities.
Your work hours will be more productive if you are well-rested and well-rounded.
[Note: If my wife sees this tip, she will, of course smirk, because this is the one tip I break repeatedly, every single night (including right now).]
The full list after the jump...
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Shuttling between tech meetups, VC meetings and conferences, I realized that there are so many types of entrepreneurs that it would be a mistake to group them all under one general umbrella. So I tried to correct that horrible wrong with this list of all entrepreneur types from A-Z.
Classic example of a fantrepreneur photo courtesy of Phil Hawksworth
ALL ENTREPRENEURS FROM A - Z
Againtrepreneur
Just sold their 5th company in 3 years.
Bumtrepreneur
They litter the streets of San Francisco, sleeping in doorways and begging for spare change. They individually make more money in a month than most Web2.0 companies.
Can'trepreneur
5 failed startups and it's probably worth revisiting that 9-5 deskjob.
Don-trepreneur
The Godfather of investors for Entrepreneurs. You probably want to check your termsheets carefully for the clause on broken kneecaps.
Entrepreneur
General class that accurately describes only 5% of the groups on this page.
Fantrepreneur
HOLY CRAP KEVIN ROSE JUST WALKED INTO THE ROOM HAI KEVIN I LOVE DIGG CAN YOU GIVE ME TIPZ FOR MY STARTUP PLEAZE?
G-Z available after the jump...
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There is so much to learn from the implementations of design concepts in games that can be applied to non-gaming.
Almost everyone working on Aviary is an obsessive gamer. Besides for offering us a convenient (and violent) way to deflate, we also find a lot of inspiration in the underlying design. That's how I justify it to my wife, anyway.
Valve Software
Two games we are currently obsessed with are Team Fortress 2 and Portal, both created by Valve Software (most famous for its Half-Life series).
Valve's success as a software company stems from their philosophy of not compromising their story narrative for the sake of interactive gaming elements. Ironically enough, by forcing their game developers to work within more difficult parameters, they end up building better interactive elements as well!
Robin Walker, Valve employee and creator of Team Fortress 2 puts it best in the in-game commentary:
Holding ourselves to strong design principals can often force us to come up with better solutions than taking the easy route.
Lesson Learned: Limitations generate creative solutions.
Team Fortress 2
Team Fortress 2 is a game where users can choose between becoming one of nine different characters, each with unique abilities and limitations. Players will adopt different characters so that their team will be balanced properly. Having 9 different types of players running around on a field is plenty confusing. Teammates would have a hard time identifying and working with each other and finding certain characters they need (for example, a medic to recharge their health). That's not a problem in TF2 though, because Valve took the novel approach of designing the characters to be physical caricatures of their abilities, instantly recognizable by their silhouettes. Confusion is completely minimized.
Andrea Wicklund, another Valve employee, says:
The more your art direction can use well-understood visual representations the less work you have to do to explain you game elements.
Lesson Learned: Good design lies in the shapes.
How to apply it: Make sure your applications interactive elements (i.e. button icons) are all identifiable by their shapes alone. Exaggerated shapes are easier for people to identify and understand. Here's a great reference point.
Portal
Portal is a first-person shooter game where users are given an obstacle course and a single weapon: a gun that shoots portals. A user can open two portals simultaneously, and walking through one makes the user exit the other. The brilliance of Portal is in understanding that physics continues to operate normally in the background and must be used in helping navigate the obstacle course. For example, shoot one portal in the ceiling above you and one portal in the floor below you and you will begin to fall straight down between the portals (ad infinitum), increasing speed as you hurtle towards terminal velocity... pretty useful if you are trying to generate speed to hurtle yourself to a previously unreachable platform! 
What's amazing about Portal is that there are no true enemies or weapons in this first person shooter. It's nothing more than a mental challenge that defies you to solve puzzles by throwing away everything that feels right to you about physical interaction with the world. It is a completely new form of interaction with a previously existing genre of gaming.
Lesson Learned: Innovation can be found in minor refactoring.
In layman's terms: You don't need to reinvent the wheel to produce something completely novel.
If something is on the Internet, is it free? Ask many people and they would assume that it is.
Until technology makes it just as easy to track artists' rights, royalties and attributions (RRA), as it is for a mashup artist to Google and save, a lot more DMCA fights are going to be appearing on the news.
Image courtesy of Tc7
Recently, photographer Lane Hartwell noticed that one of her images was used in a video by the Richter Scales that went viral on YouTube. Lane was upset that it was being distributed without her permission, so she had her lawyer file a DMCA request to have the video taken down.
Until an easier way for artists to track their content, more conflicts like this are going to spring up. Here at Aviary, we are trying to provide exactly this type of capability to all kinds of artists. Whether you are a photographer or a videographer you should be able to work together, easily tracking RRA forever.
If it's On the Internet, it's Free!
The problem lies in the process itself. It is currently much easier to download images than it is to attribute and get permission to use them. Most people will retrieve content via a simple web search, click and Save, not thinking twice about whether the owner reserves any rights in how it's reused. They assume if it is online, it's free to use.
Sure, you can manually credit your sources in the notes of your Youtube videos or Flickr images , but that takes too much time and effort... especially if you are only producing a 5 minute video. People are inherently lazy and unless they fully understand and care about copyright they wont make the extra effort.
Creative Commons is Not Enough
Creative Commons is doing a great job addressing part of this problem by making it easier for artists to license out their work, but it's not enough on its own. What if a photographer decides to change their license once a mashup artist already (legally) used it? In retrospect it looks like the mashup artist used the work illegally!
What if I change my mind? Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable... You can stop distributing your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish; but this will not withdraw any copies of your work that already exist under a Creative Commons license from circulation...
That's great in theory. But in practice it's a different story. There is no visible permanence to a revocable license. For example, on Flickr, Creative Commons licenses are not permanent. A photographer can change his or her license at any time on Flickr does not keep track of the changes. If you already used their image you could get in trouble unless you took a snapshots of the license at the time you used the image.
That's really asking people to do a lot of work and also assumes that people would have the foresight to realize that the license is publicly revocable. Most people simply won't think about that possibility and there will eventually be a conflict.
The Solution is Relying on Technology
I propose that we develop a system that inherently tracks where files come from and stores that information directly in the file itself. We need to store meta data about the file's origins, along with the actual file itself.
An example of this in action would be Photoshop tracking where new files are coming from as you do a web search and paste in the copy data. The final jpg could contain a layer of metadata from which any future user could see where elements of it originated from, be it web urls or other forms of contact information. The technology would also need to warn users (but not prevent them), when they are using a file in a way that goes against what's been instructed by the original owners.
We are actually trying to build a system that does exactly that.
One of Aviary's main focuses has been to make sure that all RRAs are automatically tracked throughout the creative process using our suite of tools. We deal with copyright issues all the time at Worth1000.com, (a site that hosts "photoshopped" images) so we are pretty sensitive to finding the balance between ownership rights and encouraging creativity through remixing. While it is important to educate the masses to care about the content rights of others, there's no way to educate enough people to make self-government effective. An infrastructure for tracking creative content will be very helpful in protecting rights where education can't. It also needs to be easy as pie.
Aviary will help artists track their content forever by letting our servers do all the grunt work, so they don't have to worry about it and others can remix work legally. Everyone wins.
Hi! My name is Meowza and I love cartoons.
Almost everything I've learned and love about design stems from my background in drawing comics and cartoons. Trying to establish character, mood, and still convey my message all within the limited space of a comic panel (and with a split second of a reader's attention span to do so) is a daunting challenge.
So as a cartoonist, you tend to find yourself resorting to thinking in basic shapes a lot. I know that if I design a character that's instantly recognizable as a silhouette, that character will work once we go in and add the facial features, attire, etc... Everything within this basic skeleton are accessories, but the base is paramount.
For example, I don't need to tell you who any these characters are for you to recognize them.
Our eyes strip down everything we see into its most basic elements on a daily basis without even thinking about it. Mickey Mouse isn't a mouse who wears red shorts. Our mind remembers him as a circle with two smaller circles on top. Just to visualize, we can dress him up in any colors or attire we desire and nobody would ever mistake him for anyone else.
But if we were to alter the base of his foundation even slightly...
Like magic, he is no longer Mickey Mouse.
Human beings are extremely lazy creatures when it comes to visual association. We have difficulty consciously remembering details and ultimately recollect most of our visuals through basic shapes.
To put this theory to the test, look at the following images and ask yourself a couple questions:
a) What's wrong with Yosemite Sam?
b) To which popular cartoon character does this eye belong to?
Answers:
a) I've changed the color of Sam's handkerchief from the usual yellow to green.
b) Woody Woodpecker.
Okay, some of you may have gotten the first one and a few may have even gotten both. But out of context and had I not asked, you probably wouldn't have given either images a passing glance even if we've all seen these characters a million times before.
So, what has all this got to do with anything?
Well, the very same principles in cartoons relates directly to the world of design. Any good design, like cartoons, reduced to its most basic framework will remain a good design. A prospective customer is fickle. They are not going to stick around to look at the great little flower incorporated into the background of an advertisement if they're not immediately hooked. And even if they do, chances are they may not remember it tomorrow. They care as much about minute details labored over in a design as you care about the color of Yosemite Sam's handkerchief.
Although a solid foundation can be enhanced with flashy details, flashy details cannot save a poorly designed foundation. Spending that extra time in the initial compositional stages of a design is of utmost importance. It's the "Mickey Mouse ears" from which all other elements of a design will work off of.
So a lot of those very same principles mentioned above, we tried incorporating into the Aviary branding and design.
We know that if our fine feathered friends you see here work in their most basic form, they'll still read once we add the details:
As a comparison, would the toucan have worked had he looked like this?
Why not? We used the exact same colors and general idea of the other toucan. But one look at his silhouette gives us the answer. It just does not read.
So, the next time you come across a great logo or a beautiful design, ask yourself what made that design appealing to you. Chances are it's not the beautiful flower in the background or your love of a particular color they used. Ask yourself how the design read compositionally. You just might find your answer there.
Now, I'm sure there are plenty of designs and logos out there that break this general "rule." Funny enough, I just can't recall any of them off the top of my head.
Well, that's my belief anyways. Or maybe I just wanted to draw Mickey Mouse today.
Hi! My name is Iz and I'm a technoholic. I love reading about technology, tinkering with hardware and most of all - I love buying gadgets. Unfortunately (or fortunately - depending on whether or not I have to clothe and feed you) I'm also extremely... er... let's call it frugal. It's not that I'm flat out cheap, it's just that I know the difference between want and need. I want a big-screen, surround-sound home theater system that can be controlled by an iPod Touch. However, I realize that all I need is a dedicated 20Mbps symmetrical fiber optic line to my house and a computer to access it on. See? Its simple!
However, the line between want and need can get blurred when an item in my want column suddenly goes on sale. For example, the iPod Touch that I want is currently out of my range at $300. If for some reason, Apple would decide to slash prices on the coolest MP3 player in history and suddenly make it $200, that want becomes an Itch. Make it $150 and - boom - now I need it!
At this point you may be wondering, "OK, you like toys but are too cheap to pay for them. So?" Well, building software comes down to a lot of the same choices and thought processes as buying crap. The touch-screen, refrigerator mounted, tablet PC becomes a feature that you may or may not implement. On the one hand - it's cool and some of your users may love it. On the other hand, many of your users won't care and implementing this cool feature may push your release date back a few weeks.
Sometimes, we have the real world equivalent of a sale: The situation changes making it more practical and inexpensive to implement a wanted feature. Scenarios include user feedback, competition or a technology breakthrough... anything that lowers the cost to (or raises the price of not) adding the feature. Suddenly, the want becomes a need and will make it into the next release.
The fun part - at least for the coders, is the actual design and implementation of the feature. Careful consideration of methodologies employed in producing the feature comes into play and this is where the programmers are supposed to shine. A good programmer keeps a need from sliding back into the want column, by making the most functionality using the least amount of resources possible.
So the next time you wonder why every household doesn't have a floor-washing robot, your favorite mp3 player doesn't have an FM radio or why your online word processor can't handle outlines, think about whether those products or features are actually needs or merely wants and you can understand why they were included or left out. At the very least, it will help you crystallize an explanation to your spouse as to why you need a PS3.
There is a prevailing attitude amongst creators that it is better to release a prototype and rebuild it the right way if it becomes popular then building it the right way from scratch.
That's foolish, but it's also largely unavoidable, since you can never really know what problems exist with your prototype until their has been mass adoption of it. The Catch 22 is that if your prototype does get properly adopted, it's already too late to rebuild it from scratch.
There's a line at your door and they want immediate attention.
People don't wait around for you to change. Copycats spring up. Investors see revenue potential, customers attention spans are short. Your direction becomes one of patching the prototype and playing catch up with your scale requirements. Redesigning is impossible.
Initial design flaws seem obvious to us in hindsight, but they rarely are at the beginning. People don't think of a prototype as a prototype until they have to patch a new bug.
Take the Y2K bug: Why wouldn't computer programmers have thought about dates after the year 2000 when designing the first computer languages? It wasn't even that far off!
The truth is that most creators simply don't expect wide adoption and it is a lot easier to build a product without worrying about scalability. That's unfortunate, but it doesn't just apply to programmers writing applications.
There are so many real world examples of hacking being the only way to address a design flaw because mass adoption prevents re-addressing the underlying issue.
New Orleans
Why would original developers choose to build a city on lower ground than sea-level in an area prone to hurricanes? Why not import more land to raise the city above sea level?
The answer is that they probably didn't intend to build a city as big as it became and levies seemed a more realistic, economical solution in dealing with a smaller city. They never considered problems of scaling, because it's impossible to predict population growth.
A city grows around a current need (i.e. access to maritime trade) and remains standing once that need fades away. Then it is up to the new residents to continue developing on an infrastructure that was never intended to support continuous growth.
The design flaw becomes an inherent, unchangeable limitation based on mass adoption. You can't rebuild or move the city itself once it becomes obvious that it simply can't scale.
So New Orleans planners hacked their inherent design flaw by building a levy system instead of raising the city up higher in the first place. Woops.
English on the Internet
English has become the global language of the Internet.
Why? Because English-speaking people invented the prototype and didn't consider the global potential for it.
Because of this lack of foresight we are stuck with browsers that do not readily accept foreign language characters for URLs. Imagine how that limits countries where English isn't a first language. Take a look at the URLs for Wikipedia articles in non-English languages. Talk about non-intuitive usability!
And how wonderful for Google and other search engines that are the Hack to this terrible design flaw.
QWERTY Keyboards
The common layout of keyboards that almost all computers come with, known as QWERTY, causes problems of inefficiency and fatigue as people type. A more ideal layout is known as the Dvorak layout. It places keys in positions to improve efficiency in typing to almost double the current speed, but it's hardly been adopted at all.
So why did we even use a QWERTY layout in the first place? Because the concept of typing originated on a now extinct need (manual typewriters), and mass adoption of that character set has persisted a limitation.
The QWERTY layout was designed so that successive keystrokes would slow down typing and alternate between sides of the keyboard so as to avoid jams in typewriters. 
And now we're stuck with a mass adoption of a way of doing things that can't be redesigned. The Dvorak keyboard is a redesign instead of a hack and therefore it will never be adopted by the masses.
Others
Can you point out other real world design flaws where mass adoption limits us to hacking instead of redesigning?
I'd love to hear them.
One of the first steps in planning out development of your product is establishing your target audience.
In every industry there is a steep slope that represents market share and an important strategy decision has to be at which point on the slope do you enter? 
Target too high and you're catering an to important niche user base, but won't hit the broader consumer base for a while. Too low and gravity will keep you from ever making it higher up the slope.
In picking where to enter the market, most businesses base their decision on immediate return. It comes down to which portion of the market will give them the largest base for the lowest cost. Therefore most companies will take the bottom-up approach, targeting the bunny slopes first with a product that has broad consumer reach and lower costs to develop, before moving on to (or possibly choosing to pass up on) a more targeted and expensive market.
I think that can be short-sighted.
With Aviary we are taking the more unconventional top-down approach: Targeting a niche of semi-professionals with our tools first and then streamlining versions of our tools down for the masses, once advanced users are happy with them.
Why? It boils down to long-term branding effects and better software design. When your brand takes on elite connotations because it caters to the elite it becomes desirable to the masses. Sure, out of the gate you become the underdog as far as overall market share goes, but as time goes on and you begin to diversify you are left with an extremely strong brand, one that can be easily adapted for markets with broader, less-targeted ranges because of the branding strength and inherent software power. It's a matter of removing and simplifying features, not hacking onto a design that is not intended to be scalable.
The added benefit to a top-down approach is that you have nowhere to go revenue-wise but up, since your market base gets larger as you go further down the slope. Your market share only broadens as your products target range does.
The flip side is that companies that took the bottoms-up approach to grab as much overall market-share as possible often have nowhere to go but down. Professionals are bored by bunny slopes.
Case in point, recent news that Apple is finally worth more than IBM.
It's pretty tiring running a small web business - you're forced to constantly change your identity and mode of thinking.
- Mocking up a presentation? Enter Designer mode.
- Crunching figures on a spreadsheet? Enter Accountant mode.
- Tweaking your code base? Enter Programmer mode.
It's not the physical adoption of an identity that is exhausting. When I'm in a certain role, I am in a zone, focused on my specific task and nothing can distract me. But ask me to switch identities and my brain goes into shut down mode and I want nothing more than to procrastinate, anything but to don a new identity. The act of switching identities is simply exhausting.
I imagine that it's very much the dilemma Bruce Wayne faces every time he changes into Batman.
Actually being just Batman? Or even billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne? That's simply kick-ass. It's the changing process that's time consuming.
Think of the amount of work involved in slipping into your private study, finding the right book to trigger the secret entrance to the Bat Cave, removing your tuxedo, donning 100 pounds of protective gear and armor, ripping nylon tights on over your hairy legs, remembering to stop hitting on the ladies, remembering to start hitting on Robin...
It's not like Bruce Wayne can just slide down a pole and instantly turn into Batman, right?
On second thought... strike that.
So how does a small business operator cope? I think the best thing you can do is to force yourself into a majority role-a-day mode. Don't try to change your identity too many times in one day, unless you absolutely have to. If you designate specific days for specific tasks instead of chunking your day into smaller pieces spent on multi-tasking, you begin to spend more time in the zone and less in mental transitioning.
Friday for me is the day I pay my bills and do accounting; Weekends are for thought process and planning; Monday's are for networking follow-up; Tuesdays and Thursdays are wild cards, usually used for programming, UI testing or design.
And Wednesdays? On Wednesdays it's business time.
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