David Pescovitz:
Graphic designer Cynthia Malaran offers simple directions to make a stark, cold iBook a bit more cuddly through the magic of fun fur. Link (Thanks, Imaginary Foundation!)
[Boing Boing]

Here are my notes from "Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess," a conversation between Clay Shirky, Stewart "Flickr" Butterfield, Joshua "Delicious" Schachter and Jimmy "Wikipedia" Wales at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Folksonomy is the process of letting users generate and apply their own tags to shared items (such as blog-posts, encyclopedia entries, photos, links, lists or interests, or what have you) and then discovering which tegs users share with one another. Unlike previous ventures into this field, the tags aren't "controlled" -- any user can invent one and any user can apply them to anything, and yet it all works.

Click here for full transcript.

[via Boing Boing

How many times have you wanted to just transfer music directly from one iPod to another?

Modgods has described a simple way to do it with minimum software and hardware required. They even named it: PodShanking. Their answer requires patience (the transfer happens by playing the song in real time), but it works.

Here's the time-killer for the day:Montage-a-google
[via Pogue's Posts]

I participate in a forum with a few friends where we discover new music together. A couple of weeks ago, someone posted about a song by Kelly Clarkson, former American Idol winner. I was busy so I didn't pay it much mind...and also, American Idol!??...how good could the song really be?

But then over the next two weeks, these supposed indie rock fiends kept talking about this pop song, how it was the best thing ever, and I was just like, wtf? and all annoyed with them for being dumb. News broke that Ted Leo had covered the song at a recent show and you can imagine the excitement that generated in indie land. When a copy of the covered song was produced, I finally caved and listened to both versions of the song. After two listens of each, I still didn't get it. What the hell is wrong with my friends?

This morning as I stumbled out of bed and into the shower, I'm humming a little tune. Couldn't figure out exactly what it was though...I was still shaking the sleep from my body and wasn't really paying attention. Still humming. Hmmm, catchy. Then. About halfway through my shower, in my best Ted Leo-esque falsetto:

"Since u been gone..."

Followed quickly by, in a very loud voice:

"Goddammit! That song!"

The neighbors probably think I'm crazy, and they're right...my stupid brain is nuts for this song. I'm not saying Since U Been Gone is good, but it certainly is catchy and I can't help but like the damn thing. Merlin, Matt, Lia, Anil, and Kathryn, I owe each of you a sock in the face for introducing me to this maddeningly infectious crap. A pox on your iPods! Now if you'll excuse me, I need to concentrate on mustering up the necessary courage to unclick the "repeat one song" button on iTunes.

As you may have noticed by reading the site in the past year, I've been reading and thinking a lot about companies...how they succeed, why they fail, how to approach them from a holistic sense so they make sense on a human scale and not just from a business perspective, that sort of thing. In deciding to start my own little company of one, here are a few things I've run across that have influenced how I'm approaching it.

Coudal Partners is a design studio based in Chicago. Like many blogs (their site is a little more than a blog, but we won't get into that now), their site features advertising in the form of text ads in the top left corner of the page. But they only accept advertising from companies whose products they have used: "sell us something then we'll sell you an ad." I love this because it ties advertising back into its word-of-mouth origins, makes it more human, personal, and believable. (More on advertising stuff in a few days.)

I don't have many heroes, but Craig Newmark is definitely one of them. He's had offers to sell craigslist for millions of dollars, many offers from VCs, he could charge for all listings on the site, or he could fill the site with advertising, but this is what he wants out of craigslist (via Wired): "get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world". The many articles I've read about Craig have really reinforced for me that you need to let your values drive business decisions and not the other way around.

I've mentioned this a few times on the site before, but Ludicorp, the makers of Flickr, has the one of the best quotes about business I've ever read on their about page. It's an excerpt from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus:

Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

The popularity of Flickr has put Ludicorp in a tight spot and it seems like they'll need to get big somehow in order to keep up with it (rumor is they've been purchased by Yahoo!). It's a reminder that you may succeed beyond your wildest dreams and you need to be ready for it to happen. Whatever their path is, I hope they can keep true to the values that have guided the company thus far.

When Google decided to pursue their IPO, the filing included an "owner's manual" written by Larry Page, one of Google's two founders. Google is aiming high -- focusing on the long term, trying not to be evil, taking on risk, not giving too much control of the company over to shareholders -- and it will be interesting to see how they fare over the long term. Google's gotten a lot of shit for aiming so high, especially about the "don't be evil" stuff, just like the NY Times gets criticized for attempting to produce objective journalism, but I think that's unfair. I'll choose a company with ideals they're trying to live up to over a business that's aiming for the status quo any day of the week.

TextDrive, a hosting company, eschewed venture capital and went right to their users and asked them to pay their startup costs (in exchange for lifetime hosting). They raised $40,000 in 75 hours from the VC200. That's what's called "creative thinking".

Dave Eggers gets a lot of crap, but I like the way he's trying to run McSweeney's:

But the way that McSweeney's is run is, "Can there be a way that what they call mid-list authors, people who don't sell in the Danielle Steel category, can still have an audience and still make a living?" McSweeney's has very little overhead, to the degree that we can sell 6,000 copies of somebody's book, and he can still get a decent amount of money, because he's getting more per book because of the low overhead. That's still our goal. I was just sort of going along with the same business model, like, "If we sell 50,000 copies, then everyone will do fine, and life will stay quiet."

Not trying to take over the world, just doing something in balance with the lives of everyone concerned.

David Bull is an artist who makes fantastic woodblock prints. He doesn't number his prints, doesn't sell through collectors, doesn't even offer individual prints, and yet he's been making a living from his art for more than 16 years. He sells subscriptions of his prints through his site and here's a bit of his philosophy on that:

I like making prints, and am not afraid of the physical work of printing them. Unlike many artists, who prefer to keep their edition sizes small (to save work, or to keep things 'exclusive') and who must thus charge high prices for their prints, I prefer to make more of them and keep the cost to each collector as low as possible.

There are lots more people other there doing wonderful things with their business lives (37signals, the independent Mac developers like Ranchero, Delicious Monster, and Panic, etc.) but that's enough for now.