How busy have I been? So busy that I finished reading this book in January and haven't found time to review it since?
Yeah, that busy.
Anyway, I'm back from redesign land and am now 100% free to do whatever the hell I want with my time. Sadly that has meant doing my TAXES. Up until now, that is. Taxes are done. Reading will commence and reviews will be written.
Heck yes.
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To continue the trend I started with last night's post, I present:
The problem in many people’s thinking is the belief that there’s always a magic business model lurking around the corner that will circumvent the normal laws of capitalism just because the internet’s involved. There isn’t. Reducing marginal costs certainly opens up a few doors to businesses, but it doesn’t mean that any product can suddenly be profitably supported by advertising alone.
"there’s always a magic business model lurking around the corner" describes the attitude of a lot of folks these days. I guess they deserve points for optimism, but when there are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake and thousands of people's jobs, optimism should cede some control to reality-based worldviews.
I read this.
Which lead me to this series of tweets:
I then read this quote in the latest issue of The Economist:
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It's not easy to do this stuff right.
Actually, I already knew that, but these two events definitely give me higher profile (and in the case of Ma.gnolia, more horrifying) anecdotes to share when I stare incredulously at someone who's just proposed, with a dismissive wave of their hand (indicating it'll be easy), adding in some feature or running fast and loose with site or feature development on a project. While I do play pretty loose with updates and the introduction of features on my own network of sites (really, I've got a network,) often going from concept to production in as long as it takes me to design/code it; when playing with other people's money I tend to be the guy pointing out the scary, often ignored, dark underbelly of the grand scheme. That's because (a) it's part of my job and (b) I've done this often enough to know that there's a possibility for things to blow up at every turn. Will they? Probably not, otherwise I'd be stark, raving mad, but as these two cases have shown, things can go wrong and when they do they can be embarrassing or, in the case of Ma.gnolia, catastrophic.
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Web-only this time, but I'll still be keeping my eye on it.
[edited to add]
except I won't since they don't have an available feed. What is this? Do they still think it's 2001?
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I used to love that magazine back in the day. Hard to believe it's been 7 years since the original shuttered its doors. Whatever it symbolized in a larger sense, I really enjoyed reading it and felt a real connection to the editorial style. Hopefully the new version will continue to speak to me in the same way.
Predict the Future of the Internet with The Industry Standard