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Clutter!

I'd had this idea a few months ago, but the experience of moving into a newly renovated house -- and reading about the relaunch of Wallpaper in the NY Times -- reminded me of it again. Someone needs to produce a home design/architecture magazine called Clutter. Every single "shelter" magazine on the market, as far as I've seen, shows pictures of homes that have been completely stripped of clutter: stacks of old bills, newspapers, strollers, magazines, Amazon boxes you've haven't opened yet, vases that are too big for the cabinets, infant car seats, and so on. These are the things that dominate any home that's actually being lived in, but you never see any sign of them in the design magazines.

I say this not because I want shelter magazines to be more realistic for reality's sake, but because some designs are better than others at dealing with clutter. When you pretend that clutter doesn't exist, you end up with designs that are lousy at managing it, which leaves you with cluttered spaces that look fantastic on day one, and progressively worse after that. In our new house, we carved out a little space on the garden floor entrance (there's a rental unit on the rest of that floor) that lets us store all the hideous and bulky -- but unavoidable -- baby gear that follows us wherever we go: strollers and car seats and prams, etc. It's a great clutter container, and it lets the much more elegant parlor floor entrance be free of all that junk. At the same time, we built a lovely marble circular extension of the kitchen counters that's just off the parlor floor entrance; it's gorgeous, but it turns out to be a clutter magnet: it begs out to have groceries and mail and yesterday's papers deposited on it.

So what do we think? If there's room for Dwell and Nest and Wallpaper, why not Clutter?

My shuttle question answered, four months later

To those of you who dismissed my speculations about a potential rescue strategy for the Columbia shuttle earlier this year: think again! Here's this from the NY Times:

If NASA had known immediately that the Columbia was damaged on liftoff, it might have sent the shuttle Atlantis on a rescue mission, the chairman of the board investigating the accident said today. But he would not characterize the chance of success.

At the time of the Columbia's 16-day mission, which ended with its breakup on re-entry on Feb. 1, the Atlantis was in the Vehicle Assembly Building near the launching pad at the Kennedy Space Center. Workers were mating the solid rocket boosters for the Atlantis's next mission to the external tank but had not attached the orbiter.

By skipping preflight checks and accelerating various processes, NASA could have launched the Atlantis and reached the Columbia before the seven astronauts suffocated, said Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., chairman of the investigation board.

Can you imagine what kind of media event that would have been? An interstellar (or would it be interlunar?) rescue mission, with a ticking clock and enough time for the networks to assemble a full coverage team? It would have made Apollo 13 look like, well, like Apollo 10.

Fun Things To Do With Words

My new Discover column is online -- this one is on one of my favorite geek topics: statistical analysis of text patterns. I know, it sounds thrilling, but check it out. I start by talking about how software has been developed to replace (or augment) human graders for evaluating standardized test essays. Then I talk about Jon Kleinberg's wonderful "word burstiness" tool, including a pretty neat revelation about the history of Presidential state of the union addresses:

Researcher Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University tapped into this skill when he created a tool that analyzes "word burstiness." It is similar to latent semantic analysis in that it detects textual patterns, but it is designed to look specifically at semantic changes chronologically. The software sees a document archive as a narrative?at each point in the story, certain words will suddenly become popular as other words lose favor. Borrowing language from the study of computer-network traffic, Kleinberg calls these words "bursty." For months or years they lie dormant, then suddenly burst into the common vocabulary...

But because the software "reads" text in such an unusual way, the tool also lets us see new attributes in documents that we already know something about. Kleinberg's most intriguing application is an analysis of the State of the Union addresses since 1790. Reading through the list of bursty words from past addresses is like browsing the pages of a history book designed for students with attention deficit disorder. Mostly, it is a parade of obvious word bursts: During the early 1860s, slaves, slavery, and emancipation jump onto the national stage; during the 1930s, depression, recovery, and banks.

Just when you think the software is demonstrating its flair for the obvious, however, you get to the 1980s. Suddenly, the bursty words shift from historical events to more homespun effects: I've, there's, we're. An observer can literally see Ronald Reagan reinvent the American political vernacular in those contractions, transforming the State of the Union from a formal address into a fireside chat, up close and personal. There's no trace of "fourscore and twenty years" or "ask not" in this language, just a more television-friendly intimacy.

Is this news? We knew that Reagan brought a more popular style to the presidency, but we didn't necessarily know the syntactic tools he used. As listeners, we intuitively grasp that there's a world of difference between we shall and we'll ?one stiff, the other folksy?but we don't recognize what linguistic mechanism made the shift happen. Seen through the lens of Kleinberg's software, the mechanism pops out immediately, like a red flag waving among the dull grays of presidential oratory. The computer still doesn't know what Reagan is saying, but it helps us see something about those speeches we might have missed...

Blog Space

Rem Koolhaas and his team were kind enough to invite me to contribute a short piece on blogs to their Wired special issue on the new "space." Most of the ideas will be familiar to readers of this (and other) blogs: the general focus of the essay is the shift in the organization of the web from pages to personalities. Here's a taste:

We've lived so long under the notion of the Web as a space of connected documents, it seems almost unthinkable that it could be organized any other way. But it could just as easily be assembled around a different axis: not pages but minds.

The explosive growth of blogging is creating the opportunity to do just that. Hundreds of thousands of individuals now maintain their own weblogs, updating them regularly with links, commentary, and personal anecdotes. There are some wonderful group weblogs, to be sure, but the general principle of blogspace is one per person. Following a well-maintained, up-to-date personal blog is - short of shacking up with someone - the most efficient method yet invented to keep track of what's going on in another person's head over extended periods: what they're working on, linking to, obsessing about, listening to, reading. On a day-to-day basis, I am more intimately aware of the latest happenings in the world of my 10 favorite bloggers than I am of what's going on with my closest friends. And of those 10 bloggers, I've met only two or three in person. As one of them, Rael Dornfest, likes to say: "Following someone's blog is like doing a TiVo season pass for a person."

The 80s Ate My iPod!

So here's a weird one. Last night, I noticed that, in addition to its normal roster of artists, my iPod now contains two or three songs from Depeche Mode and Duran Duran, only one of which I even vaguely recognize ("Girls On Film," if you must know.) I have no idea how these tracks got onto my iPod. I realize I just posted about my newfound habit of buying crazy songs from the eighties on the iTunes store, but I'm pretty sure that I'm not buying crazy songs in my sleep -- and there's no record of anything by Duran Duran or Depeche Mode in my entire music collection. (I even searched my hard drive and no mention of Duran Duran anywhere -- save all those soul-revealing fan letters to Simon LeBon, of course.) It's definitely my iPod, and it's been in my possession of late. Where did these songs come from? I'm worried that this is some kind of creeping virus, and I'll wake up tomorrow and find the entire iPod library replaced with old Bannanarama and Thompson Twins songs. Any clues would be greatly appreciated....

A Tale Of Two Press Releases

I know that one still has a market cap of $6B while the other is $275B, but for what it's worth, this is the difference between Apple's and Microsoft's respective skills at media relations. Apple somehow secretly assembles a groundbreaking music service over the past year that 1) manages to sell a million songs the week it is announced, and 2) generates literally hundreds of rave reviews worldwide, despite the fact that it's only available for US Mac users. Meanwhile, Microsoft announces the iLoo -- a toilet/web-browsing solution -- then denounces it as a big hoax, then admits that it wasn't a hoax at all.

By the way, as you might imagine, I've been spending a lot of time enjoying the iTunes store since its launch. One thing that I've noticed that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is that the combination of the limited, big-label catalog, the individual track purchasing, and the one-click interface makes the whole service ideally suited for buying crazy songs that you last listened to in 8th grade and that you really only want to listen to one more time -- but for 99 cents, what the hell...

In other words, my wife keeps walking into the study and saying things like, "Um, why are you listening to Rush's "Tom Sawyer"? Then I make her sit down and listen to Neil Peart's epic drum fills, and she understands.

Thank you, Apple.

Power Law Wagering

One of the annoying things about being so swamped with the book and the move is that I've been completely unable to follow the burgeoning discussion about social software, which has heated up quite a bit in the last few months. I'm trying to tune in a little more, as my life normalizes again, and I thought that the Ross Mayfield/Clay Shirky cage match made for some very interesting reading, as does that entire Many-to-Many group blog (also featuring such luminaries as Liz Lawley, Sébastien Paquet, and Jessica Hammer.)

The Shirky-Mayfield debate revolves around -- you guessed it -- power laws, and the new LinkedIn "professional networking" site. Shirky already sees some embryonic 80/20 distributions emerging, while Mayfield thinks they're just temporary. What I like about this debate is that they've actually made a bet about it; they're using LinkedIn as a kind of lab experiment. If in a few months, the site is organized along a power law distribution, Shirky wins; if it's much more evenly distributed, Mayfield wins.

As I've said here before, I think Clay's work on power laws has been completely essential, but I also suspect that this kind of distribution is not inevitable, and that you can foster different models depending on how you design the software. From Ross's description of it, LinkedIn sounds like precisely such a system, for one primary reason: there's two-way friction built into the linking process. It takes time to link to someone, and it takes time for that someone to approve the link. The A-list people in the network will quickly get overwhelmed with link approval requests as the network grows, which will cause the link requesters to search out new targets, which will create a more even distribution. Think of it in blogroll terms: Dave Winer has 1788 inbound links today, according to Technorati. Do you think he'd have anywhere near that many if he had to individually approve each of them?

So I'm siding with Ross in the wager, but eager to see what happens either way.

The Dust Clears

Things are finally settling down a bit in the new house at last, and I hope a more regular blogging schedule will commence next week. Our kitchen will be done as of tomorrow afternoon, and early next week we should get the remaining boxes out of the living room, which will give us pretty much the run of the whole house. We're lucky to be living so close to Prospect Park, and to have had so much good weather -- our son has basically been living in the park all day while the construction guys are tramping around the house. He's only twenty months, so we're not sure if he's entirely clear whether he's moved to a brownstone or to the 11th Street playground.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with support and interest about the new book. It was almost as exciting to hear everyone's interest as it was to hand it in the first place. As far as the book-blog integration goes, I think I'm going to follow a modified version of Bill Seitz's suggestion: once every few days I'm going to post a key passage from each chapter here, perhaps with a brief introduction, and encourage critiques, rebuttals, free associations, suggested reading, etc. When I get to the next revision, which should be in about three weeks, I'll prepare a PDF version, and email it to those of you who wrote in saying that you'd be interested in reading it. There's also an internal debate going on about title possibilities, which I might share with you all once we're narrowed down to a short list of candidates.

If this goes well, I might just give you all a cut of the royalties. Too bad they haven't figured out an online nano-payment scheme yet. Maybe the next book. :)

Home

Last week I handed in the first draft of my new book. This week my little (but growing) family packed up our Manhattan apartment of the past six years, and set sail for (or tunneled our way to) the fine borough of Brooklyn. After two days of opening boxes, and dodging the construction team that's still finishing up the renovations we're doing, we're more settled than not. This in fact is the first post from my new study, which is a lovely little space on the top floor blessed with the brilliant asset of a door. (Ever since our son was born, and kicked me out of my old study, I'd been working in a corner of a large room that also functioned as kitchen, living room, and loft bedroom.) At long last I can stay up late listening to music and posting regrettable things on the Internet. Good news for the blog, in other words, as well as for me.

We've moved to Park Slope, which is one of the classic New York neighborhoods, for those of you not familiar with it: perfectly preserved tree-lined streets of late 19th-century brownstones descending down from Olmsted's other great NYC park. As it happened, we moved in at the absolute peak time of year here: brilliant crisp 68-degree weather, tulip magnolias and cherry trees and lilacs in full splendor. We took so long getting out of our old place that the movers didn't actually start unloading the van until around 7 PM, precisely as the rest of the neighborhood was strolling home from the subway. It was a really touching scene: everybody out on the street, chatting with each other, stopping by our place to introduce themselves and offer help. I was a little worried that I'd get out here and feel pangs for Manhattan, but I haven't felt anything like that at all, mostly because all the things I love about the Village -- sidewalk-centric life, neighborhood camaraderie, great architecture and restaurants and bars -- are all out here as well, only you get fabulous green outdoor environments, and you can afford much more space indoors.

The new homeowner thing has been pretty funny. Last night I took a bath and set off a torrential leak in the basement that had to be repaired today, and I've been watering my lawn (okay, my 12 by 30 foot plot of grass) like a maniac. All the joys of suburban life, without actually having to move to the suburbs!