me & her

marissamayr: I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an...

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:20:09 -0500

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

Tumblr has built an amazing place to follow the world’s creators. From art to architecture, fashion to food, Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs. With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of thefastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent onsite each month. On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app, and those users do an average of 7 sessions per day. Tumblr’s tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network. The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%.

In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.

As I’ve said before, companies are all about people. Getting to know the Tumblr team has been really amazing. I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them. That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with. His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.

Both Tumblr and Yahoo! share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design — and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day.

http://yahoo.tumblr.com/

“We will operate Tumblr independently.” Subtly different than “Tumblr will operate independently.”

Pete Williams and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Crystal Ball

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:26:00 -0500

Here’s Pete Williams one year ago almost to the day, after the Supreme Court heard arguments on Obamacare:

“I think it’s very doubtful that court is going to find the health care law constitutional,” NBC’s Pete Williams reported after watching the two hours of oral argument before the high court. “I don’t see five votes to find the law constitutional.”

Source.

Here’s Pete Williams today, after the Supreme Court heard arguments on Proposition 8:

After the oral argument, Pete Williams of NBC News reported that it seemed “quite obvious” that the court is not prepared to issue a sweeping ruling declaring that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

Source.

Pete Williams, meet grain of salt.

Pete Williams on Twitter.

Get in and get the fuck out.

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 23:03:56 -0600

Netflix wants to challenge HBO.

Here’s how to do it:

Get in and then get the fuck out.

Hire great writers and great show runners and give them two seasons. Or three. Tell them they’ve got exactly that amount of time to tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Here’s the important part:

Don’t be a dick and tell them they’re out of time at any point before the end and don’t be tempted to let popularity extend a show beyond the end.

Get in, get the fuck out.

Do this, and you’ll have two things:

A constant supply of fresh content.
Customer loyalty.

Number one is obvious. A clean exit strategy leads to more new content. Everything that inevitably goes bad about some of the best programming can be traced back to a lack of an exit strategy. Don’t fall into this trap.

It happened to Lost. It’s happened to virtually every sitcom that has ever aired on network television. Do not let it happen to your content.

Get in, get the fuck out.

Number two should be obvious but apparently isn’t. People aren’t giving new content a chance because at times it seems we’re more invested than the networks are. I’m tired of starting (and sometimes loving) content that won’t last beyond a few episodes, let alone an entire season. Don’t waste our time.

Commit and viewers will flock to your content.

Get in, get the fuck out.

This is your new mantra if you want to out-HBO HBO.

Easy.

"This is Mac vs Windows all over again and everyone knows how that scenario played out."

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 09:46:00 -0600

That’s the punchline of a comment appended to an excellent Elia Freedman article but it could be a thousand other punchlines posted to a thousand other articles.

It’s a sentiment so lazy and so without thought (and so common) that it’s probably best ignored but, well, low hanging fruit and all that:

At what point in the “Mac vs. PC” era did Apple enjoy such a wide base of popularity?
At what point in the “Mac vs. PC” era did Apple have as large a share of the market as they currently have in the mobile era?
At what point in the “Mac vs. PC” era did Apple have a minority share of the market but rake in the vast majority of the industry profits?
At what point in the “Mac vs. PC” era did Apple have over a hundred billion dollars cash on hand?
At what point in the “Mac vs. PC” era was Apple dominating its competitors on a device for device basis? (In other words, when was any one product in Apple’s Mac lineup consistently outselling every competing PC on the market?)
At what point in the “Mac vs. PC” era was Apple so successfully entrenched in multiple product categories?

“Mac vs PC” as an argument against Apple in 2013 is intellectually lazy. To make it, you either have to be a troll, an idiot, or both.

Tech Blogs Drop the Ball: Ignoring Aaron Swartz

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:30:00 -0600

A few days ago, information activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide.

If you follow tech, you probably read about this on sites like Gizmodo, The Verge, or TechCruch.

Way back in 2011, Aaron Swartz was indicted on charges of data theft, and was facing up to 35 years in prison and one million dollars in fines.

You probably read about that on similar sites — way back in 2011.

Now, Aaron Swartz is dead and tech blogs are eager to tie his suicide to an overzealous prosecution. That’s great, except…

…where were the investigations in August of that year? In September? In October? November? December? What about 2012?

That brings us to today.

Aaron Swartz’s case — assuming it was indeed shaping up to be a gross miscarriage (or misappropriation) of justice — was just as outrageous in each of those months. The story was just as compelling.

Except a story that isn’t ever written isn’t a story at all.

Gizmodo in July of 2011:

Former Reddit Employee Charged with Data Theft

Gizmodo in August, September, October, November, and December of 2011 and all of 2012:

“…”

Gizmodo in January of 2013:

Former Reddit Co-Owner and Internet Activist Aaron Swartz Commits Suicide (Updated)

The Void of Losing Someone You Don’t Know—in Memory of Aaron Swartz

Academics Are Tweeting Out PDFs of Journal Articles in Memory of Aaron Swartz

MIT Is Launching an Internal Investigation To Determine Its Possible Role In Aaron Swartz’s Suicide

Anonymous Hacks MIT in Aaron Swartz’s Name

Read/Write in July of 2011:

Internet Activist Aaron Swartz Indicted for Data Theft: Downloading Millions of Academic Articles

Read/Write in August, September, October, November, and December of 2011 and all of 2012:

“…”

Read/Write in January of 2013:

MIT To Launch Internal Investigation Following Death Of Aaron Swartz

The Persecution Of Aaron Swartz

ArsTechnica in July of 2011:

Former Reddit co-owner arrested for excessive JSTOR downloads

ArsTechnica in August, September, October, November, and December of 2011 and all of 2012:

“…”

ArsTechnica in January of 2013:

Swartz supporter dumps 18,592 JSTOR docs on the Pirate Bay

MIT president calls for “thorough analysis” of school’s involvement with Swartz

Anonymous defaces MIT website with memorial for Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz and me, over a loosely intertwined decade

Family blames US attorneys for death of Aaron Swartz

Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz

TechCrunch doesn’t seem to have a useful search feature — I couldn’t find anything from 2011 relating to Aaron Swartz and sorting “by date” inexplicably turns up no results even though sorting “by relevance” turns up plenty — but the results I get do include this insightful article…

…written in January of 2013:

Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

What the fuck happened, here?

My main recollection of the earlier story (the way back in 2011 version) was boorish fact-checking about whether or not Swartz was “actually” a Reddit co-founder or just an early Reddit employee. Truly, hard hitting investigative journalism when you consider that over a year later, bloggers are coming out of the woodwork to describe his genius and the travesty of justice he had been facing (alone, apparently) ever since.

My takeaway is this:

The bread and butter of tech blogging (or just plain ol’ blogging blogging) is reactive journalism, and very rarely (too rarely) does anyone exhibit any form of proactive journalism. That’s hard work. It’s long nights and dead ends and patience and possible failure. It’s trust and reputation, which comes from sources first and follow from readers second.

As often as not, these are values that are seen as anathema to keeping it real as a tech blogger. Too traditional.

And, anyway, who wants to face dead ends when you can just wait for dead kids?

That’s where the real page views are.

Apple's Maps Gambit Pays Off

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:23:00 -0600

Not long ago, Apple was paying Google a license fee to use Google’s mapping data for its iOS mapping solution, even as Google withheld turn-by-turn navigation as a competitive advantage for Android.

If rumors hold true (UPDATE: They’re true) Apple’s decision to cut Google off and release it’s own maps app (which isn’t really bad at all, in my experience) will result in Google releasing a native iOS version of Google Maps with turn-by-turn navigation — and Apple won’t have to pay a license fee for the data.

So, 1) those who usually can’t shut up about competition being great for consumers should stop bitching about Apple’s decision, as iOS users will soon have more choices than ever before and 2) in hindsight, at least, this seems to have been a pretty smart move by Apple.

Two months ago, Forbes declared Google the winner in the maps war and predicted Apple would crawl back to Google to re-license the mapping data. Instead, Google rushed to prep a native App (in fairness, they probably had to buy a lot of buckets for all the ad revenue they’re about to rake in) and Apple gets its own solution as well as a new-and-improved solution from Google — free of charge — and consumers get more choice.

Win, win, win.

A Good Day for Chick-Fil-A

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 08:54:54 -0500

Congratulations to all who turned out to support bigotry and discrimination on 08/01/12: You had your day and you’ll likely have many more.

The chicken sandwiches and waffle fries were delicious, I’m sure.

Your impassioned defense of free speech won the day but then, this was no Islamic mosque, and it wasn’t JC Penney celebrating a lifestyle that you do not agree with. It wasn’t Jeff Bezos pledging his support for same.

Free speech, but only for the right cause.

Keep in mind, though: Meaningful, inevitable change is nothing if not patient, and you’re going to have fewer and fewer victories as the months and years go by. Not much more than ten years ago Modern Family — a wildly popular TV show prominently featuring a proud, loving, adoptive gay family as part of the new normal — may not have been a multiple Emmy award-winning phenomenon. Five years ago the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell seemed unthinkable.

Yet here we are.

Eventually this hateful wave of institutional bigotry will pass us by. Anti-gay sentiment and discrimination will be to the next generation what passive racism is to this one: An embarrassment that is awkwardly laughed off as a generational failing.

A relic of the past.

The worst of you will die off sooner than the best of you, and I can only hope that the best of you live long enough to remember with shame a time when you weren’t as compassionate and understanding as you eventually grew to be. A time when faith in a supposedly loving God dictated the horrible, dismissive way in which you treated the happiness and dreams of your fellow citizens.

A day that you celebrated all that by eating chicken.

We're looking to sell Lendle.

Tue, 01 May 2012 10:34:00 -0500

We launched Lendle just over a year ago. Amazon had just begun to embrace digital lending and we knew we could build a great social experience for millions of Kindle owners.

We love being part of an industry on the move and taking on some of the tough issues surrounding ownership and digital content, but our primary goal has always been to create the best social-lending site we could build.

That has always meant a site that focuses on lending above all other considerations.

LENDLE

At its core, we’re a matchmaking service for Kindle owners. Our Lendlers list the books they’ve purchased, which in turn provides the foundation for our library of lendable content.

When someone requests a book, we make that request available to the Lendle community.

We’ve introduced several new features over the last year, but they’re all designed to drive and improve the core lending experience.

To date:

We have fulfilled over 70,000 loan requests.
Our community has added nearly 50,000 unique (lendable) titles.
All told, Lendle lists 330,000 books available to borrow.

We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve built, and we think Lendle has been an amazing success.

With all that said, we started out as a team of three, and we remain a team of three: We’ve not outsourced the design, the troubleshooting, or the customer service, and we’ve accomplished all of this without accepting a single penny of outside funding.

Lendle has always been a huge undertaking, and as our community has grown, so too have our responsibilities.

On top of all that, two of the three of us have full time jobs outside of running Lendle, and various other “living life” priorities that we would like to focus on.

We don’t want any of that to get in the way of the customer service we expect of ourselves, and we don’t want our additional workload to have an effect on potential new features or the overall Lendle experience, either.

With that in mind, we’re looking toward the idea of selling Lendle to someone (or a group of someones) who is interested in building upon our successes, and taking the community to the next level.

Such a sale would involve:

The Lendle brand, including all associated trademarks.
All associated code.
Day-to-day operations.

Lendle means a lot to us. We’ve put over a year of our lives into growing a great community and implementing new features and we’ve done our best to put a unique spin on social-lending to ensure that Lendle stands out amongst the competition.

Even so, there’s still a vast untapped market for social-lending that is millions of potential Lendlers strong, and we think a nimble and innovative home for Lendle can only lead to great things.

As competition in the ebook space heats up, we expect to see more and more acceptance of digital lending amongst publishers, authors, and retailers. Already, TOR Books — an imprint of publishing powerhouse Macmillan and one of the largest publishers of Science Fiction and Fantasy novels — has announced that it will drop all DRM from its collection in early July 2012.

In addition, Amazon is moving into publishing more and more, and we expect this to increase the lendable content available to Lendlers. Most recently, Amazon Publishing bought the publishing rights to the entire James Bond backlist.

The best is yet to come.

If you’re interested, get in touch!

http://lendle.me/contact/

Site: Lendle

It was only a matter of time: Why Mac users tend to ignore the advice of PC Pundits.

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:07:00 -0500

It’s being reported that over 600,000 Macs are now infected by the Flashback trojan, a “drive by” piece of Malware that doesn’t need administrator privileges or even a password prompt to successfully latch on.

The PC pundits couldn’t be more excited. Finally, they say, the inevitable has happened and smug Mac users are finding out what it’s like to be a PC user.

“It was only a matter of time.”

It’s true. Many of these PC pundits — the Rob Enderles, the Ed Botts, the Paul Thurrotts — have been telling us for years and years that it was only a matter of time before we’d finally see a successful attack, and that we’d come to rue the day that we ignored their advice.

Let’s take a step back.

I’d like to describe what it’s been like to be a Mac user, over the years:

There’s the wilderness years — the time between Steve Jobs’s ouster in the mid 80s and his prodigal return in the late 90s — in which you’d head off to a local retailer fully expecting to be lied to about whatever it was you wanted to buy.

As often as not, you’d find yourself pulling an interested consumer aside to tell them the truth about the Apple products they were interested in, but only after listening to a salesperson feed them misinformation rooted in ignorance/disinterest at best, outright lies at worst.

Most of the Mac hardware you’d find at Best Buy or CompUSA was relegated to a single shelf. Somewhere in the back of the store. Flickering lights. If you were lucky, the devices were in working condition and/or plugged in. If you were even luckier, a “Mac guy” (we’ll call him Soul Patch) was hired to look after the merchandise and answer questions. I think he had his own drinking fountain.

In the end, we learned to answer our own questions. We learned to troubleshoot our own problems. We learned to spot bullshit a mile away.

We bought what we knew we needed because the guy trying to sell us something else probably didn’t know what he was talking about. They rolled their eyes, and we left the store.

According to the PC Pundits, Apple was doomed.

It was only a matter of time.

Miracle of miracles, Steve Jobs returned, the retail situation eventually improved, and at some point we found that we could now go to an official “Apple Store” to ask our questions. Even better, we’d (usually) get good answers, by people who were as interested in the products as we were!

The PC Pundits branded this behavior “smug” and “cult-like” but we pressed on because we’d never seen so many Macs plugged-in and booted-up. No matter, Apple’s retail strategy would fold in on itself. Dell couldn’t make it work. HP couldn’t make it work.

It was the late 90s / early 2000s, and it was only a matter of time.

We bought iPods and we foolishly locked ourselves in to Apple’s ecosystem — according to the PC Pundits — because we were buying music in a format that would never catch on for a device that was destined to fail.

It was only a matter of time.

We bought Macs. Then, our Moms and Dads and Grandmas bought Macs, too. At some point, that guy who thought he’d never buy a Mac bought a Mac. The iPod didn’t fail, despite its destiny, and it led millions and millions of new customers to Apple, eager to see if they might want to try something new.

“Uh, oh,” thought the PC Pundits: “Apple is starting to get popular.” Snicker. ”Popularity breeds scrutiny. So much for security through obscurity.” Then they’d high five and take apart their PC and blow some canned air through it while cataloguing its parts.

We didn’t know what we were missing.

It was the mid 2000s, and it was only a matter of time.

We bought iPhones, and then iPads. We started to see the term “Post PC” applied to mobile computing. Apple was leading the way. This would never happen, according to the PC Pundits. Netbooks would catch on in an big way and the tablet fad would die off as quickly as it caught on.

It was only a matter of time.

We — and millions upon millions of people who were new to Apple’s growing platform — had turned Apple into a massive success. The stock was way up. Apple flirted with being the most valuable company in the world. This could never last, argued the PC Pundits. The new iPhone wasn’t good enough, the latest iPad was barely better than the last iPad. One flop, and that would be that.

It was only a matter of time.

It’s 2012, and Apple has 100 billion dollars of cash on hand. It’s just sitting there! The PC Pundits are demanding to know how Apple will spend that cash. (After all, the party can’t last forever.)

Even worse, the only reason Apple had been able to amass that $100,000,000,000 was because they’d earned it on the backs of Chinese laborers. Not just any Chinese laborers, though: Underage Chinese laborers. The problem was widespread, and Apple had to know about it. Of course they knew. They just didn’t care. Armed guards patrolled the factory gates at Apple’s suppliers. Workers suffered carpal tunnel on a scale so massive that they forever lost the use of their hands! Chairs with no backs!

Oh, there’d be a day of reckoning … if the PC Pundits had anything to say about it. We could trust them, because they were in China while all this was happening, and they’d never lie to us. Don’t worry about the fact that virtually every company in the world had also outsourced its manufacturing to China.

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE CABAL BEHIND THE CURTAIN!

It was only a matter of time.

Finally, in 2012, our undeniable hubris resulted in 600,000 infected machines.

The PC Pundits had been predicting this day for over a decade and it was finally here. Because we weren’t constantly looking over our shoulder, because we didn’t take viruses seriously enough, we were infected by a trojan that, well, didn’t seem to be detectable through vigilance.

The anti-virus software didn’t catch it. We couldn’t even avoid it by refusing to install it.

Perhaps if we’d have just been a bit more humble!

The PC Pundits finally get one right. Decades of dire warnings later. Millions of words, thousands of articles, hundreds of empty threats later, they can finally say they were right all along.

Much like a stopped clock, it was only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, as the fear, uncertainty, and doubt percolates on the twitter accounts and websites of various PC Pundits, those of us wanting the best, most rational take on the Flashback trojan can seek it out where we’ve always found such information:

Amongst friends.

The past is prologue.

“Post PC” is now a reality. In many respects, there’s a two-way race between the walled-garden approach of Apple’s iOS and the “open” nature of Google’s Android OS. Android leads the market for smartphones (though, iOS commands a significant share as well) and when it comes to tablets, there’s not really a market other than the iPad market.

Malicious hackers are taking note:

Malware on Android devices is at an all time high and growing fast, thanks in large part to Google’s open strategy, whereas Apple’s iOS is virtually free of such exploits, thanks in large part to Apple’s walled-garden approach to app curation — an approach that has been widely ridiculed by the PC Pundits.

In fact, that very strategy is going to be Apple’s undoing. No one wants to be told what to do and consumers will eventually wise up and switch away from their iPhones and iPads.

It’s only a matter of time.

And, if not, well: Malware will eventually make its way to the platform.

Seriously. (Give it a decade or two.)

Zimmerman had so many opportunities that night.

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:56:19 -0500

Zimmerman had so many opportunities that night.

When exposing big truths, little lies matter: Mike Daisey, Foxconn, and Apple

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:17:00 -0500

At the risk of being challenged to yet another fight by the 400-plus-pound hulking behemoth that is Mike Daisey, let’s talk about little lies, and why they matter when taking on big truths, even if you’re “just” a storyteller. In a better world, we’d not need to have this discussion, but we don’t live in a better world, and Mike Daisey has been outed as a liar and a fraud.

Mike Daisey:

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic - not a theatrical - enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations.

Where’s Karl Pilkington’s alter ego, Bullshit Man, when you need him?

Let’s just get this out of the way: The dramatic license that everyone allowed Mike Daisey was to present an “extemporaneous monologue” that laid the blame for China’s labor issues squarely on Apple’s doorstep, despite the fact that those issues are, quite literally, an industry-wide problem.

It’s not fair, it’s not accurate, and it’s pretty misleading, but it’s well-within the purview of “theater not journalism” to simplify a story in order to make a larger point.

That’s not to say that doing so is without risk:

To this day, Apple is a company that people love to hate. Giving people (yet another) reason to hate Apple, to support boycotts when they were never going to buy Apple products anyway, is to miss the point. Hating Apple isn’t the same as supporting Chinese laborers, and my guess is that Daisey tapped into the former without spurring a lot of serious or lasting interest in the latter.

(How many new iPads did Apple sell last week?)

More importantly, by driving the point home, show after show, that this was an Apple problem, people were left with the idea that the problem could be solved by holding Apple to some “to be determined” ethical standard. And, if Apple refused to live up to that standard, well, we could all just go out and support Android, or Windows Phone 7, right?

The trouble is, Mike Daisey intentionally glossed over the broader issue — there is no ethical alternative, based on Daisey’s standards — in the hopes of raising awareness by piggybacking on Apple’s popularity. He knew that “dramatic focus” would bring about more chatter and, as an entertainer selling tickets, publicity became more important than strict accuracy.

Except, now it turns out that not only did he use dramatic license by focusing his anger on Apple, he also lied about virtually every important first-hand detail in his monologue. If you’ve not yet done so, do yourself a favor and listen to the “Retraction” episode of This American Life.

When you’re talking about workers who are forced to work through fear and intimidation, the story is very different if, in one version, guards have guns while, in another, they don’t. Daisey’s version supplied the guns, reality doesn’t.

That’s not dramatic license, it’s lying.

Daisey’s choice to use Apple as his theatrical whipping boy is about to be trumped by the even more sordid story of a loud, fuming, angry bully who lied and sensationalized a story in order to sell tickets. Everything he allegedly cares about (I’d argue that he cares most about selling tickets, but that’s a personal opinion) is about to come crashing down, fairly or unfairly, because of his lies.

Daisey is smart enough to know that sensationalism sells, so it’s a real shame that he didn’t think that all his little theatrical lies would, once exposed, overshadow the important truths behind the technology industry’s reliance on Chinese labor. Those who want to enact real change shouldn’t do so by taking what Daisey refers to as “shortcuts” but what everyone else refers to as fabrications.

When seeking big changes, there are no shortcuts:

The world has come undone

Like to change it everyday

Change don’t come at once

It’s a wave building… before it breaks

UPDATE

Mike Daisey has posted a new blog entry:

Many consider this week’s THIS AMERICAN LIFE episode one of the most painful they’ve ever listened to. In particular the segment with me is excruciating—four hours of grilling edited down to fifteen minutes. I thought the dead air was a nice touch, and finishing the episode with audio pulled out of context from my performance was masterful.

When Mike Daisey isn’t busy casting doubts about the credibility of his translator (remember, he intentionally hid her name so that no one would be able to track her down) he’s shifting the blame to Ira Glass.

To my audiences: It’s you that I owe the most to. I want you all to know that I will not go silent—I will be making a full accounting of this work, shining a light through this monologue and telling the story of its origins, construction, and details.

(“That’ll be $30, please.”)

Look! Up in the sky! What’s that? It’s a bird? It’s a plane?

WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSHHHH!

“BULLSHIT!”

WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSHHHH!

Mike Daisey doubled down before being exposed as a liar and a fraud. (I love being right.)

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:25:21 -0500

Mike Daisey is a liar and a fraud. As detailed in the latest episode of This American Life, virtually every important detail of his “Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” monologue was made up in the name of theater:

The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week’s episode of This American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.”

A little over a month ago, I published an open interview request, not expecting to hear from Mike Daisey. Lest you think he limited his lies to the stage, here’s how he answered a point blank question about what he saw, and who he talked with:

Q: You talked with Foxconn employees, and those who follow your work can get a sense of life at Foxconn, from a certain perspective. How many people did you talk to and how long did you spend talking to them?

A: This is actually covered in Act II of the THIS AMERICAN LIFE piece I recorded.

We now know that most of what is covered in Act II was completely fabricated. Similar lies were told to more prominent news outlets. Daisey’s follow-up interview [PDF] with Ira Glass reveals the truth, finally, or the closest thing we’ll ever get to the truth from Daisey.

Today, I learn that he had more to say about my “open interview” on his personal blog, just five days ago.

Responding to this…

In general, I think Daisey gives good, fair answers. He ratchets up the hyperbole a bit in a couple places, and I think he still offers some overly simplistic answers (as well as a couple non-answer answers) but I think they’re about the best he can do given that I’m not doing follow-up questions.

…Daisey writes:

Mr. Ford conveniently doesn’t tell us what he considers hyperbole, nor does he actually comment on which answers are simplistic, or when he thinks I am dodging his questions. He just lets the accusations hang in the air as a way of closing.

Now that he’s reviewed my work, and I’m done with giving him what he requested in a measured, forthright way, I have a response for Mr. Ford.

Nothing about your “open request” was genuine—your questions were leading, ill-informed, and made clumsy overtures toward “trapping” me in ways that a child could have seen through.

You insulted my art form and my work, at length, without knowing what it is, proud of how ignorant you are, and your sneering and contempt say a lot more about your worth than I ever could. You insulted my integrity, and in a better world we should settle this in an alley outside a bar of your choice the next time I’m in Kansas City.

You never expected me to answer your questions, and the fact that you pretend now that this has been to any degree a civil exchange is indicative of the kind of intellectual cowardice you’ve been trading in. If I gave you more attention you’d eventually shift to sucking up to me, if that served your ends.

You don’t know me, Mr. Ford. But you know yourself. That’s why you know I’m absolutely fucking right about you.

Daisey probably felt pretty good about writing this, five days ago. I picture him sitting at his keyboard, a smug look of self-satisfaction spread across his face as he pounded out his response.

Today? Harder to justify the cockiness.

Daisey is right about one thing: When I posted my interview request, I had something I wanted to say. I didn’t really need him to answer my questions (though, I love that he did now that the world knows he’s a liar) because the point I was trying to make was that there seemed to be something incredibly fishy about Mike Daisey.

My questions were leading. True. I had doubts about Daisey, and I wanted that to come across in my questions. That’s why I asked about his credentials. That’s why I asked who he spoke with and how long he spent talking to them.

It’s not true, however, that I’d have ever sucked up to Daisey. I will never, ever, suck up to someone I do not respect. Anyone who knows me knows that this is true, to a fault. He says that to feel better about himself, knowing that his popularity and reach exceeded mine, and it’s just too bad for Daisey that he chose to get cocky about it in the days leading up to his public disgrace.

A month before an independent journalist revealed Mike Daisey to be a liar and a fake, I wrote this:

Here’s a rough draft of a monoloquy I’m formulating about Mike Daisey. As it is a work in progress, please — no criticism. That simply wouldn’t be fair:

Mike Daisey is an actor playing a part. He’s a performance artist playing the role of the “curmudgeonly asshole” fighting for the forces of good against capitalistic greed.

In his world, any message purporting to be a truth — so long as it is delivered with anger and conviction — is the only acceptable truth. If Mike Daisey suggests that change is easily obtainable well, that’s absolutely the case, and don’t you fucking dare question the assertion — unless of course you’re willing to feel the brunt of Mike Daisey’s anger.

What up, Stephen Fry?

With The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Daisey stumbled onto his best and most marketable performance, offering easy claims but no workable solutions. Guess which half of that formula gets all the publicity? Guess which half is more easily accepted and regurgitated by your average technology-loving American consumer?

The average Mike Daisey answer is easy to dance to. It’s got a great beat. It inspires you to nod your head in agreement and can even make you feel good about being the sort of person that cares about the plight of workers in China.

None of that means that the average Mike Daisey answer holds up under scrutiny.

In the end, Mike Daisey cannot compromise, cannot abide reasonable arguments, and will not argue rationally, because the role he’s written for himself depends upon raw emotion.

As a means to an end, Mike Daisey is always in character.

A month ago, Mike Daisey was a darling of the mainstream media. If anyone had doubts about his story, or his character, they were sitting on those doubts in the face of Daisey’s incredible popularity, or due to the risk of seeming uncaring towards Chinese workers.

As it turns out, I knew Mike Daisey better than he was willing to let on, and better than almost anyone who was writing about him.

Five days ago, he had the luxury of bluster. It was easy to angrily claim that he was right, to portray me as a nobody and a pest.

I wonder, though: Did Mike Daisey know that his lies were unraveling as he wrote those things about me? Did he know that he was about to be exposed as a fraud?

No response needed, Mike.

Seth Godin, Apple, Rejection, and Permission Marketing

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:36:00 -0600

Seth Godin’s book, Stop Stealing Dreams, was recently rejected by Apple for sale in the iBookstore:

I just found out that Apple is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.

Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon store. IE page 35, David Weinberger link.”

A bibliography at the end of Godin’s book links directly to several books on Amazon. Amazon, in turn, competes with Apple in the ebook market. Apple takes a look at Godin’s links and says no dice.

It’s worth noting, I think, that Godin partners (or at least used to partner) with Amazon on The Domino Project, a publishing platform.

John Gruber suggests that Godin’s iBooks version could simply link to Apple’s iBookstore, instead of linking away to Amazon.

I’d second that suggestion, not as a way to appease Apple (assuming, of course, that it would), but because it seems like the common sense, consumer-friendly option. I’ve already made the decision to buy an iBook — don’t be cute and link me away to Amazon for follow-up purchases.

Out of curiosity, I checked the price and availability of the books Godin links to, both on Amazon and on the iBookstore:

Thinking, Fast and Slow | Amazon: $15.00 | Apple: $12.99
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling | Amazon: $11.41 | Apple:$11.99
Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything | Amazon: $16.30 | Apple: $8.99
Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track | Amazon: $25.54 | Apple: $23.99
Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education | Amazon: $9.95 | Apple: $2.99
Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges | Amazon: $10.88 | Apple: $12.99
Horace Mann’s Troubling Legacy: The Education of Democratic Citizens | Amazon: $28.59 | Apple: NOT AVAILABLE
The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It | Amazon: $14.94 | Apple:$12.99
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength | Amazon: $16.06 | Apple: $14.99
DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education | Amazon: $9.90 | Apple: NOT AVAILABLE
Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? | Amazon: $11.85 | Apple: $9.99
Civilization: The West and the Rest | Amazon: $21.50 | Apple: $16.99
Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room | Amazon: $17.15 | Apple: $12.99
Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential (Preorder) | Amazon: $16.97 | Apple: $12.99

The Amazon links I’ve used come from a freely-available HTML version of Godin’s book. I don’t know if the version Godin submitted to Apple contains different links or different versions of the same links, though I think the answer to that may be an important consideration.

Out of fourteen books, all but two can be purchased through Apple’s iBookstore. Of those twelve, ten are cheaper (in some cases, a lot cheaper) to buy from the iBookstore than they would be by following Godin’s existing Amazon links.

Clearly, a hypothetical customer who purchases Stop Stealing Dreams from the iBookstore 1) prefers (or at least enjoys) ebooks and 2) has chosen Apple’s offering over utilizing the freely available Kindle app. Common sense, then, says you cater to that customer’s established preference, right?

My first thought was to investigate whether or not Godin was using Amazon affiliate links, which would at least provide a monetary explanation for his desire to carry over those links. (Apple would definitely frown on that, though.)

As it turns out, he’s not (or at least he doesn’t appear to be) but that doesn’t mean he’s using standard Amazon links:

amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0865716692/permissionmarket/ref=nosim/

According to the internet, permission marketing is a term that was coined by Godin in the late 90s. Fast Company published a lengthy article on the subject in 1998:

Seth Godin’s company, Yoyodyne Entertainment, is all about fun and games. But its mission is serious business. Godin and his colleagues are working to persuade some of the most powerful companies in the world to reinvent how they relate to their customers. His argument is as stark as it is radical: Advertising just doesn’t work as well as it used to - in part because there’s so much of it, in part because people have learned to ignore it, in part because the rise of the Net means that companies can go beyond it. “We are entering an era,” Godin declares, “that’s going to change the way almost everything is marketed to almost everybody.”

The new model, he argues, is built around permission. The challenge for marketers is to persuade consumers to volunteer attention - to “raise their hands” (one of Godin’s favorite phrases) - to agree to learn more about a company and its products. “Permission marketing turns strangers into friends and friends into loyal customers,” he says. “It’s not just about entertainment - it’s about education.”

Curious.

I honestly don’t know what it means, if it means anything at all, that “permissionmarket” appears in Godin’s Amazon links and, as I mention above, I don’t know if it appears in the links that were included with the version of Stop Stealing Dreams that Apple ultimately rejected.

I do know that Apple, citing privacy concerns, is notoriously picky about letting 3rd parties use its platforms as a vehicle for collecting customer data. As an example, Apple doesn’t allow magazine publishers access to valuable customer data without explicit consent from the customer.

For what it’s worth, the above link — without the permissionmarket bit — seems to work just fine:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0865716692

Make Me Steaks

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 10:49:00 -0600

Make Me Steaks

Dan Lyons and the art of the changeup

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:45:59 -0600

Dan Lyons:

Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

Separately another VC recently told me his firm recently had passed on opportunities to invest in some new tech blogs that were proposing a business model he described as “hush money.” Potential investors were being offered “most favored nation” status for themselves and their portfolio companies if they put money into the site.

This is what now passes for “journalism” in Silicon Valley: hired guns and reformed click-whores who have found a way to grab some of the loot for themselves. This is perhaps not surprising. Silicon Valley once was home to scientists and engineers — people who wanted to build things. Then it became a casino. Now it is being turned into a silicon cesspool, an upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers — and their grubby cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on.

Dan Lyons:

Guess who else wants to “monetize his influence” and become a blogger slash angel investor?

Yeah. Good grief. Fucking Scoble. I just posted an article about it here on the Daily Beast.

Dan Lyons:

So: Godspeed, Robert Scoble. May the force be with you—and with all the other hacks for hire who will soon be following in your footsteps.

Dan Lyons:

I’ve been responding to comments on a post about my article on the Daily Beast today about Robert Scoble looking to get involved with an angel fund. This has set off a bit of a debate about online journalism and whether we’re all a bunch of click whores…

This is not to say one group is better than the other. Bloggers can do this, but mainstream reporters play by a different set of rules than bloggers. Having been both a blogger and a mainstream media guy, I see value on both sides. I definitely know which side was more fun. If bloggers can find ways to get rich off their blogs, more power to them.

Oh, fuck off, Dan Lyons. If that’s not what you were trying to say, you’ve got an awfully interesting way of not saying it. Everyone saw where the goalposts were, and it’s pretty clear that you’re now trying to move them.

Let’s be real, here: Dan Lyons doesn’t write anything particularly interesting about tech and no one really cares when he does make a feeble attempt to do so.

Because of that, he appears to be incredibly jealous of the reach of some of the internet’s more popular (and more outspoken) bloggers. He even admits this (via a hypothetical) in the first article linked above:

It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What’s worse is that all these people who are getting rich don’t seem to be any brighter than you are and in fact many of them don’t seem very bright at all. So of course you get jealous.

This jealously is manifesting in increasingly personal attack rants and is taking up time that could (presumably) be better spent being relevant as a tech reporter for The Daily Beast.

I’m not sure Lyons ever got over the fact that he’s never been more popular (and probably never will be more popular) than he was back when he was pretending to be a man he seemed to despise.

And, of course, having retired Fake Steve Jobs, his only chance at staying relevant seems to be publicly shitting on people he’s clearly jealous of.

Ouch.

No one gives a shit about mainstream tech journalists these days. Those of us who care about technology news get better reviews and timelier information from popular tech blogs than we’ll ever get from people like Dan Lyons, and I’m sure that’s an awfully hard pill for some in the old guard to swallow. Especially those who fall into the category of too old to change, too young to retire.

Instead of accepting that and putting his head down and doing the “real” work he claims “real” journalists do, Lyons is going to spend the rest of his career pleading with people to give a fuck that technology blogs don’t live up to his expectations. The problem is, most people who read tech blogs don’t share those expectations.

He knows it’s not going to change anything, but at least it’ll drive some clicks.

Arringtown and MG-Boys

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:57:00 -0600

There’s an early scene in the skate documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys where team Zephyr crashes a 1970s skateboarding competition, hoping to demonstrate new tricks. They were full of attitude and ego. They were also, by and large, thuggish assholes with a huge chip on their shoulder.

No Matter: They were on to something big, something game changing, and they knew it.

With each new trick, the Z-Boys were taking skateboarding to seemingly impossible new heights. Most competitors were politely rolling up and over and around obstacles. Team Zephyr was putting air between their boards and the ground. They were making it all up as they went, and they were doing things no one imagined possible. At some point, there was literally nowhere else to go but up.

If you were skating, you were either a Z-Boy or you were a nobody, and they loved to let you know it.

I’ve been following the dustup between Dan Lyons and MG Siegler over the last few months and I can’t shake the notion that Dan Lyons is wistfully longing for the days of rolling about on a skateboard while MG Siegler (and quite a lot of the tech-blogging community) are busy making up new rules and leaving the status quo behind.

Losing your relevance (if not your livelihood) to a younger, brasher crowd can’t be much fun, but seeing Lyons take everything so personally (and make everything so personal) is absolutely painful to watch. There’s an undercurrent of obsessive zeal punctuating many of his recent posts.

It doesn’t really matter if Lyons is making valid points about Siegler’s conflicts of interest. The fact of the matter is, the best tech news isn’t coming from people like Dan Lyons anymore. It won’t be found in mainstream outlets. Not usually, anyway.

It’s coming from those giving the middle finger to the establishment.

Perhaps being left behind and/or overshadowed is made worse by the fact that the new faces are so full of confidence and ego. So brash.

Lyons reveals his insecurities post after post, and that’s not doing anything to strengthen his position, and it’s certainly not doing anything to further the idea that there’s a better way to practice journalism.

Samsung shifts strategy from copying Apple to copying the chutzpah of a company that Apple put out of business

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:25:00 -0600

Samsung AV product lead Chris Moseley, circa today:

TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan, circa 2006:

Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

The death of the serious reader

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:30:00 -0600

Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and Freedom:

For serious readers, Franzen said, “a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience”. “Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change,” he continued. “Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

SOURCE

The Serious Reader — much like the Serious Music Lover and the Cinephile — is dying.

It was Colonel Ebook, on the subway, with the Kindle.

Still…

One wonders if Franzen isn’t lamenting so much the loss of the “serious reader” as the loss of the status quo: Readers who don’t actually do much reading, but who save their money for those bestsellers (cough, Freedom, cough) which pique their interest two or three times a year, because a massive marketing campaign tells them it’s time to open up their wallet and splurge on the next big thing.

That’s the sort of “serious” market which will always favor the Jonathan Franzen’s of the world. It’s not particularly condusive to the breakout author, the self-published, the diamond in the rough, or, you know, the rebirth of an industry gasping for breath.

This is the point where I planned to make some sort of “why so serious” crack about Franzen’s luddite-like views on the emerging ebook industry, but the more I think about it, the more obvious the answer becomes.

I guess I’ll skip the rhetorical question.

What Apple will bring to your next television

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:31:00 -0600

Will Wright:

It’s kind of remarkable. I’ve set up a couple of PCs and a few TVs over the last couple of years. Buying a new television and setting it up is far more complicated now than buying a computer and setting it up.

Hat tip to Daring Fireball for the link.

The trouble, to me, isn’t that TVs are difficult to set up. The trouble is that they’re difficult to set up right.

For most consumers, good enough is as far as they’ll ever get.

How many times have you been to someone’s house, forced to watch “fat people” because the person who owns the TV hasn’t bothered to fix the aspect ratio?

How many people even know what an aspect ratio is? Which one to choose when watching HDTV versus SDTV? (Don’t even get me started on the cute names TV manufacturers come up with to make aspect ratios seem consumer friendly.) How to handle one movie in one ratio versus another? What’s the difference in quality between an HDMI cable, a VGA cable, and a component cable? Digital audio vs. the “red and white” cable?

“Why the fuck am I getting bars on both the top AND bottom AND sides of the picture!?”

Of course, it’s “easy” to plug in and get everything wrong — “the fat people don’t bother me anyway; I hardly even notice at this point” — or use whatever cables come in the box.

When people ask what Apple could possibly bring to an Apple-branded television, imagine plugging your TV in and getting the best quality you can get, out of the box, every time.

Imagine a TV smart enough that you don’t have to be all that smart to get everything you can out of it.

If you’re thinking about it from the perspective of what Apple can bring to the table, you’re probably on the wrong track: It’s not about adding, it’s about taking away.

Simplifying.

Ideally, from Apple’s perspective, you’ll be using your new TV with their rich ecosystem of content. If you’ve got an iPad or an iPhone, all the better. Your new TV will fit your digital lifestyle like a glove.

If not, go ahead and plug that Blu-ray player in using the only option possible: HDMI for video and audio. You can go ahead and ditch any cable that Apple deems unworthy and don’t bother wondering if there’s a better option, because Apple won’t provide options.

Options result in stretched out fat people.

Settings?

For…?

Everything just works.

Lendle Year in Review 2011

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:26:00 -0600

(Cross-posted from the official Lendle blog.)

It’s hard to believe, but it was around this time last year that I called Jeff to pitch the idea for a social site that would allow strangers to share their ebooks with one another.

Here’s an excerpt from an email I typed up after our initial call:

Carolyn came up with an idea that I think is pretty outstanding:

Nooks have had this feature for a long time, but Kindle just added the ability to “lend” a book to a person if they have a kindle account (kindle or any device with the kindle app) so long as you know their email address.

So, fleshing her idea out a bit, you sign up, input the books you have on your kindle and then people can search for, say, “the lovely bones” and see that 10 people have it available to lend. You then send a lend request and if someone accepts, they can lend to you as per Amazon’s guidelines. People can reject a request as well. Perhaps people could make their lists public or private and share with anyone or only friends.

It’s basically a public library for kindle and nook books mixed with a peer-to-peer network.

Obviously, we later decided to focus solely on the Kindle (a decision we’ve never regretted) and, unfortunately, The Lovely Bones wasn’t then, and still isn’t, a lendable title. We had really hoped to see more publisher support in 2011, but several remain on the fence.

The idea was so simple, so obvious, that my original pitch is pretty much what we’re offering today.

We quickly discovered that we wouldn’t be alone in the social lending space. In fact, the competition we faced on day one is more or less the same competition we face today. It’s tough to build a really good social lending site!

In spite of – or maybe because of – the competition, we’ve remained true to the lending site we want to offer, resting the urge to become too gimmicky.

We love stats, and we show off as many as we can: How many copies of a given book are available (if any), how long you’re likely to wait on a lend to come through, whether a book is lendable, or not, how much it would cost to purchase a book instead of waiting to borrow, and so on.

PHASE ONE

We first discussed the concept of a social lending site on January 15.
We settled on “Lendle” as a name on January 17. (It was not a universally loved choice.)
We announced that Lendle was “coming soon” on January 26.
Testing began on January 27.
Beta invites went out on February 2.
Lendle launched to the masses on February 12.

On March 21st, we faced a minor (cough, ahem) setback when Amazon revoked our API access. Less than two months in, we were forced to shut down.

Here’s what we had to say about it: Lendle Press Release

No one wants to get shut down, even for a day, but the media attention that followed the loss of our API access is really what put us on the map.

Some of the outlets that wrote about us:

Daring Fireball (No outlet, big or small, mainstream or not, comes anywhere close to the traffic we get from a DF link.)
Wired
The Next Web
CNET

We also saw mentions on Gizmodo, The Guardian, Business Insider, The Christian Science Monitor, MSNBC, Slate, Ars Technica, GigaOM and The New York Times.

Fortunately, everything worked out for the best and we were back up and running the following day. We lost one of our best (and most requested) features – RIP, beloved book sync tool – but we gained a lot of new Lendlers. Press outlets even started referring to lending and borrowing ebooks as lendling.

PHASE TWO

Over the next few months, we introduced several new features, including our first marquee feature: Patron accounts. A free Lendle account is pretty amazing. A $25 (one time) Patron account is an unbeatable deal.

Read the announcement here: New features and three major giveaways

We also added the Book My Spot feature (still one of a kind in book lending), achievements, and the ability to “thank” fellow Lendlers as borrows are fulfilled.

To top it all off, we gave away a Kindle and an iPad 2!

Towards the end of May, a few of our Lendlers were featured on a CBS local news affiliate in Philadelphia: City Center Book Club Goes High Tech

And, of course, we launched Lendle’s most unique feature: It Pays to Lend

Even as we were preparing to launch, Jeff and I were talking quite a lot about a pay to lend concept. We thought it would be really cool if we could somehow pay our Lendlers for lending books, but we couldn’t really afford to do so.

Once we were finally earning a bit of consistent revenue through our Patron sign ups and the limited advertising we feature, we realized we could finally make it happen.

Whether you’re talking about Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, social networks are nothing without the backbone of a community, and that’s doubly true for lending sites: If no one lends, no one can borrow, and we’re a bust.

Lending sites have to be, in many ways, a perfectly balanced ecosystem – unless, of course, you’re happy to be a lending site in which no one ever lends any books.

Fortunately, our community of Lendlers has always been really great about fulfilling lends as quickly as possible – sometimes too fast, judging by some of the emails we get – and we wanted to put some of our revenue towards rewarding that effort.

So, we hatched a plan to pay out credits for every lend, and then $10 Amazon gift cards as those credits accumulate. No one else offers anything at all like this, to this day, and we think that’s one of the reasons Lendle has been so successful.

PHASE THREE

We launched the newest version of Lendle – the one you see when you log in today – on December 14.

Read the announcement here: Everyone? Meet everyone else.

Not only did we completely redesign the site from the ground up, we introduced Book Clubs, the best way yet to interact with other Lendlers and talk about your favorite books and authors.

We’ve got a ton of features planned for your clubs, so the best social book lending site is only going to get better over the next few months.

We also dramatically improved the speed and reliability of our search feature. (It was a long time coming.)

It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come in only a year. Publishers haven’t embraced lending anywhere near as quickly as we’d hoped, and we’re still stuck as a US-only offering, but there are millions of Kindle owners who have yet to sign up with us and we’re happy to report that awareness is increasing at a rapid pace. Over the last several weeks we’ve seen easily six times our normal rate of traffic and the market is still wide open. Every new Lendler is another book you’ll be able to borrow, a new author to discover and obsess over.

Meanwhile, Amazon has broadened its lending scope by partnering with OverDrive to offer library lending and, more recently, by announcing the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Lending has a long way to go, but the future is bright.

STATS

Total books catalogued: 397,481
Lendable: 50.9%
Loans to date: 50,500
Unique titles available to borrow: 19,615
Total copies available to borrow: 162,168
Gift cards paid out since June: Over $10,000
Most popularly requested book: The Hunger Games (2023 requests)
Amazon’s most purchased Kindle book of the holiday season: The Hunger Games
Accounts connected via Facebook: 47.7%
Accounts connected via Twitter: 10.5%
Lendler with most books: Spec (13173)
Lendler with most lends: Spec (593)

Here’s hoping everyone has a happy and fruitful 2012. We can’t wait to see what happens!