I am trying to find the balance between the longer pieces I write and shorter streams of consciousness that I just want to put out there and see if they have any shelf life. Similarly, there are interesting nuggets that I come across that I have a well formed perspective on.
The long pieces are great for me personally, and I hope that they are also rewarding for the people who take the time to read them through. That said, sometimes I just want to enjoy a proverbial slice of pizza versus doing the full sit down meal. Hence, streams and nuggets.
I think both can be enormously rich in terms of providing pattern recognition and for leveraging the 'Picture in Pocket' metaphor I just wrote a post on.
In any event, without further arm-waving…
- The folks at 37signals, who keep up a really good blog on products, delighting customers and design considerations, posed the question of how many people are optimal for a 1.0 product release. Funky wording, as it wasn't initially clear to me whether the post referred to the optimal number of developers in terms of product scope, members of the product management team or customers that 1.0 requirements are to be based on. In the end, I concluded that I could easily build a straw man around all three scenarios so let it at that. Netting it out: Triangulation is a powerful tool for maximizing efficiency, simplicity and design integrity in 1.0 and beyond.
- The New York Times recently wrote an interesting article about how this generation will turn to the Web to watch TV. While the knee jerk is to say that people don't want to watch TV on their computers (or cell phones, for that matter), that misses the point. Traditional shows will be extended by the medium, and this has pretty profound ramifications from a programming, production, and viewer/user engagement perspective. Note the hybriding of viewers and users, something I blogged about on my O’Reilly blog. The post was called Middleband Channels, and is focused on one type of application that seems fundamental.
- Read Businessweek's, "The Birth of Murdoch.com," if for no other reason than to see things from the perspective of the Microsoft of Media, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. These guys launched and own the Fox Network of The Simpsons, the FX Channel of The Shield, the unapologetically right-wing Fox News, satellite gorilla DirecTV, countless print publications and the list goes on. The acquisition of MySpace provides some valuable insight into how they view the online land grab.
