Greg Storey, Goldfish: “Let’s not go into this next year with blind enthusiasm or crushing anxiety, but with a great sense of kinsmanship and and eager promise. Let us all work together to do what we can to grow our network into a future titan of industry. One that contributes to the community and the economy, global and local.” #

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Rest in Peace, Ron. Guitarist Ron Asheton, who helped found Iggy Pop's band The Stooges, is found dead at his home in Michigan.

January marks a fresh start for many, but for the MFA Interaction Design program, it marks a milestone in our development. We’re receiving our first round of applications January 15 — just under two weeks away. I’m delighted at the prospect of reviewing the first candidates for the MFA in Interaction Design program’s inagural class this fall. In the meantime, the department is busy with some upcoming events. Online, Elsewhere This past fall, we had the opportunity to work with the venerable Airbag Industries on crafting a new department website. Working on the design with Greg Storey and Ethan Marcotte, Ethan on programming, and Ryan Irelan on development was a treat, as we’ve been a fan of the interactive work they do, as well as their insights on design and development, for quite some time. The site uses the identity developed ny The Heads of State. As a platform, it has served as a critical communication tool for the department on topics from curriculum, to critical questions for prospective students, to information on events and lectures.

SVA’s MFA Interaction Design website; Screenshot from Airbag Industries’ portfolio Upcoming Lectures Some eighty or so enthusiasts of interaction design have been attending the intimate Dot Dot Dot Lectures in New York City, the MFA Interaction Design lecture series — a venture we started in November. The series is meant for broad explorations of interaction design, business, and aesthetic inspiration. Practitioners and thought leaders give short, 10-minute talks in an informal setting. Wednesday, January 14, 2009 “The Urbanists” New forms of public space are emerging. Through an exploration of new definitions of urban environments, our four lecturers will examine the time when public space is more personal, ubiquitous computing is allowing cities to have an impact on users’ experiences, and the design of services can truly be vibrant and meaningful. As inhabitants of a city, these things are often invisible in the way we craft experiences. Learn from four practitioners how to be more aware and discerning of their presence around us. Featured Speakers:

Rachel Abrams, Creative Director, Turnstone Consulting LLC, and forthcoming faculty member, MFA Interaction Design

Adam Greenfield, head of design direction at Nokia and author of the forthcoming The City Is Here For You To Use

Phil Kline, American composer

Soo-in Yang, Founder and principal of The Living, adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture

More details and RSVP for this event Wednesday, February 18, 2009 “The Modularists” The insight required to craft modular systems requires designers to think through several variations of form and function — often beyond the original intent of an object, product, or service. How much does the design of discrete modules affect the integrity of the larger system? Should designers expect to wield control over any part of a user experience of modular systems? Four guest lecturers will examine a range of projects and trends in modular design, culminating in a discussion of the role of modularity among a group who value putting the power to create in the hands of everyone. Featured Speakers:

Nick Bilton, Designer, User Interface Specialist, Technologist, Journalist, Hardware Hacker, Researcher

Brendan Dawes, Magnetic North

Jeff Hoefs; littleBits, Smart Design

More details and RSVP for this event Past, Future Over the past couple months, recent speakers have included Gary Hustwit, Jason Severs, Principal Designer, frog design; Clive Thompson, Contributing Writer for New York Times Magazine and columnist for Wired magazine; Elisabeth M. De Morentin, Illinois Institute of Technology, Institute of Design; Tom Bodkin, design director, New York Times; Jake Barton, founder and principal, Local Projects; Andrew Sloat, graphic designer and videomaker; and Christopher Fahey, founding partner, Behavior; forthcoming faculty, MFA Interaction Design. If you find yourself in New York City, please join us for an upcoming lecture!

Steven P. Jobs said that he was being treated for a hormone imbalance but would remain in his job.

I have a thing for books and most anything related to places that hold books…book stores, libraries, shelves, etc. My heart holds a special place for the library of my youth (i.e. the library before computers and Internet). Watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s reminded me of this affection as I watched Holly and Fred search for his book in the card catalog (starting at about 1:40). There was something so grown up about pulling out those little drawers, flipping cards, and searching the shelves for the neatly typed titles. My love affair with books and all things bookish makes it difficult for me to comprehend a world that seems disinterested in books. From Adrian Hon via  Rachel Clarke I learned how grim the book reading landscape is: 40% of people in the US (and 34% in the UK) do not read books any more. They may surf the web, or the read the occasional newspaper, but they do not read more than one book (fiction or non-fiction) in a year. The closer you look at the statistics, the more depressing it gets. In the US, only 47% of adults read a work of literature - and I don’t mean Shakespeare, I mean any novel, short story, play or poem - in 2006. Adrian does an excellent job of explaining the larger issues related to the reading decline. I encourage you to read his full post. For my part, I’ve decided to be more public about my book reading. My interest is less in doing a book review per se, but more about demonstrating how much of my thinking is impacted by what I read. To start, I have 1,638 books in my personal collection. Of that number, I feel comfortable saying I’ve read about 75-80%. On average, I go through 4-5 books per week, less if my reading is for research/study versus pleasure. Throughout the coming year, I’ll share as appropriate (some of my reading selections are more mind candy than mind challenging) the books and the ideas they contain that make me think. Yes, there are a great many blogs and online writers who fire the imagination, but I never would have started blogging if I hadn’t been reading great books that got me thinking in the first place. My goal isn’t to rank the value of any creative source but rather to point out the necessity of pulling from all possible sources. Given that my posts tend to be lengthier, I suspect many of my readers will appreciate my New Year’s wish that you’ll enjoy book-filled weeks and months to come. Image courtesy of Paxsimius.       

Steven P. Jobs announced that he was being treated for a hormone imbalance but would remain head of Apple.

Steve, you're too kind to those bastards. Get well soon.

Must read.

I’m not good at theory. Almost everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned by doing. However, Muhammad’s opinions excite me. They confirm a lot of the gut feelings I’ve developed about business over the years. And topping my list of gut feelings is this: business has to give people enriching, rewarding lives, or it’s simply not worth doing. I think of our Virgin brand as one of the premier ‘way of life’ brands in the world. Whether you’re in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, South Africa, India, Europe, Russia, South America or China, the Virgin brand means something. The Virgin brand is about enjoying life to the full. By offering customers excellent value for money in so many areas of their lives, we aim to make them happier. Most businesses concentrate on one thing, and for the best of reasons: because their founders and leaders care about one thing, above all others, and they want to devote their lives to that thing. They’re not limited in their thinking. They’re focused. The conventional wisdom at business school is that you stick with what you know. Of the top twenty brands in the world, nineteen ply a well-defined trade. Coca-Cola specialises in soft drinks, Microsoft’s into computers, Nike makes sports shoes and gear. The exception in this list is Virgin – and the fact that we’re worth $5 billion and counting really gets up the noses of people who think they know ‘the rules of business’ (whatever they are). We’re the only one of the top twenty that has diversified into a range of business activities, including airlines, trains, holidays, mobile phones, media – including television, radio and cable – the Internet, financial services and healthcare. Hopefully what I’ve written here is relevant to your business no matter what sector you are in.

At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this - previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies - this list is all mine. This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them. The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs. I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer. I’ve removed six products from last year’s list: Amazon Music, Amie Street, Firefox, Flickr, Netvibes, Technorati. I still use the products I’ve removed, just not as much as in previous years. I find I’m just using Netvibes and Technorati less this year (Netvibes because Google Reader is so excellent, Technorati has fallen in favor of Google Blog Search mostly because it’s too slow and has too many internal links). I tend to upload photos to Facebook now because of the people tagging feature and since it flows well with the rest of my news feed (I use Posterous for mobile uploads); Flickr is becoming less important for me. I have moved most of my music consumption to MySpace Music, and download DRM-free MP3s from iTunes when I want to buy. Amie Street is still a great place to discover new music though, and I think their business model, which is variable pricing for music based on its popularity, is sound. Firefox is off the list as I experiment with Chrome, but I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. When Chrome launches for the Mac, I’m likely to switch. As in past years, there are a gaggle of other great products that I use regularly but didn’t add to the list in order to keep it manageable. I also haven’t added individual iPhone apps that I use daily, even though they are nearly as important to productivity and fun as the products that did make the list. Next year I expect more than a few will be added. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without: 800-Free-411 800-Free-411 first made the list in 2007 and it isn’t leaving any time soon. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. The company has taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too. Animoto Animoto, which joins the list for the first time this year, does one thing, and well: it creates slide shows from photos. Unlike all the other services on the list, I don’t use it daily. But their new iPhone application put it over the edge this year. I really like this service. Delicious

Social bookmarking site Delicious has been on the list for three of the four years (I took a brief detour in 2007 to a competing service called Blue Dot, then switched back). Delicious 2.0 is finally stable and the Firefox add-on is the reason I keep using it. Also, they long ago switched away from the annoying del.icio.us domain name, so I don’t have to look up where the dots go every time I visit the site. Digg Digg has been on the list the last three years. The site remains a fun place to hang out when I have some spare time to review the news, and Digg is one of our top ten sources of traffic. Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well. Facebook I visit Facebook daily to keep up with what my 5,000 closest friends are up to. I’m not a big fan of most of the applications that have launched on Facebook, but I do use it for photos and events. Unlike last year, though, I also now use MySpace as well regularly to reach people. These are the two social networks you have to be on to keep in touch with everyone. Friendfeed Friendfeed, a microblogging and activity aggregating service, only officially launched in February 2008. I use the service daily, although I’m not nearly as addicted as some bloggers are to the service. But like Twitter, Friendfeed is a good place to find breaking news on a variety of topics, and it’s become a must have service. Gmail I’ve never been a fan of the way Gmail groups message threads, and things like tagging of messages could be improved, but the service is far and away superior to any other web mail service in terms of features (Yahoo Mail has the best user interface in my opinion). I continue to rely on Gmail as my main personal email provider. Once Gears is integrated for offline use, I may stop accessing it via IMAP. Google Reader Three years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Then I tried NetNewsWire for a while. But Google Reader, which first launched in October 2005 as a seriously flawed product, continues to evolve and is by far the best feed reader on the market today. Hulu Hulu isn’t about work, it’s about watching TV and films after the work is done. I openly mocked the service for nearly a year as they fumbled around, but now here it is, on a list of sites I visit constantly. I spend more time watching Hulu than I do normal cable television. iPhone 3G The first gadget I’ve included over the years - the iPhone 3G, which was announced on June 9, 2008, is simply the best device I’ve ever used. Sure, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. But I can actually browse the web with this thing, and that more than makes up for a slower typing speed. This is a beautiful thing. MySpace Music MySpace Music is just a couple of months old and is still very buggy, but it changed the way users think about music on a big scale. MySpace combined its millions of band/artist pages with legal and free streaming music from the labels and creating a very compelling music product. Services like LaLa have a better user experience, but they still charge for streaming. Free is the future of music. Pandora Pandora, an Internet radio service that creates stations based on music you like, was on the list the first two years. I still listen to it all the time, and their new iPhone application put it over the top again to get on this year’s list. Pandora was one of the first startups we covered on TechCrunch, and they recently passed 20 million registered users. Scribd & Docstoc We use both Docstoc and Scribd here at TechCrunch regularly. Both services let you upload office type documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc.) and then embed them on other sites. When there’s a lawsuit complaint or interesting PDF, we add it to one of the services and embed it in our post. Skype Skype Skype has been on my list every year and I expect it will stay there. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have - I’d give up email before I gave up Skype. TechMeme TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I’m amazed that founder Gabe Rivera hasn’t accepted any of the many buyout offers I’ve heard he’s been floated. In December 2008 TechMeme gave up on fully automated news, which I believe changes the site for the worse. TripIt If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt, which returns to the list this year. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device. Twitter Last year a lot of people still hadn’t heard about microblogging service Twitter. Now, Britney is on it and the company is turning down half-billion dollar buyout offers. I mostly access Twitter through a desktop client called Twhirl, and I check it multiple times per day. Wordpress We continue to use Wordpress open source software to power all of our blogs, and it has been on the list all four years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend - without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them. Yammer Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch. YouTube YouTube has been on the list the last three years. I continue to burn time watching random videos on the site, and we use it to upload our own videos as well. Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em. Zoho Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but its free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity. Update: I’m seeing other bloggers put together their own lists. Let me know in the comments if you do one and I’ll link to it. Here’s one by Tony Bain. More: Guilmain, NewsCred, Honkin (Chinese blogger) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

I’m writing a book with Julien Smith. Since starting the project, both Julien and I have realized that it’s a lot harder to write a book than blog posts. It takes a whole different kind of discipline than what I do when I write blogs. It’s a lot harder. Because of this, and because people asked me about my writing habits, I thought I’d share a bit about the process I use. This might be useful. It might be a waste of your time. Depends what I do that synchs with what you do. Writing is as personal and varied as most things worth doing in life. Your mileage will vary. My Writing DNA

Before we get into this, a bit of DNA. I’ve been writing in some form or another since grade school. I’ve wanted to be a writer my entire life. I learned how to read early, starting with Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet and the Swan, and then rapidly into comic books. I’ve read voraciously since I can really remember. I still get through more than two books a week, even in busy times. I read a sampling of over 700 blogs a day.

I’ve written since forever, and in high school, I started getting awards. I won the National Council of Teacher’s of English award. I won a spot at the Breadloaf Young Writer’s Convention at Middlebury College (where Robert Frost taught). I have written daily for decades at this point.

All this to say it’s not like I just showed up at the playground and was Michael Jordan. I’ve been at this a while. Your mileage will vary. But that’s okay.

The Formula: Read, Write, Write- Part 1: Read

First stop in learning how to write more, write better, write effectively is to read. Read all the time. Read for hours a day if you can. Can’t find the time? Kill your television. Kill some of your video game playing (some). Kill other distractions. Reading is a super power. The more you learn from reading, the more you can improve tons of areas of your life. But what you also do is learn how others write, and you can use that. Let’s stop there. There’s a difference between just reading and reading to understand how a writer works it. Want to learn magic? Get Made to Stick by the Heaths. Learn HOW they make the book so interesting. Not the ideas, but HOW they write it. Read Freakonomics and learn how storytelling makes a book into a killer bestseller. Read every Seth book (well, except for Meatball). Want to know three fiction books that broke me down and turned me into everything I could be?

Shipping News Fight Club Slapboxing with Jesus

Shipping news taught me brevity. Fight Club taught me how not to pull a punch. Slapboxing taught me how to really pull raw emotions out of the air. Does this help my nonfiction writing? You bet it does.

The Formula: Read, Write, Write- Part 2: Write

People ask me how I write so much. One trick is that I write all day long. Not always with paper. Not always with a computer. But I’m always writing. If you and I are having coffee and my eyes glaze for a second, I’m probably thinking about how something might be worded, or I just got a new topic idea for a blog post. When I’m reading, I’m thinking about writing. When I’m at the gym, I’m thinking about posts. When I’m working on something entirely different, I’m also writing. When I’m writing, I’m writing something else. Distracting? Sure. Whatever. Get used to distractions. If you don’t, you’re doomed. Truly. There’s nothing BUT a signal-to-noise ratio. And while you try and cut noise to perfect signal, I’m finding the hidden patterns. Learn how to surf noise and you’ll learn how to jump gates. So, lesson two is to write all day. Only, this writing I’m talking about is the kind that doesn’t actually land anywhere. It just means that your mind is primed for those moments where you get a moment to write.

The Formula: Read, Write, Write- Part 3: Write

I write daily. I write emails. I write thousands of words 140 characters at a time into Twitter. I write proposals. I write blog posts (hey, here’s a blog post!). I write for the book with Julien. (Of these, the last is the hardest, but only because I’m afraid. Books are so… forever.) Writing begets writing. Once you get into a steady diet, you don’t fall off the wagon for much of anything. To write, think about structures. If it’s a blog post, is it a long one, a short one, a list, a what? If it’s writing for your big book, how are you going to structure things? Julien and I did our book in six major chapters, with a few minor bookend chapters to set the concepts up. Once we had that structure, we filled in each chapter with our mindset on every main point. So, we’d name a chapter after a major theme in our book, and then we’d write what we could think about to support it. We’d write it in no particular order, and then try organizing it once the chapter was almost finished. That way, we’d go back in and do transitions to make for better readability. Structures, even if atypical, are your saving grace in knowing how to write what you want to cover. My blog posts have a structure. I write a paragraph that leads you into the post. I lead with the major stuff. I build on that. I end with a question or three to get you talking. Every time. Go back and read 10 of my posts. Take them apart. You’ll see.

Get in, Get Your Hands Dirty

Writing isn’t an “I should start doing that” kind of endeavor. Just start somewhere. Stop somewhere. Look around. One last book plug: On Writing by Stephen King. The first half is more like an auto-biography. Interesting, but you don’t actually need it. The second time I bought this book, I started at the writing section, ripped the book apart there, and duct taped the cover back on, thus making it the book I wanted. You can do that, too. King basically teaches you to stop being such a sissy and just start writing. It’s tough love writing lessons, that’s for sure. But you know what? Writers need that more than not. The writers who need gentle writing are doing it for therapy, not business. Writing has made me a better speaker. Writing is why I’m a businessman. Writing is how I interpret the world. Others make music. Others paint. Others create code. Me? I communicate. It’s what drives everything forward for me.

Does This Help?

How does this influence your thoughts on writing? Did you see anything in there that reminds you of you? What else can I answer for you? You know the drill.

Countdown begins....

Amazing post by Patrick Rhone to start the new year.