I’ve hated Flash for the better part of five years, a bigotry mostly inspired by how poorly it has worked for me as an end-user. It’s even worse for people who need to maintain web sites in Flash, as I later learned professionally. An essential tool for any computer I use more than five minutes is Flashblock for Firefox or the outstanding ClickToFlash plugin for Safari.

Then it dawned on me: If I hate it this much, surely Adobe, who is responsible for maintaining it, must hate it even more. Surely no amount of money is worth this much pain, right? There must be another reason Adobe prolongs this shared internet misery.

Drawing equal parts inspiration from 2001, Terminator 2 and Babylon 5, I present to you: Flash is My Keeper.

For years I’ve been saying this:

Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.

This week, the second one worked over Detroit. Security succeeded.

EDITED TO ADD (12/26): Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.

Bruce is referring, of course, to the new, rumored security procedures said to be rumbling their way out of the TSA’s nightmare bureaucracy and onto your next airline flight.

In a nutshell: planes must disable their seat-back in-flight entertainment, passengers can’t use electronics, get up or access their bags during the last part of a flight. Oh, and you can’t have anything in your lap.

Keep in mind, this is in response to a dim-witted “terrorist” who snuck a weak explosive onto a plane… inside of his pants.

Remember when shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to blow up his Reeboks? That resulted in a limit of one carry on bag per passenger, despite the fact that Reid’s plan had nothing to do with carry on bags. Then there’s the whole liquid limit for carry on bags, which also makes no sense given the simple reality that liquid re-combines very easily, even if you do happen to carry it aboard in small containers instead of big ones.

So the recent rumors of new policy, while wildly stupid, are just stupid enough. They carry enough non sequitur authenticity to be utterly believable. I was ready to believe them. Then a source contacted me. He’s inside the TSA and was desperate to leak the internal memo that brought the new rules into existence. Now it all makes sense: the non sequiturs, the absurdity, the utterly incomprehensible creation, amendment and abandonment of these policies.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that in a few places, it would seem the TSA exercised forbearance when it seemed like, even by their standards, they’d crossed the line. Here’s the document, reproduced without further comment:

The universal trial, of course, is money and I’m hardly exempt. There’s a sixty day delay between me making money from an iPhone app and Apple actually paying me. That leaves immediate, painful gaps in my cashflow.

The obvious solution to this is consulting — I’m privileged to know how to do a lot of things that are useful to people. Unfortunately, I’m still learning how to market, grow and manage that particular end of my business, so I’m painted into the most dread of corners: retail.

I live by the axiom that no honest man is too good for honest work. So while retail is often the dullest, most imagination free work you can do before hitting manual labor, that’s not the part that I hate most about my seasonal job.

No, the worst of it is this: I have to call my customers “guests.”

This is some of the most odious corporate newspeak bullshit in recent years. It has always irked me. Guest means a specific thing: certainly it implies hospitality, which may explain the intent, but it fails to properly convey the truth of the relationship between the store and the customer. Being the guest of another places the guest in the inferior position and the host in the superior position. While manners may require that hospitality be extended, being termed a guest in the final equation simply means that the customer does not belong there. It suggests they belong somewhere else.

This is the wrong view.

The customer is not a guest of the store. A successful retail experience means that the customer is at home in the store.

Somewhere, somehow, having “customers” became a distasteful condition for large corporations. This is unfortunate and I wish they would cut the crap. The truth is that there is honor in having customers. There is honor in upholding the sanctity of the customer relationship. Being a customer of a business means something very specific that no other English word can capture. Being a customer means being the lifeblood of a business. Being a customer means being the motive force behind a powerful organism that provides products, services, livelihoods and, ultimately, the basic existence of others. Being a customer is being part of a tradition that keeps babies nourished, families housed and people clothed.

That means something. Something potent. Something that must be continually venerated if we’re going to keep moving forward as rational people. Does any of this sound remotely like having a “guest” to you?

I’m proud to have customers. I’m proud to respect their importance to my business and their contribution to the fact that I’m not sleeping outside tonight. That is essential to my work ethic and it will never, ever change.

The end of my seasonal retail job can’t come fast enough. I’m not sure my teeth will survive the grinding required for me to get the word “guest” past my lips on every shift.

Let’s start with this: I’m an idiot. I’m 24 years old and I don’t know anywhere near as much as I need to. I convince myself otherwise because without the strength of thinking I know at least something, I could never get much done.

That said, I do know this: there are only a few people who you should take advice from. I mean life advice: advice on how to be who you are, how to manage your world, how to grow as a person.

1. People who have demonstrated an interest in your success and years of loyalty. You’ll be lucky if you get one of these. I hit the lottery, and I have two. You’ll know them with this test: If they asked you to drop everything and save their ass (business, product, family, life) for a month, you’d do it without hesitation.
2. Your significant other. This is someone who spends a lot of time with you and sees all that you struggle with, all that makes you happy. You’ve been through good and bad and get wistful recalling both. My luck continues: my girlfriend is the wisest counselor I could ever ask for.
3. Yourself: If you cut the crap and take a long walk alone, you can ask yourself anything and usually get the right answer. Make the time to know your own thoughts: you might be surprised how much is waiting in your own brain.

That’s all. Here are people who should not be trusted for advice:

1. Some dick with a blog (even me). If you’ve ever read a top-ten post on a blog, you know the content is cranked out to drive pageviews. The author probably slapped the content together in the space of two hours to benefit an audience of thousands. Like with drive-by legal or medical advice, you’re a fool to assume you can get something directly applicable to your case from a one-size-fits-all post.
2. Parents. Your mileage may vary but parents are often too invested in your safety and security to be able to weigh the benefits of those risky life decisions with huge payoffs and incredible experiences. If your parents are batshit insane (thankfully not my case, but I have seen this) that investment may yield terrifyingly bad advice. Even if the advice you get is reasonable, there’s plenty we don’t need to tell our own parents.
3. Your social circle. Excluding a choice best friend or two, your social circle can’t tell you anything useful about how to run your life. Groups breed conformity and breaking from that might be consciously or even subconsciously discouraged.
4. Penelope Trunk. (cf. #1)

Penelope Trunk wants to tell you how to run your career. She presumes to be an expert on this subject. She’s not.

Once upon a time, as a young man desperate for growth and success, a blog specifically like hers, geared toward shameless career ambition, seemed like crack. Loyal readership taught me otherwise. Penelope Trunk is someone barely in control of her own life. That she is honest and open about her flaws is endearing but doesn’t change the fact that she cannot provide viable career advice based on personal experience. She’s proudly a trainwreck and while that may be great for her blog’s readership, would you trust a fitness trainer who doesn’t exercise and can’t stick to a healthy diet? Mental health counseling from a patient in a psychiatric ward? Computer advice from someone who uses Windows 98? Come on. I may be an idiot but at least my bullshit detector works.

Only when Penelope Trunk is viewed as a cautionary tale will you find viable lessons for your own career. I would never claim to be qualified to advise you on how to run your life. Nonetheless, if you take the things Trunk has done with her life and imagine the opposite, you may find valuable guidance.

Read on for these lessons.

Bullying is Okay

Earlier this year, Trunk was complaining about her kids. I don’t blame her — parenting doesn’t seem like a lot of fun at times and blowing off steam via Twitter is cheap, easy relief. Things got complicated when our thin-skinned heroine was sassed by some jackass in flyover country. What did Trunk do? For most people who aspire to the public eye, ignoring this would be right move. Maybe using Twitter’s block feature, if you’re an especially petty kind of douche, would have been called for. In any case, it’s hardly worth more than a few seconds of thought. I guess Trunk wasn’t busy enough with her family and leading her startup because instead of doing the grownup thing, she called his place of employment and saved their number with the intent of “ruin[ing] his life there if [she] ever felt like he needed to be taught a lesson.”

(I’m not sure crazy internet lady calling out of the blue and whining about 140 characters of abuse is something technically capable of ruining anyone’s life. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what her true plan really was.)

Next, she called his wife. From the blog: “There was no answer. Maybe by then he had alerted his wife that he is being pursued by a psycho who maybe will kill her kids or maybe will kill him. Maybe they will never answer their phone again.“

(My emphasis.)

This is professional? This is what we do with our careers? There’s a word for this: unhinged. Self-revelatory stuff, right there.

Finally, Trunk penned a seething, rage-soaked blog post naming names and even the guy’s home town. She was impressed with herself, though, for having the maturity to not post his home phone number. Trunk was happy enough to ruin his Google mojo forever. She is, in fact, proud of that post to this day. (Notwithstanding the flurry of posts that came next, lasting just long enough to push the hatefest off her front page.)

Anti-Lesson: When you build a blog readership and a meager Twitter following, you should use these tools to bully the hell out of those who dare disagree with you. Anyone who tells you your behavior is unacceptable just doesn’t get it. It’s worthwhile to spend a significant amount of time and effort persecuting a grudge. You can use bad behavior to impress other people by appealing to the worst within them.

The real lesson: Self-control is important. In your life, especially as you become more successful, more and more jackasses will come out of the woodwork. How you respond to the least courteous of those around you speaks volumes about your true character. You can spend a lot of time getting vengeance against those who piss you off but the payoff is rarely worth it. If you want to make yourself seem smaller than you are, the best way to do it is to give attention to someone who doesn’t deserve it.

“Online Stars” Are Important

We’ve all been in this predicament before:

“So, D, who is really attentive and normal—two traits I have never had in a boyfriend, ever—is scary to me because I’m giving up the chance to enhance my brand by dating an online star.“

Yeah, I guess maybe not so much. Trunk is still in high school — approval of the internet cool kids is so important to her that not dating one who can improve her standing is a quandary worth blogging about. She has since resolved the quandary by electing to marry a farmer. He must be the retired co-founder of Skype or something.

Speaking of quandaries and farmers, the internet cool kids caused a conflict there, too. After accepting a reconciliation date from this then-estranged farmer fellow, Trunk realized she was double booked!

When I came out of my giddy stupor from his email, I realized that [the date] was the same weekend as maybe the biggest schmoozing event of my life: Guy Kawasaki invited me to spend a weekend on the USS Nimitz with Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and others.

I said yes to the weekend, of course. Because how can hanging out with these guys not be great for me? It’s probably what I’ve been working up to my whole career: a weekend like that.

Guy Kawasaki is apparently a friend of hers, so we’ll skip him, but wow, Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble! Connected guys? Sure. But you know what? They’re also douchebags. 40-something Scoble, for example, sees no problem getting touchy-feely with 17-year-old female entrepreneurs. Arrington is just a pompous weiner who can’t handle other people’s low opinions of his douchery. Trunk ultimately did what anyone with healthy priorities would do: she spent the weekend with someone who loves her instead of with a self-important group of perpetual children whose only interest in Trunk is how she’s able to further their own interests.

Invitation to dine with the Obamas? With Steve Jobs? With the late Norman Borlaug? Yeah, the farmer could take a hike. But these guys on the Nimitz? No one will know who they are in 20 years. There is no conflict. These guys were a group of assclowns who have never made any meaningful contributions to humanity. They’re worth skipping for someone who cares about you. If you’ve spent your whole career working toward a weekend with them, you need a new career.

Anti-lesson: People who have convinced the internet they are cool deserve our time, reverence and attention. If you’re going to waste your time with people who aren’t internet cool kids, there had better be a good reason. You should spend your whole career getting to the point where you can possibly one day hang out with these cool kids.

The real lesson: Often with little meaningful or useful accomplishment, people can convince the internet they are cool. Maybe they truly are. Just as often, these flavors of the minute will be forgotten within a decade. Either way, they’re just people. You have your own people. You should measure the value of your people by what they contribute to your life rather than their Twitter follow count. If your career is itself focused on convincing other people you’re cooler than you are, you should switch to a career where you’re actually doing meaningful work.

You Kind of Suck and Can’t Be Incredible

Penelope Trunk wants you to know: “[Dooce] is a marvel. And you are not.”

Dooce is, in fact, a marvel: a blog that pays her bills, millions of Twitter followers and a self-directed life right from the comfort of her home. Without even meeting you, though, Trunk dispenses the above defeatist advice: you’ll never be that, even if you want to be. Dooce is not an overnight success by any stretch: she has been writing her blog for eight years. While she is certainly talented in relating her thoughts, one of the greatest contributors to her success is her simple willingness to keep showing up, year after year. Woody Allen will tell us: 90% of success is just showing up. He should know — a large swath of the population finds his self-indulgent New Yorgies unwatchable. (I am on the fence.)

Anyone with a modicum of interest in an activity and a willingness to keep showing up over and over again will become a marvel. Malcolm Gladwell calls this the 10,000 hour rule.

Imagine if Penelope Trunk had given Dooce that advice, before she became a marvel? Imagine if she had told a young Heather Armstrong she’s not much of anything and should stick to doing jobs she doesn’t much like. Imagine if Dooce had believed it. (Not that it seems she would — by all accounts, Dooce is someone who does whatever it is she wants.)

Dooce is exceptional because she chose to be, not because a supernatural event anointed her with that status.

While the overall advice of Trunk’s post is so blindingly obvious as not to need saying (blogs won’t immediately make you money), the evidence used is part of an overall theme of her blog: Penelope Trunk thinks you kind of suck and you should just quit trying to build your career if the path you’ve chosen isn’t immediately marketable. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anti-Lesson: Things that are hard aren’t worth doing. Other people are better than you. You shouldn’t even bother trying. You kind of suck.

The real lesson: You’re in control of how great you are (or aren’t). You decide how quickly you reach 10,000 hours of anything. You’ll become incredible only if you choose to be: by doing the near-impossibly difficult work necessary to get there. Just like everyone else who ever chose to be incredible.

Unethical Behavior is Just Fine

If a company pays you to say something about them, Trunk says, there’s no real reason to disclose that. That’s for newspapers. You should just trust that she’s making money from smart companies, and that makes it all okay.

The trust of her readership is for sale to highest, smartest bidder.

The FTC, unfortunately, doesn’t agree that this is acceptable behavior. They’ll be going after companies who pay bloggers to endorse their products without disclosure.

Is it unethical? Of course it is. There’s a big difference between caring about a product or company for its own sake and caring about it because you’ve been paid to. Penelope may dance around this by saying she only picks good companies but that doesn’t change the fact that she failed to disclose a paid relationship. Her estimation of a post’s value after the fact doesn’t excuse the lapse, either. This kind of ends-justify-the-means rationalization is the hallmark of a crook.

It doesn’t matter if the conversation is between a newspaper and its readers, a blog and its subscribers or a friend and a friend. When one party is giving advice that could be influenced by an outside force, it is essential that the influence be announced openly. Anything less is simple dishonesty.

Anti-lesson: It’s fine to build a loyal readership and then sell their attention without disclosure. The rules of ethical behavior only apply to old media. You make your own rules — honesty is less important than cash money.

The real lesson: Don’t build trust and then quietly sell it for money.

Don’t Do What You Love — Do What is Easy Based on Your Existing Resume

“One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to ‘do what you love.’”

Yeah, she said that. Supporting evidence: “I am a writer, but I love sex more than I love writing. And I am not getting paid for sex.”

Trunk even had a talent for combining these things, writing “the best sex scenes” her writing professor had ever read. She gave up on her erotic literature career, though, because she believed it wasn’t important enough work.

“So if you are overwhelmed with the task of ‘doing what you love’ you should recognize that you are totally normal, and maybe you should just forget it. Just do something that caters to your strengths. Do anything.”

Hmm. So because Penelope can’t do it, there must not be any way at all to find a way to build a life and career around what you love, huh? Because you can’t immediately find a way to make your work impressive to other people, it must be impossible to find greatness in it?

Bye, Adam Savage. You love scifi, building things and using your imagination. Can’t think of any way you can parlay that into an enormous, satisfying career. Be a bricklayer.

Bye, John Gruber. You love details, design, Apple, and writing. There’s no way those things can possibly come together as a lucrative blog that lets you be your own boss. Go scrub toilets.

Bye, Phil Tan. You love music? What do you think you’re going to do with that? Go buy some CDs or something.

Bye, even, to my mother. Someone who didn’t even have the benefit of a complete high school education somehow found a way to turn her love of animals into a career that let her be her own boss while keeping me fed, clothed and housed my whole childhood. Seriously: there is not a thing this woman loves more than animals, as her past ownership even of ostriches will clearly demonstrate. The result of that and years of hard work is that she’s the best pet groomer in whatever city she’s in, bar none. She can do that because she cares about her clients’ animals in ways that other groomers, just paying the bills, never could.

I guess she should have just gotten a retail job and stuck with that, right, Penelope? Hey, you said do anything.

Anti-Lesson: Don’t do what you love. It’s hard! Since Penelope Trunk never figured out how, you shouldn’t bother, either. Instead of dedicating yourself to something you’re great at doing, absolutely love doing, become the founder of an also-ran social network for young people that provides none of the value of its competitors while alienating the sort of older, more accomplished professionals those young people need to meet.

The real lesson: Your passions give you deep, generous, unique insight into specific problems. With some luck, a little imagination and a ton of hard work, you can focus your career around the things you care about. There’s a significant chance that career will matter a whole lot more to you than just “doing anything.” You’ve got a better chance at finding happiness in work you find meaningful rather than trying to fit into roles that other, faceless people will deem great.

Does Penelope have a strong writing style and a compelling blog? Absolutely. Does she have a gripping sense of honesty and transparency? Sure. But let’s be clear: as a vendor of career advice, she is a charlatan. If a career of settling for second-best, letting other people decide the value of your passions and giving up on your dreams is what you seek, then you seek Penelope. If you want your self-worth to be short-changed, then get yourself over to Trunk. If you want to improve your brand image by writing psychotic screeds against nobodies in Ohio, then boy, do I have the role model for you!

In the final equation, the case of Penelope Trunk is a sad one. By letting other people decide what matters, what’s important, she took her passions out of the driver’s seat of her career too many times. By worrying constantly about other people’s estimation of her potential greatness, she condemned herself to a life of mediocrity. Her blog and its continual churn of the latest misery, the most recent stress, is a chronicle of the results of those decisions. I don’t want that to be me.

Trunk needs to do everyone a favor, herself included, and cut the career advice crap. She is at her best when she writes about herself. The drama queen schtick all on its own is more than enough to build content around. Her sycophantic hoards of hysterically, irrationally loyal commenter fans are evidence enough of that. While her bad choices make for poisonous, self-defeating career advice and a needlessly stressful life, they nonetheless make for entertaining, instructive, even inspiring reading. That’s a great focus and the best part is that it doesn’t presume to be qualified to tell other people how to manage their lives.

I have met men and women who have done incredible things. I have found role models in people who came from nothing, who had nothing but passion on their side, and who now spend their days being paid to do incredible things they absolutely love. It’s real. It’s possible. But I, for one, will never find that place by listening to someone who says I can’t. Who comforts herself by telling you that you’re not good enough. That’s poison. That’s quitting before you start. That’s being someone else’s person, fitting into someone else’s expectations, living someone else’s shortcomings, instead of being who you yearn to be.

My advice? Don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you things online. Make your own decisions based on your own values, your own passions, your own drives, your own strengths. If you must, get advice for managing your life’s direction from people who know you, who care about you, who you can trust. Most of all, get it from people whose lives and careers approach a level of sanity and stability you’d like to emulate. If you must get advice on running your career from the internet, this is the only source I’ve seen with viable information:

Merlin Mann and John Gruber at SxSW ’09. They’re talking about blogs but their advice is broadly applicable to any career where you choose to do what you want to do.

Final advice, which you also should not take just because I’m saying it: Instead of writing comments on someone else’s blog when they piss you off, write your own post. Your content is yours — don’t fuel someone else’s blog with it. That’s their job. Also, don’t wait years to write that post. You’ll be stuck writing a long-ass screed like me.

Unfortunately, HARO, as it is called, is an awful product. It makes the fatal mistake that many fast-scaling services make: screwing the most important customer.

Three Customers

HARO has three customers: journalists, who need leads, sponsors, who pay for placement, and subscribers, who consume sponsored content and respond to journalist queries.

Subscribers are the most important customer as they are required for both sponsors and journalists to even bother with the product. Without subscribers, there’s no one for sponsors to influence. Without subscribers, the journalists get no responses.

A typical HARO email goes something like this:

1. Lengthy sponsored message
2. Cutesy personal update from the mailing list administrator, Peter Shankman
3. An absurdly long list of journalist queries

The practical result of this is that a subscriber will have to scroll an entire page before they even get to what they care about. Even better, HARO is sent out as often as three times a day.

Now, I disclaimed that as typical. What’s more interesting to my point are atypical HARO messages. These don’t happen often, but happened often enough to piss me off. HARO has particular rules about how subscribers should interact with journalists. It’s pretty obvious stuff, if you’re not five years old, but boils down to please don’t spam the reporters. Sometimes a HARO subscriber would go off the reservation, do something naughty, piss off a reporter and end up in Shankman’s bad graces.

It’s a closed system – a mailing list, after all. The solution seems pretty simple. When applicable, speak to the individual’s boss, if their wrongdoing was in the service of a larger organization. Then, kick the person off the list.

That’s it. Problem solved.

In Shankman’s defense, it seems he does do this. Then he takes it a step further, by venting his frustration into the next HARO email and scolding the entire subscriber base at large. Here’s a sample:

READ THIS: This morning, while being given a behind the scenes tour
at Busch Gardens, I had to spend a portion of the tour on my mobile
phone, calming a reporter from a major publication. Seems someone
at a major agency took it upon themselves to form an opinion on
what kind of story the reporter was writing, simply from the query
alone.  Long story short, this was a situation that should not have happened.

This isn’t brain surgery here, guys: If you can answer a query, do
it. If you know someone who can answer a query, send it to them. Do
not post them on the web, in blogs, or on message boards, and do
not email the reporter saying “You should do it this way.” Had I
not gotten an EXTREMELY sincere apology from a top-level person at
the agency, I’d be outing the person who caused the mess in the
first place, as well as outing the agency. Instead, he’s just banned
from HARO.

Five rules of HARO here: READ THEM.
http://shankman.com/the-five-rules-of-haro/

I can only speak for myself, but as a former subscriber, it’s worth listing all the things in this message I don’t give even a tiny fraction of a fuck about:

• Shankman’s very special behind the scenes tour
• The frustration of said tour’s interruption
• The existence of an over-sensitive, irate reporter who doesn’t know how to use the delete button on her keyboard
• A rehash of common sense HARO rules I already know
• Shankman’s super-duper ballbusting phone call to top-level Tommy
• The ban of another subscriber
• The power of passive aggressive ALL-CAPS text

The Precious Commodity

HARO exists thanks to a simple reality: time is a precious, ever-dwindling commodity. If reporters weren’t in a hurry, they’d spend weeks on just one story, finding the perfect source for their piece. They don’t have that luxury. HARO to the rescue. Similarly, subscribers don’t have time to build a publicity campaign, research publications or spend weeks pitching themselves. They often don’t even have time to learn how. Again, HARO to the rescue.

The issue is that HARO does not give any reverence to the time of its subscribers. Quite the opposite: not only do we have paragraphs of crap no one cares about at the top of each message, there’s this occasional business of Shankman feeling empowered to command the entire list to spend time reading a rant about the misbehaviors of a single participant.

This doesn’t even begin to take into account the amount of time it takes to scour the actual list of queries. Taken in aggregate, it’s shocking. Let’s not forget, it’s a thrice-daily proposition.

The reason it happens is that while subscribers are the most crucial part of Shankman’s business, they’re also the most plentiful – the most easy to replace. Sponsors are magic unicorns, treasured and protected. Journalists are golden geese, continually laying the eggs that make each HARO message. Subscribers? There are tens of thousands of those.

So HARO gets away with it. For now.

Complacency Breeds Contempt

I just checked my calendar. It’s 2009. A mailing list? Hell, let’s move the whole thing over to Usenet. Infinitely more retro chic and you don’t need to bottleneck the queries through a single guy.

The problem with HARO not caring about its subscribers’ time is that it completely erodes loyalty, trading every ounce of goodwill for an ounce of contempt with each message. When something better comes along, they’ll have no problem switching. Ask Blockbuster how that works.

Fine, so you’re saying if I’m going to be a douche and trash this guy’s hard work, I should have a better idea, right? Glad you asked.

Let’s Do It Better

Build a website.

That’s it. A problem actually solvable with a website. Could have been huge during the dot-com bubble, but I bet it’s enough to at least keep Shankman fed. Here’s what you do:

1. Persistent accounts that store basic bios and feedback ratings. Elevate the stars, demote those who don’t play by the rules, make it clear who’s making the best contributions
2. Categorized, post-moderated, RSS-enabled members-only query threads that let reporters post their queries whenever they want or need. Only postable by verified reporter accounts to keep the bozos at bay
3. Tagged queries: instead of having to parse a tedious headline that’s different for each query, provide the option for easy-to-scan tags
4. User-configured search agents to send email alerts any time a query seems of interest
5. Daily sponsorship opportunities, to keep Shankman in Busch Gardens tickets

That’s it. I bet you could accomplish most of it with Ning, without having to spend a dime. If you wanted to take it to the next level, you could impose a monetary bozo filter for new accounts.

Will it happen? Eventually, I’m sure it has to. Linking journalists with sources is an important job. Just because HARO’s implementation is completely hamfisted doesn’t mean someone else’s won’t eventually hit the mark. Will Shankman do it?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair, via Daring Fireball

So who knows. In the meantime, I’m off to half-heartedly find some other way to get journalists to talk about me.

Since Tallymander was made a Staff Favorite last month, I’ve noticed that there are more solutions to the tally problem in the App Store than when I began.

There are, of course, many ways to skin a cat. For me, Tallymander does the job best because I built it to my exact desires. Still, while many elements of design are subjective, there are good and bad ways to do things. Let’s look at some of the other approaches to the tally challenge.

Tally Max

A few things jump right out:

Inefficient use of space: The entire width of the iPhone’s screen is available to each tally cell, but the tally title is confined to a much more limited area. The title is the only element that the user can customize beyond the rails of your design — give it some room.

Unfriendly controls: A good, obvious rule is that the larger a control is, the easier it is to interact with. This is why, for example, the title bar of a window ends up being much larger than the controls to close it. You use the title bar more. It’s a puzzling choice, then, that Tally Max’s plus and minus buttons are the same size, since any given counter is likely to flow mostly in one direction. In Tallymander, the entire table view cell is the button. You’ve got a big, fat, 320 x 60 target to hit to accomplish your task.

Unmotivated interface: I have a neurotic obsession with LEDs. I have always loved them. That’s why they appear in pretty much every interface I’ve ever designed. Tallymander’s seven-segment counters exist because they’re readable and because I love how they look. I lovingly built each numerical glyph in Photoshop with the pen tool and spent hours tweaking the glows and highlights for each color. In Tally Max’s case, the counters are just flat output from a commonly available font. If the author didn’t want to bother motivating their appearance, why not use a simple text label, like Calculator does, and get a competitive edge from the ability to count beyond 9,999?

Tally Max makes other decisions I don’t agree with. Tallies are tied to calendar dates and they reset each day, with a record stored for previous days. It also organizes tallies into categories, which could be useful, but puzzlingly, you create new tallies from the Categories view instead of the Tally view. It’s weird and, ultimately, trying to do too much.

The one inarguably bad bit about Tally Max, though, is this note on its App Store page, screenshot taken 3/20/09:

That feels like a show-stopper. I would remove my app from sale until that business was resolved.

Clicker Tally Counter Plus

This app has a terrible name. I’m fortunate in having a girlfriend whose beauty is matched by an arresting, powerful wit and who comes up with terrific branding to replace my awful project codenames. I sympathize with the challenges involved here. At the same time, the name is very descriptive, so while it gets no points for imagination it will be easily found on the App Store.

The interface is simply gorgeous. I like the aesthetic a great deal, hearkening as it does to chunky, clicky analog gadgets of forgotten days. The font selection is tasteful and motivated to the overall look and feel of the interface. Bang up job.

For me, I sometimes find myself wanting to count multiple things at once. This app doesn’t address that need especially well, but it’s still the one I would pick if I had to choose something that wasn’t Tallymander.

Counters

Meh. The button lighting isn’t even consistent.

Game Keeper Plus

Game Keeper Plus touts itself as a score keeper, but can do other things:

Hmm, okay. I honestly can’t figure out how the hell this application works, though. Here’s another screenshot:

There’s a bit of backchat about the other apps that are built for keeping scores:

This sales copy explains everything, I think. In trying to do so much, it feels like the developer has overwhelmed himself and the user with… a whole lot of stuff. Admittedly, Tallymander wasn’t exactly built with scorekeeping in mind, but for basic game-related tasks I think it does pretty well thanks to a focused, easily-navigated user experience. When you try to do too much, you end up doing too much.

On the subject of doing too much, back to this app being positioned as a stat tracker for non-game related stuff:

That’s fine; I think everyone here, myself included, isn’t doing much more than building digital versions of the abacus. Still, with so much game-related terminology baked into the UI, it’s tough to create a pitch for this app’s versatility outside the scope of tracking scores. The user ends up having to build a mental translation table between the meaning of the game-related words and whatever custom use they’ve imagined for themselves.

I don’t know what the deal is with those eyewatering, heavily aliased pie charts, either.

The Upshot

Every problem space has a multitude of ways to approach its solution. This is a great example of that truth. Each of these apps brought different spins to the task of counting things, with varying levels of success. Gruber’s maxim about iPhone apps is proven once more: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.

Except for Clicker Tally Counter Plus (say it five times fast), I think each of these apps could probably do with trimming some amount of functionality in favor of making cleaner, more easily navigated experiences. Remember that the iPhone screen is a cramped, tightly-packed place and that mobile users are hasty, impatient people. The less stuff your users have to navigate and the less time they spend having to consider their options, the happier they will be. Functionality and power is good, but it’s best if you can tuck it away until the last possible moment before the user actually needs it.

On that note, I wonder what I ought to trim from Tallymander.

I know you have a lot on your mind lately, what with your bank purchases and the whole of the finance industry falling apart. Still, I’d like to inspire your engineers to embark upon a simple, fun skunkworks project.

You may remember cashing in the iPhone App Store craze with your free BofA app this summer. You did promise to make it less ugly. You haven’t followed through yet.

Now, we’re all busy and I sympathize. Making a nice app is hard. So I did the hard part and designed a UI for you. It’s a gift. Repay me by implementing it and sparing us all the hideous orgy of Times New Roman that is your existing iPhone UI.

Remember, I’ve done the heavy lifting. This isn’t hard. You don’t even need to do it in Cocoa. You can keep using the WebKit display your app currently uses and implement my design in John Gruber’s “shit sandwich.”

Now, the existing home screen is okay.

It’s when we actually want to get down to some banking that things go downhill:

Wow. That’s a lot of Times. Ugly, small, hard to read. Fix it like this:

Next, let’s get logged in:

Blegh. Let’s get a tab bar going. Not just because tab bars are handy, which they are, but because making the user tap an area as tiny as those menu links is just cruel to iPhone users:

There we are. The tab buttons are much easier to strike with a fingertip — less time wasted by hitting the wrong selection. We’ll start the user at the accounts breakdown, since your balance is almost always the info you want first. Next, let’s check out account detail:

Painful. Let’s better group the transaction information and use some visual cues to explain individual entries:

Not so hard. You already use those icons for desktop online banking. Now let’s transfer funds:

Making the user step through multiple screens for a single task sucks, especially in 2008. Let’s streamline this:

Better! The user doesn’t lose track of what’s going on.

Nothing crazy, here, just some simple suggestions based on existing iPhone UI conventions. I hope this helps you guys.

I built these mockups using the excellent iPhone UI PSD file. The payroll information above is speculative. I do not work for Apple. Yet.

Know why?

No one is going to let you get away with it anymore.

Today, whether you’re an individual or a large business, you need to treat people exactly the way you want to be treated. Better than that, even. A force has emerged that encourages the golden rule and punishes transgressions against it better than any social or religious system previously devised.

As usual, I’m talking about the internet.

Let’s step back in time to January of this year. Mass Effect, one of the best and most successful gaming titles of 2007, trickled back out into the awareness of ignorant people who don’t actually play video games. This, of course, means that Fox News had to get a piece of this action.

To discuss Mass Effect, they invited pop psychologist Cooper Lawrence to appear on-air. She villified the game, indicating that its overt sexuality would train boys to view women as sexual objects.

The only problem is that Mass Effect doesn’t contain any overt sexual themes or even nudity. The game includes an optional side-plot that culminates in a less-than-racy sexual encounter. That didn’t stop Cooper from running her mouth. Speaking after the appearance, Cooper said,

Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography. But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.

Oops.

But it was too late. I’ve written before about how passionate constituencies carry powerful messages online. There is perhaps no more passionate a group than those who play video games. Long misunderstood and unfairly stereotyped for their interests, gamers have built vast communities for themselves on the internet. Trumpeting the call to battle against Cooper Lawrence, the gamer response was swift, vicious and very public.

Hundreds of negative reviews poured into the Amazon page for her latest book. Discussion forums, news aggregators like Digg, and every tech-savvy blog under the sun buzzed with indignation. This was, gamers felt, an unjustified attack on a supremely talented game developer who had provided tens of millions of hours of enjoyment to so many.

Cooper recanted and expressed regret for her remarks. Shitstorm over.

Yet there are longer lasting effects. Nearly half a year later, scars still cover Cooper’s online presence.

Although hundreds of obviously abusive 1-star reviews were purged by Amazon, 68 still remain on her book’s page. Amazon is as much a product research tool as it is a sales channel. Cooper has lost countless opportunities to sell her book thanks to this gaffe.

The more telling after effects come when searching “cooper lawrence” on Google. Her third search result is the above Game Politics article that dryly reports that Cooper Lawrence is someone who is not too particular about speaking without first knowing her facts. She says so herself. Below that is a charmingly-titled YouTube video, Cooper Lawrence is a Bitch. Counting her Amazon book, her first page of search results contains seven negative entries. That first search engine impression is 70% negative.

Think about that.

Now, being a firebrand and stirring up controversy thanks to genuine, well-considered opinions can be good for one’s career. There’s plenty of negative response that can come from that online. That’s not what we’re talking about here. This is someone being very publicly and brazenly ignorant, pretending to be an authority and then getting caught without a fact to stand on. That hurts your credibility, which hurts your ability to sell yourself.

Mass Effect is a good game and a proud achievement. Over a hundred people worked very long hours for a very long time to ship it. Millions more people bought it and loved it and felt a debt of gratitude to the developers whose toil had so enriched their lives. Then Cooper Lawrence showed up and very publicly slurred it.

And she’ll never do it again.

If you do things that are unkind to others and you do them publicly, just remember that the internet is watching.

It never forgets.

1. Bona fide help wanted ads, with cash in trade of services
2. Value-for-value trades, like unpaid modeling where the photographer will give the model a DVD-R full of pictures from the shoot
3. Scam/spam posts
4. Wanted: talented individual I can fuck over

Number 4 posts enrage me a great deal. Let’s look at one.

Character Artist

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Reply to: see below
Date: 2008-02-01, 6:22PM EST
I am looking for someone to create me a 3D Character of a virtual human/avatar. The character is a woman age 18-21… I want this character to be shown in several different outfits…And I am hoping to find someone that knows how to draw the character in several different positions to animate walking.Please email me for further details, I have some examples of what I am looking for.. I will be glad to send those pics to you. This is a position for fun, a student who is just looking to gain experience.. I will put your name in my credits, and link to you.. if possible.Thanx! DanielleDanielle_Nicolle@hotmail.com

Let’s break this down. I am going to begin by translating it.

“I have very specific requirements for a highly-detailed, advanced-level computer animation project. Instead of paying you for your work, I will provide you with recognition within the tiny sphere that will be exposed to this project. I value your skills enough to give you credit for them, but not enough to pay you for them.”

Now, to be fair, there is plenty of work that creative or technical people sink dozens of hours into for fun rather than for pay. What these projects have in common, though, is that they almost always spring from personal inspiration and motivation. Working with a client for no pay isn’t fun — it’s a pain in the ass. Someone interested in sharpening their chops is much better off following their own muses.

This is just one of hundreds. I see it for gigs in photography, computer repair, web design, writing and plenty of others. Sometimes they get generous, though, and offer a few bucks:

Motion Graphic Needed

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Reply to: gigs-536221998@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-01-11, 8:23PM ESTStartup company seeks a motion graphic (animated logo + tagline) for website. It will be the primary graphic on the homepage of the site.The total animation time will not be long (probably 15 sec or less) and the output file will be either a flash file or a flash movie file.The only downside is I don’t have much to offer as cash is minimal right now.This is a good project for a student or someone looking for a quick gig.Those interested should send me an email with at least 1-2 samples of animated logos or similar.

• Location: Orlando, FL
• it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
• Compensation: $25

You know what, dude? You can’t afford motion graphics. Any sort of reasonable designer isn’t even going to plug in his tablet for $25, much less do the dozen hours worth of consultation and work it’ll take to turn this out. Let’s be ridiculously conservative here and say that it takes only five hours, including consultation and revisions. Designer, who has unique job skills and probably a college education, is making $5 an hour, less than minimum wage.

Homie could go and work at McDonald’s for an afternoon and get a better deal.

This one is my favorite:

Needed: Web & Photo Person!

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Reply to: mark@s31national.com
Date: 2008-01-22, 11:01AM ESTWe are looking for someone to expand and upgrade our website as well as work with various photo editing programs. We do events and need photos uploaded for sale and viewing. The project will be ongoing and you will be able to grow with us… We are noT looking for someone looking to score a huge payoff or a corporate way of thinking. If we did we would hire a company. We want to give a newcomer a chance to grow with a company that is fun and flexible. If you have mad skills and like getting outside now and then for a change…let us know.

• Location: Orlando
• it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
• Compensation: no pay

I don’t even know where to start with that one. I mean, clearly, anyone who wants to get paid for their talents is some sort of icky suit, right?

It’s not unique to craigslist, either. People with technology talents are constantly set upon by vultures who think that credits or a link back are fair compensation for hours or days of work. My suspicion is that the people who expect this kind of trade have no idea the sort of work that goes into learning and discharging the skills they’re asking for.

Yet, even people who should be savvy fall prey to this. A couple of years ago, when I was just out of college, Ramit Sethi reached out to me across the interwebs and offered me a remote internship with his startup, PBwiki. Sounded pretty sweet, I thought. Then I asked him about the pay. He gave me the classic line about it being unpaid at the start, but hinted at the possibility of paid opportunities down the road. This is akin to a philanderer telling one of his mistresses that at some point in the future, he’ll leave his wife for her. It sounds very compelling but very rarely is it actually true. More problematic is that once you and your employer agree that your value is $0 an hour, it’s very difficult to move your payscale into the appropriate range.

I had just started my career and had a job that paid well, so didn’t take the offer. Still, it took me a year to get used to being compensated for my talents before I could look back and see the offer for what it was: insulting. These days, Ramit is a self-styled personal finance blogger. Hopefully he advises people to sink their time into work that actually pays. Update 2/4/08: See Ramit’s comment and my response below.

To be sure, there are times where working for free can be an incredible opportunity. Working for the White House, Conde Nast, Playboy, Google or other luminary organizations is a privilege early in one’s career. But these guys aren’t Hugh Hefner or Josh Lyman looking for talent. They’re just cheapskates.

Whatever the cause, these people come off looking like assholes. You have to think that they’re getting no responses at all or the work they’re getting is shockingly awful. Word of advice, kids: next time you ask someone to do hours of work for you, ask yourself how much you would honestly expect to be paid for the same time commitment. Then you should probably double it, because if you can’t do it yourself you’re probably asking for a rare commodity.

Only you can stop yourself from looking like a dick when you go in search of good help.

Somehow it seems that the world of entertainment thinks that the above advice applies to emerging distribution methods that take advantage of the internet. No matter how many times they learn their lesson the hard way, the entertainment industry continues to screw itself.

As I write this, millions of dollars circle the drain as countless film and television projects are shuttered. Below the line crew, everyone from the boom operator to the guy who delivers scripts and checks to fancy offices, are being laid off and sent home with little hope of paying the bills. Just beyond the horizon, ad revenues threaten to evaporate as hit shows won’t be around to attract viewers to their TV screens. Hollywood today faces a work stoppage of staggering proportions. The ’88 strike was estimated to cost in excess of $500 million, and the entertainment pie was much smaller 20 years ago. There are a lot of people in a lot of pain. But it has to happen.

We’re here because once again the suits decided that if they just ignored it long enough, technology would cease to vex them. The over-arching theme of the WGA strike concerns compensation for work distributed online and through DVD.

Let’s review: entertainment reaches a crossroads with technology. Entertainment closes their eyes and prays they don’t need to act. Entertainment gets screwed.

I confess that the simmering core of iconoclasm lurking within me delights at seeing this pattern repeated with such regularity. This time, though, there’s more than just a light trimming off of some prick record executive’s expense account. This time we’re seeing real, honest, hard-working guys losing their shirts because of politics that happen well outside their world.

Creative destruction at its finest, I suppose. The bright side of this is that as more of this industry crumbles, the organizations that fall out of the other end will be smarter, leaner, better and brighter than any of the lumbering dinosaurs that plague us today. The democratization of idea distribution heralded by the internet and associated technologies is going to be the most liberating advent since the invention of the printing press. As billions of dollars in wasted budgets for crappy movies and failed TV shows have proven, a bunch of isolated, fat, old men don’t have any business deciding what makes you and I smile. They have no competence to determine what will make us laugh and cry. They are out of their depth to predict what will inspire us.

My rhetoric may sound more idealistic than I am usually wont to indulge, but make no mistake: my intentions are capitalist. Exploding artificial barriers to entry gives us a more stable, vibrant and diverse market. Cutting the head off this doddering old snake means many more people can get an audience and get paid. The idea marketplace should be a meritocracy, not a race to see who can bottle up the most exclusive resources and use them to turn out garbage.

Change is always born in pain. If it means humanity can avoid another Stealth (2005), that’s got to be worth something.