This was originally written for Jay Maisel’s facebook page. It was one of many responses on the page but while I was writing, the page was deleted and all the other responses are now gone. 

Dear Jay Maisel,

I read a pretty disheartening post this morning about what seemed like a copyright troll who sued another artist for modifying his work. I googled and found out that it was you Jay—Jay Maisel—the ‘artist’ who lives in the Germania Bank Building.

I walk by this building frequently and like most others—it’s clear that it could easily be sold for tens of millions of dollars. I was sad to hear that this is what you’re doing in the twilight of your career. A friend of mine interviewed you and made a documentary about your work and life in the building a couple years ago—I remember being intrigued and impressed. You seemed to have an old school NYC ebullience and artistic integrity that I appreciated and aspired to. I would often mention your work and life in the building to friends when I would walk by your home—I loved the story. There was something inventive and soulful about it that seemed to capture a lot of what was great about working as an artist in NYC.

I no longer have an ability to tell that story. I’d now consider it a neighborhood improvement if the Germania Bank Building was demolished and replaced by Scarano Luxury Condos and a Shake Shack. Either that or new tenants who understand that this is not what artists do. You deleted your facebook page so it’s clear that these comments are having an effect on you and I hope you can, at the very least, address them publicly. You are disappointing so many people by doing this and you don’t need to. Make amends. Give back the money. This isn’t worth 32k.

-cody

A new york neighbor and admirer of your work.

5:34 pm  •  23 June 2011  •  2 notes  •  View comments

Posted originally at Nerd Collider.

This morning Nieman Lab announced a new encyclopedia project. I’ve heard a lot of people talk over the past few years about building a “CrunchBase for News” and this is certainly the farthest I’ve seen anyone come. Saying that though, if Nieman is serious about pulling this off there are some big crimson flags. 

5 Immediate Suggestions

1.) Inline Edits

The first thing I did when I clicked on the encyclopedia was try to edit. I was pretty surprised to find that there wasn’t an edit button on each article and then I face palmed when I found this: http://bit.ly/iRgVyu 

This is…

a.) Patronizing.
You’re telling your users that in order to contribute to an encyclopedia on ‘The Future of News’ they need to drop their thoughts into a magic suggestion box? Really? It’s fine to want to have more control over entires but this is the kind of feedback system usually reserved for an airline.

b.) A waste of time for the editor. 
TechCrunch has developed and updated CrunchBase for many years now. One of the reasons they have inline editing is because it significantly speeds the process of approving small edits and new entries. 

2.) Make All Edits and Suggested Edits Visible

Right now the site feels like a loose collection of Mark Coddington articles where all the comments are hidden and it’s not clear why (or how many times) an article has been updated. Displaying pending inline edits will generate more trust. 

3.) Embrace Less Complete Entries

I asked Mark on twitter how they decide what becomes a new entry and he said it’s the lab’s editorial decision—this resulted in another face palm. Do not make having an entry prestigious, it is not worth the time. Let a thousand flowers bloom and create a system that lets you mark entries that are less complete as so. You’re putting together an industry database not an invite list for News Foo.

4.) Design the site as a platform not an advertisement for Nieman Lab

It’s clear that work went into making the site look pleasant but the look is awkward for an encyclopedia. The branding on the page is over 300 pixels and dominates each entry, you could easily pull it off in a single row and dedicate the rest of attention to content. 

5.) Tags over Categories

Online, Magazines, Tech Companies, and Newspapers are unhelpful distinctions for organizing the database as a company like The New York Times fits into literally every single one of those categories. Tags will give you more flexibility in sorting and will make it easier to add new entries.

5:38 pm  •  18 May 2011  •  1 note  •  View comments

New from Nerd Collider.

5:27 pm  •  18 May 2011  •  View comments

soupsoup:

Do The Pulitzers Need a Competitor?

Andy Carvin was robbed.

via Nerd Collider

12:40 pm  •  27 April 2011  •  13 notes  •  View comments

“

They know everything that everybody else already knows and they’re probably going to come up with the same thoughts. When you go deep on anything, you start to find nuances that other people don’t know. And it’s those nuances that really start to help you open black boxes and say, “Wait a second, can we think about it this way?”

For example, it turns out that if you use material other than silicon crystals you can completely change the behavior of a computer chip, but we don’t open that black box anymore because we’re so stuck on the engineering of chips. Or have you ever thought about connecting tissue specialists with prosthetics robotics? There’s a kind of alchemy that goes on.

”

—

- Joi Ito via Wired

Joi is the new director of MIT Media Lab. I thought this was an elegant way to describe the Strength of Weak Ties.

1:29 am  •  27 April 2011  •  View comments

“Journalism is already a field so stuffed with awards it is sometimes hard to imagine where the judges and recipients find time for anything other than judging, attending and receiving awards. The Pulitzers have the advantage of being a long narrative arc through which one can see the development and the garlanding of the best in American journalism, and the disadvantage that, by virtue of being the most recognised and prestigious awards, they attract disproprotionate discontent.”

—

- emily bell via Nerd Collider

Director of Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia

12:20 am  •  27 April 2011  •  2 notes  •  View comments

This saturday I experienced ‘Young Media Weekend’ and I’m still processing how surreal the event felt. For those that haven’t heard about it, Young Media Weekend (#YMW) is a panel/party organized by NYU Local designed to bring aspiring media kids from around the east coast to NYC for a few days to talk to each other and network with people who could hire them. The panel Annie Werner and Charlie Eisenhood were able to line up was outstanding, Reuters, Gawker, NYMag Vulture, Think Progress, Jezebel, Salon, and The New York Observer were all represented. The marketing for the event was awesome, they packed a lecture hall. The party was at a swanky overpriced hotel bar but they even managed to pull off a sponsorship so beer was not atrociously priced.

In between talking to excited freshman about how to angle their Tumblr’s and watching the national section throw beers back with Matt Yglesias on a hotel terrace, I couldn’t help but think about the beginning of NYU Local and how the culture around blogging has matured in the past three years. So, for the sake of a.) imparting historic knowledge to freshman NYU Local staff and b.) illustrating just how long it takes to get things right, I did some introspective googling and pulled up a few articles.

NYU Local Ancient History 101 - First Day

Remember this puppy? Lily Q, Ned Resnikoff and Joe Coscarelli know about this puppy. 

The day we launched Gawker accused NYU Local of plagiarism. They eventually retracted the word ‘plagiarism’ (it was due to CMS formatting) but the damage was done and our entrance to NYU was to the tune of these awesome comments:

“Look, I’m an NYU alum (Grad school from the MK and Ashley Daze), and all I have to say is there is nothing worse than a bunch of trust-fundy, navel-gazing, legacy NYU students writing about “issues”. Can we please get a DNS attack on this waste of bandwidth and memonry, like pronto?”

“I go to a school with twice the enrollment of NYU (and a better journalism school), and I know that WE don’t have enough news to even attempt to fill a 24-hour news blog, so I have no idea how these idiots think they do.”

“I doubt there’s enough news about NYU to sustain a 24-hour cycle, and I don’t see what this is doing that the WSN isn’t. Also, hardly anyone at NYU actually reads the WSN, I don’t see who’s going to read this. But it’s good resume padding, right?”

Even our peers wanted to stab us. Jessica Roy (who was recruited by Ned in the comment section and went on to become EIC) posted the following:

A self-important team of NYU journalism students is launching NYU Local, a “snarky” alternative to the never-read Washington Square News. The site will keep up-to-date on happenings around campus, and seeks to “make the NYU voice heard and recognized in the city for what it is: smart, witty, and even snarky.”  

Say it with me now: LOL!

Reaction from the school newspaper was consistent. 

“Adam Playford (who was WSN’s editor at the time) never seemed to truly acknowledge NYU Local as legitimate competition, and none of the rest of us really saw it that way, either. We just figured this Crazy, Gawker Wannabe, NYU Blog Experiment would never fully gain traction and fail.”

So it was painful and over the past few years a number of people have poured ungodly amounts of work into the site but as the kids say now… #swag:

12:20 am  •  11 April 2011  •  28 notes  •  View comments

nerdcollider:

In preparation for his book Where Do Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson spent five years studying the environments that lead to unusual rates of innovation. He ended up detailing seven attributes in his book, but if there was a prevailing theme through his research, it was that good ideas don’t…

6:21 pm  •  28 March 2011  •  9 notes  •  View comments

I really wanted to hate Color. I really did. A pre-launch startup raising 41 million dollars for a consumer web iPhone picture app (not a satellite manufacturer) makes me want to vomit. But after a night of using Color—I’m intrigued. In the context of them raising 41 million dollars, Color is one of the most ingenious and ambitious iPhone apps I’ve seen in a long time. There’s a lot I could go into and I lot I’m waiting to see but I want to talk about one use case.

I’ve been living in a Bushwick, Brooklyn apartment building for about 6 months and my contact with almost all of my neighbors has been essentially a head nod now and then when we’re walking up the staircase. I opened up ‘Color’ late tonight after already playing on it with my roommates and I notice that there are other pictures there. At first I thought, oh funny, my roommates are already using it then I realize that it’s actually my neighbor posting a picture. This is hilarious because a.) I didn’t think any of my neighbors in Bushwick read TechCrunch b.) this is a weird chance to say hello to someone nearby who I’ve always meant to be more friendly too (everyone wants to be on good terms with their neighbors). So I did. This is what it looked like:

So that was awesome. This dinky little app effectively brokered an introduction that was 6 months in the making. And more so, I realized that because all of the pictures are public, my neighbor was able to see this:

He gets a very weird peek into our apartment and what we’re like. This is creepy and could actually lend itself to some really fucked up situations but it’s also kind of amazing. There’s a lot of ways this could go wrong and there is a lot of awkwardness in the fundamentals of their product but this applied to a global scale is fascinating. I’d like to know a lot more about their leadership and the vision for the platform. 

4:08 am  •  24 March 2011  •  View comments

A week ago, I signed a lease for an apartment in Bushwick that was formally a half way house—a place where people who used to be addicted to heroin go to ‘sober up’. After months of commuting to work together, Kate Ray and I are moving in together to work on kommons.com. We are thrilled to finally have a space to live and work but we’d also like to help others who are in similar positions with their startups. Over the course of the next few months it is our plan to turn the apartment back into a Half Way House—this time in a different form.

Background on The Apartment

The usual image of a half way house is that of a dilapidated under-funded building—this place is a little different.  979 Willoughby, was funded as a luxury condo development for an ‘up and coming’ neighborhood, the apartment in question is a soaring 3 floor penthouse with 4 bedrooms and terraces.

It’s a dream apartment but by the time it went on the market, the recession was in full force and they couldn’t move the units. So, instead of slashing the prices, the owner tried to turn it into a for-profit Half Way House. The neighborhood then flipped and harassed the owner to the point where he recently ended the program. That’s why the place is more affordable. 

Why We Want to Turn it Back into a Half Way House

One of the constraints Kate and I ran into when we graduated and decided to startup in NYC was space. Not co-working space, there are a lot of great projects developing in that area—see General Assembly/New Work City/Makery—but living space. I’ve blogged about this before but In Silicon Valley you can talk someone into loaning you a garage and a couch for a few months but unless you’re BFF’s with Jay-Z, you can’t do that here. If you have a few thousand dollars saved and want to do a company in NYC, you have two options:

1.) Do your company part-time. A few thousand dollars is likely not enough to sustain your current living situation for more than a month.

2.) Budget Every Aspect of Your Life. If you want to pay around $500 a month in rent, there are places in NYC that are available deep in Brooklyn or Harlem. They provide shelter for cheap but the tradeoff is that by living so far away you miss out on many of the reasons you are living in NYC in the first place. The NYTM looks different when it takes you an hour to get there by subway.

Since graduation, Kate and I have chosen option two. We both decided that taking part time jobs would be immensely distracting and that it would be worth it to just be poor. So we ended our leases and our plan was to each do cheap sublets until Christmas but after moving twice in 30 days we realized that the energy consumed in moving and commuting to see each other was driving us crazy and ultimately not worth the amount saved in rent. We searched for another option, something in-between working a part-time job to stay afloat and living in poverty at the expense of missing a lot of NYC. We lucked out and found what we think is a third option that could also help others in a similar position, a startup Half Way House in Brooklyn. 

New York City has historically been home to aspiring artists of every form willing to exchange security for time to work on their craft. This is the same idea, except instead of a group of painters or thespians, it’s people in tech.  

Artists Lofts vs. Tech Lofts

There is a reason we didn’t just get an apartment in the McKibbin Lofts, coders are different from painters or thespians—they thrive in a different environment. There are a lot of distinctions but these are a couple of the biggest ones required in making a startup living space: 

1.) Controlled Environment. One of the most helpful things Kate and I found when working on kommons is to divide days into ‘dev’ or ‘meeting’. Writing software takes focus but it also takes hours to settle into a kind of ‘flow state’— our best dev almost always comes on days that are completely uninterrupted. The typical artist loft is not ideal for this type of workflow. This is especially true at places like McKibbin Lofts where many of the residents sustain themselves by working odd days at restaurants   and it’s not uncommon to have noise band practice at 1 am. 

2.) Light and Nature. When you spend 14 hours of your day sitting in a single place staring at an LCD screen your body craves light and nature. Kate and I have both tried coding in places that are dark and it usually isn’t more than an hour before we want to stab our eyes with the end of a macbook pro cord.  Our space doesn’t have a park outside it’s window but it has an insane amount of light and a beautiful urban view.  

3.) Access to Manhattan. Because the M train is now on the orange line, we can now get to the city in around 20 minutes and take the train directly to West 4th street or Bryant Park. When we lived an hour from the city, we skipped a lot of great events and avoided meetings because it was just too time consuming to get to them. It’s important to sometimes be reclusive and lock yourself in a space and code, but you are here because of the brilliant people who already live in the city. 

At the moment, it is just Kate and I living here with two friends. The place will only be able to have 4-6 people living here at any given time but we see it as a model that could be replicated in similar apartments.

We like this metaphor of a Half Way House because it relates to the transitional feeling an entrepreneur has to their home but we also like it because it ties into a bigger theme about NYC. A half way house is a place to go when you have acknowledged that there is no way to preserve an addiction and it’s time to re-enter a culture without this addiction. If one thing is clear about NYC, the companies that have made the city iconic, The New York Times, News Corp, Condé Nast, Miramax, are all addicted to something that is killing them. Whether it’s advertising revenue that will never return or fundamental incompatibilities with the internet, many of the people who work at these companies have seen the numbers and know they are in trouble but feel absolutely powerless to do anything about it. They can either hope someone at their company will figure it out or quit their job and figure it out themselves. The latter is a much more difficult leap to make—we want to make it easier. 

Or at least that’s the idea. This is an experiment, we’ll be tumbling’ about how it goes here: nywayhouse.tumblr.com

2:43 pm  •  6 September 2010  •  40 notes  •  View comments