Simplicity Rules

I love the niche sites that take a theme and run with it.

Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers is a fun romp through pictures of men with white beards and slightly long grey hair.

As someone who helps run a similar site of windowed snapshots, View From My Window (VFMW), I think the Kenny site could only be helped by opening it up. Make it easy to add a photo, let people rate Kennys, leave comments, and have a way to share one particular Kenny.

One of the great things I’ve noticed on VFMW is how committed the users are to keeping to the theme. If someone uploads a picture that is not obviously through a window, people often ask, “where’s the window?”

Even this picture of a window above a door, which lies pretty close to the theme of the site, gets questions from users: “This picture would even work for a site named ‘view of my window,’” one commenter said.

Visitors help a site. They shape it to their collective vision, which is the point if we want them coming back.

With big-name authors in tow, Amazon has announced some micro content for a micro price. This seems like good news for micropayments. There are many definitions of micropayments. To me it means an amount of money so trivial that the credit card transaction fees prohibit one from collecting much–or any–of the payment.

If the web can figure out how to get past the fee obstacle (ex: 30 cents plus 2.9% from Paypal), micropayments could be the kind of volume smaller publishers need to make some good dough.

How are Amazon and Danielle Steel going to make money for the little guy? They won’t. However, Amazon does seem willing to accept micro content from other publishers.

Once you are accepted into the Amazon Shorts program, you are free to contribute as many pieces as you wish. We are especially interested in getting new material from you on a regular basis.

Just that Amazon is mainstreaming the concept of paying a tiny amount of money for a small article seems good for micropayments. The fact that they seem to be pocketing the entire 49 cents is moot (and temporary, I’d gauge).

The first step for micropayments to work is for someone to just do it: sell an article for 50 cents and only make 15. Once the demand is there, we’ll see those transaction fees decrease. Amazon has done us all a favor by providing the arsenal of their huge marketplace.

I used to swear by my little paper planner. For what seems like eons, I haven’t been using it. My notepad has kept my todo list and I’ve lived with emails or memory for appointments. Strangely, I’ve continued to cart my planner between work and home every day.

This week I had more than one or two time-sensitive events to remember–beyond my brain’s threshold. Today at lunch, I brought my planner with the intention of transferring appointments from my notebook.

Glancing back to the last item on my todo list from early May, I saw this item, scrawled unusually in pen:

buy pencil lead

This has fueled my desire to finally switch to a computer-based calendar. There is no reason why I should stop “plannering” only for lack of pencil lead (which I greatly prefer to pen for the li’l planner that isn’t too forgiving of mistakes or changes).

Since my laptop is a Mac, I figure I’ll use iCal. I’d love to find out about online services that might either replace iCal or sync with it. In the meantime, it will be a remarkable accomplishment just to move away from paper.

What do you use to keep track of life?

My Portland wireless internet publication and website is looking for reviews of Portland WiFi spots.

We’re collecting information that isn’t available elsewhere from the people who know. How many tabletops does this “unwired coffee shop” have? How about power outlets?

If you’re in Portland and use WiFi, find your closest WiFi spots and write a review for one or more of them. On August 26, I’ll be giving away a nifty WiFi Seeker (pictured left) that helps you find a strong signal.

I have a lot of ideas. I don’t have a lot of time. Many of my ideas are never executed, which becomes readily apparent every month or so when a domain, purchased in a fit of excitement, expires. The founder of CDBaby has a very short and to the point statement about ideas and execution that harkens back to my secrecy pondering.

AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

In short, ideas alone are worth less than the amount of cash you have in your wallet. The author gives some multipliers and a brilliant idea with no execution ends up being worth $20.

Even more interesting to me is the good living that one person can make with middle-of-the-road ideas and execution. Not that I strive for mediocrity, but a hundred grand isn’t chump change.

At the risk of seeming like a complete boozer, I love this Portland bars magazine site. It’s a great example of truly local search and I have been using it to find new haunts for a couple months.

My favorite feature is the category chooser, which allows me to select several amenities and find a bar that matches those characteristics. For example, my oft-visited downtown Happy Hour list. Recently, a new friend and fellow web geek Kyle Ritter took over the site and has made the category chooser results shareable.

Now I can send my friends direct links to preppy rock and roll joints, or point someone to the very few bars frequented by both hippies and hipsters.

A shareable URL is something I’ve mentioned before here and it is one of my Five Tips to Make Your Site Work, which is available on my company site.

Jon on Mustache Day 2005

My friend and roommate, Jon, was married this weekend. He will no longer be my roommate, but I’m more sure than ever that we’ll remain friends.

We met during his first month of college. I interviewed Jon to be a DJ for the campus radio station. What I most remember about this first meeting is how I mixed up his last name and the last name of his co-DJ. Today, “Jon Bartell” seems completely wrong.

It was not until a few years later that I got the following insight into how Jon lives his life. He was studying in Ireland and I was in the trenches of Salem, Oregon, with two other guys. We were trying to secure ourselves a house to rent. It was unnecessarily difficult for four young men to find a place to live together. Time and again, we were being turned away and it was getting disconcerting.

In one way, Jon was insullated. But in another, he was completely helpless, at the mercy of our search. And we couldn’t promise much to him. At this time, he said something along the lines of, “I’ll be living with the dream team. We will find a place and it will be awesome.” He was right. Our eventual home was, looking back, a total dump. We made that place a palace.

Jon showed the same optimism when his now wife left Portland for medical school one thousand miles away. And I know he was 100% comfortable with his choice to exchange vows on Saturday, knowing his life will be continually “awesome.”

Call it trust or faith, it will serve them well as they make decisions and move through life together. I wish Jon and Sharon the best and look forward to seeing their many accomplishments.

Ian Hay

“There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.”

Who owns the fish?

There are fifteen hints that help you narrow down to the one possibility. I’m no logic genius and this took me about forty-five minutes, so I tend to question the idea that only one in fifty people can solve this puzzle. So, give it a try!