Simplicity Rules

Adam DuVander on keeping it simple

Friendly marriage

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Jon on Mustache Day 2005
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.

It’s a foreign fish, at least

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“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!

Political cartoons as sales pitches

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Website delivering money
I can’t decide whether this image is a brilliant boiling down of what the web can be for business or if it is purely apocalyptical. At the very least, it makes it’s point clear, like a political cartoon.

To me, the overly-obvious labels in political cartoons are funnier than the jokes themselves. The combination of clear-cut rhetoric with often passive-aggressive commentary presents a dichotomy that, like this image, is at once smart and contrived, simple and complex.

Content thievery, screen scraping, and the cost of free

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Marketing Sherpa has some great case studies of people doing business on the web. Recently they’ve noticed a lot of people stealing their content. Unfortunately, new technology has made it really simple.

Both of my major clients, BestPlaces and Who2 have also had their content pilfered, almost never with attribution. Take the first sentence of any Who2 profile and run it through your favorite search engine. Most of the results (no pictures, but still may not be safe for work) are whole copies. The same is true of BestPlaces.

And it doesn’t take much to automate this process of screen-scraping. With so much information available for free on the internet, it’s easy to imagine the thieves might not even think it is wrong. I even understand the thought that there isn’t much difference between us giving it away for free and them giving it away for free. I don’t agree, but I do understand.

For smalltime sites, there is no real recourse. Even with a service like CopyScape, it would take too much time to contact the thieves directly. Add to that the fact that some of the results are official partners who pay money or otherwise have been given the right to use the content and the problem of protecting one’s intellectual property becomes all the more time-consuming. We do not have the ability to automate the legal process the way a content thief can. It would be extremely embarrassing to send a cease and desist to a partner.

So far, the answer has been to maintain some elements that are just not copyable (or at least make less sense to copy). At BestPlaces, we have the comparisons between places, as well as a few program-driven tools. Who2 has links between profiles, as well as fun connections between famous people in the form of “loops.”

Basically, my approach to content thievery has been similar to my karmic laissez-faire search engine optimization beliefs: put good, original stuff out there and people will find you.