TechCrunch40 puts the “social” in social media

A web entrepreneur writes:

16. The homeless situation in San Francisco is crazy. Like mad crazy. Like “what are you people thinking?!?!”… I was hit up aggressively by 10 folks in under ten minutes outside the Cliff Hotel by Union Square the other day. San Francisco has got to lock this problem down.
17. Driving around San Francisco at 1AM is like a scene from Night of the Living Dead. I was weaving around mobs of homeless, drunk, and hipsters who at one point I feared would surround the SUV screaming “brains!!!!!” and turn the thing over. Again, San Francisco WTF?!?! How do you people live here? What’s the crime like? All this coming from a New Yorker who’s has been mugged three times (all unsecessful thank you very much–represent).

But luckily comments are enabled (if only for 24 hours) and the next day everything has sorted itself out:

1. In my last message about the zombie/hipster/homeless problem someone gave me a tip which has restored my faith in power of blogging: “One thing I’ve found in SF is that the homeless don’t walk up the steep SF hills, which is why I live on a hill in North Beach. They tend to reside in flatter areas with more people, like in the Mission.”

I’d heard that Romero’s otherwise poor “Land of the Dead” was a satire, but I didn’t realize they’d moved the setting from Pittsburgh, PA to San Francisco…

At least 15% of the US population are “off the network”, as the latest Pew/Internet report puts it. According to official figures, 47 million, or 15% of the population, have no health insurance; and more than 36 million live in poverty.

Let’s hope next time the zombies find an SUV that actually has brains in it.

Nielsen and Spolsky on Vista and Office 2007

Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox column has a brief discussion (Tab usability guidelines, point 9) of upper vs title vs sentence case, and I’m pleased to see that:

“Microsoft’s Vista User Experience guidelines recommend sentence case (in which you capitalize only the first character of the first word)…

In fact, Microsoft’s UE guidelines aren’t half bad (shame about the OS). And, of course, Microsoft should make it easier for Joel Spolsky to open their boxes:

“A box that many people can’t figure out how to open without a Google search is an unusually pathetic failure of design. As the line goes from Billy Madison: ‘I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.’”

Maybe then the future will turn out OK. Believe.

Tom Coates reveals authentic version of Peter Saville sticker

For the last couple of weeks there’s been a lot of chatter about Tom Coates’s authenticity shtick:

“There has to be one place in your life where you’re absolutely resolutely not for sale. For me, that place is my personal site, the representation of me online.”

Hear that crackle of vintage vinyl on the 48-track recording? Nice effect, isn’t it?

What’s really surprising about the “super spat” is that anyone at all buys Coates’s notion that bloggers are somehow authentic, while PR is fake.

Get real: every “representation of me online” is mediated, public and more or less carefully planned (the way PR campaigns are planned).

Social networks — blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, you name it — are where you learn how to present yourself, shape your profile and market your brand (w/thanks to Mercedes Bunz).

Nice photo, though — and nothing to do, surely, with the sticker that Peter Saville did for “Creative Review” way back in January — dead authentic.

The copywriter’s birthday card…

has prompted some great comments too. I still feel a sans serif font would have worked better for the header — as it is, it feels a bit too Helmut Krone, if you see what I mean…

The web as a piece of plumbing (where’s Harry Tuttle when you need him?)

When exactly did the web — a new medium that is non-linear and interactive and combines text, (moving) image and sound — turn into a delivery channel for all the old linear, passive media — the press, TV and radio?