Technology and design in plain language.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to sing the praise of Dropbox. In fact, a passionate and loyal fan base is part of why Dropbox has the breakout success it does today. I guess I’d consider myself part of that loyal fan base, but only because I’ve used it and discovered just how much it has made my life easier.

In addition to a Mac desktop and laptop at home, I have laptop at work and my wife and I both have iPhones. It became increasingly apparent that I needed some kind of syncing solution. I began by trying MobileMe.

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Last year, Gawker Media took a big step in stemming the tide of bad commenters on their media properties by introducing tiered commenting.

Nieman Journalism Lab provides a thorough write-up of their experiment. From the article:

“In essence, Gawker’s ‘class system’ means unknown commenters get stuck behind a ‘show all discussions’ link few users will click. What most readers will see are only the musings of trusted commenters and the few comments from the riff-raff that either Gawker staff or trusted commenters have decided to promote.”

Tom Plunkett, Gawker Media’s CTO posted a chart of the comment growth on his site. Notice the immediate dropoff in comments after the new implementation followed by a powerful rebound.

Well, it’s official.

After nearly five years of freelance web design, I’ve been recruited to join the staff of Rainbow Media (Rainbow owns several large entertainment brands like AMC, IFC Films, WEtv and the Sundance Channel).

Starting March 8th, I’ll be the Director of Product Development at Rainbow Media, responsible both for exploring new Internet technologies to promote the various brands as well as providing support for existing platforms already in use. I’ll be working part of the week from home and the rest of the time out of their New York City offices.

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When I wake my computer in the morning, my inbox is full of messages and notifications from social networking sites. I work through these quickly, hoping to begin the day with a clean slate. Then come the instant messages: friendly hellos, work requests, miscellaneous and sometimes frivolous comments about the day. With a little discipline, I’m able to ignore these for now; but I have a harder time with the telephone. Most calls require full attention, bringing other work to an abrupt halt. And while I’m on the telephone, the messages and comments and requests are piling up in the other channels. The miracle of instantly connecting with people all over the world from my living room is lost in the sheer volume of conversations this produces.

There’s no doubt this impacts my productivity; but the greatest victim of this mental fragmentation is my writing.

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This here’s the story of how I voided my warranty and fixed an iPhone 3G.

A few weeks ago my wife dropped her barely a few months old iPhone 3G on the kitchen floor and broke not only the glass digitizer on the front but also the LCD screen.

We took it to an Apple store and an AT&T store and both places gave us a chuckle and “man, that sucks”. Our friends at the AT&T store told us it would cost $199 just to replace the glass and that was only if we had Apple care. Since we didn’t have Apple care on her phone, they told us they wouldn’t even touch it.

Fortunately, not longer after that happened, I stumbled across Jason Beaird’s 3G Surgery post and got all inspired-like.

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For reasons that I can neither understand nor explain, it seems that a good number of people are interested in what I have to say—I just recently crossed the 900 follower mark on Twitter.

Numbers don’t mean that much to me. I’d be writing in much the same way whether I had 9 followers or 9 million followers. The numbers only hold significance to me when I think about you, the individual, the living, breathing person reading these words. I’m really humbled that number.

So I’m proposing a celebration that involves you: I will send my 1000th follower a new, hardcover edition of the Essays of E. B. White.

And have no fear, current followers, I have something for you, too. When we cross the 1000 mark, I’m going to give away 4 like-new paperback copies of Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury to 4 randomly selected current followers.

These books and authors have been some of the most influential in my own life, and I’m hoping they can bring you some of the same inspiration they’ve brought to me.

You should follow @plasticmind on Twitter, or if you’re already following me, spread the word!

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I’m blogging again.

Actually, let me rephrase that: I’m writing again.

Blogging is too specific a term. It sounds like something only tech savvy individuals do, people with computers dangling from every appendage, people who type faster than they can speak. It tends to conjure a vision of sweaty-palmed folk in basements wearing pajamas. Yes, yes, I know I’m describing a caricature of myself, but at the end of the day, blogging is just plain writing, and I’ve been doing a very lousy job of writing.

Which is why I recently took the P52 challenge. For those of you not familiar with the P52 project, it’s simply a loose association of people who are promising each other that they’ll write at least one article a week in 2010. Why in the world would I promise a group of individuals—most of whom are strangers—such a time-consuming thing?

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