Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Perhaps Microsoft should buy Yahoo! They have something in common: they both try to do many things, and too many of them are second rate.

It’s the Quality vs. Quantity problem. Apple learned its lessons long ago when it came out with too many products either not ready for the market, or the market not ready for them, such as the Lisa (right) or the early PDA, the Newton. These items suffered from being ahead of their times. Yahoo!’s problems stem from scattering their energies in too many directions. Apple’s and Google’s successes stem from excelling with the one market they are competing in.

A few examples of Yahoo! missteps and bad design:

1. Online Advertising: I’ve tried Yahoo!’s online ad program, Overture or Yahoo! Publisher Network, which they bought to compete with Google’s AdSense. The user interface for designing ads was not as thorough as Google’s, the diversity of the contextual ads presented on web pages was poor and often irrelevant to the context of the page, and the payout rate was not as good as Google’s. Eventually I deleted all my Yahoo! ads, using Google’s AdSense entirely. What does it tell you when one of Yahoo’s own writers, TechieDiva’s personal site uses Google and other’s ad programs, and not theirs?
2. Account Profiles: I’ve tried many times in the past few months to update my various public profiles. A few years ago they worked, and I had images and info linked to each profile. Out of the blue, Yahoo! switched to a trendy Anime-like design of Ken and Barbie Flash based cut-out characters as choices, and threw out my old image links. Now when I attempt to update or change the images, the system hangs and times out, or gives me a message that they are not ready to accept profile images at this time. Come on Yahoo! dudes! This is basic social networking 101, or website 2.0, I should say.
3. Hanging Links: My most frequent use of Yahoo is Yahoo!Finance. During the tech bubble, Yahoo’s mix of financial charts, stock information and message boards made for an exciting mix. In the past year, Yahoo!Finance has changed their message boards. For a long time, when you navigated to a board, you lost the navigation menu of the stock and experienced difficulty returning to it. The same for their new beta charts. I wrote toYahoo! about it, and I see navigation is now back to normal on the message boards. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
4. Yahoo!Mail: I can give credit to Yahoo that its e-mail works, but it is an ugly mess, full of advertising sidebars, spam from Yahoo!Messenger, and an extremely slow response time for scrolling and loading messages. I recently gave up and deleted all my Yahoo inbox messages just to try and make it more usable.
5. Clutter: The result of trying to be all things for all people is a massive clutter of cramped, competing stuff on main portal entries My Yahoo! page and Yahoo! Home page. Remember the original Yahoo! before all the sneaky slide on ads, when it was just a directory of many categorized web sites, and you could submit yours or others? Very Web 2.0, simple text hyperlinks, and the formula that Yahoo! grew from. Google’s search is still a clean, plain page, mostly text, with some occasional decoration, and it gives the user a focused, reliable experience. Who willingly navigates to a desktop traffic jam?

So here’s my own $0.02 plus, and I have suggestions and solutions for these and other usability problems. I can help Yahoo! clean house, simply for a few left over Semel dollars.

A truly moving and inspiring speech, and fun too.

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This video tune was performed at the first 2007 TechCrunch Crunchies: “The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.”

I can now say that I have worked at two Silicon Valley start-ups and witnessed the hype and the reality. It is a tough way to prototype and serendipity should never be expected.

The Internet and its millions of searching eyeballs is full of surprises. Today I received an e-mail from a publisher requesting permission to use an image Social Networking developed for this blog in a previous article, Hobnobbery 3.0.

My image will appear in their book, The Emergence of the Relationship Economy. The image (left) shows up on Google “social networking” image searches, and it’s an indicator of a visual theme enjoying some success. They also pitched the idea of using a still from one of my recent eyeball animations to illustrate the not so new concept of “owning eyeballs”, as in media marketing. Get their attention, grab their eyeballs, and then subject them to advertisements, be it television or computers.

So, who knows? Many of my opportunities spring out of the Internet, whether it is responding to an ad on craigslist.org, posting a resume online, or someone finding me and my work on my web site. Last April I received an inquiry about my animation of the five senses of the human body. This led to a six month production of a new and improved set of narrated animated 3D sequences, “The 3D World of the Five Senses”, to be published by Roadkill Science, a division of Teachers Discovery. Depending upon the success of this first venture with Roadkill, there may be more titles to come.

Meanwhile, despite all the social networking via the Internet, there’s nothing better than real, live parties. This is the end of the year holiday party season, so get out there and meet people and make new friends eyeball to eyeball.

‘Tis the Season for gift giving, and perhaps a little bit of global, spiritual consciousness in the positive direction. The following is a list of books and DVDs designed to enlighten your friends and family, an update of the list posted well over a year ago on this blog, Education In Terrorism.

It’s been a good year. Thank you to everybody who’s been nice to me…

and for Christmas I’d like a Taser.

What is art? What is fine art? Are the visual fine arts at opposition with visualization? If a picture communicates, provides information, tells too much of a story, is to be cast out from the fine art museum?

This argument is not new to the modern world, and covered well by blogger David Apatoff’s Fine Art vs. Art That’s Mighty Fine. Another excellent analytical article by Donald Pittenger compares the commercial illustration work of N.C. Wyeth with his fine art paintings. This article explains why I tend to imagine myself someday painting fine art pictures in the far away Elsyian Fields of retirement.

Recently when exploring UC Berkeley’s MFA program I was advised by one of their faculty members that my work in medical illustration was too much in the visualization category of art, and that I would have to undergo a “transformation” to fit into Cal’s MFA in Art Practice program. Since I believe I have already achieved a high level of practical art practice, I take no interest in this transformation. Imagine the remolding of an artist into the university’s image. Would I emerge as a UC Berkeley artistic Frankenstein?

Agreeably, my medical animation is not fine art, and yet I see no strict borders, and I am open to exploring and experimenting with a wide range of visual styles and techniques. Picture a lordly professor advising a young Leonardo da Vinci, “Stick with those religious portraits, and forget about those anatomy drawings. Take it from me kid, there’s more money in the Church anyway.”

Back to illustration, take for example The New Yorker’s Covers. You will find an excellent mixture of medium and message. I tend to enjoy this kind of picture making, going back to my early appreciation of the art of Mad magazine. The blog article, Illustration is to Fine Art as Poetry is to Prayer provides additional illumination on this topic.

I recall seeing a retrospective exhibition of the works of “bad boy painter” Peter Saul at the Madison, WI Art Center’s Swen Parson Gallery. Shocking and perhaps lacking the craftsmanship required to be a professional illustrator, and yet free and radical. Saul is one of a handful of modern pop art painters whom I admire for their talent for merging the editorial cartoon into fine art painting (George Bush at Abu Ghraib by Peter Saul below).

Enough of this topic for now. I have commercial art to make!

With the lunatics still running the asylum, the film No End In Sight documents the serious missteps of how we have become mired in this long, hard slog of a mess in Iraq.

Le Roi de CÅ“ur the French anti-war film, named The King of Hearts in the USA, played for five years at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a short walk from where I lived, and it was a cheerful play on how much fun it might be if the lunatics were released from an asylum to run a small village while World War One combat raged elsewhere in the countryside.

If only No End In Sight could be a light-hearted romantic comedy, but it is real, and the poor deciders for many Americans' futures are stubbornly still at work. Heaven help us all.