iPod Interlude
iPod
I bought my wife an iPod last year. It stopped working a while ago, and neither of us could figure out what was wrong with it or how to fix it. So, she brought it to an Apple store.
Neither of us were expecting this to go smoothly. I mean, how could they debug my computer setup from the store? Considering that iPod technical failures are probably rare, the most likely explanation is a configuration error. Sure, I've checked the USB drivers, reinstalled iTunes, etc. but would they take my word for it? I certainly wouldn't.
Anyways, she went to the store, explained the problem, and they checked out the iPod. They determined that it was a hardware failure, and not user-error. They gave her a new one.
Endorsement?
I don't know, is this an endorsement or not? On the one hand, the excellent customer service at the store was unbelievable. On the other hand, the iPod did have a hardware failure. I suppose these failures are a fact of life when you produce so many (even if the error rate is incrediblely low), so this is an endorsement. As long as the replacement works (: And, so far, it's worked fine.
Content Problem II
In a previous blog (
http://flyingsheep.blogspot.com/2007/01/reformatting.html), I talked about the Content Problem. Some solutions:
Just do it
Just suck it up and generate the content yourself. It's not enough to claim, "I have a proof for this, but the margin is too small to contain it." You actually have to work through the details.
On the other hand, how else will people recognize that you solved the problem (which inspired you in the first place) unless you actually provide the content? It's not enough to build a better mousetrap, you need to design the promotional material that convince others to buy it.
Structure breeds creativity (the Rosewater solution)
Break content into categories. If one category isn't yielding any new inspiration, switch to another. Set aside a certain time to generate content (each Sunday morning, for example).
Partition the content you've generated into multiple dimensions. An oil painting of mushrooms and a watercolor of flowers have at least two dimensions - medium and subject. Then fill in the gaps (e.g. create an oil painting of flowers).
User-generated Trick your users into creating content for you. Creating a system/engine that makes it as easy as possible to create content may be a more interesting challenge (and thus, more likely to get done) than generating the content itself.
Of course, the best part is that you can use this content-generation tool yourself (:
This also might lead to the Wikipedia problem. More on that later. Random computer generated This is similar to the matrix-filling idea above. Write a program to generate the content automatically (again, possible a more interested problem). Of course, the test of your program would be the quality of the results - are they interesting? And for how long.
For example, I could fill blogs with interesting (randomly generated) subject lines from spam I've received. Some of these subject lines are unintentionally insightful (or, for that matter, entertaining when
illustrated ).
This is basically found art.
Stolen from other sources
Example: One of my first projects was a random horoscope (if you remember that, you've been a FlyingSheep Fan for a long long time). I grabbed a bunch of ambiguous predictions ("You are feeling unusually spiffy today.") and would serve up a few chosen at random. Alternatively, I could have classified them (something about romance, something about finance, something about friends or family) and added a little more structure (possibly the results would be more formulaic). Or I could have written a little program to play Mad-libs, and generate new content.
So, these are some solutions to the content problem. There are probably more, but I guess my point (if I had one) would be to make sure that you solve the content problem (using one of these ideas, or something else) early on in your project.
Content Problem I
Unfinished Symphonies
How many times has this happened to you? You have an idea for a program (painting, poem, wood-working project), and think, "That would be a fun challenge". You do the difficult bits first (naturally) as a proof of concept. Then, once you've shown yourself that it's possible, you get bogged down in the details and never finish.
See, I think that your main objective in these projects is not the final result that you can use or show to people or whatever, but in proving that you can overcome the challenge that lay in the initial idea. Unfortunately, I do this all the time.
Blogging
One self-referential example is this blog. Writing the system (e.g. the program to store, retrieve, and send these thoughts that you're reading now) was the challenge, and I have a working proof of concept. It's not perfect (I need to work on some minor formatting issues, and I'm not sure if the Scheduled Task will run when I need it to), but the failure of this project (i.e. blogging regularly) will not be a failure of this system - after all, I can always blog "manually" - but from a lack of content.
I call this the content problem. I've got some solutions, which I'll list in a separate blog. (See the tricks I have to use to extend my meager portion of content?)
