What Your Favorite Blog Says About You | Slacktory | This seems legit.
Kottke.org: You read all the liner notes, even if you bought the album as mp3s.
Daring Fireball: You know three ways to tell Helvetica from Arial.
The Hairpin: You got Maira Kalman to draw a cartoon in your book at a reading.
via Boing Boing
The 10 Most Hated Companies in America – 24/7 Wall St.
Guess who made it to number one:
Facebook currently has more than 800 million users. Any company of this size is sure to have some detractors. Compared to other leading social media sites, however, Facebook has the lowest customer satisfaction score from the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
It’s eerie to me how Facebook users are considered customers. Best Buy unsurprisingly is number six.
The nice people at WordPress prepared this awesome 2011 annual report for me. For some reason, everyone is searching for “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake“. I just hope that post is not a huge disappointment for everyone, being that it’s a just a Fight Club reference to talk about something that doesn’t have to do anything with Fight Club. Because you really shouldn’t talk about it. (See what I did there?)
You can take a look at the complete report if your so inclined.
This year, don’t make a resolution. Instead have a fresh start and a modest change. Hope everyone has a good one.
Frank Chimero: Louis CK’s Shameful Dirty Comedy
It’s not just funny because it’s true, it’s funny because it’s disturbingly true.
…in his newest special, Louis talks about how mind-numbingly boring it is to play board games with his daughter and how much he wants to yell at her for it. Common impulse? Yes. Desirable? Probably, on a very base level to diffuse frustration. Acceptable? Nope. So, we’re ashamed by the those dark thoughts, and Louis is there to give the shameful inclinations credence through his routine. We laugh because we know, and we hear others laugh, so we can hear how we are not alone. The thought gets aired, so there’s less shame to feel.
(Via Marco.org)
Creativity is about constraints. Weirdly, many people seem to see creativity as the opposite, as being about expansion. We must think outside the box. We must generate ideas. The problem of how to be creative is the problem of thinking up things. But this is wrong. Or in any case, the opposite is just as correct. Creativity is all about thinking inside the right box. There is an infinite amount of possible ideas. The problem is not how to come up with ideas, but how to remove the ideas that are no good. The problem is not how to think outside the box, but where on the infinite plain of thought to put it. Creative work is about finding ever narrower constraints, until you are left with only one idea that fits the bill. That’s the right one.
That’s one hell of a paragraph.
Rands In Repose: A Bag of Holding
Michael Lopp’s super fantastic and geeky guide on wallets and bags.
Years of folding leather wallets with myriad pockets and flaps all yielded precisely the same result: a Costanza-sized monstrosity that contained random crap that at one time I thought I needed, but eventually became useless clutter.
Are urban bicyclists just elite snobs? – Dream City – Salon.com
A serious debate developed around whether or not bicyclists were assholes. Reporters hit up old ladies for dramatic quotes about being terrorized by reckless riders.
I kept cackling all through the end of this article. The story sounds like something taken out of a South Park episode.
(Via MeFi)
A List Apart: Articles: Being Human is Good Business
I’ve been thinking a lot about customer service and if it’s possible for big companies to actually be any “good” at it. And by big companies I mean big-box-type-franchise-everywhere-in-the world type of companies. Because while I do believe that it is possible to have a good relationship with your customers, I don’t think those relationships are made to scale. A small company can maintain those human relationships, as the A List Apart Article describes, but it’s practically impossible when a company gets too big. The only way they know how to deal with them is to either treat them like a problem to solve or as some percentage that adds or subtracts to the company’s revenue.
Of course, big or small, every company wants to make the person that gives them money happy. That’s a no brainer. The problem is that the big ones want to provide that happiness in a totally mechanical and non human way. They want to copy that cozy, small business atmosphere and be friendly to customers. They train their salespeople to make their customer forget they are salespeople, which is really meta and confusing.
Thing is, relationships with people are spontaneous. They are not a rigid set of rules and strategies that you can easily follow. They’re unpredictable. You can’t be strategically friendly. It doesn’t work out like that. If you’re a salesman on the floor no matter how hard you try, unless you’re being genuine, you are in the end a salesman on the floor. Looking for something to “chat” about with a customer to put his guard down is going to be worse in the end because you’re going to annoy the hell out of people that just want to grab and pay and your going to alienate a lot people that could potentially create that cozy “atmosphere”. Back in the day they used to call them window shoppers.
Sorry for getting all Seth Godiny, but this is something that I’ve been wanting to get out my chest for a while.
