If you’re an information architect or user experience designer, or even if you’re not, you’ve probably heard the “Rule of Seven” axiom. That is, Seven (plus or minus 2) is the magical number of things your brain can comfortably hold in working memory before it freaks out and either shuts down or needs help. Call it “channel capacity” or “user-friendliness”(why does that term seem so antiquated?), call it what you will. Information architects know that chunking things into seven or less items or categories in a navigation bar is just a good, humane thing to do. It has been posited that a tightly-knit group of seven people is an optimal community size, because above that number communication tends to break down and not everyone interacts naturally with each other and cliques begin forming. Seven digit phone numbers, seven days of the week, seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the Magnificent Seven…the list goes on and on if you want to look for it. You can speculate as to why there is this natural limit on our perceptual machinery (my tongue-in-cheek hypothesis is that it’s the average of the number of fingers on one hand and the total number of fingers) but whatever the real reason, I accept it as a nice and useful constraint.
Recently, I started thinking about applying the Rule of Sevens (plus or minus two) to my own version of “Getting Things Done”. You see, I am a tab-slut.
If you walked by my monitor at any point in the day (or night) you would probably be astounded at the sheer number of tabs I have open at one time in my browser. On average I’d say I have at least 20 to 30 tabs open. And one day I asked myself, Why? Why does each and every one of these different websites need to be open? Is this a symptom of ADD? Or am I just lazy? I mean, you could say the same thing when you see the stack of dirty dishes in my sink (though I’m not as bad about that).
So as an experiment in productivity, I decided to impose the following rule on my browsing:
Thou shalt not have more than 7 browser tabs open at any given time.
Of course this also implies that Thou shalt not have multiple browser windows open (if you can help it).
I welcome anyone else to try this experiment with me and share your discoveries. I promise to post my thoughts at the end of today, because after tomorrow, I will leaving for my honeymoon, where I have decided to take things a step further and go completely off the grid. Wish me luck! (I’m gonna need it! Bad!)
I happened to pick up a complete issue of the New York Times paper edition yesterday and I had a strange, disconcerting experience. I suppose you could call it déjà vu, but I think it’s slightly different, slightly more explicable than that…
I had given up my daily subscription to the Times two years ago, subsisting now as a “Weekender” and the truth is, I am paying $3.45 a week for the New York Times Magazine, since that’s the only section I really read. The rest, as they say, is “fish wrap.”
All other days, and even weekends, therefore, my daily experience with the Times is through its superb digital online product. So there I was, waiting in the hallway of my office, waiting for Ryan to come in since I had left my keys inside in my rush to leave the day before, and, bored, I picked up the newspaper someone had left for recycling, fully intact. After scanning the front page for a second, I realized that I had seen each of these headlines the day before online.
I hadn’t read each article, of course, but as I flipped further, I thought to myself, “So that’s where they put that article, and oh, I didn’t realize that one got the entire front page of the business section!” It was like someone had come in and re-arranged all of the furniture in my apartment, with different priorities and a different sense of order.
And one of the beauties of this post-digital encounter was that I stumbled on a fascinating article which hadn’t been on the “most e-mailed” list and it was a blip in the parade of articles on the homepage that day. But there it was, front and center on the business section:
Google in the paper
Google, the online giant, had been sued in federal court by a large group of authors and publishers who claimed that its plan to scan all the books in the world violated their copyrights.
As part of the class-action settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages; copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning, and can opt out of the whole system if they wish.
But first they must be found.
The article was about Google’s campaign to satisfy the terms of this class-action settlement, payback, if you will, for attempting to scan and offer digitally every book in the universe, to compensate the authors and copyright holders for this use of their “property”. The irony was that, in order to achieve this, Google was taking out half page ads in newspapers all over the world, an undertaking only Google could pull off.
Fancy, that: Google having to use paper to distribute information.
It just goes to show: print is going to recalibrate itself from what it used to do (everything from phone books to news to long texts to novels) to focus on what it does really well in a digital, networked world (not hyper-fresh news, not phone books, on-demand magazines and books, and information distribution off the grid).
Well, after a flurry of slapdash HTML/CSSery done while watching the Oscars, I’ve put up the new public site for the Redub Reader. It’s at http://reader.redub.org. Totally coded by hand, though I’m sure I’ll port it over to WordPress at some point, but sometimes it’s just easier to maintain good ol’ fashioned HTML pages with TextMate.
I just wanted to give you loyal Redub readers who follow my indulgent musings here on the blog (yes, all 3 of you) a little sneak peek into the in-house project that we’ve been working on for the past few months.
Thanks to the amazing skills of Ryan Lauer (with crucial assistance and input from Karl here in the office) we’re getting to a point with this project that we’d like to start getting some input from actual users.
Instead of giving you a long spiel about what it is, I offer you this dorky little video as a trailer:
You can sign up at the URL in the video, or you can just go directly to the development URL:
This is a screen reader intended for personal use. Ie, when you run across an article that you think is waaaay to long to read (but you really really want to read it), try hitting “Publish article” and copy and pasting the text into the form. You will be able to manually remove cruft from the import (it’ll be automatically scrubbed of HTML and Javascript) and send it to the Reader. It’s like taking a long article through a car wash.
Hint: Don’t tell anybody…but try just importing any NYTimes URL instead of copy and pasting. Works best for long NYTimes Magazine pieces that really don’t translate well into their regular news article templates.
Enjoy!
Thanks!
Irwin
P.S. – We know there are tons of little typos and UI kinks. We’ve got a long backlog of tasks and bugs to fix so go easy on us. It’s still early yet.
In my earlier post about the Kindle, I wondered why Niall Ferguson’s new book cost so damn much. $30 for a bunch of paper, ink, and cardboard? This, and the current recession, got me to thinking about the value of information and its physical manifestations.
Why do books cost so much? Consumers are often baffled at the price tag attached to what appears to be little more than a mass of paper, cardboard and ink. A whole host of factors, including the size of the book, the quality of paper, the quantity of books printed, whether it contains illustrations, what sort of deal the publisher can make with the printer and the cost of warehouse space, all affect the production costs of a book. But, roughly speaking, only about 20 percent of a publisher’s budget for each book pays for paper, printing and binding, the trinity that determines the physical cost.
The rest of what you shell out for, say, the new Donna Tartt novel pays for the publisher’s overhead (the cost of maintaining a staff of editors, proofreaders, book designers, publicists, sales representatives and so on), and for the cuts taken by distributors (who run warehouses that supply books to retailers) and booksellers. Promoting the book is another expense: printing up catalogs presenting each season’s titles to booksellers and the media, purchasing ads, mailing out hundreds of review copies to critics and sending the author (if he or she is lucky) on a book tour. So are shipping fees and the storage costs on unsold copies.
Why food in restaurants costs so much
This is a big aside, but I am reminded of my days running the back of the house for a restaurant, when I had to do food costs and pricing on every item in the menu. This involved standing on the line with a digital scale and as the cook was firing each dish, I would stop him, weigh each piece of meat or veg he was using down to the scallion, and hand it back to him so he could finish the dish. (I know, I know, you’re supposed to do all this before you launch. Hey, it was my first time! Gimme a break!) Later I made a spreadsheet of all the bulk prices we paid each vendor from our order sheets and calculated the actual food cost of each dish. It was painstaking work but here’s what I learned from that experience:
If you want to know how much an item on the menu costs in most mid-range restaurants (1 to 2 stars), take the price on the menu and divide by 3. That’s the cost of the raw materials it takes to make the item. There’s some debate in the restaurant industry as to whether labor factors in, but in most New York restaurants that cost is usually deemed negligible (you can guess why). If restaurants had to pay living wages and benefits to their back of the house staff, you would probably see those prices go way up, which is why fancy restaurants cost so much. The price of a steak has an upper bound. It’s the overhead for everything else (ambience, Daniel Boulud’s salary, etc.) that you’re paying for.
Why CDs cost so much
Pennies That Add Up to $16.98: Why CD’s Cost So Much
A Neil Strauss piece back in July 5, 1995 for The New York Times (before he became a pick-up-artist and wrote The Game) points out that (back in 1995) a CD, say, Rod Stewart’s “A Spanner in the Works,” cost “more than 100 times the cost of the materials used to manufacture it”. (Incidentally, 14 years later it’s selling for $8.99 on Amazon.)
Setting prices “is very arbitrary,” said a top executive at a major label, who described his company’s pricing policies only on condition of anonymity.”We’re trying to raise CD prices,” he said. “The reason for this is that our costs are escalating in such a marginal way, everything from marketing to promoting to signing bands. It costs $400,000 to $600,000 to sign a band. The first video costs a minimum of $50,000. Touring is more expensive, and people’s salaries are a lot higher. Our profit margins are being squeezed.”
Yesterday, the Silicon Alley Insider did a great little back-of-the-envelope thought experiment to figure out first around how much it costs the New York Times each year to produce the paper and distribute it (including cost of printing, salary and benefits to all the writers and employees) and concluded it would be cheaper to give each of their subscribers a Kindle (current market value, a whopping $359)! (Think of all the trees!)
According to the Times’s Q308 10-Q, the company spends $63 million per quarter on raw materials and $148 million on wages and benefits. We’ve heard the wages and benefits for just the newsroom are about $200 million per year.
After multiplying the quarterly costs by four and subtracting that $200 million out, a rough estimate for the Times’s delivery costs would be $644 million per year.
The Kindle retails for $359. In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: “We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years.” Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million — a little less than half as much as $644 million.
I predict that one day in the near future, a large media company (if not the Times) will come to this conclusion, and the eBook reader market will explode. Either that, or they will come to the realization that most people have a computer (or at least access to one) and a cell phone already (plus people won’t really do pass-along with Kindles or eBook readers) and decide to just go completely digital.
Why do Videocassettes DVDs cost so much?
Do we really need to go over this? I quote from another post in 1995, this time from Nicholas Negroponte, who really started me off thinking about the distinction between atoms and bits with his seminal book, Being Digital:
During a speech I gave at a recent meeting of shopping center owners, I tried to explain that a company’s move into the digital future would be at a speed proportionate to the conversion of its atoms to bits. I used videocassette rental as an example, since these atoms could become bits very easily.
It happened that Wayne Huizenga, Blockbuster’s former chairman, was the lunch speaker. He defended his stock by saying, “Professor Negroponte is wrong.” His argument was based largely on the fact that pay-per-view TV has not worked because it commands such a small piece of the market. By contrast, Blockbuster can pull Hollywood around by the nose, because video stores provide 50 percent of Hollywood’s revenues and 60 percent of its profits.
And 14 years later, we all know who was eventually proven right. Can you say Netflix?
Conclusion
This recession is bringing the digital revolution and all of its myriad, economy-altering implications to a head, accelerating the inevitable. This is no time for nostalgia. Do you know how to publish and remix your content to multiple channels and extract full value from this networked, information economy?
