Yet more whining on Apple secrecy

I'm sure Jens Alfke is a great guy and a great engineer, and I understand if he leaves Apple due to creative differences. Yet some of his comments seem to warrant a big "Duh!"

I think Apple’s policy on blogging is one of the least enlightened of major tech companies; Microsoft in particular is surprisingly open.

Well, Apple has been all about secrecy for the past decade or so, while Microsoft, perhaps the world's greatest vendor of vaporware, has always embraced blabbering as one of its main communication tools. Isn't it as simple as this?

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Apple, Jobs developing new, human side?

Ever since the return of Steve Jobs, Apple hasn't been about faces. Withe the exception of Apple's media events where Jobs, Phil Schiller, the occasional product manager or VP would take the stage, Apple's people have been mostly hiding in shadows.

When you interact with Apple's web page, you don't interact with people. You read news items or carefully crafted PR, search databases, buy with 1-Click™, or, at best, interact with other users in the support forums. It's all cool and impersonal.

Even video introductions for products show screencasts, and feature professional voice actors.

Under Jobs' tenure, "About" boxes of Apple's software products stopped listing the names of individuals (perhaps for fear of making the jobs of headhunters too easy). Even O'Reilly's Learning Cocoa book was, somewhat ridiculously, written by "Apple Computer, Inc." Not by people.

But that trend has been changing lately. First, there was the iPhone guy. Then Steve Jobs started to blog. And now we have the Leopard guy.

Why?

Jobs has "blogged" on the following occasions so far: when he delivered his open letter to record industry executives; when he addressed criticism by environmentalists and envisioned a greener Apple; when he announced a rebate for early iPhone customers; and finally, when promising an iPhone SDK (no link available, the announcement is simply a text-only item in Apple's Hot News section).

The first "blog post" is unique in that Jobs expresses a personal opinion and attempts to influence decisions by executives of an industry by summoning the power of media. It isn't something a company or a CEO does routinely, it certainly isn't business as usual, thus its unusual format is understandable and warranted.

However, the other items could easily be replaced by traditional Apple press releases. They do not really contain anything special that would necessitate their unorthodox format. There doesn't seem to be anything inherently suggesting a need for personal communication from Steve Jobs in those messages. Yet Jobs has chosen to present them as personally signed pieces of communication.

Again, why?

Similarly, the two new faces Apple has attributed to its iPhone and Leopard products (without names, though) mark a strange departure. None of the demos we see from these two guys would suffer one small bit, none would be any less informative or useful if we saw no faces, only narrated screencasts and close-up shots.

Yet Apple has decided to add those faces.

Why?

Is it just some PR stunt that Apple's advisers have come up with?

Or is Apple maybe concerned that it's growing too big and scary? Is it adding a human touch in order to counterbalance a (perceived or real) mean streak in its operations? The buy-me-twice ringtones, the options scandal, the monopoly accusations?

Or is Steve Jobs simply growing more vain, mellow or sentimental with age? Does he maybe think more and more about his image, his perception – maybe his legacy?

By the way. Did you notice how that Leopard guy really looks and sounds like Steve Jobs doing a keynote? By the time he talks about Quick Look, his voice could be mistaken for Steve's. He could be nicknamed Steve Lite. It's almost spooky.

Maybe this is what Jobs means when he keeps talking about Apple's DNA.

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Fake Steve: has he still got it?

This stuff is just brilliant:

You let me know what time and what to wear. I'll be there in jeans and a black turtleneck, two hours late.

It's quotes like these that make me forget that Fake Steve has been exposed as some Forbes editor. Daniel Lyons is just brilliant, brilliant.

Something has been bothering me, though, ever since he revealed his true identity, and I haven't realized until recently what it was.

I thought Fake Steve was a thoroughbred, inveterate, dyed-in-the-wool Apple and Mac zealot, someone with a Steve Jobs fetish, and exceptional writing skills. Okay, it was incredibly naive of me to think that he wasn't an accomplished writer, that he was a natural. He is way too good for that.

But after the revelation, I felt that somehow part of the magic was lost. I haven't been able to pinpoint it for a long time, but now I know why.

Even though Lyons says that he's an Apple fan, it's this quote (same source) that's been bothering me:

Mr. Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. “I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it.”

Mr. Lyons says he recalled trying out the voices of several chief executives before settling on the colorful Apple co-founder.

See? He's not obsessed with Steve Jobs or Apple. He could (and would) have chosen any other CEO.

When he extols the virtues of the iPhone, the Mac, or Apple's strategy with over-the-top exaggeration, his parody isn't self-ironic: it's merely surgically accurate.

My impression is that Fake Steve is less soul and more brains than I've believed.

Fake Steve was unavailable for comment.

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Random anti-bad-idea post: Sentenc.es

I learned about this a while ago via Daring Fireball. John Gruber was endorsing the idea.

Basically, Mike Davidson complains that answering even short e-mail questions may take very long, and also that as he gets too many e-mails, he tends to prioritize the easiest ones to answer, not the most important ones.

Don't we all. But his solution makes me shudder. He now always responds in five sentences. He wanted to do a word or char count, but that's difficult, so he arrived at counting sentences. He then posts a short Q&A at the end of all of his messages ("Q: Why is this e-mail five sentences or less? A: http://five.sentenc.es") linking to a little explanatory website he operates, where he sums up his policy.

What's wrong with this? Everything. First, writing short messages is not always easier than writing longer ones. You'll soon find yourself fighting the tool. Second, why be so damn restrictive and dogmatic? Couldn't you just strive to spend less time on answering e-mails? How about a timer? Or nothing at all, just an effort to keep it short? Maybe you'll average on five sentences, maybe you won't, but why this "one size fits all" approach?

And don't even get me started on the sociopathic explanatory link at the end. If your correspondants are insulted by your brevity, a pre-recorded explanation will only rub salt into their wounds. Guess what, you've been handled by a policy. You're not so important.

My suggestion: strive to spend less time on answering e-mails. If some of them end up too brief as a result, add this sentence at the end: "Sorry to be brief, I'm really busy."

No weblink or clever URL, though.

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Honestly, I'm just sick of everyone in this stupid Edelman/PC Mag/Twitter story

This made news, I guess, because Twitter was involved. Do you remember the time when bloggers started explaining how they first heard of Twitter, and what the hell it is anyway? Me neither. You know, all bloggers have always known all about Twitter, so this is why they just started dropping its name whenever they felt the time was ripe. You know, me too. That Twitter. I'm not going to admit that I only got around to first reading about Twitter some three weeks ago. As a blogger, being well-informed is what I'm all about, and I always know about everything. Even if I don't say so.

Anyway, here's the story. Edelman PR is a company representing several tech firms. Its senior vice president Steve Rubel gets a free subscription to PC Magazine, and throws it in the trash. Tsk, tsk. Worse, he chooses to tell all the world about it via Twitter, even though his company routinely begs the editor of that very magazine in his trashcan if he could pretty please write about its clients.

I'm going out on a limb here, but my guess is that this may have been caused by Olympic-sized stupidity, and/or psychopathic tendencies that are not uncommon among senior vice presidents.

But anyway, PC Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jim Louderback learns this, and throws a hissy fit like I've last seen in fifth grade. He's taking his ball home:

Should I instruct the staff to avoid covering Edelman's clients? Ignore their requests for meetings, reviews and news stories?

I know Louderback meant this as a rhetorical question, but the answer actually exists: no.

Duh.

Louderback is an editor. His job is to know what matters to his readers, and then instruct his reporters to write about those things.

I somehow doubt that many PC Magazine readers think along the lines of "I wish they stopped covering all the companies who happen to be the clients of that PR firm whose senior vice president wrote something nasty the other day."

Or is it just me?

Yet his childish rant goes on:

I did a quick search through my recent email, and found that over the past few weeks Edelman staff pitched me about news and new products from Palm, MarkMonitor, Mozilla/Firefox, Microsoft (hardware and Xbox), Eyespot.com, Vulcan Flipstart and Dash Navigation. Heck, they even pitched me yesterday on the release of Adobe's new Creative Suite 3, which has to be relevant to at least some of the 11 million folks we reach across our magazine, web and video properties each month. And then I realized that this was probably just the callous act of a rogue Edelman exec, and it didn't necessarily reflect the views of the rest of the company. Still, it made me wonder. And in the future, if I'm on the fence, I'll probably be somewhat less inclined to take a meeting with one of Edelman's clients.

OK. So if it weren't for Edelman, PC Magazine would never have covered Palm, Microsoft or Adobe.

Riiiiight.

And if some psycho at the same Edelman, a PR firm that no PC Magazine reader has ever heard of, says something nasty, the magazine will stop covering all these companies.

Here's the slogan of PC Magazine: the independent guide to technology.

If I were a subscriber, I'd cancel now.

And Twitter about it.

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Adding reddit links to Blogger Beta

As a gentle reminder to your readers to help popularize your blog via reddit, you can add a reddit button to each of your posts. This will give readers a one-click opportunity to boost your posts on reddit if they're already submitted, or an easy way to submit them if they aren't. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)

I haven't found any literature on how this procedure works on Blogger Beta, so I had to do a bit of poking around in the less-than-spectacular Blogger Beta documentation, as well as some experimenting. It's no rocket science, but in case you were planning to do the same, and got stuck somewhere, here's how I did it.

1. Go to the buttons page on reddit, and copy the code for the button style of your choice to your clipboard. (The one this blog uses is style 1.) Paste the code snippet into some text editor.

<script>reddit_url='[URL]'</script>
<script language="javascript" src="http://reddit.com/button.js?t=1"></script>

2. Log in to Blogger Beta, and navigate from your Dashboard to Template, then Edit HTML. Click the check box which says "Expand Widget Templates."

3. Now you'll need to edit your template. I recommend that you copy the entire template file and paste it into a text editor, so you'll be able to use Find/Replace and other text editing facilities. (Like, you can have the editor speak out the entire template file for you. It's great fun to listen to.) Good ol' TextEdit will do (if you're a Mac user), but make sure you work on a plain text file, not a rich text file. (You can switch between the two formats in the Format menu.)

It's also recommended that you save a backup copy before proceeding, just in case something goes wrong.

If you think you're done with your edits, copy and paste your template back into the browser's text field, and click on the Preview button to see if it looks fine. Don't click on Save unless it really all seems OK. (Don't expect to test links in Preview mode, though. They won't work. That's normal behavior.)

In case you really messed up, and want to revert to the original code, your backup copy comes in handy. Or, you can revert to Blogger's original version of the template, but then you'll lose all your previous hacks, if any.

4. OK, now you need to find the place where you need to paste the code. This is probably the trickiest part for most of us. The natural place for the button would be in the footer of a post. However, I placed the link at the end of the post body instead, for design considerations.

In any case, if you want to find the suitable location for your button, some elementary understanding of a Blogger Beta template is handy.

The template file usually starts with some lengthy CSS declarations. Then comes the part which instructs the Blogger engine how to lay out your blog.

This is an XML file which includes XHTML tags, as well as some proprietary tags that operate the Blogger engine, instructing it to display your contents. If you want to put the reddit button in the post body, you should look for a part in the file that says

<div class='post-body'>

This is where the post body begins. Depending on your template, various bits of code follow, and finally the <\div> closing tag marks the end of the body.

I placed the code I'd got from reddit right before that closing tag. If you want to put it in the footer instead, look for a suitable place between the <div class='post-footer'> and the <\div class='post-footer'> tags instead, but as I can't walk you down that path, be sure to test your code with the Preview feature before you commit to it by saving it.

I added a <br\> tag right before the reddit script just to make it look nicer. (Don't forget the "\" , as this is XHTML.)

5. Now comes the final trick: the reddit code contains a bit which needs to be rewritten. The part where it says "[URL]" is just a placeholder, you need to replace it with some Blogger code that yields an URL for each post. So after you've pasted the reddit code, change its first line from this:

<script>reddit_url='[URL]'</script>

to this:

<script>reddit_url='<data:post.url/>'</script>

This was the part which took me the longest to figure out, as the documentation was, again, a bit sketchy. But now I've found the right syntax, and it should work a charm for you too.

Oh, and finally, a less-than-gentle reminder to my dear readers: please be kind enough to give my posts some boost on reddit… Thank you.

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