Dominik’s Blog

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I’ve launched Dominik’s Tumblelog, powered by Tumblr.

What is a tumblelog you ask? In short, it’s an oldstyle weblog, before blogging became a semi-pretentious publishing platform (not that there’s anything wrong with that). A tumblelog records one’s tumbles throughout the web and life in general, a “stream” in my parlance, and a literal interpretation of a log of interesting places and sights one’s stumbled across on the web. And therein lies the root of a tumblelog, stumble. It isn’t meant to be perfectly organized or impeccably formatted, but rather a quick, short link, along with accompanying text or a photo.

Tumblr makes it painless to do this, and even lets you integrate other feeds (such as your shared items on Google Reader). I’ve done this over at my tumblelog, and look forward to continuing to use it.

What will happen with my blog? Things will continue as they are, with most longer content posts being posted here. You can think of the blog as where the articles live and the tumblelog as where interesting snippets live.

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Happy New Year! Have a great 2008 :)

I’ve closed my Facebook account. Or, rather, since one can’t close a Facebook account per se, I’ve deleted friends and removed all that I could from my profile. Finally, I set my account to ‘inactive’ in Facebook, which is as close as one can come to deleting it.

I opened my account back in March 2004, when Facebook was a small, quiet, private site open only to few colleges around the country. I never amassed more than 400 friends (I think my final tally was somewhere in the low 300s), but it was a nice way to vaguely keep in touch. I found myself checking in on the site perhaps once or twice a month, if that.

Back in September 2006, I defended Facebook’s mini-feed, with the tagline of “If you aren’t comfortable now, you shouldn’t have been comfortable before.” My logic there was that the mini-feed didn’t expose any information that wasn’t available before, it just made it far more accessible. I did find it bad marketing on Facebook’s part to launch it without even so much as an opt-out option available, but I figured they’d learn from that mistake in the future. Finally, I found it a touch ironic that all the “Stop the New Facebook” groups grew virally in large part thanks to the very mini-feed they were railing against. In the end, Facebook made it possible to opt-out and control what was posted in the mini-feed, restoring the option to maintain the security-through-obscurity regime that many of its users had accustomed themselves to.

Facebook didn’t learn from its mistakes. Beacon, which differs from the mini-feed in the important aspect that it reveals previously non-public information to the public (and select Facebook advertisers). Where the mini-feed merely made what was already knowable easier to know, Beacon published previously unknowable information for all to see. Once again, without even so much as an opt-out provision at the start, though this has since been added.

Beacon, combined with Facebook’s slow slide towards something resembling selling out, convinced me that the small, quiet, cool way to keep in touch with friends online that I knew from March 2004 was gone forever. I “closed” my account, as best I could, having to put up with the final indignity of having to delete each of my 300+ friends one by one.

Fundamentally, Facebook is trying to reconcile its revenue model with what makes people use its site. The weakness of its traditional banner ad model is that people ignore the banners and instead look to see what their friends are up to. Beacon tried to one-up this by putting ads into what their friends were up to. Rent a movie from Blockbuster? Facebook will let your friends know what you rented and when, so they can rent it from Blockbuster too, which conceivably gives Facebook a cut. An ingenious idea, except, as Seth Godin puts it: “People don’t truly care about privacy . . . What people care about is being surprised.” Had Facebook allowed people to opt-in to Beacon from the start, those people who wanted to then could do so, and they would not be surprised to find their rentals being broadcast to their friends. In fact, they’d be happy that the service they opted into was working. Instead, we have a nasty shock to all Facebook users who suddenly find that their previously private actions on Facebook advertisers’ sites are suddenly — without clear warning or any action on their part — being broadcast to all their friends. Worse: without a way to turn it off. This caused the uproar and backlash.

Farewell Facebook.

I am 24 years of age today.

Over at Subtraction, whose design I find very appealing, Khoi Vinh muses on magazines, asking “does anybody read them anymore?“ The following post germinated as a comment, but I realized it would also make an interesting blog entry… so here it is:

Subscription wise, I only have two magazines/journals that I read cover to cover each issue: The Economist and First Things. Design wise, First Things leaves something to be desired, at least in print, but I find the content enjoyable. Recently I’ve taken to reading most of their articles online, since I actually prefer their website’s layout to their print copy.

The Economist has a tasteful design, which makes it pleasure to sit down and read through it — though here also, I find myself reading about 50% of the articles on their website, which was redesigned a year ago and “clicks” very well with what I perceive as the magazine’s image. I’m no expert in the grid system, but I think I detect some elegant use of it on economist.com — everything seems ordered, elegant, precisely in its place. I’ve recently also tried their new podcast, which is the entire text of the magazine read by professional (British) actors, free for download each week for subscribers. I was positively impressed, but I don’t spend so much time commuting (thankfully) that I can listen to an entire magazine. Still, it’s nice for listening to several articles on the morning and even commute, and positively great for any weekend excursions.

A notable feature of First Things and the Economist is that both are crammed with text and any illustrations or photos are tastefully added as accents, not the main focus. I read TIME when I was 11, and enjoyed it then, but now when I look at it I’m amazed at how little actual information is presented in the articles. They’re just … too short.

As for newspapers, at 23, I never really have gotten into them. I find paper newspaper far too unwieldy and I hate getting newsprint on my hands — they’re just too big to read comfortably without putting them down on a table, and I prefer to do my reading on the couch. I do visit online newspapers though and I like the NYT’s new design a lot — it’s very elegant. Most other newspapers I only visit sporadically whenever Google News brings up an article of theirs.

Type dominik into Google and dominik.net is the first hit :)

It’s actually been that way for several years, without any real effort on my part aside from making and maintaining this website; I suppose I have an advantage from this site being around since 1999 as well as having a rare name with a relatively rare spelling.

If this site weren’t the first hit on Google for ‘dominik’, it wouldn’t really be worth the effort to try to make it so, since this is just my personal website, with some poetry, photos, a Japan travelogue and this very blog.

Incidentally, that’s also the point of Seth Godin’s new book, The Dip. Seth Godin, a master marketer, argues that most things worth doing in life will start out easy, then get difficult and then, only if you persist through this difficult period — he calls it the Dip — then things get really good. For example, you might call the first year of law school the Dip of law school — it’s generally agreed that the first year is the toughest, because it’s meant as a filter. The bar exam is another dip.

I had the fortune of being able to see Seth talk in person yesterday in Ann Arbor, and his talk was excellent, entertaining and educational. I even managed to snag the last question, asking:
“How do you find ‘your best’? In other words, how do you pick the dip you want to overcome?”

I asked this question because it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about; I have this set of interests and passions, and then I have the real world. The trick of building a career, at least as I in my rather inexperienced perspective see it, is to pick the right set of interests and passions and put them into a job that lets you be the best in the world at what you do. This means best in the world in the opinion of the market that you’re in, since that’s the only market that matters. Example: In the market of the Democratic primary, only open to registered Democrats, does it matter what a Republican voter thinks? Answer: No.

This lesson can even be applied to family life. If you’re a husband or a father, your goal is to the best husband and father in the market that matters. But what’s the market that matters? Your wife and children. The Dips of marriage and parenting, of which there are doubtless many over the years, if surmounted, will lead to a rewarding marriage and family life.

The final, important point, is that some processes in life don’t have Dips. They just have flat Cul-de-sacs, dead ends leading nowhere. The key is not sticking to those pointless plateaus but rather quitting them and seeking out the right Dips.

But how does one find the right Dip? This was exactly my question to Seth yesterday.

His answer: Basically there are three factors that can help you determine whether a Dip is worth pursuing.

1. Are you excited about the field the Dip is in?
2. Is this size right? In other words, can you get through the Dip with your current resources and abilities? Or there other, preliminary Dips that you need to conquer first? (E.g. If you want to be a lawyer, you need go to law school before taking the bar exam).
3. Is it worth it? So you conquer the Dip and are now on the other side. Was it worth all that effort?

In terms of dominik.net being the first hit on Google for dominik, I’ve already surmounted that Dip. But the Dip was tiny, since dominik is a rare spelling of a rare name. It was exciting, and it was worth the effort, since there wasn’t any effort I wouldn’t have done anyway (building my website).

Micro summary: Pick the right Dip, stick through it, and win! Quit pointless plateus (Cul-De-Sacs) to invest more time into sticking with your picked Dips.

For more, you can read Seth’s The Dip Blog, which has many illustrative stories as well as book excerpts. And of course, you can go read the book! I highly recommend it :)

Finally, I’ll link some images from the book to illustrate these points:

And you can buy the book on Amazon. Currently it’s $7.77:

Three down with two to go, I’m now in the home stretch.

The weather outside has gone from gray and drab to bright, green and sunny. Summer has arrived on Winter’s heels. Spring apparently an afterthought…

I’m looking forward to finishing up my first year of law school within just a few days. It really feels as if it has flown by, but I can honestly say that I’ve learned a lot, both substantively and procedurally (so as to learn more better).

Here’s a photo which I think captures this feeling of greenery and summertime blossom:

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Merry Christmas :)