Jeffrey Veen

Robot Cross Stitch

This was a project I started a couple years back that I lost between moving, packing and unpacking. I found it a few days ago and finished stitching it over the weekend. It was inspired by my favorite t-shirt back then.

I like cross stitching for it's obvious connection to pixelated icons and images from the web. I made the pattern by grabbing a picture of the shirt, knocking out the background, and posterizing the colors down to just red, yellow, and black. Then I blew up the image 400% and added a grid to show each stitch. Now, you can just upload an image here and have it spit out a pattern. You'll still need to spend time simplifying and sizing the source file, though.

I've always liked images of robots - especially mid-20th Century anthropomorphic representations. I like that style, but I also like the metaphor. Robots represent our approach to technology and, frankly, how wrong we usually are. We had hoped to create tech in our own image, like Rosie, the Jetson's maid who zipped around the house cleaning and cooking. We hoped that robots would enable a life of pure leisure - walking, talking butlers that do our bidding.

Our present reality is far from those idealistic days, but in a way I'm grateful for that. Instead of technology serving us, we've created powerful tools that amplify our abilities. We use computers to make us smarter, the web as an outboard brain, networks to stay connected. Rather than building robots as better humans, we've used technology to become better ourselves.

But that's just me at my most optimistic. The truth is I like to stitch things like this to get me away from the damn computer. I think I'll start another project...

 22 Jul 2008 | Comments (6) | View blog reactions

Who is John Snow?

Last month, while attending the fantastic @Media conference in London, we paid a quick touristy visit to a street corner in the heart of Soho. There, we found a small monument - an old hand-drawn water pump on a stone pedestal, its handle notably missing. We climbed up on it, had our photo taken, then ducked across the street for a pint in an old pub named The John Snow.

The pub's name was interesting to me for a couple reasons. I had just finished the Steven Johnson book, "The Ghost Map," a riveting account of the neighborhood's 1854 cholera outbreak. Johnson tells the story of Dr. John Snow, who had lived near where we had our picture taken, and how he followed a hunch that the disease could be spread by water, rather than being airborne. After days of investigation, Snow proved to London's health commission that this Broad Street well was the source of the outbreak, convincing them to remove the handle. It was an early instance of science and evidence winning against superstition and prejudice.

But even more interesting to me was one of the tools he used in his work - a data visualization showing cholera deaths marked on a map correlated to the location of the pump. In the speech I gave that week, I pointed out how his graphic techniques are still a model for good design over 150 years later. Contrary to the popular myth, Snow didn't create that famous map; he was working from an existing visualization first drawn by sanitation engineer Edmund Cooper months earlier. Snow did, however, redesign the work by carefully eliminating elements and emphasizing the casualty data until the narrative of what had happened was perfectly clear. You can't look at that map without thinking, "Yikes! Stay away from that pump!" Snow's early geo-mashup can still inspire.

So back to the eponymous pub. As we stood near the crowded bar, I decided to do a little experiment. Even though there was a plaque on the wall detailing the establishment's history and namesake, I started asking the folks around me, "Hey, why is this place called 'The John Snow'?" hoping to find fans of the historic story - or maybe even someone interested in the visualization. Instead, here's what I got:

The tall Irish guy with a ponytail: "No bloody idea, brother."

The group of women laughing in the corner: "Oh, he's some wanker on the telly who bought this place years ago." (They were thinking of this Jon Snow, who is actually quite respected.)

The bartender, who came close, but really should know better: "Before this was a pub, there was a hospital here and he was the doctor in charge of it."

How quickly history fades - especially after a few drinks.

  7 Jul 2008 | Comments (6) | View blog reactions

Stories we'll hear at the Start Conference

One of the nice things about organizing your own conference is getting to choose who you want on stage. That's been particularly fun these last couple weeks as Bryan and I have been thinking about who we'd like to talk to and what we'd like them to tell us.

We started with some good friends whom we've worked with and respect. Ev Williams, for example, was an easy choice. We've known him forever, and worked on a redesign of Blogger together a few years ago. We're talking to him about how his new thing, Twitter, is growing and evolving, what the challenges and opportunities are, and the lessons he's learned so far. I've had similar conversations recently with both Matt Mullengweg of WordPress and Mena Trott of 6apart. Their stories have interesting parallels, but even better divergence.

So, yeah, a lot of our friends are in the blogging world. But we do know a few people outside of that world. Julie Davidson and Narendra Rocherolle, for example, are joining us to talk about their unique partnership, both in business and in life. They've built Webshots, one of the first photo sharing apps, as well as 30boxes, a fantastic calendar app that stands as a fantastic example of how to do the Right Thing when building on the web.

On the other end of the entrepreneurial spectrum is our pal Merlin Mann. He's built a solid brand out of his productivity site 43Folders and we're looking forward to talking to him about how he did that. But also, I'm particularly interested in his ideas for how small teams can find the best ways to work together and communicate with each other. Also, he is a bit, um, energetic on stage. We should have a good time.

We've got a bunch more people joining us on stage - people who follow the industry, comment on it, invest in it, and help companies get started. I'll post more on them soon. I hope you can join us.

 24 Jun 2008 | Comments (4) | View blog reactions

Introducing the Start Conference

When I recently decided to leave my job, I began a little personal project I called "100 Lunches." I wanted to sit down with a bunch of people over a meal and just listen. What was interesting to them these days? What where they building? Were they nervous about the state of the industry? Excited by all the new opportunity?

As I started the project, I quickly realized that the stories I was hearing needed a wider audience. My friends and colleagues told tales of late nights, harrowing server crashes, exhilarating growth, and touching emails from their users. Not one of them knew what they were getting into, nor would any of them change their paths.

Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if everyone could hear these amazing start up stories?

So I got together with my long-time friend and business partner Bryan Mason and started planning. We decided to get a great group of entrepreneurs, investors, and other people associated with new web companies together for a day of discussion and advice. And that's how the Start Conference came to be.

So here's the deal: On August 7, we'll spend the day at the beautiful Fort Mason Center talking about starting companies. We've got a lot of fun things planned, including a fantastic party on the Bay afterwards. And we're making it cheap - just $200. We didn't want to turn this into a conference filled with investors hunting for the next big thing. We wanted something for people who make web apps and dream of starting their own thing. (Also, we understand that you probably won't want to submit an expense report for a conference that encourages you to quit your job.)

If you've ever thought of staking out on your own, we hope you'll join us. It's going to be great fun.

All the details are on the Start Conference web site. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments here.

 11 Jun 2008 | Comments (9) | View blog reactions

Welcome back Webmonkey

Isn't it nice to get reacquainted with an old friend?

This morning, the fine folks over at Wired relaunched Webmonkey. Somehow, they managed to pry it out of the dying hands of Lycos and revive it as a collaborative site based on MediaWiki. I couldn't be happier to see the site come back; I've just spent a nostalgic afternoon digging through everything that's there.

The original site was founded at HotWired back in 1996 by my friend June Cohen. She pulled a small team together and started publishing tutorials, news, and opinions about how to make the web. They asked me to write a column, which I did for a couple years, and eventually I joined them to redesign the site. I loved that project - it was one of the first sites we built that was dynamically driven through templates rather than as static HTML files - a real separation of content and presentation. It was a big deal for us back then, and it influenced a lot of my future work.

The new site is equally dynamic, but in a much more contemporary way. As a collaborative wiki, it embraces openness in a way that really resonates with the original mission of Webmonkey. The team wrote about it in the new site's introduction:

When Webmonkey debuted in 1996, the site was sort of a soapbox for HotWired's engineers and designers -- a place for them to evangelize emerging web standards, rate the newest browsers and demonstrate their bleeding-edge code hacks. Those engineers also produced stacks and stacks of tutorials on all aspects of building for the web. [...]

Faced with the prospect of going back into the archives to continuously update and rewrite the older articles, we decided to turn Webmonkey into a collaborative project. It was an easy decision.

I completely agree. And I'm thankful that we have another chapter to follow what really looked like the end.

 19 May 2008 | Comments (5) | View blog reactions