Chad Dickerson's Field Notes

"Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson says he conceived the idea after reading a news article about the dire..."

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 12:18:38 -0400

“

Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson says he conceived the idea after reading a news article about the dire financial straits of Michigan cities which turned to private “emergency financial managers” to reduce crippling deficits at the expense of local autonomy.

“I thought, ‘why can’t that happen in Portland?’” Dickerson said. “Aside from the zipcode of our office building, Portland has been the bedrock of our customer base for years. Etsy practically invented bird-on-apparel technology, so this is our way of saying ‘thank you’ to a city that literally helped put us on the map by making feather hair-clips and steampunk goggles socially acceptable articles of clothing.”

Dickerson says the first phase of the Etsy Plan will consist of the construction of dozens of LEED-certified, solar-powered arts-and-crafts studios throughout the city, and will employ tens of thousands of the city’s underutilized creative class to design cutting-edge versions of the clothes they’re already wearing.

“By empowering marginalized art school dropouts, bloggers and bass guitarists in the creation of quality goods, we’re lifting them out of poverty, and that’s a wonderful thing,” Dickerson said. “And if they decide to spend their newfound income on our rejuvenating placenta-and-agave body butter, well, that’s even better.”

Subsequent phases of the plan call for outfitting Portland’s homes with knitted “sweaters” to reduce heating costs, designing a rotating seasonal wardrobe for the city’s signature 34-foot-tall Portlandia statue, and reverse-engineering brick-and-mortar restaurants into hemp-powered food trucks.

”

- “Etsy Acquires City of Portland”

Knight News Challenge: Mahaya

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:18:09 -0400

Knight News Challenge: Mahaya:

newschallenge:

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Index all social media, allowing everyone to search, see, and better understand the world’s stories (e.g., Tahrir Square).

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

Yes: manual aggregation for events (eg.,…

Getting retweeted by one of your favorite bands is awesome. :)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:26:56 -0500

Getting retweeted by one of your favorite bands is awesome. :)

"If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive...."

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:22:47 -0500

““If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.””

- Is This the End of Wall Street As They Knew It? — New York Magazine

"Chad Dickerson was hired out of college in 1995 as a webmaster for all the newspaper’s content that..."

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:43:51 -0500

“Chad Dickerson was hired out of college in 1995 as a webmaster for all the newspaper’s content that was not on Access Atlanta, and he could see that restricting online access to proprietary subscribers was limiting growth. “I had just turned 23, and it was basically my first real job,” Dickerson told me. “And I was thinking, ‘Who are these people who signed up with Prodigy? No one uses Prodigy. Everyone uses the web.’ That was what motivated me to get them out of this stranglehold.””

- “The forgotten history of Access Atlanta, one of the early web’s most innovative newspapers”, from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, in which I talk about my first real web job in 1995, helping save a newspaper from the “stranglehold” of Prodigy.

Still proud of that effort, though it didn’t amount to much in the end. Much Perl was harmed in the process. (and OMG, I’ve been working professionally on the web now for about 18 years!)

"Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads...."

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 08:45:51 -0500

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone — best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

- Steve Wozniak. ”Woz on Creativity: Work Alone.” (Brain Pickings) From his memoir.

"Thank you Etsy.com, for bringing this issue to our attention. Yes, let’s all act to block SOPA/PIPA..."

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:29:58 -0500

“

Thank you Etsy.com, for bringing this issue to our attention. Yes, let’s all act to block SOPA/PIPA as an expression of our right to freedom and creativity. And let’s be responsible as a group by not plagiarizing or stealing each other’s ideas. It’s our birthright to be prosperous and creative. We don’t have to blatantly steal or copy another artist’s work, like Charles Schultz’ Peanuts, for example. Let’s not feed the government’s perceived need to police by blatantly infringing on known copyrighted material especially. There are plenty of public domain ideas and an infinite amount of new material waiting to be manifested through our imaginations and hands. When artists are given obstacles like lack of money or resources, they pull something beautiful out of a tangle of used yarn or cardboard, or write a song from a dream, or a play from an overheard snippet of conversation. Truly, artists are masters of stewardship and resourcefulness - the “re-sourcing” of “etheric” genius grounded in new art that the public doesn’t even know it has been waiting for, yet finds refreshing, honest and essential.

We - Connie and Andrew - our company (and our actual names) - commit to paying attention to this issue and honoring the creativity of ourselves and others.

”

- One of the favorite things I read yesterday during the blackouts, from the Etsy Forums.

"Portlandia,” which débuted last winter, on the Independent Film Channel, and returns on January 6th,..."

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 23:01:46 -0500

““Portlandia,” which débuted last winter, on the Independent Film Channel, and returns on January 6th, is the rare sketch-comedy series that has a sustained object of satire. It’s about life in hipster enclaves, and the self-consciousness that makes hipsters desperately disavow the label. Many of its characters are caught up in the prideful culture of D.I.Y. entrepreneurship, in which people reject office jobs in favor of becoming, say, an appliqué-pillow designer with a page on Etsy. (This season, a couple launch a business based on the catchphrase “We can pickle that!,” brining everything from eggs at an urban farm to a broken high heel found on the sidewalk.)”

- Oh, Portlandia. You are so good.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/02/120102fa_fact_talbot?currentPage=all

"They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who..."

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:54:38 -0500

“They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him. Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. “You’re ripping us off!” he shouted. “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!” Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.””

- Steve Jobs ripped into Bill Gates for stealing ideas from Apple for Windows, and Gates had a pretty awesome comeback line.

From Walter Isaacson’s bio of Steve Jobs, page 178.

"Dream Good": Woody Guthrie's New Year's Resolution List, 1942 | Brain Pickings

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:35:00 -0500

"Dream Good": Woody Guthrie's New Year's Resolution List, 1942 | Brain Pickings:

Awesome.

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no..."

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:37:28 -0500

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (need to find the primary source!)

Marvin Gaye in Amsterdam, performing What’s Goin’...

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 13:47:13 -0500

Marvin Gaye in Amsterdam, performing What’s Goin’ On. (1976)

Cover of comic book biography of John Wilcock, one of the...

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 15:04:42 -0500

Cover of comic book biography of John Wilcock, one of the founders of the Village Voice, who was also Andy Warhol’s biographer and attendee at the Velvet Underground’s first performance. See the first eight pages here.

"Think of it as the first Etsy novel. It’s sweet and cozy but also intelligent and unconventional,..."

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 13:02:30 -0500

“Think of it as the first Etsy novel. It’s sweet and cozy but also intelligent and unconventional, and it makes for excellent company in a troubled time.”

- “The Night Circus”: Magician vs. Magician

Love that a novel can be described as “Etsy.”

“This is a random assortment of science ads collected from...

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 11:55:23 -0500

“This is a random assortment of science ads collected from various science and tech magazines of the 50s and 60s. We’re particularly struck by how they have utilized the modernist aesthetic in a manner particularly appropriate for its subject matter.” (via Science and Tech Ads - a set on Flickr via brainpickings)

"This used to be funny, but now it’s really just terrifying. We’re dealing with legislation that will..."

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 08:48:29 -0500

“This used to be funny, but now it’s really just terrifying. We’re dealing with legislation that will completely change the face of the internet and free speech for years to come. Yet here we are, still at the mercy of underachieving Congressional know-nothings that have more in common with the slacker students sitting in the back of math class than elected representatives. The fact that some of the people charged with representing us must be dragged kicking and screaming out of their complacency on such matters is no longer endearing — it’s just pathetic and sad.”

- Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works | Motherboard

"We played the spot once, and when it finished, Jobs said, “It sucks! I hate it! It’s advertising..."

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 08:28:08 -0500

“

We played the spot once, and when it finished, Jobs said, “It sucks! I hate it! It’s advertising agency ****! I thought you were going to write something like ‘Dead Poets Society!’ This is crap!”

Clow said something like, “Well, I take it you don’t want to see it again.” And Steve continued to go on a rant about how we should get the writers from “Dead Poets Society” or some “real writers” to write something.

”

- Behind the Scenes of Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign (via implodr)

The biggest thing that bothers me about the “Cult of Jobs” is that people often seem to mistake the unfortunate, frequently counterproductive, side effects of the personality that made him great for the very cause of his greatness. Steve has long been, and always will be, one of my heroes, but I really worry that an entire generation of entrepreneurs is learning the folkloric lesson that the secret to success is to be a mercurial asshole who abuses everyone and listens to no one. There’s a reason people like Steve start successful companies: because they believe in themselves, envision their success unwaveringly, and don’t compromise. But there can be a dark side to that fanatical self belief: a disdain for the ideas of others. I think there are a lot of reasons for Steve’s late-in-life success at Apple, but I suspect one of the biggest is that he finally managed to surround himself with brilliant people (like Chiat Day’s Lee Clow) who knew how to handle him, curb his worst tendencies, and present important ideas to him in a way that he would accept.

(via buzz)

"Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the..."

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:45:42 -0500

“Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described this phenomenon as “the metaphysical hangover”: “When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover… . You have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is.” Some people are unable to convince themselves of this. Amis described the opening of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” with the hero discovering that he has been changed into a bug, as the best literary representation of a hangover.”

- Is there a cure for alcohol hangovers? : The New Yorker

Judging from some of the holiday parties I’ve been to this year, this may be a useful bit of reflection for many people.

bedroomcovers: Cat Power - Good Woman Lovely. Found via...

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 09:57:27 -0500

bedroomcovers:

Cat Power - Good Woman

Lovely. Found via newspeedwayboogie.

"As with other Montessori materials, they observed that when children were supplied with the correct..."

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:05:27 -0500

“As with other Montessori materials, they observed that when children were supplied with the correct materials and stimuli, and permitted to freely repeat the activities at will, they were able to acquire musical skill spontaneously (quickly and with relative ease). Montessori explains: “In actual practice, we found that when the material was used with some restrictions, by forty children between three and six years of age, only six or seven proved capable of filling out the major scale by ear. But when the material was placed freely at their disposal, they all progressed along the same lines and showed about the same rate of improvement, as was the case with our experiments with reading, writing, etc. When individual differences appeared, it was by no means due to the possibility of performing these tasks, but rather to the amount of interest taken in these exercises, for which some children showed actual enthusiasm. Eagerness for surmounting difficulties and for high attainment is much more frequently found in children than we, judging by our own experience as adults, easily suspect.””

- Through some random research, came across Montessori Bells. The philosophy behind music education that they embody is very similar to the philosophy behind hacking and hack days.

Montessori in Bloom: The Bells Are Here!