“The film is simply a football match between Real Madrid and Villarreal which took place on April 25 2005.

17 cameras are entrained on Zidane during the course of the match giving an insight that is rarely seen during televised football matches. Player-cam this is not. You often don’t see the ball, even when he has it.

What is striking is how little he says and maybe even how little he moves. To begin with he is a periphery figure.

…The concentration etched on Zidane’s face during he film is rarely broken. He looks tough and smiles only once when joking with Roberto Carlos.”

From the BBC: The frustration of Zidane

The 37signals team have an excellent blog. I like them. We used their job board for recruitment, and use Basecamp at work.

Also, I have spent the day (well part of the day) reading up at Google’s Conversion University. Of course it is in Google’s interest for us to have effective websites, since that should translate to more click-throughs for them. But I like the principle of openly sharing very useful and valuable information.

It’s something I learnt out in my Easter trip to Silicon Valley, where individuals like Evan Williams, Naval Ravikant and Max Levchin educated me on how to improve Boso. If only we could have that same level of co-operation here.

Also, wtf?

I’m going to be controversial and say I like the new Facebook interface. There has been something of a backlash (see Group Students against Facebook News Feed - Official Petition to Facebook) to the new feed-style approach of communicating changes:

Primarily, this is because people feel it’s an invasion of privacy. Almost *anything* (wall comments, invitation acceptance, relationship status etc) you do on facebook is now instantly and easily viewable by others. This *had* always been public information, but before people had to go out of their way to stalk find out what had been changed.

Firstly, I would argue that if you’re not happy with people knowing who’s wall you are commenting on and so on, then you can always remove this from your own mini-feed, so you have the option to keep some privacy on what you are doing in the fb world. Secondly, if you take the perspective that fb is a utility (which is what they do), then they have only made that utility more efficient. Previously, you could see which friends had made profile changes, but have no idea what had changed, so this was as good as no information. Now, it’s communicated to you.

Finally, familiarity is comfortable, and people have been very used to the old interface (it’s been essentially the same forever). This is the first time that users will have to learn something new, which the brain inherently dislikes. It does seem like information overload, but hey, this is the first iteration of this approach and I’m sure it will improve.

Incidentally, does anyone know if fb do focus groups or beta tests for any of their new features? I imagine the feedback loop is pretty strong, but it’d be surprising if they hadn’t for a change like this.

However, despite all of the logic of the above, if students are simply not comfortable with it, then fb will have to act. Facebook prides itself on tracking online what happens offline, but perhaps it was never meant to be this easy!

ps: the fact that people are using facebook to protest against facebook indicates how much ownership members feel over the site. That is an achievement in itself.
pps: to get the alternative view, check harj’s blog here.

From Strunk & White:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Also see the long and short of it.