I realized something interesting yesterday, and believe I have found a helpful way of explaining at least one of the communication issues involved. Forgive me for the metaphor, but I am both a huge fan of Law & Order and the son of a man who explained everything through stories.

Here’s the basic plot synopsis of quite a few Law & Order episodes:

John Doe hires a professional hit man to shoot Jane Doe.

Discussion questions:

1. Who owns the gun?
2. Who is responsible for Jane Doe’s murder?

The District Attorney doesn’t care who owned the gun or who pulled the trigger. They always go after John Doe, the person who initiated the murder.

Reading Rand’s comments on Sphinn, one thing is pretty clear: He makes no distinction between owning the gun and pulling the trigger himself or hiring a hit man to pull the trigger.

For him, they are one and the same.

What’s entertainingly flawed about this logic is that, if you pay SEOmoz to use Linkscape and you download some of those reports to your computer, you can claim the same accomplishment they have claimed. Because you have paid them for access to their data, and you store your own copy of what they sold you, you too can advertise that you have your own web crawler that has indexed 30 billion pages.

This may be hard to pull of if you do in-house SEO (unless your boss thinks a spare hard drive can fit 30B pages) but if you have SEO clients, it’s all in how you spin it. Just add a page to your site with a friendly picture of a robot:

And, you know, keep saying over and over again that you have your own crawler. Good luck! :)

Could your company pull up a backup of anything from seven years ago? Let alone make it functional in the same context it once was? I surprise people whenever they learn I keep emails for as long as I do.

Anyone who didn’t believe they are keeping a Time Machine-esque index of every version of any page ever crawled should be convinced now. Just like a lot of folks want BackRub, I bet a lot of folks would love access to a searchable and far more comprehensive internet archive than the, well, actual Internet Archive.

Things I’ve learned about my sites from playing around with this?

• I did not rank quite as well as I remember ranking.
• I abused duplicate title tags, a lot.
• My general design style has evolved but is still recognizable (probably a bad thing!).
• I was reminded of some of our old domains and the odd subdirectory structure of the different web projects.

Diana mentions Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture which is getting a lot of attention with his recent passing. Many people are probably already in a mood to seriously consider their life’s course.

While these two posts have great value to me, I fear the next few weeks. The influx of attention, conversation and links that these genuine heartfelt posts generate will be irresistible for imitators.

Perhaps though, this global blogger introspection will lead to some greater universal truth?

What I know for sure is it will difficult to ignore.

I’m not sure what to think of this comic book approach to presenting complex technical subjects. If their target audience is non-technical, then panels like this one are not going to help.

Did I really just read “de-allocated memory” in a comic book? And, while I first glance it appears comic Mike Beishe is juggling the letters “X,” a closer inspection of his right hand reveals he is in fact holding a mystical orb.

Overall, the format leaves me with serious (well, for a web browser) questions about just what the heck they have in mind with this project. I’m also fairly confident that the “typical” browser user won’t even make it to page 6 to learn how to juggle de-allocated memory. It’s pitching too low for the well-informed and too high for the less-informed.

In fact, if you end up spending less time here because you’ve learned how to treat your attention as a free agent with incalculable value, then, in an unexpected way, you’ve paid both of us the highest compliment I can imagine; you’ve crossed the shit out of that river, and now you’re ready to just let other folks use the boat for a while.

Too many so-called productivity resources are, in fact, enabling the very time wasting behaviors for which they claim solutions.

Subversion. Work with a team using the most popular source control system there is, baked right into the sidebar. Check out code, update, commit changes — yep, Coda just saved you even more time.

And it’s a free upgrade? Yow.

Get it while it’s hot.

Update: Release Notes 11 New, 82 Improved Features. Yow indeed.

Now we’re fighting again, only this time the battle is in your pants. Every one of these little trouser Macs represents a victory in the next big wave in personal computing.

…

There’s only one answer we can afford to accept, because to lose this battle is to lose the war.

Mike has provided the best response thus far to his own critique of the App Store.

Many believe the only reason for pulling this product from the Applications Store was because someone might “accidentally buy it.” I love Steven Frank’s analysis of this problem:

You have to be dumber than a box of dried-out paintbrushes to “accidentally purchase” something, and even if you’re unwilling to accept personal responsibility for your own actions, it should be an open-and-shut case of giving the unwitting user a refund and moving on.

Of course, people “accidentally buying it” isn’t the reason for pulling an application like this, even with John Gruber’s logical business decision for pulling a product with a high return rate. Apple’s most likely reason to nip this idea in the bud? Stem the tide of copycats.

As soon as the word got out that Heinrich was able to profit $5,600 from a few hours labor, we would have been treated to the $899 “I’m Rich” application which displays a blue gem. Then, hours later, the $799 dollar “Phat Pimpin’” application which displays an jingling gold chain and flashing diamond-encrusted dollar sign. And, eventually, when the horse has been beaten to death, there will be free versions.

If there’s anything we’ve learned on the internet, it’s that a unique, interesting and utterly original idea that can actually work once will be mindlessly duplicated en masse by people who don’t get it.

Apple removed “I Am Rich” only because they didn’t want to add a new category for “Status Symbols.”

Look for a few changes coming to this area. :)

Here’s the adorable image that got the commenter in a tizzy: