Some big news dropped yesterday in the e-reading world: Amazon acquired Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, the popular (and, dare I say, best) reading software for iPhone. I’ve used Stanza for months now and have read about half a dozen books and other works on it. I was as skeptical as everyone else about the ebook thing, but my iPhone is now my go-to reading platform. Stanza started out good and has only gotten better.

Big wins for Stanza: integration with several e-text sites via API, the ability to read just about any format you can throw at it, and ad hoc downloading of any file from a URL (you can also pull down a file from your hard drive by opening it in Stanza’s bare-bones desktop app). Obviously, it can’t read DRM-locked files, so all those books you bought for your Kindle are so much garbage to Stanza.

Not to be outdone, Amazon released its own reader for iPhone, named Kindle after its pricier hardware cousin.

Big wins for Kindle: access to the entire Kindle store (which I like), and syncability with your Kindle hardware (which I don’t have, but wish I did).

I love Stanza, but I did try Kindle, since 1) it’s free and 2) the real Kindle isn’t. I bought Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon on the Kindle store (you can’t do it from inside the Kindle app; you have to use the Web site) and got about five percent through the book before missing Stanza so badly I bought the non-DRM edition from Fictionwise (which you can do from inside Stanza on the iPhone).

So what is Amazon going to do with Stanza? Though there is precedent for Amazon offering DRM-free content, I can’t see them offering competitors’ titles for sale right alongside the Kindle Store, can you? I think the best we can hope for is a beefed-up Kindle app with some of Stanza’s sweet user interface features, like low-light mode, screen orientation control and the iPod-like book browser.

Those things are all wonderful, but for me, the discovery of new content right inside Stanza is key. I published stories to Feedbooks and Smashwords. All those Stanza users can find my stuff right on their iPhone, and I can find other independent writers to connect with and support.

The worst possible outcome would be the end of free (as in speech) titles in Stanza. I really hope Amazon isn’t just out to eliminate the little fish, throwing out the nascent indie fiction market with the bathwater.

I would love the best of both worlds: a reader that can read any file you own, in any format, in addition to the vast Kindle catalog. But I’m not holding my breath.

I’m hoping that Amazon is really interested in Stanza’s desktop app, and its sharing feature. I’d love an ebook answer to Delicious Library, or iTunes (Cory Doctorow’s on-point rant notwithstanding). I’d love to have a desktop application that organizes my content and can push it to my platform of choice, keeping my place in sync everywhere.

I’m looking in another direction for that, though.

After I switched to reCAPTCHA the other day, it took all of half an hour before I saw my first bit of trackback spam. reCAPTCHA can’t do anything about trackbacks, unfortunately, so I withheld judgment.

The trackback spam was shortly followed by a bunch of comment moderation emails from WordPress. It seemed there were dozens of humans out there carefully pasting spam into my comments form and solving the CAPTCHAs. What a sad thought. So I turned Spam Karma 2 back on. After some help, I understood that reCAPTCHA saves spam that does not pass the CAPTCHA for your perusal. (Does anyone actually go back and peruse spam?) Quoth the FAQ:

reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam, so if you get moderation emails when spam comments are sent, you will get moderation emails for all spam comments with reCAPTCHA. We highly recommend turning off moderation emails with reCAPTCHA.

I read this before installing the plugin, but found it confusing. “reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam”? Which comments? All of them? Why would it do that? So, naturally, I ignored the warning.

It turns out that I wasn’t the only one confused. The ambiguity could have been eliminated by adding one word to that sentence. So an exercise in fighting spam becomes a lesson in copywriting.

I still love the reCAPTCHA concept, but I have to stick with Spam Karma for now — unless someone knows a solution for catching only trackback spam.

If you have a blog of your own, you know what a CAPTCHA is; for the rest of you, you’ve probably cursed at more than one. CAPTCHAs are those garbled images of words that you must decipher on many web sites to prove that you’re a human and not an evil spamming robot. If you’re like me, you find them at least mildly annoying. Until now, anyway.

I stumbled across reCAPTCHA over the weekend. Most CAPTCHAs use random words to prove you’re human, but this one shows you images of actual scanned text. The text comes from books that the Internet Archive has scanned but not digitized. You get to do the digitizing yourself by typing in the word. If enough people complete enough CAPTCHAs on enough sites, pretty soon that adds up to a bunch of books archived for posterity.

I love this idea for several reasons. It’s crowdsourcing at its best. It’s also a perfect example of what 37signals calls judo: break a big task down into many small steps; better yet, take something negative and turn it into a positive. It’s a good cause that happens to be book-related.

When I saw there was a WordPress plugin available, I installed it right here for you all to try out. Now go help save the world.

Plus, I could use more commenters.

I got invited to try Skitch today (thanks Angela!), and is mind-blowingly cool. If you’re interested, leave a comment and I’ll send my one invite to the first responder.

While following Friday’s ruckus on Signal vs. Noise, I noticed the prior post was a reader shoutback entitled “The tools you use”. I like monkeying with new tools and toys as much as anyone, so I scanned through it and noticed a reference to a web application called iUseThis. Think of it as Digg for your hard drive. You can submit a program to the site, and everyone else who uses that app can sign up and say “I use this application.”

I went ahead and created a profile of the software I use. I was going to add it to the Signal vs. Noise comment thread, but said thread is several days old now, so I won’t bother. Feel free to link up your own profile here, though.

iUseThis, being a good little Web 2.0 app, features application tagging. However, only the “owner” of an application (is that the author, the submitter, or both?) can add tags to that app. I think that’s missing the point. People use tags to categorize their own data. The list of apps I use is my data and I can’t organize it (actually, there’s not even a way to sort the list). Compare it to my del.icio.us page — I can add whatever tags I want to my links, and that adds value to my information. On iUseThis, I would have liked to tag my “work” apps (TextMate, Transmit, Minuteur) and my “play” apps (Google Earth, iTunes) separately. Do all the programmers out there care that I manage my photos with iPhoto, or that I like to write with Scrivener? I’m guessing not so much. I hope the folks behind iUseThis pick up on that, and add user tagging to applications.

And finally — yes, I recognize the irony of trying a new toy that helps you find new toys to try. It’s almost as bad as writing about writing…

“I’m continually surprised that more companies aren’t willing to consider telecommuters, especially on the job board. My feeling is that you can’t trust the person you’re hiring to get the job done without being under your thumb, you’re probably not hiring the right person.” -From the Signal vs. Noise archives

Fact: I’m expecting my second child at the end of the month. My wife is happy at her job and our family is nearby.

Fact: Less than five people in Columbia, SC have ever heard the term Ruby on Rails. (OK, that’s not necessarily a fact, but it sure seems like one.)

Fact: There’s an amazing series of tubes that can connect me in realtime with pretty much anyone on the planet, anytime. Shoot, I even got me a cell phone and a Starbucks just around the corner.

Conclusion: A guy like me, with ten years’ experience building web applications for startups, on just about every platform that’s ever been buzzworthy, should be able to find someone to pay me to work remotely.

Wrong.

I’ve responded to ten or fifteen posts on the 37 Signals Job Board. The typical reply to my resume goes something like this:

“The resume looks great. Can we do a phone interview?”

“Hmm, 803, what area code is that?”

“So are you looking to relocate to (metro area X), or just anywhere?”

“You aren’t able to relocate? Well, thanks for your time.”

Rails is the best platform I’ve ever built a web application on. It’s the only one that I look forward to using. Before I spent quality time with it, I was ready to give up software development for good. I don’t want to use .NET or Visual Basic again, and I couldn’t work half as efficiently if I did. (Imagine seeing a job posting that read “Designer wanted. Must be proficient with MS Paint.”) Unfortunately, those are the only local job openings.

Relocation isn’t an option for me right now. A year from now, that may change, but that’s hardly the point.

37 Signals is a group of fairly smart and influential guys, half of whom are scattered around the globe. It’s their job board you’re advertising on. If telecommuting works for them, give me one good reason why it won’t work for your company.

I’ve attempted to manage my time using the Getting Things Done method for about a year. A cottage industry of GTD aids has sprung up, from the humble Hipster PDA to the fancy Tracks and everything in between. I’ve used Gmail, as outlined in Bryan’s whitepaper, for most of the previous year.

The big selling points of Gmail are:

• labeling
• search
• as a web application, it’s accessible anywhere
• your inbox doubles as your GTD inbox, which means that email message you need to answer is already in your GTD system as an action

I’ll let you read the paper for more details.

After a few months, the system started working against me. Gmail is not the fastest web application on the block, which made weekly reviews (a cornerstone of GTD) a pain. I’d click on all my project labels by rote, wait for the list to load, nod my head, and click on the next one. I wasn’t really processing much.

Your mileage may vary on this next point, but for me, it’s not such a great idea to mix my email and actions. I hated checking email because I’d see all the todos and feel swamped. I hated checking todos because I had to wade through spam and content to get to them. I setup rules to automate some of that, but I was always tweaking my rules in lieu of just Getting Stuff Done. Merlin remarked that your GTD system should be like your coffee cup; mine was a British roadster that lived in the shop (and I know a thing or two about that).

What did I do about it? You’ll have to wait for the next post, because this one has been sitting in my unfinished queue for way too long.

One year ago today, Flickr fessed up to being acquired by Yahoo!.

“They’re not going to replace any of us with suits, nor induce us to wear them. Lapel? I don’t know what you mean.”

To celebrate this dubious milestone, here’s a poignant story of one erstwhile Flickr fan’s struggle to get his password back from Yahoo!’s clutches.

• Who does Yahoo! think they are? (Space Age Wasteland)

Quick break from vacation to point out this post at Signal vs. Noise:

Enterprise is the New Legacy (Signal vs. Noise)

The sharp kids at 37 Signals picked up on something the Startup Junkie noted awhile ago: enterprise is becoming a dirty word.

Startup Junkie: Mission Statement (Colaspot)

Happy New Year!

One of the things I found useful after setting up GTD with Gmail was the Greasemonkey script that adds a delete button to the Gmail interface. Greasemonkey, if you’ve been living under a rock, is a Firefox extension that allows a web developer to make “aftermarket” changes to an existing web site. Such as adding a delete button to Gmail.

However.

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you know that the latest versions of Greasemonkey have had serious problems. Nothing seemed to work after upgrading. This morning I found a simple fix. I upgraded to Greasemonkey 0.5.3, followed the directions, and all is well again. Even my Gmail saved searches work, for the first time. If you’ve been in Greasemonkey withdrawal like me, the craziness is over.