Dear esteemed readers,

While at Wordcamp a couple weeks ago, I was asked about what I write about on my blog. Good question. Something I often wonder myself. I proceeded to delay my response while I thought of some answer that would best communicate how I felt inside:

“Umm, well, some photography and technology news I guess, but not—”

“Ahhh, so it’s a personal blog?”

There was something about the way they said “personal” that was demeaning. As if no blog could possibly be worth reading if it’s personal. Looking around that room at the blank faces of “social media probloggers” trying to make a penny off a new medium, I could see that they missed it.

Write top ten lists with killer post titles. Spam your blog on every social network out there. Don’t be passionate, personal, or exhaustive. Make your posts easily skimable and don’t write about more than one topic. Build a community, entertain your readers, and make sure you submit to Digg. And for goodness sake, NEVER write a post over 500 words—the readers might get bored.

And then I get criticized because I don’t want to “embrace new media”.

Listen here: spamming people and treating your audience like mindless zombies is not “new media” or “social media”. It’s more like old media than anything else. The Internet doesn’t exist so we can constantly pamper the reader in a desperate attempt to plead with them to stick around. We don’t have to constantly push “punch the monkey” ads in the reader’s face, or tease them with juicy headlines and Digg bait. That’s what television is—reporters repeating the same rhetoric while teasing viewers with headlines and yelling them not to go away because, by golly, they’ll be right back.

You’re missing the point.

The Internet exists so that anyone with something to say can say it. And be heard. Everything has an audience—you just have to have something worth listening to. Unfortunately, we’ve over-saturated the world of “personal blogs” with stories of our girlfriend’s brother’s dog, diluting our message, and giving personal blogs a bad reputation as useless, mundane, and senseless.

I like how Jack Shedd puts it:

There are only three requirements I’ve ever sussed out from reading excellent sites. Write well, write often, and write with passion. It seems if you can manage that, you’ll find an audience.

Back to the question: “What do you write about on your blog?”

Such a simple question. What do I write about? Well, anything that I find interesting. It is MichaelMistretta.com after all, and if you’re not interested in what I’m interested in, why are you here in the first place?

But I want to go deeper than that. Something more.

Ideas.

That’s what I want to write about. Thoughts and ideas that inspire. Sure, there will still be photography and tech-related posts as those are still things I love. But my focus has changed. I guess you could say this blog has always reflected Michael Mistretta, and Michael Mistretta’s direction is changing.

This ‘change’ probably won’t affect you at all. My interests have stayed the same. But I’ve decided to publish this more for me than for you. Everything I’ve written up to this point has been a steady progression towards this decision.

Looking at some of the blogs that have inspired me over the last 10 months, I’ve also decided to change the way MM.com will be published.

• From John Gruber, I learned that it’s okay to have a linked list—and make it interesting at that.

• From Shawn Blanc, I discovered the novelty of publishing an exhaustive post, written masterfully down to the 5000th word, debunking the myth of readers only wanting short, scannable posts.

• And from Seth Godin, I found the value of consistently writing short, succinct posts that communicate a single idea in the most powerful way possible.

Anyone can grasp onto one of the three of these concepts, and claim it as their writing style. And that’s how I treated them for awhile—one being better than the other. If you were lazy, you posted a link. If you didn’t have much to say, you wrote a short post. And if you had a lot of time on your hands, you wrote an exhaustive post.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

You see, none of these mediums are better than any of the others. They can all suck, and they can all be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I used to think of a post topic and ask myself which type of post—short, long, or link—I felt like writing. No more. Now, when I think of an idea for a post I ask myself what the best way to communicate is.

If someone else said it better than I ever could, why waste time repeating them? Use a link. If you have an idea that doesn’t require a 4000 word post, by all means, don’t write the 4000 word post. It’s not a matter of one being better than another as much as it is one complimenting each other.

-

Again, to quote Jack Shedd:

If you’re worth reading, someone will read you. If you’re worth watching, someone will watch you. If you’re worth hearing, someone will listen.

And that’s exactly what I intend to do. Thank you for sticking with me throughout this ride. Things are about to get a whole lot better.

-Michael

An unordered list of observations regarding the lesser-known features of the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros announced at today’s Apple Event:

• The 3.5mm stereo jack in the MacBooks and MacBook Pros will now recognize the microphone in the iPhone earbuds. Interestingly enough, the click remote on the headphones also work, playing, pausing, or skipping a song in iTunes.

• Apple chose to focus their new notebook lineup on graphics over raw CPU power (as seen from the 2.1Ghz white MacBook selling for $999, and the 2.0Ghz aluminum MacBook for $1299). With a big push in Snow Leopard for GPU-accelerated computing, we’ve reached the end of measuring computer performance simply by the processor. The Nvidia 9400M looks like the perfect mobile chipset—providing a good compromise between battery life, compactness, and performance.

• As I mentioned earlier today, Steve Jobs and Jony Ive seem committed to make the next generation of Apple computers as simple as possible: “We’ve refined and refined every detail in the service of the user. Just to get rid of complexity. If something doesn’t need to be there, it’s not there.” From removing buttons and latches to an impeccable attention to detail, Apple is determined to making the MacBook the simplest notebook ever.

• FireWire 400 is dead. And even worse, FireWire is nonexistent from the MacBooks. I anticipate that consumer camcorders will continue to move towards solid-state capture, and higher-end HDDs will adopt the pro FW800 standard. Similar to the uproar over Apple removing a modem from their original MBP, FW400 will die a slow and quiet death.

• Apple has had a big push towards accessibility with their new laptops. Both include removable batteries and user-serviceable hard drives and RAM.

• Steve commented on transitioning all the Macs over to the new DisplayPort “standard”, where “standard” refers to a standard that doesn’t exist yet. Apple’s always accustomed to being slightly ahead of the curve though (recall 802.11n and ExpressCard adoptions). DisplayPort is able to carry audio as well as flexible resolutions of video, and is smaller than HDMI, enabling all of Apple’s future Macs to potentially power the 30-inch Apple Cinema Display.

• The downside to DisplayPort is it hasn’t been widely adopted by many manufacturers. Want to connect to a third-party display? Adapter. Want to connect to a projector? Adapter. Want to connect to Apple’s own 30″ display? $100 adapter. It won’t be long until a third-party capitalizes on this and starts including “adapter compartments” into new MacBook bags.

• Will the new 24″ LED Cinema Displays work with older MacBook Pros via an adapter?

• Mobile storage has improved since the last time I bought a notebook. 320GB 7200rpm drives are available for the MBPs and 128GB SSDs have been added as an option across the board.

• Personally, I’m fascinated by the dual-graphics cards in the MBPs. The 9400M integrated graphics perform at 80% of the performance of the previous 8600M GT for standard use, and allow for an extra hour of battery life. When connected to a power adapter, the MBP switches over to the more powerful, dedicated 9600M GT graphics card.

  A few questions remain: Is there a UI for switching graphic cards on-the-fly? Will the screen go black for a few seconds or flicker? Can both the 9400M and the 9600M GT run simultaneously? No doubt, having two GPUs will be an interesting combo for pros looking for a tradeoff between battery life and performance.

  U P D A T E: Looks like the GPUs can be controlled from the display preferences, and require you to log out in order to take effect.

• Most interesting is how Apple is positioning the MacBooks in their mobile lineup—as mini MacBook Pros. With an aluminum finish and a decent graphics card, Apple has finally brought back the 12″ PowerBook, albeit in a larger form-factor. These beasts are more Pro than MacBook now, and as John Gruber extrapolated, the $999 white MacBook can be compared to the new MacBooks as the iBooks were compared to the 12″ PowerBook.

  I think we will see more of Apple blurring the lines between ‘pro’ and ‘consumer’ in the near future.

I like to call it the Photoshop effect.

Today, everyone is a designer. Yep, a bunch of people have pirated Photoshop and have magically deemed themselves “designers”. And they’re determined to let the whole world know it. When I inquire about hiring a designer via twitter, everyone and their cat claims to be qualified simply because they have a copy of Photoshop.

The same problem can be said about blogging: I have a blog, therefore I’m a blogger; I have a digital camera, therefore I am a photographer; I have a twitter account, therefore I have friends.

Personally, I’m sick of it.

I have a fair bit of design sense. I own Pixelmator, and it does the job for me. But by no means do I call myself a designer. No, that’s someone else’s job. And so when I ask for a designer, I’m not looking for those with design tools, I’m looking for designers. Real designers. But often, the people that approach me have less design sense than I do.

We’ve become disillusioned, and have grown to think that by simply following a set of rules, we can become an artist. That if we preform a simple 1, 2, 3 process, we too can make something inspiring and wonderful.

That’s the problem. Creativity is not a math or a science. It’s not something with rules that you can break. It’s an art. It’s when a person has a story burning on the inside of them, and they use every medium available to tell that story.

Whither the Story?

Here’s my petition to every artist out there:

Stop it. Stop thinking about the tools. Stop taking pictures of things just because they’re there. Stop writing unoriginal content. With the amount of stuff out there on the Internet, your stuff better stand out among the overload of media being shoved down your audience’s throats.

But first, you have to have a story to tell.

The problem we’ve come up against are people have started to take art too seriously. A whole cottage industry has come up around digital photography and blogging and design—telling artists what they should and should not do to be successful. People making money off telling other people how they make money. And people actually believe this nonsense:

If I only follow these 53 and a half rules, then I will be successful. If I only had the money, then I could make it. If I only had the connections, the friends, the support, the equipment, the whatever… THEN I could create something beautiful.

Jack Shedd details the only requirements necessary for publishing a successful weblog, and I dare to say that they apply to every aspect of being an artist:

There are only three requirements I’ve ever sussed out from reading excellent sites. Write well, write often, and write with passion. It seems if you can manage that, you’ll find an audience.

It’s time for the true artists to begin breaking the rules again.

Real Artists Create

I’ve never been really good at art. I was taught that art was the thing you drew in sketchbooks, and because I never felt creative around sketchbooks, concluded I wasn’t an artist.

But there’s more to being an artist than that. So I’ve assembled my own definition:

A person who can communicate their imagination in a physical form, using whatever medium available to capture and portray their passions, thoughts, and emotions—reaching across language and culture barriers to connect to a viewer’s heart.

An artist is the master of their tools, and will use whatever tools necessary to tell the story he or she wants to tell. They know their equipment inside out—every knob, button, and switch—so their equipment simply become an extension of their mind, never getting in the way. They are free to focus on creating, and not on the tools themselves.

Artist are passionate and deeply attached to their work. Usually, true artists simply create for a hobby. Most artists give up creating things they love in exchange for a living. That said, the artists that are free to create things they love for a living are often the happiest. And most productive

Artists foster creativity. They are constantly thinking and meditating on how they can communicate a story. Because after all, artists are simply storytellers.

Better

When I take a photo; when I publish a blog post—when I create something—there’s a certain level of dissatisfaction. Not dissatisfaction in my work, but a dissatisfaction in my current state.

It’s hard to describe. It’s an insatiable desire to do things better. And better. In my mind, I see the metaphorical image of the perfect artist. And everything I create is one step closer. Be content with what you create, but never let that stop you from becoming better.

The key is growth. As an artist, you thrive on growth. You thrive on knowing that your latest creation is a little bit better than the creation before it. All you’re looking for is a sign—one new subscriber per month—that proves that you’re growing. That you have not hit your peak; that you still have room to grow.

An artist isn’t concerned with how good they may or may not be at the moment. They know that if they have a story worth telling and continue to grow it, one little bit at a time, they will create with more drive, more talent, and more passion than anyone else.