Jeff Croft

I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.

Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.

I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.

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  • Link // 01.15.2012 // 5:47 PM // 0 Comments

    SOPA: Before Solving a Problem, Make Sure You’ve Got the Right Problem

    Tim O’Reilly on SOPA: “In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?” Exactly. Piracy is real, but the economic impact of it is up for serious debate.

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  • Link // 08.07.2008 // 9:09 AM // 1 Comment

    A Timeline of Internet Memes

    Holy shit this is awesome. Via Rex.

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  • Link // 06.04.2008 // 2:29 PM // 0 Comments

    Vanity Fair: How the Web Was Won

    Vanity Fair has “an oral history of the internet,” in which several pioneers, from Steve Case to Marc Andreessen to Jeff Bezos to Jerry Yang to Craig Newmark to Cindy Margolis (yes, Cindy Margolis), right up through Larry Page, Fake Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg discuss the history of this medium. Pretty awesome.

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  • Link // 09.17.2007 // 9:39 PM // 0 Comments

    Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site

    TimesSelect goes the way of the dinosaur. Welcome aboard the cluetrain, NYT.

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  • Link // 08.20.2007 // 1:57 AM // 0 Comments

    What A Comment Stream Would Look Like In A Meeting

    Definitely funny — at least if you’ve ever tried to read Digg.com comments.

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  • Link // 08.13.2007 // 2:15 PM // 4 Comments

    Adactio: Reflection

    Jeremy has some great thoughts here on the nature of online conversation. Based in part on a back-and-forth he and I had over the weekend, I was feeling similarly depressed about the ability for people to communicate as civil human beings for the past couple of days. Besides that exchange, I managed to (seemingly) offend Eric Meyer and Christian Montoya, and I had to read this incredibly depressing post and its subsequent comment thread. I was quite down for a while there— so much so that Michelle noticed and I ended up venting to her about it.

    While I generally don’t agree with Jeremy’s belief that comments on blogs are a bad idea, over the weekend I knew exactly what he was talking about. I think the best piece I’ve ever read on on this topic is Wilson’s Shouts and Echos.

    I don’t have much positive to say on the matter — I just hope it stops, at some point.

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  • Link // 07.06.2007 // 1:05 PM // 3 Comments

    How To: Use IRC On The iPhone With Colloquy

    I haven’t complained much about the lack of an SDK for the iPhone, mostly because the iPhone already has 90% of the apps I’d want on it. But IRC is one of the three biggies it’s missing, for me personally (the other two are instant messaging and a good RSS reader). This is definitely a hack, but it’s a fairly elegant one and Nathan reported success with it. Worth giving a shot, if you want to IRC on the road.

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  • Link // 07.03.2007 // 1:12 PM // 1 Comment

    The iPhone’s Secret Blindspot

    “… Jobs does not understand the 21st century computer usage paradigm. In this century, people don’t send memos to each other. And that’s what email is - electronic memos. Today, people chat; they blog; they share multimedia like pictures, video, and audio; they flame each other on forums; they link with each other in intricate webs; they swap effortlessly between different electronic personae and avatars; they listen to internet radio; they vote on this that and the other; they argue on wiki discussion groups.”

    Okay, two things:

    1. People don’t use e-mail today? Hello?! Do you have a job? Hell, a third of my day is often spent e-mailing.
    2. Isn’t almost everything that this guy says people do (instead of e-mail, I guess), possible on the iPhone?

    Weird piece, man. Weird piece.

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  • Link // 05.22.2007 // 5:29 PM // 0 Comments

    Slate: You cannot resist lolcats.

    Im in ur mainstream media. I can has world domination?

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  • Link // 03.23.2007 // 7:15 AM // 0 Comments

    News Corp. and NBC to take on YouTube

    This is about as likely to unseat YouTube as the Zune is to unseat the iPod. That is to say, not chance in hell.

    By and large, traditional media companies are losing to tech companies and web startups. Why? Basically, because they’re followers. Very few of them have the foresight to snatch up the brilliant young minds in the web world, and instead just follow the leader (in this case, YouTube). But the Internet seems to favor innovative and first-to-market products. Traditional media hasn’t released many of either.

    (All that having been said, there are a few traditional media companies who get it…thank God.)

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  • Link // 03.07.2007 // 2:40 AM // 0 Comments

    ‘Adult’ spam hits all-time low

    Porn and such now accounts for only three percent of junk mail. My completely uneducated analysis is that porn, unlike drugs and financial “advice”, is something people actually seek out on their own. There’s less need to send unsolicited advertisements, because people actually want porn.

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  • Link // 02.07.2007 // 12:15 AM // 0 Comments

    Ze Frank: Waves

    Probably my favorite episode ever. Or at least the episode most relevant and personal to me.

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  • Link // 01.25.2007 // 3:16 PM // 0 Comments

    Forbes: The Web Celeb 25

    Forbes picked the 25 biggest web celebrities. They get the list right, for the most part, but I’m not sure Jessica Rose should be number one. Still, interesting read. Notables (to me, anyway) include Merlin Mann, Leo Laporte, Seth Godin, Jeff Jarvis, and Jimmy Wales.

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  • Link // 01.24.2007 // 8:26 PM // 0 Comments

    James Bennett: A chronicle of the Ages of the Web

    A funny and entertaining spin on the history of the web, Tolkien style. I’ve suggested to James that he extend the narrative to include the Server Side Dominion, which was once ruled by Perl and CGI, before being taken over by PHP and Java, and more recently by modern, dynamic languages.

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  • Link // 01.08.2007 // 4:09 AM // 3 Comments

    Pavatar: decentralized avatars for blogs and the like

    I really like this idea. For the most part, the implementation seems sound. I think I’ll be whipping up some Django code to implement it here. So if you comment on this site, make yourself a Pavatar. :) Via Matt.

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  • Link // 01.03.2007 // 10:30 PM // 0 Comments

    Sam Ruby: OpenID for non-SuperUsers

    Maybe more appropriately titled “OpenID for less-Super Users”, this is a nice post covering the basics of the authentication system.

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  • Link // 01.03.2007 // 12:42 AM // 0 Comments

    The Long Tale of 2006

    “But what makes the long tail so disingenuous is that what happens in the long tail has almost no ramifications on what happens in the head.” Indeed. Insofar as I can tell, Newsvine is about the only “long tail” style web app that has made compensating the users for their user-generated content a part of their business plan. It frightens me to think just how much great stuff is on YouTube that the creators will never see a dime for. Long tail, my ass.

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  • Link // 12.12.2006 // 6:36 PM // 0 Comments

    Some interesting market research on what people do online

    “Relatively new Internet activities such as blogs, video, and phone calls are the fastest-growing in terms of usage, though old standby services like e-mail and shopping continue to dominate Internet users’ time.” Instant messaging, watching videos and downloading music are way up over last year, while reading news, sports, finance, and job searching are down.

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  • Link // 12.01.2006 // 7:55 AM // 0 Comments

    Why most web sites suck

    100% correct on every point. Simple, direct, and accurate. Love it.

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