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Everyone out there who follows a web-two-point-oh personality has probably heard by now about Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Good People Day 08″ initiative (short video), where he challenges everyone to talk about good people you know. Here are just two of the ones I’d like to highlight:
Jason Jacobsohn ofNetworking Insight
Many of you in Chicago technology know Jason from his work at the Chicagoland Entrepreneurship Center, KMG Enterprises, and through his blog, Networking Insight. I don’t know Jason very well yet personally, but from the several interactions I’ve had with him I can say he’s a great guy and someone who ‘gets it.’ He’s been gracious and helpful to me each time I’ve come to him with a question, and I believe him to be trustworthy. The more I see come out of Jason, whether it’s good content on his site, how he keeps in touch with people, or his upcoming event, the Great Chicago Networking Extravaganza, the more I see that Jason is a good person well deserving of his success.
Kelly McKiernan of BZPower and LEGO
LEGO fans out there will probably know Kelly from the Bionicle community site BZPower. Kelly has been a mainstay in the LEGO community for years and has used his unique combination of web development, administrative, and interpersonal communication skills to be a driving force behind many community projects. In many cases, Kelly taught me the meaning of “cooler heads will prevail” by living it out in the numerous conference calls, emails, and online discussions we participated in together. From working with him, I know he’s an invaluable asset to any team that must bridge the challenging gap between technology and business interests while navigating political minefields without setting off (m)any mines. ;^)
On Saturday morning I had coffee with Greg Cross, a LEGO fan who I met at BrickWorld last year. Through the conversation I pulled up an old presentation, one of many I gave on the LDraw system for creating virtual LEGO models. Since I’ve lately been thinking about LDraw again, and since I’ve recently talked to a few non-LEGO friends about the software and (shameless plug) my book, I thought I’d upload it and share. Enjoy!
Note: It looks like some of the images didn’t convert properly and transparency didn’t work on some. Try not to let that distract you :-)
A friend just sent me this link, and apparently it’s not all that known on the Internet yet. The site did get Dugg, but I haven’t seen anyone in the online LEGO community pick up on it.
The web site play/nyc first displayes a strange copyright notice, then this screen:
It appears to be a mockup of a native iPhone application (perhaps coming after the June update?) and highlights features where you can build a model by dragging parts onto the screen, challenge friends, and share models with friends.
It looks like a cool concept, and I’d love to see an iPhone app for either LDraw or LEGO Digital Designer, but I hope it ends up being a bit more robust than this. And on this one, I have a gut feeling it isn’t official, based on the fonts chosen and the way the logo is used. Which means if it isn’t, the page may be short-lived…
Wow, has it been that long? Flash back to the summer in-between my junior and senior year of high school. The memories are coming back to me now. I read the news on our email list on July 27, 1997–two days after he died of flu complications near his home in NSW, Australia. I had never met James face-to-face, but I had traded a bunch of email with him. I loved using the program he wrote called LDraw, it let me build LEGO models on my computer in 3D and share them with others. It was a DOS program and at first I was quite confused, so he walked me through using it over email.
This was the first time someone I knew only on the Internet had died. I was amazed at the sadness and emptiness I felt, even though to me, James was really just a series of emails and a program. What amazed me more was his death impacted all of my online friends–and at that point I hadn’t met any of them yet either. A memorial sprung up. LDraw users picked up where James left off, writing new parts and coordinating “official” community updates. They kept his passion for LEGO and computers alive through our “L-CAD” list.
One of my most treasured LDraw experiences over the last ten years was the brief opportunity to meet James’ parents, Don & Robyn, in 2001. I invited them to the second annual BrickFest in DC as a gesture, a courtesy even, not thinking they’d fly all the way here from Australia. They leapt at the chance.
Over the 2-3 days we spent together at the convention, they told me stories about their son and the remarkable things he did while he was alive. Never selfish, always helping other people, and passionate about computers and kids. James dropped out of his first year of college and soon after he taught senior-level courses. He was simple and humble, he loved his family and he loved to be a servant. He ran a small computer business and wrote LDraw as a hobby. Don & Robyn were sure proud of him, and they were delighted that we loved using and furthering James’ work, even if it was just his hobby.
Just a few weeks ago, I had the honor of presenting the 2006James Jessiman Memorial Award at BrickWorld here in Chicago. The award is a way the LDraw community recognizes people who make outstanding contributions to the LDraw system and advance James’ original work. While it has been a decade since James passed, I like that we pause and remember where our system came from by acknowledging James and his original work. When you look out today at the LEGO hobby, there’s hardly a corner LDraw hasn’t touched. It’s fundamentally shaped how people communicate, trade, and share ideas online about the brick. That’s something I wish James could be here to see.
Very good news came through the intertubes today about BrickShelf. Kevin Loch announced that he has determined a way, through paid accounts, to keep BrickShelf running. Also, in his post, he communicated his logic behind the shutdown last week, and admitted in hindsight it wasn’t the best way to go about it. Certainly a forgivable offense, and there’s nothing like a little shock therapy to give folks a wakeup call.
In followup to my previous post, though, I definitely wouldn’t do this to a paying customer.
Here’s to hoping BrickShelf lives on for years to come.
I love companies and people who provide great customer service. I have varying degrees of negative emotion ranging from annoyance to all-out hatred for companies who suck at it.
Today I stumbled, in a rather personal way, across an example of really bad customer service. The web site tens of thousands of LEGO fans have used to host photos of their models has been yanked from the web with not so much a warning — rendering thousands of image links and references unavailable and some people (including me) without some of their photos. The only “warning” was after the fact - a message on the BrickShelf web site that read:
Brickshelf has discontinued operation. We apologize for any inconvenience.
I for one lost a pretty rare photo — one of me with James Jessiman’s parents, Don & Robyn, when they came to visit in 2001. For those of you who know the backstory of James and LDraw, that’s a big deal to me (and I presume to a few others). Yes, I should have had that photo backed up, but I had no idea Kevin would pull a stunt like this.
Now, for some background, Kevin Loch has been hosting these images for free for about ten years. The bandwidth charges have been enormous for this, as Eric Smith speculates in his post (his numbers are spot on, I work in the data center industry). The LEGO company did subsdize the site for a while (not sure of exactly how long) when the cost became prohibitive, but has since stopped. Kevin also attempted to recoup some costs by displaying ads on gallery pages.
On one hand, it’s Kevin’s site, his out-of-pocket expenses, and he can do whatever he darn well pleases with the site. No one is or has paid him a dime (save individual donations). He has no legal obligation to anyone to maintain the service or give a warning of shutting down. It even says so in his terms of service.
So here you have it. Hundreds of thousands of pictures hosted on a site for years (and linked to by thousands of pages) are just gone. No advance warning, no opportunity for image owners to back up their stuff if they need, no chance for them to change their links over to say, Flickr, and keep their web site viewers happy.
Kevin deserves our thanks for providing a place to look at people’s creations. If he’s decided to take it down, then we need to say thanks, and move on. A warning might have been nice, but you have no idea what the circumstances were that caused the shutdown.
They have good points, but ahem “A warning might have been nice?” ??!
Let’s look at the bigger picture here. Tens of thousands of people have uploaded their stuff to BrickShelf. Thousands of people have used it as the de facto image hosting site for about ten years. This means there are thousand and thousands of links to images across the internet. Many are indexed on web sites, discussion forums, and blogs and they reference creations that are easy to find with a simple search. Kevin knows all of this.
While he’s been providing this for free for years, and it’s within his rights to take it down without a word, it’s certainly not nice. In fact, it’s downright rude. And while yes, the people who have used his site and enjoyed the pictures on it over the years do owe him a huge “thanks,” it’s also reasonable to expect us to be upset when it just disappears overnight, uprooting the majority of model images online.
The bottom line: it’s about customer service, and Kevin blew it on that one. By not giving people any opportunity to back up their stuff when he discontinued BrickShelf’s service, he pulled the rug out of a whole lot of people who “bought” into him and his site as a trustworthy place to host and link to their stuff. I don’t know what Kevin does for a living, but if I were looking to buy the professional services he provides and knew the BrickShelf story, I’d look elsewhere without batting an eyelash.
So Kevin, so long and thanks for all the images–but no thanks for pulling the cord.
. Thanks for visiting!
Wow, has it been that long? Flash back to the summer in-between my junior and senior year of high school. The memories are coming back to me now. I read the news on our email list on July 27, 1997–two days after he died of flu complications near his home in NSW, Australia. I had never met James face-to-face, but I had traded a bunch of email with him. I loved using the program he wrote called LDraw, it let me build LEGO models on my computer in 3D and share them with others. It was a DOS program and at first I was quite confused, so he walked me through using it over email.
