The movie business faces many of the same changes that the music industry faces, though with a few twists. In the music industry debate, the music stores themselves don’t seem to have a seat at the table: we hear more about the record companies than the distribution channels. The movie business is different, where the main distribution channel is the movie theater.

The big debate in film exhibition is “closing the window” — industry-speak for releasing movies to DVD at the same time as releasing them in the theater. The studios and theaters are worried that by releasing simultaneously with DVDs (as well as pay-per-view) they will cut into ticket sales. The studios are worried because they make a lot of money from ticket sales — the success of a movie is gauged first and foremost by box office gross. The theaters are worried because they’re the ones selling the tickets.

The movie business would do well to look hard at the music industry and consider its response, especially since the music industry has taken so long to understand the changing landscape. By embracing (or at least tentatively approaching) the new ways in which media are created, distributed, and consumed, the movie busiess can drive over this hurdle without feeling so much as a bump. Just because there’s less opportunity to make money the old-fashioned way, doesn’t mean there’s no way to make money in a new-fashioned way. Indeed, theaters should seize upon this as a call to action to convert the movie-going experience: improve upon the things that make it enjoyable (comfortable seats, leg room) and eliminate the things that make it unpleasant (in a word, teenagers).

With digital media, the cost structure changes. The expense of getting a print to a movie theater and paying someone to load the enormous projectors goes to zero. (Though I lament the demise of the projectionist as much as the next guy, innovation will always create not just new jobs, but new professions.) When theaters have a larger library at their disposal, the licensing costs will also go down, making it cheaper to run the theater. With these costs becoming marginal, new doors open, leading to the Theater of the Future:

• Themed theaters: All sports, all the time. Shows major sporting events. Runs the Natural during off-nights in the World Series and Rudy in the days leading up to the Superbowl. Sells tickets in bulk, so you can bring your friends or hold a bachelor party at the Stanley Cup. Sells season tickets, so you can have front row seats to every major sporting event and throws in free screenings of sports-themed movies.
• Genre theaters: Action movies must be seen on the big screen. During the Spring lull, run movies that people love watching in the theater: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Matrix, etc.
• Movies by request: Theater puts a poll on its Web site, customers vote on the movie to show that weekend. If you vote, you get a voucher for free popcorn.
• Kids only: Show kids movies before noon! A whole market untapped by the current model: theaters generally don’t show movies in the morning.
• Dual channel: DVDs come with a pass to see the movie in the theater. Sound crazy? People buy CDs even after they’ve downloaded music for free online. Why not turn it around? Give them the theater experience after they’ve dropped $30 on the DVD.
• Really big screens: No doubt closing the window will cull movie theaters. People will stop going to the bad ones. This is a good thing because it will force movie theaters to re-think what makes them competitive to the ever-increasing home theater market. Maybe we can lose the multiplexes with screens the size of laptops and go back to theaters where the screens are really, really big. In the theater of the future, Kong looks like Kong and not a chimpanzee.
• Double features: Not just for mid-20th century history books any more! Why shouldn’t the double-feature make a return, especially when you can run the original War of the Worlds before the remake?
• Theater, Interrupted: Movie Tivo?
• The Elsewhere Cinema: Instead of attaching movie theaters to malls, maybe they can be attached to other types of venues. The other major costs in a movie theater are real estate and personnel. Perhaps there are partnership opportunities that allow theater owners to realize efficiencies in both these areas.

So, some of these are bad ideas, but this is all off the top of my head, and I’m a movie fan, not a marketer in the movie industry. Imagine what someone with a real stake in this business might come up with.

Though I’ve mentioned my dad’s television show before, if you haven’t yet tuned it, there are still a few episodes left in the season. He’s gotten some great press! If you like movies, you’ll love Movies 101.

Finally! James has been telling me about his analysis of del.icio.us for months and he’s finally posted something to his blog about it. It’s made for some great conversation and he’s done a fantastic job scouring the rat’s nest of tags to shine a light on good practices and great examples. This is a must read if you’ve been wondering whether del.icio.us is worth the hype.

The other night, just before the DC World Usability Day, James and I got dinner and he was telling me about some of his latest work in the del.icio.us area and he said:

The thing I like most about del.icio.us is me.

(Which, paraphrased into my more vulgar parlance, means “social bookmarking my ass.”)

In response to an article on the demise of the the folder metaphor, I wrote a piece for greenonions.com called “A world without folders is not a world without structure.” This piece makes the argument that although we’re seeing looser implementations of information hierarchies, there are underlying structures to our information systems that require a professional touch. Just because your web site no longer has a static navigation system doesn’t mean you can fire your information architect, however whiny he might be.

While navigation and categorization may (or may not) wane, other structures of information remain important to the design process. Here are some examples of non-navigational and non-classification structures that are still relevant, regardless of your feelings about navigation:

• The anatomy of a document
• The different views of a dataset
• The process of completing a task
• The inherent relationships between different types of documents

All these are examples of structures that aren’t classification or navigation in the common understanding of those words. Having a professional information architect think about and articulate these structures is useful to the project because any system is easier to build with underlying patterns.

Indeed, our minds frequently find patterns whereever they exist, even if they’re not immediately relevant for the problem at hand. The discussion below goes into some (strange abstract) detail (involving circles and triangles) but here’s a simple example: How many of you have boiled your methodology down to three or five steps?

On one level, this abstraction is true: it only takes five (three, sir!) steps to build a web site. But this level of abstraction is useful only for sales pitches. Try to do a project plan without digging into the details, and you won’t get very far.

Sometimes, these structures are so salient as to be a distraction from reality. Our minds have imposed a pattern on a set of observations and because we have come to understand what we see in terms of the pattern, we believe the pattern to exist. Perhaps we’re observing a business process, and though reality says there’s little consistency between one instance of the process and the next, we can abstract our observations to a level where Authoring –> Editing makes sense.

This is an important phenomenon I’ve only just recently started to think about: the perception of a pattern happens at a certain level of abstraction. All patterns are abstractions–if they weren’t they wouldn’t be patterns. But structures are observable at different levels of resolution. To illustration this, I came up with this jumble of circles, squares, and triangles.

Perhaps the shapes represent steps in a process. Every instance of the process slightly different, but they have enough in common where we can see the pattern shown in abstraction #1: The process is pretty much always three circles, three squares, and three triangles with one of each gray.

But suppose we decide that the differences in the gray shapes is substantial enough that we can’t include that in the abstraction, we are forced to see a different pattern, perhaps like the one in abstraction #2. Just to make this a little more concrete, imagine that the gray shapes represent steps in the process performed by a different group of people, and their tasks are significantly different. Still, though the mechanics of the task are different, the gist is the same, so we can say “this type of work is done, though it’s done differently by the gray people.”

On the other hand, we may realize that particular tasks are not performed in the same order every time. Instead, we can only draw the conclusion that groups of tasks are performed in a certain order, whether the sub-tasks are or not. This is reflected in abstraction #3, which says, “We don’t know how many circle, square, or triangle tasks we’re going to have to do, but we do know they’ll always come in this order.”

These levels of abstraction occur on pretty much every business object. Compare three press releases side-by-side. Or three different document types. Compare the responsibilities of one content provider in your organization with those of another. You’re pulling out patterns. And in finding the patterns, you lose distinctions that may or may not be crucial to the operations you hope to support with a system.

This seems pretty important because it can make or break a system’s success. Taking abstractions too far, translating observations into requirements that are meaningless, leads to systems that don’t effectively support business. The other risk at this end of the spectrum (too abstract) is that the system loses value. If I’m creating a system to support a very simple two-step workflow, what’s the point?

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum: too little abstraction. Perhaps you’ve based your requirements on a limited set of observations, or there are too many exceptions to account for. In this case the system loses value because it is inflexible, and doesn’t effectively account for every situation.

As builders of computer systems, we gravitate toward patterns. They are the repeated structures that systems thrive on. As information architects, however, we have a responsibility to distinguish good structure from bad. We can’t simply observe a pattern and build to it. Instead, we must find the delicate balance between too abstract and too specific such that systems don’t enforce nonsense rules while still providing a relevant, coherent, and value-add framework for supporting needs.

Regular readers know how important good television is to me. It was, therefore, disheartening (though not surprising) read that Fox’s Monday night comedy lineup was cancelled. Arrested Development has had a strong third season and their consistent showing at the Emmy’s seemed to make them a formidible contender. Fox reports, however, low ratings. The four million plus households who tuned in on Monday were in for a treat, but the numbers weren’t big enough to keep the comedy afloat, despite a stellar cast and sharp writing.

Kitchen Confidential is (was) embryonic, with chemistry between the actors only mildly bubbling and that something that holds a show together still forming. At the same time, with so few smart comedies on the air, these drawbacks are minor and probably require only a bit of time to iron themselves out. Kitchen Confidential gave us an interesting premise, decent writing, and some good characters. Shows like Arrested and Confidential (as well as NBC’s My Name Is Earl) give me hope that the smart and (truly) funny sitcom is not extinct in a post-Seinfeld world. Then again, maybe it is.

Despite its more bad boy image than the Big Three, Fox has a sordid history of show cancellation (cf. Firefly) and is becoming less likely to take a chance. With the cost of developing a new show as high as it seems, I can’t figure out why Fox would cancel already developed shows. Isn’t it less expensive to give shows a chance to shake out then to invest in a new one?

Anyway, I’m going to soak up the last few episodes, buy the DVDs and put them on the shelf in what’s becoming a graveyard of good cancelled shows. We watch these DVDs (Sportsnight, anyone?) and wish we could see the growth of favorite characters and the resolution of plotlines. Perhaps Fox and the other networks are just following the first rule of show business: always leave ‘em wanting more.

Since I have the day off for Veteran’s Day, I drove my 13-year-old sister-in-law to school. In the Gene Smith tradition of posting interesting conversations with the younger generation, here’s what we talked about in the car ride:

Her: I hope we get a lot of snow days this year.

Me: But doesn’t that cut into your summer vacation?

Her: Think about it. [She really said that. Sounded just like my father-in-law. Scary.] The summer is endless. It goes on forever. We have, like, 14 or 16 weeks off. I’d rather give up a week of summer in exchange for some days off during the school year when I can play in the snow.

Can’t argue with that kind of thinking.

No doubt Dirk Knemeyer’s heart is in the right place, but advice articles like his latest in Digital Web are about as useful as singing the praises of Web 2.0. Neither take reality into account. Web 2.0 (however you define it) requires building a new kind of corporate culture that un-does decades of management “wisdom”. It’s easy for the internet futurists and visionaries to give us kid-in-the-candy-store advice on how we should be integrating this into our business models. At the same time, for a handful of people to un-do the corporate culture of large organizations is amazingly difficult.

Similarly, Knemeyer’s piece lists half a dozen imperatives for improving your design methodology, from using smaller teams to insulating design teams from the rest of the corporation. He imagines, perhaps, that designers exert so much control over their working environment that they can safely shape it without fear of reprisal.

Knemeyer management ideas are possibly quite sound–there is value to more agile product development teams–but how many people working in this business really have the luxury of making these decisions? Perhaps this sounds defeatest, but I prefer thinking of it as pragmatic. The battles Knemeyer describes are not the ones I would pick. I find it hard to believe that more than a handful of people have the opportunity to shape their working environment.

But my aim is not to shoot fish in this barrel. Instead, I want to offer some advice to columnists in design magazines: accept reality. Assume your audience knows the way it *should* be done and give us some strategies for mitigating the realities we face. I can’t choose the size of the team, so give me some ideas on how to create a “small team environment” within the context of a large team. I can’t operate independently of the rest of the organization, so give me some tips for navigating difficult corporate politics.

No doubt I’ve fallen into this trap myself, and only now as a reader I can see how annoying it is. My apologies for prior indiscretions. I hope to write better from here on out.

Jeff wants to know what’s in your blog’s drafts folder. Here’s mine…

• Formality
• Raging Debate… among Mandolinists!
• Mother and Design: Prototype Effects in Cluster Models
• or Defining the Damn Thing
• Removing pseudo-blending from content management systems
• Exemplar effects in content types
• GPO must syndicate
• Space cowboys don’t use phasers
• Your organization is unstable
• One small step: defeating defeatism
• The demise of business rules
• Life Hackers, Decision Makers, and Relinquishing Control
• Distinguishing Decision-Based Design from Other Methods