The New Disruptors

Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) is a essayist, novelist, blogger, and co-editor of BoingBoing, and he is exhausting. The man is a production machine, churning out excellent book after excellent book as if writing were a job instead of something to agonize and procrastinate over. As of this writing, his latest books are Homeland and Pirate Cinema, and, with Charlie Stross, he wrote Rapture of the Nerds. Cory has also long been an advocate for the personal ownership of culture, demanding corporations and governments keep their hands off what we make and their noses out of our individual use and modification of media and hardware. To that end, he has fought endless wars against restrictive legislation.

Marco Arment helped bring Tumblr into existence, founded Instapaper and The Magazine, co-hosted the podcast Build & Analyze, and created the podcasts Neutral and Accidental Tech Podcast with Casey Liss and John Siracusa. He has a lot going on, but less than when we recorded this two-part podcast weeks ago. (This is part 2.) I didn't know it at the time, but Marco and I spoke as he was finalizing a deal to sell the majority interest in Instapaper. Go back and listen to Episode #20: So Successful That He Fired Himself (part 1) for how Tumblr and Instapaper grew. In part 2, we talk about Marco's podcasts, The Magazine, blogging, advertising, and related topics. On Twitter: Marco Arment, Accidental Tech Podcast, The Magazine.

(This is the second half of a conversation with Craig Mod. Part 1 is Episode #17: Everything in Moderation. In it we covered publishing and crowdfunding; in part 2, we talk about how to cope with the multi-platform disruptive future for publications.) Craig Mod writes essays that have the power to change the way you look at everything around you. At regular but somewhat distant intervals, he posts a long bit of writing that retrains your mind to see the world as he does. But he doesn't just talk, he creates projects that demonstrate his points as a designer and publisher of print and electronic work. On Twitter, he is @craigmod.

Topato Corporation, known as Topatoco for short, has spent nearly a decade fulfilling artists' dreams. Started by Jeffrey Rowland to ship out merchandise related to his own webcomics, he expanded in 2007 to take on making and delivering books, T-shirts, and related goods for other cartoonists. Our guest, Holly Rowland, has been working with Jeffrey for seven years, and is in charge of a new effort called Make That Thing!, currently in beta testing, to help run crowdfunding projects. On Twitter: Topatoco and Holly Rowland

Marco Arment's career has come in two main acts: as the first employee of Tumblr, he helped create a service that changed the fundamental nature of blogging by introducing both ease of creation and social networking. While there, he toyed with a service, to let him read Web pages offline without formatting, that became Instapaper. In late 2010, he left Tumblr to focus on that service full time. Now Marco is a successful podcaster and the editorial director of The Magazine — the best publication ever created — at which I'm the editor and he's my boss! (I still have a job after we recorded the podcast.) Our conversation will be aired in two parts, each about an hour long. In this first part, we talk about how as a Tumblr developer Marco found out he didn't want to manage people, how Instapaper developed, and issues of managing resources and scaling. In the second, we move further into podcasting, The Magazine, blogging, advertising, and other areas. On Twitter, Marco Arment, Instapaper, and The Magazine.

Duncan Davidson and Greg Koenig joined forces a few years back to start Luma Labs, a firm that makes across-the-chest camera straps. The two collaborated first on Luma Loop, a free-sliding camera strap, and then created Cinch, one that holds a camera tighter but still allows for movement. The Loop was kaboshed by a potential patent lawsuit; the second model has been a good seller, but with volume comes decisions about ramping up production. In this episode, we discuss all that, how they developed the original Cinch and Cinch 2 (about to be released), and quite a bit about rapid prototyping. On Twitter, find them at @lumalabs, @duncan, and @gak_pdx (Greg)

Aly and Beth Khalifa have decades of experience in product design, both as consultants for clients and in making their own stuff. The Teastick was the first product they made and sold themselves; the Impress coffee filter is the latest. The North Carolina designers are bursting with ideas and work actively to promote collaboration, including in their own shared work space. @GamilDesign on Twitter

Craig Mod writes essays that have the power to change the way you look at everything around you. At regular but somewhat distant intervals, he posts a long bit of writing that retrains your mind to see the world as he does. But he doesn't just talk: He creates projects that demonstrate his points as a designer and publisher of print and electronic work. Craig and I had such a great but long conversation that we decided to split it into two parts. This is part 1, about publishing and crowdfunding; part 2, on publishing to different platforms, will air in a few weeks. On Twitter, he is @craigmod.

Jonathan Coulton has called into existence a world in which a bearded Brooklyn-residing, Yale-graduated, Whiffenpoof-participating programmer singing songs on nerdy topics he records in a home studio posted to the Internet can quit his job, build an army of fans, give his music partly away, attract 700 people to a themed cruise, become a regular on public radio, and have his work ripped off by a major network television show. We talk about his singing background, how his career began and progressed, and how you bring your fans with you when your style matures.

Zach Weinersmith, the artist behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, takes nerdy Web comics to their logical extreme, and has developed a huge following among science geeks. We talk about his career, the popularity of Web comics, and fulfilling big Kickstarter campaigns in this podcast. Find him on Twitter as @zachweiner; his SMBC comics feed is @smbccomics.

John Gruber is either the world's biggest Apple fanboy or the most nuanced explicator of Cupertino's smoke signals, depending on whom you ask and on what day. In a more objective reality, John's Daring Fireball is the place you go to if you want to have a bigger-picture understanding of the universe in which Apple is firmly in the center. We talk about how he turned Daring Fireball from a side project into a heavily visited and deeply satisfying outlet for his writing.

Dalton Caldwell is the head of App.net (sometimes called ADN for App Dot Net), which some think is a Twitter competitor, but it isn't quite. It seems to be a typical venture-backed startup firm, but it is not quite that, either. There's a lot more under the surface of App.net, including neutrally hosted services, ecosystems aimed at software developers, and crowdfunding, among other topics, which we talk about in this episode. App.net is offering a limited number of free-tier accounts, introduced last week and explained in the podcast, to listeners of The New Disruptors. Follow this link to sign up. If the link says there are no invitations left, please send me an email (click Contact above) or message us through our Twitter or App.net accounts.

Taylor Levy and Che-Wei Wang run CW&T, an art and design studio that produces an array of items ranging from purely commercial to completely aesthetic. The way they string projects along that spectrum offers a lot of insight into how one can fulfill one's own artistic vision in a world of commerce. They're also the team behind the Pen Type-A, a large and ultimately complicated Kickstarter project that we'll get.

Lumi makes a fabric-dye that becomes permanent when exposed to bright full-spectrum light, as from the sun. But that's not why the founders, Jesse Genet and Stéphan Angoulvant, are on the show. Rather, it's the way, starting with an obsession of Jesse's when she was 17, that the two bootstrapped a company using collaboration, crowdfunding, and craftiness.

Jason Fried co-founded 37signals, a Web design company that found one of its internal tools for managing projects could be something effectively used by others. Millions of users later, 37signals offers Basecamp (overhauled substantially a year ago), Campfire, and Highrise among other services. The founders not only transformed their business, but routinely help others transform theirs. Fried collaborated on a book called Rework that distills years of what he learned from running a successful company and helping others with theirs. You can look at and sign up for Basecamp as a trial subscription, but this episode isn't a product plug; Basecamp fits the disruption mindset. Microsoft Project is perfectly fine software for companies that have employees in one place and need the top-down approach. Software as a service (SaaS) typically involves an application you access via the Web for which data is stored centrally, and updates to the software happen centrally as well. Salesforce, an early SaaS alternative to enterprise-licensed and -managed software, was founded in 1999, and had risen as a force that defined the industry by the time Basecamp came out. Rework may be purchased from Amazon.com and many other fine bookstores. Glenn brought up three concepts relating to 37signals' work: The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond's explanation of the difference between software code controlled by a handful of priests and that in the marketplace that's open to all; The Cluetrain Manifesto, a provocative set of theses that turned into a revolution and a book by declaring, among other things, that markets are conversations; and Stephen Jay Gould's use of the term hecatomb to explain evolution's remorseless pruning of failed mutations.