this is sippey.com

Very happy to announce the launch of American McCarver, the group sports blog I'm contributing to along with Catalano, Gruber, Knauss, Michaels, Monteiro, Snell and more to come.

It's good company to be in. As my friend Mat Honan tweeted, "Wow, so this is an all-star lineup. I mean, except for @sippey." Couldn't have said it better myself. Humor me, though, and go read the post I wrote when we were in double secret beta, about David Foster Wallace and Roger Federer.

Also, kudos to Monteiro for the brilliant touch of cycling through classic McCarverisms in the header, like my favorite "It's better to have a fast runner on base than a slow one." Couldn't agree more.

I'm spending the week in London. Arrived here yesterday afternoon and after dumping bags at the hotel wandered down to the Tate Modern. I'm generally a fan of timelines, but found the Tate's artist timeline a bit depressing...an artist's entire life's work, reduced to their name on a wall, clumped with others to make it easy to understand. Ah, reductionism.

Loved the Barclay's bike hire system, though. Nabbed a bike for the afternoon and managed to survive riding on the left-hand side of the road, out through Hyde Park, down to Kensington, back up to Camden. Ten or twenty years ago a system like this would never have worked in San Francisco, but enough of the life of The City has moved to the flat lands (Embarcadero, downtown, SOMA, South Beach) that maybe?

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Getty Images photographer Rich Lam, at Esquire, on the kissing couple in the middle of the Vancouver riots last night:

It was complete chaos. Rioters set two cars on fire and then I saw looters break the window at a neighboring department store. At that point, the riot police charged right towards us. After I stopped running, I noticed in the space behind the line of police that two people were laying in the street with the riot police and a raging fire just beyond them. I knew I had captured a "moment" when I snapped the still forms against the backdrop of such chaos but it wasn't until later when I returned to the rink to file my photos that my editor pointed out that the two people were not hurt, but kissing.

Remember kids, even if it's fake, it's real. See also this, this, this and this. I should start a Tumblr or something.

Jonah Peretti once told Gothamist that “the Internet is powered by bored office workers who sit at their desks forwarding emails, surfing the web, reading and writing blogs, and IMing funny links to their friends.” He called this the Bored at Work Network, or BWN.

The mobile corollary to the Bored at Work Network is the Bored in Line Network, or BLN. Mobile is powered by bored smartphone owners standing in line, updating their Facebook statuses, reading Twitter, thumbing through Instagram, playing a turn on Words with Friends, checking in on Foursquare or flinging an Angry Bird.

Web experiences have optimized for the BWN: related story links, skyscraper ad units and share buttons designed to divert attention and spread virally to other bored people. Mobile experiences are quickly optimizing for the BLN: bite-sized moments of media consumption, content sharing or game play designed to last as long as it takes for the person ahead of you to pay for their groceries.

So?

• Being on the home screen matters. When you’re bored in line, do you reach for an app or for your phone’s web browser?
• If you’re translating your web experience to mobile, think about if and how it works for the BLN. Would you read your site while bored in line? (Relatedly, responsive web design is necessary but not sufficient tool for the mobile web.)
• Remember that with the BLN, you’re not competing against your competition. You’re competing against Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and the dopamine rush of flinging an angry bird at those obnoxious green pigs.

Hat tip to Todd Lappin of Telstar Logistics for the lunch conversation (God, I love lunch) that motivated this post.