Happy Halloween, Samhain Eve, or whatever you celebrate!
Archive for October, 2008
Too spooked to blog today!
Friday, October 31st, 2008Clay Shirky interviewed on CBC Radio show Spark
Thursday, October 30th, 2008
CBC Radio’s Spark, hosted by Nora Young, interviewed Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and it’s really good. An edited interview aired in May 2008 but the full interview can be downloaded here in MP3 format.
Shirky describes his cognitive surplus concept in more detail. Put it this way: if you look at the millions and billions of hours of television watching time and could take a fraction of that to some good, interesting, or worthwhile work, you could do some amazing things.
Previous generations never had the benefit of a cognitive surplus, which comes from having more leisure time. They were too busy working to live.
If human brains were better at performing background tasks like the SETI data processing initiative, where your PC can be used to help crunch some of the data, I’d say this concept could really go a long way. It appears that we need things like:
where a lot of effort goes into building a work environment and dividing work up into smaller chunks, to really take advantage of this.
Awesome concept, though.
First draft publishing or bust!
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008
Image by nightthree
Writing continues to transform into a rapid-fire burst of characters that spew out without filters or second thoughts. Get it out, include a link or two and BAM! Your words are on the Web faster than a thundering Emeril (don’t click on this; it’s kind of dumb).
Is this the future of writing?
Fifteen bloody rewrites? Are you a loony?
One thing that stuck in my mind after listening to a recent John Cleese podcast was the idea of drafts or versions of a document. He mentioned doing fifteen (!) drafts on a script. The number of drafts that the episodes of Fawlty Towers that he and Connie Booth went through for each episode is legendary.
In all seriousness, can you ever imagine yourself writing FIFTEEN drafts of a document (unless, of course, you are a professional writer)?
Can you imagine washing your car fifteen times in a row? Making your bed?
Cooking a meal?
OK, bad examples, but do you know what I mean?
Professional writer AND blogger – contrast
Andrew Sullivan, author of The Daily Dish, is a prolific blogger who focuses on short, focused posts including links and quotes to other web pages. I don’t know how much time his average post takes to write, but it doesn’t seem that it would take a long time. These are likely one-draft posts. Blog and go. Apparently they are only 20 minutes apart at times.
By contrast, Sullivan recently provided a well-crafted and thoughtful article about why he blogs. How many drafts did it take him to write that, I wonder?
[Note: podcast with Andrew Sullivan discussing this article is here - MY POST CONTINUES AFTER THE VIDEO]
It takes a village of rewrites to grow a battlestar
Meanwhile, from the Colonial podcast zone, I get the impression that virtually every single episode of the new Battlestar Galactica went through no less than ten drafts, not including scads of minor changes that occurred during filming and editing. Granted, the process of developing screenplays is much, much different than standard documents, mainly because you have to deal with changes that occur when you finally see what your creation looks like in three dimensions.
But still. That is a whole lot of writing.
That’s too complicated for me to write – how about a blog post instead? OR A TXT MSG FTW!
QUESTION: if more and more people keep blogging short bursts of prose on a continual basis, are we gradually going to lose the ability to do the research, analysis, and deep thinking to write traditional long form prose? [EDIT: are we losing the knack for revising, proofing, and editing documents into world-class material? Or are we dealing with a new generation of content creators who don't appreciate the need to EDIT?]
What do you think?
We are more separated by time than geography
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
Geography is no longer an obstacle. Blogging, microblogging, instant messaging, webcasting, etc. have made instantaneous communication the norm in today’s world, even more than the telephone did.
Time zones, on the other hand, are still a major hassle.
For example, when it’s midnight here in my town, it’s 8:00 PM on the west coast of North America. And it’s 4 AM in the UK. And 2 PM on the east coast of Australia.
It seems to me that despite the great tools we have for communication, we still haven’t found ways to compensate for time zone differences without causing disruption to one party or another.
Is this a problem? What do you think?
Twitter is a never-ending festival of bytes
Monday, October 27th, 2008
I’ve been using Twitter for close to a year now and I’m falling in love with it all over again. It’s like a magical combination of a farmer’s market, a state/town fair, and a soapbox to shout to the world. It’s very tempting to think of Twitter as a never-ending festival of bytes because of the diversity of people, opinions, and sites there.
If you’re not familiar with Twitter, the 140 character communication wonder, a great starting place is Getting Started On Twitter (note: I am a contributor to Touchbase, the Pistachio Consulting blog, so I may be a bit biased, but Getting Started on Twitter does link out to a lot of great resources).
Short bursts of communication is the thing on Twitter. You send quick messages via the Web or any device that can send SMS messages. By adding links to web pages into your Tweets (Twitter messages), you can communicate huge amounts of information with a short message.
I’ve been using Twitter for the better part of a year now. My feelings on the service have varied greatly during that time. As many of you may know, Twitter has had a history of stability problems, either during key events in the tech blogosphere or due to underlying design problems. Early and mid 2008 were particularly trying times.
Thankfully most of Twitter’s stability problems seem behind it. Twitter has removed parts of its service (including Track, much to the chagrin of some power users) and has done other things behind the scenes and the dreaded Fail Whale is a rare occurrence these days, at least in my experience.
My feelings about Twitter have varied through the year:
- I’ve been upbeat about the service
- I held a little contest on Twitter
- I’ve been frustrated about the service (see the Fail Whale link above)
- I’ve been pragmatic about what we can expect from a free service
- I’ve been cynical about being a Twitter user
And so on.
I’m back to being more positive about the service when I say that I think of Twitter as a never-ending festival of bytes:
- Lots of interesting people there
- It’s a way to get access to an incredible stream of information
- It’s VERY easy to use
- It’s a way for me to promote both my own work but, increasingly, the good things that other people are doing on the Web
- It’s fun
Twitter isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Moreover, if this was happening in the real world I wouldn’t enjoy the experience because I’m not a fan of crowds, at least in large doses – it’s the way I’m wired.
Fortunately, you can jump in and out of Twitter as often as you like. Plus, it’s always on.
After a lot of different thoughts and feelings, I’m back to enjoying Twitter again.
How about you? What do you think of Twitter: good, bad, or indifferent?
NOTE on Dec. 17/08 – you might want to check out this longer post on Twitter followers, including dos and don’ts.
Great post on the value of an idea
Sunday, October 26th, 2008Just catching up to this post about idea creation by Hank Williams at Why Does Everything Suck?
Here’s an excerpt:
I am a member of the NextNY mailing list which is a group of New York folks that talk about tech business and entrepreneurship. A recent conversation and actually a persistent theme in that group is that in a startup, an idea is worth 1% and execution is worth 99% or some other highly disproportionate ratio.
I take issue with the concept.
Here’s the problem with the formulation. It belies a misunderstanding of what an actionable “idea” really is. A good idea is almost never some light bulb moment that occurs where you realize some insight that no one else has seen. In truth there are few of those. Very, very few people are that smart or that lucky. Great actionable ideas are really a collection of much smaller ideas, weaved together in such a way as to create something useful unique and compelling. There are few actionable “aha” moments.
In other words, to me, coming up with great actionable ideas requires lots of perspiration, iteration, and ideation. However, once you have an actionable idea that has been achieved through this process it is worth *way* more than 1%.
Great stuff, Hank.
I left the following comment in response:
I think that the idea could be worth a lot more than than the 1% valuation as well, but I look at it from a different point of view. A great idea, with a good plan behind it, is the product of a lot of work. The planning, thinking, and critiquing, when done properly, can eliminate wasted effort during the life of implementing this idea. A former colleague once used the following rule for testing: one day of test planning is worth (or saves) three days of actual testing by eliminating lost time. If the valuation is based on time and effort, then the time taken to develop a stellar idea would be significantly greater than the 1%.
If you’re interested in the process in developing and creating ideas (or content), I recommend checking this out.
