Thought Process : Process Thoughts

A year ago today I was in Ft Walton Beach, watching my father die. Not fun blog material, but there you go. We took a couple road trips around north Florida discussed paleontology and such… but prolly not enough, in the end. If I had to advise folks who still have access to their progenitors, I’d say “spend all the time you can, cause it might not be much”. Ask all the questions you can. Get the history. And listen.

Two years ago today, my Brother in Law was showing me my first geetar chords - G, C, D, of course, and a strumming pattern: Down down up up down up… and now that provides entertainment, inspiration and outlet to whatever moments I can allow it, which is quite a few.

Is it the greatest rock and roll swindle? No, I don’t think so, but it made a nice headline.

I have to start off with a disclosure - I’ve read very little about the Kindle; next to nothing in fact. Dave Winer twittered a link to Become a Kindle Author on Crave and Cliff Gerrish twittered his post, a great “what if” around it, and John Gruber twittered a link to this post on Daring Fireball and I watched the videos and executive interviews at Amazon’s product page. One person on twitter even quipped “I hear there’s a hack coming out that will let you run old Pippin @World software on the Kindle”; OK, that was me.

So I guess I’ve read a couple things. I just can’t buy into it. As much as I’d like to, I think it’s going to let the shareholders down in fairly epic proportions. First off, the name of the product sounds like it’s going to start a fire like ones tyrants and despots throughout history have used to burn books; not a nice connotation.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a book freak. Amazon is by far my most visited site. I’d say I go there almost every day and I buy a couple books a week. I own books that are family heirlooms, I have fiction and non-fiction which can’t be sold for enough to cover postage, and I’ve spent way to much over the years on expensive computer books that go out of date before I’m done with them. I sell my used books on Amazon and keep the money in their Gift Certificates to “reinvest” in more books, CDs or DVDs (usually guitar instruction DVDs). Pictured here are a couple photos of my unruly bookshelves, disheveled because I’m really trying to cull through and sell some more.
I also have a penchant for the tactile. Cliff (who also just posted his perceptive take on Kindle) and I frequently trade links to sites about pencils. Yes, Pencils. Pencil sharpeners too. Sad, I know. In fact, one of my favorite books “Thinking with a Pencil” is prominently displayed in the photo to the right, and I currently covet “Sketching the User Experience” - guess I’ll have to sell a few books over at Amazon.

So, why no dice on the Kindle, besides the unfortunate name? For some books, I’m sure it’s fine - New computer manuals, yeah, maybe. They could have taken that a lot further if the author could designate segments to be beamable and equip it with infrared , so you could beam code snipits to your computer. Business titles, one’s you really don’t need to keep. Yeah, maybe, but most of them are so boring I tend to get them at Audible. Businesses could also use it for training or on-boarding as it matures. For fiction? maybe for someone, but not me. For classics? Nada - I just don’t see myself reading Sherlock Holmes on a we computer screen.

One pro, is it uses SD cards; so does my Treo and my Elf, so that would work. Fragility. Books are pretty durable, and they have to be; they get tossed around, say on, slept on. etc. and, the price tag… $399? over an iPhone, well, that toy’s gonna have to wait. I’d rather wake up Christmas morning to find a Chumby, by far.

Update - I’m not going to get the next parts of this out before the Thanksgiving holiday - just too much to do, but, shortly there after. Promise.

If you’ve read the press lately, watched 60 minutes, 20/20, know anyone under 30 or been to the water cooler at work, you’ve no-doubt heard about the increase in chatter about Websites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn which make it easier to reconnect with old friends and colleagues. Between all the new terms and the plethora of sites, you might be wondering how to get your feet wet in this new world.

Well, that’s what I’m here to help you with! There are a couple logical steps to dipping your toes in the water which will probably make it easier for you to do a couple things you are already doing, and that will pave the way for deeper social interactions if you want to keep using computers to socialize with friends, old and new.

Now, if you’re just looking to passively read blogs or view photos and videos (what we call “consume”) you’re going to have to look elsewhere; Google your favorite interest, hobby or passion and you’ll be busy for weeks. I’m really pointing you in the direction so you can take your first steps into contributing to the fascinating wealth of information which is out there.

So, we really only do a few things on the Internet of social worth -

1. We send and receive messages with other people (this can be anything from email to chat rooms, to recommendations, to various Web site specific versions of messages we’ll get into in the next chapter)
2. We create, store and share stuff we’ve created, such as photos, video, writing and recommendations for books and products
3. We track and organize stuff, like Web sites we’ve visited, messages we’ve sent, music we like, things we want to own

I’m guessing you’re doing some of these things already, at the very least the first: you do email right? You’re probably doing # 2 as well, if you have a camera, video camera, write stuff in Word, paint pictures, etc., you just might not be doing it socially on the Web yet. And, if you’re doing anything in life, you’re probably organizing it, from the proverbial shoe box full of receipts, to a hyper organized filing system to fully web based way of tagging (don’t worry, if that term’s foreign to you, I’ll explain it later) and organizing your digital stuff, you’re somewhere on the scale of being organized. [Need graphic here for the scale]

The organizational part is where so many people get hung up in this computer stuff. The fact that it’s all transparent, and shapeless makes organizing it a challenge for some people who are either very visual, or just used to working in our physical 3-D world. Don’t worry, there are tricks, and some concepts which will help you overcome these obstacles.

So, in my next three posts (hopefully one per day Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday the week after Thanksgiving) I’m going to dig into a beginners guide to doing each of these three things.

1. We’ll send some messages other people on the web can read and benifit from. We’ll probably start at Amazon because it’s pretty non-threatening, and you’ve probably been there. If you haven’t done it, we’ll set up a wish list while we’re there.
2. We’ll create a photo account at what’s probably the most popular photo sharing site, Flicker and we’ll use this thing called “tagging” to organize our own photos, and find other people out in the “community” who might take photos similar to ours. Finally we’ll also look around Flickr and see how you can leave little messages there telling people how you like their stuff,
3. We’ll set up this really great service called Delic.icio.us where we can bookmark sites we find, and use a system basically the same as Flickr to find other people who are looking at stuff similar to ours. It’s really great because a) it stores your Web browsing bookmarks on their site, so you can get to them from any browser on any computer anywhere, and b) the look-up thing can really expand your ability to find things faster.

Then we’re going to take a little break and debrief. somewhere in there we’ll talk a little about privacy and security around this stuff. Then we’ll talk about how to share these things with your friends before moving on to some more socially complex sites and services on the Web.

So, check back, it’ll be fun.

A quick scenario to show how the 5 steps of design can be used to choose the best options for an everyday chore - Doing laundry.

 

 Problem Solvign by Design: Forward: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (344)

Boy, these are tempting - an attractive internet retrieval device:

Check ‘em out: www.chumby.com

With more and more of our time and attention spend in applications we are currently calling "Social Media" most of which send email and otherwise communicate with us via our channel of choice, and most of us having a personal, personal business, or work Web site to repose our contact info, I began wondering what folks were putting on their business cards these days.

Original Tweet: Hey Gang: quick survey: what addresses, URLs, numbers do you put on a biz card now? Feel free to pass to your followers. I’ll agg & post.

As the twitter tweeted, I only got 3 responses, but that’s OK. here they are, and feel free to add on in the comments section

mtlb I freelance, so just name/blog name/title/email/cell/blog url. No other IM/web/social media info. I save that for email signature.  06:17 PM November 06, 2007

miguelrodriguez   @joetennis at least these: name, title, primary address, email, website url, office and mobile phone numbers   05:04 PM November 06, 2007  from web in reply to joetennis

tastybit   @joetennis on my latest moo card, I include my name and one url: http://seriousaboutcamo.com    01:33 PM November 06, 2007  from twitterrific  in reply to joetennis

Thanks for the replys, and readers, feel free to add your own answer as a comment.

“If we can do that, then the customers are going to feel a deep loyalty to us, because we know them so well. And if they switch to a competitive website - as long as we never give them a reason to switch, as long as we’re not trying to charge higher prices or providing lousy service, or don’t have the selection that they require; as long as none of those things happen - they’re going to stick with us because they are going to be able to get a personalized service, a customized website that takes into account the years of relationship we’ve built with them.”

–Jeff Bezos, Amazon

A refreshing take on presentation skills. Organize a Pecha Kucha Night in your town soon!

Created and Narrated by Ben Ullman. Special thanks to D.J. PurposeMaker Kyle Tait for Audio guru-ship.

If you haven’t caught the Mimobot craze, Julia Roy certainly has - you can see her extolling their virtues here on Seesmic

As I move through the process of helping my day job develop a community strategy, I’m trying to tease out the kernels of unique truth about “social media”. There are many facets that people are grappling with, some technological, some sociological and a few economical. Interestingly enough, the politico’s haven’t entered the arena yet, and quite the opposite, social media is giving rise to methods of circumvention within oppressed cultures like mainland China.

This is all good, but what’s unique about it? What will “stick”, because evolution demands endurance. Most everything people voluntarily spend their time on is justifiable as relevant. When those people are, on the average, intelligent, they their justifications sound more relevant.

Since computers fit so well into the business sphere, the benefit of a new phenomena (like CD-ROMs, or Shopping Carts, or distributed ID, or Social Behavior) is most frequently cost justified in it’s benefit to business - this fits well with the Enthusiast/Professional/Lay-person adoption trajectory which most technology products go through. What’s really the case, is for business to benifit, they have to create innovative ways to bridge the early adopters sense and the mass market demand.

So, to have endurance, a capability (I’m calling Social Media a capability, as it’s everything from software to behavior) has to eventually be generalizable to the broad, non-technical population, because for the vast majority of humans, computers are vastly unsatisfying places to spend time.

So, towards identifying some of the bridges between traditional methods of social behavior, and this new stuff, I’m just capturing some notes for my analysis stage:

• People have always created media: Photos, home movies, poems, invitations, thanks you cards.
• People have always exchanged small messages: “small talk”, sound bites, cocktail party chatter, all the way back to notes passed via foot messenger.
• Most of what is created by individuals is not worth consuming: this goes for music, the written word, food, paintings, etc. People do much of these creative efforts for self expression, therapy and numerous other personal reasons.
• As with Spam, as the cost of production goes down, quality will drop in direct proportion and expectations will be met less often.
  Case Study: in the days of hand written Christmas cards distribution was limited and responses were understandably infrequent. Follow-up was in the form of reciprocity and might have a cycle of a year or so. I believe this is what used to be called personalization
• As input channels multiply, peoples ability to manage the information inflow will be more and more challenged and they will be forced to triage in relation to their need to juggle their other day-to-day obligations.

This is nothing but notes… observations. it should just be up on a wall somewhere, but for now, this is my wall, and you are welcome to help me analyze it.