Digital(Analog)

After a wonderful Pad Thai at Martha’s house tonight, we made a pact. No more fancy cable. We’re both calling Time-Warner tomorrow and cutting down to the most basic cable, and that is just for reception. Corey and I are looking into some of the elgato products as a means for possibly avoiding cable entirely!

It’s kind of scary — I grew up with a television on almost all the time. We all figured that there is so much media out there, and we can watch movies and TV shows via iTunes and AppleTV, so who needs to let Time Warner molest us?

It’s also really exciting — I’d been watching too much TV anyway.

I suspect this is going to work out quite well

Inspired in part by the 2005 and 2006 annual reports by Nicholas Felton, and by a desire to be clever and crafty with my 2007 holiday card, I’ve been thinking about collecting a year’s worth of statistics.

So… What kind of statistics would you want to collect of yourself (or of me) over a year? I’m thinking of going with a graph theme and collecting data that would show well on a linear scale with a point for each day of the year.

In considering all of the collectible data I’ve come up with this so far - what else would you add?

Food and Drink
Ate at Whole Foods / Ate out / Cooked home
Drank something other than water

Health
Took medicine
Felt ill
Saw a doctor

Work
Worked from home / at the office
Worked on a weekend day
Conference / Vacation
Keystrokes typed (This would just be neat to know
Travel
Miles flown
Miles driven
What country I’m in

Lifestyle
Exercised
Went on a date
Bought a plan / plant died
Finished reading a book
Dollars spent

No, its not the title of a M4M personal ad, but a concept I’ve been grappling with. As I was about to head out the door this weekend for a North Carolina Equality Conference I thought about grabbing my computer and taking it along. (The MacBook of course…)

As I thought more about it I decided not to. When I think back about my decision it was a mix of a few things that I’d order:

1. Ruggedness
2. Flexibility
3. Distraction

Part of the reason that I bought the MacBook (as opposed to the MacBook Pro) was its size. I wanted the most portable (flexible) option I could have among the Mac collection. I’ve found though, that I’m hesitant to bring it along because I’m afraid of how rugged it is, and it’s nowhere near as portable as a paper notebook.

The element of it being a distraction was really not comparable to the other two.

I know that this is in part a function of cost. If I could get a new laptop with minimal cash cost, and minimal hassle cost (transferring files and settings and such) I’d probably bring it more places, but not many places - at least I don’t think… That’s because of how portable it is - it still feels like an encumbrance.

So terrific - I’ve basically said nothing more than “My laptop is heavier than I thought it was, and I’m afraid to break it”. It’s a tangible thing so that is clear.

I’m interested in the trade-off between rugged and flexible in other spaces too, particularly in social software. I think we’re doing a great job on ruggedness - We’ve got plenty services that people rely on heavily to get “real work” done and they are performant and stable to a more than acceptable degree. But how flexible are they? Flexible can be defined a number of ways - my highest barrier to entry seems to be the space between my brain and the software.

I’ll have an idea that I want to blog about in the car, and it seems to get lost by the time I get to wherever I’m going. And when I am in front of a machine, the cost of opening the blogging tool, whether its local or form-based on the server, seem high enough to allow my fleeting attention time enough to move me onto the next pressing thing.

There is also one of the biggest costs of entry for me which is pretty much embodied in this post. The part of my brain that says that “not perfect” is not good enough when it comes to, well, a lot, but blogging in particular. I’ve had a few ideas for posts in the past that have completely disappeared b/c I didn’t feel like I had the time to craft them “properly”. (Assuredly a mix of both obsession and continuous partial attention deficit disorder
I was hoping to try a strategy for working some of this out at the conference this weekend. I downloaded TwitterBerry (the BlackBerry twitter client - a must since I don’t have an unlimited txt plan) so I could tweet throughout the day. As it turns out there was a problem with data coverage / EDGE access / DNS access / something that kept me disconnected. Oh well.

So I guess this post is my first attempt to work it out. I’m convinced my WordPress install is rugged, the tools a sufficient for me to enter a post, and they don’t have to be “perfect”. Lets see how all that works out

From TechCrunch:

What They’re Launching

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language (Facebook requires use of FBML for security reasons, but it also makes code unusable outside of Facebook). Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

My friend David Harrison had an article featuring him published in the New York Times today. He does great work to capture samples of languages that are dying off:

In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were “vulnerable to loss and being forgotten.” Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.

I can’t help but wonder if social tools and their place on the internet will lead to the preservation, or homogenization of language… Perhaps David will have a look at this post and comment

If you shop at Whole Foods (at least the Whole Foods in Chapel Hill) then you know the answer to that question and many more so long as they take the form of "When are xxxx in season…"

I love that infographics like this are becoming more common place…

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"Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web — so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there. Here he presents "We Feel Fine," a project that scours blogs to collect the planet’s emoti(c)ons, and the "Yahoo! Time Capsule," which preserves images, quotes and thoughts snapped up in 2006. And he premieres "Universe," which presents current events as constellations of words — a tag cloud of our collective consciousness."

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I bought a Mac. (Well technically it’s my second Mac, I owned a Mac Classic II in college).

I was saving for a new computer to replace my Dell desktop and decided that I really wanted to play with OS X and should probably have another laptop instead of custom building a $2,000 desktop that I won’t use to its full power. Since they’re running at 2+ GHz they’re not a bad little machine either - at least I can tell from the 45 min I spend playing with one in the Apple store at Southpoint.

The box is sitting on my kitchen counter.

Its partly an exercise in restraint (I had some work to do tonight [what else is new], and I’m taking next week off, so there is plenty of time to play :-), partly an attempt to get to bed at a reasonable hour (I knew that if I opened it up at 9pm when I got home I’d be up REALLY late and I’m almost certain, based on the 2nd sleep study that I did last week, that I’ve got narcolepsy), and partly an exercise in getting rid of buyers remorse (if I let it sit there for a bit I’ll be confronted with it’s “returnability” and just get over it… I saved the money and can afford it.).

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Denise Kalos and Bill Takacs from O’Reilly Media.

"What we know is that people learn first form their peers"

Whats going on in the world:

• Workforces are distributed
• There is a huge gap between the baby boomers and Gen-x’ers that will replace them.
• The attitude toward work-life balance for "Millenials" is different. They will change jobs about 19 times in their career. They are also primarily focused on their personal goals, not their work goals.

Principles most important to the enterprise:

• "Harnessing collective intelligence"
• Data is the "next intel inside"
• Rich user experiences
• Software above the level of a single device
• Perpetual beta

[Not sure what they mean here about being "important to the enterprise" - they're not taking questions until the end] [They cleared it up when I asked. These are points Enterprises need to be aware of when they think about implementing web2.0 technologies]

Gave example of company reaching out to communities for product development. Kettle Chips uses their online presence to get new chip flavors.

"If you build it they MAY come, manage it properly and they will engage, thrive and prosper" (Tools can’t by themselves create community.) [They had some tips here, but skipped past them.]

Community maturity model

Informational > Provisional > Communicative > Proactive > Productive > Leveraged

Its all about people. People need:

• Exposure to things that capture their interest
• the right resources at the right time
• a place to find their voice and hear what others are saying
• a forum to shine and share success
• to be actively guided to ensure that their energy and efforts align with strategic objectives.

Attract Members, Build Community, Capture Knowledge

Getting lurkers to be participants - the best way is to create controversy.

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We do a great job at building software to get in people’s way.

There is a power law for participation (reading is easy, but not very engaging, while collaborating and leading are hard, but highly engaging.) We need to find ways to build low cost of entry points for participation in our tools.

"There is not collaboration without a goal" - Eugene Kim.

Discusses wiki usage at call centers. Makes the differentiation between ’self service’ and ‘community service’.

Discussed 4 scenarios where wikis are used best. (Didn’t catch them while looking up Eugene Kim)

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