(New Year's video here. This post is different: geeky little test… No need for any normal human to read!)

Anyway: normally I publish via ping.fm. Basically: you hook up facebook, twitter, etc to ping.fm, then you can use a ping.fm client, or just email, to send your item to ping.fm and it will publish to all the things you've hooked up to it. The nice thing is that there are lots of clients, and lots of places you can hook ping.fm up to.

The not so nice thing is that it seems to occasionally, inexplicably, just not publish. The blog post with our year end video, for example, ping.fm decided wasn't worth publishing. Hey, right or wrong, thats MY call!

So, I decided to try out dlvr.it. I'd been meaning to do this for a while. This is really a more specialized (and perhaps more reliable?) cross-poster optimized for blogs. The idea is that you can hook dlvr.it up to your various feeds, and it will poll them, then publish on facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc.

That seemed to work this morning (mostly: the thumbnail was the visitors widget on Facebook for some reason!!!).

However: I figured this polling thing really sucks. So I thought I'd try hooking up Pubsubhubhub on the blog and seeing if that works.

(Yeah, I know: perhaps I could do something more useful like hook up social graph markup stuff. But that will take actual thought…)

Anyway, the only way to tell if my Pubsubhubhub thing works is to publish something. So here I go!

My venture into the world of video, enlightening all about the panel I'm on at Le Web 2011 on "Mobile Local Social in the Enterprise":

Hope to see you there!

As many of you know, I was recently off in Tokyo, then Singapore and Malaysia for business reasons. At some point, I'd like to post some broader observations. At this point, just a couple of things.

First and obviously foremost: A week after my departure, Japan was hit with the terrible combination of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear catastrophe. Like many, I am challenged to understand the scale of the disaster, made especially poignant by my recent visit and my appreciation of the kindness and talents of my new friends in the Japan team. Please forgive my not making those reflections a further part of this post: the right words have not yet been found, not here and not by me. Fortunately, those friends old and new and their families and colleagues are all safe. Many, of course, continue to face challenging circumstances.

Second: while its of dramatically lessened import compared to the above, I wanted to reflect slightly further on the subject of my last post, about groups of individuals using "social business" to re-organize in a more open/democratic fashion, about essentially moving from using their org chart as their primary information processing tool to using more advanced techniques like filters, recommenders, activity streams and the like - approaches pioneered in the consumer realm by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. It was an open question whether this would be a useful message in cultures as different as Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia. The initial feedback I had was that at least among some in the audience, there was great openness to the approach. It will as ever be intriguing to see how culture and technology connect and evolve here. Lengthier thoughts coming soon.

Third: I had the privilege of trying out prezi as a keynoting tool, and of meeting the CEO and Founder, Peter Arvai. I'm certainly a rank amateur at the use of the approach, but the groups I worked with found it an enjoyable alternative, and Peter was patiently encouraging :). I'm looking forward to playing around more, and open of course to pointers to other such innovative re-thinks on how to engage an audience in what can so often seem like a rote pushing of information. For those interested in seeing what I presented, you'll find the presentations on Prezi at the following links: my Tokyo keynote, my Singapore keynote, and my Malaysia keynote (all pretty much the same), along with a more business audience spin that I gave to a CHRO (HR exec) audience in Singapore. Its a long way from clear that these presentations stand alone without my verbose explanations!!! Anyway, I enjoyed the chance to experiment with communicating in a new way, and I think you can actually grab them and copy/mod/play around yourself with the presentations using prezi. All part of the social business experiment!

Well, for the first time in a long time (I think over ten years?), I'm down at Lotusphere where all the talk promises to be about "social business". I'm actually quite interested in social business, so I thought I'd write about it periodically here, usually tagged "innovation" and/or "technology". The views here on this (or any!) subject are mine and not necessarily those of the IBM company, and my intent is to explore thoughts in this area, as in other areas on this blog, rather than shill for my employer. Its a new line for me to walk, so if I stray the course, please advise.

Anyway, I think the Quora definition of social business is quite good in its reductionist sense (and since the market is still evolving here a reductionist definition is probably a good one). At its root, social business looks at the way people have "improved" their personal lives using social tools - insert your favorite technique here - and says "Why can't we do the same in a business context?". In other words, if you like hanging out on Facebook and find its a good way to keep up with what large groups of people are doing and stay in touch, you might ask yourself when you're in a work setting why you can't do things the same (well, perhaps slightly modified…) way. The same could be said of other consumer social business tools (Facebook, but also Twitter, Foursquare, Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr, etc). It turns out you can do business this way, and IBM and others sell stuff to do this. I wanted to focus more in this blog however about how people generically think about this stuff and where it might go, rather than who has the best way to implement it.

The most difficult thing I've noticed in discussing "social business" with people is getting them to grasp the power of it, and whats required to get the power. Its quite difficult, as the benefit is most easily realized through experience, and the benefit grows the more the people that you work with are part of the experience. Its a huge bootstrapping problem to get from "zero" to the experiental result. In this experiential regard, its not unlike some consumer devices (what makes, say, the iPhone a cool thing is a lot harder to describe than it is to experience by playing around… Hence the Apple Stores…. but I digress). The difference though is that experiencing the benefit of an iPhone doesn't require you to get some critical mass of friends on the iPhone. In the social realm, it does. This was a huge barrier at the beginning of what we used to call "Web 2.0", and one that the best companies accidentally or on purpose broke through with groups of early adopters until there was sufficient network value for it to be likely that mainstream users could quickly realize the benefit.

So far, so good.

In businesses, however, I think there is a further hurdle. I think that those business that get to the full benefits of social business will ultimately wind up overhauling their cultures in as fundamental of a way as the changes that human societies went through in the transition from subject to citizen. At the endpoint of this journey, a whole set of expectations about how ideas progress through the corporation and how people shepherd them will change, to a large degree to ways the polar opposite of the way they are today. Why?

Well, business (or human society…) has always been about relationships, cultivating the right people to sell to or get investment from or get promoted by or whatever. This is nothing new. In a closed society, however - for example, the monarchical cultures present in what we might broadly call the medieval period of many cultures - the nature of these relationships is fairly straightforward. People have an explicit rank in society, the rank flows from the sovereign, and sucess has to do with answering the interests of the sovereign and forming relationships with the sovereign and those whom the sovereign deems important. The broader set of ideas and interests of "We, The People" are part of the equation only in so far as the sovereign and gang need to avoid revolution and motivate, say, the army to defend the nation or grab another fiefdom.

This frankly worked well for much of human history, if you gauge well as meaning "assembling empires" at least. Ie if the British Empire or the Roman Empire had a stock price, you certainly could have played buy and hold for quite a long time based on the successes that their closed society management models delivered.

Over time, though, it started to break, perhaps beginning with the Enlightenment. To grossly oversimplify, what started to come out in the Enlightenment is that it was really important to get the best ideas, and the closed society model stifled the best ideas too much (either because the people couldn't get enough food and education to have ideas, or because the people with the best ideas couldn't get heard (best case) or got thrown into a volcano for threatening the perceived wisdom (not even unfortunately worst case)). Societies that loosened the reins started to surge forward.

This wasn't all sweetness and light, though. There are probably lots of reasons, but for the purposes of this essay I'll claim that the collapse of closed Empires coincided with the growth of heavy industry and industrialization. These societies did need good ideas, but they also needed lots of capital. A crappy idea about how to make steel, along with huge amounts of capital that a steel factory needed, made more steel, and hence advanced the society, more than a great idea with no capital. Ironically, the society that most triumphed in its ideology the need for labor to overcome the despotic desires of capital, the Soviet Union, may well have been kept alive by the fact that the greatest growth periods in its history (the first industrialization wave in the twenties and thirties, then the rebuilding and "Sputnik" wave in the fifties and sixties, when the USSR was one of the fastest growing economies on earth) coincided with times when the demands of the society required capital more than labor (or a least more than the innovation aspect of labor).

Eventually, however, the innovation/labor drumbeat started to drown out the capital/heavy industry drumbeat in advanced societies. The "easy part" of industrialization was done, and now societies needed to find the best ideas in order to continue to generate wealth. This becomes visible in the latter part of the Cold War, when western societies, the US in the vanguard, really started to increase the productivity gap between them and closed societies at an increasing rate. Innovation came into its own, the Soviet Union crumbled, and some great ideas started to bubble over that way as well.

What does this have to do with business and specifically social business? Well, I think we're on the cusp of the same thing. Business leaders in many advanced economies and even in developing economies where the "winners" have started to emerge have outstripped the "heavy industry" phase, where having lots of capital was a greater determinant of success than having lots of great ideas. Silicon Valley is an obvious ground zero of this revolution, but it spread. Innovation has become a primary determinant of survival, not just victory.

The challenge? Many businesses look much more like closed societies than open ones. Knowledge is siloed, hierarchies manage the flow of information (even in the best flattened hierarchies), task forces pop up periodic great thoughts whose "radicalness" is limited a priori by the selection of the participants. Things may not fall apart, but, hey, this approach ain't gonna put a man on the moon. They need to find a better way to get the best ideas, and the better way is to shift the culture, from a closed society to open society.

This is, however, a radical thing. Its certainly not simply the technology of what I've heard disparaged as "blogsnwikisnthings" (blogs and wikis and things). It is however a major change in behavior encompassing the use of blogs and wikis and things that will let these ideas get out. If you want to allow the best talent to hit the best ideas and influence them in the best ways, its a prerequisite to implement an open culture where the people and ideas can actually find each other. If we tell everyone to blog, but never read the blogs or comment on them; if we put our ideas in wikis, but lock down the wiki, prevent changes, or treat the wiki as a technique for "the owner" to publish his or her internal website, we certainly didn't get a culture of innovation. We got, merely, blogsnwikisnthings.

The analogy, from a society standpoint, might be newspapers and elections. The Soviet Union had newspapers and elections. It just didn't have the ability for anyone to make a newspaper, express any (well, longer story, but pretend "any") idea they like, and allow any idiot to run for election to see which idea would win. This is kind of like having blogsnwikisnthings that are locked now: thanks for printing the party newspaper, as I needed something to wrap the fish in. The secret locked down idea has the same value, perhaps even the same future, as fish wrap, bird cage liner, and other noble roles.

This, in my view, is the payoff but also at its heart the challenge of social business. To gain the benefit, a business needs to begin to chart a course where the "closed society" model gets overtaken by the "open society" model. To do so, the business needs to gain new skills, and start behaving in new ways where the techniques that were often the most successful in the old model are now at best useless, and at worst harmful. To implement the new skills and culture, businesses need the technology support. Its not about blogsnwikisnthings, but if you're looking around and not seeing those things implemented and used as fundamental cornerstones of an increasing number of business processes, you're probably not yet on the road to social business.

You may, of course, prefer the old, closed, model. In this case, you certainly don't need blogsnwikisnthings. A few propaganda posters ought to do. After all, isn't it true, as the Stalin-era propaganda poster said, that LIFE IS BECOMING EVER MORE JOYFUL?

Well, it finally happened. Again. My MacBook died, stone cold dead. I press the power switch - perhaps a slight, barely perceptible flash occurred, perhaps not. It might have been my imagination. In any event, it died, and won't turn on. The second MacBook in a couple of years. Perhaps the third piece of Apple equipment. All the home built stuff? Still running fine. The stuff from Oldi that we'd bought liketribe in Moscow? My understanding is that that stuff is still running fine. Only Apple's stuff died.

Of course, good things come in threes, and disasters come in droves, so this wasn't the only thing that failed. I returned from Europe the night of May 24th, toting a Kindle that had died during the trip, forcing me to watch movies and read a paper book. On May 27th, I had scheduled going up to Rhode Island to open up the boat for the season. And that weekend, the laptop died. The air conditioner in my apartment died. The building's Internet was cut off. And my 3G connector went AWOL. Harrumph.

Anyway, I hastily shopped around on my iPhone to get something delivered for…. at best Wednesday the 2nd, as I wouldn't be back until the 1st and it was a long weekend anyway. I decided the Apple fail rate was too high, and I run OpenBSD mostly on the laptop anyway (excepting the boat navigation software, which is Mac only, but I have a MacMini that will likely get drafted into service for that, and replaced with an AMD64 home built machine that is nice, reliable and running Ubuntu), so I figured I'd get a netbook. Various reviews indicated that the Asus UL30 in varying incarnations was a good deal, so I ordered one of Amazon for overnight delivery.

And? Come Wednesday am, I had a nice confirmation from Amazon that my laptop, ordered for overnight delivery on June 1st, would be arriving on June 8th. Whose definition of overnight was that? I am still trying to figure out how to cancel that and meanwhile bought the same machine (actually slightly better, for the same price) from J&R in downtown Manhattan.

This is my first non-Mac laptop in a while, including friend's purchases, so I was intrigued to see how Windows 7 et al would work, though I fully intended to OpenBSD-ify the machine. I must say the machine seems pretty nice - 4gb memory, 50gb drive, and 12 hour (allegedly) battery life for $650 plus tax. The out of box experience was, of course, not up to Apple standards, with weird cryptic phrases and such. But colors were nice. Of course, Windows 7 seemed really sluggish, notwithstanding people saying its an improvement on Vista (which I'd never touched), but, again, I didn't care - I was going to add OpenBSD.

First, however, I wanted to make sure that I had a complete system backup, like a good boy. For the price of four DVDs, Asus didn't include any media, so the benighted user needs to make his/her own. Four or more hours later (and good thing I bought the external DVD drive!), I had my DVDs. Its now 2:30 Wednesday afternoon.

So, I install OpenBSD. The drive partitioning stuff is predictably cryptic, but works, and miraculously the OpenBSD instructions on how to dual boot using the Windows boot loader actually worked first time as well. I had fully anticipated hosing the machine, but, so far, not. By 7pm, I was finished installing OpenBSD, ready to start setting up all my software, AND I'd backed up the original Windows machine. "Man," I was thinking, "this isn't so bad." I spent Thursday day loading up all the stuff I use, giving praise to my newly found Verizon 3G card as it sucked down tarball after tarball to aid in all the installs. "This really isn't so bad!" I trumpeted. By late afternoon Thursday, my peculiar needs were 95% addressed. In a few minutes, I'd be finished.

Now. I'm a long time computer user. I should've known that you NEVER say to yourself "this isn't so bad." Thats when the Zeus who hates computer software installations throws a thunderbolt at you. And so it was with me, as I promptly copied a bunch of files in the wrong direction, hosing the installation.

I said a few bad words.

And then a few more.

Then I repeated those, for good luck.

And I began again, forcing more coffee into the La Pavoni to leave me hopped up on espresso to work late into the night. By midnight, plus two gin martinis, I had it reinstalled. Even the weird email config stuff with sendmail, that makes one want to stick forks into one's eyes, that I had not documented correctly in my own notes from before, and had not completed before hosing my install.

And now? I'm backing up the new system, writing this blog, and answering all those emails, letters, phone calls, text messages, tweets, IMs, etc that I've been blocking out while heads-down resuscitating this thing.

I was asked (at, ahem, a rather importune moment in this journey) whether my strange OpenBSD setup is worth it, given the time it adds to my install. I'm guessing its just a little north of four hours time now, about the same as the Windows 7 backup media creation, so its not so terrible, and that includes all the little tweaks and customizations that one makes on any system. So I'm going to still argue that my set up didn't really slow me down.

But Apple dying did. And my fumble fingers on the install did. And the need to create my own media did.

So now I'm back on-line. If I play this album backwards, will my truck start working, my girl come back, and the factory re-hire me? I don't know much about country music, but I sure didn't enjoy my brief experience with the lifestyle.

Working with a number of different people around different aspects of "innovation" (essentially, either bringing a new thing into the market or changing an existing thing), one of the things we've been honing in on is the relationship between innovation and product management. "Product management", I think, is something that has a fairly elastic definition in the tech world, depending on the nature of the company and product. In general, tech companies try and think about borrowing the consumer packaged goods (CPG) (especially Proctor and Gamble) model of managing products and bring it to the technology world, but the record of success here is uneven (especially on product introductions). "Innovation" has a similarly variable definition, generally reduced to meaning "having a new idea", though its meant to mean the process by which invention (the new idea) is transformed into something of utility. I'm going to sketch out some thoughts over a series of articles as to what I've seen happen in product management in tech companies, how product management is approached by different companies and in different situations, and some thoughts on when variant techniques can be applied.

First, what is product management? The CPG definition is something like "CEO of the product". In other words, the product manager is in charge of getting the product to market; dealing with product, pricing, positioning and promotion (or your other favorite "four P's"); and is held accountable for the P&L of the product. In CPG, the product manager can source "technology" from throughout the organization, or externally, and has a wide degree of discretion about which internal resources to use to do product development and fulfilment.

Technology organizations have a fairly variable set of views, but rarely have I seen product managers in technology with the scope of CPG product managers. For one, in technology startups, the source of ideas and customer needs is more or less the CEO. A start-up usually has one big idea, about making one simple thing better somehow, and that big idea is born of a collaboration between a technologist (the CTO) and a business person (the CEO). As they go about executing, the CTO finds inventions and technologists that can be brought to bear on producing the product, and the CEO finds funding and customers and partners with whom the original vision is fine-tuned until "product-market" fit is established. Or not, in which case the company closes or shifts direction.

Rightly or otherwise, as start-ups grow up, this model soaks into the organizational fabric. The clever new thoughts come from the CTO's organization (frequently, frankly, because the things that the company makes are quite technical so the people sitting outside R&D rarely have the depth to understand them fully, let alone figure out new things about them) or from the CEO's interaction with shareholders, customers, and partners. Especially if the CEO is the founding CEO, s/he often has the best "gut" for customers, simply from having interacted with them from before the company was born, and knowing many of the mistakes the company made along the way on its path to growth.

What happens once the founding CEO is gone? The new CEO will usually be some blend of sales and financial person, brought in to drive up revenue, cut costs, sell off pieces, do acquisitions, and/or sell the company. In other words, the replacement CEO will rarely be a product person. In this case, product innovation flows right back to the CTO's organization: either because the founding CTO is still there, or the products are too complex, or the R&D organization was calling the shots before and so continues to, and the new CEO is a bit out of his/her depth in product and so leaves it to R&D.

So if you follow the flow above, the stages go something like this: a startup has an invention (CTO) which is turned into something of utility (ie an innovation) through interacting with the market (CEO); the startup grows up by learning more about the market (CEO) and technology (CTO); the grown-up company focuses on operations (CEO) and incremental innovations (CTO). In other words, product management doesn't exist in the beginning as a discrete job, as its instead the CEO focusing on finding the product-market fit for the CTO's invention(s); product management then turns into a partnership between the CEO and CTO, and winds up being done by the CTO. Never having been created as a stand-alone department, product management is de facto in the hands of the R&D department in most tech companies, and there it remains.

Is this a problem? I'm not one who thinks the org chart is the cause or solution to all business issues, so at the level of this introductory article I'm simply going to say "sometimes". I think the real questions when looking at product management and introducing innovations into the market place concern which issues are confronting the organization at different points in time. From this, one can hone in on which issues are actually product management ones, and which techniques, therefore people, and therefore, lastly, organizational constructs, are appropriate to solve them. With that introduction, I'm going to stop for today, but promise that the next article in the series will look at the initial product management problem (one frequently performed by the startup CEO), which is "how do you find if anyone wants to buy what you're thinking of?". Certainly if I or anyone had a 100% hit rate at this, we'd be running, say, Apple (hey wait - Steve Jobs is running Apple, so I guess someone does have a 100% hit rate! :) ), but there are certainly a few techniques around exploring ideas and markets that help reduce the risk that I've observed, used, and failed to use, with the results most predictable in the last case. And that shall be the next post…

Last night, I had the good fortune to attend the New York Semantic Web meetup. The semantic web is a way of exposing information on the web that makes it simpler to extract meaning from the information. (A trivial example: I could use semantic web technologies to indicate that "Nigel Beck" is my name, making it simpler for a web service to realize that this web site and, say, my LinkedIn profile are related to one another. Of course, I could also indicate more useful things, like relationships with friends or clients or associations, etc). Tim Berners-Lee among others is hot about it - which, considering the last thing he got excited about became the web, is a pretty good reason to take a look. As a former boss of mine once said: "Here are the things I find interesting. If I, as your boss, find them interesting, you should find them fascinating"… Ok, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, our overall web boss, I'm fascinated :)

Anyway… it turned out the timing of the event was particularly propitious, as Facebook had just announced their open graph protocol at their F8 user group the day before. Since the pundits on the blogosphere went bananas about privacy, and the hoi polloi went bananas trying to figure out what everyone was really talking about, there was, shall we say, a fairly full room of curious people. They ranged from "how do you spell semantic web?" to "my friend invented it, he's on our board, and I know everything". Generally speaking, the less knowledgeable tried to ask good questions, and the better informed tried diligently and civilly to answer even (ahem) less-than-good questions, so a good time was had by all. A tea party, in other words, it wasn't.

The group didn't get all the way to debating what the Facebook announcements meant, but there certainly was general groaning and gnashing of teeth. Here's my view of what Facebook actually announced and what it means (with - full disclosure - an admission that I am intensely biased towards favoring open source, open data, open et cetera, but I shall try to stop the propeller from spinning while I consider this…).

A review of first principles: semantic web stuff, as I mentioned, allows you to annotate data so that it has meaning. This is important for computers because, while they are very good at stuff like computations and storing information, they are rather bad at inferring things and understanding language. A human reading this web page has no problem discerning that some of the words on the page are special - they mean things like "name" or "title of blog", for example. A computer, however, has no idea, and so applications that wanted to figure out those things (such as, say, OpenCalais) had to rely on various cunning techniques that are essentially statistical, and so require lots of data, lots of calculations, lots of computing power, and aren't 100% perfect.

If this sounds fairly abstract and meaningless for the average user, hold on a moment. Many of us - about 400 million of us - have our own web page(s) in the form of our Facebook profile. This specialized web page has some quite interesting things on it - like your name, or location, but also things like who all of your friends are. This data, however, lives inside Facebook only and isn't really connected to wherever else you go on the web or whatever else you do. The result from a user perspective can be kind of annoying: I have to teach every web site about me for it to do anything useful.

This is where Open Graph (and sort of Facebook Connect, to a degree, and some other technologies) come in. The idea is that web sites will annotate themselves in such a way as to indicate their relationships with other data, and additionally that you can connect your relationship with that web site to "you" - or at least you in the form of your Facebook page. So, for example, I ought to use some markup to indicate that this site is about me, that it is a blog, and that it related to the "me" on my Facebook page. I could then extend the page further, so that when you click on a "Like" button on the page, you indicate your relationship with my page. That is, there is a new relationship created between you and an article on my blog, where you say you like that article. (You could also hate it, but there is as yet no "hate" button).

Boring? Well, your Facebook activity stream could then show the various blogs (or whatever) that you've said you liked. You could also see when you're on that page whether your friend(s) liked it. Furthermore, Facebook (or someone) could use that information to propose other things you might like - either other blogs (which you might appreciate) or random things from their advertisers (which, maybe, you won't appreciate). This is kind of a big deal.

Why? Well, lets be three different people: you the web surfer, you Facebook, and you the web company that is not Facebook.

You the web surfer get something cool: you don't have to restate your friends and preferences everywhere, and you'll hopefully get better personalization out of the sites that you visit (either directly or because some other widget on the site provided by Facebook or whomever gives you recommendations of some sort). On the other hand, you lose something: privacy. So this is the first reason why people are annoyed. When you say "I like that purple giraffe site", its potentially exposed to your friends in your Facebook feed, and exposing your silly tastes to people you wanted to hide them from. Worse, these tastes are exposed by default to the world, not just your friends, so there is further potential for mischief and embarassment. Lastly (more of a web geek thing), its not too clear who "owns" those tastes and how you can delete them or move them elsewhere. Do you care? Maybe not, but you just told Facebook (and the world) a lot about you but you don't get to control that information.

From Facebook's point of view this is all quite lovely. They know more about you, they can monetize their advertising and their data more effectively, and they build themselves more deeply into the fabric of the web. Triple win. The only downside is the degree to which the end consumer feels threatened by the borg.

And from the standpoint of other web developers? Well, certain things are going to be harder to make if you're not Facebook. There are a litany of start ups that provide recommendations, for example (I love recommendations, and I had a start up in that area), and their business models may have to change. If Facebook has information on 400 million peoples' preferences, they're likely going to do a better job on recommendations than your smaller site. How open Facebook is going to be with this "social graph" data is an open question - and, of course, we've seen that various large players, including but not limited to Facebook, have capriciously changed their terms from time to time, wiping out whole cottage industries as they change direction. Not a good place to be left as a start up.

The next step? Well, a bunch of people (probably including me!) are going to go and put some semantic stuff into their sites and see what happens. A bunch of others are going to push harder at creating open standards (like OpenLike and GnuSocial), and they're going to support corporate initiatives like the Data Liberation Front at Google, perhaps expanding their scope. And a really large bunch of actual non-geek people are going to have to figure out another set of Facebook privacy settings to avoid embarassment.

Personally I'm going to leave the data public for now, click on a bunch of "like" buttons, and see what happens.

I know it appears unlikely to some, but, based on last Thursday's announcement of further restrictions in the Apple Developer's program, I've finally realized what the problem is: Steve Jobs hates me. Personally. I know the rest of you think its all about Apple's strategy, and Steve's personality, and stuff like that, but all that stuff is naive. I know the truth. Steve has a dart board, and its got my photo on it.

Let me explain. Way back, when Steve was a young multimillionaire, and I was a wee lad, I didn't use the Apple II. I learned to program on a strange machine, but I tried to have Steve and Steve's hacker ethos. I even told people that the Apple II was a stupid thing to buy, a trivial games machine for kids. This, its clear to me now, is when the persecution began. How I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then!

Flash forward a few years. I'd honed my technical expertise on device drivers and lisp interpreters, and moved on to dead languages. Dead human languages. One dark and stormy night, however, in the midst of acquainting myself with the mysteries of the optative mood in ancient Greek, I was called upon by a local businessman in Toronto to follow the Steve-wa and go to NeXT came, to learn to program Steve's newest thing.

I must admit, I thought the NeXT was cool. But I also thought it was a stupid idea for the local businessman to pursue. Steve undoubtedly simmered and plotted, and finally came back as head of Apple, eventually launching the iPod.

"Do you think the halo effect will work?" a friend of mine asked me.

"No, never" I replied confidently. Having been in the tech industry for years, and having the aforementioned deep relationship with Steve, I could easily predict this one: the iPod would have no effect on reviving Apple's stock. I even received an iPod as a gift, after the first millions of units had sold. The iPod was hard to use, and iTunes integration sucked. It was, sadly, time to sell Apple stock.

Nefariously, Steve persisted and fought back. Macs came out in fancy different shapes, slim, and with Intel chips, offering the ability to dual boot Windows and assuage the concerns of Mac-curious Windows users. The IBM PowerPC chip (which I was, among other things, in charge of marketing) was unceremoniously dumped, in the dark of night, with assassins dressed in black like ninjas, distinguished only by a pale grey glowing Apple logo in the center of their chests, delivering the news to the IBM fabs in the dark of night.

Of course, I knew it wouldn't last. The rising stock since my last prediction had been an anomaly, brought on, no doubt, by cheap credit and collateralized debt obligations and the like. Steve was doing lines of crushed financial weapons of mass destruction, all while standing inside a pentagram and calling on the powers of Satan to buoy the stock. When that failed, he back dated a few options from time to time. It would soon all be over.

Sure enough, in a fit of hubris, Apple released the iPhone. Closed. No removal battery. No 3G. No GPS. Locked to one carrier.

"Hah!" I laughed. "Many have tried to open up the crappy sealed world of the mobile phone industry in the past. No way Apple will make a difference!"

The gullible bought the crappy thing in droves. It was hacked. Accelerated. 3G and GPS were added. The App Store came out.

"30%!" I exclaimed. "What fool developer would give Apple 30% AND give them veto rights without recourse over their revenue stream?! I'll stay clear of that crappy thing".

180,000 morons wrote apps for it. Some hackers unlocked it and provided an alternative app store. Finally, I bought one.

Sure, it made phone calls, occasionally even holding the signal for the entire call. At times I was even able to use the cut and paste to capture some thought. I even browsed, though Steve would thoughtfully close the browser windows at random for me if I opened more than eight, to make sure I wouldn't get confused. He even made sure I wouldn't get distracted by multitasking, or low quality applications that competed with Apple's native apps, by banning such things. It was kind, and considerate, but somehow I felt it was directly targeted at aggravating me.

Generally speaking, it was starting to seem like Steve might be on to something. Apple was looking at buying a few small countries for the developer talent. I thought perhaps I should consider working with some mobile app projects.

"But wait!" I thought. "Any reasonable client will want not just iPhone, but also Android and Blackberry. Maybe even some of those other crappy phone OSes, like the one from that Finnish rubber boot company. Let's use some portability stuff!"

We looked carefully. We sniffed. We kicked the tires. Finally, we made a selection, and various projects began to run around showing off their apps, chortling and filled with glee. Steve had hated me for years, but it seemed at last that he might bury the hatchet.

And then…just when you thought it was safe to go into the water: Steve bans writing apps, unless the Apple tools themselves are originally used. You probably need to get your color palette approved. I think he might even make sure you indent the code the way they do at Apple.

The blogosphere reacted like courtiers before Louis the Sun King: "Excellent choice, sire! Exactly as I would've done it myself!".

"Its for quality control" the sheep meekly apologized, whilst pulling up all those "Software wants to be free" photos they'd had made of themselves in the "Open Systems Forever" days and rushing over the to airbrushers. Spin doctors working to un-maverick John McCain worked overtime at rewriting the Internet wayback machine's archives, making sure no trace remained of anyone ever suggesting that software wanted to be free.

Software, it turns out, wants to be enchained.

That way, it will have high quality user interfaces. Run swiftly. Multitask like lightning. Allow micropayments. Without abundant and capricious restrictions, applied retroactively, this can never occur.

"L'AppStore, c'est moi" Steve proclaimed.

I, of course, know better. The company that wins over developers wins in the end. As he has been so many times in the past, Steve's finished.

Recruiting ("search" if you're dignified, "headhunting" if you're not…) is a hopelessly broken industry. Recruiters, especially executive recruiters, extract large fees from companies then proceed to place only people already in their network. They ask for referrals, but more or less do nothing with them. Legendarily, recruiters (and, sadly, some employers and company advisers) retain a prejudice against candidates who are currently out of work by noting that a position is available to "passive candidates only" - that is, those who are not looking for a job. I mean, why actually hire someone who wants a job? So it was with interest that I read recently this profile of OneWire.

OneWire is a New York based start up trying to invert the "fit candidate and job together" problem. They have a specific structured data approach (I presume essentially a semantic web approach) to register candidates, then they charge recruiters to subscribe to this information. If recruiters can't fill the position, they can put a bounty on the position and turn prospective candidates into "recruiter's assistants". I didn't see any detail on the bounty size, but if its sufficient this can indeed motivate people to mobilize their social network and refer candidates.

Crucially, it seems OneWire is free to candidates. I like this approach. TheLadders, for example and by contrast, seems to me to have little incentive to ever place anyone as it charges fairly large monthly fees. In this economy, its unclear why any company would bother to post on TheLadders and get thousands of unfiltered applicants all of whom are paying high monthly fees (and perhaps purchasing add-on services like their resume writing service) to get out of their current role.

I'm obviously writing about this company from a standpoint of near total ignorance, in that I haven't spoken with the company, or acted as a recruiter or a candidate! But I like the thought that a well funded start up is going after this space even in this economy. The traditional recruiters are not getting people back to work. Job sites that are out there make lots of money off of the monthly fees they charge candidates, but unleash thousands of resumes on the company that posts. Applying some semantic smarts to the "fit" problem sounds like a promising way to go.

So Tuesday, sitting in the warm sun of an early spring in Manhattan (sheesh - sounding like "Sex in the City"), the unthinkable happened: my iPhone suddenly lost its grasp on reality. First, it failed to find the network for a while. This is not entirely abnormal in this nexus where high demand meets AT&T's network, but after five minutes or so, it seemed a bit suspicious. So I reset the phone.

Ooops.

Now I got the little Apple picture. And nothing else. So I did a hard reset (hold down the home button and power on/off button for at least ten seconds).

Real oops! Now the phone would bring up the Apple picture for a while, then ultimately fade the picture out, and reboot again. Hm…

Some wags online had suggested doing the above while plugged into iTunes. I came home and did that. Nope!

Finally, at long last, defeated and weary, I stared unthinkable reality in the face, and trudged over to the Apple store. My neighborhood Apple store is the flagship glass cube at 5th Avenue, and the retail experience there, while lauded by thousands, to me is about as enjoyable as sticking forks in my eyes. I hate the crowds, the noise, the overly hip casual greetings of the staff, the dumbed down experience. I've been in tech for decades, I think to myself. Can't I get a little more… technical experience?

Upon confessing my complaint, I'm immediately sent with the other petitioners to the Genius Bar.

I hate being in a place called "The Genius Bar".

I now have to make an appointment and stand in line. Don't they know who I am? rings through my mind. Can't I pre-diagnose or read some instructions or something to avoid this mob of the hoi polloi (properly speaking, the ων πολλών (with a rough breathing, but I cannot figure out how to type that), but who studies Greek grammer any more, really?)? Apparently not. Apple likes to keep their instructions dumb, and their customers dumber, so I must stand.

To give credit where credit is due, I arrived at 7:25pm, managed to get a 7:40pm appointment, and was served by 7:47. Then another twenty minutes while they "hooked it up to the diagnostics".

This turned out to mean "reset the entire phone". All one needs to do is hold down the home button and power switch while connected to iTunes, then release the power switch when the Apple logo shows up - but keep holding down the home button. Then it eventually goes into recovery mode.

And now you can…. restore the whole phone to factory settings! My phone was, barring an app or two, recently backed up, so I was fine with this.

However…

I didn't realize that the backups (or at least the backups I made) didn't include my notes (my fault - but never using that app again - I'll stick with stuff that backs up over the air, thanks), or any of my application settings. So for every single app I needed to go back in and reset the userid, password, customizations, whatever.

Harrumph. My phone is, at least temporarily, back to life. Provided I'm within sprinting distance of a laptop with all my apps in it, it can be quickly restored in the future. Of course, since the battery only lasts a few hours, one can seldom be untethered for long, but still - somehow this tech approach feels ancient and unworthy of what Apple reaches for for its brand. Couldn't there be an over-the-air storage and sync?

Maybe there is… But I don't have it. At least I once again have a working phone, and hopefully the instructions revealed to me at the Apple Temple will enable me to keep their shuddering retail experience distant for the foreseeable future.

I was pursuing a few thoughts over the last few days about visualization techniques and "understanding" data. Specifically I was thinking about a comment a friend of mine made that a recruiter that he knows gets 800 resumes a day. Conversely, I was speaking to a friend who has four recruiters working for him to find staff, but still cannot get staffed quickly enough. This felt like a "can computers sort better?" kind of problem. A quick bit of research concluded that this is a very hard problem that lots of people are working on. So I wondered: what if you could just turn yourself into a picture faster? The idea being that human's can match pictures faster than words, so perhaps this would help with the noise.

A little perusing and I came across wordle, a really cool (and, unfortunately, not easy to reuse) site that makes a cloud for you. I fed my resume in (directly from my linkedin profile - apologies if you see the abbreviated version, but the full version, including recommendations, minus punctuation, and all in lower case, is what I fed in), and came up with this:

This looked pretty good! I was surprised how much information actually "came out" in this representation. Perhaps not always 100% the emphasis that I want, but that may be a clue to toy with one's resume more than a fault in the methodology.

That said, I wondered if this contained enough "information". In other words, this worked more or less on straight word frequency, which would mean that creative use of phraseology and synonyms (which, arguably, makes a resume easier to read) would in fact obscure some details.

So, I dug around a little and came up with zemanta, which among other things can eat some text and turn out terms. I signed up for an API key and fed it my resume via one of their example scripts (I picked the Ruby one, as I had recently endured some Ruby pain).

The results were a bit middling. It boils the whole thing to seven to ten words, which seemed slightly reductionist and a bit off target. When I fed it section by section, however, the results per section were very very good. You basically get seven phrases and a confidence factor - so, for example, you might get "Marketing - 25%" - meaning that Zemanta was 25% confident (or had a 25% confidence factor, which might not be the same thing) that the paragraph had something to do with Marketing.

This looked like a good start.

To turn it into a tag cloud, I took each section and fed the Zemanta words into a script. The script combined multiple words - like say "Marketing and advertising" - into a single word - eg "MarketingAndAdvertising". It then repeated the word a bunch of times depending on the confidence factor. Confidence of 25% = 25 times, 7% = 7 times, etc. (Can you deduce my tricky algorithm?). This came up with this tag cloud:

Not bad! Comments on which version is better, or what should change, would be welcome.

For the masochists, here is the ruby script I used. Replace "whatever" with your text, paragraph by paragraph, and obviously replace 'Oh My Key Is Very Secret' with the key you get from Zemanta.

text = "whatever"

gateway = 'http://api.zemanta.com/services/rest/0.0/'
res = Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse(gateway),
                         {
                         'method'=>'zemanta.suggest',
                         'api_key'=> 'Oh My Key Is Very Secret',
                         'text'=> text,
                         'format' => 'xml'
                         })

data = XmlSimple.xml_in(res.body)
answer = ""
data['keywords'][0]['keyword'].each { |v|
   term = ""
   v['name'][0].split(/ /).each{|word|
       term = term + word.capitalize }
   1.upto((v['confidence'][0].to_f() * 100).round) { |i|
       answer = answer + term + " "
       puts term + " " }
}
answer

I mentioned yesterday I'd endured the tortures of the damned and undertook the labors of Hercules to improve my own ability to post. I thought I might mention a few reader tools: ease of use for the iPhone, RSS feeds by tag, email subscription and instapaper's "read later" button.

To read from the iPhone, try http://j.mp/nigelbeck. This is just using a simple utility to convert my blog feed into a nicer iPhone summary. When you click through to an article, it takes you to the original, not-too-iPhone-y site. But its perhaps a little nicer. You can try it for your favorite feeds at iPhone RSS Builder.

In my blog, if you find you like, say "innovation" stuff, but don't like the rest, just click on "innovation" in the tag cloud. The RSS button on that page will be just for innovation stuff. Or, for geeks - the shortcut is http://www.nigelbeck.com/ + the tag + .xml. So the feed for innovation is http://www.nigelbeck.com/innovation.xml

I don't have the "subscribe here by email" directly on the blog, but try http://www.feedmyinbox.com if you like. If you put in http://www.nigelbeck.com/atom.xml (or the feed of your preference, like the innovation one above) into the box at FeedMyInbox, then you'll get it emailed to you. This is often more convenient that using RSS readers for many people.

If you find many things (my blog or others) in the "cool, I need to read that later when I have time", try http://www.instapaper.com/. They have a "read later" button you can install, so when you come to something interesting, you click on the "read later" button, it records it somewhere, and you can read it later when you have time. Handy.

Thats it for my productivity enhancement - or, "how to waste more time reading blogs" - missive of the day.

I'm a little overdue on my third installment of my Goldstone report analysis… but I've got a good excuse! I found myself migrating between blogging tools, as I'd hit a number of bugs in my previous approach. I found a new "simple" approach that seemed widely adopted. I waded in.

Be very afraid, dear reader.

A brief piece of background: I had decided earlier to use a static blogging platform, for lots of reasons. What this means is that you write your blog locally, apply some magic, and it comes out as a bunch of HTML files. You can use standard software tools to move that from your machine to your server. This is in contrast to the "normal" way of using a tool like Wordpress (hosted or otherwise) or Blogger or Typepad etc.

Why bother? Its easier to write locally, and its cleaner to run. One of these days, when I get zillions of hits on my blog, it will take longer to fall over as its all statically generated, not built dynamically through a series of database calls like "those other tools".

I've been generating the blog using Emacs org-mode and blorg, but I finally got fed up with blorg. I like the approach - its one big emacs script that builds your whole blog - but I kept hitting weird errors where blorg bugs cropped up as the file got longer. I suppose this could be an Emacs or elisp thing, but that stuff is about thirty years old so one would think its stable by now? Anyway, debugging something that fails only when the fiftieth file is processed, and only sometimes, is a real pain, and so I thought perhaps I should move back towards "the norm".

"The norm" for static blogging is jekyll. Upon seeing there was jekyll for org-mode, I thought I'd give it a try.

This was extremely painful.

Why? Well, part is my fault: jekyll is meant to be easy for people who code in Ruby to use, and, until the last few days, I'd never coded in Ruby. So this was annoying. (Same with quirky little stuff, like no proper scoping of variables to blocks… Hey who needs that? Its only 2010!)

But more of the pain came from standard problems playing with badly tested open source stuff: docs that were not up to date ("oh actually its "page.title" not "post.title"… Why tell anyone? Let them guess!"), prereqs that were not installed, and, more to the point, extremely limited function. Jekyll basically just munges together a bunch of html using the Liquid templating engine. Anything Liquid can't do, Jekyll doesn't do. So that means sitemaps, tag clouds, feeds, etc - all fall into the category of "roll your own".

Jekyll is pretty popular, so I thought I'd find the bits I needed notwithstanding that.

Um, not so much. Classic bits of "I am so smart I'll post this to help the world" code float around, but many have never been executed even once. How do I know? Because they have syntax errors. Programs with syntax errors have never been used. Thanks for posting, guys, but maybe keep it to yourself if you can't be bothered to run it first.

In the end, I think I have it running again. Posting is still a little bit clumsier than before, and I wrote seven Ruby scripts, two perl scripts, and three shell scripts to get what I wanted (plus had to install a few Ruby libraries, where some, like HTML entities, wouldn't install the first few ways I tried). And it took a couple of days…

At some point, I'll be a good citizen and post these somewhere, as they do stuff like generate the feeds and tag clouds etc. In the interim, feel free to ask if they sound interesting.

The site should now be back up working and I've endeavored to keep all the links the same (just for those legions of followers who deep link into me).

Why did I bother with all this? Part curiosity, part eternal optimism that it will all be better in the end, part a sense that doing it yourself gives you some insight into how things actually work.

But there sure are days when I have second thoughts :)

My last couple of posts have talked about the world as it, lamentably, is: backlash in Massachusetts and not enough experimentation in New York. I wasn't implying thats the way I like it, or the way I think it should be. For example, I live in New York, and, obviously, believe innovation can happen here. There are just some barriers that go with the benefits.

In the same spirit of looking at barriers, I thought its worth looking at what has characterized the big innovations of the past few years. Inhabiting a technology head space, I'm definitely biased here, but it seems to me that the last five to maybe almost ten years has been characterized by a set of technology "revolutions" that have focused on ease of use. Twitter is the poster child for a simple product that does just one thing and became popular, but Apple's remaking of the consumer landscape has focused around the same notion: a music player thats integrated with a store, a phone thats simple to add applications to, etc. Seth Godin, in a much re-blogged video of a speech he gave a few years ago at Google, makes the case that ease of use was what separated Google from Yahoo back in 1999 (see about minute four).

There's nothing wrong or surprising about these "ease of use" innovations being so powerful or generating so much wealth. As technology has moved from the geeks and ivory towers out into the hands of consumers and the mass market, making "one of those, but simple" could at times be conceived to be a breakthrough.

And yet…

At another level, this is somewhat depressing. As when I wrote earlier about our desire to sum up people in a bullet point, perhaps missing the Da Vincis, it feels that some potentially really cool innovations get thrown out with the bath water as we increasingly judge the new things that come up through this lense of simplicity to decide whether they are worth while. Certainly, for example, Unix is complicated - AND useful. And "Unix made simple" is the basis of Apple's resurgence, so Unix clearly retains utility in a "simple first" world.

But Unix couldn't have gotten out of the gate in this world. As Unix (and its derivatives/friends/flavors/brothers/whatever, the Linuxes and the BSDs) was growing, getting ironed out, being taught to be scalable and debuggable, etc, Unix was legendarily difficult to use. Even windowing systems in the Unix world were awesomely complex, requiring a three button mouse, combination key strokes, massive setup, and frequent reversion to arcane commands on the command line. You could indeed do anything - if only you could figure it out.

For a while, this retarded the growth of Unix in the marketplace (though, I'd argue that Unix had to wait until the hardware to run it was cheap enough, which took at least as long as the inventions that made Unix easy to use). It didn't, however, slow the rate of innovation in the Unix world, where the platforms and derivatives grew, were ported, stabilized, expanded, and made more useful in a variety of settings. Everyday Unix users (Mac users most notably, but certainly Linux and BSD users) now benefit enormously from those innovations: one Linux server I run in the Amazon cloud was just rebooted for the first time since November of 2008 last night (and that was, it seems, involuntary :)).

So what? Well, how many geeky complicated would-be Unixes are hiding in the heads of potential inventors and entrepreneurs, languishing in a world where investors and early customers will judge them first by sub-second installation times, or whether or not they need to read the manual? While, of course, direct-to-mass-market consumer innovations have tended to be in those categories, how much has that conditioned our evaluation criteria for new ideas to come? Furthermore, does the "ease of use" vein of innovation remain infinitely, or at least sufficiently, fertile to be the starting point for the next wave of innovations?

I'm no ease of use guru (and I use OpenBSD and Emacs and similar arcana daily), so perhaps this is sour grapes. It would be nice, though, if the next wave of cool startups got beyond "And THEN, you can add all your friends - AND SEND THEM A MESSAGE!"

I'm sure this wave will pass. But sometimes, economy aside, it all seems soooo 2007:

1

Ok, it was really five days ago. I couldn't resist the headline, though.

Five days ago, I was at an event here in New York that I mentioned when discussing texting 90999 to help Haiti. We all started playing with foursquare, the hot app du jour. I must say I was a little surprised how many people at the event were checked in on foursquare (and how few at the next day's event - none in fact…. Demographics, it appears, are the answer to everything).

foursquare is mobile local social networking with a kind of gaming twist. On foursquare, you "check in" to the venue you're at, and can immediately see a list of other's who are checked in. You can also "shout" out a message to the assembled multitudes. By visiting different places, you can get promotions (like a free coffee nearby) and you can collect points and badges to compete with your friends by seeing who checks in the most. Lastly, which is I suppose the app's primary utility, you can see where your other friends are (as long as they're members of foursquare).

The app has a few flaws. Its a little slow, and I, at least, constantly forget to check in. The promotions are a true Holy Grail of local apps, but will require a lot of partners or a large sales force to pull off. Also, as evinced by the differential usage in the back to back events I went to, there may be a thin demographic slice that is out running around and bouncing from venue to venue to chase down different friends.

All that aside, I think its a pretty cool idea, thats obviously both early enough and popular enough to grow considerably. As my friend Peter Propp has noted, there is a lot more in the concept that foursquare and/or other companies could do to grow the concept: we were all in the room on foursquare, but there was no opportunity for us to interact with each other or with, say, the sponsor's brand. We just looked at each other's pictures, collected some points and badges, and moved on.

There is a next step, though, that they're perhaps pointing the way towards: I think now that we're all on Facebook (our friends and family), LinkedIn (our business connections) and, to a degree, Twitter (our personal news channel, in my opinion), there still is room for a fourth kind of connecting: contextual connections.

These contextual connections are not really friends - they're just acquaintances for the duration of an event, or maybe a set of events. You and Bob to your left and Sally to your right at the ball game don't really want to "permanently" link up via Facebook; you just want to cheer together at the ball game, share the uplifting experience of the walk for breast cancer that you're doing together, get a free shot of vodka at a bar promotion, or get your name entered in a draw for visiting all four booths of a company or consortium at a trade show. You may decide to add each other to your permanent list, but your initial connection is more fragile: its a shared experience, a fleeting connection.

This is not quite what foursquare is doing. At the moment, at least, foursquare offers you really Yet Another place to create a list of friends, and, probably, one that will be narrower (and perhaps more transient) than the other three above as it consists of those friends to which you are always happy to broadcast your location.

Smarter investors that I are hot about foursquare. For my part, I'll look forward to the app with the contextual friends list, and all the exciting business constructs that can come out of it.

For some reason, capturing (and managing) todos seems to be a difficult problem for technology tools. Every once in a while, my brother and I wind up going on about this. I'm not sure if this is a technology problem or a people behavior problem, but for whatever reason, the right tool always seems elusive.

Years ago, I used a piece of paper. The top left was short term todos, the top right was people I needed to call, and the bottom was longer term projects I was focused on. I'd edit, scribble, and mark over, then when I could no longer read the page, I'd rewrite it, which was a good time to clear out junk. This system worked pretty well.

Then I got a Palm Pilot. One of the original ones, back in 1993 or something like that. (In fact, I re-tried it a few years ago and it still worked! Even the 13 year old software worked on Windows. Take that!, Microsoft-haters!). It was fine for calendar and contacts, but useless for todos as they took too long to enter.

Thats more or less been the history of it: RememberTheMilk, or ReQall, or (gasp!) even Org-Mode seem to be good for a kind of work, but not for all of it. Why?

Sometimes its that old data entry problem again. ReQall fixes this somewhat as you can enter items via speech, but I've found it seems to "forget" my todo status at times. If your todo program doesn't remember, um, what good is it?

But leaving that aside, I think the problem is one of definitions. There are todos we really intend to do ("Pay Mortgage"). In fact, some we're really wasting our time writing down as we won't forget them anyway ("Get downpayment for house"). Some are aspirational ("Go for a swim") - we might do it, or we might not, and there is no project that depends on them, so they tend to sit, accumulate, and clog up the todo list. So then we delete 'em. So much for those todos.

Other todos are transient - effectively they expire. "Build Snowman" doesn't work well once the snow has melted. We don't know when its going to melt, but, before it does, we want to build one. When the snow melts, the todo has expired. Can't it just go away and stop clogging up the todo list? (In fact, some bookmarks and contacts are like this: they're related to something we're doing near time, but after trying to find a plumber or research a todo tool, we no longer need the contact/bookmark: Can't they just go away? Has anyone invented one of these?)

Some todos are kind of floating ideas ("Install new todo software"). We do intend to do it, sometime, when we've got spare time. But not actually now. We're busy now. We don't want to delete them, because life would change somehow, if we ever did it. But….

These todos also clog up the todo list.

There are probably others. But I think this taxonomy of todos is the real problem, regardless of the product (or system, for GTD advocates).

Thats why a piece of paper works so well for all those unforgettable, or aspirational, or floating, or transient todos.

It will surprise few who know me that, while assembling this blog, I decided to do it in kind of a weird way.

Yep, hard to believe, huh?

A little history sort of explains why. At liketribe, we experimented with using Vox first. It was an ok tool, but the privacy settings (for when we were in stealth mode) proved fairly difficult to manage. Once our site went live, we installed Wordpress on our server, along with a couple of plugins.

I found Wordpress a little annoying as its kind of a heavy install. You need an actual database installed. Posting, then testing the post, is also a little annoying, as you have to be web connected when writing, or cut and paste, then if you use multiple servers (say, one for testing and one for production), you need to cut and paste between them (so far as I know).

So when I put up mail2.im, I thought I'd go way simple and try tumblr. Tumblr works pretty well, and has a nice clean look, with options to post from many places. However, since its meant to be simple, its not that configurable. It also has the problem that if you're experimenting with the blog (say, its look and feel), you more or less have to do that "live". I must also confess that, notwithstanding tumblr's popularity, I wonder whether its really too similar to what people do on Facebook to really continue to matter.

Which brings up Facebook. I guess one can sort of blog there, but you really have little control over the look and feel, and have to play with weird privacy settings to get your blog world readable.

So what to do? I'd been intrigued by the idea of people using static blog generators, like jekyll. Jekyll is kind of "back to the future": they basically say "You have a site anyway, and it has pages anyway, so why are you managing the ones that happen to contain blog content differently?". With jekyll, you basically define a framework (essentially say "An empty post will look like this), then run the tools to generate the pages every time you post. Most people use a version control tool, like git, to move the content up to the server to publish.

This approach works well for me (though its gorpy and finicky to set up). You can write locally, when offline. You then generate the site and test it locally. When you're connected, you post it. Simple.

Except…

Except I'm too weird to just do that! For the better part of the past year, I've been increasingly using Org Mode to organize my thoughts. Org-mode is a bizarre tool in many ways (it runs in Emacs), but its amazingly flexible.

In Org-Mode, you just make a bunch of outlines. You then can tag headings in the outlines as todos. You can do elaborate tagging and workflows with todos, then when you want to see your todos, you can define different agenda views for them (eg "Everything this week" to as complex as "Everything concerning my client Bob for which I'm waiting on Cindy"). You can use the outlines as a memory tool (for example, to capture a quick note, or, using a bookmarklet, to remember a web page you're viewing, or even to create a to-do linked to the email that generated it). Whats really cool is that these outlines can be in many different files, and Org-Mode will pull the agenda views across the files. "Everything for today" can therefore pull from your main todo file, as well as twelve different outlines that are in various stages of completion as final documents and so contain todos. More recently: you can even view the todos including your different agenda views from your iPhone using MobileOrg!

Speaking of final documents: in Org-Mode, you create a final document by publishing your outline. You can do this in arbitrary and complex ways (for example, you can make a certain subsection publishable to a slide presentation, but the rest to HTML), but in the main I've found I tend to publish to a PDF (via LaTex), to HTML, or to a wiki (via translating the html to the wiki mode in question using html2wiki - very handy if you're dealing with multiple wikis using different back ends, which you might if you interact with different people on different projects where they've each picked their own wiki flavor). You can more or less back convert to PDF to Word using tools like this, if someone really demands a Word doc.

It therefore seemed reasonable to look at using Org-Mode to publish a particular file as a blog, rather than as a PDF or plain HTML or whatever. I discovered blorg had aspirations of doing this. Despite the author saying he'd shelved it intending to rewrite it, I thought I'd give it a shot.

How's it working? Well, the results are mixed. For some reason, blorg is indeed incredibly buggy. Sometimes it will not generate links correctly, for example, then moving a TODO within the file results in the next run generating a link. These are weirder problems that I've experienced with any other tool - even ones I've had to fix myself (like, in fact, blorg, which I've added some features to, which, ahem, might occasionally be the source of the bugs).

Leaving aside the bugs :), it works well. I can stay in Org-Mode, the "simple" tool I'm increasingly using for everything I do. I publish, run a simple command, and the blog is posted, everything is pinged (via Ping Fm), and I'm off to the races.

Would I recommend it? Well……… tell me how you like Org-Mode first, then lets talk about the rest :)

On a serious note: anyone with any interest in how to set up the above, let me know and I'll be happy to help.

I thought I'd write up a little about home exchanging, in the spirit of all those "what I did for my summer vacation" essays one was compelled to write as a child. More seriously, I had been "home exchange curious" for years but never quite got around to trying it until now. The verdict? While I haven't made it all the way back to my apartment to see if my exchangers stole the TV and the cutlery, this was a very good experience and a good way to visit a new place.

What is it: You trade houses with a total stranger you meet on the Internet. Sounds weird, huh?

How it works: In my case, I used the site HomeExchange.com. You upload pictures of your place, write a catchy description, and - oh yeah - pay 100 bucks to join for a year. This is refundable if you don't get an exchange within the year, so if you're wondering whether your toxic waste dump in the Nigerian Delta can be exchanged, there is no risk (apparently) in listing it and trying.

This then proceeds a little like online dating. You look at other places and write them notes, they look at your place and write you notes. HomeExchange.com doesn't do anything from here on in: you receive requests and replies to your notes in whatever email box you registered, and manage your own process. This was slightly tedious, as I got about 50-60 inquiries (apparently Christmas in midtown Manhattan is a popular choice), and there was a lot of email back and forth to work on details, prioritize, and select between different possibilities. Some people seem to come back and say things like "I also have this other place. Would you like it?" which struck me as a little strange. For me, I was more comfortable responding to inquiries concerning a posted property, not some other thing which they hadn't posted. Whether this was a scam on their part, or an attempt to save money, I'm not sure, and so cannot offer further advice on.

Our exchange wound up being negotiated fairly late in the day (late November for a December 22nd swap), so in the end a number of criteria like travel costs and flight times ventured in to the final selection. In the end we selected this place near Ghent, in Belgium. Why? It was easy to get to from the UK (by ferry and car, which turned out to be a lucky choice as our travel weekend was the weekend of a huge snowstorm in the UK - the tunnel and Heathrow were both closed!). We wanted a house, so we'd have space to relax in and not feel the need to pound the streets 24x7. And, in addition to all the "normal" sites in Belgium (museums in Brussels, designers in Antwerp, beautiful medieval town of Bruges, Ghent itself, restaurants, beer, mussels, chocolates, and fries…), I have an interest in World War One and wanted to visit some battlefields near Ypres/Ieper as well as the Vimy memorial in France.

How it went: Very smoothly. We got in touch via email, negotiated the details, and on a snowy Monday showed up in their driveway. We chatted for a while, went over all the details, and Born and Lotje (the home owners) grabbed their things and headed out. We exchanged a few emails and one phone call (when the dishwasher looked like it might be flooding), and otherwise had a simple, relaxing time, got to see the country differently than we would have otherwise, and, of course, saved a significant amount of money compared to if we'd had to spend money on a hotel for the period.

My advice: This seems to be a great way to travel. Obviously, it depends on how you are able to write up the place you've got available to exchange: good photos (like you're trying to sell your place), and a good write up emphasizing whats interesting will really help, I should think. Also planning in advance for popular dates (Christmas, Easter, and August for Europe, for example) is required. Its worth looking at what others include: for example, those with homes not in dense city centers tend to offer their vehicle as well. If you don't feel comfortable doing this, it might make your place less attractive.

Would I do it again?: In a word, yes. If only I could arrange my plans to see a few months in the future, I'd be planning April's exchange now!

I've been using twitter (or more actually, a member of twitter) since the early days when it seemed nobody used it. I was certainly one of the "nobodies" - I didn't really get it, and was especially irked by how popular something so stupid seemed to be getting, at least among insiders, especially when it didn't even work very well.

A few years on, I must say I'm a convert. I like the way its asymmetrical (unlike, eg, Facebook), so we don't have to both be friends for one of us to follow what the other says. More than that, I like the way they've opened up the API so that I can access my stuff however I like, even if its differently that how you get yours. I prefer tweet.im, for example, as I'm an IM kinda guy. When I want noise, I can turn on IM and get a stream of twitter updates in real time, as well as other messages. Turn off IM = no noise. I don't need to consciously go to twitter and see whats up, I just get it.

Perhaps thats the summary. Maybe I'm a little slow, a little jealous. But, slowly, finally, I'm starting to get it…

Not sure if its high oil prices, consumer pressure, the collapse of the auto industry, or government subsidies, but green car news seems to be inundating me these days. Since I live, car-less, in Manhattan, my interest in these areas for the moment is rather more prurient than practical; however, a number of things caught my eye today.

First is this: a regular Ford Focus getting 62mpg! By "regular", I mean no hybrid technology, not even diesel, just a highly tuned gas engine. It seems there is hope in that old gasoline stuff yet….

Second thing: the green car of the year is the Audi A3 TDI: 40/52 mpg. Not bad and certainly Prius-competitive - and, again, relatively old style technology: a tuned small diesel.

These kinds of cars are great for today's consumer to get to lower consumption without low luxury/high prices (per my friend @dangreenberg's comments). My heart, however, wants to be free from dead dinosaurs and experience the quiet guiltless glide of electricity. Short of shelling out $100k+ for a Tesla, I think the upcoming BlueCar from Pininfarina is the way to go. It has that Euro-metro look, but with some funky features. I can readily imagine zipping around town (or, more likely, around Rhode Island where I spend as much of the summer as I can) in one of these. I think they're Europe only in the forecast 2011 release, but if my fortunes drift me to spending more time in Europe, I want one of these parked somewhere near by!

Of course, the great conundrum remains the sex appeal of the traditional engine. As a motorcyclist, I'm well aware of the role that plays in vehicle marketing strategies. Why else would the exist? When we see Arnie in the BlueCar instead of converting his Hummer to hydrogen, we'll know we're really on the road to change…

Welcome to the "new new" blog and "new new" website.

Its been a while coming, and in the interim I'd done a number of things, finally using Weebly for a while. While Weebly looks like a pretty good tool, I thought I wanted a little more flexibility, so finally put everything together and moved this blog (and this site) to a new server.

The primary subject I'll be writing about is, not surprisingly I guess, innovation. I'll be writing about how people innovate, things I find innovative, and innovations I'm pursuing. Frequently clients I'm working with will generate interesting insights on this subject, which I'll try to detail as best I can without revealing things that they'd prefer to keep under wraps for the moment.

For those who are into such things, I've chosen to use some static blogging tools rather than a more conventional approach to blogging. Time will tell if this is a good choice, but in the interim you should at least be able to see familiar ways to comment, get feeds, and such. One reason I chose to do it this way is that I can use org-mode and emacs, which is pretty the set of tools I use for everything else these days if I have any choice in the matter. The detailed reasons are likely subject for another post, but basically I can easily work offline in simple text documents, customize anything that irks me, then upload when I get it all looking right. Its indeed an acquired taste - but, I've acquired it!

You'll likely find a mix of subjects on the site, but you'll find everything tagged. If you only want "innovation" entries, for example, just click on that tag, grab that feed by clicking on the little RSS icon on the sidebar, and you'll have only the stuff you're interested in.

With that I'll close for today. Its Thanksgiving week, for those of the American persuasion, so I know its a short one for many people. To those celebrating, have a great holiday.