Month: May 2006

I received this note in my inbox this morning from MEDIACHANNEL.ORG

Follow the link at the end to read a fascinating story.

EXCLUSIVE Report from Rory O’Connor and William Scott Malone

The (Other) Story Judith Miller Didn’t Write
In an exclusive interview Judith Miller tells the details of how the attack on the US Cole spurred her reporting on Al Qaeda and led her, in July 2001, to a still-anonymous top-level White House source, who shared top-secret NSA signals intelligence (SIGINT) concerning an even bigger impending Al Qaeda attack. Ultimately, however, Miller never wrote that story either. But two months later — on September 11 — Miller and her editor at the Times both remembered and regretted the story they “didn’t do.”
By Rory O’Connor & William Scott Malone, MediaChannel.org / NavySEALs.com

http://www.roryoconnor.org/blog/index.php?p=176

If you’re looking for more insight into this whole Web 2.0 thing, you might want to check out Inside the Net (scroll down the page), a podcast by Amber McArthur and Leo Laporte.

This week’s episode features an interview with Stuart MacDonald, one of the organizers of the Mesh Conference, which I attended earlier this week.

The podcast is a weekly show, which highlights new applications and people in the Web 2.0 community. It’s always interesting. And it’s just one of several podcasts that Leo Laporte is hosting these days. I highly recommend Security Now, with Steve Gibson and TWIT. And if you want to know what TWIT is, check out the show.

For those of you who were worried by my last post, don’t worry. The fire was a false alarm and everything worked out.

The Mesh conference wrapped up yesterday but I’ve been busy all day and didn’t get around to filing an update until just now. And I see that my last post did generate some worries (although I doubt you were really worried!)

The 2-day event was a real success, in my view. But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can see a lot of other blog posts on Technorati or you can check out the conference Wiki, where you’ll find lots of details about what went on. I’m putting together a highlights package for the folks back at the office and I’ll post that here when I’m finished.

For now, let me offer a few of my own insights.

First and foremost, this is a really happening business – this whole Web 2.0 thing. A lot of very smart people are involved and they are passionate about what they’re doing. We talked a lot about how the promise of the Internet (the ability to make so much information available to so many people) which was promised, but not followed through on, with Web 1.0 is now arriving. The advent of improved broadband and more sophisticated business models (and a healthy dose of reality) all makes for an exciting business model that is working.

There are companies out there doing really exciting things and making money at it. Some more than others, of course. Blogging is one area where there is a lot of skepticism about whether there is a viable business model. But personally, I can’t get too excited about monetization. Most of the bloggers I know are in it because they want to be and they’re passionate about writing their blog. If they do end up finding a way to make a few bucks, so much the better, but making money is not the reason they’re doing it. And I’m not sure that anyone could sustain a blog (or an audience) if they didn’t have the passion we admire.

That being said, there is a difference between a business blog and a personal blog. Some blogs, like this one, are a bit of both. And that seems OK. But I suspect that as this segment matures, we’re going to see a stronger separation of the two. The great thing about the Internet is the way it can support both types (and plenty of others as well) so easily. There seems to be a blog about almost everything out there and they’ve all got some kind of an audience.

I’ll wrap this up (because that early morning train arrives early!) by noting that a common thread talked about by everyone at the conference, no matter what their role, was the necessity for transparency in this new world. As Steve Rubel noted, "The blogosphere is the greatest fact-checking machine ever developed." If you lie, or try to stretch the truth online, you will be found out and you will suffer for it.

And that is a good thing.

Tags: mesh06

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I’m sitting in the Mesh Conference, listening to the fire alarm sounding, and everyone is just sitting here. Kind of cool. We’re a bit nervous, but no one is moving. What do you do when the alarm goes off? The building security has just come on and told us to stand by for further instructions, and apparently the fire department is on the way… Strange. But I wanted to post this mostly because I thought it was kind of cool to be able to put this out in real time. Of course, by the time you read it, I’m sure everything will be back in order…or you’ll never hear from me again. Either way, I’ll try to keep you updated.

Tags: Mesh06

Robert Scoble is one of the world’s best known bloggers, through his Scobleizer postings and he’s famous as the Microsoft blogger.

But for the past few days his blog postings have taken a radically different turn, one which has shown just how powerful this new tool is for communications.

His mother in Montana has suffered a massive stroke and Robert has written about his hectic flight back to Montana to be by her side. Yesterday, the family received the bad news that the stroke was catastrophic and her death is only a matter of days.

It’s tough news for anyone and Robert’s decision to share updates with his thousands of readers demonstrate the unique relationship that builds between a blogger and his or her readers. While we may talk business, or consider ourselves to be running a “corporate” blog, it’s still a labour of love, really. Without passion, a blog will whither and die.

Robert’s sad, but profoundly moving posts in recent days, bring to my mind my own thoughts when my mother was in hospital a couple of years ago after a stroke. I wasn’t sure whether to write about the experience or not, but I did. (Here’s the link to the post.) And I was glad that I did. Things worked out for us. Today, my Mom, while not as strong or as mobile as she was, is still with us and I’m able to talk to her on the phone.

One important point Robert has made repeatedly is the importance for all of us to discuss with our family and friends what our wishes are should we suffer a massive stroke, as his mother did.

If there’s some good that might come out of this, please sit down and communicate with your family about what you’d like to have happen in a similar situation. Do not leave these kinds of decisions to your next of kin.

Because his mother had signed a do not rescuscitate order and told her friends and family, they are able to honour her wishes without guilt.

There will be no happy ending for Robert Scoble. But life will go on. And his decision to bring us into this personal situation is a good thing.

A long time ago, around about the time I entered the work force in a serious manner, I remember reading some wonderful predictions about the future. Things like we’d all be working about four days a week, we’d all have pension plans that secured our future, and we’d all live to ripe old ages, free of debilitating illness and diminished capacity. (I was never sure how we’d go from healthy to dead without going through that phase.)

Since then, I’ve come to accept that most of these predictions are not going to come to pass. Especially the part about working less.

It seems to me that people I’m working with regularly are working a whole lot more these days — not less. For many, it’s a point of pride that they are in the office early, staying late, using their Blackberries at all hours of the day and night, mixing business with pleasure (isn’t a working vacation an oxymoron?) and comparing notes with each other on how to reduce stress in the least amount of time. (Is a spa worth the extra time? Do they have wireless?)

There seems to be general agreement that stress is a bad thing. But it seems impossible to keep it from building. And unfortunately, some of the stress reducers that are adopted, such as scheduling time at the gym or squeezing in a weekend getaway, often become another item to add to a too-busy schedule, and end up adding to the stress level.

Here are a couple of recent examples that I came across.

An overworked manager, realizing that staff meetings were a good thing, but not prepared to sacrifice normal work hours, decided to hold weekly staff meetings at 7:00 am. That way, they could get things out of the way without cutting into the work day. You can imagine how the staff felt about the idea.

Another company suspected that senior staff were starting to look out of control because they were meeting at all hours of the day and night. While the senior folks figured they were dedicated, the staff’s perception was that nobody really knew what the heck they were doing and they were running around without a clear idea of what they were doing. (Probably the case, I suspect.) The solution? Senior staff started leaving the company on time, but came back later to finish up “important” work.

The “bum in the seat” approach
Part of the problem we’re facing now is that too many people are measured not by the quality of the work they do, but by the hours they are at work.

I once worked with a Director of HR who measured people’s performance by whether they were at their desk at 9 am in the morning. If they were, they were considered to have worked that day. If they weren’t, they were docked pay. There was no consideration for anyone who might work at other hours. If you wanted to be paid, you were at your desk. No one was too worried whether you were working or not — that wasn’t the point.

Our relationship with work is a tricky subject, isn’t it? The work week is five days long, with two others called the weekend. Whose idea was that, anyway? How come it can’t be the other way around? Or at least closer to a balance?

There is an old saying that work expands to fit the time available and I think it applies to our five-day week. If we simply cut it to four (or maybe three?) days, I suspect we’d end up with as much work getting done — or even more.

I suspect it, but over at A List Apart, Ryan Carson has taken this idea a step further. In a great post, called “The Four-Day Week Challenge,” Carson recounts his personal experience with shortening his work week to four days, instead of four. Here’s how he set up his decision:

And then it hit me: there will always be more to do. Working more won’t change that. In fact, working more is actually counter-productive. I was starting work everyday at 5:30 AM and working till 10:00 PM, but I still wasn’t done with everything. If I was working those extreme hours and still couldn’t keep up with my to-dos, then clearly working more wasn’t the solution.

The problem wasn’t a time issue, it was a mental issue. I knew I had a whole week to finish my work, so I spread it out over five (or seven!) days. If I knew I only had four days to finish a whole week of work, it would’ve motivated me to get things done more efficiently.

His story of how he and his wife implemented their four-day week is a great read. And along the way, he comes up with some great tips for how to be more efficient during those four days to ensure that work doesn’t intrude into that nice three-day weekend you’ve now earned.

I think Ryan is on to something good here. And we should all think seriously about how we can build our own work situations to emulate his.

A couple of posts ago, I was talking about how I seemed to have a lot less time for reading books than I used to. Or rather, I’m using my available time for other things besides reading books.

This weekend, I’ve been trying to work my way through all those RSS feeds that have built up in my reader, as well as clearing out some of the unheard podcasts backed up in my Ipod. So I’m doing plenty of reading — but not books.

It appears I’m not the only one who is struggling with this problem. I came across a couple of posts that address the issue of too many books and not enough time to get through them.

The first is The myth of “keeping up” from one of my new favourite bloggers, Kathy Sierra from the Passionate Users blog. I seem to have been sending you guys over to her posts a lot lately. But I really like her take on life and she’s a great writer.

This post talks about the problem of too many books to read. But Kathy goes further than some (like me) and rather than just complaining about it, she’s got some good ideas on coping. So take a look. And if you’ve got any other ideas, she encourages you to add to the list.

The second post comes from a blog called “An Entirely Other Day,” written by Greg Knauss. In The Back-Logged Life he tells us that he’s had enough of the “info-glut, which has taken over his life. For example:

My entire life has devolved into an endless, grinding slog through my back-log. Everything I do is about catching up, doing the stuff I didn’t get done the day before, plowing through some other goddamned thing that needs my attention. Ending the day without actually adding to the total aggregate is a victory. There are times when it piles up faster than I can shovel it away.

His solution? Dramatic and simple:

… As of now, my fancy-pants, community-generated, emergent-behavior data-sorting heuristic is: a calendar. If I haven’t gotten to something in a week, it dies. Stick that in your attention economy and smoke it. I’m re-booting. Feed list: empty. In-box: empty. TiVo: OK, OK, I still need to watch “24.” But other than that: empty.

So screw you, info-glut! I’m not going to be the responsible info-citizen I’m expected to info-be anymore. If I get to it, I get to it. If I don’t, well, then it couldn’t have been very important in the first place. I suspect that burning children and drowning buildings will still get the attention they need. But the year-old e-mails that are stinking up the bottom of my in-box? The month-old “Daily Shows”? The three dozen Waxy Links that I’ve flagged and sorted and pinned to a corkboard for further study some day? Gone. And good riddance.

So, there you have it. Two approaches to dealing with all that info rolling into our lives every day. I’m still working on my information grid, to try to rate the quality of the information I get compared to the volume. But I don’t have a clue where that will end up. I suspect I may be leaning towards Greg’s solution.

I used to read a lot of books. Now…not so much (as John Stewart might say.)

There was a time when I’d have several books on the go at any one time. There were usually a couple by my bed. I’d often have a non-fiction tome underway out in the living room. Something more upbeat might be in my book bag and I’d often have some kind of a thriller, or a mystery, sitting around ready to go.

But either I’m getting older (OK, I am getting older) and less able to multi-task, or I’m getting older and doing more multi-tasking. Does that make sense? Either way, I’m reading less books.

And that worries me. Reading books is exercise for the brain. Sure, I spend a lot of time on-line and I read on-line articles and research stuff on the web. I do a lot of reading but its not the same as sitting down with a book, and getting lost in it.

What I do read a lot of are book reviews. I recommend them highly, especially if you’re like me and don’t have (and don’t expect to have) the time to read the books themselves. A well-written review goes a long way to delivering the king of intellectual pleasure that makes books so attractive.

A few weeks ago, Martin Levin, the books editor at the Globe and Mail, had an interesting column about a new book that’s come out, called “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.” It seems to be part of a trend towards larger lists that are supposed to help us time-challenged people focus our attempts to improve our lives. Similar titles are aimed at albums and movies.

I haven’t got a copy of this book, but I might, just to have it nearby. I know there’s no way I’ll ever get through all those books, but I’d like to think that I might. But even someone as well-read as Martin had only read about 450 or so of the books on the list.

An interesting tangent that flows from this conversation is wondering whether my not reading as many books as I used to equates to getting less information?

I’d say no. I’m inundated with information these days. It flows in through the Web, podcasts, phone calls, e-mail, meetings (so many meetings!) advertising, radio, television…eek!

But does more information equal “more knowledge?” (doubtful) Or more “Peace of Mind?” (ditto) Or “More clutter?” (bingo!)

What I need to create is my own “information grid.” I’d like to list the various ways I get information each day, what I do with it, and how I use it, or pass it along. I struggle with the nagging feeling that the amount coming in is swamping the amount that is going out, or being used. There’s too much noise in my day.

To put it another way, my inbox is getting really overloaded and I need a way to get some balance into my information flow.

I’m going to work on this idea and update you as I go along.

In the meantime, what’s your information flowchart look like? Maybe you’ve already got a handle on this problem. If you do, please let the rest of us in on your secret.