Category Archives: Internet

“Bottom-Up Revolution”

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From an opinion piece on Al-Jazeera, by Paul Rosenberg 

Obama, however, is just one political figure, reflecting the more general state of US politics – particularly elite opinion and major economic interests. His ambivalence is, in this sense, an expression of America’s fading power. Obama’s belated attempts to play catch-up with the Arab Spring are but one facet of a more general loss of previous dominance.

And this from Wadah Khanfar, on the obsolecense aging Arab regimes:

This outstanding change, this historic moment, was totally lost on ageing governments that thought they were dealing with a bunch of kids who only needed to vent and then go home to their aimless lives. But they were wrong: because their ideas were old, their opinions were old, their minds were old, and their spirit was old. Ignorance can sometimes be a tool of destiny.

I’m finding Al-Jazeera a very credible and refreshing source for world news.

And then there’s this from a recent NYT story:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Reminds me of all those Stinger missles we gave the Taliban fighters to use against the Russkies.

Fresh coat of pixels

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It’s been a few years since I messed with the look of smays.com so I decided to give the old blog a little make-over. For those who care about such things, I switched from the Thesis theme to one by StudioPress, running on the Genesis framework.

I’ve been slowly, but steadily, migrating most of our company sites in this direction because the Genesis platform is just so flexible and easy to work with. So, I’ll be rearranging the furniture for a bit. You comments are welcome but will most likely be ignored.

In The Plex

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The full title of Steven Levy’s book is In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. When I finished it I was pooped and a little depressed but I’m not sure I can explain either. Read the book and we’ll talk. [Good review in the Washington Post]

Looking back at some of the other books I’ve read about the Internet and technology, I think this might be my favorite. Up there with The Facebook Effect, Cluetrain Manifesto, and Cognitive Surplus.

David Kirkpatrick’s Facebook Effect was much kinder to Mark Zuckerberg than The Social Network but that story didn’t move me the way In the Plex did. And I’m sort of dreading the biography of Steve Jobs, though I can’t say why.

I used up some highlighter on this one and will add those passages here in a day or so.

Email Experiment

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I’m going to try a little experiment next week. Beginning at midnight this Sunday (12-June), I’m only going to check email once a day. At 7:00 a.m. Central. I want to see if eliminating the distraction of checking and replying to email throughout the day allows me to be more productive. Those who need to reach me have options:

Co-workers can send me a private message on the company Yammer network. Or call. The rest of you can message me on Twitter (@smaysdotcom) or AIM (smaysdotcom). Google Chat would require me to keep Gmail open and I don’t want the temptation.

UPDATE: I’ve terminated my little experiment. After just 48 hours. Turns out I didn’t get that many emails and Gmail did such a good job or sorting and prioritizing, it really was less of an issue than I had assumed. Another revelation was that I send a lot more emails than I receive. I’ll have to think about that. I also became aware of how integrated my email is with my calendar and task manager.

Chris Anderson’s email charter

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Chris Anderson laments we can “spend most of our working week simply handling the contents of our in-boxes. And in doing so, we’re making the problem worse. Every reply, every cc, creates new work for our friends and colleagues. The total time taken to respond to an email is often MORE than the time it took to create it.” Mr. Anderson’s ideas for “fixing” email aren’t new but well worth sharing here:

Respect Recipients’ Time. This is the fundamental rule. As the message sender, the onus is on YOU to minimize the time your email gobbles at the other end — even if it means taking more time at your end before sending.

Be Easy to Process. This means: crisp sentences, unambiguous questions, keep it short. If the email absolutely has to be longer than 100 words, make sure the first sentence is clear about the basic reason for writing.

Chose Clear Subject Lines.

Here are some that don’t work:

Subject: Re: re: re: re
Subject:
Subject: Hello from me!
Subject: next week….
Subject: MY AMAZING NEW SHOW starts next week at the Vctory Theater at 113-86 Broad Lane, every night 8 PM 6/7–7/12

Here are some that do:

Subject: TED Partnership Proposal
Subject: Rescheduling today’s dinner with Sarah G.
Subject: Noon meeting cancelled (eom). EOM means ‘end of message.’ It’s a fine gift to your recipient. They don’t have to spend the time actually opening the message.

Short Does Not Mean Rude! Let’s mutually agree that it’s OK for emails — and replies — to be really short. They don’t have to include the usual social niceties, though the occasional emoticon is no bad thing ;-) . No one wants to come over as brusque, so don’t take it that way. We just want our lives back!

Slow Does Not Mean Uncaring! Let’s also agree that it’s OK if someone doesn’t respond quickly, or ever. I’s not that they don’t love you. They may just not want to be owned by their in-box. Avoid sending chasing emails, unless you’re desperate. It’s only exacerbating the problem.

Abhor Open-Ended Questions. It’s really mean to send someone an email with four long paragraphs of turgid text followed by “Thoughts?”. It’s generous to figure out how you can offer people simple yes/no questions – or multiple choice! “When you have a moment could you let me know if you’re A) firmly in favor, B) mildly in favor C) against or D) no opinion. Thanks!”

Cut Gratuitous Responses. You don’t need to reply to every email. If I say “Thanks for your note. I’m in.” You don’t have to reply “Great.” That just cost me another 30 seconds. If you must confirm, put it in the subject line with an ‘eom’.

Think Before you cc: cc:’s are like mating bunnies. Like Tribbles from Star Trek. Like spilling a tub of olive oil-coated spaghetti on a well-waxed floor. Like too many metaphors. Most of them are unnecessary, and they are hard to get rid of. The rule should be: for every additional cc, you must increase the time you spend making sure your outgoing email is crisp and that it’s clear who needs to respond, if anyone. And if you reply to an email, take care to ask whether you really need to include everyone cc’ed on the original email.

Speak Softly. DO NOT USE ALL CAPS IN THE BODY OF YOUR EMAIL. It’s rather like screaming at someone. And they’re hard to read – as are most unusual fonts and colors. Simple sans serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica, Verdana work best. If you want to add some zing to your emails, design a personalized signature tag.

Attack Attachments. Don’t use them unless they’re critical. Some people have all kinds of graphics files as logos or signatures that appear as attachments at the receiver. Not cool. Time is wasted trying to see if there’s something to open. Even worse is sending text as an attachment when it could just as easily have been included in the body of the email and saved that extra click-and-wait.

If you send an invite to an event, it’s fine to include an attachment that announces it visually. But:

-If there is a URL, include it in text form so it shows up as a clickable link. Or make the whole image itself a clickable link. Not fair to expect someone to retype a url !
-Please include the location, date and time in text format so that the information can be quickly copied and pasted. That way it can quickly be added to a calendar. (And error free. You don’t want “The Knickerbocker Club, 7:30 PM, black-tie required” to morph into “The Kickboxer Club, 7:30 AM, black-belt required”.)

    Make it easy to unsubscribe. If you send out email newsletters, please make it easy to stop the flow. Letters that prompt rage are not helping your brand!

    Think about the thread. Some e-mails depend for their meaning on context. Which means it’s usually right to include the thread which they’re responding to. But it’s rare that a thread should extend to more than 3 emails. Before sending, cut the crap!

    Don’t reply when angry. Just walk away from the computer. Stamp your feet. Scream out the window. Do not send an email until your emotions have calmed. One rude, jerky email can tar you for life… and spark an even worse response.

    Use NNTR. “No need to respond.” Use it in a subject line, right before EOM. Or use it at the end of an email. What a gift to your recipient!

    Pay a voluntary email tax. The reason email is escalating is because it’s free. No one wants to change that… but what if at the end of each month, you quickly totted up how many emails you had sent, multiply by the average number of cc’s, and pay that number of cents into a personal book-buying account. You’ll end up with a lot of great books… and it might just pull you away from the goddam computer for a bit! Speaking of which…

    Switch off the computer! This could be the most important rule of all. If we all agreed to spend less time doing email, we’d all get less email! Consider… calendaring half-days at work where you refuse to look at email. Consider… email-free weekends. Consider… setting up the following auto-response. “Thank you for your note. As a personal commitment to my and my family’s mental health, I now do email only on Wednesdays. I’ll reply to as many as I can next Wednesday. Thanks for writing. Don’t forget to smell the roses.”

    If you want my attention, you must earn it

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    My pal Todd sent me an email yesterday with a link to a YouTube video. I asked why he didn’t just direct message me on Twitter or Google Chat.

    “Email is easier for me,” was his reply. He was sharing something he thought was interesting so he gets to decide what works best for him. Right?

    A lot of people screen their in-coming phone calls. This infuriates some callers who feel you have an obligation to take their call.

    All of this got me thinking about who controls communications of this sort. The “sender” or the “receiver.”

    Every evening our USPS mail box is filled with junk mail that we routinley throw in the dust bin (for my UK pals). I asked the mailman about this last week, if there is any easy way to stop 3rd class mail. He mumbled something about writing each of the senders. Yeah, right. In that instance, the direct mail people control the communication up to the point I shit-can the stuff.

    I was intrigued by the decision of UNC professor Paul Jones to abandon email altogether:

    “I spent 30 years investing in email,” Jones said. “The undergrads I teach use everything but email. Journalists use Twitter. You can use anything else to get in touch with me — text messages, AIM, G-chat, Facebook, Facebook chat … but I was investing too much into email and getting little back.”

    I send a lot of email but don’t expect anyone to open and read what I send. It’s my responsibility to make the subject line so interesting and relavent to the recipient that she WANTS to read it.

    This seems pretty cut-and-dried to me. You might want to communicate something to me, but you need my permission. I have to open the email (or snail mail); pick up the phone; grant your friend request.

    It’s my attention. If you want some of it, you have to earn it.

     

    When the net was young

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    A couple of nights ago I was browsing through some old Day-Timers (calendars) and came across a few memories from 1994:

    April 26 – A meeting with some folks at MOREnet and the University of Missouri J-School. My first look at a web browser (Mosaic). I was blown away. The Internet was a very different creature before the browser.

    June 20 – Sent check to someone named Bill Bahr a check for $1,700 for a used Toshiba notebook computer. Base price was $1,400 plus $300 for a fax/modem PCMCIA card.

    I think it was this one. It was a heavy mother but I was giddy at the idea of being able to take a computer with me on the road.

    Is Gen Y changing the workplace?

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    Generation Y (GenY) is made up of those born between 1981-1999. I hear a few knocks on today’s young people but mostly from older folks with a very different view of… everything. I found the following in a story on a Canadian website and have applied for membership in Gen Y.

    Clay Collins, author of The Alternative Productivity Manifesto and Quitting Things and Flakiness: The #1 Productivity Anti-Hack, argues that Gen Y is different than previous generation workers in the following ways:

    • Gen Y uses modern tools and technologies, including software that’s easily accessible and free from the Internet;
    • Gen Y easily maintains their to-do lists, and priorities by synching with the PDAs and iPODs;
    • Gen Y are not workaholics, and understand the relationship between a balanced life and productivity;
    • Gen Y are more likely to love their jobs, because they change jobs more frequently, and stay in jobs that match their passions and talents;
    • Gen Y has a continuing thirst for learning and personal growth;
    • Gen Y wants to have new experiences, try new things, and be creative;
    • Gen Y doesn’t stay in jobs they don’t like just to be comfortable and secure.

    Understanding Generation Y is important not just for employers. Older workers–that is, anyone over 30–need to know how to adapt to the values and demands of their newest colleagues. Before too long, they’ll be the bosses. via Is Gen Y changing the workplace? Entrepreneur Financial Post.

    “Why did the world shatter at the touch of a hyperlink?”

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    Dr. David Weinberger asks (and answers?) the question: “Why did the world shatter at the touch of a hyperlink?”

    “Newspapers, encyclopedias, record companies, telephones, politics, education, analytics, scientifics, genetics, libraries, mass media, high culture, television, classrooms, assholism, channels, columns, stations, tours, travel, marketing, picketing, knitting, hectoring, picturing, gossiping, friendship redefined, attention redefined, leadership redefined, defamation redefined, curating, editing, publishing, correcting, crowds, mobs, shopping, bar-hopping, catalogs, sing-alongs, fact-checking, being together, being apart, staying together, moving on. Social forms and major institutions, many set in the Earth on stone foundations, fell down at the flick of a hyperlink.”

    This started me thinking about tech changes over the last ten years. Digital cameras; high speed Internet access; social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook); iTunes; smart phones; Google; Tivo; ebooks and on and on.

    And, finally, how has our company changed during the past ten years? Can we list the Ten Biggest Changes? Five? Three? And is that even a relevant question?