Too much stuff

Posted on November 27, 2009 by Steve Mays

This PBS program on design has stuck with me for a couple of days. In one of the segments, a designer said something about removing everything that is not essential until all that remains is the essential. (This MacBook is a very nearly perfect example of that aesthetic.)

The same, I suppose, could be said of the theme I chose for this blog (the theme… not my execution). Thesis is the creation of Chris Pearson. More creative types have done all sorts of wonderful things with Thesis but I like the way it looks “right out of the box.”

I have gone through phases where I thought I could add a little “pizazz” to a site. If you have that designer gene, you can pull it off. If not, more is less. Knowing that –and lacking the gene– I shoot for simple. And let’s face it, nobody comes to a website twice because it looks cool.

I just finished a book by Deepak Chopra in which he says something about simplicity as an element of happiness. I’m paraphrasing here: If you acquire something, give something away. Sort of, “stuff neutral.” I’m going to give that a try because I clearly have too much stuff.

PS: So much for “less is more.” Got to playing with Thesis options and figured I’d play around with a header image for a few days.

Tagging

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Steve Mays

When I first encountered the concept of tagging, it seemed a little… obsessive? I’ve always been pretty good about organizing things into folders and the idea of “meta data” was mostly lost on me. In the last few years, however, I have become a believer. As good as search has become (on the desktop and in the cloud), there’s just too much stuff.

smays.com – 4,707 posts
flickr – 1,744 images
iPhoto – 2, 670 images
YouTube – 132 videos
Posterous – 374 posts
Twitter – 4,933 (no tags but you can star)

And that’s not much stuff compared to many others. Which brings me to mail. I use Apple Mail at work and here on the MacBook. Compared to Outlook, it’s very lean and basic. Has a notes and to-do feature (that I don’t use), but basically just does mail, with a spare, clean interface.

When it comes to email, there seems to be two schools of thought:

Save everything in one folder. Or, difficult as it is for me to believe, just leave everything in the in-box or the deleted folder. Our Help Desk guys tell me it’s not uncommon to find 20,000 emails in one of these folders. These are the keep-it-all-and-search folks.
Delete emails quickly or save in one of several folders. I fall into the latter group.

Where was I headed with all of this? Oh, tags.

I don’t have all that many emails but now that I have the tagging bug, I find myself wanting to tag my emails, so I’m trying out a little Apple Mail plug-in called MailTags. It’s not very pretty (which is unusual) but works pretty well. And it gives me the option of editing the subject line of an email. Don’t get me started on clueless subject lines.

If you’d like to know more about tagging, I recommend Everything is Miscellaneous, by Dr. David Weinberger.

New camera promises to capture your whole life

Posted on October 17, 2009 by Steve Mays

From article at NewScientist.com:

“Worn on a cord around the neck, the camera takes pictures automatically as often as once every 30 seconds. It also uses an accelerometer and light sensors to snap an image when a person enters a new environment, and an infrared sensor to take one when it detects the body heat of a person in front of the wearer. It can fit 30,000 images onto its 1-gigabyte memory.

The ViconRevue was originally developed for researchers studying Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Studies showed that reviewing the events of the day using SenseCam photos could help some people improve long-term recall.

Vicon’s version will retail for about $820 and will also be marketed to researchers at first; it will go on sale in the next few months. A consumer version should be released in 2010. So far, only 500 have been made, most for use by researchers.

For consumers, the gadget will provide an easy way to become a “lifelogger” – someone who attempts to electronically record as much of their life as possible. Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has made his life an experiment in lifelogging, recording everything from phone calls to TV viewing, and uses a SenseCam wherever he goes.”

Okay, it might be fun to play back a day’s worth of images at high speed. Or to set that little rascal next to your bed if you have to spend a few days in the hospital. And if you’re going to a protest this would be and if you could hang on to it.

Big St. Louis architectural firm getting their blog on

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Steve Mays

Clyde found this blogging success story in the St. Louis Business Journal. It’s about HOK a global architectural firm with headquarters in St. Louis (I assume). It’s a biggie, with $752 million in revenue in 2008.

A year ago they launched a blog (HOKLife.com) to put a more human face on the firm, which has 2,000+ employees, and to communicate with potential hires, clients and competitors.

It’s a group blog with three dozen contributors from their offices around the world, whose posts, by the way, are not edited. Senior writer John Gilmore:

“Young readers are very savvy, and they know when something’s not authentic. If hour’s not authentic, it’s the kiss of death for a corporate blog.”

True that. The Business Journal article included some findings of a 2009 survey (of companies with more than 1,000 employees). Among the findings, companies with blogs reported higher levels of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, greenness, revenue and market share.

The companies with blogs reported revenue per employee of $336,792, compared to $263,333 for those without blogs.

Despite success stories like this one, there remains –even in our company– pockets of resistance to blogging as a communications tool. And I’m convinced it comes down to control. Like HOK’s Gilmore said above, it’s got to be authentic and that means unfiltered and unedited. And that’s really difficult for managers who are centralized, command-and-control guys in their DNA.

If you have a subscription to the StL Biz Journal, you can read the full article here.

“The audience isn’t the audience anymore”

Posted on August 17, 2009 by Steve Mays

Thanks to Michael Kruse, a staff writer for the St. Petersburg Times for one of the best stories yet on the challenges facing “media exclusivity” in sports. In the interest of full disclosure, the company I work for (Learfield) pays serious money for just the sort of exclusivity described in in this piece, which focuses on a recent change in the media policy of the SEC, one college sports premier conference.

“… earlier this month (the SEC) sent to its 12 schools an eye-opening new media policy. It places increasingly stringent limits on reporters and how much audio, video and “real-time” blogging they can do at games, practices and news conferences. But even more interesting is that the policy also includes rules for fans in the stands. No updating Twitter feeds. No taking photos with phones and posting them on Facebook or Flickr. No taking videos and putting them on YouTube.

A conference spokesman said this policy was meant to try to keep as many eyeballs as possible on ESPN and CBS — which are paying the SEC $3 billion for the broadcast rights to the conference’s games over the next 15 years — and also on the SEC Digital Network — the conference’s own entity that’s scheduled to debut on SECSports.com later this month.”

The reporters covering sporting events have always (well, at least since blogs and such came along) been under certain restrictions regarding blogs and how much audio/video they could put online. The new policy by the SEC is “the most stringent language yet in college sports.”

“Ticketed fans can’t “produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event. …”

Sounds like I couldn’t call my brother and describe a thrilling touchdown run. God forbid, I took a photo or video clip and emailed it to him. The Times story included some really good quotes, like this one from Mike Masnick, editor of the blog techdirt:

“If it reaches the point where it’s not just 15 people doing this, it’s 1,000 people, it gets more and more difficult to stop,” he said. “At which point you either stop letting fans into games or you figure out a way to deal with the fact that fans are going to do this.”

…and this one from new media expert Clay Shirky:

“The idea that people can’t capture their own lived experience is a losing proposition.”

I encourage anyone involved with collegiate sports (and related media) to read the full story. Here’s my take-away:

“The audience isn’t the audience anymore. The SEC’s greatest supporters are now also the SEC’s biggest competitors.”

HuffPo link = big traffic mojo

Posted on August 14, 2009 by Steve Mays

We’re seeing major (for us) spike in traffic to one of our blogs from link on Huffington Post site. Radio Iowa News Director O. K. Henderson has been doing a super job of covering “town hall” meetings in Iowa. And breaking news, as she frequently does.

Posterous is the mosterous

Posted on July 31, 2009 by Steve Mays

A really good review of Posterous by Andy Ihnatko of Chicago Sun-Times. The more I use Posterous, the more I like it. Can’t see myself giving up the WordPress blog but if I were just starting today… If you haven’t seen my previous posts on this, Posterous is a blog you update via email. It’s really that easy but the resulting site is far nicer than you’d expect.

smays.com

“We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts.” — Sam Harris

Tag Archives: blogging