Randy S. Nelson: “We’ve made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We’re trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It’s no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it’s a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people.”
Month: January 2006
Streaming Four Things
Dave Seah sent me an email indicating that he had participated in the Four Things meme and was passing it on to me. Ever the rebel, never wanting to do things like others, I’ve decided that I won’t follow the meme exactly as indicated but instead rip it apart, analyze it, and rebuild it if you will. You know Six Million Dollar Man sort of thing.
Why do people do stuff like this? Easy. They want to know more about the people around them. The assumption is that people can often tell a lot about others by what they read, watch, and so on. A good example of this is Dick Hardt’s presentation about Identity 2.0 at OSCON 2005 in which he asks “Who am I?” and proceeds to basically tell us that I am where I live, what I watch, what I read, and so on.
So why do we have to ask for this information? Because a lot of people don’t put this stuff on their website. Sometimes it’s not the big things that people want to know about (i.e. What’s your life’s ambition?) but the little things (i.e. What do you usually eat for breakfast?), as all those little things connected together (aka Small Pieces Loosely Joined) give a more accurate representation of the person than the one big thing.
Should people be putting this stuff on their website? Hmm, well, I think it really depends upon the person. For example, if I indicate four places I’ve been in my life, I think that’s kind of pointless. Yes it gives you an idea of the places I like to go but it doesn’t really tell you why I wanted to go their in the first place. If on the other hand, I had a journal entry for each location I went to, giving a brief description of the ups and downs of each trip, then I’d think you’d get a more accurate idea of why that place interested me in the first place. In other words, what was the motivation for me wanting to go to that location. Same goes for reading books. I may list the lastest books I’ve read on my site but unless I give a brief description of what I like and disliked about the book, you aren’t going to know what motivated me to read this. For example, I may indicate I just finished reading a fantasy novel. Ok you think, he like fantasy books and you picture in your mind some D&D geek. Yet if I told you that novel made me realize the importance of friendship, community, and global cooperation, you’d probably be surprised that I even found that in a fantasy novel or was even looking for it in the first place. What I’m getting at here is that everyone sees the world through different eyes and thus while we both may be looking at the same thing, we probably aren’t seeing exactly the same thing.
So what am I going to to about this? Right now nothing, primarily because I don’t have the time. However, when I do get the time, I would like to add journal streams to my site that cover topics similar to what this meme talks about (to a degree anyways).
Jobs I’ve Had – An employment journal of where I’ve worked. Categorized, rated and with job descriptions. Unfiltered, it would be like a mini-resume of my past employment. Filtered by rating, it would be some of the best jobs I’ve had.
Favorite Movies – A movie journal of those I’ve watched. Categorized, rated, and reviewed. My top four rated movies would equate to the movies I could probably watch over and over again.
Places I’ve Been – A location journal of where I’ve lived. Categorized (by world location), rated, and with descriptions. In effect, a mini-travel review of the locations I’ve lived. The things that I loved (and possibly hated) about living in these places.
Favorite TV Shows – Not really sure I’d add this as I’m not that big of a TV watcher, as most TV shows are mindless to me. Hmm, although if I did displayed it then you might be surprised at what I did watch (i.e. documentaries, history channel, etc), so having it might actually be beneficial in relaying “who I am” and “what interests me”.
Websites I Visit Daily – Hmmm, this to me would just be a link list (ala del.icio.us) journal. The top four rated sites would probably be those that I visited daily (or at least more frequently than others).
Food I Love – Hmm, not sure about this. I could maybe see a restaurant review type journal instead. In effect, you discovered the food I loved by the places I eat.
Places I Want To Go – Again, not sure about this. I mean there isn’t any one place that sticks out in my mind right now. More than anything I like wandering from place to place off the beaten track. Gypsy boy that’s me. 🙂
Taggers I’m Blogging – A people journal of who I know and have interacted with. Categorized, rated by frequency of interaction, and with descriptions of the people. Filtered by “virtual buddies” and freqency of interaction (as Dave Seah calls them), you’d see a list of of the people I’m interacting with online the most.
Ok that’s all I can write. Back to work!
Tech Industry Wrap Up
Dave Winer: “Look, the tech industry is and always will be fucked up. They still somehow manage to make a semi-usable product every once in a while. My Mac is slow as a dog, even though it has two CPUs and cost $5000, but I use it anyway because it’s prettier and slightly more fun than the crap Microsoft and Dell ship. But give me a reason to switch, even a small one, and I’m outta here.”
Just Want Somebody Listening
From the top of the first page
To the end of the last day
From the start in your own way
You just want somebody listening to what you say
It doesn’t matter who you are.
– Square One, X & Y, Coldplay
You Already Know
For some reason I keep buying books that relay things I already know. Not sure why but it may have something to do with just wanting some confirmation of my beliefs and intuition.
Technology Is Just A Tool
Technology doesn’t make me feel connected to the world. It is the words and actions of other people, being relayed by this technology, that does.
Your Neighbor’s Site
Dan Earle and Sue Hutchins: “Finally, we are concerned with use of immediately adjacent sites. This is likely to have great impact on design decisions because activities on them influence our site and what we do affects them.”
Think Too Much, Feel Too Little
My head hurts from thinking too much. My heart hurts from feeling too little.
Charlie Chaplin: “We think too much and feel too little.”
Decentralized Community Discussions
Say a community of twenty bloggers wants to all talk about a specific topic that is of importance to the entire community. How would you best do this based upon the following criteria?
- Allow each person to respond to the topic on their own site.
- Allow those viewing the response to see everyone else involved in the discussion as well, no matter what site you were on.
- Allow others to easily add themselves to the discussion without having to sign up to anything at all.
In effect, the end result is that you are creating a sort of decentralized virtual gathering place. No matter which site you are on, you see all of those involved in the discussion.
Trackback Route
You could theoretically do this with trackbacks but it would be a major pain in the ass. Imagine if you wanted to be a part of the topic discussion that already involved twenty people in it. This means in adding yourself to the conversation, you’d have to send twenty trackback pings, one for each person already in the conversations so that your new response gets added as a trackback below each of their responses on their own sites. In addition, each of those twenty people, when seeing your new trackback added to their list, would have to send a trackback ping to your new response so that all of their previous responses get added as trackbacks below your response on your site as well. As I said, the more people involved in the community discussion the more complex and time consuming it gets.
Technorati Route
I also realized that you could just go to Technorati and see all those people linking to the originating question but there are issues with this approach as well. First off, it doesn’t allow you see those participating in the conversation on your site itself, as you have to go to Technorati’s site to see the list of people’s responses on the subject. Even more so, it requires that everyone who wants to participate in the community discussion ensures that they link to the originating topic question. This doesn’t always happen. Someone may come along and instead link to someone else responding to the question but not to the originating question. This happens all the time and, therefore, looking at Techorati doesn’t give you an accurate scope of those involved in the discussion. For extremely large community discussions though, this would be the way to go as showing a list of hundreds of people on your site wouldn’t be realistic. Instead you could go to Technorati and browse through those engaged in the community discussion.
Hmm, too bad the community itself couldn’t then rate these contributions to the community discussion somehow so that the best responses were always near the top. This would be kind of like how Technorati rates blogs right now but instead for a specific community conversation. Not sure how it could do it but maybe it might be feasible if your response you linked to those community responses you thought were good as well as the originating question. Therefore, on Technorati’s end, not only could they create a list based upon the originating question surrounding the community discussion but it could sort the list based upon the most linked to responses that originate from within the list.
Ok, wait a minute. I just realized that Technorati gives you an RSS feed for watchlists now. I haven’t used this yet but I’m assuming it only shows the latest feeds that were added to the watchlist. Therefore, if a community wanted to have a discussion around a topic, the originator of the topic could create a watchlist for it and relay that information as well. That way those engaged in the discussion could display the lastest people participating in the community discussion right on their own site’s using a utility like RSS to Javascript. And again, maybe the originator of the community discussion could give out this script code for others to use. Too bad that Techorati didn’t have some script code to show this directly somehow. You just insert the code and not only does it show the latest people engaged in the community “watchlist” discussion but it automatically adds you to the discussion and provides a link to show how others can join as well (i.e. Want to be a part of this community discussion? Here’s how you easily can with Technorati!). Everything in one small package! Now that would be nice!
Happy New Year!
Well that was a short “sleep” for this site. I’ve already got a ton of ideas again. Time to start manifesting them though, instead of just rolling them around in my head.