Category: General

I’ve been looking for a while for an RSS to XML-RPC routing service that would in effect relay content from one site to another. If anyone has seen such a service please let me know.

Basically you’d log into the service, add in RSS feeds (mix multiple ones together even) and then select an XML-RPC method (such as MetaWeblog API) to relay and post these feeds onto another site. The amazing thing is that this service would really only need to relay the feed content, not store it.

Why am I looking for this? Because it would alleviate the need for blogging services to include feed aggregation within their services itself.

How would I use this? To create my Connected Communities idea. In effect, allowing many individual local sites to collaborate together on a collective effort through the sharing of information.

I believe I caught a bug this last Thursday because ever since then I’ve been feeling like crap (i.e. exhausted, minor sore throat, nauseous, slight occasional dizziness, etc). Sunday I went to bed just before 11 PM and woke up late for work yesterday at 9:20 AM (I usually start around 9 AM). Feeling like crap again, I decided to hit the bed early last night just before 10 PM. I’ve now been up almost an hour since just after midnight, tossing and turning, feeling like I’m going to throw up at any minute. Of course during this hour, thoughts have been tossing and turning around in my head as well, so I thought I’d at least get something out of me (and thus hopefully prevent the “other” from happening).

The last hour I’ve been thinking about my Exploring Squarespace site and already I’m having second thoughts about creating it. Don’t get me wrong though. One thing you have to realize about me is that I love helping people. Yet while my Exploring Squarespace site is a great outlet to let me share my knowledge of Squarespace with others, it isn’t my passion. Ever since the Katrina disaster of last year, I’ve stated that I want to start focusing on changing the world to make it a better place. For some people, this may seem like idle dreams but for me I’m dead serious about it. Actually ever since I landed up in the hospital on New Year’s Day at the start of 2003 (with stomach pains that reminded me of the Alien movies), my mortality has constantly been on my mind. Life is precious to me, mine own and others, and I’d rather not waste a single moment of it. “Don’t save time, savour it” is a little expression I’ve created to help remind me of this.

Therefore, ever since the Katrina disaster, I’ve been trying to research various ways we as a people can utilize the Web to help connect our various communities (online and off), to foster a better culture within them, and most importantly of all, to allow us in times of need to unify all of these communities together in one focused global effort (like aiding people in a large disaster situation like Katrina) by each of them working collectively on a local level. And actually when Anthony approached me to work at Squarespace, I was ecstatic because it was the perfect job situation, as I only needed to work a six hour day which would give me plenty of time to pursue my passion on the side. Or so I thought. Of course, once I started working on Squarespace, I started getting all of these ideas relating to the service and my Exploring Squarespace site is a culmination of a lot of those ideas that I’ve spent my time on. And yet even though I’m enjoying sharing this knowledge with others, at the same time I’m very upset with myself that I’ve deviated so much from my initial path that I had started on.

So what happens now? Well, I obviously want to get back on track in spending most of my free time focused on my research as I had done before. Yet I obviously don’t want to throw all of my work on my Exploring Squarespace site out the window or stop sharing this information with people either. For now, I’ll probably just let things ride and see where they take me. My primary concern though is the feedback on my Exploring Squarespace site. I feel bad about it but I honestly don’t have the time to respond to these additional queries. In effect, I can share the basic examples with people to get them going in the right direction, but people will need to help one another if they have problems figuring out how to apply the examples to their own site. As I said, for now I’ll let things go as they are but down the road, who knows, I may have to close off comments and possibly even the forums I just opened on the site as well. Or at the very least I suppose, ensure that everyone is fully aware that I’m just sharing the basic information and I can’t provide much more support than that. As I said, I feel bad about it but at the same time, I have greater goals and passions that I need to pursue in my life and they’ll need to take precedence, as my time is a precious commodity to me.

I think one thing that a lot of people need to realize is that many bloggers don’t blog for others but instead blog for themselves. Dave Winer is one such person who has always stated this time and time again, and I myself have always felt the same way. I don’t think of my blog as a stage act where I’m putting on a show to an audience (and thus need new material daily to keep the show running and me tapping my feet) but instead I think of it as a personal journal that I can record my thoughts and remember them in the future when I forget life lessons I’ve learnt in the past. Today is no less of example of this.

While digging around on the Web last night, trying to discover those who have pointed to my site in the past (which is a great way to find new and interesting people), I came across an article by Elran Oded entitled Good Design Will Set You Free: Moment of Zen that I actually had read a long time ago. Why I was glad I found it again though was because Elran helped to remind me of something very important that I had learnt but forgotten when he said the following.

“The Myth of Perfect Web Design” by D. Keith Robinson was originally written on August 4th, 2003. But it couldn’t be more significant in today’s climate of redesign madness. The rules are all being rewritten before our very eyes, and it is sheer genius for him to have reposted this article the other day in this current context. A testament to the power of truly good writing. Anyway, it seemed to lift me up a little because it appeared to confirm earlier statements regarding overdesign (and trying to be the coolest), prioritizing (choose your battles), and sacrifices (in design). i especially liked the comment made by Nollind Whachell, which in my mind, perfectly characterizes the Myth article. Simply put, “Perfect equals rigid”. so true.

When I read what I had written back then I basically gave myself a mental slap to the head. How could I have been so stupid! This was something that I’d learnt in the past but had totally forgotten. What made me think I had forgotten it? Because my Exploring Squarespace site is a great example of this “perfect rigidity”. In my mind, I had this “perfect vision” of what it would be, that being a digital magazine that I’d publishing “frequently”. The problem though is that producing a magazine is a hell of a lot of work because you need to create all of your content first before you can publish your “issue”.

When I looked at what I was doing I laughed at myself. What an idiot I was! In trying to create this “perfect” vision of what I wanted to achieve, instead of sharing this information with others, I instead ended up building a dam that not only blocked the flow of information to those who really wanted it but also built up my stress and frustrations as well, since I was trying to produce something “perfect”. When I saw what I was doing, I immediately said the following to myself.

Stop trying to be perfect.
Don’t let thing build.
Let things flow.

And as soon as I said that, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I needed to start unplugging the dam’s I’ve built and start letting things just flow which in turn would help release the pressure that had been building up. Things don’t need to be perfect. They just need to usable. Design isn’t about achieving perfection and holding it there up on a pedestal for all to see for all eternity. Design is about working at something daily to make it better than the day before.

Design your relationships.
Design your life.
Design you.

In closing, I just want to relay two more little things that I learnt from this experience.

Small changes daily
make a big difference over time.

Stories help us to
remind us of our culture,
of who we are
and of what we value.

That a company would actually put out promotional material like this and be dead serious about it just makes my skin crawl. Ya carbon dioxide is a natural element of life and so is water. But if the entire planet got submerged under water, would they still be singing the same tune? I mean give me a break. You’d almost expect this company to start marketing CO₂ “enriched” water or something. It’s amazing how seriously screwed up people can get when it comes to money. At least some people are trying to show how absurd these ads really are (parody starts about 30 seconds in) but not sure if it is enough, as I could see some people actually believing that excessive amounts of carbon dioxide are a “good thing”.

“What’s that orange color over the city Mommy?”
“That’s called carbon dioxide honey. Don’t worry it’s a good thing and a natural part of life. Now hurry up and finish your McDonald’s cheeseburger and lets go. Mommy’s got to pick up her new SUV.”

Jeff Jarvis talks about what companies can do to compete against Google in untapped areas. I couldn’t agree more on his comments on social networks.

* Social connections: I think there is a big opportunity to map social connections that already exist online. MySpace is really Rupert’s space. The internet is our space. It is, once again, already a social network. So look at it that way and make connections among the people here. Make it a way to find people. Make it a way to measure the quality of relationships: authority (as in Technorati), trust, leadership.

“It is, once again, already a social network.” Exactly! This is another reason why I left Flickr. Yes, it does a great job at creating social networks but those networks are confined to Flickr itself. MySpace does the same thing. We need to start creating social networks that are open and accessible, that can easily grab, share, and utilize the existing content on our sites already, no matter which software or service they are created with.

Doc Searls has an interesting article entitled Markets without Marketing.

My take on this is forget about “markets” altogether. Instead focus on creating relationships. And yes that means thinking about your “customers” as real people.

One thing that I’ve realize about relationships though is that creating the relationship is the easy part. The hard part is actually maintaining / sustaining that relationship.

I normally recommend YouTube to people (and was even going to have a bit on them in my first issue of Exploring Squarespace) because it’s really an easy way to add video to your site. After reading the following from a Boing Boing post regarding YouTube’s new terms and conditions though, I don’t think I’ll be recommending them further.

…you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business…

Love this post on Boing Boing relating to a person selling an old Seven-Up print plate with the wording as follows on it (and showing a baby drinking from a Seven-Up bottle).

So pure…So good… So wholesome for everyone… including the tiniest tots!

Why I find this both hilarious and interesting is that I’ve been thinking about and seeing a lot of these kinds of things lately around me (especially in advertising).

In effect, how many things are we doing today that seem normal, yet in the future we’ll look back and say how stupid and absurd we we’re? Or put another way, the “right way” to do something today may be the “wrong way” to do something tomorrow.

When I was away on vacation this last week, I realized how much I enjoyed getting out of the city and away from the “rat race”. It’s almost as though you finally get a chance to “unplug” and therefore you’re much more easily able to find yourself again. With this in mind, I was reminded of what I said before about culture. That being that not only does our culture define us but we too define our culture.

Why this was important to me is that I realized that if we are going to live in these ever increasingly fast paced times, where changes occur at a dizzying rate, then we need something to ground or anchor us so that we don’t lose our way and more importantly don’t lose our self identity in the process. For me, cultural values are the perfect anchor because not only do they define how you want to live your life but they also emanate from you and can change the world around you. In other words, you define your culture and your culture influences those around you when you interact with them.

A great example of this was back when I used to play Counter-Strike. During that time, I was playing in a computer game in a totally fictitious make believe environment. Yet in interacting with others within that game, I still held true to the values that I strongly believed in as a person. On our Counter-Strike server where we let people play in our “world”, we were very adamant in defining the values and rules of our community’s culture and expected those within that environment to follow them otherwise they could go elsewhere. We promoted an open, caring, and sharing environment where “newbies” (those new to the game) could come and receive help without being harassed or ridiculed. As mentioned previously, this created a wonderfully enjoyable environment for everyone within our community (it almost reminded me of the TV series Cheers where you show up and everyone yells “Norm!”).

Dave Winer’s words couldn’t be more true.

They’re supposed to seek out people, to interrupt repeating and droning.

The people with the awareness and attention need to be the ones exploring and discovering those hidden on the edges instead of continually droning about themselves and their own ideas. This pushes the idea of sustainability for everyone, not just a select few. The idea is to share what you have gained with others around you, so that the entire “village” prospers and grows instead of just you.

This is why search engines are such popular and powerful points on the Web. They point away from themselves.