Category: General

The Web is an ecosystem.

Ecosystem: a system formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their physical environment.

It is an environment with which we as organisms live and interact within on a daily basis. While not a physical environment, it definitely influences and affects our physical world, just as our physical world influences and affects it.

Environment: The complex of social and cultural conditions affecting the nature of an individual or community.

It is comprised of the social and cultural conditions that affect us.

Condition: A mode or state of being.

It is our state of being as a people, here and now today (although I’d say primarily from the viewpoint of those within the rich countries of the world).

Being: The state or quality of having existence.

It is the state or quality of our existence.

State: A condition or mode of being, as with regard to circumstances: a state of confusion.

Quality: An inherent or distinguishing characteristic; a property.

And when it comes down to it, like so many other things in our life, we must make a choice between an existence of just being or a distinguishing existence.

Choice: The act of choosing; selection.

Distinguishing: To perceive as being different or distinct.

The Web is what we choose to make it, just as we ourselves, as a people on this planet, are what we choose to be. With every choice though comes consequences and responsibilties. Are we ready and willing to accept them? Or do we feel that our existence is not what we wish it to be and do we desire to choose another different one? The choice is yours. Be what you wish to be, what you wish the Web to be, and what you wish the world to be in every choice you make every day.

Well I just had a great phone conversation with someone at Blast Radius about my resume, as I was recommended to give them a call through a friend of a friend. The conversation brought about some good news and bad news. The good news is that I definitely feel this person has clarified the steps I need to take in improving my resume. The bad news is that I think it is going to very difficult for me to do this. Why? Because as I already guessed, showing your portfolio of accomplishments is critical, especially if you can show how your work directly profited the company and by how much (i.e. I built Site A and it attracted this many visitors and profited the company by this much).

As I mentioned to this person, I didn’t have access to that information at the time. Maybe companies today give out that kind of information to all their staff but it wasn’t something that we thought about back then. I mean if the site launch went smoothly and the client and, more importantly, client’s customers were verbally happy about the site then we felt that we did a great job. Hell we were often to focused on doing a good job and improving our process than slapping each other on the back with site statistics afterwards.

Another thing that this person spoke of was tangibles vs intangibles. Tangibles are your accomplishments that you can obviously show, where as intangibles are things on the side that still may help the company but aren’t tied to a specific job title. For example, he described a type of person called a “connector” who is like a focal point in the company that people come to for advice or information. As soon as he said that, I realized that’s what I was. However, he indicated that intangibles were like the icing on the cake. They make a great person even more desirable, yet they can’t obviously stand on their own, as you need the tangibles as the foundation.

One thing that troubled me though is he said that you have to prove how you helped and improved the company. I got somewhat flustered by this. Why? Well, as anyone who worked during the dot com bomb period knew, most of these companies went down the tubes. So I’m thinking in my head, how the hell do I prove I helped and improved the company, when the management’s direction may have doomed it? I mean I did a great job for the company. They always told me that. Yet how do I prove that if the company consistently went downhill with sales, especially near the end. In the beginning we rose from doing just one job to multiple large projects but this person kept telling me that I needed specifics to prove how I helped the companies overall sales figures or something like that. Um, as I said before, I know very few companies who freely hand out their financial information to their employees.

Interesting indeed! Just found another job posting for a Senior User Experience Designer by a company in town called Peerflix. Why I was so interested in this job posting was because of their adjectives describing the position title. They said they were looking for an “entrepreneurial, multi-talented” Sr. User Experience Designer. Well multi-talented is my middle name! Also after reading the company details and finding out that they had a blog as well, I found this post by Danny Robinson, the company co-founder, entitled Decentralization is now which peaked my interest in them even more. Danny’s thoughts in his post echo similar thoughts of my own, particularly the importance of a decentralized approach vs a centralized one and also the importance of RSS in connecting everything together in this new Web future. Once again, let’s hope my thoughts, experience, and skills peak their interest as well! I’m crossing my fingers, toes, and eyes again, so hopefully I’ll get a call soon because I’m finding it hard to type, walk, and see.  🙂

Ok, it’s away! I just sent my cover letter and resume off to Social Signal and I’m now crossing my fingers, toes, and eyes! Below is my cover letter (and I’ll put my resume online again soon as well). Hopefully it peaks their interest and does the trick in landing me the job (or least an interview to talk to them).

BTW I ended up not using my revised accomplishments that I was working on because I really wanted to get this out the door to them. I will still be working on this accomplishments list in the future though because I think it will give my resume much more of an impact in terms of my experience and abilities.

—-

Rob & Alexandra,

When I noticed your job posting on Craigslist for a progressive geek / office administrator and then proceeded to your company website to read about your company, I nearly fell out of my chair. Your description of “collaborative communities” sounded exactly like my research on what I call “connected communities”. As your job posting indicates, I felt this could be my dream job, as I’ve been looking for a job like this that will not only utilize my diverse set of skills and experience but more importantly match my personal culture and ethics of working for a company that is trying to change the world and make it a better place. I believe that Social Signals is exactly the type of company I’ve been looking for and both of you are exactly the type of caring conscious people for whom I’d love to work.

As for my knowledge and experience, I actually have done a lot of government work in the past (more even than my résumé shows) but over the past ten years I’ve actually done more work related to online community building within the computer gaming scene, both professionally for large companies as well as voluntarily for the gaming fan communities that surround these company’s products. It is within these communities, however, that I discovered the importance of culture which pushed my interests outside of just the computer gaming scene to look at cultures elsewhere, with the World Wide Web being one cultural environment of particular interest to me. More recently, events like the Hurricane Katrina disaster have been a catalyst for my emotions and feelings in wanting to do something that actually helps the world in collaborating and communicating more effectively together on a larger scale. Immediately after the hurricane, the Recovery 2.0 project ( http://www.recovery2.com/ ), initiated by Jeff Jarvis, interested me the most. However, the more I researched ways for people to collaborate together on a larger scale using blogs, tags, and RSS, the more I realized this idea could be used for any type of large scale project, not just for disaster relief.

Also, the more I researched this, the more I wanted to collaborate and work with others within a company toward this goal. I know this is going make this cover letter lengthy but I just want to make you fully aware of what an amazing coincidence your company announcement has been to me as at the beginning of September I posted the following message on Craigslist’s job area for Vancouver. And as you’ll see below, I think your company’s goals match quite closely with what I was looking for in a company.

> Are You A Caring And Creative Tech Company?
>
>Do you know of a caring and creative tech company or organization 
>located in Vancouver, BC who is working on a Web 2.0 social software 
>application to allow millions of people around the world to collaborate
>and  share information more effectively? If so please let me know. I’m
>feeling fed  up and frustrated by the Katrina Disaster and would like
>to work with a group  of people who are working on ideas and technology
>of this nature to help  make the world a better place.

And finally with regards to my actual skills and abilities, in relation to your job description, my background has allowed me to perform, in one way or another, most of what you are looking for in a person to fulfill this role. Most of my knowledge over the years has primarily been self-taught due to my ongoing ethusiasm for research and exploration of new ideas and technologies. I am also what you would call an extremely proactive individual in that I believe in solving problems before they happen. Working within a team environment, I strongly believe in being well organized and detailed so that any work performed by one person within the team environment can easily be passed onto another person to continue the work process. As for a wide range of responsibilities, I assisted with pretty much every aspect of operations within the last company I worked for (i.e. web development, computer support, proposal writing / reviews, process & standards definition / documentation, technology / software research, branding / identity, business advice, and more), primarily because it was a startup and the environment permitted me to help out wherever I could.

If you would like to find out more about me, definitely check out my blog at http://nollind.whachell.com with particular interest on my Notable Entries listing within my right sidebar column. I hope both of you will be just as amazed as I was at how close our goals and visions are for a better world.

And finally, while I can only put so much within this cover letter and résumé, I would love the opportunity to meet and talk to both of you in person, so that I can relay more about myself and my stories that directly relate to this job and your company’s goals.

Yours truly,

Nollind Whachell
nollind@whachell.com
(604) 732-9403

PS. Web 2.0 Definition: Web 2.0 is more about a change of thinking than about a change of technology. It is about taking existing technological tools and rethinking their usage to allow us to do things in amazing new ways.

Ok, this is just too weird to let slide, as I’ve been ignoring this for the last week and I can’t anymore. Normally when I get email spam in my inbox, it just goes to my junk mail folder and I delete it later. However, lately I’ve actually seen the contents of some of these spam emails and I’m beginning to wonder if my imagination is starting to run away on me (either that or I’m going nuts seeing these patterns). You also have to remember though that I don’t live in the US and I think the War on Terror is actually a War in Error (nod to Doc for the spin on that).

Here’s where my imagination is starting to run away from me. What if Al Qaeda used encoded spam-type emails to transmit to their cells around the world using the Internet? I mean think about that for a second. Wouldn’t that be ingenious? They basically would be openly communicating with each other across the Internet using mail formats such as marketing spam that everyone tries their damnedest to avoid in the first place (or automatically deletes)! Here’s some examples of what I’m talking about (with emphasized words in bold). This spam email was from 12 October 2005.

Breaking news alert issue – big news coming.

Allixon International Corporation
A X C P . P K

We give it to you again as a gift. This company is doing incredible things. They have cash and have made great strategic aquisitions. Current price is $4.70.
Short term projection is $8. This company has dropped big new’s in the past. Who’s to say they don’t have another big one.

We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.
Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.
Don’t fear change, embrace it.
People fail forward to success.
When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.
Any colour – so long as it’s black.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
If indeed you must be candid, be candid beautifully.
You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?
Life is largely a matter of expectation.
Irony is the hygiene of the mind.
Bond. James Bond.
There is nothing more wonderful than freedom of speech.
If a thing isn’t worth saying, you sing it.
I don’t mind being miserable as long as I’m painting well.
I may be a dumb blonde, but I’m not that blonde.
Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

Ok when I read this spam email I almost couldn’t believe what I was reading. What was being said “between the lines” was just too evident to be a coincidence, at least to me anyways (and as I said, I’m not a paranoid person). Again just put your point of view from a terrorist cell standpoint when reading the following.

Big news coming – We have more planned. Be ready.

We give it to you again as a gift. This company is doing incredible things. They have cash and have made great strategic aquisitions. – We have plenty of assets and funds to do our work. We will be sending you these assets and money so that you can continue to do your incredible work.

This company has dropped big new’s in the past. Who’s to say they don’t have another big one. – We’ve dropped the Twin Towers in the past. We have another big plan ahead as well ahead.

We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual. – Continue to do your work for your children and Allah.

Don’t fear change, embrace it. – A common expression but one that can speak for terrorists as well. Don’t fear what you are doing, embrace it.

False face must hide what the false heart doth know. – Be vigilant in appearing as normal as others, so they do not see what you are doing and raise suspicion.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. – Don’t let the infidels make you feel inferior in their ways. Remain calm and hidden.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it? – Materialism of the Western World is an illusion. Do not be fooled by it’s embrace. Stay strong and focused.

There is nothing more wonderful than freedom of speech. – We will be the voice of our people for the wrongs that have have been done to us.

Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die. – Feel no fear in death. In giving your life for those you love, Allah will embrace you.

Ok, that’s just the first spam email I noticed. I was going to let this slide but then I started seeing other similar spam emails at which point it just seemed way too weird to not point out. Here’s another one that I just got today, 16 Oct 2005,…holy crap, I just realized it is the same stock company name of Allixon. Ok, I really hope this is some elaborate joke by someone (and that I’m not going nuts). Here’s what this latest spam email says.

Big news expected. This should invoke LARGE gains.
This stock will explode. Do not wait until it is too late.

New news expected this comming week. Expected 7 day price $6.00

Trade Date: 17 Oct 2005
Company: Allixon International Corporation
Stock: AXCP . PK
Current Price: $3.75
Expected Target: $6.00

About Allixon International Corporation

Allixon is a leading provider of RFID Middleware and Mobile Internet solutions for device computing.
Allixon combines its products, expertise, partnerships and integration capability into solutions for a wide range of device computing applications, including RFID Middleware and m-banking solutions. Allixon’s products based on ubiquitous technologies direct companies looking to tap into the wealth of data captured by networked devices such as RFID readers or handhelds to extend the quality of information to any device where they want.

If the company is able to effectuate it’s business model.
WATCH OUT!!! We could see a GREAT STORY IN THE MAKING.

GOOD LUCK AND TRADE OUT AT THE TOP!!!

Ok, again the wording just seems pretty weird and almost seems to be in a pattern. Here’s the breakdown.

Big news expected. This should invoke LARGE gains. This stock will explode. Do not wait until it is too late. – Be ready with your objectives. Do not be late in preparing them. This effort will help our effort immensely when our targets explode.

New news expected this comming week. – We will give you more instructions later this week. Weird about the spelling error on “comming”. First one I’ve seen. Does it mean something?

If the company is able to effectuate it’s business model. WATCH OUT!!! We could see a GREAT STORY IN THE MAKING. – If we succeed in our plans, go into hiding immediately, as our deeds will be great and draw attention to you. Hmmm, or it could actually be instructions relating to the terrorist targets or plan. “Great Story in the making” almost sounds like a building with many stories. Maybe the target is a large building that is being built? No idea.

GOOD LUCK AND TRADE OUT AT THE TOP!!! – Allah will be with you and will see you up in heaven. Or the “trade out at the t
op” again sounds like some building. Maybe another trade building which is what the Twin Towers were? Maybe plant the explosives at the top of the building? Again, no idea.

And finally does the company name, dates and stock amounts mean anything. Are stock amounts actually how many days before the event or the time of the event? BTW obviously if these emails aren’t fake, the company and the stock would be real, since if it didn’t exist it would draw attention to their emails which they wouldn’t want to happen. It all has to look legit from a casual glance.

The weird thing in all of this is that this is exactly how a decentralized “connected community”, that I’ve been talking about, would work. Everyone works in small groups from a localized level, dealing with their own objectives with only situational awareness messages being spread between the different communities (or cells in this case) with everyone working from these messages using their collective “shared mental model” (as again I mentioned in my situational awareness post) to work on a common objective (in this potential case, blowing something up).

Ya, I know. I sure hope I’m just imagining all these patterns I’m seeing here and this is either a joke or some over zealous foreign marketer with bad word usage. 🙂

BTW I just remembered what this type of communication is called. It obviously isn’t an encoded message but what is called a “fugue” which I first read about in The Man Who Never Missed series of books I read a long time ago. It is basically hidden meanings within the evident words being spoken. Think of it almost like slang where one word implies something else but in this case, you are speaking with everyday words instead of slang expressions.

When I woke up this morning (by our spastic hyper cat Sam), I ended up lying on the floor with him in the middle of the living room, as it seems to calm him down for some reason. Anyways, as I was lying there I started thinking about my resume and all the frustrations I’m having with it. Of course, it is so frustrating because it is like looking at Mt. Everest from the bottom of it. I realized, however, that I just need to put my head down and focus on each step of it instead of looking at the entire “mountain” before me.

Thinking particularly on my accomplishments, which every resume guide tells you to focus on, I realized that why I was having trouble writing out my accomplishments was because again, I would end up looking at the entire list of accomplishments as I made it which actually closed my mind the more I added to it. Weird, I know.

I realized suddenly what had to do here was just focus on each individual accomplishment on its own. Kind of like having a bunch of small pieces of paper and writing one accomplishment on one and then sticking it behind the pile to focus on the next one. I immediately realized that setting up another blog journal to handle this would probably be a good idea. I could focus on filling in an empty blog post each time to list the accomplishment and then categorize each post relating to the job title or company that the accomplishment relates to. Therefore, when I was all done, I could click on that category tag and see all of the accomplishments for that particular company all grouped together and then list those accomplishments on my resume.

So what I’ve done is created a temporary accomplishments journal that I’m going to start putting down my individual work accomplishments within. Feel free to look at it and make any comments on the accomplishments I write out since I’m going to post a little story below each accomplishment and hopefully my wording of the accomplishment will match the story.

BTW this journal won’t be listed anywhere else on the site but here because it will only be temporary. I’ve enabled feeds on it though (which you can find by auto-discovery of the section URL), so it’s your choice if you want to temporarily subscribe to these “scraps of paper” while I’m working on them.

Seth (via Ed) points to The Advertising Slogan Generator (using the word Link in linking to it).

Here’s other words I threw in and what I got back.

Culture: All The Culture That’s Fit To Print

Web 2.0: Make It A Web 2.0 Night

Permaculture: Don’t Leave Home Without Permaculture

To me the “culture” and “permaculture” slogans are particularly amusing since they are so ironic. Our culture is what we are immersed in and media/print is all around us. Permaculture deals with building your site properly (where your home is located) so that it is in tune with the ecosystem around you.

I DON’T FRICKEN BELIEVE THIS! I THINK I’VE JUST FOUND MY DREAM JOB! I was just cruising Craiglist’s Vancouver Job Listings and I came across a job listing for a new company in town called Social Signal which is being created by Rob Cottingham. I found a post on his blog that describes the company and job in detail. When I went back to the Social Signal site though and read the About section of their site, I nearly fell out of my chair! Take a look at this!

What is a distributed collaboration network?

A distributed collaboration network is the next generation of online community, creating shared value through technology-supported collaboration. It leverages “Web 2.0” tools – tools like blogging, tagging, and RSS – that push the Internet beyond information portals and towards collaborative communities. It’s a decentralized, non-hierarchical way of working together that facilitates nimble, project-specific teamwork within a larger, ongoing community.

This community is supported by an ecosystem of web sites that share content and relationships using technologies that make group collaboration an almost effortless extension of individual workflow. A blog post written on one site might pop up in a topical web page on another part of the network. A collection of useful web resources created by one user could be syndicated and republished by half a dozen other sites. A breaking news story could be published on multiple sites, inspiring a blog-based discussion held across multiple sites that is then collected and mirrored on a single web page. There is no hub in a distributed network, just an ever-expanding network of sites that each offers a different point of entry, catering to particular interests and users.

HOLY CRAP! This sounds exactly like my connected communities idea that I’ve been talking about! Ok, let’s do a breakdown of what they said above.

Blogging, tagging, and RSS – Big ditto on that! The idea is to use simple technologies in new and different ways to achieve amazing things. Also the simpler the technologies the more flexible and scalable the system can be.

Collaborative communities – Their name for what I call “connected communities”.

It’s a decentralized, non-hierarchical way of working together that facilitates nimble, project-specific teamwork within a larger, ongoing community.  – Like oh my god, I have a sentence somewhere that says almost the exact same thing! The only thing not mentioned here is the necessary change of company or organizational culture required to utilized such a system. I mean when you say “non-hierarchical”, you’re really talking about equality within the system, with everyone having a voice or part in adding to it and also accessing it. That’s why blogging isn’t so much about a change of technology, as a change of thinking.

This community is supported by an ecosystem –  Yes, this is it! This directly relates to my more recent thoughts on the Web being a permaculture which directly relates to an “ecosystem”. I remember David Weinberger back in 2002 telling me he didn’t like some of the words in my notes on Paradox: In Giving, You Make Yourself Stronger because it made the Web sound like some sort of “organism” but now I realize why I used those words. The Web IS an ecosystem which is why when I started to read about permaculture, everything just came together and made perfect sense to me.

There is no hub in a distributed network – Exactly! Decentralized is the way to go! That way you don’t have a centralized system that, if it overloads, can bring down the entire network system. Instead each community site works independently, sharing and relaying information to the other sites (almost like how the cells in our body work collectively together as our immune system).

Want to see something even more hilarious that relates to this? Check out this posting I did to Craiglist’s Vancouver Resumes section back at the beginning of September just after Hurricane Katrina hit.

Are You A Caring And Creative Tech Company?

Do you know of a caring and creative tech company or organization located in Vancouver, BC who is working on a Web 2.0 social software application to allow millions of people around the world to collaborate and share information more effectively? If so please let me know. I’m feeling fed up and frustrated by the Katrina Disaster and would like to work with a group of people who are working on ideas and technology of this nature to help make the world a better place.

THIS IS EXACTLY THE TYPE OF COMPANY THAT I WAS LOOKING FOR! I don’t believe this! Even more so, here’s another couple of excerpts from a post to Craiglist’s Vancouver Resumes section from farther back in April of this year.

I’m a professional seeking a startup company to help…

…In a nutshell, I am jack of all trades who primarily strives to be a very proactive and efficient problem solver on a variety of fronts, preferring to solve problems before they even happen. This is exactly why I think I’m perfectly suited for a startup over a larger company because from what I’ve seen most larger companies usually prefer more specialized niche people (and may think a multitalented individual’s skill sets are spread out a little too thin for them).

Again this has been my primary problem in trying to find a company to work for. I keep wanting to try to find a startup because I know in those types of environments I’ll be able to utilize more of my diverse skill set instead of just being stuck in a box doing one thing. Their job description pretty much sounds like they are looking for the type of person that I am. Someone who is proactive and can help out within different areas of the entire company.

Man, this is unbelievable! I will do ANYTHING to get this job! I don’t care if I have to scrub the toilets in the company! Hehe, I’ll do it! Ok, I have to rework my resume. I think I might need to add back in my older clerical office work I did in the past for the Federal Government (when I worked for the Community Futures branch as a clerk/receptionist, organizing stuff for the BC region, such as mailouts, meeting schedules, meeting notes, etc) as the job description talks about that kind of stuff. It’ll make my resume more than two pages but I think it will be better to show more of my diverse skill set.

BTW it looks like they use Mac’s in their office as well! I had a iBook G4 with a wireless Basestation last year but I stupidly sold it to my sister because I wanted to try another stab at the gaming industry again last year (which uses PC primarily). Therefore, I sold it to her and I got a Dell XPS machine instead. WORST computer decision of my life! I’ve been dying to get back to an Apple machine since then. Hopefully if I can get this job with them, it would allow me to get back on a Mac machine as well.

HOLY CRAP! I just realized something! Remember how I was just talking about creating a nowblog and how I thought these viewpoints that you made on a specific topic were important because it shows a collective “focus” on something of interest to you in your life? Well duh! What if blogging software could do this for you automatically??!!

I mean think about it. What type of content did I just say I would be collecting in a nowblog? I’m giving a description of my topic and why it’s important to me, then I’m listing not only posts from my own websites but articles posts from other websites, not to mention general website links and items to purchase (ads) that relate to my topic directly. Ok, so I started thinking here that all those article posts that are from my site are just posts with a category or topic tag that groups them together and lists them all. Hmmm, now what if all of the articles links from other sites on this topic were tagged daily links that I had posted on my site? Again, you could just show the listing of these daily links centered around this specific topic. Hell, even ads could be handled the same way if you made a post for each ad and tagged that ad.

All you would really need to do to accomplish this dynamic nowblog viewpoint would be to create a new archive template in Movable Type that displays these lists one after the other in a design display format of your choosing. My default format was just one after the other but hell, you could get creative and make the books which relate to the topic as a vertical thumbnail gallery off to the side or however you choose to display them. The important thing here though is that you could dynamically create these viewpoints on the fly and have a static URL that people could view it at. Hmmm, in effect what this nowblog page sounds like is an Uber category page of not only your journal posts but everything that you’ve seen that relates to this topic (i.e. website articles, websites, books, movies, etc)!

I just discovered this post by Avi Solomon and I’m blown away. This echoes my thoughts remarkably on my post about A Record of My Life. Here’s a quote from his post.

A storyboard is an apt metaphor for how we make sense of our own life history. Storyboarding can be used to sense emergent patterns in our own life story and to envision the life experiences that we wish to welcome into our future.

What I didn’t go into detail on this post about but what I have talked with others about, such as Anthony Casalena of Squarespace, is the need for a blog display format that allows you to achieve this storyboard. In effect, when you pan back to this “orbit view” that Avi talks about, what you are doing is filtering your view based upon your life’s key moments what I called my “transitional moments” which are those moments in your life where a major change or transition occurred within it. Anyways, attached below is my email I sent to Anthony about this blog display format back on September 29, 2005.

—-

Anthony,

Blog Content Display Views Are Crap

For example, if you got a chance to look at the Project Comet demonstration, then you’d see that no matter which view you looked at the site content with, they all looked pretty much the same. Either you saw little mini-streams of “what I’m reading” on the sidebar (with little book thumbnails to represent them) or you saw an endless scrolling views of blog posts, either from a single person or from multiple people. I can describe one word for this display format. Crap!  🙂

Record of Your Life

You see Six Apart themselves reminded me of the problem and potential solution when they said that they wanted Project Comet to be like a “record of your life”. When I heard this I visualized something amazing but Project Comet didn’t even look anything like it. Even Dave Winer himself of Scripting News reminds us of this “record of your life” fact when he talks about what he wrote about a year or so ago in his blog. And here in lies the issue, if our blogs or journals are a record of our life, then why aren’t we taking advantage of them (like Dave Winer appears to do)? The obvious answer to me was because they aren’t formatted to take advantage of this recorded information.

Everything Just Focused On The Here And Now

This is why I said at the start of this email that I wanted our recorded thoughts to be not only “useful to us now” but also “useful to us later”. Right now, if you look at most blogs. The emphasis is primarily on what that person is thinking right this moment. You see their current thoughts posted in the main content area with a listing on the side of their recent ten thoughts as well as recent movies, books, music, whatever. Everything you are looking at is focused on the here and now. Yes of course people have archives as well but it is how these archives are displayed (or not in this case) in relation to the current content that is the problem.

No Feeling of Accumulation

You see THE single most frustrating thing I find about blog journals is that there is no feeling of accumulation or buildup in a sense of learning from the past. Instead it just seems like people are talking over and over again in some endless loop about a certain topic. What I’m looking for is a way for me to look at my content now in relation to where I’ve been and to where I’m going. For example, when I talk about culture in my journal, it is focused on the hope and the desire that we as a society will eventually shift away from our current negative cultural focus to a more positive one. A lot of this has to do with the way businesses work and how I believe they work against people’s common cultural values (i.e. open, honest, truthful, etc). Yet the problem with my journal is that I can’t easily say look at all of these culture posts from “a thousand feet up” to survey what I’ve spoken about and where I’m heading with the topic. The best I can do right now though with blogging software is wade into this stream at “ground level” and trudge through it thought by thought because no one has figured out a way to look at an accumulation of thoughts from a distance and still retain their meaning.

Your Life/Journal Timeline

Well I think I may have stumbled upon a way to do this (although I’m not 100%) and I’m already in the process of doing up some Photoshop mockups of what I have in mind. What’s the potential solution? From an idea standpoint (not technologically speaking), imagine a timeline that you can slide along in, zoom in and out of, and even filter by specific thought stream. So a typical weblog of today might be the timeline set for “today”, with the zoom set to almost “maximum”, and the stream filter set to “all”. And let say that each of these zoom views changes the amount of information displayed based upon how far you zoom out. So at maximum zoom, you get the full details of everything you are pointing at (because you’re up close). While at minimum zoom (almost looking at your entire life in one scoop), you see only the key elements that defined your life with extremely brief descriptions to accompany them. Again let me emphasize, I’m not talking technologically here but from a general idea standpoint. This isn’t any fancy Flash application.

Your Music Timeline: By Day & Month

Ok to some examples. Imagine you’re looking at your journal and you switch your stream filter to say “music”. Immediately we see just my latest posts that relate to music. Ok, pretty normal with regards to today’s blogs but what if we zoom out and change the setting from just viewing a day to instead viewing a month, year, decade, or even life? What would you see then? Wouldn’t you start seeing patterns and changes in your taste of music? Zoomed into the “month” of September, you see the days of the month as horizontal bars stack one below the other (i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc) but you only see those days where you added music to your journal. In addition, you also see the rating of the music and a brief excerpt of your review of it (if you had it).

Your Music Timeline: By Year

Now if you zoom out to the “year” view what happens? Ok, now we see all of 2005 with each month being a horizontal bar stacked one below the other (i.e. Jan, Feb, Mar, etc) with only those months where you added music being show (which may be every month). For each horizontal month bar, we see a row of album covers for that month, sorted with the most popular album on the left and the least on the right, with a maximum of 5 or 10 albums shown. So by looking at the 2005 view we see our most favorite, interesting, and meaningful music of 2005 for you.

Your Music Timeline: By Decade

Ok now we zoom out to the “decade” view. Now we see all of the 2000’s, from 2000 up until 2005. Each year now is represented by a horizontal bar (i.e. 2000, 2001, 2002, etc) stacked one under the other. Upon each bar we just see thumbnails of the albums of again say of our top five or ten rated albums for that year with only the album name shown with it.

Your Music Timeline: By Life

And finally if we zoom out to the “life” view, we see our entire life broken down into decades. Again each decade is represented by a horizontal bar (i.e. 1970, 1980, 1990, etc) stacked one under the other. Upon each bar we just see our top rated music for that decade with its rating. In effect, we are probably seeing the music that literally c
hanged our lives at key transitional moments in it (i.e. Pink Floyd).

Imagining Other Filtered Timelines

Ok so now that we’ve seen what a music timeline can be represented, what about other thought streams? For example, what if you recorded in your journal descriptions of the various jobs you are working at, as you make the transition into them? By switching various views wouldn’t we almost get a resume of our work experience? What about photos? Wouldn’t by switching out to the “life” view, we would see a collection of thumbnail photos in each decade that basically represented the key transitions in our life (i.e. assuming we rated photos not just by how they looked but how meaningful they were to us)? If we were younger when we first started blogging, wouldn’t we see photos of our first date, first car, first home, getting married, notable vacations, notable jobs, etc? What about if we focused just on a thought stream like my one on culture? Well if I zoom out to a “month” or “year” view then what I’ll see is my top five or ten rated posts (by title with small excerpt) that were my key defining and transitional moments in my stream of thought. By looking at this view, I can see the “waypoints” in my thought of where I’ve been and also project forward to see where I would like to go.

Project Management, To Do’s, & Reminders

Now another thing you’ll need to realize is that you don’t need to be using this system for long to take advantage of the year or decade view even. I mean look at people using Flickr. When they post photos, they can manually set when the photos was taken. So even though you are adding it today, it can be an old photo that you took years ago. You can still add it to the timeline at the point it was taken. Of course, you can do the opposite as well. Why not define posts to the future? What if I’m working on a project and I want to set waypoints or milestones for the project that I’ve defined as a stream? If you can post to the future, then you can do this. When you view your journal though, it’s focus still comes up to the current day though. But imagine if you had a future post reminder for the upcoming Web 2.0 conference? Not only could that post remind you of the conference but after you’ve been to the conference you could turn that post into a full description of the event itself. What about a future vacation reminder? Same thing. After the event, you can fill the post with what happened during the vacation or create a followup post instead that talks about it.

Summary

Ok I think you’ve probably fallen asleep by now, so I’ll wrap it up here. If you do want to see a Flash application that makes use of a timeline approach, check out the Classic Motown Timeline below.

http://classic.motown.com/timeline/

That’s it for now. When I get my mockups done, I’ll probably be putting them up on my site. I’ll let you know when they are there.

Nollind

PS. BTW I was just reminded of Dave Winer’s constant checking of his archives for interesting tidbits again. You could probably even add that to your sidebar somehow to show what you were listening to, reading, and watching a year ago, not too mention your general thoughts at the time. Kind of like a This Day in History which you show highly rated items on this day from various years in the past.

Oh ya, that was another interest idea I had. Some streams themselves are not always constant. For example, I used to be heavily into computer gaming but right now I’m not actively discussing it. It would be kind of interesting if you could zoom out to at least a month or year view and see the activities of those streams! Even more so, why not show only the most active streams in your sidebar (with a link to the full listing on another page). Hell you could even go back a year and see what thought streams you were discussing the most at that particular point in time, showing your evolution of interests over time.