Breathe In, Breathe Out

Friendfeed Activity

I've been spending a lot of time over on Friendfeed lately, so not posting much here. Here's some of the stuff I've been looking at:

Easy Ways to Participate in Social Media

Image by luc legay, via Flickr (CC license)

Earlier, I wrote about why I’m interested in social networking or social media like Twitter and Friendfeed. While these services are heavy with tech/pr content right now, I think services like this can be immensely useful for all sorts of groups and even individuals. Right now, those sites are heavy with tech/pr content, but that's not always going to be the case IMO.

But what can you do if you’ve been curious about social media or social networks like Twitter or Friendfeed or whatever, but you don’t know much about how to go about participating?

You might start with 5 Great Ways to Contribute to Social Media. Sharing can be as simple as one simple click to indicate you like something someone else has shared. Or you might just share information about a new application you've tried and liked. It doesn't have to be complicated at all.

Social Networks: Why I Care

I've been reading a lot about social media, spending time on Twitter and especially FriendFeed. Why? Primarily because of the ideas I read about Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. Boiled way down, the social networking technologies make it possible to do something that was unthinkable not so long ago - to organize without organizations.

Another effect of these new technologies has to do with traditional filters to publishing content: they just aren't as relevant anymore. Want to write an article about your favorite subject? Go ahead; write and post it for the world to see here on the internet. You don't need an editor to give you the go ahead.

One consequence is the explosion of content available. RSS feeds, twitter streams, etc. And we can feel like we're drowning in information as a result.

So I've begun to think about why I need to pay attention to stuff like Friendfeed and Twitter. But right now, both are primarily filled with Tech/PR types sharing lots of information. And I'm not a Tech/PR person.

If I’m not a PR or Tech guy, so what do I care what Robert Scoble and Louis Gray find interesting? Not to pick on them, mind you. They are two of the most popular and active.

What I’m really interested in is learning to use these new tools most effectively. Some day, the content distributed by these tools won’t be almost exclusively about Tech/PR. I might want to gather a group of Feldenkrais practitioners or clients to share ideas. But if I or they don’t know how to use these tools well, what’s the point? But if we do learn how to use Twitter, Friendfeed or whatever well, then we’ll have a sharing ability we didn’t have before. And that will be a really valuable asset to have.

Every once in a while, you get some gems on using FF or Twitter, or whatever, in a way that wasn’t clear before. For example, Gray posted some useful information yesterday about hiding stuff (that is, filtering information) in FriendFeed.

So I’ll keep on subscribing to their stuff. And someday I’ll figure out how to filter it for what I really need from it. Or some item in Scoble’s or Gray’s feed will help point the way.

Perpetual Early Adoption

How do things change? Yeah, I know, that sounds like a bunch of metaphysical BS. But it starts getting practical when you add a qualifier statement like change "from what in and to what" and then apply that to a specific field, like, say, marketing.

Every business school student comes across the idea of a product lifecycle: a product or service gets introduced, pickedup by early adopters, then mainstream adopters, and then onto late adopters. There's been a lot of early adopter buzz lately among social media geeks. You know, the people who've been on Twitter since it began.

Robert Scoble, champion of early adopters everywhere, wrote about Early Adopter Angst on his blog today. The take away message here, at least for me, is early adopters are the ones driving change in society. I certainly buy into that; you can follow me on Twitter to prove it. But I came away from Scoble's article with a nagging sense of "something's missing here."

A product, service or idea, if it's to appeal to even the earliest of adopters, needs to be seen as worthwhile. And for that, it has to make sense within the context of the current culture. Ideas too far ahead of their time can wither and die without as much as a whimper, let alone an echo.

And that idea came from remembering something I read a while ago in the book The Wisdom Paradox. I don't recall the specific terms used, but the sense of it is something like you never here about the real geniuses because their ideas are so far ahead, no one at the time can relate to them. Passenger service didn't make sense when there were no railroads, buses or airlines, for example.

Scoble promotes the idea that Twitter will be mainstream in a few years. Maybe. But even if an idea does make at least a little sense, I think it can remain in the early adopter stage for a long, long time.

One of the things I do is something called the Feldenkrais Method. Without getting into specifics here - click on the link in my blog's sidebar to read about it - it's been stuck in the early stage of the early adopter stage for about 40 years. And I don's see it getting out anytime soon.

And I think that's a shame. It has real benefits to offer almost anyone. Yet, today, it's somewhat known within the various flavors of physical therapy, and almost not at all outside them.

One of the things it does well, better and easier than anything else I've experienced, is change the state of tonus in your body. That is, it loosens overly tight muscles and tightens overly loose muscles, result in better posture and ease of movement. And, of yeah, it makes you feel good, and even reenergized. And you can get pretty stiff and tight by, say, staring at a computer screen for long periods of time.

It's been in the early adopter stage for 40 years or so. A related method, the Alexander Technique, has been in the early adopter stage for over 100 years!

Will they ever get out of the early adopter stage? Hard to say, but I'm thinking probably not. But I'm glad I adopted it early, even if no one's heard of it. The challenge is relating it to everyday life of all of us, not just people who need to rehab. It really does have benefits for all of us.

Will maintreamers and late adopters get in on it? I hope so, but I fear the answer is no.

But, hey, we can still Twitter about it, can't we?

Technorati Tags: feldenkrais, learning, marketing, socialmedia, change

Less Television, More Media

Image by gbaku, via Flickr (CC license)

With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube.

Much of the useless information I know came from watching television. I know who shot JR, for example. Or, McDreamy and McSteamy used to live in New York, and McSteamy slept with McDreamy's wife.

Yep, I've pissed away a lot of hours in front of the boob tube. But not nearly so much in the last couple of years. There are plenty of other ways to consume media time - blogging, twittering, sharing stuff with friends and family. What? You thought I was going to talk about using the time to read or exercise?)

Oh, we still watch a few favorites, whenever we want, thanks to TIVO. But consuming media - maybe better put as using media like television - isn't the same as it was and never will be, thank goodness.

Author Clay Shirky has made a career out of talking about this kind of stuff. His book Here Comes Everybody will give you a clear view of what's going on with media and society. And a transcript of his speech at the Web 2.0 Conference puts it in a little more perspective.

Society's television viewing bender came not from the invention of television, but was a kind of side effect from adopting the 5-day work week in the 20th century. That change created a big dab of free time, and Philo T Farnesworth, David Sarnoff, William Paley, et al were happy to fill it.

Shirky calls the free time a cognitive surplus, time you brain doesn't have to think about work. With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube. The tube produced, and we consumed; a classic one-way interaction.

But the internet and social media have changed all that. We can still consume media, but we can also produce out own content and share it with whomever we please quite easily and cheaply.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

And that's making for a big change that will be even bigger when today's toddlers grow up:

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

That all sounds like the most wonderful thing - and it is. But I think there are going to be some side effects that aren't necessarily good ones.

Increasingly we can consume, produce and share media on the go with mobile devices like iPhones, Blackberries, or whathaveyou. And we've probably all experienced trying to hold a conversation with someone who's preoccupied with reading email or looking something up on one of those mobile devices.

I've referred to this continuous partial attention syndrome previously. I expect it will get a lot worse as things unfold.

But at least we won't spend enormous amounts of time watching and wondering who shot JR.

Seesmic Widget

I've signed up for Seesmic, a kind of micro video blogging site. It kind of goes along with the current Twitter craze. In fact, the Seesmic company has bought Twhirl, a Twitter posting and reading application. I expect a tight integration between them very soon.

(My Twitter name is tommyl if you'd like to follow me there.

Anyway, here's a widget with my most recent Seesmic posts. Curiously, I haven't been able to get it working in the sidebar, but it does seem to work in a post. Anybody have any idea what's going on?

Seesmic Updates

(Loading ...)

Where Do Comments Belong?

Slow Saturday, so there's a kind of tempest in a teapot about blog comments and where they belong. Louis Gray started it out by asking Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners Ire? He's talking about the increasingly available option of posting comments about a blog post on social bookmarking sites (Friendfeed, for example). One of the problems with this practice is that the comments don't show up on the blog, and so the author might never see them.

Divorcing comments from the post they're commenting on doesn't make a lot of sense to me. On the other hand, social bookmarking sites are their own feed aggregators and take advantage of the connections in the networks of people using them.

Dave Winer wrote a little bit about this on his blog today. But he also mentioned a way the RSS 2.0 standard can support direct comments to the blog. And he demonstrated with a screenshot of one that does.

I tried it out, and lo and behold, it does. And I wondered if other aggregators offered a similar feature. The only one I could find was NetNewsWire. If you right click on a headline in NNW's headline list one of the contextual menu options is "open comments." At least it is on some blogs, but not all. So NNW must be using the RSS 2.0 tag that Winer talked about.

I think this would be a useful option for any aggregator, desktop or web-based. In the meantime, I've signed up for Disqus comments hosting that offers a way of coordinating comments.

What do you think?

Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense

It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.
Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

[From Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense ]

Yellow Journalism: Not So Bad?

Yellow journalism generally gets a bad rap, but maybe it wasn't really so horrible. Some of the same factors that gave rise to yellow journalism are with us today. But we might all benefit from it this time, at least according to one journalism scholar.

It seems like everything's reality TV and celebrity gossip, neither of which I have much interest in. But everything isn't, thank goodness.

The hugely fragmented market for TV programming provides a lot of choice, and a TIVO provides the means to capture it and let me view it whenever I want. A lot of crap on TV, but I don't have to see it. No slam against Dancing with the Stars or Entertainment Tonight fans: they can do the same as me. (At least when the writers come back from their strike.)

Same idea with news and other sorts of topical information. The Internet has made for an almost infinitely segmented market where all sorts of regular (and irregular news) can be found. And that trend will expand greatly in the future.

Search engines make finding news and info easy, and distribution technologies like RSS and email bring it to you so that you can do whatever you want with it on your own timetable

This level of choice seems relatively new and shiny, but it's not, not really. We've seen stuff like this before in an unlikely place - the era of yellow journalism about a hundred years ago. At least that's what writer Steve Boriss is getting at in Yellow Journalism: the Golden Age of American News.

Now most of us are used to thinking of yellow journalism as a bad thing, what with Citizen Kane telling his journalists "you supply the headlines, I'll supply the war."

But there's a lot more to it than that. Yellow journalism arose in response to both technology's effects on publishing and distribution, along with population growth. Boriss paints a clear time line of all this:

• expensive-to-publish newspapers appealing to the elites at first;
• then steam driven presses driving down the cost of production;
• then the telegraph and telephone making in all current and relevant.

Suddenly in the late 19th century, technology stood the elite and the unwashed side by side, so to speak. The audience was a mass one, but the media hadn't caught up.

Then Joseph Pulitzer came up with a formula for covering the real news, but doing so in a sensationalist way that also appealed to the masses. The serious news presented in a way appealing across the board, driving circulation and profitability to new heights.

According to Boriss, this lasted until the elite publishers got pissed enough to form a cartel out of the Associated Press, drying up the sources of sensational news treatments and setting the tone of the news business for the next 100 years.

So here we are again. Technology has dealt us a new hand. If you want sensationalized news, it's just a click or two away. If you want the serious stuff, same thing. But now it's really segmented, coming from too many sources to count - for now, at least.

Not everyone will agree with Boriss' ideas. One commenter on the blog that published the post took exception, saying in effect it could promote even more Britney and Paris news than ever before. If Boriss is even remotely onto something here, the answer is yes, it probably will. And there will be people ready to snap up even the most minute gossip nugget. I'd bet saturation determined by advertisers,not news consumers.

There aren't any Pulitzers or Hearsts - yet, though we do have Murdoch. But that's OK. I'll just start to worry when someone like Murdoch owns Fox News and MSNBC at the same time.

Clever Learning Approaches

A clever approach to learning to draw is in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. One of the ones I remember best is upside down drawing. For a non-artist like me, it's downright daunting to attempt to draw something exactly as you see it. "There's no way I can do this" I usually think. But when I turn the original drawing upside down and simply draw the lines I see(and the relationship between them), a passable copy of the drawing begins to appear.

The instructions have you change the context you're approaching drawing in. Rightside up, my brain can't seem to figure it out, but upside down, a very different context, it's just a bunch of lines, and I can draw lines.

We use this sort of approach in Feldenkrais work, changing the context of movement to offer outselves and our clients new options for movement. Often, the outcome is pretty creative and useful. Sometimes dramatically useful for us or our clients.

I don't normally think of this context-changing approach when I think of comics. But one of the most widely distributed comic artists does just that when faced with losing his speaking voice permanently.

Scot Adams writes about discovering a clever learning approach to a condition called Spasmodic Dysphonia after a doctor told him no one ever recovered completely from the condition. Adams somehow came up with the idea, in his words, of remapping his brain. Changing the context of his speaking has done the trick, at least so far.

Adams first began experimenting with the voice he had left, changing pitches, looking for patterns, singing some words. Then he disovered a kind of jumpstart that really got him going with his natural voice - speaking rhyme.

But the best part of Adam's description of his process was what he calls reestablishing the connection between his brain and his speech:

When I say my brain remapped, that's the best description I have. During the worst of my voice problems, I would know in advance that I couldn't get a word out. It was if I could feel the lack of connection between my brain and my vocal cords. But suddenly, yesterday, I felt the connection again. It wasn't just being able to speak, it was KNOWING how. The knowing returned.

Adams blog post is worth reading: it's not only very well-written, but really conveys the passion of someone left with only learning as an option to the life he wants to lead. That's a big change in context.

New Look

This weblog has a different look due to using Sandvox to assemble it. Previously I had been using Tinderbox (and their relatively immature blogging client Flint) to manage the content and my own css design to publish. 

Though the Sandvox designs are limited in number, I finally figured out that their designs were much more elegant than anything I could put together from scratch. And I like the outline structure Sandvox uses to manage the pages, at least in a weblog.  

Blog Design Solutions

Blog Design Solutions is the book I've been hoping to find. As a recent convert to Wordpress, I'd been looking for a manual that could reveal it's workings and how to change them if I wanted. To be sure, there's lots of Wordpress stuff online, but I've been finding myself working pretty hard to dig out the useful bits. It's probably because I'm not versed in PHP, mySql, or really much on anything on the server side.

Enter Blogging Design Solutions. There's a chapter on Wordpress that takes a lot of the mystery out of playing around with themes, markup and exactly how the damn thing works. Very useful and that alone is worth the price of the book.

But the real value for me was the clearly written explanation of how to get Apache, mySql, PHP and even myPHPadmin running on my local machine. That's allowed me to put a copy of Wordpress locally so that I hack with it to my heart's content and not screw up the blog running on the server.

There are other chapters on Moveable Type, Expression Engine or Textpattern. And there's even a chapter on how to cobble together your own content management system.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Web Filters of the Future

Consensus Web Filters made a big impression on me. And it's not just me; there are lots and lots of links to that post all over the place. So when I stumbled across Man vs. Machine in Newsreader War, I was hungry for the information.

This article focuses on whether future collaborative-style news sites will depend more on human-edited or algorithmic sources. It pretty much picks algorithms over meat. Sites like Digg and its ilk depend heavily on submissions from web surfers.

But it seems the filtering services offered by these sort of sites are both too broadly and too narrowly focused at the same time. Mary Hodder of Attention Trust (a fascinating topic on its own) like the current sites, but thinks they're too narrowly focused:

"Digg and Memeorandum are definitely an order of magnitude better than anything we got from any top-down news organization, but when I look at them, I see all the things that are missing," said Hodder, CEO of the video aggregation startup Dabble. "Digg and Memeorandum are catching one slice, and it’s fantastic and a total breath of fresh air, because it's not The New York Times or the L.A. Times. But it's still only one slice. If you are really going to nail this, you have to have thousands of slices."

The gist of her argument is the limitation imposed by submissions from a limited group, and suggests than many more perspectives need to be taken into consideration for the filters to be really useful.

Almost to support the algorithmic approach, I checked out a new filter mentioned in the article, Tailrank. When you join Tailrank, you submit a list of feeds you've been reading. The sites secret recipe shakes and bakes though them to make a constantly-updated customized list of recommendations. Though the algorithm isn't revealed, it obviously depends on links to blogs; the more links, the higher the rank, probably.

A drop down menu on the user's page lets you select the number of links to use for a filter (this is after you've signed up for a free membership). When I selected 2 links, Tailrank returned 136 blog posts, 8 links 28 articles and so forth. So it was a little ironic that when I set the filter to use the maximum number of links (35), it turned up just one article: Consensus Web Filters.

Consensus Web Filters

Consensus Web Filters: on the always-cool Cool Tools tackles the relatively new breed of collaborative news sites that have emerged recently. Kevin Kelly talks about how important these types of sites have become to his news reading habits. In a clear way, he describes what they are, how they work and why they're important.

What really caught my interest here was the idea that the collaborative process the sites use don't necessarily mean that we just see popular news items.

But most important for me is the large volume of very interesting news that will not become "news." This is the kind of material that is more interesting than random pages but which lacks an appealing hook to place it on the front page of a magazine or even a news website. Often these items are timeless; they don't make the front page because they could be run at any time. But they are more valuable than odd curiosities. Because of the voting, tagging, bookmarking process enough people find the item worthwhile that they rise to notice. What emerges for me is a delightful counter-news, or what we used to call at CoEvolution Quarterly, "news that stays news." I have encountered no other process in the world that is better at surfacing "news that stays news" and "news that will be news" better than these collaborative filtering sites.

I checked out some of the recommended sites to see if and how this might work. Indeed it does. On Digg, for example, you can see (or subscribe to the feed for) items just coming in, before they get "dugg" to see if they'll make the front page. Other sites Kelly mentions offer similar ways of seeing stuff before (or while) it's being processed through the collaborative process.

I had first run across this idea of "news that stays news" long ago in Stewart Brand's book about the Media Lab at MIT. That was published 20 years ago. Things change; things stay the same.

endo - The Newest RSS Aggregator for Mac OS X

endo - The Newest RSS Aggregator for Mac OS X:

So this is something new. A Wordpress blog and also using a new aggregator (ecto) and blogging client (endo). I found ecto and endo on Newsvine and decided to give them a shot. WordPress I'd been thinking about for a while and finally took the plunge just now. I've always had client-based blogging software before, so this is something new all the way around for me.

Change is good. (I hope.)