I’ll credit Zach Hale for first making me wonder why the hell Twitter was really even worth thinking about (though I can’t appear to locate my original comment on his blog to that effect).
After much resistance, I’ve finally set up my Twitter account (you can find it on my Profiles menu on this site’s navigation bar). Why? This series of articles had a lot to do with it, but I also decided that I’d take a page from the book of one of my co-workers, Martin Criminale, and at least try throwing my hat in the ring. And, of course, Zach had a bit to do with it.
Now if they only had an import option that allowed me to upload contacts without sending out invitations (the Gmail contact import doesn’t appear to be working for me at this point). I’m also curious about whether it might be possible to integrate my blog posts and my Twitter posts in such a way that they all appear in a continuous stream on this page (without necessarily being an entry in my WordPress RSS feed). It’s probably doable, just a question of figuring out how. Tweets, as they call Twitter entries, would have to be indicated, but that’s not overly hard. Perhaps a combination of SimplePie and my standard WordPress template code?
Inspired by Nick Cernis and his blog post on Inbox Heaven, I’ve decided that I’ll try a partial implementation of his system:
Attempt to remove messages from my Gmail inbox as fast as possible. Star items that need immediate followup and delete items I’ll never reference again.
Check the “Starred” list daily, at minimum.
Use labels to track messages that are of interest to me that I may want to reference later (which is what I was previously using starred messages for).
Reading the Inbox Heaven post inspired me to go on a deletion binge and remove a few thousand e-mail messages from my account (most – if not all – of them list messages from back when I monitored Prius e-mail lists).
Alas, this won’t apply to my UW accounts, since the UW uses IMAP for mail retrieval.
As some of you are probably aware, Sean Rees and I are both co-founders of Energy Soapbox, a web site dedicated to promoting sustainability and environmental awareness. This blog features posts that focus on diverse issues from the meaning of sustainability to sheepwalking (though I have slowly become the sole contributor as late).
With Dennis McDonald’s post on creating blog-based microcommunities, I actually wonder if we might have approached the Energy Soapbox project the wrong way. In a nutshell, McDonald has been working with another blogger to have a shared conversation posted on both their blogs. They then combine their RSS feeds on the topic and present them as a single page (with each blogger having his own copy of that page on their web site). Would this have been a better approach for Sean and I to use – establish a common tag or category that would synthesize all of our posts together? That’s not to say we couldn’t also use the Energy Soapbox domain for its current purpose of displaying a running record of the conversation, but the sort of split McDonald describes would denote the ownership of the ideas better and empathize that Energy Soapbox is merely an additional platform (or – ahem – an additional soapbox).
That said, there is still an important question here – when is it better to “spin off” these sorts of projects into their own space, rather than attempting to combine disparate resources to represent a conversation? There aren’t any real criteria that answer this question, and that may well be for the best, but this still seems like an important conversation to have overall.
My résumé has been updated. I’m starting to wonder whether I need to trim the damned thing, since it does seem like there’s a lot on there, and some of it may stop being entirely relevant after a certain period of time. I’m still very proud of being Eastside Journal’s Most Inspirational Graduate of 2001, but how long does a high school graduation award actually matter? This is a bit of a trickier question, since I’m still in school. I’ve had people look at that document and think it way too long, while others think it proves that I have a vast array of experience (let’s ignore my personal reaction to that last opinion for the moment).
Something quite interesting popped into my head, and thus prompted this post. As most know, I do a lot of reading as a part of my masters studies, and have done a lot of reading in the past regarding a host of different topics, particularly during my undergraduate work at Evergreen. Oddly, when I’m doing academic work, I almost never like to read anything else, since my energies tend to get a bit drained from having to keep up with the academic stuff in the first place — there’s residual effect as well in that I seem to not like reading much for time periods after the academic year has ended. Regardless, I find myself in a bit of a quandary; I’ve done a lot of reading on the subjects of sustainability and information management, but I really have no method as it stands of referencing all of that information or even recalling where something in particular cropped up.
This is a big problem, and spans a lot of different resources: textbooks, class notes, handouts, technical articles, magazine articles, programming code snippets, old web site designs, even in-line notations on whatever I’m reading. I come up with ideas for projects that (no pun intended) peter out (cough) after a while, either for lack of motivation or for lack of appropriate reference material – in general, it tends to be more the former than the latter, but lack of reference material also rears its ugly head occasionally. This isn’t because I lack the information; it’s because I’ve seen it somewhere but can’t find it again!
I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot. Everyone faces this. I have a slight advantage in that I’m beginning to recognize some of the ways that this is solvable, but at a slight disadvantage in that I am not quite as involved with stuff like social tagging or folksonomies — though I should note that Wikipedia has it wrong; folksonomies and social tagging are not the same thing, and saying they are is misleading. Anyway, the main reason I have a problem is that I don’t have a quick way of finding any annotations or relevant readings for a particular topic. If I wanted to remember a bit about economics, for instance (a highly relevant subject for me at the moment because of PB AF 594), I don’t have any way of knowing what articles I’ve read related to the subject or where my books are that cover that subject or what I might’ve taken as notes in classes three or four years ago that talked about the subject. This is partly lack of time to look all this crap up. This is also partly because that requires locating things – like my ink in my last blog post, I may not know it’s already around or may think I loaned the book on the subject to someone else. I actually thought I had loaned one of my economics books to my mother (don’t ask me why I thought this) until I spotted it going to bed one night on a bookshelf directly across from the bed!
I’ve tried recently to reduce the amount of stuff I hang on to that makes it harder to find things. I’ve started a “clippings binder”, where I rip out magazine articles that I think might be useful for future reference and recycle the rest of the magazine. I can’t bring myself to do this for my copies of eco-structure, since those are just pure gold, but most of the other magazines I have floating around succumb to this sooner or later. I can’t do this to books (and won’t – my father, who is doubtlessly reading this, would about have a conniption and ban me to the seventh or eighth layer of hell). Last year before moving to Seattle, I donated a bunch of (admittedly mostly fiction) books to Olympia’s Goodwill branch to reduce the number of books I had sitting around. But really, this hasn’t done much – I still have a lot of books I want to be able to reference.
There’s an extra dimension here – not only is there stuff I have read, but there’s stuff that looks relevant that I want to read, but can’t find the time.
It seems like the only really good way of doing this would be to start creating additional notes on every single book I read that might be relevant to future work, but that in and of itself is a lot of additional work. Would it increase my ability to look for and find information? Probably, especially if it were implemented correctly (I’d guess a wiki system with some sort of tagging grafted on would work quite well for this). Perhaps I’ll take a sabbatical in 2009 after I graduate and spend the summer reading and making notes and putting them into some coherent system. Yeah, right. So how do we organize all these resources that we personally find relevant? There are answers — maybe — and those answers are (fairly) likely to be relevant. But in the meantime, if I want to remember all I’ve seen on sustainability, I’ll have to read it all over again, or at least spend a copious amount of time reading over whatever notes I made in the margins of books or on paper somewhere in a binder buried in my closet.
That’s assuming those notes existed at all, and that’s a whole ‘nother problem.
I’ve been thinking I needed printer ink for the last several weeks, since my printer is reporting that several of the cartridges are getting quite low. I had intended to order some tonight, and nearly did until I opened my filing cabinet and found refills for every single ink cartridge I have.
Well, at least I found the cartridges before I ordered new ones…
Note – I use a business-level printer that does duplexing and provides an insane amount of paper storage capacity (and it’s got a wireless connection built in to boot) – why do I use something with that much power? Home-use printers seem to fall a bit short in the areas of networking and duplexing, thus I went to business models. This is an HP OfficeJet Pro K550dwtn (actually, it’s a K550dtwn), and thus far has served me quite well. It helps that I keep my need for ink down by forcing all printouts to only use black ink and to use the “Fast/Economical Printing” setting (which is essentially draft printing). There is no visually appreciable difference between draft printing and normal printing speeds, except that draft printing uses a lot less ink.
This was a presentation given by Benjamin Chiao from the University of Michigan – he’s currently a PhD student at their Information School, but also has an economic background, which is where much of this talk was couched.
What’s the point of solving spam problem? Less time sorting spam, less economic cost for blocking spam, customers spend less money
$10 billion/year spent on spam related technologies
What is uncensored/open channel? keep inbox filters, no filters in special folder, guarantee delivery of messages into folder
Properly tagged messages will automatically be assigned to a folder/label
No new technological infrastructure required and fully reversible
Existing mechanisms to prevent spam: legal punishment, filters
Proposal of the open channel: decrease benefits of spamming by decreasing the number of recipients
Economics: micro-economic model shows open channels increase benefits to recipients, advertisers
This is not a unique mechanism – Chiao compared it to TV shopping channels: you don’t have to watch, but the information is constantly there
Open channel is like web sites – anyone can post
Not excluding the possibility of search within the open channel
Sender tags sent messages (as being part of the channel? This wasn’t clear in the talk)
The definition of spam used here specifically targets unsolicited commercial mass e-mails – no other message types are considered here
Current spam volumes are between 80-90% of total network traffic – 40% advertise medications, 19% is adult content, 41% other (according to Evett 2006
Spammers continue because they are economically supported – there’s a point where the supply of spam must meet demand
Why do we need open channel? Why not just search for the content via existing search engines? Sites selling these products disappear too quickly: 30% of domains created die within a day (according to MessageLabs 2005)
Spammers need to keep pushing information to inboxes because they must move rapidly due to legal reasons
60% of spam messages are sent by zombies – computers hijacked for the explicit purpose of sending spam
The CAN-SPAM Act has essentially legalized spamming
The open channel proposal separates the current e-mail ecosystem into two ecosystems – one “open” (the proposal) and one “traditional” (the current model)
Audience observation: this system assumes that EVERY e-mail system implements the open-channel concept
Current technology already partially implements this idea (sort of)
Spammers might be happier on open channel! 😀
This is still a theoretical idea
Essentially create two channels: one open and one censored (I’m not clear on whether the “channels” are analogous to the “ecosystems” mentioned above)
E-mail recipients opt in to the open channel in order to maximize their own utility
The sender gets its current revenue from the advertising charge times the number of mails received
The sender’s current cost is the constant reestablishment of sending channels (zombies)
The open channel attempts to establish equilibrium between advertisers and receivers of spam (note that advertisers, senders, and receivers are independent parties)
There is not just a supply curve but a demand curve for UCM
The open channel method induces UCM to move out of the current e-mail system
I’m not sure Benjamin gave sufficient background to make any of us fully appreciate the idea – there’s two problems with it that I can see: first, it exists within the reality of economics, not the reality that we commonly deal with. Thus, it’s governed by the same economic laws that give me such a headache in PB AF 594, and understanding the concept requires a suspension of our own realities in order to appreciate the laws that govern the proposal. The second problem is that it’s not clear how this can be implemented within the current system. Is this a system that merely adds a tag to all messages that identify it as open-channel or “traditional”? How do you physically separate the two ecosystems without actually modifying the current e-mail structure, and how do you enforce proper usage of both ecosystems? An honor system in which we assume that the senders, the receivers, and the advertisers are all working to maximize their own utility (basically their net happiness) is perfect in economic theory because economic theory establishes that everyone will strive towards some theoretical maximum benefit, but in reality, it just doesn’t seem possible.
There was one thing that I want to follow up on – Benjamin mentioned the Attention-Bond Mechanism (Loder 2006) in his talk, so I’ll have to look up exactly what that entails (it’s a concept related to the acceptance or rejection of e-mail messages).
The iSchool held a panel of practitioners in the field of Information Architecture as part of iCareer Week at the beginning of the quarter. These are my notes from that panel (interpreted without quite as much of the fresh context in my head as I usually like, I must admit).
Recommended courses: 530/540 (taxonomy/technology); project management; research methods and analytical skills; coollaboration/teamwork; 580s; User Centered Design (UW Extension/UW Educational Outreach)
When in class, always ask the question: “What’s the point of this?’ Also ask, “How can I communicate the value of this to someone not familiar with the concept?”
What kind of information architect do you want to be?
“What other value can I add to the degree?” (ask this)
Mike Crandall: What functional subspecialties are there in IA? What is IA?
metadata, user experience, user research, usability, analytics, wireframes, data modeling, interface/interaction design, evaluation
Major groupings within IA: taxonomy, HCI, design (visual and interaction)
There are also “innies” vs. “outies”: internal and external consultancies in IA. The contrast here is one of a mother who takes care of the kids and an ER doc who does triage. This is the contrast between a consultant for a company and a consultant for an agency.
If you want to get into programming as part of the MSIM degree, go for concepts, not languages
It’s difficult to be a developer and an information architect.
It’s important to be able to talk to people who understand how the system is built – hence why programming can be important.
Mike Crandall: What kinds of tools do you use?
Outlook/Excel/Office, mind mapping software, Illustrator (some), InDesign, workflows
“We’re consultants first” – need to be able to advertise and deliver IA. How to express that? “Deliverables, wireframes…”
“Tools were not a big concern [in work] – I had the underpinnings.”
Mike Crandall: Looking for a job – what did you do in your job search? How did you find IA-related jobs?
Join a professional organization related to IA and stay informed
Look for a job using your own personal network – go through the people you know
Make your own projects while you don’t have a job and build it. Create your own portfolio.
Get into a company that needs what you want to do and do it (note that this may not match your “official” job title!)
Brush up on resumes and cover letters
Audience question: how do you present stuff that’s not really done?
Get to the level of “I feel good about this piece of work” and give the context of the assignment
Depends on the type of IA you want to do
You’re attempting, in your portfolio, to show how you synthesize a large amount of work
Mike Crandall: process is the important thing: you sell the process, not the work.
Don’t be afraid to say you don’t do something because it isn’t your strength!
Mike Crandall: What is your next career step?
CEO! Getting more of the science behind the ideas, getting more in front of clients, practicing current work, “getting good”, balance design with working with people, create a collaborative process, start their own company, become web director, learn business skills, learn team management, work on motivation (self and others), get more management/oversight experience, work on client/account management
Audience question: What do you hate?
Being rushed, repetition, wireframes (sort of)
wireframes are breaking down – high level of interaction
Special Interest Group lists are valuable
Audience question: when did you finally feel confident?
When working with first client
Focus on the user is your selling point
Fake it – say stuff with confidence, even if you have no clue what you’re doing