Views of a Modern World

Everything else Rick writes

Twitter: “What is it good for?”

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As someone who’s only more recently adopted Twitter as a tool, building on top of multiple blogs, Facebook, and LinkedIn, I’ve been consistently faced with two questions:

  1. Is there a specific model for using twitter that makes the most of the tool?
  2. How can folks following hundreds (thousands!) of people get anything done other than read tweets all day?

Question 1

Geoff Managh, of BldgBlog, writes on question #1 and answers the pre-complaint: who wants to read that stuff?
He urges us to separate the tool from the work; that ballpoint pens and twitter are just as capable of capturing (NB: not “producing” like some robot Bartleby) quality writing as moleskines and MS Word. That said, he defaults to a simple position: twitter is a note-taking tool and you can write what’s important to you. There’s less difference between me reading a WSJ editorial that I disagree with and a tweet that bores me; if the content isn’t interesting, we’re supposed to stop reading it, the same way we do with books, magazines, articles, editorials, blog posts, and emails. Notice a trend?

I have recently decided that the microblogging description of twitter might be the real secret sauce here. Once upon a time, there were these things called weblogs, and many of them were like personal online diaries or journals. Eventually, as people are wont to do, some of these weblog-ers started writing more interesting things, and people liked to read those posts. And then it continued. And some of you might have even recognized that we now have blogs and bloggers and no one automatically things that these are a fortiori silly things to do. We now note that well-written blog posts are closer to newspaper columns than the online “dear diary.” Since twitter works over SMS as well, and many people don’t have full-fledged blogs or even carry laptops and smartphones with them everywhere, maybe democratizing access is an important piece of the story. People will find their voices. That’s not a bad thing.

Question 2

I’m hoping to get a mini-interview with Darren Rowse of Problogger to expand on his recent tweets on how he manages the 37,828 people he’s following and his 57,965 followers (as of 1445 Eastern Time on 4/28).

That post will be part II of this mini-twitter series.

Set work-home boundaries on Facebook

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A breakfast networking group I attend regularly returns to the topic of social networking tools/sites and where people can or should draw lines to separate their business and personal lives. It’s a common sentiment that “I don’t want clients seeing old college photos.”

Michael Phelps in a compromising position

Michael Phelps in a compromising position

This article via the Personal Branding Blog deals expressly with these issues by attacking difficult question #1: What do you do when your boss sends you a friend request?

The short answer, that I was pleased to learn, is that you can use the friend “lists” feature. Create a friend list called “professional” and add the right folks to it. You can then edit your privacy settings and set permissions the way you want and then use the list as an exception to the viewing permissions. There are probably a variety of permutations you’ll have to sort through, and so you should test your settings vigorously before putting up something that you don’t want people to see.

Way cool photos of NYC

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NYC street photo with only children

NYC street photo with only children

I really liked these très cool pictures, photoshop montages of NYC streetcorner photos. Not time lapse but time-space compression photography. It’s a technique I’ve never seen before, and it brings the street photo into a whole new world. I could imagine different photos using the same technique as public service announcements, showing the homeless, abuse victims, animals, and the disabled or elderly. These people are all in our lives, in the City. I think the photographer/artist is really like an editor, carving away the unnecessary and the everyday to focus on the compelling interest for the photo at hand.

Via VSL.

Build credibility by writing your own posts

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I recently saw an article with some tips on writing blog posts more quickly. They were all decent tips, but one caught my eye as being either completely misguided or crazy like a fox. Tim Scullin wrote:

Outsource Your Posts

Currently I write all my posts because I am very interested in my topic. However if you can’t keep up or are just not interested in writing about your topic anymore then outsourcing your posts could be a great opportunity for you. You can get quality posts from English speaking writers for as little as $10 a post. Make sure you test out your writers skills before you pay and even then only pay for a few posts at first. If you find their style is horrible or doesn’t fit with your target audience then you can change.

Now, I write all these words with an occasional advance read-through of topics on “Simplifying Complexity.” Blogging is about conversation. It’s about voice, your voice and my voice. We can’t discuss issues, I can’t present information, if you can’t trust that they’re even my words.

Well, some people can. They’re called companies. To me, the only time when “outsourcing” the writing makes any sense is when you are merely putting up blog posts to sell stuff or to create an apparent mountain of content too hard for a DIY competitor to climb. And that’s a race to the bottom.

Outsourcing blog posts is not much different than celebrity ghost-written twittering, or gwittering (that’s ghost-twittering, and yes, I just made it up; TwitterProxy seems like the right word for Obama’s folks – see below). A fellow in the NYT article complains that it’s okay to “ghostwrite” for brands but not for celebrities who are brands. It’s simple — one is sending updates about X using twitter and the other is X sending updates.

For example, we had a PR firm pitch ThoughtStorm, and while we liked their PR activity proposals, the offer to create social network profiles, updates, and so on was definitely a slippery slope for us. Now it’s easier for us to draw a line because we know that there are few people who could create actual content related to what we do as opposed to posting news-ish updates and links to other people’s writings. And we would have simply identified these sorts of updates by labeling them as from a different user/team rather than from me or my partner.

Finally, although I’m unlikely to use the President as an example in many circumstances (and the stories seem to indicate that Obama’s tweets are indeed ghost-written), the Whitehouse blog doesn’t claim to be written by him, when it could be. Any President adopts the words of speechwriters, and there are those heads of state who control their own messages (Churchill is a personal favorite of mine in this regard).

If Winston Churchill could find the time to write his own speeches during WWII, you can respect your audience enough to find the time to write your own blog posts. If you can’t write all the time, just write better when you do.

So, you tell me: Is Tim giving misguided advice, or does he secretly know that only the “inauthentic” will use this tool, get presumably less interesting copy, and thereby cease being in actual or potential competition with so-called “real bloggers?” Or to make a more pointed question: would you be upset if you found out that your favorite blogger was faking it?

Logo contest on crowdSPRING

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We’re running a logo contest on crowdSPRING for a social network-based site serving the ASD (autistic spectrum disorder) community.

Besides wanting to see a greater variety of designs from different people rather than a number of variations on a theme from one person, I wanted to see how the original “thoughtstorm.com” might have functioned. My friends know that the genesis of “thoughtstorm” for me was a play on “brainstorm” as part of my C2B business idea.

So, please feel free to spread notice of the contest to folks who should design an entry. Also, you can vote on the entries yourselves at the project page.

If there are designers who want to improve the project pro bono but don’t like crowdSPRING or others on principle, send me a design (I obviously won’t use unless we agree to a deal), post a link here as a comment (and then everyone else may get to coment), or enter and you can agree to donate the money to REED Academy, Alpine Learning Group‘s Outreach Program, or Autism Speaks. If you agree to that and do it, I’ll match the donation myself.

NYT sidesteps Godwin’s Law

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Today’s NYT has a story about a former Capitol Hill staffer who is a “dissenter” and “skeptic” on climate change issues. He might even be a “misinformer.” Congratulations to the NYT for breaking out the thesaurus and not calling the guy a “denier.” That term is loaded and hateful in its message.

I humbly submit Colosimo’s Corollary to Godwin’s Law:

Labeling someone a “denier” on any topic other than the Holocaust is a violation of Godwin’s Law.

Do you have links to stories that share this view of the degradation in the climate change debate? It’s not about climate change, it’s about collegial debate on things that clearly have huge impacts on society but are almost certainly not inherently or deliberately evil (unlike say, Rwandan genocide or atrocious conditions in hospitals for the mentally ill).

Use self-BCC to tame your sent folder

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Over on Simplifying Complexity, I recently doubled one of our software bounties from $250 to $500.

Here’s a deeper background on the topic:

Unlike people who use their sent items folder as a giant bucket to keep track of things they sent to people, I prefer to BCC myself and then file the actual email I sent in the proper folder. Using  the sent folder in this way and then also separate folders (however many) confuses me in part because I’m a folder guy, not a pile guy when it comes to saving emails. As for the actual sent folder, I just delete everything in it.
Another advantage of the BCC vs. just checking the sent folder is a clearer signal, easier to track in my workflow, that an email actually went out than switching back to the sent folder to check. If I bcc myself on something that I actually don’t need to keep, I just delete it. Deleting emails is part of my normal workflow in the inbox; if that email were part of sent mail, it would just be extra garbage in the pile.
My sense is that my preference for folders is a probable  aftereffect of keeping legal client emails separated as much as possible to avoid inadvertent disclosures.
Certainly, better search tools, whether from gmail, Outlook, or Xobni, have improved the viability of the pile/bucket method. Fewer places to file things makes it faster to handle email, and better search reduces the need to separate things so much upfront. I’m slowly moving toward fewer buckets, and there are still some things that will have to be segregated. For example, I expect to slowly transition to this general framework:
  • Marketing/networking (all “keeping in touch” that doesn’t get put into folders for Pam, the boys, and my brother/sister-in-law/twin nieces).
  • ASD will be a new folder to collect autism-related items, separated into REED, Dylan, 30seats, and client-specific folders (same rationale as above).
  • Under a “Business” folder, I’ll track these:
  1. Client/project-specific folders
  2. Admin for everything that is business admin-related and doesn’t go elsewhere.
  • Nonprofit for my work on various charitable efforts (including Allegheny and other autism efforts)
  • Usernames to keep password emails all in one place. (Still seems easier to find that FedEx username without having to look through tracking notices.)
  • Z-Quicken for everything that’s an e-receipt, order confirmation, or payment (I use the “Z-” prefix to keep it at the bottom of the list).

Putting the list down on paper does make me feel happy about the impending reorganization. As for waiting-fors, actions, etc., we use the NetCentrics GTD plug-in for Outlook, so it creates a few extra folders. My biggest reason for not putting stuff in an “action” folder for emails that have to be checked is the sense, proven by my experience, that I will ignore that bucket and it just becomes another black hole. Things need to be handled, and my goal is to use the plugin to take emails with embedded tasks and turn them into actual tasks rather than move them to a different pile.

As I scan the inbox now, there are 187 messages, 2 unread. 1 is a furniture ad I’ll delete shortly and one is a BCC from me. There are probably 30 messages related to a blast I sent out yesterday related to Dylan’s CBS appearance. I’ll get caught up on those today and get back down to 100 by COB today. The rest that require more work: I recognize that I need to frame them into tasks, and I want that burden right in front of me, whether it’s things to read, track, or respond to. In many cases, for those items where I’m writing things such as this post, I prefer to just handle them by writing the post (or at least starting it and adding a link) rather than going through an intermediate step of creating a “BLOG xyz” task in Outlook. (I promise I’ll break that habit soon!)

In any event, I thought that this brief explanation will be helpful to some of you. My recommendation is that you consider attending one of People-OnTheGo’s “Total Organization” workshops by my colleague Pierre. The ToolsMap (™) is absolutely amazing, and even now, years later, I think it’s terrain completely untouched by anyone else in the productivity field.

Deflect “pre-distractions” before they steal focus

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Lifehacker recently highlighted a “tangent log” idea from another writer. I thought the concept sounded familiar and realized that my colleague Pierre has long included the “Add to to-do list” page as part of the journal he discusses in his “Accomplishing More with Less” workshops.

I’m slowly migrating toward using a paper journal (Moleskine Ruled Notebook Large, with a nice leather cover) as an adjunct my tablet and Blackberry Pearl. (I’ll skip the gory details on those for a later post on tools & tricks of the trade.) While I’ve learned in Outlook to simply create a quick task for the blips and beeps of everyday intrusions, Pierre’s model is to create a dedicated space on your working pages to make it simpler to note what’s starting to intrude on your brain and handle it enough to let it slip away without stealing your focus. I suppose David Allen would use a post-it (I recently read an interview where he was jotting on a post-it in the middle of answering a question. No link handy at all.)

What techniques have you used to handle pre-distractions so that they aren’t lost but don’t destroy your concentration?