Managing personal projects the Spinuzzi way

I recently received an email asking for suggestions about personal knowledge management. Since I like to reuse my efforts, here's a modified version of what I suggested.

Personal knowledge management is by nature an idiosyncratic thing, so my ideal ecosystem will be different from others. That being said, I came to the conclusion a while back that omnibus solutions don't work all that well: usually software will do one or two things exceptionally well but is mediocre at other tasks. So I've been gravitating toward mashup solutions that preserve interoperability as much as possible.

Also, I've gravitated toward solutions that leverage mobile tech as much as possible: services that offer mobile interfaces, services that take and send text messages. That's mostly because I'm not working consistently in an office, and I like to check the calendar and set tasks on the fly; your mileage may vary.

So here's the criteria I have for applications:

• Tags. If you're going to work across services, you need to be able to filter everything via the same set of tags (or labels, in Google's terms). Tags allow you to specify project, role, etc. and to bring the same shape to data across services. Currently there's no way to synch tags across services, so I do this by hand, and ruthlessly prune. With a little initial effort, you get unanimity in tags across services. When it works, you can pull everything relevant into the same view. You can also assign the same data to multiple tags, meaning multiple roles and projects -- something that early web-based PM software such as Basecamp wouldn't allow.
  
• Mobile interface. Mobile interface accessible through a mobile browser, SMS (texting) interface preferred.
• Stability. Got to have uptime; preferably an established brand that will not disappear tomorrow.
• Data portability. Don't want to get trapped in a particular service. When necessary, apps should be able to share. Open APIs.
  
• Developer community. I don't write applications, but it's nice that others do. So I tend to use services that are supported by large user communities that develop plugins and etc.
  

So here's what I currently do:

• Email: Google Mail. I use GMail's tags (aka labels) extensively, and I like that I can assign colors to tags so I can visually scan through messages as well as filtering by tag. You can set filters to autotag messages. GMail also has a great mobile application if you like to check email via phone.
  
• Tasks: Remember the Milk, rememberthemilk.com. RTM has a GMail plugin so that you can see email and tasks in the same window. It also has tags. The tags aren't color-coded, but you do get a tag cloud, which is nice for seeing which projects are more fully developed. Mobile interface too.
  
• Documents, outlines, notes: Google Docs. I collaborate extensively, so the sharing features are great. With Google Gears integration, you can work offline as well, although you might prefer authoring in Word and uploading. Tags are color-coded in the same way as GMail, and I use the same tags and colors across the two. I dump all texts into GDocs that aren't confidential -- notes, ideas, outlines, chapters. I also coordinate complex collaborations in a spreadsheet. An excellent search feature also allows search-as-you-type. Again, the big advantage is tagging, which allows you to filter by project, role, or whatever. Mobile interface too.
  
• Calendar: Google Calendar. Same as above, plus GCal accepts appointments and sends reminders through text messaging.
• Trip scheduling: I haven't used it yet, but I intend to use TripIt: <http://www.tripit.com/>. The big news is that when you get a trip itinerary emailed to you, you forward it to TripIt and it parses the email, creating a unified view that you can access via mobile and share with individuals or the world. TripIt accepts airport reservations, hotel reservations, etc. and offers granular control so that you don't share everything on the itinerary. If your acquaintances also use the service, TripIt will inform you when you and they are in the same city and for how long.
• Notes. I've been using my blog to think out loud about tech issues and to review books; the book reviews in particular become raw material for my articles and books. The blog's an important part of the ecosystem, but it's not attached to particular projects, so I don't tag blog entries the way I do everything else.
  

Depending on your work habits, you might check out other more unified solutions. There are several desktop solutions such as CircusPonies Notebook <http://www.circusponies.com/>, Curio <http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/>, and DevonThink <http://www.devon-technologies.com/>, but I've found them to be rather limiting.

Do you want to discuss your own information ecosystem? Leave your take in the comments.

DeskAway

Sahil Parikh, founder of DeskAway, wrote to me about his company's product:

a project collaboration service for small distributed teams. We are based out of Mumbai, India and while most people were concentrating on the outsourcing business, we decided to put our energy into building something scalable that people across the world could use. We are live with paying customers - mostly from US, UK, France and India. DeskAway's main goal is to eliminate guesswork  - when multiple people start working on multiple projects/activities together.

DeskAway follows the familiar Basecamp model for web-based project management, but it adds several features, some of which have become common in more recent web-based PM software and some of which I haven't seen.

• Contact sharing
• Team blog
• Robust time tracking
• Reporting and analytics for project summaries, project timelines, time tracking
• An issues summary for managing and tracking breakdowns
• Project wiki

I have not yet signed up for the free trial, but hope to do so soon. It looks like an interesting product, and I like the emphasis on reporting and analytics.

DeskAway - Project Management Software, Project Collaboration Software, Task & Issue Tracking Software

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RescueTime data suggests Microsoft is still on top

That's the upshot of this (unscientific) data mining from desktop app RescueTime, which sits on your desktop, monitors your application and website usage, and allows you to tag those uses for your own self-analysis. I've used RescueTime for a while now (after switching from Wakoopa), and am really interested in the results and the potential for large-scale characterization of volunteer participants' application use. Of course, this initial report is also a way for RescueTime to indicate how it could sell this characterized data to app developers and presumably advertisers.

Early Adopters Still Spend More Time With Microsoft Than Google, Facebook, or Skype. But For How Long?

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Unified Activity Management is brought to the consumer

Michael Muller had a terrific talk about UAM at SIGDOC 2007. It's nice to see this fascinating approach being brought to Lotus Connections. UAM has a surface resemblance to lifestreaming (e.g., Facebook's activity streams) but is focused on bottom-up characterization among teams.

The AppGap » » IBM Lotus Connections - A Video on Activity-based Computing: News, views, and reviews of Work 2.0 tools, apps and practices

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Kinds of Twitter messages

ReadWriteWeb teamed up with Summize, a Twitter search engine, to characterize Twitter messages (tweets). From a scholarly point of view, this makes Twitter into a vast corpus. Here's the interesting news:

What we found is that there are three main types of conversations going on. First, there are status updates of every day occurrences such as, "getting coffee," "check out this post on X," "going to sleep," or other mundane life things. Second, there are short term memes where many people talk about some event before, during, or after it. These conversations are usually short lived -- ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. For example a TV show like "Lost" will have some buzz, before, during, and for a short time after the show airs, but will drop out of the stream very quickly. We saw that happen with "LSD" when the drug's creator Albert Hoffman died last week. The final type of discussion we see on Twitter, are long term memes. These are topics of interest that people talk about for days, weeks, or even months. Politics or new video games are great examples of these longer term discussions happening on the platform.

What People Say When They Tweet - ReadWriteWeb

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The question that political strategists need to begin asking

On TechPresident:

A Washington State state delegate named Suzi LeVine, looking for an easy way to organize her state’s Obama delegates, turned to free wiki service Wetpaint, which helped her quickly build the Barack Obama Delegates site. This is one of those sites that serve such an obvious function that we wonder how the delegates could live without it. So why haven’t supporters of the other candidates done anything similar?

techPresident – Obama Delegates Learn To Self-Organize

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Cellphone spam

Not a bad idea when built into the service and sharply targeted, as in Blyk; awful when broadcasted across phones that do not have unlimited texting plans. Frankly, this seems really boneheaded on the spammers' part: how many people will be eager to buy a product after having to pay for an unsolicited ad? Unfortunately, the result will probably be telecomms implementing overaggressive spam filters to avoid customer claims against them:

Now some consumers, like Ms. Lightfoot, are monitoring their cellphones more aggressively for unwanted messages and, in some cases, demanding refunds. Computer security companies have developed products to help fight mobile spam. And AT&T, Verizon and others are making it easier for customers to block unsolicited messages and keep spammers at bay.

Spam Moves to Cellphones and Gets More Invasive - New York Times

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Overlaying real world and game

I had thought of this sort of concept a while back, but it's interesting to see it being applied:

Using an iPhone or Google Android cell phone, Parallel Kingdom knows of a users physical location enabling a virtual character to move around in that area of the virtual world. Users can attack, trade, or mingle with people around them, and can pick on friends, build kingdoms, go on raids, wage war, or establish economic empires.

Parallel Kingdom: Role Playing Via iPhone or Android With Location Mashup

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filtering social media

An initial proposal for bringing some discernible shape to the streams being generated by social networking and social media tools.

Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media - ReadWriteWeb

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The Next Right

Patrick Ruffini, who has been blogging at his own site and at PrezVid, announces a new joint venture called The New Right. It's meant to spark a netroots movement for the right to counterbalance the established movement on the left. Ruffini explains:

Part of the problem is structural. When the conservative blogosphere first emerged, we were in the midst of a political upswing, with back-to-back-to-back victories in 2000, 2002, and 2004. Political activism wasn’t going to be a comparative advantage for the right online. Most were content just being pundits or media critics. This trend was reinforced by the blogosphere’s success in scalping Dan Rather, part of a series of new media-driven events that arguably changed the trajectory of the 2004 election.

Ever since then, a radically different set of circumstances has dominated our politics. It’s one that requires a substantially different response — one that requires us to stop being pundits and start being change agents.

Put simply, the party, and in many cases, the movement, has lost its moorings. Earmarks exploded ten-fold, and it wasn’t under a Democratic Congress. In this winter’s primary, we saw the once mighty fiscal-social-national conservative coalition turned in on itself, with economic conservatives pitted against social conservatives. And too many of the “experts” in the Presidential campaigns this cycle failed to modernize the way the party does business, clinging to the old top-down rostrums of direct mail and fundraising-by-cocktail-party in an increasingly networked and crowdsourced world.

It’s no wonder that Joe Conservative outside the Beltway feels that none of his self appointed “leaders” are listening to him. He looks to Washington and sees a leadership class that is too often arrogant, timid, divided, and technologically behind the curve. It’s no wonder why this year more than most his wallet has been sealed shut when it comes to supporting Republican candidates — even the good ones. 

Ruffini really gets these tech changes in political organization, strategy, and analysis, and it should be interesting seeing how he applies his knowledge in the new venture, no matter what your politics.

Patrick Ruffini :: Introducing The Next Right

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Work smarter, not harder

An argument for firing workaholics. Bottom line: no virtue in working hard if you can't prioritize, can't get things done, and inadvertently cause the crises you solve. 37Signals diagnoses workaholism as a symptom of perfectionism, and I think that's true, but it also results from getting locked into a tactical, reactive stance.

I should link this from my syllabus, since I regularly tell my students they are graded on results rather than effort.

Workaholics fixate on inconsequential details - (37signals)

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iWAC 2008 presentation - "Learning to Cross Boundaries"

You're coming to iWAC 2008 in Austin, right? Here's my slides. Some are similar to the ones I used in Santa Barbara this February, but the emphasis is on horizontal and vertical learning this time.

A rare story: China outsources manufacturing to US

LA Times, via BoingBoing. A (rare) story about a Chinese businessman who has invested $10m in a South Carolina  printing-plate factory:

His main aim is to tap the large American market, but when his finance staff penciled out the costs, he was stunned to learn how they compared with those in China.

Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg -- less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants. U.S. electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn't have to put up with frequent blackouts.

About the only major thing that's more expensive in Spartanburg is labor. Liu is looking to offer $12 to $13 an hour there, versus about $2 an hour in Dongguan, not including room and board. But Liu expects to offset some of the higher labor costs with a payroll tax credit of $1,500 per employee from South Carolina.

I wouldn't take this as a larger trend, but it does point to some of the (short-term) advantages the US still has in the manufacturing realm, particularly a reliable public infrastructure.

Chinese firms bargain hunting in U.S. - Los Angeles Times

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Conjunctured signs a lease

I blogged about Conjunctured a while back because the concept was interesting to me. Conjunctured is a "co-company" in which independent freelancers "come together to collaborate on the projects they feel most passionate about." As I said in that earlier post, this org structure sounds a lot like Zuboff and Maxmin's "federations," but even less hierarchical.

Conjunctured has now leased a coworking space, which is great. But what stopped me was this:

We were excited about being a part of such a cool community, both in 501 and in east Austin (the city’s fastest growing part of town). Here are some shots of the space we were tweeting about here, there andeverywhere Tuesday afternoon.

After soliciting feedback from potential coworkers via Twitter DMs, emailing people who have filled out our membership questionnaire and making some select phone calls to loved ones and advisors, we decided to bite the bullet, throw down a deposit and sign a one-year lease.

It makes sense that a distributed co-company would use such distributed avenues. Twitter in particular.

Conjunctured » Blog Archive » Scouring the city for a space.

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Microsoft possibly targeting Facebook?

Yesterday I basically opined that Facebook is bloatware and might be vulnerable to the lightweight, single-function, interoperable applications that are currently colonizing it via activity streams. Today Microsoft's bankers are rumored to be nosing around Facebook. Somehow this makes sense.

Potential Microsoft Move Leaked

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GDocs now allows CSS for document styling

A big step toward Word-level formatting. Of course, you have to know CSS in order to take advantage of it. My guess is that this step is transitional, and a point-and-click style editor will wend its way down eventually.

Google Docs: Style Your Google Docs with CSS

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Twitter Blocks

I mentioned that tools such as Twitter need some sort of aggregated view. I wasn't really expecting Twitter Blocks, and it doesn't really get the job done, but it is fascinating. Thanks to my spotter for passing this on.

Reading :: Quests

Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives
By Jeff Howard

Jeff Howard, an alum of the Computer Writing and Research Lab, recently published this interesting and unusual book that brings together game and narrative, gaming and literature, design and criticism. It aims to reach several different audiences, including digital media theorists and game designers, but in many places it works the hardest at reaching instructors who want to incorporate videogame design into their literature classes.

If you're thinking this is a fairly narrow audience, you're right. And at some points, the book has a hard time maintaining its balance, switching from inside baseball on lit crit to code snippets to discussions of the Aurora Toolset. It can be dizzying.

But the book does achieve its purpose: it draws direct analogies between literary quests and game quests, demonstrating how quests must be implemented differently in the different fiction environments, and discussing how to make that transformation in ways that lead to better games and better interpretations of the literary texts. And although the switches between environments can be dizzying, Howard manages to make things look easy. His low-key writing style and chapter organization help us to know when we're on familiar territory and his analogies help us across unfamiliar territory.

Even though the book is pitched at these specific audiences, you might pick it up if you have a background in one area (computer-assisted instruction, literature, game theory) and want to see how the other areas can help you out. It's an unusual book, but an illuminating one within these areas.

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Ambient intimacy; thoughts on Facebook's future

Jeff Jarvis meditates on the term, linking to Leise Reichelt. The notion has been at the top of my mind lately, as I've been ramping up my set of Twitter friends and checking my Facebook via mobile phone.

As Jarvis and Reichelt both argue, the (life)streams of updates we get from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. allow us to keep up with each others' moods, activities, and interconnections in ways rather different from face-to-face contact, email, written letters, or phone calls. That doesn't necessarily mean better, but certainly different. Like Jarvis, I've reconnected with friends and former students who would not be on my radar otherwise. I've also found opportunities to network and think through shared problems.

I find to my surprise that my media hierarchy is tilting sharply toward Twitter. Now I check it before my RSS reader: some of the people I follow on Twitter can be counted on to post the big tech headlines. For a small circle of friends, I receive their updates via SMS, allowing me to anticipate their day and text them condolences or congratulations. We arranged an impromptu game of Mario Kart online yesterday via Twitter -- another killer app that had not occurred to me. And Twitter's direct messaging function allows me to text people without knowing their mobile numbers as well as archive interactions.

The mobile integration is critical here, since (a) I am on the go so much; (b) unlike my computer, I own my phone; it is a more private space; (c) SMS takes so much less bandwidth and is so much less obtrusive.

Okay, so what does this mean for Facebook? Here's the thing: Facebook is to Twitter what Emacs is to the Unix | operator. Facebook has attempted to become a platform in its own right, a place where you can run an  unlimited number of apps and extensions that take advantage of its network effects. Twitter focuses on doing one thing well, with stripped down functionality. It's open API allows it to take in and push out text along a variety of paths (it's how I update my tasks in Remember the Milk, for example).

I recently thought that Facebook's approach made a lot of sense: you supply a platform, you lock people in with network effects. BUT -- people follow my Twitter updates through Facebook's activity stream (via FriendFeed). So what happens over a short period is that Twitter colonizes Facebook, exploiting its network effects. People are setting up Twitter to update their Facebook status. And using Twitter rather than Facebook to direct-message each other. And those apps that you can access through Facebook can generally be accessed through other services too. At some point -- and I have reached that point -- Facebook becomes a dispensible middleman. FriendFeed becomes unobtrusive connective tissue for one's many web services, Twitter becomes the preferred communicative medium.

All this suddenly makes me wonder whether Google's loss of high-profile executives to Facebook is a matter of getting the wrong people off the bus. If Facebook becomes Emacs, it's going to become too restrictive for many users, and Facebook's threatening ad revenue growth is not going to be sustainable. Meanwhile, targeted mobile ads show surprising strength, and Google has a much more realized mobile ad strategy right now. Ask me what I think in a month or two.

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Ambient intimacy

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BlykWatch

In response to my earlier post on Blyk, Ricky sends me a link to his weekly BlykWatch. Fascinating. If you want to know what ad-supported mobile might look like, here it is. And if you wonder how people might react to the ads, well, let's just say that I'm sure that different demographics will respond differently.

SMS Text News » BlykWatch

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Blyk experience suggests ad-supported mobile phones are more than viable

Meant to blog about this last week:

Blyk announced last week that they had reached the 100,000 subscriber level in the UK. For those who do not read our blog regularly, Blyk is the radical UK youth-oriented mobile service provider, who offer free calls and free SMS text messages, to youth users (absolute age limit 16-24, membership by invitation only) in exchange of receiving up to 6 mobile advertisements per day.

Not only do subscribers tolerate the ads, they have reportedly asked for more of them. Response rates are 29%, which is incredible for advertising.

So I've been thinking about this. Would I enter into this sort of bargain, in which I received free mobile service in exchange for six ads per day?

On the one hand, I'm already seeing ads through the mobile web interface. They're not impairing me. And I already receive a lot of text messages via Twitter, GCalendar, etc., so I don't think it would take much cognitive overhead to process them. Six messages a day doesn't seem like a lot to process at any rate, certainly compared to a hefty monthly phone bill.

On the other hand, where does Blyk get the marketing information? I assume that with response rates that high, ads are highly targeted. Would I need to fill out a detailed questionnaire in advance? To what extent would my communications and choices be monitored? I'm sure this information is available; I'd need to go over it with a fine-toothed comb before committing to such a service.

At any rate, I'm only able to speculate at this point: Blyk is only in the UK right now, and I'm way outside the target range of 16-24. But it's a model to watch.

Communities Dominate Brands: Blyk hits target 5 months early, 100,000 youth members VERY happy with mobile ads

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Why You Should Be Lifestreaming

Mark Krynsky argues for lifestreaming. This struck me: "I now primarily subscribe to people instead of RSS feeds." Which makes me think of the fact that mobile phones allow me to call people instead of locations.

Why You Should Be Lifestreaming | Lifestream Blog

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Will Streaming Office Kill Google Apps?

That's Randall C. Kennedy's prediction. Streaming Office is the full MS Office suite, delivered over the Internet as a subscription-based service. He says:

Faced with a decision between a watered-down, limited, web-dependent pseudo-suite and the full power and richness of Microsoft Office, users will flock to the Microsoft camp - especially if the company prices a "pay as you go" Office aggressively. And then it will be "game over" for Google Apps and its ilk.

"Pay"?

Enterprise Desktop | Randall C. Kennedy | InfoWorld | Streaming Office: Death knell for Google Apps? | May 1, 2008 11:23 AM | Randall Kennedy

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Mild tech-oriented body mods

Nothing complicated, we're just talking about fingernails.

Why should Motorola's handset unit's new CEO come from outside the US?

Because the US mobile phone market has made such dismal decisions. An analogy:

So what is wrong? American executives in telecoms do not see the future, they are stuck in the past. Imagine being a car executive thirty years ago, but running a car factory in the Soviet Union. That is not where you could learn about modern methods of just-in-time manufacturing and advanced customer segmentation and microchips and electronics into car design. A car executive in Japan or perhaps Detroit could be competent to head a new car factory, but not one from the backwards markets, such as the former Soviet Union.

Communities Dominate Brands: On Search for Moto CEO, or for that first day to-do list

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"I was pleased I wasn't being mortarboarded in Guantanamo..."

An odd quote from a journalist taken captive in Iraq. Apparently he meant "waterboarded." Our college students seem to enjoy being mortarboarded.

Social Media Consumption Workflows

Louis Gray publicizes his social media consumption workflow. An interesting idea, and I think it might also be useful as a minor assignment if you're teaching that sort of class.

But it might also be useful for people to publicize their own workflows for their friends. I find that many people assume the end-all-be-all contact point is email, and for that reason I tend to check it first and frequently. But I'm finding that I privilege SMS and increasingly channels such as Twitter lately. The most important aspect of my social media consumption, however, is mobile access. YMMV.

louisgray.com: My Social Media Consumption Workflow

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Get them collaborating intelligently in the classroom

In professional writing classes, we often have students collaborate on group projects. As I've written elsewhere, I think we need to step up the game -- including more collaboration software and providing a project management framework for strategically organizing and executing group projects. (See my presentation on the topic.)

Along these lines, Shiv Singh at The App Gap runs through the latest collaboration stats from Businessweek. He points out that according to the survey, "82% of white-collar workers partner with co-workers. That number appears low." And he asks:

Here’s my question - which of these segments are most likely to use online tools to collaborate? And how frequently does that group collaborate? My sense is that those that are motivated by learning use the online tools and collaborate the most and they probably also get ahead by collaborating more without realizing it .

Right, and those collaborative online tools are increasing opportunities for cross-organizational, contractor-subcontractor and provider-client collaboration as well. At the higher ed level, we need to account for those changes and provide more of a structural template for supporting and modeling collaboration.

The AppGap » White-collar workers collaborate more than ever: News, views, and reviews of Work 2.0 tools, apps and practices

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Cognitive capacity?

Clay Shirky has an intriguing thesis that sitcoms arose to absorb a surplus of cognitive capacity, a surplus that was made possible through 20th century automation (and, one might add, shorter working weeks and the move away from subsistence agriculture). We had more time and opportunity to think, and sitcoms were one way to absorb that time.

Shirky estimates -- through what looks to me like dodgy math, but it's a popular book, not an academic one -- that if we take Wikipedia as a unit representing 100 million hours of human thought, then television watching represents 2000 Wikipedias a year.

And he argues:

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

He might have a point. I watch perhaps three or four hours of TV a week, and it's Tivo'd so that I can skip the parts I don't care for (including commercials and any screen appearance by Ryan Seacrest). The time I would otherwise spend on TV goes to reading my RSS aggregator and blogging stories like this one, stories that eventually plug into my scholarly work. (Or doing Ashtanga, but let's set that aside.) This activity counts as recreation, but works out as intellectual labor returned to the larger scholarly community.

Similarly, we've seen an explosion in social networking and cooperative gaming, in which people abandon the TV to produce innumerable texts that build up their own personal archives (brands?) and connect with others. Add to that the more ephemeral but omnipresent phenomenon of texting and you get a lot of intellectual surplus used in productive ways (productive in the sense that people are constructing things rather than simply viewing them).

Death of the sitcom frees up 2,000 Wikipedias worth of cognitive capacity - Boing Boing

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A high-profile academic plagiarism case

Virginia Postrel writes a damning post about the apparent serial plagiarism by an English professor, James Twitchell, of her and others' work.

Plagiarism is an academic sin that probably seems harmless at the time of commission, yet destroys reputations. That's even true when the sin was committed as an undergraduate (Joe Biden) or accidentally, as the result of juggling too many sources without well distinguishing between them (Doris Kearns Goodwin).

And it's easy to accidentally appear to plagiarize: A few months ago, when going over some page proofs, I noticed that the copyeditor had taken some of my block quotes and put them into standard paragraph style. I'm glad that I caught the error, which could easily have resulted in a plagiarism charge (if people actually read my work widely).

But that does not seem to be the case with Twitchell's work, which not only closely paraphrases passages without attribution, but slightly modifies them to enter into faint dialogue with the original sources. The dialogue is not obvious when you read the passage, but becomes clear when you lay it beside the source. How much more productive the dialogue would be if it were open rather than hidden.

Sometimes when I talk about plagiarism to my students, I tell them: If professors catch you plagiarizing, we don't just think it's a character issue. We take it as an indicator that perhaps you're just not college material. There are several honorable and skilled professions out there that do not involve referencing and modifying others' intellectual work; if you have the urge to plagiarize, consider keeping your integrity and switching to one of those professions instead. Perhaps I should make that speech a standard part of my grad classes too.

Dynamist Blog: If You're Going to Steal My Prose, At Least Keep My Facts

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We need something instead of search

Too much data is now online for good search results.
Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point?

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Workstreaming, or the Facebook of Enterprise Management

My flagger pointed this out a couple of days ago but I haven't been able to blog it until now. Trampoline Systems' Sonar Dashboard is meant to marry workstreaming, social networking, and enterprise dashboards (well, the term "marry" doesn't work so well for combining three things, but whatever). It also tackles the chief problem with Web 2.0 solutions, which is that they are hard to scale because their information is hard to aggregate:

So at Web 2 Expo this week, Trampoline Systems, the UK-based enterprise startup, launched its new Sonar Dashboard tool designed to be a “Facebook for the enterprise”. This allows employees to create profiles, watch a news feed of colleagues’ activity and use a contacts list. Dashboard automatically tracks employees’ everyday work activity, such as email. Their Sonar Server product analyzes the social graph, information flows and expertise hidden within the company, allowing users to work out who in the company can help them, across departments and geographies. Sonar Dashboard makes the network searchable, and gives visibility to the right people via a simple visualization tool that maps the user’s social graph. Users can completely control what they share (the system automatically filters out blatantly personal material) and also lets them work out what they themselves are most preoccupied with. I haven’t seen a product like it so far and the visualization tools are pretty amazing.

Obviously there are some privacy concerns here, and one thing that struck me about the screen caps at the Sonar site was that it provides different views for peers and managers. But let's bracket that for now. The really interesting thing for me is the visualizations, which allow people to visualize their formal and informal social networks. There's a piece of the aggregation/summarization puzzle. But there are more pieces to find and fit.

The Enterprise Social Network, Auto-Generated And Visually Mapped

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Projjex -- another contender in the project management/collaboration space

Project management and collaboration tools seem to be coming closer together. This trend was kicked off with 37Signals' Basecamp, but seems to ramp up with each new iteration of web-based PM.

The latest example is Projjex, "an online collaborative workspace" that takes the project as the unit for collaboration. It manages tasks, documents (including all standard Office formats and PDFs), notes, meeting times, and time tracking in a single webspace. It also offers deep search that goes across tasks and through the actual text of your documents.

Unlike Basecamp, but like many Basecamp imitators, Projjex also offers tagging. It also promises mobile integration via text reminders and a mobile interface.

I have watched the Projjex demo but haven't taken it for the free test drive yet. Based on my quick review of the site and tutorial, I think it might be good for larger units that want a one-stop shop for internal collaboration as well as some client collaboration.

Projjex | Get it done

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Google's small business strategy

According to Google's public policy blog, "David Fischer, our VP for Global Online Sales and Operations, will testify before the U.S. House Small Business Committee to explain just how Google has become an engine of economic growth and opportunity for hundreds of thousands of small businesses." The testimony focuses on AdWords, but as I've noted elsewhere in this blog, Google's other apps (GMail, GCal, Docs) are also targeted to small businesses in an increasingly "co-opetive" environment. Tellingly, "David will highlight the fact that small business success stories like Regina's [a customer's] are a powerful testament to the importance of maintaining a free and open Internet."

Google Public Policy Blog: Creating opportunities for small business to thrive

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The Twitpitch

Even shorter than the elevator pitch. Brilliant. All of you who are on the job market, take note.

We've all heard of the elevator pitch: the brief overview of a product, service, or project that can be delivered in the time it takes to ride an elevator, usually around 30 seconds or so. Now here comes a new idea: the Twitpitch, and yes, it's just what you think - the same pitch narrowed down to 140 characters or less.

Twitpitch: The Elevator Pitch Hits Twitter - ReadWriteWeb

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Congratulations, Clancy!

Congratulations to Clancy Ratliffe on the birth of her son! He's beautiful, Clancy.

Precious Little Henry | CultureCat

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Come on, Android

Bring this concept app to market. I especially like the little 360-degree view indicator in the top right corner, which reminds me of Battlezone.

Enkin: navigation reinvented

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Google Docs + Google Gears -- preliminary impressions

I've been waiting for Google to roll out Docs + Gears integration because I want to see how the web app is extended to the client for offline access. Now I've been able to test it, some initial impressions:

• Editing existing docs seems fine. Big yellow message at top to let you know you're editing offline.
  
• Spreadsheets are view-only. (Mentioned in Help.)
  
• Presentations are greyed out. You can see them in the list, but you can't get to them. (Mentioned in Help.)
  
• Can insert comments in docs (great for offline grading).
• Cannot create new docs -- that's a real handicap, and I suppose you can leave a few blank docs hanging out there if you absolutely want to compose new things in GDocs. (Mentioned in Help.)
  
• Once you have edited a doc, in the docs list it says "Edited offline" next to it. Great.
• Can still view by doc type, by folder. Can still assign to folders and remove from folders.
  
• Can only print via "Printer-Friendly HTML."
• "More actions" only allows "Preview."
• Offline Help available but rudimentary.
• Can delete docs.
• Can sort docs.
  

Overall, this integration is not as great as I had hoped. The word processor works fine to edit existing docs, but since you can't create new ones, it's pretty limited. I guess you could have a few blank docs hanging out there just in case, but that seems like a bit of a hack.

On the other hand, GDocs is a good way for students to share their assignments, and I could insert comments even when offline. I also have several manuscripts to edit, so I doubt I would be at a loss for work during short periods.

I'll continue to road-test GDocs over the next few days. If you're doing the same, why don't you drop me a line or write your experience in the comments.

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Finally

GDocs has finally rolled out offline access to me. Took a long time, guys. I'll be playing with this over the next several days and will blog a report. 

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The mortgage crisis might negatively impact higher ed

Usually bad financial times result in more people going back to school. But that might be hard, since educational costs are rising -- and the characteristics of this crisis might make it much harder to obtain student loans.

Student Loans May Be Impacted by the Mortgage Crisis | Capital Gains and Games

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Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Labor ...

is apparently going to endorse Obama. That's not the part that amuses me. Here's how he's described in the New York News:

The endorsement in question is that of Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Labor and a friend of both the former president and his wife for four decades.

But the two actually had a date in college. How strange would it be for someone you had dated to endorse someone else?

Heilemann: Robert Reich to Endorse Obama -- Daily Intel -- New York News Blog -- New York Magazine

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Facebook apps for office/career use

The Social Web trawls through the offerings and finds tools for office software, to-do lists, project management, etc.

The best Facebook apps for business and career enhancement | The Social Web | ZDNet.com

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Web 2.0 was about sharing, Web 3.0 will be about filtering and aggregation

That's the upshot of this TechCrunch post. The examples are FriendFeed and Twitter. Basically, we need dashboards for these streaming tools.

Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise—And Twhirl Isn’t Helping

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Creating listservs for SMS

That's basically the idea of this startup. Seems like Twitter should have this capability. Something like this would be useful for rapidly organizing cohorts at events such as conferences.

If you are looking for a rapid and free way to send a text message to an entire group then txtmob has the solution you have been looking for. To get started, simply go to txtmob.com and register your email address along with your cell phone number and the carrier. Instantly, you will receive an SMS message from txt mob containing an authorization code that you must enter at txtmob.com to complete registration. After registering, you can either join existing groups or make your own. You and your co-workers could join together and send messages to the entire group either online or by sending a text message to “yourgroupsname@txtmob.com. This is most certainly the easiest and cheapest way of sending and receiving group messages available.

Update: Guy Kewney points to this post, but inaccurately attributes the last sentence of the above block quote to me. The block quote comes from the linked source and was probably submitted by the startup itself. I do not endorse the service, I just note the capability and the trend.

Txtmob.com - Send and Receive Group Text Messages | Visit Txtmob.com

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One of the 200

Andrew Sullivan links to the world's most unappealing music, created by conceptual artists in the 1990s based on polling data of the most unappealing features of music. I confess that I love this train wreck. But then again, I love Severed Heads' early work with musique concrete.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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Videos of paper prototyping

The Interaction Designer's Coffee Break points to a YouTube video of paper prototyping usability tests at Corel -- a great resource for those of us who teach the technique, despite some of the dated aspects of the video. What is really interesting, though, is that YouTube has a ton of "related videos" involving paper prototyping. Who knew?

Video of paper prototype usability tests - GUUUI

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Now here's a killer startup: ask philosophers questions

Web startups are difficult to monetize. Philosophy is certainly difficult to monetize. Let's put them together!

AskPhilosophers.org - Philosophy For Everyone | Visit AskPhilosophers.org

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The lessons of Bittergate are obvious

"Bittergate" -- the recent incident in which some of Barack Obama's off-the-record comments at a fundraiser were circulated via a blog -- yields lessons that should have been learned much earlier:

But Bittergate does serve as a key reminder of the Macaca Moment’s core communications lesson for 21st century campaigns:

Digital recording devices - video recorders, audio recorders, cell phone recorders -- are everywhere. All the time. They are small, discrete, often invisible – even when they are being used. And video and audio can be sent wirelessly from anywhere to anywhere, anytime – so that a comment made in San Francisco (or rural Virginia) may be instantly shown on national TV.

Combine (1) this rule of Digital Omnipresence with (2) the rules of Off-the-Record/On the Record (i.e. – nothing is ever truly, reliably, off-the-record), then you’ve got Bittergate.

techPresident – Bittergate's Digital Import

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Granular social networks

A short, intriguing post by Thomas Vander Wal about how social networks can be improved. He says:

What we have is partial likes in others and their interests and offerings. Our social tools have yet to grasp this and the few that do have only taken small steps to get there (I am rather impressed with Jaiku and their granular listening capability for their feed aggregation, which should be the starting point for all feed aggregators). Part of grasping the problem is a lack of quickly understanding the complexity, which leads to deconstructing and getting to two variables: 1) people (their identities online and their personas on various services) and 2) interests.

Explaining the Granular Social Network :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net

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Coverflow on the web

Led Zeppelin's website uses a Coverflow-like browser to allow you to browse their albums and DVDs. I'm not a fan of the Flash-only site, though.

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Why Salesforce + Google Apps won't work -- Zoho's perspective

Surprisingly evenhanded and provocative. In a nutshell, closed vs. open mindsets.

Zoho Blogs » Very Expensive + Affordable = Still Very Expensive

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Rapid prototyping -- paper or Fireworks?

My former student David Lee swears that Adobe Fireworks is a better prototyping platform than paper. (This pairing reminds me of the spate of Scandinavian articles on cooperative prototyping with Hypercard that we saw in the 1980s.) Do you have a preference? Why don't you drop by his blog and leave a comment.

Inventing Web 3.0: Rapid Prototyping pt2 - Paper vs. Fireworks

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A quote from the Obama flap and the blogger who reported it

Again via my flagger. Marc Cooper, who edits the blog on which Obama's controversial remarks about Pennsylvanians were recorded, discusses the ethics of citizen journalism in fundraisers. This part seems perceptive:

"Obama was indeed more loose-lipped than usual. He should be more careful in his choice of words when he is staring into so many video cams, no matter who is holding them.”

Right. Some are making noises to the effect that fund raisers are "off the record" and so citizen journalists should not report them. But conventions such as "off the record" only work when you can establish a stable relationship with a stable entity (such as the NYT) and enforce the convention by restricting access to that entity if it does not live up to the bargain. When every supporter can bring a videocamera and post the results, nothing is off the record.

Katharine Q. Seelye - On Line - The New York Times - Politics - Election 2008 - New York Times

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There are languages missing

Via my flagger, a meditation on how citizen journalism is reported in the established media. The case is that of the blogger who attended Sen. Obama's fundraiser and heard his controversial characterization of rural Pennsylvanians. But the broader issue is one that will be hashed out quite regularly going forward, I think. Who broke the story -- a newspaper, a special interest group, a campaign staffer? Or did it just come from nowhere, the way Tim Russert portrayed it?

We're in uncharted territory here. There are languages missing. People get mad when they don't know what to call things. So much so that Mike Allen of the Politico in 12 reasons 'bitter' is bad for Obama couldn't even find the word "website" to describe the Huffington Post, which became in his tortured rendering, "a liberally oriented organization that was Obama's outlet of choice when he wanted to release a personal statement distancing himself from some comments by the Rev. Wright." Sounds like a shadowy 527 group.

Jay Rosen: The Uncharted: From Off The Bus to Meet the Press - Off The Bus on The Huffington Post

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Naked federations

I came across Conjunctured, an Austin company, by following a few links:

We help organizations have conversations online.

Conjunctured leverages the power of collaboration and community. We are inspired by the existing concept of coworking and call ourselves a “co-company” – it’s a term we came up with that describes how the company is structured – we don’t employ people. Instead, a team of independent freelancers, all specialists in their own areas, come together to collaborate on the projects they feel most passionate about.

What interests me is that the described structure sounds a bit like what Zuboff and Maxmin call a "federation," a group of independent professionals or contractors who come together for a project, then disband at the end of it. Conjunctured sounds perhaps a bit more stable than that, but it forefronts the distributed model of work rather than hiding it, as most federations do.
Conjunctured » Howdy

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Anthropology, design, and cellphones in the NYT

My flagger points me to this article on one of Nokia's design researchers, Jan Chipchase, who travels the world examining how people use their mobile phones. He theorizes their impact and imagines how to design them to better fit their cultural and physical environments.

Being the NYT, the story does not link to his website.

Cellphones - Third World and Developing Nations - Poverty - Technology - New York Times

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Nomadism

The Economist has an article on digital nomads. Commentary at Smart Mobs and Communities Dominate Brands.

Nomads at last | Economist.com

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Getting a raise in academia

All you have to do, apparently, is switch jobs. Which, of course, generally means moving to a different region. Salary compression and salary inversion mean that the later you are hired, the more you proportionally make.

On the other hand, don't cry too hard for us -- academia is the last bastion of lifelong employment thanks to tenure.

The Seniority Pay Cut :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs

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I think I will skip American Idol tonight

'American Idol' to get a dose of US campaign 2008

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Redesigning MySpace in the browser

When I heard about Stylish, the Firefox extension that allows you to download and create personal themes for frequently used websites, I knew that it was made for websites such as MySpace. The MySpace default is cluttered and confusing, and although many people have used LoveMyFlash and similar themes, many haven't -- making MySpace a real hit-or-miss user experience.

So I installed one Stylish theme yesterday and now every page on MySpace appears in that theme. It's a nice end to the arc that began with Creating Killer Web Sites and other late-nineties web design books that espoused the philosophy that web designers should have absolute control over the user experence. Back then, I opposed that philosophy because it seemed opposite to the strengths of open-standards HTML. Now, it's nice to see that those design choices can be simply routed around in sophisticated ways at the client itself.
Myspace - Black/Gray | userstyles.org

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iPhone-based social networking

I link to TechCrunch a lot, partially because Michael Arrington and his crew really get how emerging technologies are changing communication in social and workplace contexts. Today's post describes an upcoming iPhone-specific social network that allows you to detect other nearby network members and friend them in person:

The startup behind the new application won’t let me disclose their name yet. But the application is awesome. It shows you everyone around you who has it installed on an iPhone (default privacy is set to off, but can be changed). Users can scroll through nearby users, and set filters for men, women or age ranges. If you find someone interesting you can pull up their profile and ping them. If they respond you can start a chat, on the phone or in person. Of course, they can also choose to block you.

Location is based on the triangulation feature of the iPhone, which is accurate enough to get this going. And the startup thinks they’ve found a way around the fact that third party iPhone applications can’t run in the background (meaning you’d have to have the application open, and not use any other iPhone features, to run the social network and see others). They explained the work around in general terms to me, but asked that it remain confidential for now.

iPhones and similar smart phones are increasingly important, and they're at hand all the time. I got to see some relatives this weekend who are not particularly tech-savvy, but who have iPhones and love them -- they've become texting, emailing, and browsing fiends. A workable social network whose primary platform is the iPhone would have a decent chance of taking hold with them.

I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day

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More on Google Apps Engine

Bad news for ops departments and open source?

In the same way that Google Apps (and Mac OS X) have enabled people to run without IT departments, Google App Engine is going to let them go big without an ops department. With the current imposed limits I can't prove this theory at Mochi Media, since everything we do is beyond the scale of their current quotas, but maybe I'll allocate some of my "infinite spare time" to ditch this Wordpress crap and try it out for my blog while they sort that out :)

The minus is that this project is actually probably pretty horrible for open source. Yahoo and the rest of the Hadoop team have their work cut out in making that stack competitive with this. If they don't, Google is going to own scale for a while. While MySQL and PostgreSQL still have some years left in them as people learn how to write scalable apps, I can't see that model lasting very long now that you don't have to be in Google's employ to use better solutions to the data problem.

from __future__ import * » Google App Engine - Changes Everything

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Google App Engine

Essentially, infrastructure on which you build your own web apps. As ReadWriteWeb says:

Computing infrastructure is rapidly turning into a utility and Google App Engine is yet another example of this.

Google: Cloud Control to Major Tom - ReadWriteWeb

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Bring it on

The promise of a superfast internet:

Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.

Coming soon: superfast internet - Times Online

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The John Slatin Accessibility Fund

In honor of our late colleague. Please consider contributing time or money.

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project matches accessibility experts with companies that would like a brief review of their site for accessibility. In return, the site owner is asked to contribute a minimum of $500 to The John Slatin Fund. The John Slatin Fund was established to help John’s beloved Anna offset the medical expenses incurred during John’s long illness. The goal of this project is to raise $25,000 for that purpose. Learn about the project and sign up at knowbility.org/business/john-slatin

oz: the blog of glenda sims ( the goodwitch) » The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project

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Helter Skelter

The Mike Gravel version. Just ... wow.

Embedded Video

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The truth about 9/11

9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says

Reminder: JBTC special issue on social software

Manuscripts for my JBTC special issue on social software are due May 1. If you've been polishing that manuscript, make sure to get it to me by then -- and if you'd like to discuss it with me beforehand, please do!

I'm not an addict, it's part of my health regimen

BBC NEWS | Health | Daily caffeine 'protects brain'

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Barely a website at all

That's the description of the new website for Modernista, a general-market ad agency. Like Ron Paul's website, it barely exists:

Upon punching in the URL, a small navigation bar appears, redirecting visitors to a host of the best-in-class Web 2.0 services. Click on the agency's "about" section, and you're taken to its Wikipedia entry; "work" displays a TV reel via YouTube, print examples via Flickr and web executions on Del.icio.us. Agency news is delivered through Google News, and a "contact" section lets users get in touch via AIM or Skype.

In some ways this decision is too clever by half, trying to prove that Modernista "gets" Web 2.0 and consequently giving up the control over branding that one would expect from an ad agency. But on the other hand, it also makes sense from the standpoint of cutting costs and boosting user experience:

"The thing about the web these days is there's all these great tools out there, you're just not going to be able to come up with a better way to share photos than Flickr or a better way to build community than Facebook," so it's wise to tap into what's already out there rather than build from scratch, said David-Michel Davies, executive director of the Webby Awards, which each year honors excellence on the Internet. "They're putting their best foot forward in saying we get Web 2.0," Mr. Davies said.

I'm flagging this article partially because it points to decisions we've been making at the academic level, particularly in the CWRL, for some time. At TTU, I built the English department website as a web app in ASP (not a great idea, since I'm not a programmer and the site had sustainability issues). When I took over as CWRL director, we implemented an open-source content management system, Drupal, to take over most issues. But I began thinking in the direction Modernista has taken, and currently our instructors take advantage of a lot of sites such as Flickr, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc. on an ad hoc basis. But our core site remains in Drupal, where we can (a) back it up easily, (b) keep it within accessibility guidelines, (c) guarantee uptime, (d) control branding, and (e) secure data.

Does that choice make sense for other organizations or individuals? Probably less and less. My personal site is at <http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/spinuzzi>, but I barely touch it; most of my activity and "branding" is in FriendFeed, Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. The personal site becomes more and more vestigial. As we continue to move away from large hierarchical organizations and toward temporary federations, it makes more sense to organize our professional presences in this way as well.

Modernista Makes a Break With the Past - Advertising Age - Digital

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Amazon expands into SMS

Now you can text Amazon with price comparisons in the store -- and follow through by buying your selections. By doing this, Amazon effectively reaches a much broader customer base, and reaches them anywhere. Brilliant.

Amazon Launches SMS Buying Service

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Slow-moving cloud

Google Docs is finally rolling out limited offline access.

Official Google Docs Blog: Bringing the cloud with you

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So there is a name for this terrible fear that grips me

Nomophobia is the fear of being out of mobile phone contact - and it's the plague of our 24/7 age| News | This is London

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iPhone as lifestyle companion -- sounds really really familiar

Via TechMeme, UnwiredView.com examines recent Apple patent applications and discovers clues that the iPhone might be positioned as a "lifestyle companion":

Turns out, that Apple is thinking how to make an iPhone into a full “Lifestyle companion” device, that can monitor your health condition, act as a fitness trainer and diet consultant, suggest daily routines dependent on your occupation and personal health hazards, and even shape your shopping habits.

And all this on the same familiar iPhone platform .

The key here is modular approach, incorporation of multiple sensors in the iPhone itself, it’s accessories and specialized software and content available through the iTunes.

Let's extend this a bit. You take a friendly mobile computing and communications platform, modularly add sensors, and use it to continuously monitor status in a variety of ways. You can (theoretically) stream this information to a repository so that you can review aggregated metrics or zoom in to see patterns and correlations at certain points. ("Seems like I feel lousy every spring at this time. I wonder if that correlates with high mold count?" "Do I eat less or more when I exercise regularly?") You can (theoretically) make this information available to your health care providers, your diet and exercise buddies, your Facebook friends, your biographer.

It starts to sound a lot like the MyLifeBits project that Microsoft has been running the last several years. Except that Apple has perhaps figured out how to make it marketable and specifically useful to average consumers.

iPhone. Your Lifestyle Companion » Unwired View

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Peter Merholz on Alan Cooper

Peter Merholz's analysis of Alan Cooper's Interaction08 keynote is really interesting and valuable, particularly because it sounds like the academic-industry divide we often discuss in professional communication. My emphasis:

Alan makes a lot of good points in his talk (many of which we make at Adaptive Path, such as how thoughtful design allowed iPod and Palm to beat predecessors, the value of distinguishing between design engineering and production engineering, and the value of the Quick Win), but he lost me when he advocated ignoring the business folks because they simply won’t get it. Not just “don’t” get it, but “won’t” get it. He seems to think that business folks are wired in such a way that they can’t handle the post-industrial economy. He also believes that attempts to quantify business value of post-industrial work is a fool’s errand.

He basically told the audience what they want to hear, but not what they need to hear.

peterme.com :: Alan Cooper Told The Audience What They Wanted To Hear, Not What They Needed To Hear

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The debate continues

Iraqi astronomer goes on TV to explain why Earth is flat - Boing Boing

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What Google Apps need

A way to sync labels across applications: Gmail, GDocs, and perhaps Blogger. And maybe labels for calendar items (rather than Google's preferred way, which is to create separate calendars). That would go a long way toward improving its project management support.

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Google Docs looking more like older versions of MS Word

If this trend continues, I expect it to start to look like WordPerfect 6 soon. Maybe we will be able to see the underlying HTML by pressing alt-F3.

Official Google Docs Blog: New Toolbar and Menus

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Clinton, snipers, YouTube

CDB dissects the current snipers-in-Bosnia story that is dogging Hillary Clinton. Like CDB, I don't take sides on the campaign. The more important and interesting question is how distributed tech will continue to disrupt campaigns and their attempts to build ethos.

Communities Dominate Brands: Truth police catch up with Hillary Clinton's Bosnia sniper story

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Archiving text messages

They're currently ephemeral, but at least one service aims to change that:

As more important communications take place over SMS, SMS apps will inevitably need to improve text management and desktop backup. In the meantime, Treasuremytext fills the gap nicely.

Yes, you should be able to get to your text message archives the way you do your email. Data storage is cheap.
SMS: Archive Your Text Messages with Treasuremytext

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The Lifestreaming Backlash

Via John Jones' friendfeed, an article on how we are (supposedly) drowning in activity stream data. The comments are interesting too.

My take: Lifestreaming apps need filters and visualization tools to produce aggregate views. Those tools should be able to summarize history and make comparisons across streams (users/personas).

The Lifestreaming Backlash - ReadWriteWeb

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Phone bill turns into social network

This sounds fascinating and useful, though I am not willing to give up my Sprint login for it. Why don't telecomm companies do something like this themselves?

Skydeck Helps You Manage The Social Network Locked In Your Phone (500 Invites For Private Beta)

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Email drops another notch on the communication hierarchy

2,433 Unread Emails Is An Opportunity For An Entrepreneur

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Reading :: The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing
by Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, Michael LeBoeuf

Professors like to believe that since we know a lot about one subject, we know a lot about other subjects too. Obviously that's not so. There's nothing more humbling than realizing that you're way, way over your head in a different area of your life, and at those times, it's a relief to find a clearly written guide to help you through those difficult concepts that everyone else seems to understand.

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing is one case in point. Investments confuse me. But the authors manage to lay out the basics of investing and a particular investment philosophy in clear, understandable terms that even a rhetoric professor can follow. The book is named after the authors' investment mentor, Vanguard founder John C. Bogle, who pioneered the no-load mutual fund and introduced the first index fund. Bogle's philosophy is fairly simple: rather than trying to beat the market and trust in active managers, buy mutual funds that represent the market index. The markets tend to rise over time, and active funds have trouble beating the market in the long run, so investors in indexed funds tend to come out ahead -- and they don't have to pay steep management fees.

The book also has a lot of advice that makes intuitive sense. Spend less than you make. It's not how much you make, it's how much you keep. Stay out of debt. Pay yourself first. Buy used items, including clothing and cars (this from three authors who are millionaires). Commit future pay increases to investing. Diversify, making low-cost indexed mutual funds your primary investment. Establish a stock-bond-cash allocation and stick with it, rebalancing every 18 months even when your stocks are going through the roof. Get a Roth IRA as soon as you can and let the magic of compound interest work. Put windfall funds away for six months before touching them so that the excitement wears off. Write down your major financial goals on one piece of paper.

Reading this book hasn't made me an investing expert. But it has given me some solid advice and some basic tools for managing my small investments, and some confidence in how to proceed. Check it out.

Google Spreadsheets matures more

And continues to constitute a threat to SurveyMonkey, among others.

SXSW CMS panel roundup

I wasn't there, but Jim Brown was.