Mar 2005, 46 entries

Here are a few things that I’ve learned that I’m actually happier to live without:

• car
• television
• video games
• toilet paper roll holder thing
• towel rack
• romance
• cats
• books
• dvds
• cds
• life insurance
• toaster, printer, blender
• things hanging on the wall
• a single purpose
• land line
• reservations, tickets
• things on the shelves
• shelves
• sentimental items

And a few things that I have but which maybe I should get rid of at some point:

• washing machine, dryer
• oven, microwave
• unused clothes like suits, skiing gear, camping stuff

And finally, some things which I actually do think make me happy to have around:

• cell phone
• guitar
• bike
• plants
• gin
• comfy bed
• walk to work

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

A few others: bluishorange, heather, and more. Make yours here.

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

I didn’t take any notes because I don’t necessarily need to remember the details. I want the details to be absorbed by the swamp of my mind and dissolved into their common parts and slowly condensed on the swamp floor as a thin film covering all the shellfish.

Tags

The most remarkable thing about tags is that people like tagging things. In the history of metadata, this is extremely rare and we should not take them for granted. It is a miraculous event sort of. It’s as if people all of a sudden started having shiny coins falling out of their pockets for no reason at all. Now, people have been trying to generate shiny coins for millennia but it has always seemed to be somewhat of a drag. Wow, shiny coins falling out of my pockets, all of a sudden, and I still feel happy and refreshed! Well, for years we’ve been thinking about what to do with shiny coins and have all sorts of hopes and dreams about how we want them to learn how to play the flute and get a scholarship to Harvard, but now that we have them that doesn’t seem to be what the coins want to do. Same with tags, we have always wanted this metadata to serve as a replacement of tedious ontologies and yet while they show some prodigal talent for these purposes they just don’t seem to want to practice extra hard on the weekends in order to be semantically unambiguous and to reliably capture all the nuances of multidimensional classification.

• people tag things for many different reasons

• other people want to use tags as a replacement for ontologies

• these other people seem to assume that the first people are tagging things in rational and thoughtful ways

• these (other) people are mistaken

We should treat tags like happy accidents that sometimes appear rational, and which we can draw interesting assumptions out of that will sometimes match our desired outcomes. We should analyze them the same way we analyze clickstream data or other behavioral patterns… assume that it’s dirty, that it doesn’t map perfectly to our ideal picture of the world, and don’t be afraid to throw a lot of it away when aggregating it. To me, this is what makes it exciting… it’s another source of data that we can play with. It’s not reliable or consistent, but it’s extremely interesting because in many cases it may end up revealing trends that we didn’t even intend to imply. In other words, it’s interesting because it isn’t objective, and therefore it can be used to reveal the deeper trends that we don’t even know we’re participating in until we look at it from 10,000 feet up.

Less

• Malcolm Gladwell taught us that sometimes we can become smarter by listening to less information. Doctors who make decisions based on four key characteristics (intentionally omitting access to anything else) can predict the risk of cardiac arrest much better than doctors who make decisions based on all available information.

• Jason Fried taught us that sometimes we can become smarter by postponing decisions. Program managers don’t need to think about their products, they just need to “make them real” in the form of prototypes and screens so that decisions can be made in the context within which they need to be solved.

• James Surweicki taught us that sometimes we can become smarter by communicating less with our peers. A group that consists of a range of different kinds of people will make better decisions than one that consists of a collection of very smart (yet similar) people.

• Merlin Mann taught us that sometimes we can be more productive by meditating, doing yoga, and turning off instant messaging.

Less information, later decisions, less communication, fewer distractions: better.

More

• Chris Anderson taught us that the top 20% is not enough. Long-tail businesses open up the bottom 80% to us, and we love it.

• Paul Hammond and Matt Biddulph taught us that one dj isn’t enough. Radio shouldn’t be limited to the top hits or the random lottery of requested songs. Let people send in songs via text messages and control the radio themselves.

• Clay Shirky taught us that a ontologies (one method of categorization, typically by a trusted authority) are over-rated. Let everyone tag things however they like, for whatever reasons they like.

• Werner Vogels taught us that scale is an advantage, that more nodes and more complexity allows you to create systems that are smarter and more adaptable than smaller systems.

More options, more feedback, more tagging, more load: better.

Oookay. It all makes sense, in a way, doesn’t it? Not logically, but some other way.

You can think of it as the latest battlefield in the never ending war between Less and More. They are equally matched, and there have been occasional peace talks between the two sides in the forms of truces in the towns of Personalization and sometimes in Customization and sometimes in Aggregation (in which Tags is a small neighborhood) but for the most part we’re still taking casualties on both sides.

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Congrats to the flickr team. Announcement here.

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Matt Webb asked us to scan a list of names for someone named Nelson Tubb (or something like that). I saw the list and made a quick strategy in my head… I would scan the first letter of the items of the list for capital Ns. I burned the shape of an N in my head, and sat back while another part of my brain (not me) scanned the list and sent a little note to me whenever it found a capital N. I then read the name, and either returned a “continue” or a “stop” signal to the other part of my brain. It only took about two or three stops to find Nelson Tubb. I think it’s interesting that we can create these little micro programs in our head to do tedious tasks for you that pure attention couldn’t do nearly as quickly. For example, try picking out the bald heads in a crowd. Don’t you create a micro program that randomly scans the crowd and lets you know when it finds something that matches the pattern you gave it for a bald head? What about when you’re walking down busy streets… are you explicitly looking for dangerous cars or do you just have a micro program running that you rely on to let you know about dangerous-looking situations? The other day I walked across a street without looking either way at all and only realized that I this program was running on the assumption that sound would notify me of any cars. Only problem was that I had headphones on.

How many of these programs are we running? Too bad we can’t run top on our heads. I’m keeping an eye out for these programs in my head… to see if they’re really working as they should and also so that maybe I can set up more if they’re reliable. One for whether or not a gorilla is leaping towards me. One for whether or not I’ve shrunk to the size of a rollie pollie.

I just got back from my two favorite web conferences of the year, SXSW Interactive and O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference. Here are some things I learned:

• Don’t take notes. I think things sink in more when you actually listen and process the information as it comes in. By taking notes, you’re forced to cut out a lot of the data without first experiencing it. Plus, everyone else will take notes.


• Don’t use your laptop in the panels unless you absolutely have to.


• Don’t pay for a hotel room. I had a great time creating a little adventure by showing up without a room and finding places to stay. Not much sleeping went on anyway.


• Do try to get a panel. I was tremendously nervous about my tutorial but I think it went well, and it’s fun to experience the speaker side of things as well as the listening side.


• Talk to lots of people. But also make sure that you really spend some quality time with a few new people. I had a great time getting to know several people that I had met before but never talked to for an extended period (and some that I had never met before) a lot better. In particular, both the Brits and the Microsofties were surprisingly cool. The last coffee break at SXSW outside of the Hilton was a great moment for me. And that beach area at the W (despite being sort of weird and too fancy) really made the whole Etech trip those two nights I spent up there, gathered around the fire pit.


• Don’t talk about yourself too much. I found it really refreshing that people weren’t just constantly trying to pimp their projects, but spent a lot of time talking about cool projects that other people were working on.


• Sit by yourself sometimes. I really liked sitting on a chair somewhere and just watching people randomly walk by. Some inevitably say hello. There’s no internet equivalent to that, is there?


• Don’t sleep.


• Don’t go to every panel slot.


• Follow the whims of strangers.


• Check flickr every half hour.

The content of the panels were of course interesting too. There were a few things about tags, keeping things simple, the long tail, and remixing stuff. But now I must sleep.

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

right before ben leaps over the flames doing a somersaut

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

don't lick the sidewalks

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo: