Anti social media

No hyphen in the title.

For what it's worth, after nearly a decade playing around with different web apps and services, here's how I leverage web tech to organize personal information:

• Web browser links bar -- this is almost a dashboard for me. Right now, I have five folders with 3-7 url's in each, and a few nested folders, plus 10 links right on the links bar. No part of the links bar is a repository; it's a selective list of the most-used services and resources: weather, jango, Google Docs, my commuter train schedule, plus -- in folders -- news titles, writing tools, and some personal favourites.
• Delicious.com and Google Bookmarks -- delicious was launched as a "social bookmarking" site, but Google gets it right by removing the "social" from the same service. I use these as a genuine repository of stuff; like when you're surfing the web and you come across a neat cottage for rent outside of Galway, a nice quote, a book review, etc. I'm torn between the two services; I like housing everything under Google's roof, but I still have a soft spot for delicious. Check out these two tag-centric uses: music; wine-review. It's also a great place to store news stories.

In other words, the links bar is kind of like a kitchen -- you go there each morning to get stuff done. Delicious/gBookmarks is more like the library in your basement.

• Twitter -- Twitter is like the hovercraft or personal computer: it's neat at first, then seems over-hyped and not that practical, but does have great potential. For some, Twitter is literally micro-blogging; it's blogging in a world where there are too many blogs, so you slap everyone's wrist and say "spit it out in 30 words!" For me, it's actually an amazing window into certain celebrities. But, since this is the anti social media (without the hyphen) post, let me say I see another facet to Twitter; it's an alternative to delicious in that you can very very quickly archive and annotate a link to review in the future. E.g., you start reading a deep article and you cannot finish it, so you tweet the piece and reflect on it in like 25 words, and that evening you might go back and finish the article , departing from the point of your reflection. Following this, you can of course blog about it, etc.
• Google Tasks -- you write down things to do and then check them off. Satisfying. Drawback: embedded in Gmail or iGoogle. Not standalone.
• iGoogle -- iGoogle was conceived as a platform for lots of gadgets (quiz's, simple games, quote of the day, etc.), similar to the iPhone's success in this realm today. But it's best use, in my view anyway, is as a kind of RSS reader. I find it a lot cleaner and simpler to browse news with this tool. I have a page for tech media and another for political strategy (etc. etc.), and within these I add a gadget for each media title. iGoogle serves up headlines only, with a single click to read an embedded blurb about the full story, and another click to that full story, offsite. You can choose how many headlines are served up per title, so for some infrequent updaters I ask to see only one or two of their latest stories; for Techcrunch, I read seven at a time. You can tweak this to no end, but I think it's a great and clean way to skim news across many titles -- in a single category per screen -- without getting overloaded.
• Bubbl.us -- one of the better mind-mapping applications. I'm not sure the world needs this; you can also draw on a piece of paper and it works out quite well. But it's nice to go back and see how you plotted out a problem, or associated various issues. For what it's worth, I find it really helpful to organize certain wikipedia-type information this way. I have a mind-map called "serious writers" and another called "business thinkers." But I generally use it in the same way people use white boards. The export and print features are particularly good, even if it doesn't have a great skin overall.
• Webnote -- not quite mind-mapping, but a nice place to store ideas. Not sure if it's being maintained, but my notes are still there.

Association -- premier cognitive skill for creative executives

Harvard Business Review weighs in on traits of visionary leaders (think: Steve Jobs/Jeff Bezos).

FTA:

Overall, associating is the key skill because new ideas aren't created without connecting problems or ideas in ways that they haven't been connected before. The other behaviors are inputs that trigger associating — so they are a means of getting to a creative end.

I enjoy the distinction HBR makes between creative and traditional executives. The "integrative thinking" line spouted by Rotman sounds hokey to me; or at least sprinkled with fairy marketing dust as much as imbued with core meaning. Creativity is central to how Roger Martin presents Rotman, but does the school seriously aim to produce creative thinkers? And what do they mean by that?

The Steve Jobs/Jeff Bezos distinction -- as people apart from analytical, military-style commanders -- is useful. Founders tend to share this quality -- a vision for the company that is anything but ironic. A workplace belief system that is as certain as one's private self-image. There is no script.

And perhaps that honesty -- that removal of the barrier between what is real and what is work -- unlocks other forms of cognition.

Big Box web

I live in a town that's grown from about 20,000 people to about 65,000 people in six or so years. It's a suburb of Toronto; or, in a sense, a suburb of the Toronto suburbs.

I think, of the 45,000 people who just moved here, most came from the nearby suburbs. One thing you notice about this town is how few people shop on its traditional main street -- it's a pretty street with traditional shops, but at peak times it's dead. My theory is that, these people who came from other suburbs return to those suburbs to shop; they are used to the big box stores with big value. To the locals, it may seem odd to drive for 45 minutes to buy meat, but to suburbanites that's an average Saturday (ie. hell). You could say that main street has been disintermediated by people whose commute has conditioned them to long drives.

I think something similar occurs on the Web. I was listening to Cat Stevens on youtube (ie. the universal juke box) and wanted a listing of tracks on a cassette tape that I likely lost five years ago; I wanted to listen to the songs on YouTube in the same order as the album/cassette.

What did I do? Until recently, I would have gone to hmv.com, because that's a Canadian website and the online source for physical music media. But before I started typing,  I realized that Amazon is better than HMV. I don't really care that much that it's in the U.S.

I don't care about the more local option; all that I care about is the one big answer that I can store in my head. I can keep a few dozen URLs in there, and Amazon.com covers off a lot of products.

So, as far as the web goes, maybe things are spiky and not flat. Maybe there's only room for one Amazon, and one eBay and one Google, etc. The Network Effect supports this, too.

But the flat Earth argument would be that sophisticated searches could flatten all of the Amazon competitors and provide me with a list of prices. So Amazon becomes where I research and price determines where I buy. But maybe Joe the plumber/surfer doesn't use that type of thing.

The album is a mix tape

I think the first mix tape I made was for myself; maybe some Pearl Jam and Led Zeppelin I'd jog to. Then I found out girls liked mix tapes and I started making them with different songs -- each carefully chosen to represent something.

Now it's not just teenagers in love who make playlists in iTunes. Really, these are not songs but lists -- lists that call individual songs from one's harddrive. And it's the individual song that people purchase (or don't purchase) today. Playlists can have hundreds of songs and there can be overlap from one playlist to another. In fact, they can even be random or "smart" -- not pre-set, but based on attributes such as how often songs are listened too, how highly they're ranked, their genre, etc.

But where does all this wizardry leave the 14-song CD sitting at the counter in Starbucks? Given the context of 99 cent songs at the iTunes store, infinite playlists and zero-loss digital copying, I think of that CD as just another playlist.

Like Sheryl Crow just made me a mix tape.

YouTube as iTunes

Ever dug into iTunes with a tune in your head, only to find you can't buy it on iTunes?

Ever used iTunes like an LP player ... one song at a time?

YouTube is basically a P2P music service, with every song I've ever wanted to hear in video format. Content owners likely allow YouTube to host music videos for the same reason they let radio play songs. But if they knew I used YouTube like a kind of infinite LP player, maybe they wouldn't.

The long tail

This is to the Internet what "The Making of the President" was to the making of the President (after 1960).

FTA: "Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody.... Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are ... In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. ). "

Using del.icio.us as an edited news reader

When newspapers go online, they tend to use a content management system (CMS); no one "hard-codes" the home page. An RSS news feed can also be viewed as a CMS, albeit one you have only sky-level control over. However, when all news exists in a CMS, and RSS abounds, it begs the question, what exactly is the meaning or relevance of a media title.

I want news by topic, relevance, popularity or author. I'm not sure the name on the journalist's paycheque is relevant to me.

That said, I've stumpled upon an interesting use for del.icio.us -- the "social bookmarking" website famous for inventing (or popularizing) the use of tags. I wrote an earlier post here about my mis-use of tagging, when I first joined del.icio.us -- spasmodically, I tagged every bookmark with a cathartic splurge of verbage. Any and all words that I associated with that website, or the unerlying concept, found their way into the tag line. In theory, a year or a decade down the road, your brain would not have changed so much than a slightly more restrained splurge of verbage, in a search, would not return the saught-for bookmark.

This was all stupid. Tags are not psycho-analysis. They are categories. They are an improvement on the Mac/Windows "folder" concept in that, though they still are folders,

there can be multiple folders for one bookmark.

I don't have much use for the "social" aspect of del.icio.us. I don't care what's "hot" there. Digg does that better. And I have even less use for it as an alternative to my browser's favourites feature. I do use del.icio.us as a very functional storage vehicle for news and other "thought leadership." My job requires me to know a lot about what's going on ... not just what news stories "have legs," but what smart people are saying about the economy and business, etc. Since I spend a lot of time each day reading original news (and thought leadership) sources, I take the opportunity to save interesting articles in del.icio.us. By tagging, I can look back over categories, which could equate with industries or clients, etc. Furthermore, since del.icio.us' URL conventions are logical (ie. a list of all posts you've tagged "IFRS" can be found at del.icio.us/your_name/IFRS), it is extremely easy to share segregated news feeds with others.