Sunday, June 19, 2005

POLLARD'S NAIVE PROPOSAL TO SAVE E-MAIL.   There's a great debate in the blogosphere and among technologists about whether e-mail, much disparaged as the cause of productivity-sapping information overload, and a lightning rod for relentless and overwhelming spam merchants, is toast. Detractors say it is unrescuable, an inefficient use of time and an ineffectual means of communication. Supporters say it is the inevitable and powerful successor and replacement for snail mail, and must be redesigned to solve the problems that are preventing it from doing its critical job, which is (as shown on the chart above, from my earlier post) -- ubiquitous, fast, free 1-to-1 (or 1-to-a-few) (but short, non-critical, non-iterative) written communication. Like Clay Shirky, I love e-mail, warts and all. Some of the things that e-mail has allowed me, and those in my communities, to accomplish that no other medium could have achieved: Strengthened relationships and improved dialogue with readers of our Salon blogs. Pressured the Canadian government to fundamentally change its position on several key matters such as the Kyoto Accord. Enabled readers of my genealogy site to contact and exchange critical information with me. Enabled me to conduct targeted surveys of Salon bloggers. Enabled my high-school graduating class to organize an amazingly successful reunion. Helped establish and strengthen communication and collaboration among many loosly-knit communities of which I am a member. So I want to save e-mail. I think we need to either fix the problems plaguing e-mail (info overload, spam and abuse), or develop a substitute tool that fills the void its demise would leave. I think a possible answer to spam and info overload is a simple concept I call transient subdomains. Here's what I mean by this term: What do we do now when we get too much spam in a mailbox? We trash it and set up a new one. It's a one-step-ahead-of-the-enemy approach, but it's extravagent. Suppose instead of just assigning people an e-mail address, we assigned them an e-mail domain, with the ability to set up an infinite number of subdomains (or channels, if you prefer), each with a short and finite life. Example: Let's say my e-mail address is dave.pollard@hotmail.com (it isn't -- I use my real e-mail address sparingly in public because of spam etc.) Instead of junking this address when the spammers overwhelm it, suppose instead I had an e-mail domain: dave.pollard@hotmail.com/ and could create any subdomains I want, and abandon them when they've lost their value. So for example right now I'm interested in people's opinions on my novel-in-progress. With transient subdomains I could request them at  dave.pollard@hotmail.com/WhatCouldBe. And I occasionally help out Mark Hoback by co-editing Virtual Occoquan, the online periodical, and I would be able to communicate with potential authors of the next edition at dave.pollard@hotmail.com/VO28. And I'm collaborating on some Social Networking and Social Software developments with a small group of people in two distinct communities (one consisting of people I regularly meet in person, the second of people I've never met but who have expertise the first group lacks), so I could communicate with them under the subdomains dave.pollard@hotmail.com/SocialNet1 and dave.pollard@hotmail.com/SocialNet2. Not only do I think transient subdomains could save e-mail from lamentable extinction, I think the same concept applied to phone numbers could save us from telemarketers as well. OK, I'm done. I told you it was a naive proposal. Now I'm looking to those that understand the technical workings of e-mail and telephony to tell me whether it could work, technically. And for the twisted minds out there to tell me how the spammers could get around it. [How to Save the World] [JohnLawlor.com] 11:16:43 PM

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT. [How to Save the World] More spot on insight from Dave Pollard. This ties in nicely with several lines of thought I've been exploring. Take a look at Is Knowledge Work Improvable? for example. The key challenge here is that success depends more on leadership than on management. [McGee's Musings] [JohnLawlor.com] 11:07:55 PM

We Don't Have the Tools is OUT as an Excuse. Amen! 99% of the time, the tools are good enough! All you need is a pied piper! From Desirable Roasted Coffee: Reboot: We Don't Have the Tools is OUT as an Excuse.: QUOTE What's key here is that drive and brains and a willingness to collaborate, not expensive tools and committees, created this site. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 5:33:01 PM

Flackster exposes NetModular's "blogging" at AlwaysOn. Sounds mighty fishy to me too! From It gets worse: Corante > Flackster >.: QUOTE The CEO (Jesse Tayler) of a company (Netmodular) that develops blogging software (Blogworking) writes a less than entirely coherent pitch for his own product. He posts this pitch on an independently-owned, semi-commercial blog site (AlwaysOn) that just happens to run on the software platform developed by his company. Neither the author nor the site's owners make any effort to disclose the partisan nature of the pitch. After I attack the covert and, in my opinion, clumsily argued pitch at my blog, a commenter (Marc Lefton) leaps to the original author (Jesse Tayler)'s defence. Thirty seconds of research reveal that the selfless defender of Mr. Tayler's reputation is also directly connected to both Netmodular and to Jesse Tayler himself. A fairly important point Mr. Lefton neglects to mention. This is exactly the kind of thing that allows detractors to call the integrity and editorial standards of bloggers into question. As Rick Bruner put it last year, in a short piece about Mazda's ill-advised faux blog: "Marketers, please, please get the point: blogs are about building trust, not spinning it." 'Nuff said. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 5:31:01 PM

Jon Udell's How to Screencast using inexpensive tools. Great advice and HOW-TOs from the prime practioner of screencasts! From O'Reilly Network: Screencasting Strategies.: QUOTE All this, of course, is purely academic if you don't run Windows or aren't in a position to license commercial software in order to make screencasts. So in this column I'll focus on basic strategies that transcend specific tools. If you're on Windows, you might be using free stuff: Windows Media Encoder, or WME, for capture and Windows Movie Maker for editing. I haven't found a free capture tool for the Mac, but I have used WME to record Mac screen activity by way of a remote VNC session. For native video capture on the Mac I'm told that the relatively inexpensive Snapz Pro works well. Of course, iMovie, bundled with Mac OS X, is a capable low-end video editor. On either platform (and on Linux as well), Audacity is the cheapskate's weapon of choice for recording and editing audio narration. In these scenarios you'll wind up producing either Windows Media (.WMV) or QuickTime (.MOV) files. Neither affords the simplicity of Flash (.SWF), the most universally accessible delivery format. But that may not matter crucially. Both Windows Media and QuickTime can yield compact, progressively downloadable files. And in each case there are freely available, cross-platform options: Windows Media Player for Mac OS X and QuickTime for Windows. Here's one way to think about the tradeoffs. If people like your screencasts so much that they demand more seamless playback, that's a good problem to have. You'll know that an investment in tools is justified. Meanwhile, focus on creating compelling content. To that end, here are some of the guidelines I've developed for myself. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 5:30:09 PM

Mark Fletcher - Embrace short app dev cycles and have great customer support. Great advice! From wingedpig.com - Mark Fletcher's Blog: Stealth Start-Ups Suck.: QUOTE Web services have many advantages over shipping software. You can continuously update the service, fix bugs and add new features. There are no long development cycles. Embracing this is a key to success. The first version (or several versions, probably) of any service you create is most likely going to suck. And that's ok. Your service won't scale to handle a lot of traffic. It will be missing a huge amount of functionality. It'll probably look bad. And it'll have bugs. All of this was true for both ONElist and Bloglines, but they both ended up reasonably ok. Because you can continuously update the service, you can deal with these issues. One of the many great things about running a web service are the users. A passionate user is one of your greatest assets. And I would argue that the only thing of real value a web service has is its users. They act as advertising for you, telling all their friends about your service. They are the best source of new feature ideas. And they are the best Q.A. testers you can get. Most importantly, they're the gauge that tells you whether your service is actually useful or not (ie. is it worth losing years of your life continuing to develop and run it). By getting your service launched as quickly as possible, you'll get exposure to this wonderful resource sooner. By listening to your users as you add features and improve the service (because, remember, it won't be perfect at launch), your users feel like they are a part of the process. They start to have a sense of ownership of the service. Which reinforces their passion. And with the constant updates and fixes to your service, you're continually giving your users reasons to talk about you. Users are the one thing that your competition cannot copy and develop internally. Technology can be copied. Users have to be earned. One thing to remember, however, is that you need to be responsive to customer support, because that's one of the key ways to cultivate passionate users. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 5:29:29 PM

It's about attention NOT platform. Go Susan go (of course attention is Steve's baby first and foremost). From Susan Mernit's Blog: Things I tell clients you might want to know.: QUOTE It's about attention, not platform. People don't say Hey, now I want to read a newspaper! Which one is it? --They want news and they go for the most immediate form--0ften web or cable TV. If you are an entertainment information brand, you are competing with brands you may never have considered--but they'll cut into the time your product used to get. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 5:27:40 PM

Cat Diaries (NMC Presentation). This morning at the NMC Summer conference was my presentation on More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs… maybe it was the small room, but it was pretty full. I threw a whole lot of kitchen sinck at them. The gist of this was to address the dissmissive commonly uttered description of blogs as [...] [CogDogBlog] 5:07:10 PM

Thanks Dave!. "I haven't made a scientiifc study of the problem, but I'm pretty sure that few, if any, of the tools I use on a daily basis were developed and fielded by his critics." [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] [McGee's Musings] 12:55:49 PM

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