Ian M Rountree

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Learning the Task Snowball Method

April 24, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

Today I didn’t just hit Inbox Zero, I also hit Google reader Zero. it was a monumental achievement – I haven’t hit Reader Zero in months.

How?

I used the Task Snowball method, derived from the Debt Snowball method I just learned on the Get rich Slowly blot (though the post was from 2006).

Basically, Task Snowballing goes as follows:

  1. List all your tasks from least effort to most. It helps to make a physical record, on paper.
  2. Devote a set period of time to the tasks.
  3. Cross ofthe tasks in sequence as quickly as possible.

This may also fall into the Get To Done mode of thinking, or Cult of Done problem solving theory.  Either way, I have no email, no Reader items, no new Waves, and now, a new blog post under my belt, and it’s only 9:41 am. I have two hours later today to tackle some of the others.

The significance? go look for my last blog post. Then wait for my next. I bet the time is shorter from now to the next, than it has been between this and the last. Snowballing in action.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: cool stuff, nevermind the buzzwords, sociology, task snowball

Never Mind the Buzz, Cocks

February 13, 2010 by Ian 15 Comments

bella_durmiente on FlickrWhen I started Tweeting, I didn’t de-construct the service because I didn’t feel I knew enough about what I disliked or appreciated about it. I also didn’t know what it was actually for. The same thing goes for Facebook – when I joined, I didn’t get it, mostly because all of my friends were using it in such starkly different ways. Dynamic networks are like that – you can’t judge the entire service or network based on the habits of a few groups of users. Much as we like to burn the Midnight Oil, it’s impractical to over-study networks that just came out.

But then Google released Wave. Instant internet-wide love/hate relationship. And now it’s Buzz. And it’s another case, in part, of twenty people using the same services fifty different ways, and no one seems to know what they’re actually for. As much as we like to think well of Google, this is far from The Cure for Social Media.

It’s easy to see why. Buzz interrupts you, something internet marketers have been trying to avoid for years. It makes a mess of your inbox, when its default settings are on, and there’s no real way to get right of it, short of turning it off. This all or nothing approach has a number of people convinced that Google’s off their own kool-aid and making some key errors in product development.

To me it just looks like they’re taking the tactic of Ship-Then-Perfect to an entirely new realm – I wonder what Seth Godin would think about that, actually. But I doubt he’s on Buzz. He’s not even on Twitter, really – which is fine. However, Jeff Jarvis, one of Google’s few scholars, has a great deconstruction of the visible intent of Buzz on his blog; post titled “Google’s Buzz(machine)”

I turned Buzz off after my BlackBerry went ballistic over the first fifty alerts coming in within five minutes. The merging of my inbox was too much – I don’t want that, and it’s easy to see from all the clutter on Twitter and elsewhere, that not many other people do either. Stephen Hodson noted that Search Engine Land completely killed a story about the rumoured split between Buzz and GMail – which may have proven an important point about exactly how much we try to appease El Goog, even when we dislike features of their services.

The important point that many of these de-constructions are missing is that this is a service stil in Beta. Google is well known for their endless cycles of public beta. Christopher S Penn made the first good point when he talked about why Buzz is Brilliant and Deadly for Social Media 1.0 on his own blog – and I agree with much of what he says there. Robert Scoble, Supercurator, made a note about Google’s announcement as well, taking the tactic of talking about why Google won’t go after Twitter or Facebook on their own. The bit that convinced me to look more into Buzz?

Google isn’t willing to piss its users off to get to the next level. [Facebook’s] Zuckerberg is willing to piss off Facebook’s users by changing the platform. He is in the midst of changing his platform once again from something that was only for private friends and family to something that’s more public so that Facebook can effectively compete in search (or, at least, be like Twitter and sell its feeds to Google or Microsoft). Google just isn’t willing to do that over and over.

I think Scoble’s got it right here – the features we hate about Buzz are temporary. Already, people are coming up with stupid Buzz tricks to make sure that the service is usable – and it works. I’ve turned Buzz back on, having followed about three of the tips from AEXT.net‘s article on Undocumented tricks for Buzz. Most important trick there? Convincing GMail not to deliver Buzz notices to your in box. Anyone with a Smartphone needs to use that, just to make the service liveable while Google is still ironing out The Kinks. Tip number 5, on finding a user’s name to @ them with is also very handy for larger following groups and conversations. Props to Mark Dykeman for sharing this one, as well – I would have written Buzz off entirely without these tips.

I’m still not sure how I’m going to use Buzz. Don’t be surprised if you see some posts in the next week about how I actually do use social networks personally – I think some study might be required before I can decide if I really need that extra tank in my motor pool.

What do you think? Is Google off its rocker, or is this another instance of the Big Country saying Yes before it’s time?

UPDATED: Jeff Jarvis dropped a post about Buzz’s to-soon launch.

UPDATED x2: The Supreme Court of Texas Blog also added some privacy concerns about Buzz, especially poignant information for journalists, lawyers and, yes, even bloggers.

Photo by Aitor Escauriaza.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: AEXT.net, big country, buzz, buzzcocks, christopher s penn, el goog, google, google buzz, jeff jarvis, midnight oil, nevermind the buzzcocks, nevermind the buzzwords, nevermind the linkbait, pun alert, robert scoble, stephen hodson, the cure, the kinks, wave, yes, zuckerberg

What Does That Mean, Exactly?

January 20, 2010 by Ian 6 Comments

SaltaMonte on FlickrI have a problem with buzzwords.

Can you name the last five buzzwords you heard? What about the last ten? Don’t worry about the order, just try to come up with something recent, some term you’ve run across, that really didn’t seem to stand for anything, but was intended as a broad generalization of a concept, and applied to a very simple, elemental ideal.

I’ll help. Here are some: Rights. Reform. Liberty. Justice. Freedom.

We’re used to seeing ideas like blogging, the social web, networking, entrepreneurship come up in the discussion of overarching, nebulously defined ideals, but the trouble is that so much of our society is predicated on these vague shorthand terms. I wonder sometimes if buzzwords in general are part of the problem, or not. How are we supposed to communicate in general if we can’t communicate these ideals in the specific?

The whole point of language, especially codification and good lexicography, is to make sure that communication is reliable, understandable and universal. Dialects and slang aside, raw core ideals should be easy to transmit in short bursts, to make conversation breathable. But throwing in buzz, or any kind of highly emotional lingo, ruins a part of this because, like it or not, no two people speak the same language. As much as we convince ourselves we all speak (for example) proper English, it’s a crock.

I’ve got a better vocabulary than a lot of people I know. This can come in handy, as I spend a decent amount of my time being a translator. Working in the core has drawbacks – immigration rates and cheap housing mean that the down town area, at least of Winnipeg, is saturated by people who speak English – this supposedly common language – to varying levels of success. Having strong command of the language lets me do my job effectively whether the people I’m speaking to own the technical command or not. But every so often, I run into trouble translating, and it’s usually because of the wide adoption of buzzwords.

We don’t all use the same ones.

Perfect example: patch cords. What does that mean, exactly? You wouldn’t believe the number of times in a month someone asks me for a patch cord, then gets incensed when I ask what kind they mean. You know, a patch cord! For hooking up a TV! This isn’t a buzzword for me. I work with a lot of kinds of cords: coaxial cable, analog RCA, S-Video, component video, DVI, HDMI – and that’s just the video cables that fall under this category. If you want audio, there’s also RCA, but then we get into things like quarter inch mono and stereo, eighth inch for the same, digital coaxial, optical cable. See where this is going? In one eight foot section of my shop, we’ve got easily twenty different kinds of cords that all fall under the broad description of “patch cord.” Don’t yell at me because you can’t bring yourself to specify.

Don’t yell at the system because it can’t either.

If we get so confused over one term relating to two dozen kinds of AV cabling, imagine what someone from outside our sphere thinks when they start hearing terms like health care reform, universal justice or rights and freedoms. Often, these words either mean nothing at all, or can mean so many different things that even with context the lack of specificity is damaging to communication. It gets worse when we bring up the broad ideals, but don’t concieve for ourselves what possible specifics we might mean.

Our culture – the entire western hemisphere, everywhere from western Europe to Canada, the USA – produces buzzwords at an alarming rate!

I’m still waiting for someone to explain the job qualifications of a Director of Community. Or a Social Networks Manager. On the surface, it seems like such a simple ideal – but like any good category, it has to leave room for details that haven’t been conceived of when the buzzword is created. Which is part of the problem, I suppose. Specificity is great, but exact language requires a lot more time than most people have these days. It’s worrisome that our language has begun to so accurately accommodate the velocity of our society.

As someone wise is reported to have said, there is more to life than increasing its pace.

I’d encourage you to be more careful of why you use buzz along with your words. The shotgun approach to conversation doesn’t serve everyone as well as it does stereotypical politicians. Some of us have to back up our statements with fact.

Photo by HVargas.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: buzzwords, freedom, justice, language, lexicography, liberty, nevermind the buzzwords, politics, rights, social media, vague, verbosity alert, vocabulary

Choosing Your Audiences

January 4, 2010 by Ian 6 Comments

As willing as we are to be transparent (those of us who put our lives out online, anyway), we do need to be careful about choosing where we share, and the voice we use to do so. This isn’t just about context, though it could well be – Jon Udell has a concise way of summing up the need for context – but tone, manner. Digital body language at its best.

You don’t develop any social language overnight, and most of it’s impossible to predetermine. As Liz Strauss said on a recent interview with Mitch Joel for the Six Pixels of Separation podcast, there’s a big gap between the actions of an out-of-college enthusiast and a dyed in the wool professional. It’s all well and good to be a digital native who can carry on a phone conversation while texting at five tweets a minute and using acronyms like RSS, CSS, PHP and Social Media. Wait, the last one was a buzzword. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

This applies to more than just business, it applies to any conversation, venue, network or clique we manage to get ourselves involved in. Sometimes you can recognize when you’re acting differently, or when others are. What’s more difficult is figuring out what informed these people with visibly “better” manners to behave this way in the first place.

Over the next few months, I’m going to try and figure out what habits work best, make sure you piss off the least number of people, and make communicating in some of these channels more effective, efficient and enriching. As much as we’d love to believe “Just Act Human” is a great call to action, it’s just not that simple. I’ve had trouble; I’m betting you have too.

So let’s figure this out together, ok?

Photo by kevindooley

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: buzzwords, digital body language, digital etiquette, digital-manners, liz strauss, mitch joel, nevermind the buzzwords, six pixels

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