What’s in common? A simple Google Reader heuristic
What’s in common? A simple Google Reader heuristic
Want to see what happens when you don’t just wantonly add everyone in your address book to your Google Reader shared subscriptions?
If you are subscribed to people who share good stuff (presumably respected colleagues and friends), you’ll know when something REALLY important happens because suddenly it’ll be highlighted by many of the folks you trust. One quick load of your Reader shared items and you can visually spot in less than a second what things should top your reading list, like a series of “read this first” signs. The more of your trusted friends who share something, the more you should probably pay attention to it.
This also reinforces the vital lesson in social media that it’s not who follows you but who you follow that can drive a tremendous amount of value.
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Twitpocalypse postponed due to vuvuzelas
It’s true, as posted in the Twitter API group:
as you’ve all probably noticed, with the world cup going on, twitter is experiencing record load. because of this, we’re moving the oauth switchover date to august 16, 2010.
we want to make sure that you all have calm waters to test your new codebases where you’re not dealing with whales, robots, and whatnot. with the world cup ending on july 11th, you will all have over a month’s time of calm waters and site stability to finish the switch over. also, with the vast majority of media providers already switched over to OAuth Echo, you now also have an additional month of time to work out your integrations with them.
just to review what we’re going to be doing: starting on august 16 we’ll be ramping down the rate limits on basic auth roughly by 10 calls/hour/day ending on august 31st. on the 31st, you won’t be allowed to make any other basic auth calls. in other words, if you don’t do anything, you’ll get more and more frequent rate limit errors as you approach august 31st. starting on august 31st, any basic auth request will get a HTTP 403 response back. as always, please reach out if there are any questions or concerns. for those who have already switched over, thanks!
So grab your vuvuzela and celebrate – you have another month or so before the Twitpocalypse.
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Small wins
In an early morning chat from Las Vegas, I was talking with Mr. Waldow about gambling – specifically, blackjack, and how I approach the table. My methodology is fairly simple: I set an amount I’m willing to play with, be it $5 or $100. When I step up to the tables, that’s exactly the amount I intend to play with and I will keep it in play as long as I can. When I win, I take the winnings and put them in my pocket, never to see the light of day again. The original bet, whatever size it is, remains in play.
At the end of the session – which admittedly doesn’t last very long, on average about 6 minutes – I walk away. Win or lose, once the original gamble is done, I walk away. If I’ve won $10 or $300, I still walk.
DJ had an interesting take on this:
“Well, that’s why you never win big. You have to play big to win big.”
That’s perhaps true in a system which is fair; casino gambling systems are inherently unfair, and designed to be as unfair as permitted by law. The only way you ever win – big or small – is to garner the favor of luck long enough to win something, and then walk away while you’re still ahead.
It’s absolutely true that I never win big at blackjack, ever. I never lose big, either. In fact, I rarely lose at all (I recommend Darwin Ortiz’s book Casino Gambling for the Clueless (amazon link)
for solid basic blackjack strategy). In the last 6 times I’ve addressed a blackjack table, I’ve walked away with a net profit between $5 and $70.
Do you have to play big to win big? In a negative expected value game, if you play big, you win big and lose big, but lose big more often. If you have limited resources – and don’t we all – you will be wiped out by gambler’s ruin. If you play with discipline and accept small wins, all those small wins add up to some tidy profits, tidy big wins.
This is one of the greatest flaws in thinking by humankind, and it pervades every aspect of leisure and business. I’ve lost count of how many people and companies that have completely abandoned solid, working systems in favor of a “play big” bet on things like collateralized debt obligations or social media. Folks spend and squander limited resources to “play big” only to find out that their previous system which accrued small wins was far more reliable.
Consider carefully before you decide to play big. Sometimes it works out.
Other times…
Play to win by being just as accepting of small wins as big wins.
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What content are you sitting on?
I was going through my archives the other day, sifting out stuff that I didn’t need to hold onto any more, and found some pretty amazing content collecting dust. I have hours and hours of video, text, and all kinds of media, some of which has never seen the light of day but is incredibly valuable. Other stuff used to be posted online, but has since vanished due to changes, time, even companies going out of business.
Here’s a really simple exercise for you to try: wherever you keep your archives and backups (you do keep backups, right?), go sifting through them for 15 minutes at some point today and see if there’s something in there that is worth bringing back to the light.
Why? Your network, your audience is ever-changing, ever-shifting, and hopefully ever-growing. There are people you are friends with today that had never heard of you a week, a month, a year ago. While your old stuff may be dusty to you, it may be brand new to them – and more valuable than it ever was. Rather than discard old stuff simply because it’s old, take a look at your old stuff and see if it’s worth rseurrecting.
Here’s an added twist: with what you know now, see if your old content improves. Do you have access to better tools, better knowledge, better processes? Here’s a photo I shot way, way back in 2001, which is practically the stone age in digital terms.
What’s different is that today, I have access to tools like Aperture and Adobe Photoshop. When this photo was taken, I would have been using Adobe Photoshop 6.0. Today’s version, CS5, is technically version 12.0 of that same software, and the tools have just gotten better. I used Aperture’s basic auto-enhance tools on this photo and it looks better than it ever did back then.
Here’s a video clip of world-renowned master martial arts teacher Stephen K. Hayes from 2007.
What’s changed? iMovie 9 has motion stabilization and audio normalization, so what would have taken me a ridiculous number of steps back then to edit took relatively few today. You get to enjoy the content – which is still as valuable as ever – but re-creating the content is much less painful.
Back when I did a daily podcast, years ago now, I would go to concerts and with the artist’s permission, record stuff live. All those old recordings are still sitting around in raw form, collecting dust in the archives. When I dug back into them to resurrect something, I found that they definitely needed editing – but my editing skills have changed and improved vastly in the 4 years it’s been since I made the recording. Here’s an example, Rebecca Loebe’s song Grace recorded at a bar in Cambridge, MA about 3 1/2 years ago (MP3). Sounds better than ever with better audio editing knowledge.
So what are you sitting on? What stuff seems old and stale to you but your newest friends might really, really enjoy? It’s a summer Friday – go take a few minutes and bring something back from the past. If it’s still high quality, all of us will appreciate enjoying it again, whether we’ve seen it or not.
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4 books for fresh thinking
Julien wrote a great blog post the other day about putting better stuff in your brain, stuff that will feed your brain and take it in new directions. Here are a few suggestions for things you can add to your virtual or real bookshelf, should you be so inclined.
Full disclosure: everything’s an affiliate link, probably to Amazon. Fair warning.
New Thinking
The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander. This very hard to find classic is a life lessons book disguised as a book about architecture. A great deal of it talks about qualities of building (web pages, marketing materials, houses, careers, whatever) in ways that put words to things you’ve been wanting to express all your life but never quite found. Alexandar’s book is wonderfully refreshing and helps you to develop a language of patterns for anything you’re doing in creative work.
Awakening
Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trunpga. Trungpa’s Shambhala will wake you up. It will literally deliver a swift kick to your head and also explain why some things that should make you happy instead sometimes evoke sadness. It’s not depression – it’s an inherent quality of beauty, an understanding that what you’re looking at isn’t going to last. Very worthwhile. If you read, study, and master this book, you will make huge strides towards freeing yourself of many of your self-imposed limitations.
Strategy
The Art of War. Sun Tzu’s military classic has been translated and retranslated more times than you can count, and most of the translations are based on the old 1910 Lionel Giles translation. While workable, Giles didn’t necessarily capture the flavor of Chinese idioms or the language as well. Wee Chow Hou’s translation does a great job of this. Even if you’ve read other translations, get this one.
Fresh Eyes
The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos by Michael Freeman. This is THE book I recommend to anyone who’s just gotten a digital camera. While it’s easy to get started with basic photography ideas like the Rule of Thirds, Freeman’s book takes you to another level. He teaches you how to SEE, how to look for photographic opportunities, recognize patterns, use built-in human tendencies for eye movement, and see life through your lens in new and different ways. Freeman’s book is a game changer, not just for a photographer, but for anyone who has to do any kind of visual work – web design, WordPress themes, marketing collateral, whatever.
Notice something else here? None of these books are sales or marketing books. There’s a reason for that. If you’re looking for brain changing, game changing books, chances are the thinking you’re looking for isn’t going to come from the sales and marketing section of your bookstore. You have to dig into much more primal stuff in order to get to those breakthroughs – art, photography, architecture, war, belief. Marketing books can interpret some of these primal things and transform them into actionable materials, but you first have to have a well to drawn on, and no marketing book I’ve ever read can provide that.
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