Category Archives: Innovation

Writing Less to Write More

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Has anyone noticed that I’ve written less recently?

Has anyone noticed that I’ve written more recently?

Grandad takes a bathDepending upon what you read you may have noticed different things.

I took a look at the amount of time I spent writing interrupt driven content on Twitter and Facebook and decided that it wasn’t the best use of my time.

I found that I was spending a significant amount of time checking for updates so I could respond to updates. All I was doing was feeding my ADT.

I decided that it was time for a bit of housekeeping. My aim was to replace quantity with quality. Rather than writing hundreds of 140 character interactions, I want to write more considered, longer interactions of a higher quality.

So I’ve taken a few simple steps:

  • I’ve removed the Facebook and Twitter apps from my BlackBerry.
  • I’ve hidden Tweetdeck on my laptop, so I have to go and consciously choose to start it.
  • I’m limiting myself to one session on Twitter and one on Facebook a day.
  • I’ve made a conscious effort to maintain a list blog topics to improve the quality of what I write there.
  • Facebook and Twitter are banned after 8:00pm
  • Although Google+ looks interesting I’ve resisted the urge to add to my list of interruptions.

The result is that I’ve written a lot more on my blog and managed to calm down my ADT quite a bit. A bit like a reformed smoker, I’ve started to notice how bad some people are. I’ve read a lot more. As well as being more productive on my blog I’ve been more productive in a number of other areas too. I’ve also been sleeping better and increased the amount of exercise I do.

Not surprisingly, the number of visitors on my blog has grown significantly too, but that’s not why I’m doing it.

Because it’s Friday: Domino Fun

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Someone (I can’t remember who) pointed out this Google Chrome Domino cascade the other day:

Google Chrome Falls Down

It reminded me of how much fun we used to have with dominos when we were kids, but we never quite got to do anything as fun as this one from a supermarket somewhere in Finland:

Supermarket Domino

I wonder if they sold all of the boxes of (broken) breakfast cereals and biscuits afterwards.

Privacy and Attention Dimensions: Groups

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"If you want to control privacy and attention – just put them in a group" seems to be the answer that most of the socials media (and other) sites are moving towards.

Visiting Vernon StumpyEach of them has a subtly, or even dramatically, different way of implementing groups, but fundamentally they are all trying to do the same thing.

The basic philosophy is that we can put people into different buckets and the bucket is then linked to different levels of privacy and attention.

The main reason for the buckets is that they provide a way of simplifying the administration of the system.

In most instances the group configuration that most people use is quite simple. Flickr, for instance, doesn’t even let you create your own groups, it gives you three – contacts, contacts that are friends, contacts that are family – that’s it. People need to fit into one of these buckets if you are going to control what pictures people can see. Google+ has circles which are nicely animated, but basically do the same thing. You can have as many Circles as you like, and you can put people into those circles in order to control what people see and what you see about people. Twitter’s notion of a group is the list, but they only help attention management, they don’t do anything for privacy.

There are a number of challenges with this situation.

The first challenge is the most obvious issue – there is no way to manage groups across the various services. If I want a family bucket on Flickr and Facebook I need to create it, and administer a group on Facebook and another group on Flickr. If you really wanted to get organised about the groups that you use you would spend a significant amount of time administering all of them.

Another challenge, and the most fundamental one, is that socially a group is quite a fluid thing, and the fluid has different densities. My example here is an event with a group of friends. The group for the event starts off as the group of friends who are invited. The group related to the event doesn’t stay like that though, as people choose whether they are coming, or not, the group changes, but it doesn’t change in the same way for everyone. Some people who are not attending may still want to be told about the group as the event occurs, others don’t want to know anything. If we are running the event for the group of friends we will know the difference between the people to keep in the loop, and the people to leave out. The members of the group have changed, but so has the type of connection that people have with the group.

Groups might help us in administration terms, but I don’t think that groups really give us what we need.

Also see: Privacy and Attention Dimensions

Privacy and Attention Dimensions

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I’ve found it quite interesting recently to watch as a number of social media sites, Facebook, Flickr, G+, have introduced changes in the ways that privacy is controlled and attention is raised.

Grandad wonders whether the old computer will run VistaMost of us have an instinctive approach to both privacy and attention. We tell certain things to certain people, and not to others. I doubt many of us could, in most instances, describe this instinctive privacy by a set of "if…then…" statements. Most of us have a similarly instinctive approach to attention, we know which messages require us to raise someone’s attention directly, and which are just noise.

There are, however, a set of people for whom this instinctive approach doesn’t work. All of us suffer times when we get the privacy and attention approach wrong. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have passed on a piece of information I thought was public to find that it’s pure gossip. But there are also a set of people who’s privacy and attention framework doesn’t work the same as the rest of society, for some people this manifests itself as autism.

Today’s online communication mechanisms are a bit like dealing with an autistic child. So many things that are shouted in public should really be said in private. There are certainly things that aren’t said as loudly as they should be too. One of the major complaints of any online system is the amount of noise they generate trying to get our attention – "no I don’t care that you’ve just bought a sheep".

We try to apply a set of physical world metaphors to our online privacy but the current approaches still require us to think about who we want to see what when we post it. I think we still have a long way to go before online systems get closer to being aligned to our privacy and attention instincts.. 

There are a whole set of dimensions to privacy and attention that I don’t think we yet really understand, and we certainly haven’t done enough to codify them yet.

It was with that in mind that I read about the new capability on Flickr to create geofences. Geofences enable you to define a privacy level for pictures taken in a certain location. This is a new dimension to the privacy debate as far as I can tell. I have, as an example, set pictures that are taken near my home to be private to Friends and Family only (no that’s not the location of my home):

It might be a new dimension, and add to the toolset available, but it’s still not really how I think my privacy instincts work.

Facebook has always had an attention problem which most people don’t realise you can adjust already by turning off certain notifications. There latest approach to tackling this problem is the new lists feature. I say new, but it feels very much like the way that Google+ works, although I’m sure they’d argue differently. Again, it’s another dimension to breaking down the attention problem, but I still don’t think that my personal attention instincts work that way.

One privacy dimension where I think we are nowhere near codifying our real world experience is in the area of memory. I think that we are only just reaching the point where we are realising what a good thing our ability to forget is. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like the internet to forget certain things about me.

Organisation Charts

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I love this cartoon from Bonkers World about different organisation structures:

I work in a large organisation that looks much more like a couple of these charts than others, and there are days when I’m not sure what it really looks like.

When people unfamiliar with the organisation ask how they get things done I regularly tell them that the informal organisation structure is much stronger than the formal one. So perhaps the diagram doesn’t matter too much anyway.

The connected world we now live in makes a whole set of new organisational shapes possible and great many of them will be successful.

At the end of the day it’s the people that matter though.

Hat tip to Seth Godin.

Naked on the Fourth Plinth

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In London’s famous Trafalgar Square there are a set of plinths with sculptures on them, there is also another plinth – known as the fourth plinth – which doesn’t have anything permanent on it.

Jimmy and Granddad visit Alnwick GardensThis fourth plinth has, in recent years, been used to host all sorts of art projects and installations.

The installation that gained, probably, the most public interest was Anthony Gormley’s One & Other.

In this project people were invited to apply for a sixty minute slot on the fourth plinth. The intention was to “create a collective portrait of humanity”, this translated into people doing all sorts of things for their sixty minutes of fame. Many people chose to carry plaques with a message on them others performed an activity, all of them were videoed.

The people who gained the most fame were, not surprisingly, the people who chose to spend some, or all, of their time naked.

I sometimes ask myself the question when I’m posting something to Twitter or Facebook or even this blog:

If I were stood naked on the fourth plinth and the whole of London were watching would I still be comfortable saying this?

There are a lot of people who could do with a similar checkpoint before they write and post.

(The reality of posting to Twitter or Facebook (or any other ‘social’ site) is actually a whole lot scarier than standing on the fourth plinth with a plaque but for some reason the scariness doesn’t translate into caution)

Telling Stories

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I’ve often thought that schools should spend much more time teaching people to tell stories.

Universities should, in my opinion, have story telling as a basic requirement for all courses.

I sit in so many meetings where someone stands up and talks through a set of slides. I use the word ‘set’ to describe a random collection of information.

The slides themselves aren’t coherent, the order of slides isn’t coherent, in short there is no story.

People connect with story, stories travel and live on beyond the event itself. Tell a story and you’ll be memorable.

One of the best lecturers I ever had at university was my ‘Stress’ tutor. He regularly started lectures with a broken component. He’d then tell the story of how this component got broken. This story would always be told with glint in the eye and an air of mystery.

Our job was to solve the mystery in order to complete the story. He’d then tell us the real end of the story. I still remember one of the stories about a tow bar component that had actually led to someone’s death – that’s nearly 25 years ago.