My good friend Rastin Mehr and several colleagues are soon to launch the Anahita Social Engine … an open-source framework for building social networks and applications.
Unfortunately, it didn’t offer an option to clone yourself instantly and do double work … so while I wanted to post on it, I may have procrastinated a little. The article provides 10 tips on beating procrastination.
Here are my fave 5:
First make sure you really, really, really want to do it. Seriously – don’t skip this step.
Keep things simple – don’t mess with tools, formatting, anything, just start.
Find something about it that excites you.
Put something you dread more at the top of your to-do list — you’ll put off doing that by doing the other things on your list.
Forget about perfection. Just start doing it, and fix it later.
One proviso on number one:
If it’s not something that you really, really, really want to do, at least ensure that it’s something that you really, really, really need to do.
We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do – the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.
If you are idle, or sick, or poor, however hard it may be to diminish your wants, it will be harder to augment your means. If you are active and prosperous, or young, or in good health, it may be easier for you to augment your menas than to diminish your wants.
But if you are wise you will do both at the same time, young or old, rich or poor, sick or well; and if you are very wise, you will do both in such a way as to augment the general happiness of society.”
I worked with Thomas Clifford (AKA Director Tom) recently on a corporate film that I was executive producing.
He was absolutely amazing. And he’s done hundreds of films over a 25-year career. And he’s one of the most connected social media individuals you will ever find. But 3 days ago he just got laid off.
Which only goes to show that in this current economic climate of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt … many good people are losing their jobs as companies are slowing down.
Tom, however, being Tom, is a proactive guy. So he put together the Hire Tom website and kicked his network into high gear. As WorkLifeNation reports, here’s his 4-step strategy:
Making the Hire Tom site
Alerting his network
Multiple LinkedIn updates
Twitter, Twitter, Twitter
Read the article for the full details – it’s great. And the results are coming too. I connected with Tom today, and he says that the opportunities are rolling in – only 3 days after being laid off!
Of course, not everyone has over 500 connections on LinkedIn or 2000+ followers on Twitter. Still, there’s a lot to be learned from Tom’s actions … especially that the time to work on your network is before you need it!
I hate gossip rags at the checkout counter, and my opinion is no different when the medium is a blog. But I love this post on 8 things bloggers can learn from Perez Hilton by Marko Saric.
The fact is, Perez Hilton is a fantastic success story. According to Saric, here’s how he got there:
Find a topic there is an audience for
Find a topic you have passion for
Be consistent
Be unique
Do not censor yourself
Be provocative
Experiment with the blog monetization
Expand your blog
More details and expansion of each of those points in the original post – if you’re a blogger, I recommend you read them.
A couple of provisos:
Be careful about the no censorship rule
If your blog is not where you make your money, be careful. It can have a backlash with colleagues, your boss, organization, or family. My advice: don’t write anything you don’t want even one person you care about knowing. That includes your boss!
Be careful about being provocative
If you’re writing a trashy celebrity blog, maybe that’s a good rule. It’s probably not quite as good an idea, however, if you’re writing a legal blog, a business blog, or diplomatic blog. Sure, you want to be interesting. But it’s never a good idea to go out of your way to insult, disparage, or denigrate others. And picking fights simply in an attempt to be interesting is juvenile and likely to backfire.
Being careful may not be the way to create exceptional art. But it does have some advantages in building relationships and getting things done.
The Vancouver Sun is using the tree version photo (in which interior pages are printed in black and white) to populate the e-version online (which, of course, ought to be in full glorious color.
This is not the way to be moving boldly forward into new media during a time in which newspapers’ traditional business model is being assaulted on all sides.
Maine is planning to expand its seven year old 1:1 computing initiative to 100,000 students.
Currently, the state provides 37,000 Apple MacBooks for students in grades 7 through 12, plus 10,000 teachers and administrators. Now they’re looking to expand to serve an additional 53,000 high school students.
This is one of the largest 1:1 computing experiments in education, though it could pale in comparison to the 1,000,000 Classmate PCs Venezuela has ordered. So, what’s the cost to the state of Maine? According to Ars Technica …
The state would like to pay $242 per year for each MacBook, for a grand total of $25 million per year, or about twice what Maine is currently paying for 37,000 notebooks.
Facebook continues to grow at a torrid rate. Reunion.com is growing almost as fast. Ning, Tagged, and Multiply are also all growing at over 100% annually.
However, Twitter is the runaway winner in unbelievable growth rates. While it’s growing from a smaller base, and therefore it’s easier to get a higher multiple, a growth rate of almost 1400% annually is just astounding.
Yesterday I was courted by a member of the cult of done. I’m still deciding whether or not to join. I hear it’s a good community but the health bennies suck.
Here’s their manifesto. If it looks a little incomplete, that’s because they only spent 20 minutes on it:
There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
There is no editing stage.
Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
Once you’re done you can throw it away.
Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
Destruction is a variant of done.
If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
Done is the engine of more.
If I joined the cult, I’m sure I would get more done. But would I get good things done? Probably.
It’s like that old art school experiment. The prof asked his class to do one of two assignments – the only requirement for the class. Students could pick their favorite.
The first was to make one perfect pot.
The second was to make 50 pots of any quality.
Who made the best pots? The students who did 50, of course. Without worrying about quality they just went and started making pots. By 20 or 30, they were pretty good at it. By 50, some of them were experts.
Meanwhile, the perfect pot students (I kinda like that phrase) were so painstakingly slow their one pot took forever … and because they only had one pot to make, their skills did not increase at the same rate as the 50 pot students.
So will joining the cult be a good thing? Perhaps.
I just don’t want the builder of my next house to be a member … and on his first pot.
It’s hard to believe that something so ubiquitous and useful and … essential is only 20 years old. I mean, I wouldn’t have a job if it weren’t for the web, and that’s probably true of millions of people today.
Back in 1989, Berners-Lee was a software consultant working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside of Geneva, Switzerland. On March 13 of that year, he submitted a plan to management on how to better monitor the flow of research at the labs. People were coming and going at such a clip that an increasingly frustrated Berners-Lee complained that CERN was losing track of valuable project information because of the rapid turnover of personnel. It did not help matters that the place was chockablock with incompatible computers people brought with them to the office.
Berners-Lee has some great ideas about where the web should go next. His vision is of a major advance that could serve as the foundation for innovations that we can’t even imagine today.
One year ago Berners-Lee said that all the pieces needed to build a new Semantic Web are now in place. Last month he gave an impassioned talk at the high-profile TED conference about a related concept called Linked Data, a set of ideas he outlined in 2006. The gist of the idea is that we need every institution that can do so putting raw data in standardized format up on the web.
The term ‘Web’ was invented by English scientist Sir Time Berners Lee on March 13th, 1989 and now the wild web has reached 216+ million websites (as per February 2009 data from Netcraft).
I’m about to board an airplane to go to the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, and have been brooding about the fact that I’ll be deprived of the Web for just a few hours while we’re in flight. It’s startling to remember that something as essential as the Web is so new–and that the guy who came up with it is not only still with us but very much involved in shaping its future.
The Web is becoming a massive interlinked computer, and computers need data. As more and more data becomes linked across the Web, the more that it can be accessed, analyzed, and computed. As Berners-Lee says, “Data is relationships.”
Wow. This is great – you can’t invent stuff this good.
Sony has had a digital reader product for some time now: Reader Digital Book. Lately Amazon refreshed its Kindle, and is of course getting much more virtual ink.
So here’s a small piece of Sony’s marketing campaign that I stumbled across during a routine Google search:
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
I worked with 
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
