stoweboyd and the /messengers

The whole Four Hour Work Week is obvious bullshit, but I hadn't realized what a jerk Ferriss is. Penelope Trunk has witnessed this all first hand: the way he slimed his way into having coffee with her, his annoying email 'etiquette', his worker bees spamming blogs with comments that link back to his book's site, etc.

She ends her post, 5 Time management tricks I learned from years of hating Tim Ferriss, this way: 

The idea of time management only matters in relation to how important the stuff is that's competing for your time. The stuff that makes time management the most difficult is relationships. Which Tim does not excel in.

Fine. Not everyone has to be good at making real connections.

But Tim runs around telling people who have lots of relationships competing for their time how to think about work/not work, forgetting that in the real world, where people are not assholes, time management is not an equation or a semantic game because relationships really matter. And figuring out how to judge time in terms of competing values is the hardest thing of all.

Tim is all about time management for achievement and winning. But there are not trophies or measurements for relationships. There is only that feeling that someone is kind. And good. And truly connected.

And Tim is not.

Robin Chase is the founder and former CEO of Zipcar, thinks that the strnaglehold that car manufacturers have on car data makes no sense:

Driving By the Numbers

Current federal law requires annual emissions and safety inspections for all cars. A mechanic plugs an electronic reader into what’s known as the onboard diagnostic unit, a computer that sits under your dashboard, monitoring data on acceleration, emissions, fuel levels and engine problems. The mechanic can then download the data to his own computer and analyze it.

Because carmakers believe such diagnostic data to be their property, much of it is accessible only by the manufacturer and authorized dealers and their mechanics. And even then, only a small amount of the data is available — most cars’ computers don’t store data, they only monitor it. Though newer Toyotas have data recorders that gather information in the moments before an air bag is deployed, the carmaker has been frustratingly vague about what kind of data is collected (other manufacturers have been more forthcoming).

But what if a car’s entire data stream was made available to drivers in real time? You could use, for instance, a hypothetical “analyze-my-drive” application for your smart phone to tell you when it was time to change the oil or why your “check engine” light was on. The application could tell you how many miles you were getting to the gallon, and how much yesterday’s commute cost you in time, fuel and emissions. It could even tell you, say, that your spouse’s trips to the grocery store were 20 percent more fuel-efficient than yours.

Carmakers could collect the data, too. Aberrant engine and driving behavior would leap out of the carmakers’ now-large data set, allowing them, if necessary, to conduct recalls much earlier. And, in exchange for your contribution of anonymous data, carmakers could send you driving benchmarks aggregated from your peers; then your app could tell you how your driving compares with the average of all drivers of the same car.

Having such readily accessible data streaming from your car might raise fears of a Big Brother scenario, in which carmakers would know where you are and how you are using (or misusing) your vehicle. But you would still decide whether you wanted to tap into the data, how you would use it and with whom you’d share it.

Allowing drivers and carmakers access to real-time performance data wouldn’t prevent every future mechanical failure. But it would allow carmakers and entrepreneurs to develop analytical tools to help catch developing problems in both individual cars and entire model lines. Cars would continue to break down and even cause accidents, but it wouldn’t take a Congressional hearing to figure out why.

Every car could have something like a Twitter account with a history of all of it's actions and stats. This is the Bruce Sterline notion of a spime: dumb devices stream their internal state changes into the cosmic data stream.

Obviously this would be of benefit to all of us, and -- by the way -- would obviate the need for 'black boxes' in cars for after the fact examination of collisions or other bad driving. Of course, the publicy/privacy duynamic is deeply embedded in a context like this. People's geographic location in their cars would need to shared in safe ways, but cars levels of emissions are supposedly regulated. It would be better to send a message to someone whose car is belching out illegal levels of smog than to find out at next year's emission test, obviously. And people who drive dangerously, by racing through red lights or speeding, have no right to privacy in such cases. That is why we install video camera/speed sensors at dangerous intersections.

William James once wrote, "You can judge a man's intelligence by how well he agrees with you." In that regard, David Gelernter is my main man. In a recent but oddly titled piece at Edge.org (what a nice name!), Gelernter could have been reading one of my recent slide shows:

- David Gelernter, Time To Start Taking The Internet Seriously

 

13. The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The "velocity of information" is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today's typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it's not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure.

14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.

15. Every month, more and more information surges through the Cybersphere in lifestreams — some called blogs, "feeds," "activity streams," "event streams," Twitter streams. All these streams are specialized examples of the cyberstructure we called a lifestream in the mid-1990s: a stream made of all sorts of digital documents, arranged by time of creation or arrival, changing in realtime; a stream you can focus and thus turn into a different stream; a stream with a past, present and future. The future flows through the present into the past at the speed of time.

16. Your own information — all your communications, documents, photos, videos — including "cross network" information — phone calls, voice messages, text messages — will be stored in a lifestream in the Cloud.

17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it's obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it's easy to blend any group of streams, it's easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for "snow" means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn't deal with snow. Subtracting the "not snow" stream from the mainstream yields a "snow" stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.

18. Nearly all flowing, changing information on the Internet will move through streams. You will be able to gather and blend together all the streams that interest you. Streams of world news or news about your friends, streams that describe prices or auctions or new findings in any field, or traffic, weather, markets — they will all be gathered and blended into one stream. Then your own personal lifestream will be added. The result is your mainstream: different from all others; a fast-moving river of all the digital information you care about.

19. You can turn a knob and slow down your mainstream: less-important stream-elements will flow past invisibly and won't distract you, but will remain in the stream and appear when you search for them. You can rewind your lifestream and review the past. If an important-looking document or message sails past and you have no time to deal with it now, you can copy the document or message into the future (copy it to "this evening at 10," say); when the future arrives, the document appears again. You can turn a different knob to make your fast-flowing stream spread out into several slower streams, if you have space enough on your screen to watch them all. And you can gather those separate streams back together whenever you like.

20. Sometimes you will want to listen to your stream instead of watching it (perhaps while you're driving, or sitting through a boring meeting or lecture). Software will read text aloud, and eventually will describe pictures too. When you watch your high-definition TV, you might let the stream trickle down one side of the screen, so you can stay in touch with your life.

21. It's simple for the software that runs your Lifestream to learn about your habits; simple to figure out which emails (for example), or social updates, or news stories, you are likely to find important and interesting. It will therefore be easy for software to highlight the stream elements you're apt to find important, and let the others rush by quickly without drawing your attention.

22. Lifestreams will make it even easier than it is today for software to learn the details of your life and predict your future actions. The potential damage to privacy is too large and important a problem to discuss here. Briefly, the question is whether the crushing blows to privacy from many sources over the last few decades will make us crumple and surrender, or fight harder to protect what remains.

23. The Internet's future is not Web 2.0 or 200.0 but the post-Web, where time instead of space is the organizing principle — instead of many stained-glass windows, instead of information laid out in space, like vegetables at a market — the Net will be many streams of information flowing through time. The Cybersphere as a whole equals every stream in the Internet blended together: the whole world telling its own story. (But the world's own story is full of private information — and so, unfortunately, no human being is allowed to hear it.)

[emphasis mine]

Time is the new space.

I call it the Post-Everything Economy istead of the post-Web, but same same, all same.

How have I never met this guy?

Since I don't drive much, I often miss trends like digital billboards:

- Matt Richtel, Electronic Billboards Called Another Driving Distraction

The billboard industry argues that the new signs are part of a larger technological and economic shift to a paperless society (no more crews hoisting and removing ads from billboards) and that they give advertisers more flexibility.

Marketing materials published last year by Clear Channel, one of the nation’s biggest billboard companies, say the digital billboards are, among other things, ideal for posting game scores by advertisers like radio stations and sports bars. News organizations can also use them — “as the Web site headline changes, so does the digital billboard,” the materials say.

”It’s a very flexible, very responsible medium and very impactful,” said Ron Cooper, chief executive of Clear Channel Outdoor, which has 450 digital billboards and plans to add 150 more this year. Big corporations that have used them include ABC, AT&T, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, General Mills, Ford and Verizon. “Consumers report seeing it, remembering the brand, remembering the advertisers.”

He and others in the industry say they have been careful to make the signs memorable but not distracting. They say the “television on a stick” label is an exaggeration.

“It’s a slide projector — it shows one image after the next,” said Bill Ripp, a vice president who oversees digital billboards for Lamar Advertising, another large billboard company. “We were as concerned as anybody. We wouldn’t want to cause danger.”

So many people are concerned about the dangers of texting while driving, and now, digital billboards, that they forget the elephant in the room: It's driving that's dangerous. Let's get rid of the damn car culture! Then digital billboards would be a cool thing.

Now, that to one side. Let's take the digital billboards on the highway theme to the extreme.

Imagine that in the near future your car could be outfitted with a transponder of some sort, like the one we use for EZPass toll booth systems. We could opt into ad networks so that when we are driving home late at night, after working too long one evening, all alone on the highway, the ad could be targeted us individually on that big shining billboard.

Or imagine that Sunday afternoon, when a large number of Redskins fans are within sight of a digital billboard, and they opt to show the Redskins game scores. Five minutes later, the traffic is mostly soccer fans, so they get the DC United scores.

Or you could text from your car, and your Twitter message could be displayed next to the scores.

Or they could synchronize a series of displays to target you as you speed along, showing you five different shots of this years Camaro.

All of these things are obviously dangerous, at least to the driver of the car, but so are GPS systems, cell phones, reading while you drive (I have seen that a lot in Southern California), changing clothes while you drive (saw a woman putting on pantyhose while driving, once), applying mascara, eating, making out, and so on.

But putting up giant digital biillboards is an eyesore, and obviously intended to make people look at them. It's inherently a distraction, while drive-through fast food isn't. We should outlaw this.

I was rocked back on my heels when I read a Maureen Dowd column yesterday. She has recently visited Saudi Arabia, and in discussions with the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal about the changes coming in the near future of that country's liberalization. After talking about women's role in the future Saudi Arabia -- there are female lawyers there, now, albeit in a very limited role, and Saud looks ahead to a time when women would drive cars -- she turned the discussion to technology:

I asked if technology — Saudis love their cells, Berries and computers, and Bluetooth flirting is rampant in malls — would pry open the obsessively private kingdom.

“Privacy in the modern world is a relative term,” he replied. “How can you have privacy when you have the computer, Twitter and all the others? It is just part of the complications and difficulties of modern life.” (He and the king have never Twittered.) People now, he mused, sounding like a Saudi Garbo, just “have to worry about how to be alone.”

Saud might have been the foreign minister of a western democracy, or the CEO of an American company. BUt here we have a Prince of Araby, a major leader in an Islamic, closed society, discussing the rise of publicy in an open web.

I bet that enormous societal change is coming, because once bluetooth flirting starts, and the foreign minister is talking about Twitter's impacts on the foundations of privacy, the global village is not far behind. No society can long withstand the lures and promise of an open web.

Embedded in a deeply ambivalent post in which he announces the end of his blogging, Joel Spolsky distills great advice from Kathy Sierra on the topic of... blogging... which he is quitting to grow his business. Hmm.

Well, first, let's look at the advice from the incomparable Sierra, as channeled by Spolsky:

Let's Take This Offline

So, what's the formula for a blog that actually generates leads, sales, and business success? I didn't even understand it myself until last year at the Business of Software conference, when one of the speakers, a well-known game developer and author named Kathy Sierra, blew me away with an incredibly simple idea that explains why my blog successfully promoted my company while so many other blogging founders foundered.

To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur's blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn't. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium seems so personal, and often it is. But when you're using a blog to promote a business, that blog can't be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it's hoped, become your customers. It has to be about making them awesome.

So, for example, if you're selling a clever attachment to a camera that diffuses harsh flash light, don't talk about the technical features or about your holiday sale (10 percent off!). Make a list of 10 tips for being a better photographer.

If you're opening a restaurant, don't blog about your menu. Blog about great food. You'll attract foodies who don't care about your restaurant yet.

If you make superior, single-source chocolate, don't write about that great trip you took to the Dominican Republic to source cocoa beans. That's all about you. Instead, write the definitive article about making chocolate-covered strawberries. For the next 10 years, whenever a gourmand or a baker searches Google for a recipe on how to make chocolate-covered strawberries, he or she will find your post. Helping your users make awesome chocolate-based confections is likely to attract readers who might buy fancy chocolate, and that's the point of a successful blog. Writing about trips to the Dominican Republic is going to attract only people who might want to travel to the Dominican Republic. Unless you're selling that, you shouldn't be blogging about it.

But then, if you are successful at attracting foodies, or camera afficianados, or programmers, invest ten years and then quit?

I am at ten years and counting too. I started blogging in 1999, and with only a few hiccups along the way, have kept at it ever since. It is certainly not for everyone, and Spolsky is right when he says that most corporate blogs stink.

Writing is very hard, and writing well is incomparably hard. It is unlike other business challenges or work. It's not like writing emails, or planning, or hiring, or selling. And it has the negative characteristic of demanding a great deal of time. And it is a largely solitary pursuit that takes you away from others, like most forms of creativity. (See The Costs Of Being A Creative.)

I am betting that Spolsky has simply run out of time. His company has grown to 30+, and he is imbedded in nearly every process of the business, I bet, every product line. I don't know him, but it sounds like he has thrown himself into a plan to aggressively dedicate himself to the business, and to perhaps emulate the secrecy of Steve Jobs and Apple in the future.

He is after a different sort of role for himself, the CEO of a much bigger, more closed company.

I think he is chasing the past, though. That there is a place for a CEO to continue to chase a bigger, more open dream, like Tim O'Reilly and Craig Newmark have done.

Update on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 11:54AM by Stowe Boyd

Alex Payne of Twitter has apparently stopped blogging too (accroding to Matthew Ingram), after a flap arising from comments he made there about features the company is experimenting might cause people to stop using third party applications. So, Twitter, never a very open company, is getting darker as it grows in importance. Another company emulating Apple? Does great design and huge impact necessitate monolithic secrecy?