Think about what you do for the majority of your day: you communicate ideas and relay messages into text. Writing. Whether sketching code or prose, you are a writer.

I certainly spend the bulk of any given work day writing.  Between emails (several hundred a week), spec documents, new project proposals, copy for the company’s various web properties and products, etc. etc. etc. I spend a lot of time in front of the keyboard word processing as the kids (don’t) say.

I work every day on a nice iMac loaded with the full iLife Suite (including Pages), Office for Mac (including Word), and the Adobe CS4 suite.

But ask me what program I like the best and increasingly depend on, and I would tell you TextEdit.

That’s right, TextEdit: the simple minded runt of a program that most Mac users only open by accident. I find it irreplaceable…it’s even on my dock right next to its better looking, smarter cousins.

On the one hand, I’m a spoiled rotten ingrate with problems of privilege: I bitch and moan through the 60-90 seconds it takes to launch Word.  That’s mostly my fault, since I’m typically running 6-10 other applications, including resource hogs like XCode, Photoshop, or Firefox with 25 open tabs.  (My compulsive multi-tasking and inability to maintain a clean virtual desktop is the stuff of legend in my office).  Still, I’m a spoiled rotten ingrate and my minutes are precious (I think).  TextEdit launches instantly with a nice clean page and a cursor waiting for my brilliant prose snappy copy upbeat but sometimes lengthy debugging notes.

On the other hand, I appreciate TextEdit for more than its reliably fast response in my time of need.  95% of what I write everyday requires a single font size and format, a bullet list or two, and some basic formatting. (See what I did right there?). For the 5% of my documents that require a fancier touch, I have plenty of great programs at my disposal. 37 Signals’ take on “Less is More” speaks directly to the reason I find TextEdit so compelling:

“Less is More” implies that more is better. It’s not. Less is less. Less is just right. Less is better.

We’ve grown to expect so many things from products as basic and fundamental as word processors. Each additional feature packed into a Word or Pages brings along with it a thousand formatting nightmares and frustrated searches through the endless option menus. When my goal is to transfer thoughts from my head to the screen as quickly and efficiently as possible, I turn to TextEdit.  I raise my virtual glass to this champion of no-frills software perfection.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user aless&ro.

The Apple iPad has been described most commonly as a consumption device. That is, many argue that its purpose is best suited for the consumption of varied content more so than productivity. While I don’t completely agree with that synopsis, the iPad is indeed great for leisure time use.

In fact, using the device has changed my leisure habits, and for the better. How has a simple device done this? Well, let’s look at the strengths of the iPad, and how that has helped an average person with their leisure time – me, to be exact.

The Beauty of Instant On Access

The iPad, like most smart phones, offers an instant on capability for quick use. While most users now take this in stride, compare it with an average laptop. Instead of waiting for the laptop to wake up from standby (or worse, boot up), I can turn on the iPad, swipe, get info, and turn it off again in only a few seconds, all the while saving wear and tear on the laptop lid.

This makes it great to do simple things, such as checking for a specific email or even getting the time. I no longer need to decide if it is worth it to bring up the computer just to check the weather. I check it whenever the mood strikes me. And finally, having nearly immediate access to TitanTV on my terms, makes it practical to check what is coming on the TV without needing a computer.

As long as I have the iPad handy, I can float in and out of my computer usage during leisure time without giving a second thought to laptop mechanics, such as proper ventilation. For quick occasional use the iPad blows a laptop away – the laptop will spend a lot of its power (and your time) just coming up each time you need it.

Big Screen for Tired Eyes

Okay, so you would argue that you would use a smart phone for leisure time instead of a laptop, and that is quite possible. After all, you can get a TV schedule on a smart phone as easy as you can the iPad, and it shares the same quick power up and auto power off as the iPad offers. And I will agree with you on these points.

That is, I will agree with you if your eyesight is in great shape. But for a lot of people that have a few more years under their belt, using a smart phone requires reading glasses. And guess what – when I am relaxing and watching TV, I do not have them handy. Nor do I want to put them on to check what is on TV. But the iPad is big enough that I can read it fine. Sure, I have the font size cranked up in the browser, but it works great for me and my tired eyes. This is especially true after using a computer screen all day. With the iPad I have immediate information at my disposal during down time, and I can leave the glasses at the desk.

Now, this larger screen size is not just handy for quick information. I like to read on the iPad, and when I do, I have the fonts large and comfortable. In fact, I can read the display easier than I can a printed book, thanks to the larger text. I shudder to think how thick a printed book would have to be in order to have the same size fonts – a lot of good trees would have to die to make it possible.

eBook Alternative Markets

So, yes, I like to read eBooks thanks to a larger text display. In the past it has been hard to find the titles I wanted to read. But now, with the iPad, I have the largest market available to me. With the right app, the Ipad becomes a virtual Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBook, and more. I can shop around with Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and more and find that elusive title. I can also compare prices, and even see what free eBooks are available from each (which is a great way to discover a new series that I may have overlooked in the past).

Beyond that, excellent apps such as Stanza allows me to tap into all of the other books that are available on the web and otherwise. I have built up a small collection of eBooks over the years, and the only problem is deciding which ones I want to put on the device. So far, eBook availability on the iPad is nothing if not wide.

Magazine, Comics and PDFs

Of course, not everything I read in my leisure time is an eBook, neatly formatted for a device. In fact, I like to read a good magazine every once in a while, and even partake in an occasional comic. These items are designed for the portrait oriented page, something that the widescreen laptop is simply not. What’s more, you really need to see the whole screen to take it all in. When you force it all to fit on the average laptop screen, it is not pretty.

But a tablet in general, and the iPad specifically, does portait orientation just fine. I can see, and read, an entire page without scrolling and without dead screen space to make it fit. I am free to flip through my favorite digital magazines, zooming in as desired, without chasing the screen around to see what the page offers. And by having all of my magazines (and occasional comic) in a truly digital form, they are not left sprawled out on the sofa, nor do I have to chase them down when I am in bed. If I have the iPad handy, I have them handy.

The same works great for a lot of PDFs that seem to multiply. I can see the entire PDF page at a glance, and I can easily read through them. For this I use one of the many available apps available to handle the storage and reading of PDFs, and the only problem is deciding how many I want to store on the device. It is all handy to me as long as I have the iPad within arm’s reach.

Great Form Factor

Finally, I have to bring up the great form factor that the iPad offers. With the iPad I can watch a movie on the larger screen, and if I fall asleep no big deal. It is not heavy enough to do any real harm, and it is durable enough to survive the ordeal. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for most laptops, especially when you consider the mechanics for the folding top, the keyboard, and the need for circulating air.

In fact, simply being lost in the covers could be a real problem for a hot running computer. More than once I’ve had to dig through the covers for the iPad after a restless night, something I would not like to do with my laptop. Even some of the best netbooks are not particulary well suited to under cover missions. While I would not suggest dropping an iPad onto a hard tile floor or sitting on one, so far it has done great for my uses and abuses.

As you can see, the iPad has changed my leisure habits for the better. Now I find it easier to use information services during casual time. In fact, I am more informed because of it, and it saves me from having to leave my state of leisure in order to do some tasks. And that to me is almost priceless after a particularly trying day.

This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward.

The key to his description, of course, is intent.  Sally is interested in a new umbrella, so she goes on Bing to search for umbrellas.  Bob wants to know the score of the latest World Cup game, and he jumps on Google to find it.  Amanda wants to find a quick headache remedy, so she fires up her browser and tries a search on Yahoo.

People who work on search sometimes refer to this as the “lean forward” experience.  You have an objective  or an “intent” for your online journey, and you are using a search engine to achieve that objective or satisfy that intent.  As you search, you leave behind artifacts of your exploration for the search engine to analyze: the keywords you used, the results you clicked, your location, and even whether you came back to the search results quickly (a sign that the page you went to didn’t quite fit) or decided to stick with your chosen result.

The aggregation of these expressed intents provides useful insight into what the world finds interesting.  One way that Google exposes this information is through Google Trends, which shows the top search keywords and topics in real time.  Google Flu Trends takes the same approach but filters for flu-related queries only, which rivals other sources at predicting the outbreak of influenza.

But as modern life becomes increasingly digital, and more and more devices and everyday objects sprout a connection to the web, the idea of search as “intent” may start to give way to a different phenomenon: the “lean back” experience.  Or, what I would simply call “collateral search.”

Larry Page defines the perfect search engine as one that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”  Note that he doesn’t say that it understands exactly what you ask it — it understands exactly what you mean.  Take the next logical step: the perfect search engine would be able to interpret your desire for information, and make that information available to you, before you’ve even affirmatively expressed that desire.

How might a search engine be able to capture your desire for information before you expressly invoke it?  Actually, Google has already built it and deployed it across millions of web pages.  It’s called AdSense.

Think about it: you go to a website.  In the sidebar is a Google AdSense box, like this:

How are those ads triggered?  Google scans the contents of the page (in this instance, it’s a story in the New York Times about the I Can Has Cheezburger? empire) and then searches its inventory of ads for the best matches — and of course, the highest bids.  The user has not explicitly invoked this search, yet here we are with a set of search results (albeit paid) that relates to the user’s activity.

We’re seeing some other early experiments in this space, as well.  Danny Sullivan points out that Bing and Yahoo are triggering collateral searches when users click through slideshows and other links on their homepages (and he astutely argues that these sorts of “queries” should not be counted the same as intentional ones).

Prepare to see more of this “lean back” or collateral searching over the next few years.  As augmented reality takes off, you can bet that services offering “search as you look” capabilities will rise.  Geolocation is starting to mature; expect to see more products that will notify you of results based on where you are and what you’re doing.  The “Internet of Things” — where everyday objects and appliances become connected to the web  –  is imminent.  Your house will search for the best light bulb prices when your lamp goes dark, and your car will search for the best gas prices in the area as you approach the quarter-tank line.

I want to end with a word about privacy in this new paradigm, and that word is education.  The common user’s understanding of his or her digital privacy is sorely trailing their exponentially increasing use of the Web.  As discussed above, we’re entering an age where the “crumbs” we leave behind are not just the result of eating our digital daily bread, but also a consequence of our normal quotidian routines — even those we exercise offline.  Driving a car, replacing a lightbulb, pulling our phones out in a shopping mall: these are all actions that will eventually invoke automatic online activity.  If we can’t manage the privacy of information we input directly, how will we ever manage the information that we input implicitly?  While search technology may be moving away from the idea of intention, it is precisely with intention that we must prepare ourselves — and the next generation —  for this new world.

Carr’s central argument is that with the increased use of the Web comes a decreased ability to engage in long-form reading and deep thought.  Now, a while back, I blew up at another author who made similar claims without providing much, if any, causal evidence.  I am happy to see from a few of Carr’s recent shorter pieces that he at least relies on published research to back his arguments.

Calls for “Delinkification”

Believe it or not, I’ve actually just committed what Carr deems to be one of the primary crimes perpetrated by the Web against deep reading and thinking: inline, contextual hyperlinking.  He explains in a post (oops, I did it again!) on his blog:

The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What’s good about a link – its propulsive force – is also what’s bad about it.

Carr describes a multiplicity of reasons why the link distracts from long-form reading and comprehension:

1. The link, by its very existence, makes us pause in our consideration and comprehension of the overlying and surrounding text to make a decision: do I click this, or do I ignore it?
2. If we choose to click it, we are taken to a different page completely.  Our brains must reset to prepare to capture and understand the new information.  We lose focus on what we were on before.
3. The problem can compound if the new page itself has links for us to decide on, and possibly follow further away from the original document.

Carr concludes that “people who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.”

In his blog post, Carr cites a few experiments in “bottom linking” that seek to mitigate this allegedly attention-degrading practice.  It’s just what it sounds like: instead of linking within the text to other destinations on the web, one simply collects links at the bottom of the post.  I’ve seen this from time to time, and I don’t like it for a few reasons.

Why Delinkification Is Bad For Users and Bad For the Web

First, consider the loss of context if, hypothetically, I had written the first two paragraphs of this post without links, and instead included this list at the bottom of the post:

• The Big Switch (Amazon)
• My review of The Big Switch (Tropophilia)
• “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (The Atlantic)
• The Shallows (official site)
• My take-down of Susan Jacoby (Tropophilia)
• Excerpt from The Shallows (Wired)
• “Does The Internet Make You Dumber?” by Carr (Wall Street Journal)
• “Are Google Maps and GPS Bad For Our Brains?” by Carr (Washington Post)

Compare that approach to what I actually constructed in the first two paragraphs of this post.  In the “bottom linked” version, you don’t know that the last three links are examples I am giving of how Carr makes science-backed arguments.  You also don’t know that those three are to be contrasted with my criticism of Susan Jacoby in the link preceding them.  Sure, I could explain all of these relationships in the bottom link area… but why go to all that trouble when I can simply link in the context of the post itself?

My second criticism is born from an observation Anil Dash made at an internal Google retreat I attended last year: hyperlinks were made into commodities by the growth of search engines (like Google) that turn connections into value, but contextual hyperlinking is also a skill, or even an artform.  The well-chosen link, when applied to the right word or phrase in a post, can say much more than is expressed on the surface.  Shifting links out of context and into a bottom list may save long-form reading and thought, but it removes an important and under-appreciated aspect of web literature and culture.

Third, and much more practically, removing links from context possibly hurts a lot of the value brought by search engines like Google.  Sure, Google will find the same links on the bottom-linked version of a page as well as it does on a inline-linked one.  But you can imagine that Google also takes into account the hyperlinked words themselves, the words around the link, the position of the link in the page, or maybe a dozen other attributes that depend on links being related to the content on top and around them (disclaimer: I am no more aware of the nitty gritty ingredients of Google Web Search’s secret sauce than you are).  In other words, stripping links out of context potentially degrades some of our ability to find webpages.

Finally, I’ve seen some bloggers go so far as to put a footnote (hyperlinked even!) in the text that points you to the relevant link at the bottom.  What does that fix?  You get the “distracting” hyperlink without the immediate value that the link brings.  To me, this seems like an even bigger distraction than what currently exists.

Have A Little Faith (And, A Call For Innovation)

Though I haven’t read The Shallows and don’t know what his full reasoning and recommendations are, what has bothered me the most about Carr’s arguments on this topic are his lack of faith in the capacity of modern humans to adapt to new media and the challenges that they pose.

In his counterpoint to Carr’s Wall Street Journal piece, Clay Shirky reminds us that every media revolution has brought fear, turmoil, and sometimes chaos — but they have sparked amazing cultural evolutions as well.  For example, the invention of the printing press “fueled the Protestant Revolution,” but it also paved the way for “novels, newspapers, scientific journals, the separation of fiction and non-fiction” and even the concept of scientific peer review.  The Internet may be rewiring our brains to work a different way, but that doesn’t mean all outcomes are disastrous.  History, so far, proves otherwise.

Look, I don’t disagree that links can be distracting.  I don’t deny that, when presented with a link, my mind momentarily pauses to decide whether to click it.  But when I decide to click a link in an article that I plan on finishing, I rarely just “click it.”  Instead, I use a simple shortcut (on Windows: Ctrl-click; on Mac: Cmd-click) to open the link in a new background tab.  I may do this a few times in the same article, opening the links up for later consideration (unless I feel I need to check the link out to better understand what I’m reading, in which case I navigate to that tab while keeping the original article open).  There is a subtle but important difference between this and bottom links; my mind is able to process the context of the links while still saving them for browsing after finishing the current document.

Admittedly, the Cmd-click solution isn’t an obvious one for the average browser user (indeed, the average browser user usually doesn’t know what a browser is exactly).  I think what we need are lightweight, out-of-the-box browser capabilities to show what’s behind a link (before clicking) so that we can decide whether it’s worth it to leave the current page.  Snap and Apture (among others) offer some interesting solutions on the publisher side, but Snap is a slow, terrible user experience, and I haven’t seen Apture widely adopted.  To give you a sense of how Apture works, check out this post on my personal blog where I tried the service out (click the “video” link).

This capability is actually already built into the HTML language itself.  The “title” attribute lets publishers add text that will show up when you hover over a link.  You can see it in action by hovering your mouse here.  But again, far too people take the time to hover — it’s far faster and easier just to click away.  I really think then modern browser makers need to think about building in stronger capabilities for pre-click link evaluation.

Closing Thoughts

I welcome Nicholas Carr’s criticism.  I think it’s important.  I don’t doubt that the research he cites is well-founded and thorough.  Indeed, I agree that the Internet is rewiring our very impressionable brains.  I can feel it.  But I dispute his conclusion that it’s making us “stupid.”  I spend a whole lot of time online, but I still read books, often for hours at a time.  At the least, I think it’s way too early to tell, and I am optimistic that we’ll adapt for the better.

I’m also glad that he’s proposing solutions, even small-scale experimental ones, to counter any potential fallout from this neural transition.  However, I think that any widespread changes we make to the way we publish and read online need to also preserve the pre-existing value of the Web.  We have an opportunity, after careful reflection, to seize on Carr’s observations and make the Internet — and the conversations that happen there — a better place.  Let’s do it with a spirit of progress, not regression.

Image used under a CC-BY-SA license courtesy of Flickr user Max Klingensmith.

Saturday was the unofficial 300 year anniversary of copyright, as first formalized in Britain’s Statute of Anne in 1710.  I took the opportunity to reflect a little bit on my personal blog about my own interest in copyright law (part of a broader interest in technology and Internet law).

At the end of the post in a section called “© needs reform,” I get to the real reason I am fascinated by copyright law: because it is in major disrepair, and failing to keep pace with the rate of innovation we’re seeing today.  In short, I’m interested in copyright because I want to help fix it.

I thought it would be appropriate to flag that section for you here on Tropophilia, since it is something I’d love to change.

Image used under a CC-BY-SA license from Wikipedia Commons.

The dream employee for a lot of companies is a twenty-something with as little of a life as possible outside of work–someone who’ll be fine working fourteen-hour days and sleeping under his desk.  But packing a room full of these burn-the-midnight-oil types isn’t as great as it seems. [. . .]  You don’t need more hours; you need better hours.  When people have something to do at home, they get down to business.  They get their work done because they have somewhere else to be.  They find ways to be more efficient because they have to.

-Rework (affiliate link)

The 37 Signals team behind the project management software I and thousands of others use daily (Basecamp) published a new book laying out some of the principles behind their success.  They call Rework a “by product” of their business; the equivalent of a cookbook written by a chef confident enough that their mastery will still trump any upstart competitors armed with detailed instructions.  One of the ideas promoted in Rework, after all, is to strengthen and promote your business by teaching–customers, other business owners, even competitors:

[E]mulate famous chefs.  They cook, so they write cookbooks.  What do you do?  What are your “recipes”?  What’s your “cookbook”?  What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional?  This book is our cookbook.

And it’s full of direct, combative, written-with-purpose recipes for running an un-apologetically small but thriving business.  The book is organized into a series of brief essays on a variety of work topics; read on for a few passages I found particularly compelling and a special video dialogue where Jarred and I discuss the book:

The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use. [. . .] If you’re solving someone else’s problem, you’re constantly stabbing in the dark.  When you solve your own problem, the light comes on.  You know exactly what the right answer is.

Just as there’s a danger in trying to solve someone else’s problem, there’s a danger in thinking that the answer to your problem is the answer to everyone’s problem.  This seems clearly, painfully true in the world of tech.  Friendfeed probably solved a problem for its creator, but it never caught on because most people don’t consume countless online channels like Robert Scoble.  The best products and services, it seems to me, address common pains that an innovator experiences personally.

Whenever you can, swap “Let’s think about it” for “Let’s decide on it.”  Commit to making decisions.  Don’t wait for the perfect solution.  Decide and move forward. [. . . ] It doesn’t matter how much you plan, you’ll still get some stuff wrong anyway.  Don’t make things worse by overanalyzing and delaying before you ever get going.

I can’t endorse this approach fervently enough.  As the authors point out elsewhere in the book, decisions delayed often translate into languishing projects and vanishing motivation.  In my experience, putting off a decision rarely leads to subsequent follow-through.  More often, two weeks later you’re back in a meeting with the same people facing the same dilemma…with no new information or additional wisdom.  Pull the trigger: decide, then change course if it doesn’t work.

Instead of trying to outspend, outsell, or outsponsor competitors, try to out-teach them.  Teaching probably isn’t something your competitors are even thinking about.  Most businesses focus on selling or servicing, but teaching never even occurs to them. [. . .]  Teach and you’ll form a bond you just don’t get from traditional marketing tactics.  Buying people’s attention with a magazine or online banner ad is one thing.  Earning their loyalty by teaching them forms a whole different connection.  They’ll trust you more.  They’ll respect you more.  Even if they don’t use your product, they can still be you fans.

I LOVE this notion, and it explains my affection toward 37 Signals and the authors of this book.  I’ve read Signals vs. Noise, the 37 Signals blog, for years.  Long before I started using Basecamp and Highrise.  Why?  Because it’s a corporate blog that’s interesting.  Imagine that.  They periodically post updates on 37 Signals products, which didn’t mean much to me before I became a customer, but they also offer–via the blog–a trusted perspective into the actions of other companies, developments in the tech industry, and content (quotes, photos, and the like) that’s just plain fascinating.  Here‘s one of many pieces I’ve re-posted from Signals vs. Noise on my personal blog.

Teaching is underrated because it requires significant and genuine investment, often without an immediate return.  Putting the time into creating an ebook on trends in your industry or a “how to” guide that could be used by your competitors doesn’t directly pay off the way sales calls might.  But when done well, I think many consumers are eager to listen to a company willing to share expertise and teach.  We’re all bombarded by so many marketing pitches every day; what if you learned something every time a company pitched its product or services?  What if a company offered you valuable insights before you ever signed a contract or paid a dime?  I’m really excited to try this concept out in my own work, and I’ll share my efforts when they come together.

We’re all capable of bad, average, and great work.  The environment has a lot more to do with great work than most people realize. [. . .] [T]here’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under lame policies, poor direction, and stifling bureaucracies.  Cut the crap and you’ll find that people are waiting to do great work.  They just need to be given the chance. [. . .] Great environments show respect for the people who do the work and how they do it.

An environment where employees feel valued, respected, and trusted to take initiative really makes all the difference.  Without falling into the common trap of making everything a generational commentary, this seems to be a key shift.  Today’s younger workers are entering the workplace expecting to contribute ideas and find new ways to approach old problems.  Companies and organizations that recognize this desire–and refuse to worry endlessly about the (probably minor) consequences of not approving everything from the executive suite–will be rewarded by employees who take pride in their work and exceed expectations.

Workaholics make the people who don’t stay late feel inadequate for “merely” working reasonable hours.  That leads to guilt and poor morale all around.  Plus, it leads to an ass-in-seat mentality–people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren’t really being productive. [. . .] Workaholics aren’t heroes.  They don’t save the day, they just use it up.  The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

Nothing is more toxic, in my mind, than the “ass-in-seat mentality.”  It not only demonstrates a lack of trust and respect toward your employees, it betrays more fundamental and serious issues in your workplace.  Employees who take the fate of their company or organization seriously deliver, even if it means working at 2 in the morning after spending an afternoon in the park.  Employees who know that they are valued simply for showing up during set hours will quickly lose motivation to go above and beyond.

I recommended Rework to Jarred, who devoured the book in less than 24 hours.  Here’s a short diavlog we recorded about a few themes in the book (note: early in the video I carelessly forget one of the authors’ names.  Apologies to David Heinemeier Hansson, who co-authored the book with Jason Fried): [Ed. Note: Apparently Wetoku, the service we used to record the video, mangled it somehow and it no longer displays...we're hoping this is temporary]

http://wetoku.com/video/87duoeqr/player

I would recommend Rework to nearly anyone.  It represents a worldview that is sure to seem anathema to many “experienced” (read: “older”) business owners and managers, but in staking out one extreme it’s sure to cause any reader to examine their own productivity, work culture, and business (or organizational) values.  We might not all want or need to function as 37 Signals clones, but I challenge anyone to read this book without discovering a nugget of wisdom or provocation to action that does not change some part of their approach to work.

In the video, Jarred and I obviously mention Rework, but Jarred also mentions Getting Things Done by David Allen and I speak about Small Giants by Bo Burlingham.  All three books are highly recommended.

In September 2008, TechCrunch held its second annual TechCrunch50 event.  The multi-day conference brings together early-stage startups to give demos of their products in front of a panel of tech investors and consultants.  As I browsed through TechCrunch’s coverage of the event, one demo caught my eye in particular: the FitBit.  I put the $99 device on my Christmas 2008 wish list, but production and shipment was delayed by almost a year and a half because of design issues.  I just received my unit last month.

FitBit was a rare TechCrunch 50 demo in that it actually conceived a product made out  bits and atoms.  The company produces an extremely compact device called the FitBit Tracker.  About the length of a match and the thickness of a pack of gum, the Tracker is little more than an accelerometer coupled with a Bluetooth antenna, a bit of memory, and an LED display.  In other words, it’s a tricked out, wi-fi enabled pedometer.

But the value of FitBit lies not so much in the gadget itself as as in the data mining it enables.  The driving concept is unofficially called “the Prius effect,” the idea that people will behave differently (better, hopefully) when they have more granular visibility into their behavior.  For the Prius, it’s the in-dash monitor that shows how much gas is being saved by the hybrid system.  For Google Powermeter, it’s the hour-by-hour online graph of home power consumption.  When you can track your pace and realize the stakes, the competition you hold with yourself to become better grows fiercer.

You clip the Tracker onto your belt or pocket, and it automatically logs your movement throughout the day.  When you come within range of the included USB base station, the Tracker offloads its data into the cloud-based FitBit Dashboard app.  That, in itself, is a lot of the value proposition: FitBit makes monitoring your fitness extremely easy.  No logging your daily steps in a spreadsheet, converting them into miles, or estimating the calories; FitBit does it all for you, automatically.  The onboard LED shows the raw data, as well as a little flower that grows and shrinks with your level of activity.

Using the web app, you can view your activity anywhere from minute-by-minute to day-by-day, including the approximate calories lost, miles traveled, etc.  If you need to enter activities not captured well by the Tracker (skiing and swimming for example) or if you forget to wear the gadget one day, Fitbit provides a deep database of activities that you can select from to approximate your exercise.

To help put your exercise into perspective, the Dashboard also enables you to track the food you eat and the amount of sleep you get.  For food tracking, it has a robust database of thousands of generic and commercial foods that you can easily search, select portions, and assign to different meals.  The Dashboard totals the calories and other nutritional value, and shows the data on the same graph as your fitness level.  Thus, in a single view, you can see (however approximately) whether you’re burning more than you’re consuming.

As for sleep tracking, I’ve found this to be the least useful feature of the FitBit suite (but it’s still a neat trick).  Essentially, you enable “sleep mode” on your tracker (rendering it ultra-sensitive to movement) and place it in a provided wristband before hitting the sack.  The Tracker then logs how long it takes you to fall asleep, how many times you wake up in the middle of the night, and (assuming you remember to turn off sleep mode when you get up in the morning) how long you’ve slept total.  This information is also uploaded to the Dashboard and graphed separately.

I’ve found it really great to get a general measure of my fitness and nutrition data, and it has helped me make better choices of how/what to eat and how much to exercise.  I have a feeling that I’ll start being lazy and slack off on inputting my food data, but the activity level data is really the most important part of the package.

What would make the experience even better?  A mobile app that lets me enter my food and review my data on the go, as well as provide custom alerts (like a mid-afternoon warning that my calorie intake is on track to exceed my calorie burn).  I think the app could be more social too, perhaps letting me assign friends, family, or coaches as dedicated accountability agents to review my data and encourage me to keep at it.

In sum, I think the FitBit is a really nifty, useful gadget that over the long run will totally be worth the money.  The nice thing is that the gadget itself needs no upgrading, and any inadequacies in the web product can be updated regularly through the cloud.  It’s one of the best pairings of bits and atoms I’ve seen in a while.

I’m intrigued by the types of businesses that are so romantically attractive to would-be entrepreneurs (yours truly), midlife crisis corporate types, and ambitious retirees…despite being nearly impossible to launch successfully.  From the Slate story Ezra references about a nice couple who decided to chase their dream and open a coffee shop:

The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one’s own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to Barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they’re going to lose a lot of it.

[...] Guess what, dear dreamers? The psychological gap between working in a cafe because it’s fun and romantic and doing the exact same thing because you have to is enormous. Within weeks, [my wife] and I—previously ensconced in an enviably stress-free marriage—were at each other’s throats. [...] Two highly educated professionals with artistic aspirations have just put themselves—or, as we saw it, each other—on $8-per-hour jobs slinging coffee.

The restaurant business can be worse.  Here’s one industry veteran’s warning to day-dreamers:

I had somebody approach me who had a very good job with a major company and an MBA from a prestigious university [and wanted to open a restaurant]. I looked at him and asked, “Is your career in danger?” He said, “No, but I’ve always loved food. I love to cook. I love to have parties.” I told him to invite 20 friends over, throw a great dinner party, and then take a stack of $100 bills and burn them one by one. It will be fun—and cheaper than opening a restaurant.

It’s easy to confuse the types of establishments we like to frequent with the types of enterprises we’d like to run.  Coffee shops embody a tremendous mythology based on the notion that since it’s so relaxing and fun to be a coffee shop patron it must similarly be painless and joyous to create that space for others.  Unfortunately, customers people can be unreasonable, stingy, fickle, and downright unpleasant when they’re low on caffeine or faced with a slightly-stale scone.

Almost any business can seem more glamorous and, frankly, easy to manage from the outside.  The trick is understanding enough about the good, the bad, and the ugly reality before jumping into a new industry or setting out on your own…while maintaining enough of that naivete and idealism to succeed, even in impossibly difficult endeavors.  No one dreams of owning a joyless moneypit that serves coffee or Italian food.  But the great coffee shops and Italian eateries are run by people who knew the risks and decided to give it a shot anyway.

Image of a presumably very happy and well-run coffee shop used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user pellesten.

That’s because she’s dead.

@Genny_Spencer is the daily diary of a female teenager between 1937 and 1941.  Her grand-nephew David Griner, a social media strategist and developer, found her diaries and decided to create an daily, auto-posting account of each entry.  When Griner first started the account on January 1, 2009, his great-aunt was still alive (although stricken with dementia).  She passed away about a month later.

As Griner notes, there’s really nothing personal in the diary – it’s more a daily accounting, and most posts focus on the temperature.  But in a time when we’re blasting and being blasted with updates about celebrities and start-ups, gaffes and gore, these mundane, anachronistic tweets offer a real breath of fresh air when they pop onto my screen.  What a different time, when it was sometimes literally too cold for children to go to school because they had to walk so far, or when the highlight of one’s day was having a parent’s friend over for dinner.

There are many exciting potential applications of this idea.  For example, last year on the anniversary of the first moon landing, a site called We Choose The Moon created Twitter accounts for Houston Command, the Apollo 11 spacecraft, and the Eagle lunar module.  The radio transcripts were fed through the accounts in sync with the timing of the events 40 years ago, letting us experience the exciting pace of the event in real-time.  Scattered among other present day updates, it presents a really compelling reminder of how much excitement is happening all around us.

While these novelty accounts don’t justify the existence of Twitter or other real-time social services, they do make for interesting use cases.  They also help keep in perspective the times we live in, and the level to which events in our lives really qualify as “groundbreaking.”

The Advertisement That Watches You - I’ll leave the details of this particular implementation to the article, but the essence of the technology is a billboard with a built-in camera that, through facial recognition technology, can tell when anyone within a certain radius of the advertisement is looking at it.  This one, interestingly, changes to its main message when people are not looking.  You can imagine, however, how this technology might develop over time: electronic ads could be powered off until it new there were passersby actually looking at the space.  Facial recognition could also be used to power an impressions-based ads payment system, much like exists on the web: advertisers would only have to pay per “view” or elapsed “eyeball time” on the ad.  Of course, such commercial use of facial recognition technology also raises enormous privacy concerns (How long are camera images kept?  Would the technology eventually be used to identify people and serve ads based on their personal interests, or  even the clothes they were wearing or the book they are reading at that moment?).  It will be interesting to see how this area grows, if at all.

Bicycle Highways - I thought this was a cool idea, but I’m not sure I see it gaining widespread adoption outside of cities that have significant numbers of bike commuters.  What I think is really clever is the possibilities raised with GPS and RFID technology that would allow for bikers to create on-the-fly pelotons, which in turn would be able to gain privileges for traffic lights and such: a mix between EZPass and carpool lanes.  Throw in a custom social network for the city so you could plan your departures in order to meet up with a regular riding group, and this could be really great for those cities with big biking cultures.

The Counterfeit Self - I think this research has implications for the Web.  There has long been a debate about authentication online: when writing a blog, posting comments, or joining a social network, is it “better” for users to have the ability to remain anonymous or pseudonymous, or should they be encouraged or required to use their real identity (obfuscated to whatever degree they prefer).  Many argue that encouraging or requiring authentication would, for example, solve the problem evidence by the (often hateful and troll-like) comments of any given YouTube video.  Opponents summon the right to free dom of speech as a defense of anonymous use of the web.  Some governments, like South Korea, actually require what is referred to as “real name verification” for websites in their jurisdiction that surpass a certain threshold of users; users are required to authenticate against a national registry before they can interact with the site.  Considering the idea of how behavior is influenced by fake identity could offer a fresh perspective in this debate.

Good Enough is the New Great - One aspect that this idea doesn’t cover (and I can’t remember anymore if the Wired article does or not) is information.  Just as consumers are turning to cheap cameras, low-fi music files, and YouTube videos, they are also turning to Twitter for their information fixes.  Many argue that in moving from mainstream to social media as our main source of information, we make a similar sacrifice of quality for convenience.  I think that may be true in the short-term, but I’m hopeful that just like companies are starting to fit better and better sensors into those tiny Flip cameras, so will Twitter eventually recapture some of the fidelity of the “news” that it carries.

The Google Algorithm As Extinction Model - I feared that this would be some diatribe about how Google would lead to our own extinction, but luckily my apprehensions were misplaced.  This is a really, really cool one.  I wonder what if PageRank could also be applied to, say, fighting crime?  I guess that’s sort of what that show Numbers is all about…

Guilty Robots - OK, I’m going to admit, I’ve been on a bit of a Terminator fix lately.  Robots scare me.  I am a big fan of technology and the Internet, but when it comes to having robots do stuff with increasing autonomy… I mean, what?  Why do we need to program “guilt” into a machine?  Do we really need to automate our violence and our emotional attachment to it?

Literary Alzheimer’s - Yet another example of how almost any subject can be studied scientifically!  This time: authorship.  Are statistically significant results from an analysis of vocabulary a smoking gun for dementia?  Probably not, but it’s still fascinating.  I hope that more research like this can and will be done as more books are scanned.

Lithium in the Water Supply - I’m not sure “number of suicides” is the dependent variable on which I want to base a decision to add chemicals to my water.  But an interesting idea nonetheless.

Lunar Legalism - Yes.  Just, yes.  This is awesome.  We have an “Outer Space Treaty” and a “Moon Treaty”?  Why did I not know this?  Forget IP Law, I’m going to specialize in Interstellar Law suckers.  I’m going to be the Jefferson of the Milky Way.

Massively Collaborative Mathematics - Another great example of opening up big problems for attack by the discrete “spare cycles” of thousands of people.  The old saying is that “people are smart, but groups are dumb.”  Plug a group into the Internet, and think again.

Social Networks As Foreign Policy - Lots of folks criticize social networks of all stripes as a waste of time: why put so much effort into keeping tabs on the digital profiles of others (and curating your own) when you could just talk to those people in person.  I think as Americans we’re biased because we have the leisure of freedom of association and freedom of gathering together, all without fear of being caught up in violence or oppression.  Digital networks allow those who otherwise don’t enjoy the social privileges we do to express themselves and to network with likeminded peers.

Subscription Artists - These things get me so excited.  What I would like to see (maybe it exists already) is this model, except as investment in ideas.  Instead of just funding an idea, you can actually invest in a “share” of it and reap some of the rewards.  We wrote last year about a highly controversial and possibly fraudulent effort to do this with a novel, but I think there could be room for an SEC-approved approach.  Some fear this will lead us back into the days of patronage, but I think that’s shortsighted.  What better way to fund the arts than by the fans?

Undead-Austen Mash-Ups - One more point for the commons!  Seriously, though, how many more regular Jane Austen novels do you think were sold as a result of this mashup?  I bet it was not insignificant, and I bet that sales of this book did not substitute for sales of regular old Pride and Predjudice.

Waste Tracking - Just a smart idea, all around.  Though I think it would experience a lot of roadblocks to widespread adoption, I could see this easily being adopted out here in the Bay Area and slowly expanding to other communities.  If I knew I might pick up some cash for my trash, I’d spend more time being thoughtful about my waste.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Cayusa.

All of us have a level of personal value that in today’s connected community driven conversations, we can establish very quickly. This personal value relies heavily on the skills you hold and in how you use them. With access to social networks, online media outlets, and the ability to expand your network, personal branding can catapult you and the knowledge you have to new heights.

This strikes a chord with me, as I’m typically skeptical of “personal branding” as a discipline.  It always feels inherently phony; as something you do to hide anything that doesn’t fit in whatever box you’re carefully crafting for yourself.   But lately I’m giving in a bit to the personal branding evangelists, mainly because I’m gaining more and more confidence that who I am personally and professionally will, on balance, lead to more opportunities than disappointments if it is reflected online.

Part of what always bothered me about personal branding was a sense that you needed to be “on message” at all times. I first experienced social media in a purely social way as a college student on Facebook.  The evolution of social media into a tool for business, politics, and activism still hasn’t changed my prevailing view that certain social networks can and should remain social in nature.  Any friend of mine who seems “on message” on Facebook actually strikes me as being “incredibly dull.”  Thus, any attempt at message discipline on my part results in a bit of self-loathing: I worry that I’m becoming “one of those people” who seem unable to let their guard down long enough to genuinely converse with people online or publish an honest, unfiltered reaction to news or life events.

All of the personal branding experts (and blogging experts, for that matter) will tell you to pick a single topic and stick to it.  The word from social media “pros” is to develop expertise and build your reputation.  I’m interested in many different things, and I go through phases of intense interest in very random industries, issues, concepts, and hobbies.  I liken my consumption of online content to a continuation of the liberal arts education I so enjoyed.  As a result I have trouble focusing with any consistency on one topic, one angle, or one message.  Nowhere is this more apparent than, well, right here: the theme of this blog is “change.”  And to think, Jarred and I worried that would be too limiting.

But now I’ve come to view my own brand—and, by extension, the concept of personal branding—to be inclusive of both my authentic self (versus a caricature crafted for the internet) and of my varied, ever evolving interests.

What I now realize is that multi-disciplinary and dynamic passions distinguish all of the people I find interesting and want to be around; as the saying goes, it’s a feature, not a bug.  For all of the large law firms and medical residency programs that have my friends scrambling to wipe every trace of their less-than-buttoned-down selves from the web (good luck), I’m confident there are enough potential employers, business partners, and clients out there for whom my “brand of one” online will be viewed as an asset or at least a conversation starter.

For all of the risks of putting yourself out there, the potential personal growth, interpersonal connections, and gained expertise are tremendous rewards.  Because ultimately, don’t we all want to work with and for people who “get it” in the sense that they:

1. View online engagement—be it blogging, podcasting, tweeting, or simply reading tons of content—as evidence that someone is interesting, motivated, and passionate; and
2. Understand that a reasonable online presence (you won’t find me defending behavior that I would find offensive in life displayed online) need not be sterile or phony to be appropriate

So consider it a New Years resolution: build your brand online.  But, more than anything, be confident that by being yourself online and off you’ll gain more than you lose.

Image used under a Creative Commons License courtesy of Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik.

I think that is incorrect, because in science, the cool thing is that fail = win.  What I mean is that science is all about testing something, getting results, and developing a conclusion based on those results.  If your model sucks and your experiment fails as a result, you’ve learned something.  You rebuild, you try something else, and you chalk your first try up on the list of things that don’t work.  Launch and iterate, my friends.  It’s the Google way, and we’ve done alright so far.

Stories are just as much about what’s written as what is not written.  Pictures are just as much about what is captured as what is not captured.  Science is just as much about what works as it is about what does not work.  There is another debate in the research community about whether it is worth publishing failed experiments in academic journals.  Of course it’s worth it!  People learn most from failure!  Of course maybe more space should be reserved for the epic wins, but there is just as much to be gleaned from the details of an epic fail.

That is why I am so stoked about the Energy Department’s announcement that they are going to fund a bunch of cutting-edge research experiments, some of which currently exist only in conceptual form.  Says the leader of the new initative, Dr. Arum Majumdar:

“We don’t know which ones are going to work, but we’ll try them,” he said, “and if many of them fail but one works, that’s great, we’ve solved the problem.”

Exactly.  And for the projects that are funded but ultimately do not prove feasible or scalable, we’ll still have a win on our hands.  We will have explored and ruled out approaches based on data instead of instinct, and we will also have encouraged researchers and entrepreneurs to take risks and to think outside to box.  That’s America, baby.

Image used and modified under a Creative Commons license courtesy of willandbeyond.

Google Reader is a tool for pulling interesting content to a central inbox via “feeds.”  Almost every website on the web that publishes regular updates also sends out a feed that can be subscribed to via various tools.  As a result, instead of clicking through a long list of bookmarked sites to see if there’s something new to read, you can just subscribe to that site’s feed and all the new content will build up in your inbox.  (If you want to subscribe to Tropophilia‘s feed, click here.)

Though it got off to a rocky start, Reader has been incrementally socializing and personalizing itself over the past two years.  First it let you share items publicly; later, those shared items became directly available to your contacts who also use Reader.  Recently, the team introduced the ability to “like” an item in addition to sharing it, and it also created a section of “recommended” feeds based on your reading, sharing, and liking history (although it was a little hard to find).  It has also given users new ways to share with the “send to” feature that lets you post to Twitter and other third party sites.

At first, it was confusing as to why there was both a “like” and a “share” feature, with many people not understanding when they would do one without doing the other.  This week, the Reader team cleared that up by delivering the punch line:

• You can now sort any feed (including the comprehensive feed) by “magic.”  The sorting is based on what Reader has determined you’re interested in, as reflected by your reading/liking/sharing history.
• The “recommended feeds” feature now has prime real estate in the main sidebar in a new “Explore” section.
• There is a new “popular items” feed (also sortable by your personalized “magic”) that shows you what items have been popular across the web recently.

It’s now clear why there is a distinct “like” button.  If you enjoyed an article but don’t necessarily want to share it with your contacts, you can “like” it and Reader will feed that signal into its personalizing algorithm.  The more you “like” things, the more recommendations Reader can make (and the more Reader can provide everyone with a sense of what’s popular on the web at any given moment).

With these few moves, Google Reader will likely rejoin Twitter as one of the first places I go when I have time to spare and want to see what’s going on in the world.  I have my trusted feeds that I have added myself, but now I also have the ability to sort those feeds according to what I’ll likely find most important or interesting.  In addition, I am now constantly offered new sources of information to consider adding to my diet of feeds.  I can quickly click a feed, browse its items, see how often its authors post, and decide whether to subscribe or pass.  If I pass, it is removed and replaced by a new feed suggestion.  This adds a new layer of tailored serendipity, letting me discover new voices and points of view within the topics that interest me.

Finally, the popular items feeds adds an additional layer of true serendipity that lets me take the pulse of what’s buzzing on the web.  Add those improvements to the fact that Reader aggregates the reading recommendations made by my friends, and it truly is one of the most customized and personalized sources of information aggregation on the market.

One of the observations being made about my generation’s expectations for news is that we no longer believe we should have to go find out what’s happening or being said in the world — instead, we expect that information will find us.  By rolling out these new features, the Reader team is delivering a product that meets (and in some ways, exceeds) those expectations.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user optionthis.

As a future lawyer (side note: I sent 12 of 15 law school applications last weekend!), it reassures me that at least the ABA’s leadership has recognized that lawyers, firms, and their clients need to adapt in order to survive.  But I found it even more encouraging that Schofield highlighted the need for the entire justice system — especially the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which were last updated in 1938 — to be refreshed for the present times.  I’d like to highlight a couple of her points and add my own thoughts as well.

The first area that Schofield specifically targets is the billable hour.  The billable hour system rewards firms and attorneys for the time spent working on a project.  While the rate can vary depending on the type of work performed, the rates typically do not reflect the value added by the work performed.  And it doesn’t even really make logical sense, as Evan Chesler noted in Forbes back in January: “If you are successful and win a case early on, you put yourself out of work. If you get bogged down in a land war in Asia, you make more money. That is frankly nuts.”  He went on to propose a system more similar to how a construction contractor operates:

For reasonable periods of time during the life of a lawsuit, say three months at a time, I should do what [a contractor] does: identify the client’s objectives, measure, calculate, build in a contingency and come back with a price. Once the price has been agreed upon, the billable hour should be irrelevant. The client will no longer be surprised by a whopper bill and met by the standard (albeit true) explanation that “litigation is unpredictable.”

Whether this is the approach that wins the day is up for question but, as Schofield concludes, “sooner or later, something has to give.”

Moving on from the billable hour, Schofield notes that the new generation of lawyers is organizing its workload and its information in new and different ways from the previous generations.  Using an anecdote, she notes that younger attorneys are no longer organizing evidence or information as a “story”, and instead are keeping key documents in their originally produced, bates-stamped order.  The takeaway is that as the tools for organizing and making sense of information become more sophisticated, we no longer have to rely on physical arrangement or sorting in order to retain a sense of sense or order.

This should not be lamented in my opinion, but celebrated and built upon.  The further into the information age we progress, the more information and data there will be to collect, understand, and present for consideration.  More and more, we will rely on tools to do that type of processing for us; what will be important from a human skills perspective is the ability to instruct those tools how to find and present what we need.

I spoke on the phone recently with Professor Fred Lederer at the William & Mary Law School.  In 1993, he helped start a program called the Center for Legal and Court Technology that “seeks to improve the administration of justice through the use of appropriate technology.  They recognized over fifteen years ago that the world’s judicial systems would need to keep pace with the rapid innovation that would arrive with the 21st century.  From the question of resolving disputes across multiple jurisdictions via videoconference, to figuring out the best means of conducting electronic discovery from data-saturated companies, the CLCT plays an important role in training new and veteran lawyers alike how to be better advocates in the information age.

Schofield concludes her essay by calling for a rebooting of some of our laws and the entirety of the justice system.  She highlights intellectual property law as a particular area of concern, noting that affairs have progressed to such a poor and confused state that content companies, in a vain attempt to protect themselves, feel forced to sue the very customers and partners they need to survive.  While this is also in large part a failure of imagination and innovation on the part of the content industries, the laws could be improved as well.

Of particular concern to Schofield is the ever-decreasing synchronization between the realities of the present and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the court protocol for civil suits.  Schofield notes that 1938, the years the Rules were last refreshed, was the same year that the ball point pen was patented and that transatlantic air transportation was just a vision.  Now we live in a world where information is anywhere and everywhere at once, where employees work for companies headquartered on the other side of the planet, and where more or less everyone carries a small, constantly-connected computer in their pockets.  The Rules “speak of a 100-mile radius for service of subpoenas and the admissibility of hearsay statements by unavailable witnesses whose presence cannot be procured.”  Choice of venue and law are based on “anachronistic ideas of territorial jurisdiction and sovereignty.”  We are applying the procedures of pre-World War II to post-9/11.

The first of Google’s “Ten Things We Know To Be True” philosophy is “Focus on the user and all else will follow.”  The legal industry and the justice system would do well to follow this, whether they consider their “user” to be their client that should pay for the value received, or a citizen or company that deserves the fairest application of justice that is available.  Technology is meant to improve our lives, and that should include improving the protection and enforcement of rights as well.

In hopes of making this post more than a typical “I swear I’ll blog more often….starting NOW!” vow (I’d love to see statistics on how many blog posts start with some variation on this theme), I thought I’d share a mix that I created tonight for my friend Sam.  Sam hasn’t received his mix in the mail just yet (is it possible to ever find a blank CD lying around when you need one?  I think not), but it’s ok because there are a a few surprises left out of the online mix.

Enjoy the tunes.  I might blog more often, and I might not.  You’re busy people.  You understand.

I recommend listening to this playlist in a car at night or under headphones, just because those are my two favorite ways to listen to music.

http://www.lala.com/external/flash/PlaylistWidget.swf

One of my first posts on Tropophilia profiled the founder of reCAPTCHA, Luis von Ahn, and his efforts to harness otherwise-wasted human effort.  Given today’s announcement, I thought it made sense to repost it in order to put into context this acquisition and the “spare cycles” philosophy that it engenders.

Disclosure: I am an employee of Google.  I was not an employee at the time this post was originally published.  All views expressed in this post are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of Google.

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“Spare Cycles: Distributing Computing Among Machines and Minds” - published January 19, 2008.

A few weeks ago I read an article in The Economist about distributed computing, defined by Wikipedia as “a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program are run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network.” Basically what you do is download a program that, when you’re not around, uses your computer’s processor (which would otherwise be mostly idle) to crunch data sent to it from a central server. Your computer joins thousands of others crunching data at any one time, forming a giant networked supercomputer with each unit working on a different piece of the puzzle.

What’s the puzzle? It can be anything, or at least anything that requires a whole lot of computer power to figure out. Some puzzles are humanitarian in nature; for example, the World Community Grid (sponsored by IBM) currently has projects tackling cancer, AIDS, and Dengue fever research, as well as African climate change. Others are more geeky (or, should we say, scientific), like the SETI@home project which is searching for extraterrestrial intelligence by analyzing radio telescope data.

So the bottom line is this: while one way to save the planet and contribute to science is through the donation of time and money, another way is through the donation of your computer’s processing power. Why let your computer idly sit while you’re at work or school all day — occasionally using a small processor burst to throw the next picture from your hard drive onto your screensaver, which no one but your dog is watching — when you can have it use its full capacity to solve some of the world’s toughest problems?

The buzz word for this phenomenon is “donating spare cycles.” Basically, a cycle is the process your computer goes through to retrieve a command from its memory and execute that command. It’s how your computer works and, in a way, it’s how our minds work too. A human cycle, then, would be the process our brain goes through to retrieve and process information from our memory. But do humans have spare cycles to donate? You bet.

Meet Luis von Ahn. I first read about him in this article in Wired magazine. You know those pictures of twisted letters and numbers that you have to enter to sign up for an e-mail or other online account? Those are called “CAPTCHAs”, and von Ahn invented them. CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” While optical character recognition has advanced far enough to allow computers to “read” standard text, the technology is not (yet) capable of deciphering the contorted figures presented in CAPTCHAs. By entering the letters you see, you prove to the system that you are a human.

So we’ve established that CAPTCHAs are essentially good, because they protect the integrity of such services as Facebook, Gmail, and so on. But aren’t they annoying? Do you feel like you’ve just wasted 10 seconds of your life when you fill one out? Well, what if I told you that those 10 “wasted” seconds could, when correctly harnessed, actually be used to do some good?

Enter the reCAPTCHA, also invented by von Ahn. What is it? The website for reCAPTCHAs informs us that while it takes about 10 seconds for one person to fill out a CAPTCHA, “in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.” 150,000 hours of “wasted” time every single day. Imagine if those man-hours were put to use!

reCAPTCHAs do just that by asking you to enter slightly distorted characters from two word images in a CAPTCHA. One image’s solution is known by the computer, and the other is not. This second, unreadable image has been pulled from the book scanning project being undertaken by the Internet Archive, similar to the Google Books project. If you get the first word right, then the system assumes that the answer you provide for the second word is also correct. The system verifies the answer through several users before sending it back into the database. In those otherwise “wasted” 10 seconds, you have more or less helped in the effort to render the world’s libraries digital. How ’bout that?

Von Ahn has several projects that are studying and implementing this idea of distributed human computation. The ESP Game randomly matches up two players who are presented with a single image. They are tasked with “tagging” that image with words that describe it. When the two players agree on a word, they get points based on the time it took them to enter the common word and then move on to the next image. After an image is used in several games, commonly tagged words are considered “taboo” and cannot be used as the agreement word between the two players. This forces players to be creative and find more descriptive or more contextual terms to describe the picture.

So what’s the deal? Most image search engines have only two things to go on when scouring the web in response to your query: the title of the image, and the words surrounding the image on a webpage. By using the information gathered from The ESP Game, however, search engines now have human-generated and -verified terms that describe the subject of the image, the colors of the image, even the quality of the image. By playing a (fun and addictive) game, players help make the web more searchable.

Another example of distributed human computing is the Mechanical Turk, a project hosted by Amazon.com. The philosophy is similar: the site recruits users to complete tasks that computers simply cannot — a “human intelligence task”, or HIT. Last summer, the Mechanical Turk was famously used to distribute discrete sections of satellite imagery of the Nevada desert to thousands of humans, who in turn clicked “yes” or “no” as to whether there was any sign of Steve Fossett‘s downed aircraft. Fossett was not found and the search was ended, but as many as six previously unknown crash sites were discovered in the process.  [9/16/09 update:  The remains of Fossett and his aircraft have since been located.]  Because this project is not in game-form, users are enticed to stay through monetary compensation — mostly pennies per task, but that can add up in the end.

In a presentation to Google (video here), Luis von Ahn talks about The ESP Game and some of his other initiatives in human computation. If this stuff sparks your curiosity, it’s worth the 50-minute watch. But here’s the money quote, as paraphrased by Bob Wyman:

Ahn estimates that during 2003, 9 billion human-hours were consumed [...] just by people playing Solitaire on their computers. [...] To provide some scale to that number, Ahn shows that the Empire State Building in NYC took only 7 million human-hours to build (6.8 hours of Solitaire play) and the larger Panama Canal took only 20 million human-hours to build (less than a day of Solitaire.)

Idle human time is valuable. If there’s a way to harness it to do good in the world, then I’m all for it.

[9/16/09 update: Removed information about a Tropophilia-sponsored team on the World Community Grid.  This effort is no longer active.]

Images courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University, and Flickr users saschaaa and tmartin.

I am a pretty rabid fan of a little music ensemble called Dave Matthews Band.  You might have heard of them.  I just returned from a trip with my brother to the ostensible Mecca of DMB fandom: the band’s annual three-night stand at The Gorge Amphitheatre in central Washington.  Counting this weekend, I have been to 16 of their concerts.  I have all of their studio albums, most of their official live releases (they number in the double digits), and countless (legal) amateur recordings of other shows.  The total track count in my iTunes library for the band and their side projects numbers over 800.

But if you think those numbers are sickening, try these on for size.  I am such an unabashed fanboy of the band that when they released their latest studio album, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, I ended up buying it in two different formats:

• the iTunes Pass version ($20), because along with the album tracks it also came with (so far) 16 extra pieces of exclusive video, studio audio, and live audio content delivered piecemeal over time;
• the (physical) Deluxe Box Set ($60) which included the same extra studio audio as above, did not include video or live audio, but added in extra artwork and photos.

Let’s pass over the rather obvious and self-admitted fact that I have obsession issues.  The interesting thing about the information above is that I had to pay $80 – eight times the album price – to get what might be called the total media experience available in physical or digital form.  Isn’t there a way to merge these two, and make it less expensive (and therefore more attractive) to feel like you truly own not only the music, but the album experience itself?  This is the question Apple has asked as sales of entire albums in the iTunes Store have dwindled, with consumers instead opting to buy tracks piecemeal.  Their first answer was a service called iTunes Pass.

iTunes Pass was Apple’s first attempt at solving the riddle of how to replicate the experience of buying a box set or, to go even further back in time, a vinyl.  You pay twice the normal album price, but in addition to the entire album itself, you get extra “special” content: early track releases ahead of the full album sale date, demo tracks, live tracks, the entire cover leaflet, videos, and more.  What makes it more interesting is that this extra content is not delivered all at once, but it is sent to you over time.  So every week or two, you have a nice little mini-Christmas when you find a new video or exclusive track to enjoy.  This rolling delivery method also enables access to content that might not otherwise be available on the album release date — like, say, live versions of tracks from the band’s tour.

I am not aware of how successful iTunes Pass has been, but it apparently was not satisfactory.  Yesterday, Apple supplemented that service with the long-rumored iTunes LP.  Both Apple and the record labels were interested in going beyond iTunes Pass to renew the “retro” experience of going to a store and buying a big, beautiful LP, and combining that with the feeling of exclusivity that comes with owning an exclusive content-filled box set.

Essentially, iTunes LP takes the iTunes Pass experience and dresses it up in an immersive, interactive format.  It will vary on an artist-by-artist and album-by-album basis, but often the experience will be crafted by the groups and their creatives staffs themselves, rather than by Apple.  In addition to putting the iTunes Pass audio and video content in a cool visual form, iTunes LP also has the capability to deliver the photos, artwork, lyrics, liner notes, and other information that before was really only desirable in physical form, in an engaging and attractive digital package.  It is unclear whether the LP content will be delivered piecemeal, as is/was the Pass content, or if it will be obtained all at once.

I have to say, when I first read about iTunes LP yesterday, I was skeptical.  It seemed to me that Apple was merely dressing up the iTunes Pass in a gimmicky, flashy interface.  However, my Big Whiskey iTunes Pass converted free-of-charge into an iTunes LP last night (after I upgraded to iTunes 9.0, which is required to view any iTunes LP), and I am actually pretty impressed.  iTunes LP actually is a pretty beautiful and engaging experience.  If this format had been available when I decided to buy the box set plus the iTunes Pass, I might just have bought the iTunes LP instead.  I get most of the same photos, all of the same videos, all of the same audio minus a few bonus studio tracks, and most of the same “aesthetic” experience provided by the box set.

Would I buy an iTunes LP for every album I bought?  No.  But for long-awaited albums from bands I really admire, sure.  My biggest issue is that, as far as I can tell, the iTunes LP is not a portable format.  Maybe the music and video content is, since I assume it is stored just like any other rich content is in iTunes; but the photos and the flashy aesthetic experience are most likely locked into Apple’s walled garden.  This won’t be a deterrent for most people though, and it offers a big reason for them to choose the iTunes Store as their point of purchase over competitors like Amazon (or Tropophilia’s darling, Lala).

Will the iTunes LP renew interest among consumers in full album purchases?  Will Lala and other competitors find a way to replicate this experience in the browser, and perhaps even in a portable, open format?  Will this save the music industry?  Stay tuned.

Click that image and view in full size, or better yet, click the link above and view this in Google Earth yourself.  In short, we have an astonishing number of satellites orbiting our world.  Thousands upon thousands.  Those are not stars in that picture.  Every single one of those little bitty particles surrounding our planet is a human produced mechanism.  Those that are not inactive are beaming radio waves between each other and to the surface.  Some are equipped with cameras, some with telescopes.  How are they not colliding?  How is the International Space Station not being torn to shreds?  I know the answers to these questions, but still… it is nothing short of incredible that we have managed to distribute this many machines into orbit around our planet, when just over 100 years ago we had not even figured out how to sustain powered flight on Earth.

You can click on any satellite and have its trajectory mapped (hence the several colored lines swirling around the planet).  What’s more, the positions of all the satellites are updated every 30 seconds.  I want to keep this open on my side monitor all.  day.  long.

I have no philosophical or other insightful point to make here.  I’m only trying to say one thing, and it is the following.

Damn.