Useless Tech Tips 101

I've noticed that some of the 'tech tips' web shows have recently started offering micromanagement tips for personal computing. One example (that I will not link to) is a popular 'daily' show where the hosts introduce methods to 'control' browsers, such as 'how to make your browser display over 40 open tabs on the screen at once'. However, it may be time to adopt the time-honored approach of "use the telescope, not the microscope" and to step back and look at some of the overarching principals of personal/time management, instead of learning how to juggle so many balls at once.

One of my friends wrote to me yesterday claiming that she was trying to get her email inbox "under 1000", so I humbly refer you to a useful site that offers some excellent advice on adopting principals and strategies that might help you avoid getting into these 'mass tangles' to begin with. Prevention is usually better than the cure.

43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero

Enablement in the Workplace

"Enablement means giving employees the wherewithal—organizational structure, information technology, and other resources that lead to confident decision-making—to do their jobs well. According to an online survey and interviews conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) for a study commissioned by Microsoft, 87 percent of respondents rate enablement as important to employees’ sense of pride and confidence in their work."

Download the study here

World Community Grid

Grid computing is 'always on'

Distributed computing is an excellent example of how an 'always on' culture can realistically contribute to positive change. I support BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), and groups that I've contributed to include:

• SETI - the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
• Folding @ Home - computing valid candidates for medical treatments
• World Community Grid - search for solution to diseases such as cancer and dengue fever
• Climate Prediction Net - developing models of worldwide climate change

I encourage any of you who have computers that are sometimes just sitting around idling to participate in community projects such as these - there are scores more to choose from.  All it takes is the time to set the software and accounts up, and the will to 'loan' your computing power to a variety of worthy causes.  

Riding Technology's Wake

All hail the pioneers of the new frontier! A toast to the early adopter - that glorious breed of cyberwarrior who parts with his time and money for new products and operating systems, and then battles each bug and glitch as if his honor was at stake. And to those of you who felt like it was your mission to test blog on every new website and service... R.I.P.

It's one thing to be 'ahead of the curve,' but it's a completely different thing to be 'spinning out of control.' There are those of us who will choose to try absolutely every new service, experiment or 'toy' on the Internet in order to find the next big thing, but then we might find that we're simply among the other thousand (or million) people who were doing exactly the same thing - and providing free testing and reporting services for those who were hoping to reap the rewards of free labor.

Choose your missions and your battles wisely, and remember that sometimes the people riding the wake are ultimately having more fun than those who are battling the wavefront.

Photo by jkprime. CC licensed.

Psychological Mining: The Genius of Facebook ‘Games’ and Quizzes

There’s an eerie brilliance behind some of some of Facebook’s seemingly innocuous applications. The most insidious genius that I have encountered thus far is the “Likeness” application, as it preys upon so many levels of hope and fear, and then supposedly ranks users against each other, then ranks/matches them with people who achieve similar scores to them.

I need to dig deeper into their privacy policy before I can make any sort of overarching judgement about whether or not this kind of application is data mining for targeted advertising, but I see absolutely no reason why this kind of data collection isn’t a form of targeted advertising tool – if I input all of my preferences and fears, with the idea that I’ll then be ranked against my ‘peers’ (and all of the other characters that start to randomly pop up within the system), then why shouldn’t I suspect that this is not a new kind of collective litmus for psychometrics?

If I’m given a choice of the kinds of attributes that I most desire myself, with the promise of discovering those in my contact list who have similar desires, then why on earth would the developers not be feeding this information back to subscribing marketing divisions? How on earth do they make their money without ad support?

An example: “Choose the things you’d want more of first: intelligence, creativity, friends, money, beauty, money, beauty, confidence, athleticism, fame, respect, time to yourself.” Surely if I rank order these fields then advertisers and marketers will be able to sequence both my priorities, and those of everyone who completes the sequence, so that they can direct products at me that will supposedly fulfil my needs and desires?

My suggestion is that the new wave of social ‘games’ that we’re being presented with are not only highly amusing, personal, and engaging, but they may also be leading to targeted product development and advertising that will supposedly fill our needs. Is it all harmless social fun, or is there a quiet wave of extremely careful targeted advertising that’s about to start arriving in our Facebook accounts?

Blogging the live fantastic

Along with the preponderance of 'ubiquitous' wireless technology, we've witnessed a shift in the way that information can be shuttled around the planet. Predictably, a shift in methodology is resulting in a metamorphosis of the products of reportage.

Liveblogging is the new, hot phenomenon - in much the same way that everyone had to rush out and sign up for a YouTube account last year if they didn't already have one. Post-"broadcast yourself" we've moved into the next phase: "broadcast everything." For the past several years I've, sadly, sat up late at night and followed some tech conferences as lines of text would drip listlessly over my modem. For me, liveblogging was the opportunity to be somewhere "live." Alas, I wasn't really a part of these conferences. Moreover, I knew I could wait until the next morning, when I'd be able to just watch a video of the said event.

This year, however, conferences like Macworld supposedly 'crashed the blogosphere' because so many people decided that they would now be the liveblogger du jour. One has to wonder whether a thousand voices are really necessary when they're pretty much saying the same thing? In the past we had radio commentary for political and sports events, because we weren't able to see or hear them live. The art of commentary evolved into television, as words to accompany wordless actions, like a ball flying toward the crowd, or a wedding procession, or an inarticulate F1 vehicle hurtling towards a hairpin bend. But liveblogging is not limited to discussion of wordless actions - it can actually be commentary superimposed on commentary. Even time-honored institutions like The New York Times are now experimenting with the form for events such as the Democratic Debate.

With the mass activation of legions of citizen journalists, is the face of reading and writing changing? Although liveblogging may appeal to the desire for narrative and immediacy, could it also be a less efficient, less articulate method of acquiring information, when so much infobloat already exists? Any middle school student should be able to tell you how to take narrative or sequence, and fold it back up into summary and synthesis. But liveblogging isn't about synthesising - it's all about capturing the moment.

Obviously there's a place for liveblogging in 2008, but I have to wonder whether having it as a discrete stream of information, divorced from what it's commentating on, is really where liveblogging is heading. If I actually had a live video feed of a political debate with a liveblog superimposed with additional information it might be more compelling - or more relevant.

However, maybe this is where I've missed the relevance of liveblogging, because its current potential might be measured more accurately by what's accessible, rather than what's possible. Several years ago I chatted with the Kelly brothers, creators of the Internet TESL Journal, in Nagoya, Japan. Their website looks like something from the dawn of the Internet, but they explained this to me in very simple terms - no unnecessary graphics, no unnecessary bloat, because their prime concern was ensuring that the content was accessible to as many people around the world as possible - regardless of bandwidth.

It's so easy to forget that not so many years ago our laptops were tethered to physical wires, and that our access to the Internet could be mind-numbingly sluggish. As usual, the information rich have forgotten that the information poor are not playing by the same rules. So despite your cable TV and your broadband Internet, liveblogging is still the closest thing that someone, somewhere can get to some very real experiences.

Image by Sue Richards. Some Rights Reserved.