Filtering Communications So They Don’t Drive Us Mad

By | November 22, 2011
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A dear friend was supposed to drop something off around 11 pm last night. I turn in around that time, so I just nodded off. Luckily I didn’t hear her SMS come in around 1 am. But I could have. I consider the phone the primary communications device–if someone has an emergency, that’s how they’re going to reach me–and so you can’t really close it off. But how do you filter out stuff like my ditzy friend SMS-ing me at 1 am to tell me that after all she’s not going to drop something off?

In short, how can we set up filters on our communications channels so they don’t drive us mad?

One is not to give out your phone number. I keep a second prepaid phone around and I give that number, and that number only, to people I do business with. That phone gets turned off on weekends and evenings. I often don’t answer a cellphone call if I don’t recognise the number; if it’s important enough, I figure they’ll SMS me first, or else they’ll already be on my contact list.

Another is to confine and contain online. I don’t accept contacts on Facebook unless I’ve met them in person (and like them.) Everyone else I point to LinkedIn. I’ve noticed a lot of people are now following me (and everyone else, it seems; I’m not special) on Twitter so I’ve scaled that back to ‘public’ observations.

Indeed, Web 2.0 hasn’t quite resolved this issue: We’ve been campaigning to bring down those walled gardens, but we’ve failed to understand that garden walls (ok, fences) make good neighbors.

Email is still a burden: I’m still getting a ton of stuff I didn’t ask for, including press releases from UPS, just because I once complained to them about something, and stuff from a PR agency touting posts on a client’s blog (that’s pretty lame, I reckon. What would one call that? “My-Client-Just-Blogged Spam”?)

One way I’ve tried to limit incoming stuff is through a page dedicated to PR professionals. I then point anyone interested in pitching to me to that page. I’m amazed by how few people who bother to read it, but I’m also amazed at how good the pitches are by those that do. (And of course, I then feel bad that I don’t use their painstakingly presented material.)

I like this from Max Barry, author of Jennifer Government, who gives out his email address but says If you put the word “duck” in your subject (e.g. “[duck] Why you’re an idiot”), it’s less likely to be accidentally junked. What a great idea.

Then there’s simple things that help to keep the noise level down: Subscribe to twitter on clients like Google Talk and you can turn it on and off just by typing, well, on or off. (You can also turn on and off individuals, so if scoble is getting a bit too much for you, just type ‘off scoble’. I’ve always wanted to be able to do that.)

I’d like to see more and better filtering so we don’t have to succumb to the babble.

Stuff I’d like to see:

  • Phones that change ringtone or volume after a certain time unless they’re from some key numbers.
  • SMS autoreturns, that say “The person you sent this message to is asleep. If you need to wake him/her, please enter this code and resend. Be aware that if the message is not urgent or an offer of money/fame/sexual favors you may face disembowelment by the recipient.”
  • Oh, and while I’m at it, the ability to opt out of Facebook threads if they lose your interest.

And, finally, a way to turn down friends and contacts from my communication channels without them knowing. A great service, in my view, would be one that appeared to authorise their requests to be your buddies, but didn’t. Call it faux-thorising.

The Revolution That Keeps, Well, Revolving

By | November 22, 2011
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It’s interesting to watch how quickly our Web 2.0 tools are changing, changing us, changing the way we communicate, and being changed by us. And how each step feels like a revolution, and yet, usually, isn’t.

The latest thing is Twitter 2.0, as I would call it. Nothing has actually changed in the software, but the way people are using it has. What was originally a presence and status tool has become a communication, networking, information delivery and spamming tool. And it’s creating its own unique problems–which probably aren’t that unique, if you stand back from them–and now, its own rules.

Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, is the first I’ve noticed who is trying to wrestle with the new realities.

He starts out:

I’m a passionate about Twitter.  I spend more time in on it than in any other social media venue.  Twitter has been good to me.  It is the source of leads for my text and video blogs, not to mention several very nice consulting and speaking offers.

This has created what Shel calls “the most up close and personal of social media”. Shel uses Twitter as a place to communicate with fellow twitterers and meet new people within a “small neighborhood, one where it’s safe to speak out, where strangers are scrutinized by locals this all happens at a certain easygoing pace.”

But then he goes on to talk about the “new wave of adopters coming in”. I suspect we’ve all noticed this: legions of “followers” who add your twitter feed (“tweets”) to their list. The worry is that now the conversation Shel was having with his small neighborhood is being listened to by a legion of outsiders who may or may not be anonymous.

Twitter, it should be pointed out, allows various options: You can be private, or you can allow anyone to follow your tweets, or you can vet who follows you. If someone follows you, it kind of behoves you to check out their tweets, if not to actually follow them, then at least to get a sense about whether the person following you is the sort of person you want to have following you.

Shel has come up with what he calls his “Twitter Follow Policy:”

  • If I do not know who you are, or what you look like, or where you are coming from I will not follow you.
  • With very few exceptions, I will not follow brands, candidates, causes or company names. I wish to talk with humans, not brand icons, neither surveys nor bots. If you are a real person & you are passionate about your work, then I embrace you. If you are a Direct Marketer using Twitter to push you brand into my forehead, I will block you.
  • Even if you are a real person, I may not follow you. I need to see that you are talking either about topics or people I care about.
  • If you disagree with me, do it under your own name and I will respect you. If you personally insult me, I will block you. If you are consistently unpleasant or just boring, I will unfollow or block you.
  • With extremely rare exception, I will not follow anonymous Tweeters.

Wise stuff. But as some of the commenters on his blog post point out, people use Twitter for different reasons. Not everyone follows Shel (or to a much more modest extent, me) because they want a conversation with me. I don’t follow others for the conversation, necessarily. Many people don’t want to be followed, just like many people read blogs but don’t necessarily blog.

The problem here is that Twitter is a great tool that has already broken out of the constraints of its creators’ imagination. But now it’s created uses that may conflict with each other and create fresh problems, such as those experienced by Shel who see the informal networks with fuzzy but distinct ‘village limits’ undermined by outsiders who don’t know the ‘rules.’

I applaud the new lease of life that Twitter has been given with this new kind of usage. In some ways it is a striking counterbalance to what I believe is the failure of Facebook to evolve beyond the huge surge of a few months back; I’ve noticed that usage in my little world have fallen off quite dramatically since the beginning of the year. Facebook will eventually become a sort of ‘profile cemetry’ unless these users are convinced it represents more than a novelty ‘old friend discovery’ tool.

Twitter has stepped into the gap left here by the declining appeal, and lack of direct communication that presence tools offer (Jaiku et al) and the walled-garden, asynchronoous web page to web page/email world of Facebook. Twitter, via delivery mechanisms like Google Talk, have colonised a space that is “instant messaging with social characteristics.”

Shel’s approach is a smart one. Though I wonder how many of these kinds of policies we’ll have to come up with as the landscape continues to evolve.

Global Neighbourhoods: My Twitter Follow Policy

Learning in the Open

By | November 22, 2011
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Here’s a piece I wrote for the WSJ on open source education resources. It’s part of the free section of WSJ.com.

A revolution of sorts is sweeping education.

In the past few years, educational material, from handwritten lecture notes to whole courses, has been made available online, free for anyone who wants it. Backed by big-name universities in the U.S., China, Japan and Europe, the Open Education Resources movement is gaining ground, providing access to knowledge so that no one is “walled in by money, race and other issues,” says Lucifer Chu, a 32-year-old Taiwanese citizen and among the thousands world-wide promoting the effort. He says he has used about half a million dollars from his translation of the “Lord of the Rings” novels into Chinese to translate engineering, math and other educational material, also from English into Chinese.

The movement started in the late 1990s, inspired in part by the “open source” software movement, based on the notion computer programs should be free. Open-source software now powers more than half the world’s servers and about 18% of its browsers, according to TheCounter.com, a Web-analysis service by Connecticut-based Internet publisher Jupitermedia Corp. Behind its success are copyright licenses that allow users to use, change and then redistribute the software. Another inspiration was the proliferation of Web sites where millions share photos or write encyclopedia entries.

Free Online College Courses Are Proliferating – WSJ.com

Learning in the Open

By | November 22, 2011
0 Comment

Here’s a piece I wrote for the WSJ on open source education resources. It’s part of the free section of WSJ.com.

A revolution of sorts is sweeping education.

In the past few years, educational material, from handwritten lecture notes to whole courses, has been made available online, free for anyone who wants it. Backed by big-name universities in the U.S., China, Japan and Europe, the Open Education Resources movement is gaining ground, providing access to knowledge so that no one is “walled in by money, race and other issues,” says Lucifer Chu, a 32-year-old Taiwanese citizen and among the thousands world-wide promoting the effort. He says he has used about half a million dollars from his translation of the “Lord of the Rings” novels into Chinese to translate engineering, math and other educational material, also from English into Chinese.

The movement started in the late 1990s, inspired in part by the “open source” software movement, based on the notion computer programs should be free. Open-source software now powers more than half the world’s servers and about 18% of its browsers, according to TheCounter.com, a Web-analysis service by Connecticut-based Internet publisher Jupitermedia Corp. Behind its success are copyright licenses that allow users to use, change and then redistribute the software. Another inspiration was the proliferation of Web sites where millions share photos or write encyclopedia entries.

Free Online College Courses Are Proliferating – WSJ.com

How to Add Half a Year to Your Life

By | March 26, 2008
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By Jeremy Wagstaff

At the risk of boring you all to death this week I’d like to talk about folders. Yes, I know it’s not the most exciting subject in the world, but I’ve seen too many people make a mess of this that I reckon reading this article should save you on average about 10 minutes a day, which over a lifetime adds up to nearly 180 days, so you can thank me when you’re in your retirement home.

The problem is this: We create files, we save files, we copy files, we move files. We delete files, we edit files, we rename files, we back up files. We lose files. It’s the last bit that I want to focus on. In short, we treat our computer like a store cupboard that we never organize and never clean out.

When you buy milk you know where to put it, right? In the shelves built into the fridge door, right? You put the washing back in the cupboard when it’s all folded, right? When you bake a cake you put it in a tin, right?

But when we create, move, save, rename, copy, backup a file we rarely do anything similar. If we’re disciplined we put it in the My Documents folder (in Windows) or in Documents (on Macs.) If we’re feeling really energetic we might even make a special folder called “Other documents” or something equally imaginative.

This is about as far as we go. It’s like throwing the milk anywhere in the fridge, or the towel in the nearest drawer, or the cake in the nearest cupboard. The more files you have, the harder it’s going to be find them. You’ve probably found that already.

So the obvious first lesson is: organize your folders. I’ve told you about that before, so that’s not really the lesson. But it’s worth saying again: organize your folders. Make new folders for new projects, and make them subfolders (i.e. folders within folders) of bigger categories. Projects, for example, may be a main folder, but have other folders within it called ‘Logo design project’ or ‘Cake baking’.

Doesn’t matter, so long as it’s logical and you get into the habit of storing all related documents in the same folder.

Now, here are some tricks to make this process easier. In Windows you’ll see a little icon in the box that appears when you want to save a file (what’s called the ‘Save As Dialog’ that looks like a folder with a corner of it on fire. This is the button for creating a new folder. So navigate to the folder or place where you want to make your new (sub) folder and click that button. Type in a name, hit enter, and then save your file there.

I would recommend you make it really simple for yourself by making folders like C:Documents and C:Downloads and C:Dump and C:Backup to store your stuff. (The C: refers to the hard drive, which is always called C for historical reasons.) You can make subfolders below these, but having these folders in what is called the root directory makes it easy later.

The problem is that once you start making lots of folders, you’ll find that the Save As dialog doesn’t always open in the folder that you want it to, and navigating around subfolders is slightly less fun than visiting the dentist, even if you’ve put them in the root canal, sorry directory.

Here are a couple of tricks to make it easier in Windows. If you use XP, download a little piece of free Microsoft software called TweakUI (UI stands for User Interface). You can find it here: http://tinyurl.com/2meyw (just scroll down the rights hand side until you see the download link.)

Once you’ve installed the software launch it (you’ll find it in the Powertoys folder in your Start Menu) and select the Places Bar item in the Common Dialogs entry. Once you’re there type in the names of the four or five folders you use most (if you’ve used my suggestions above, this is easy enough to remember. If you haven’t, jot down the full path (with all the backslashes and stuff, and type them in. I know it’s not fun, but it’ll be worth it.)

Once this is done, click OK, and try opening a Save as dialog in one of your Windows program. You should notice an extra little pane in the left hand side with your newly entered folders appearing in a list. Click on one of those and you’re magically shuffled off to that particular folder. Now you should be saving precious minutes already. (Thanks to Dennis O’Reilly of CNET for this tip.)

A word of warning: This doesn’t work in Microsoft Office, which uses a slightly different dialog box. There you just navigate your way to the folder you want to save, right click in the left hand pane where the special folders are located and select the “Add ‘[the name of the open folder]’” option.

I’ve got one more tip for you in this field, which will help if you’ve got more than five folders you want to access or save files to. A small, free, program called FileBox eXtender (from http://tinyurl.com/yjhns8) will add an extra couple of icons to your Save as or Open dialog boxes which will contain a list of your recently used folders. (The software is useful but not that intuitive; if you’re having problems try an alternative, also free, called Direct Folders from http://tinyurl.com/ynt235.) Both should work with Vista.

I’m not aware of Mac programs that do this, but doubtless I’ll hear from users and be informed/chastised accordingly.

Jeremy Wagstaff writes for The Wall Street Journal Asia and the BBC World Service. His guide to technology, “Loose Wire”, is available in bookshops or on Amazon. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.