Alpha Mind Blog

When I found my post about Dee Rambeau’s “farewell to blogging” growing past 10,000 words, I decided to make a little e-book instead of posting it. I also decided not to put links in the pdf file, because readers would have driven themselves crazy following links; they’d never get my own essay finished.

The links that would have gone in the essay if I’d let them, are here:

Creative Commons licensing.

Dee Rambeau’s farewell post on his own blog.

Amanda Chapel’s post about the burst bubble of business blogging.

Wikipedia article on “irrational exuberance.”

The folks Amanda calls “rabid” in her “bubble” post:

• Jeff Jarvis
• Steve Rubel
• BL Ochman
• Shel Holtz
• Debbie Weil

MLMs: Multi-Level Marketing.

Wordpress, fine blog tool. I’ve stuck with it through two blogging careers.

Build a Better Podcast, my short-lived podcast about podcasting.

The quintessential A-listers I use as examples:

• The Huffington Post
• Seth Godin
• Om Malik
• Guy Kawasaki
• Dilbert

Darren Rouse’s post on 15 requisites for the professional blogger. The post, by Daniel at Daily Blog Tips, which Darren takes off on.

My own post on editors, which won me my 2005 scoble.

Scoble’s post linking to mine.
Financial Times. It shows up on my driveway daily. I read it most days. It’s excellent.

Wikipedia entry on Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London.

Wonkette. Not, oh please, to be confused with Strumpette, whom I also mention in my essay, and whose link is above.

MIT Sloan School of Management.

The allegedly sleazy ADM.
The HP Way.
George Orwell Resources.

Lists of tools:

• asymptomatic.net, blogging tools.
• aggcompare.com, rss aggregators.
• podcatchermatrix.org, podcast aggregators.

Social Bookmarking:

• del.icio.us.
• digg.

Wikipedia’s list of social software.

More social sites: squidoo and AmIHot.

Grant McCracken’s first post on “Cloudiness.” He’s done more since then.

Paul Graham’s essay “Is It Worth Being Wise?”

Hobson and Holtz, their fine podcast, “For Immediate Release“.

Kathy Sierra passes on a video of a newborn horse. I also used a photo from her post. Glorious!

Dee’s Post at Marcom Blog explaining his no longer blogging.

Radio Userland, the first blogging tool I ever loved.

Robert French at Auburn University. His students’ blog there: Marcom Blog.

Scripting News. I started reading Davenet in 1998, and I still enjoy reading Dave when he takes the time to write anything longer than 20 words.

Scobleizer. Robert Scoble’s blog, the basis of my new economic unit, the scoble. A scoble is the average value of one link to your blog from Scobleizer.

Skype. Rocks and isn’t a time sink, like the next two.

MySpace. Sorry, but I always navigate very briskly away from sites that play sounds at me unbidden.

Second Life. You have got to be kidding. God has given me maybe 85 years, if I take after my mom’s side. I have already stuffed 4 or 5 careers into that, and I want to get in about 3 more. So I have time to go build a house of bits in a world of pixels, and hang out with people who have that little to do? Nononononononononono! No!

Lee Hopkins. A good man fallen among Second Life, but still okay.

Google Alerts. They rock. Google is probably the company that will be smart enough to implement what I suggest in this essay.

Photo Credits: (partial here, complete in the book)

StockXchng Stock Photography web site, from which I took many pictures for the essay. Below I list the web sites of individual photographers whose work I used and who have their own sites. In the e-book, I list the StockXchng pages of the others who upload their photos there.

Teacup photo: Matthew Bowden. Gillingham, Kent, UK.

Dead Parrot Photo, from Wikipedia’s entry on “Dead Parrot Sketch.”

“Price Tag” photo: Hilary Quinn. Cork, Munster, Eire.

“Arborial Marsupial Road Sign”: Laurent Cottier. Lausanne, Switzerland.

World Socialist Movement web site.

“Diva and Filly” photo: Kathy Sierra, link given above.

Telescope photo: Martti Vire, Rauma, Finland

Yikes! It’s been a whole week since I found Kami’s post about Dee Rambeau’s posts about why he was quitting blogging. I read Kami, read some comments, followed some links, and started posting.

7,000 words later, I saw I was writing something I could never permit to be a post on my blog. It has become an e-book, the link to which is at the bottom of this post.

Here’s what happened. Dee Rambeau posted to his blog that he was done blogging. Says it’s a waste of time. Says the blogosphere is getting noisier, the quality of content going down.

There’s been a bit of reaction and some overreaction to Dee’s posts, both the one I just cited and the one he left on Marcom Blog, the blog of those communications students at Auburn.

What I didn’t hear is anybody really talking about the time economics of blogging. I hear this and that about the ROI, or lack of same, for corporations that blog. But the simple, personal economics of time spent blogging, I’ve heard nobody discussing that.

So I thought about it myself. I realized that entering the blogosphere is a little like entering Second Life. You trade in some real world currency for the coin of the realm you’re entering. In the blogosphere, that coin is the link, but links aren’t identical in value.

So I’ve invented a unit of link value, which I call the scoble, and I set out to work with it.

I adduce some theoretical reasons why the economics of blogging might well be deteriorating. Dee Rambeau might be the canary in the coal mine (although in the essay, I didn’t mention a canary. I did use M. Python’s dead parrot.)

The mini-book I wrote is rather light-hearted—I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I’ve got blogging all scienced out. I made some feeble efforts at humor because the picture I painted was in some ways kinda dismal. (I was, after all, dabbling at the Dismal Science.)

All is not gloom, however. In the end I make some concrete suggestions for improving blogging’s future. Now that I’ve written it, I realize what I thought was a major software product design is in fact just a tweak to what Technorati and Google already have. Google could implement what I suggest in a weekend. I hope they do!

Final note. The e-book is link-free. The links that would have been in it if it had remained a blog post will all be in my next post.

Here’s the book: Unfashionably Late: Why Every Book About Blogging Written Before 2009 Is Already Obsolete (Except for this one, I give this one three weeks.) Enjoy.

I hate to emulate Steve Gillmor as coroner, but I think YouTube is dead. The last five, count’em, *5* times I’ve followed a link to a YouTube video, I’ve seen the same stinking thing:

Two of the five links were less than two days old when I clicked them.

I ain’t going there no mo’.

Here follow the last five points I made in my email to the RSD:

6. Own books. Libraries are great, but… It’s important to have a collection of good books right at your fingertips. That way when you find yourself having a teachable moment, that moment when you remember what so-and-so did especially well that’s like what you need to do in your own writing, you can reach for so-and-so’s book on your shelf and see how it was done, just when you’re fully motivated to learn and use it.

7. Read old books. By knowing how English has worked over a period of more than three centuries, you gain an understanding of how language changes and adapts. This will help you you understand how *you* can adapt language, making it your servant and not your master. Even books too old to have been written in English can be great helps. Sometimes story and image matter more than the precise language in which they are conveyed, so check out Herodotus and the Old Testament (esp Genesis, I&II Sam., I & II Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah) and Attic tragedy. Also the less old greats of other languages, like Tolstoy, Hugo, Goethe.

8. Because language does and must adapt, learn when to throw the rules out the window. A major turning point in my writing was when I realized that the second line of the Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” is such a communications masterpiece as to utterly nullify its being a grammatical abomination. (In case you forget or don’t know: Line 1: “Well she got her daddy’s car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now.” Line 2: “Seems she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now.” Brilliant.)

9. Read for wisdom. The best writers have been those driven to try to make sense of the world. They do so with varying success, but it is their thirst for wisdom, not just knowledge, that also makes many of them dig deep for an understanding of how to communicate what they learn. So: Francis Bacon, Erasmus, Penn, Gibbon, Drucker. (Note that Penn’s writing is as bad as it is good, so you need some discernment if you’re to learn from it. Good and bad often live in shocking cohabitation; as Randall Jarrell admiringly wrote, “… only a man with the most extraordinary feel for language—or none whatsoever—could have cooked up Whitman’s worst messes.” In a less dramatic way, this is true of Penn.)

10. Take risks. One of the great advantages of writing for editors is that they’ll tell you when your experiments fail, and as long as you don’t waste too much of their time, they don’t mind your taking risks. Thus you can try the less straightforward way of saying something. What most editors won’t do is tell you, if you give them plodding, no-risk writing, how it can be made more interesting. If they were that creative, they’d be writing not editing. Pruning excesses is their business, supplying the excesses is yours.

In moving ideas towards realization, people are even more likely to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy than they are in economics. Bob Sutton’s post on “Why Specialists are Grumpy and Generalists are Happy” suggests two things:

1. people who are deeply invested in a single idea are likely to be touchy when the idea is attacked, and
2. this may, by extension, explain why generalists are happier than specialists.

This certainly rings true to my experience. Leaving aside specialists and generalists (about which I commented on Sutton’s blog), I think it applies to innovation processes in organizations as well. A company that has a regular and monitored innovation process is likely to have a healthy attitude toward ideas. It knows how to let a thousand flowers bloom and how to let nine-hundred-ninety-one of them die. Pathological emotional attachment to a single idea is unlikely in a true idea factory.

But when a company unused to innovating finds itself in need of a new idea, say because growth is stalled or a market is disappearing, it may only know how to work with one idea at a time. It can then invest far too much in that one idea, and ride it all the way to disaster.

I saw this at work in one of the consultancies I worked for in the 90s. We decided we needed a “signature analytical model” as part of our thrust into new practice areas. In two tormented brainstorming sessions, I was the only person who had come up with a viable idea, and I’d had only one, which I’ll call The Widget-Gadget Matrix. It wasn’t an earthshaking idea, but it might have worked. But only one day after the second session, I was shocked to hear one of the consultants say “We’re locked into the Widget-Gadget Matrix.”

Of course I was pleased that my idea had been accepted. But I was also dismayed that the company saw any need to lock itself into the idea. Maybe in a year or two, after we had published our book on Industry Analysis Using the W-G Matrix, we might have been locked in, in the sense that to recant or demote the idea might make us look silly. But before the idea had even appeared in a single article? We weren’t locked in nor should we have been.

I’d only been at the firm a short time, and I was pretty sure that with a bit more experience I’d come up with better ideas than the WGM, and probably several ideas, not just one. This was why I was personally so un-locked-in to my own idea. Not just because I wanted to leave room for better idea, but simply because I was confident there were more where that one had come from. I didn’t feel I’d invested much in it. The rest of the firm, though, was exhausted by the brainstorming sessions and felt that it had shot its creative wad. All its eggs were in that one basket.

Make no mistake, I liked my idea. Ten years later it still looks to me like an idea that could become a successful brand for a consultancy. But even if I had felt strongly attached to it, I would have felt a caution against the attachment, because to be locked into it would have been just the recipe for shutting off the flow of new ideas.

The RSD wrote me an email a few weeks back, stating how much she enjoys my writing (aw shucks) and asking for writing tips. I gave her some. I now offer them to you, somewhat altered from the personal manner in which I addressed her. There are ten of them, and I’ll post them in two parts.

1. Read a lot. Composition classes don’t teach us nearly as much about writing as writers do by example.

2. Read good literature. Read the best. Try MFK Fisher, a superior writer. Read Abraham Lincoln, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Dickens, Conrad, and especially C.S. Lewis. Find ones *you* think are good; your judgment is likely to be right.

3. Write for publication, in actual magazines and newspapers, where they employ actual editors. These people will teach you lots of lessons.

4. Write for the best publications you can get your work into. The better the pub, the better its editors, and the better the feedback and lessons they’ll give you. Make a targets list and work patiently to get your writing into every publication on your list. Unfortunately, some of the best-written and best-edited publications are all-staff-written (like The Economist) or peer-reviewed journals by folks with very special qualifications (like the New England Journal of Medicine), so you can’t work on them without being on staff. (BTW I know two people who have edited at NEJM, and both found it a great experience.)

5. Read books about writing. Yes, there are too many of them out there, but the good ones are truly helpful. I especially like A Writer’s Time, by Kenneth Atchity; Style: Towards Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams (gets my very highest recommendation); On Writing Well, by Wm. Zinsser; and Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brand.
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That’s the first half of what I told the RSD. I have one more note to add. I did not mean to suggest that composition classes are of low value. I merely meant that they cannot capture all the lessons that are contained in the work of fine writers. Coursework and the vast literature on how to write are very valuable, because none of us learns everything we might learn from example. Sometimes the example needs to be made explicit to us, in a teacherly way, before we can appreciate and use it. One reason I recommend Williams’s Style is how he makes explicit the brilliant choices Lincoln made in the Gettysburg Address.

[coming in part 2: On Reading and Rules. Tune in tomorrow.]

PREFACE

Thought leadership, once we dare to take it seriously rather than treat it as a buzzphrase, is actually a vast field. To learn it properly, one must stick one’s feet into many disciplines. It is also important to refrain from trying to go too deeply into any of those disciplines (unless it be out of pure love) because it is at their peripheries, where they intersect, rather than their depths, that the craft of thought leadership is found.

In light of which fact, I introduce this glossary with the following suggestion: Don’t ever be ashamed of needing to consult a glossary, especially in this subject. You can’t know it all. In fact one of the essentials of thought leadership is the capacity and desire to learn what one doesn’t already know.

GLOSSARY

blog (n) 1: a weblog, i.e. a web site which is frequently updated using software designed to make this process simple. Blogs may have many properties, but the only one that is common to all blogs is that entries appear in reverse-chronological order on the main page. (I.e., last entry first.)

blog (v) 1: to employ blogging software to publish words, pictures, audio or video objects. 2: to log another blogger’s published materials on one’s own blog. (e.g. “Who’s blogging who?” D. Winer) This does not refer to plagiarism, which is a bad thing, but to engagement with the quoted or linked item, which is a good thing, and is usually signalled by commentary on the thing being blogged.

RSD (n) The Rock Star Daughter of Max Christian Hansen. This appellation, and the extended version, PEBRSD (Precious Excellent Beloved Rock Star Daughter) will be used in Hansen’s blogs until the daughter in question explicitly gives permission for her real name to be used. The following facts about the RSD are public as of February 2007: She is in her mid-twenties, is a professional writer, works in marketing for a professional association, and is actually a rock star, in a modest and non-degenerate sort of way. As readers of Hansen’s blogs are aware, he is every bit as fond of her as a father ought to be. He also respects her a great deal, as being 1000 (+/- 32) times as mature and responsible as Hansen was at the same age.

Just finished reading Jason Van Orden’s excellent new book Promoting Your Podcast. Highly recommended for newbies. There’s so much to learn just in order to create a decent podcast, it can be daunting to take the next steps, the ones that get you heard. Jason does a fine job of hacking through the jungle of feeds, directories, statistics, and community-building.

Thanks go to Lee Hopkins for recommending the book.

Last week I thought it was only a joke when I read a blog post saying that the NFL might forbid people having “Super Bowl parties” because of trademark infringement.

But now this, from the Des Moines Register .

Apple wants the Lift, a Des Moines downtown bar, to stop using the name “iPod Monday” to describe a weekly event in which patrons share their musical tastes via their iPods.

“Please choose a name for your product that is consistent with Apple’s guidelines (that does not include iPod or any other Apple trademark or variation thereon),” reads a letter from Apple representative Pete Alcorn to Curtis. The e-mail refers to the event’s Web site, ipodmonday.com, and related podcasts and online broadcasts.

My first tempation: to say “Gee, do I need to comment on how stupid this is?”

But on second thought, it’s a perfect follow-on to my last post.

Apple is a very smart company. As Paul Graham points out, though, smart is not wise. This isn’t stupid, it’s just far from wise.

Smart says: if someone uses our trademark, we go after them.

Wise says: we do what’s in our interest. What’s in our interest is to encourage people to spread our trademark for us.

Wise, had it been present at Apple, would also have said, “It’s not in our interest to be perceived as badly as this will cause us to be.”

P.S. Legal departments in big companies are there to keep other departments from making very costly mistakes. But who’s watching over the legals?

A fascinating article by Paul Graham: Is It Worth Being Wise?

Another sign we may have to choose between intelligence and wisdom is how different their recipes are. Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them.

I agree there’s a trade-off, but I also believe it’s necessary to seek for as much intelligence and wisdom as we can.

The key is in Graham’s choice of the word “curing,” which implies something very like eliminating, and I believe is the wrong word. In fact, all domestic animals, including humans, tend towards neoteny, the carrying of childish qualities into adulthood. For humans, there’s then the matter of overcoming, but not curing, the childish qualities.

The difference between curing and overcoming is that, when we’ve done the latter, the quality overcome remains within our repertoire–we can turn it on or off. We can choose, based on context, whether to allow the quality in question to express itself.

The person whose sexuality is “turned on” either all the time or randomly is a ghastly thing to contemplate. Equally ghastly, though, it the idea of someone who has “cured” their sexuality.

Wisdom is, I believe, precisely the capacity to wield one’s capacities by choice and not by inward compulsion.