Alpha Mind Blog

A couple of hours ago I tweeted thus:

Tempted to start blogging every piece of hard/software that doesn’t work. Could be a full-time job. Why do we put up w. so much rubbish?

Well, I’ve decided to go ahead and start doing it.

In no order whatsoever, here are just a very few of the broken, incomplete, badly designed, badly supported, just-plain-sucky things I’ve had to deal with in the past couple of weeks:

1. Blogger. I don’t think Google has made a single improvement to this mess since they bought it. It’s a rudimentary, feature-deficient, ugly, lousy blog platform.Today I blogged a post by a Blogger blogger (oy, that clause is a mess), and of course I couldn’t send a trackback, because Blogger doesn’t believe in trackbacks. But they’ve got this possibly-spiffy feature called “create a link,” which I hoped would be a simple interface for manually creating a trackback. Such a feature would have been a baby step out of the dark ages. But no, it’s a process by which, despite my already owning too many blogs, Blogger tries to compel me to create one using Blogger, so I can write a single post that links to the post I want to track back to. After I’ve already written my post that links.Later, of course, I learned that my link will show up automatically, after Google Blog Search finds it. But I learn this after I waste a good deal of time trying to understand a feature that should have been, but wasn’t, designed to follow existing standardsI remember an old joke:

   Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light build? A: None. Bill has declared darkness a standard.

   Maybe it’s time to dust that one off and make a couple of substitutions on the names?

2. Windows Live Writer, about which I said something quite positive just a few days back. Here’s a post I put on one of my other blogs yesterday:

   And here’s what Windows Live Writer wanted me to deal with to get that post written:

   

   ‘Nuff said, I think.

More non-functioning junk coming in next few posts, including but not limited to:

• my Giant bicycle: four months after purchase, it’s at death’s door, but trying to kill me first…
• BlogTalkRadio: lots of time wasted with support people who provide absolutely no support…
• a GE can opener that sprays the whole kitchen with can juice.
• OpenOffice Writer: doesn’t permit Windows Vista to index contents of document files…
• Skype, whose SkypeOut service is absolutely unsuitable for business use…
• the city of Berkeley, which I love but is the most incompetently managed municipality I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen way too many municipalities)

And we might just get around to exploring the burning question:

With everything sucking this much, how long can the Kool-Aid last?

I still mean to write, one of these days, about why I love Andrew Cline’s Rhetorica blog. Meantime, I’ll just use the blog’s sixth birthday as another excuse to recommend it.

By way of Execupundit, I discovered the Damn Interesting blog today. The article about the Nazi spies (follow my link to find Execupundit’s link) is interesting indeed.

But just now I’d like to mention that Damn Interesting did a piece earlier this month on The Extraordinary Astrologer Isaac Bickerstaff. I love the story, and I covered it on my 2nd episode of Build a Better Podcast, the short-lived experimental podcast I did in 2005.

In that episode, I also mentioned the somewhat mysterious relationship between Jonathan Swift and his great and good friend Stella. And I did a reading of Swift’s exquisitely ridiculous love poem “On Stella’s Birthday,” which might leave one wondering why, if Stella was capable of shooting a man to death (which she did), she didn’t choose Swift himself for her bullet.

Check out the podcast here

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A Swedish vodka travels to New York to look positivly Soviet. An amazing photo submitted to the Sacramento Bee by one Macy Felix, who has no other web presence I can find.

Fine work, Macy, whoever you may be.

I’ve had prospective clients tell me they find it refreshing that I don’t gloss over any of the difficulties of blogging. The challenges are real, and I always point them out.

But I generally put things in a positive light. The way I see it, some of the hardest things about blogging are also the very best reasons to do it.

Prime among these is the openness it engenders. Simply put, to succeed at blogging, one must establish oneself as trustworthy. Notice I didn’t say “gain trust.” One must really be worthy of it.

My friend Robert Levering has made a career out of teaching one simple fact: The greatest single determinant of workplace quality is trust. And if corporate blogging can teach a firm or its manager a thing or two about trust, the entire organize benefits.

So I encourage companies to think of blogging as a tool, and not just a tool for marketing, for PR, or for ego-gratification. But as a tool for teaching one of the great corporate disciplines: authenticity.

I’ve been wanting to write the above paragraphs for months. I was spurred to do it by two posts on other blogs today which, I believe, form a pair.

1. Matt Cutts points to a Q&A with Udi Manbur, and quotes exactly the part of the article that also grabs me:

At Google we do not manually change results. For example, if we find for a particular query that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it. We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm—we have to go and actually change the algorithm. That is, we have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution. That makes the process slower, but it puts a lot more discipline on us and makes it more unbiased.

2. And Andrew Cline suggests that news organizations start calling each other out on published inaccuracies.

I’m sure you see the common theme. What Google does, and what newspapers generally don’t do, is set themselves a hard row to hoe. A row that, if you dare to hoe it, will have the long-term result that you’ll do more things better.

I believe the practice of blogging is a lot like both of these examples. Doing it will compel you to develop methods, not for giving good search results, but for designing micro-messages on the fly. And it will also invite the scrutiny of others, including one’s rivals, which will teach you habits of honesty and diligence.

Both disciplines–crafting messages well and cultivating those messages in the soil of authenticity, are important for any company. And the key fact of social media is that, for every organization, sooner or later, these skills will be not simply what differentiates the best, but matters of outright survival. Because the key fact of social media is that scrutiny is coming. Organizations of all kinds will need to learn to deal with it.

So why blog when it’s so hard? Because sooner is much better than later.

I started a new blog yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before; blogging does that to my sense of time.

I’ve decided to convince restaurateurs in greater Sacramento how easy and valuable it is to blog. I’ve started a pretty bare-bones site, Eats4Sacramento, which I intend to invite others to participate in. We’ll see how it goes…

Someone discusses leadership, and Jim Stroup dissects that discussion. And in the process gives a fine quick overview of one of the prime rhetorical stop signs:

The thing that struck me about this particular presentation was its unapologetic brandishing of the “of course” debating technique. This, actually, isn’t properly debate at all, but rhetorical intimidation. One preemptively dissipates any doubt detected stirring the audience about one’s claim with a half-surprised, half indignant bark: “of course.”

… because his time would be better spent writing books.

Somebody, wish I could remember who, once said something to the effect that

Writing is a faucet in the attic. Talking is a fire hydrant on the street. Open the latter and the former goes dry.

Sounds like Hugh’s discovered Twitter is a lot like talking.

del.icio.us Tags: gapingvoid twitter hugh macleod hughmacleod writing

Seth says forget the resume. Heather Hamilton says Seth is leading people astray. Neville Hobson, on the For Immediate Release podcast, says “Seth has a point, but we’re not there yet.”

I agree with all of them, but mostly with Neville.

I had a bit of a controversy with Seth on this blog once before. Twice, actually; here’s the second part.

Why is Neville the one I agree with most? Because…

The simple fact is that Seth Godin is all about the future. He writes for the bleeding-edge denizens of that brave world into which all of us, will we-nill we, are being carried by the Internet.

It’s a world in which monolithic companies and monopolistic brands are playing an ever-shrinking role. In which, as a direct result, there is more and more work to be done that won’t be done by people in jobs, as conventionally defined. And even less work being done by the kinds of jobs Seth refers to as being “a cog in a giant machine.”

So, my nutshell observations about all this:

1. Seth is right. If you’re outstanding, a resume will only serve as an excuse to reject you. “Look, it doesn’t matter that you learned Perl in a two-day weekend well enough that you were teaching it on Monday. We need somebody who knows Python.”
2. Heather is right. The vast majority of jobs, even some world-changing jobs, jobs people kill for, still require a resume. Heather’s company, Microsoft, is still changing the world in some wonderful ways. (Although I once scorched the inexcusable Word 2007 in this blog, I’m writing this post on Windows Live Writer, which MS executed brilliantly.) Most jobs at her company are still choice morsels, and if she says you need a resume to get ‘em, well, I trust her.
3. Neville is right, in that Seth will be more and more right, for more and more people, as time goes on. The world is moving Godin-ward.

Now, a bit of my own experience.

The most interesting job I’ve ever held, by far, I got without a resume. (It was also the best-paying.) A friend told me she’d given my name to someone who was creating a new position, and a few hours later, he called. It was 1997, when web sites were too new for most companies, and I had the nerve to walk into my interview without a resume, but with a web site for this prospective employer’s company. I’d created it the night before based on what I learned from a few phone calls.

A twist, though: I was asked for a resume, after the hiring decision had been made. “I just need to show the management team you’re a real person,” was how the owner and president put it. And that, I believe, is how many job seekers should be thinking during this period of transition to a more Godin world. Have a resume. But offer it last, and give it a lower priority than any of the items Seth suggests. Have it to meet the compliance requirements after you’ve already won the job. But, if you’re to stand out from the crowd, it’ll be by doing everything you can to win the job before you have to hand over a resume.

It used to be that “references available on request” was the last line on the resume, and checking them was a late step in the hiring process. Let’s turn that around. Let’s lead off with a blazingly enthusiastic reference that ends with the postscript, “In addition to the incredible talents I’ve mentioned, I hear Heidi has a good-looking resume.”

del.icio.us Tags: Godin,Seth,Microsoft,resume,jobs,Nevile,Hobson,forimmediaterelease,sethgodin