Alpha Mind Blog

So I’ve been YouTubing for 3 months. Where has the time gone?

That’s not a trivial question.

In my e-book Unfashionably Late, I talk about how the cost of using blogs increases over time. What is true of blogs is true of all social media, but especially of YouTube. As with blogs, the problem is that a person who is likely to be interesting is also somebody who’s interested, possibly to the point of being easily distracted.

And YouTube offers more ways to be distracted than any other social medium. It offers stimuli and feedback loops in a great variety of time frames. You can converse with friends in chat rooms called “streams” where the feedback is nearly instant. Or you can make videos, and for months afterward watch the views and ratings they receive.

So whether it is quick or slow feedback that draws you, it’s there, along with everything in between—along with that essential element of gambling addiction, randomness.

You can make friends as a way of getting attention, and then find that you lavish attention on your friends at great cost in time.

In my own case, I chose to hitch my own fame to a rising star, LisaNova, and planned to have my first two videos mention her, as a way of riding her popularity. Since then, there has been so much drama surrounding Lisa, with a virtual lynch mob calling for her elimination from YouTube, that I can’t help wanting to follow it.

Worse, I get involved in it. From being a thoroughly fake friendship by means of which, in my first video, I made a trifling joke about YouTube friendship, I have had a lot of communication with Lisa and find myself truly liking and respecting her, more so with each passing week. So I’m very tempted to make videos defending her against the mob.

There is still the little pragmatic voice in my head, asking if it will be worth the time and effort to stay involved in the Lisa controversy. But that voice gets increasingly distant as the charms of YouTube take over. Who cares if it’s worth it, I just wanna do it. I wanna! I wanna! I wanna!

It’s good for me now and then to re-read Unfashionably Late. My own words remind me that I’m using social media for very practical purposes, as part of my business. Also, they remind me of the dangers of being seduced by social media and failing to count the cost.

Social media are potentially very powerful business tools. Unfashionably Late lays out some of the difficulties of using them for business (or any other kind of personal advancement.) It remains for me to work out the solutions to the difficulties.

YouTube will be a superb testbed in which to seek these solutions, precisely because the dangers of blogs are not only all present in YouTube, but multiplied.

Here on the Alpha Mind blog, in the coming weeks I’ll lay out what I’m learning in the YouTube world, and apply the lessons to blogging. I hope that for my readers who use thought leadership as a linchpin of their marketing mix, the benefit, in learning to use social media effectively, will be great.

Yeah, this post by Scoble is four days old, but he’s so dead-on right that I have to respond.

I recently plunged into YouTube. A serious time-sink, and a lot of fun, and a hotbed of serious possibilities for business communications. (More—much more—on that in coming posts.)

YouTube isn’t at all serious about policing my friend-making habits, and I’m glad of it. Yes, they do include a silly bit of language about “if you know this person” when you invite someone to be a friend…

… but they don’t ask you how you know the person.

The whole idea of friends on social media sites is fraught with much potential for silliness. It became the theme of my first YouTube video. Enjoy.

Lisa Donovan (LisaNova as she’s known on YouTube) and I had a very nice exchange of emails, so one could almost say we know each other—now. But that exchange happened after she signed on as my friend. I couldn’t have sent her the email if she hadn’t accepted my friend invitation without knowing me from swiss cheese. Of course, I could honestly say I knew her—I knew she makes well produced and really funny videos. But she didn’t know me. She accepted my friend invite because she’s gracious.

Well, actually, because she knows what’s good for her YouTube career. Turning away potential friends would have been rather boneheaded.

The very charming Kami Huyse blogged about the 10 Most Irritating Words on the ‘Net and so sent me on a journey that has now gone 8 hours (with two major computer glitches and a pastoral visit sandwiched in.)

Based on Kami’s partial list and this article, it looks like the full list is probably:

1. folksonomy
2. blogosphere
3. blog
4. netiquette
5. blook
6. webinar
7. vlog
8. social networking
9. cookie
10. wiki

My vote is for “meme.” Yuck. It’s as bad as kudo, almost, but kudo antedates the Internet, while meme, I believe, got currency on the ‘net way back when The Well was new.

It’s always a good feeling when a new application you’re trying out fails in the first 10 minutes. That way you haven’t wasted a lot of time.

Windows Live Writer just did that for me.

First thing it offered to do after making its first connection to my blog was to put a temporary post on the blog. It put the post there, but it was permanent, and I had to use my blog’s administrative interface to delete it.

Pretty bad manners. I uninstalled WLW.

Somewhere among WLW’s pages was a promise that I could see a perfectly formatted preview of my posts. Found no way to do that. But remember, I only gave the product 10 minutes.

I hear good things about WLW. Just didn’t work for me.

Sniff…

Dave Winer (in 2005) on professional journalists: “They take longer to get it wronger.”

Here’s the proof:

NPR : Bloggers Debate Code of Conduct. Nothing wrong in the audio, but the written intro has Kathy Sierra calling for a code of conduct that, as 100 blogs have told me over the past many days, she has come out against.

And, folks, this whole story is as stale as last week’s tuna sandwich. I have several good excuses why I was late picking up on it. But it’s now 17 days later than that, and NPR, with resources vastly greater than mine, is just getting around to stating Kathy’s opinion 180 degrees wrong.

So there I was reading this immense fat packet, my printout of “Creating Passionate Users.” (Hmm, that should have been italicized, now that it’s a book, even if the world’s only copy is the one I’m reading.) And I’m looking for what made Kathy a successful blogger. In this process, it wasn’t my first revelation, but it was my first big one, when I realized that Kathy knew her subject.

Yeah, I hear you muttering “Moron!” under your breath. But wait till I explain what I mean by knowing a subject.

Again, I have to say not everyone will get as much out of this lesson as I did. Because not everyone is doing what Kathy set out to do. Here at The Alpha Mind, though, I am.

When You Map Out a New Field, You Have to (Duh) Map It.

Kathy created a whole new field of study. Although “brain science,” if I may use such a loose term, is at the heart of Creating Passionate Users, CPU is without doubt a cross-disciplinary field. And it’s a practical field, not a laboratory undertaking or (at least not yet) an academic major.

So the first challenge that Kathy faced was to understand where its boundaries were. She whipped this challenge by mind-mapping.

Now you’re about to find out something about how I read. Because I’m going to confess that I read a world into this one picture in that post:

The picture is a mind map Kathy used for a seminar she conducted. But when I looked at it, it came to me in a flash that Kathy has her entire subject mapped out in just this way, and, I’d wager (if not for my scruples) that she had that map in her head, fairly complete, when she started the blog.

Before last week, “The Alpha Mind” lacked such a map. Here I am, trying to develop a field of endeavor that nobody’s ever defined before, and I’ve been trying to do so without defining it.

This week I’m correcting the problem. (Okay, total digression here. I remember when I worked in Silicon Valley for a French software company, and they sent a new build with release notes which included the luscious sentence “This lack has been suppressed.” Many smiles in native-English-speaker land.) My lack of a mind map has been suppressed.

What difference does it make?

First, this one. When Kathy decides to blog something, she knows exactly where it fits onto the map of her subject. Comparatively, some of my past posts suggest a man groping in darkness. Even when Kathy blogs something that doesn’t map, she knows it, and she doesn’t do it all that often. When the connection is tenuous, at least she knows how to make the connection.

For example, check this out. (You don’t have to stay for the video, but I recommend it.) It’s one of my favorite CPU posts.

Now that you’re back, in case the video overwhelmed you so you forgot the last line of the post, I’ll remind you:

By this morning, both foals were crossing the “kick ass” threshold, and loving every moment of being alive.

Of course, the “Kick Ass Threshold” is a key Sierra theme, and so she was able, cleverly if preposterously, to tie that morning’s trip to the stable to CPU’s main topic.

It was Kathy who talked me into trying mind mapping, mostly through this paragraph:

The key to using mind maps for brainstorming…. is to go really fast. The idea is to engage your “right” brain (metaphorically speaking) while simultaneously supressing your judgemental, logical, rational “left” brain. Something magical happens…

“Hold on!”, Max butts in rudely. Before I let Kathy finish, I just have to say that something magical happened indeed. That Kathy could use “right-brain-left-brain” and not lose me completely is almost a miracle. “Right-left-brain,” as the notion is popularly used (and as Kathy is using it here) is nonsense. Note that even as she trots it out, Kathy tries to distance herself from it by her insertion of “metaphorically speaking.” I can’t help it, both of my lobes say gak. It isn’t my right brain that says “Max, lighten up,” it’s whatever mysterious zone is controlled by the Law of Charitable Associations, which I invented last week as yet another result of reading Kathy, and about which I promise a post next week. Anyway, I lightened up and accepted the kernel of what Kathy was saying.

Okay, Kathy, you can go on now…

…when you just start throwing down nodes and drawing connections and linking ideas without giving ANY real thought. The moment you start thinking/analyzing, you’re screwed. But if you just let it happen, you’ll find yourself looking down at your paper 10 minutes later and seeing things you never would have come up with using a logical thinking process. So it’s not a matter of “waiting for the muse”, but it’s also not a matter of using brute force thinking. You just have to do something!

Something here grabbed me. Perhaps it was a vague sense that, when I outline, I always run into a wall, and the wall always seems to have a little voice, only audible subliminally, in the deepest depths, that goes “who’s this idea’s boss?” It’s hierarchy rearing its head, long before it has any usefulness. Whatever it was, I found that what Kathy was saying had a clarion ring of truth to it.

So I got a mind mapper (freemind, open source, free, works this year which wasn’t true last time I tried it.) I’ve started using it. I’ll tell you what I’ve observed in a separate post. For now I’ll just say that I love it, and I expect it to be a boon to me in these ways:

• It will conduce to good choices in where I read and link.
• It will help me maintain focus.
• And that will help me find my audience.

So…

Look, Ma, I made a mind map!

…so The Alpha Mind now has a mind map. And I have some serious plans for that mind map.

First, I hope to make it my site map. I hope it will let me lose that stale linear list of categories. Instead, a reader will be able to go to the mind map, get a quick vista of what I’m doing here, identify the sub-topics of interest to him/her, and unfold nodes and follow links to posts and pages.

I also hope that, when I find readers who really engage with the subject, the mind map will be a powerful point of engagement. They’ll be able to critique my approach to the subject at a high conceptual level, forestalling my devoting lots of time to ill-conceived sub-topics. (Why fix your grammar when you’ve written a plot that stinks?)

Here’s the map, folded up to show only one node out from center. Click on it to view it unfolded.

…Shel Israel needs a nap. And maybe blogging is wee bit tired, too.

This page on Shel’s blog is a study in what I wrote about in Unfashionably Late. Read the comments.

Shel wants people to respond to his book ideas as they come out, and he’s not getting enough response. And we who commented are saying that maybe a blog isn’t the place to write a book any more. Shelley Powers is especially succinct:

Weblogging really has pushed the limits of ADD–creating it where it didn’t exist before. The medium doesn’t translate well into longer efforts requiring more work or analysis.

And Ted Koterwas chips in with this:

so, if blog posts are getting shorter, fewer people are taking the time to read and comment thoughtfully on long meaty posts, and the twitter hype is true, it would seem that for many people, the ability to broadcast and be social is much more important than having anything meaningful to say.

I appreciate Ted’s mentioning twitter. If blogging has shortened the attention spans of its practitioners, what will twitter do? Or perhaps, what is it already doing?

And maybe it’s not just twitter. There’s also the overabundance of all social media. Some of the best bloggers are getting positively lost to us as they explore Second Life.

Somebody has finally read and written about Unfashionably Late.

Ian Delaney in New Media Knowledge - Should You Blog? says:

Despite its alleged benefits, blogging costs time. And time is money. A new paper by Max Christian Hansen argues that new bloggers should count the cost before they enter the fray. Ian Delaney examines the arguments.

Thanks for paying attention, Ian!

Kathy Sierra: Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, etc.

She asks the rhetorical question (I paraphrase), “Why do we still go to conferences when there are so many media to bring them to us.”

Here’s my list of reasons:

• One-on one in crowds. Why is it more fun to see a movie with someone else? Because, even if you’re too polite to talk to each other loudly, you still hear, see, sense each other reacting, in real time. Your companion’s reaction shapes and informs yours, and enriches the whole experience. You’re seeing a different movie when you see it with someone else.
• One-on-a-few in crowds. Even the best video-conferencing tools can’t capture this. The few people sitting near you provide (decreasingly with increased distance) the same thing your one companion provides. We are made to do things in groups, and we are made to read each other.
• Giving what you get. What companions give us, we give them, and we get a kick out of it.

All in all, I think giving is the most important thing, even when it’s on the very subtle level. Here’s an example:

My friend Lee Hopkins is one of the most skilled appreciators I know. One of the many persons he appreciates is Kathy Sierra. Why would he want to be in the audience rather than sitting at home seeing live video of her speech? Because, even if he’s sitting 13 rows back, she just might see him, hanging on every word, contributing his wee mite to what a good audience does for a good speaker.

I admit this list is partial, and admit further that Kathy’s probably right that no list is likely to cover all the reasons face time matters. It’s just my wee mite.