Alpha Mind Blog

DISQUS adds qontinuity where it was much missing.

Go check out Scripting News where Winer is testing it out.

DISQUS adds nice commenting capabilities to blogs. Works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and MovableType. Allows:

• readers to rate comments
• comments to be sorted by rating
• a comment to be specifically designated a reply to another comment
• comments to be threaded (a consequence of the last bullet)
• an RSS feed to be made just for one blog post and its comment stream, so that if it goes long you can easily keep following it (remember the incredibly long series of comments on O’Reily’s Blogger Code proposal? Or Kathy Sierra’s farewell? Each would’ve been better threaded and with its very own feed.)
• the thread to be subscribed to by email instead of RSS, for those who prefer
• a DISQUS user’s comments, no matter on how many blogs, to be aggregated in a single RSS feed. I.E. you can subscribe to my comment feed to read everything I say, all over the blogosphere.
• API access to the DISQUS back end.

I’m sure there are other goodies there I haven’t gotten to yet.

Whatever else I learn about it, I’m having a blast just commenting scripting.com. Winer’s been a hero of mine for years, but commenting his blog has been a pain. Now that it’s easy, and in the expectation it’ll be temporary, I’m cuttin’ loose, commenting every post he puts up.

I’ll try to get DISQUS working here tomorrow. No promises. I have a video to edit, an audio comment to record for FIR, and four blog posts queued up.

So, here I am all excited to take part in Owyang and Scoble’s cool micromedia meetup today.

I even logged in and reserved my spot.

I have a very succinct and possibly funny video in my camera.

In my bag.

Next to me.

With no stinking firewire card to capture it.

With at least 25 minutes between me and the nearest firewire.

With a client having an emergency that’ll occupy me for the next three hours.

With the meetup 2.1 hours away.

Sigh.

But I’m stubborn and I’m participating anyway. Read on:

The future of media is where these kinds of connections will actually work for nearly all the people who attempt them.

Sigh.

Then again, the future of communications will continue to be largely asynchronous.

And so, how about those of you who come by here subscribing to my feed so that tomorrow you can come back and see my succinct and possibly funny video?

Later y’all. Bissoux.

And while you wait you could sample some of my other videos, here and here.

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.

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…

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.

I hate to say something or someone sucks. It’s a vulgar, nasty expression. But sometimes it’s just the thing that has to be said.

Take my recent post about Technorati, for instance. Within thirty hours of my posting, Technorati showed every link to my blog that I knew existed when I wrote the post. (Yes, I admit it’s not that many, but hey, I’m still new.) Still no explanation as to how they found those linking pages after they were already several days old, or why they hadn’t been found earlier.

Perhaps it’s my imagination running away with me, but maybe, must maybe, someone at Technorati monitors what bloggers are saying about the company, found my post, and investigated the problem.

Strictly speculation.

But if a company is wise enough (and I believe this is indispensible wisdom) to monitor how bloggers are talking about it, what’s the first search it should do every morning? Well, for me it would be

“[Company_name] sucks”.

It’s by far the most common form of rant about a company.

So maybe it’s not what happened at Technorati when I kvetched about them. But it’s what I hoped might happen. And, for whatever reason, the end result is what I wanted.

And, Technorati, if you’re reading this, thanks for finding my missing links.

Dave Winer on the future of Twitter:

I’m very reluctant to dismiss Twitter as a passing fad, aware that many people said that about blogging, and I was sure they were wrong, and they were.

I’ve been trying to avoid Twitter for some time now. Blogging eats time, and one of the ways I cope is that I studiously avoid testing every new social media tool that I learn about in the b-sphere.

But something happened yesterday that tells me I’m going to have to learn about Twitter. What happened?

I checked my stats and found I’d gotten almost as many referrals from Twitter as from Seth Godin’s blog.

I didn’t even know Twitter could link. That’s how careful I am to preserve my ignorance and husband my time.

I suspect it happened because of Scoble. Here’s Winer again:

…if I were a Scoble fanboy, I would love that he posts every event in his busy life to his Twitter channel.

Last week I left a trackback on Scobleizer, and I think Robert might have Twittered it, for whatever reason. At least I know that two of the referrers were

http://twitter.com/Scobleizer (etc).

If Robert was the originator, he certainly has some fanboys (and girls) out there, because I got referred by 8 Twitter URLs for a total of 55 requests. For my newish, scantily-read blog, this is a flood.

Since I need to know how readers get to my blog, I’m going to have to check out Twitter. At the prospect of which I sigh, even though the reason (increased traffic on my blog) makes me smile big-time.