Fire and Knowledge

The study found that access to the Internet leads people to feel better about their lives. “Put simply, people with IT access are more satisfied with life even when taking account of income,” said Michael Willmott, the social scientist who authored the study, at a press conference. “Our analysis suggests that IT has an enabling and empowering role in people’s lives, by increasing their sense of freedom and control, which has a positive impact on well-being or happiness.”

—”Is the Internet the Secret to Happiness?”

Years ago a friend of mine forwarded an email to me from the editor of a popular magazine with this comment:

Isn’t it interesting that the editor—the head honcho!—of ______ would write like this!

This was the editor’s email he was referring to:

hi _____, thnx. we love Thomas too. if u want to pitch our literary editor on a review, he’s at __________…
best -tom

I remember being amused and thinking it was a symbol of our cultural and linguistic decline.

That was five years ago. Now I have a more practical perspective on his email — he was just a busy guy, trying to get as much done as possible.

I’ve been thinking about this because over the past year, and more so in the past six months, I’ve gotten very busy. Starting Rainsong Media was a big step for me professionally, and a few months later I also founded Beacon Ad Network with a partner. Add a few other projects on the side, and you have a recipe for busyness like I’d never experienced before.

So what do you do when you have a couple hundred emails to go through every few days? If you want to actually get things done, you have three options as I see it:

1. Hire someone to check and respond to your email
2. Let them pile up and only respond to emergencies
3. Write in shorthand

Most of us do not have time to respond to a couple hundred emails with a polished response — if we did, we’d never get anything else done. And even if we hire someone to handle our emails, there will still be many to respond to ourselves.

And that’s where shorthand comes in. Instead of taking 3-10 minutes to answer an email, you can answer it in 30 seconds.

Say you dedicate 2 hours a day to email. Look at the productivity differences:

• 24 emails at 5 minutes per email (average)
• 120 emails at 1 minute per email (average)

That’s a 500% productivity increase.

There will always be emails that need thoughtful, polished responses. But most of our emails don’t — they are simply information requests that can be answered quickly in shorthand.

So shorthand isn’t a symbol of cultural decline or of lesser intellect. Let’s drop our elitist attitudes. For many of us, it’s just a sign of busyness and a desire to get things done.

There’s a bug in OpenX on some installations where this error is displayed when trying to login:

Error: File permission errors have been detected, and must be fixed before you can continue….

chmod -R a+w /home/[dir]/openx/var/cache

Running that command may fix it once, but it’ll be back the next time the maintenance script runs.

Here is how to fix it:

1. Go to your openx installation directory
2. Open up plugins/deliveryCacheStore/oxCacheFile/oxCacheFile.delivery.php
3. Add the following code to line 102 (right before the line “if (PHP_SAPI == ‘cli’)”):
   @chmod($filename, 0777);
4. Save the file
5. Run the maintenance script again

Viola! The permissions will now be set correctly when the maintenance script runs.

[BTW, if you need any openx or website help, I'm available for hire through my design company, Rainsong Media]

There are three questions you have when you’re hiring a programmer (or anyone, for that matter): Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them?

Someone who’s smart but doesn’t get stuff done should be your friend, not your employee. You can talk your problems over with them while they procrastinate on their actual job.

Someone who gets stuff done but isn’t smart is inefficient: non-smart people get stuff done by doing it the hard way and working with them is slow and frustrating.

Someone you can’t work with, you can’t work with.

—Aaron Swartz, “How I Hire Programmers“

Twitter, in essence, allows you to attend a great big cocktail party filled with diverse and (typically) civilized chatter. Some of what you hear and say will be frivolous. But the chatter will also provoke, inform, and engage you in a way, and at a volume, you can’t replicate offline.

—Jack & Suzy Welch, “Why We Tweet”

(And yes, you can find me on twitter under @jpsowin)

Kevin Kelly talks about the new socialism in Wired:

We’re not talking about your grandfather’s socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now….

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods….

Now we’re trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn’t solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

A new search engine called Wolfram Alpha “takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does”:

Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out “on the fly”, according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in “10 flips for four heads” and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is “curated”, meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.

“I’ve wanted to make the knowledge we’ve accumulated in our civilisation computable,” he said last week. “I was not sure it was possible. I’m a little surprised it worked out so well.”

I can’t wait to try it out!

Newspapers have a love/hate relationship with Google. They love the traffic it brings, but hate that it seems to be destroying their print profits. Consider what Robert Murdoch said:

“Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, ” ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ “

Danny Sullivan gives the solution that’s been around for over a decade:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

That little bit of code would stop Google from indexing their site. Their complains would be over.

But they don’t really want Google to stop “stealing their copyrights,” do they?