Sowing Light

Google Reader has some great tagging and sharing features.  You can easily get an Atom feed of those stories that you have tagged with a particular tag - this is a great way to keep a public ‘current reading’ list.  It wasn’t as easy as I had thought it would be to get this feed up on my Wordpress blog, but I found a way.  Hopefully the below will be helpful to anyone trying to do the same.

The feed, with concatenated titles

The Problem:

Wordpress uses the Magpie RSS parser to parse feeds. This is true for the built in RSS widget and also the advanced KBRSS widget. Magpie has some limitations that are highlighted by Google’s feeds. In particular Magpie has a nasty habit of taking multiple <link> tags and squishing them into one, and doing the same with multiple <title> tags. Very bad behavior for a parser. Without any additional treatment, Wordpress digests Google Reader links like the picture at right.

The Solution

I’ll cut out some of the wrong turns along the way.  This post, from EconTech, solves a parallel problem and gave me the key to fixing this one.  We need to scrub the feed before we send it over to Wordpress.  He used Feedburner to clean it up and translate it to RSS, than let Wordpress and Magpie digests the RSS that Feedburner spits out.

The Step-by-Step

1. Get your Google Reader Feed URL (Settings -> Folders and Tags -> View Public Page -> Get the feed from your browser)
2. Set up a Feedburner feed using the URL from step 1
3. On the Feedburner feed, deactivate Browser Friendly and Smart Feed (under the Optimize tab)
4. Still on the Feedburner feed, activate Convert Format using RSS 2.0.
5. Note the URL of the feedburner feed
6. Use that one to populate your RSS widget in Wordpress

Bonus Points

• I assume that the default Wordpress RSS widget works, but I didn’t try it.  Part of what I like about Google Reader is the ability to add notes to the items you share, and I wanted to make sure those got fed in.  So I’m using the kbrss plugin.  You can follow the instructions to set that guy up - it’s pretty straightforward.  I use a template along these lines to get the fields I want:

<li><span class=’reading-date’>^pubdate[opts:date=F jS Y]$</span><br/>
<a class=’reading-link’ href=’^link$’ title=’^title$’>^title$</a><br/>
<span class=’reading-annot’>^gr=>annotation_content$</span></li>

• If you get deeper into kbrss, you’ll probably want to use the ?kbrss=feed_url option to take a look at how Wordpress reads your feed.  On my setup, I had to encode my feed url before this option would work.  Probably some sort of security issue.  Here’s a string encoder.

Missing Pieces

What’s left out of this solution is those second and third links and titles that were in the original feed.  In particularly, the title of the blog that the story originally came from doesn’t get carried through.  If you want to take up the charge, that’s something that should be picked up in a more robust solution.

Deeply Technical Google Reader, RSS, Wordpress

I’m going to admit it. I don’t want to spend my life programming. It’s fun and interesting, but it’s not what I would call ultimately worthwhile. What I really want to do is learn, teach, grow in love, and raise a family. I think these are supremely good things for a human being to be doing.

None of the things that I really want to do are good ways to bring in income. It may be possible to make a living as a teacher, but it has too many downsides for me to be enthusiastic. Firstly, teachers are grossly undervalued and underpaid. Don’t get me started. This is one of my hot buttons. Secondly, I’m spoiled by high tech income. It’s tough to take an 70% pay cut. Thirdly, I don’t want to start skewing what and to whom I teach based on where I can churn up cash. I think that would be injurious to the love and joy I’d like to teach with.

Even though learning, teaching, and loving aren’t great ways to bring in money, that’s the way I want to spend my time. I’m a bit of an idealist that way. I don’t want to devote too much time to financing the whole affair. The blessing is that I have pretty simple tastes and a modest budget. I want to live in my community in Jerusalem, keep the kitchen stocked, and go out once in a while. I’d be perfectly happy with about $30k a year.

So what I’m left with is this puzzle: What’s the best way for a person like me - with solid skills in programming, design, analysis, and business - to make a modest income while spending only 4 hours a day on the job?

I think it’s all sorts of possible, and the idea of giving it a run is in itself exciting. It may not be the big hairy audacious goal that star-struck startupists are driven by, but it’s audacious in a different sense. I feel like I’ll be prototyping a sane and sustainable approach to a balanced, enjoyable, and fulfilling life. That’s pretty worthwhile - no?

Organizational Dynamics, The Creative Process joy, Lifestyle Income

Earlier this year, I wrote about the “5 Whys”, a problem-resolution technique honed at Toyota.  Eric Reis yesterday posted his experiences using the 5 whys in his own organization, and adds an important piece the I wasn’t previously aware of.  The technique starts by taking a problem and asking ‘why’ 5 times, successively.  Why did the server crash?  It didn’t have the latest patch.  Why didn’t it have the latest patch?  Our policy is to only patch once a quarter.  Why do we only patch once a quarter? We don’t have enough staff time to patch more often. etc. This process helps you identify some of the root, systemic causes of the problem.  What Eric adds is the following:

So far, this isn’t much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. The next step is this: you have to commit to make a proportional investment in corrective action at every level of the analysis.

There’s where the technique hits the pavement.  Is it better for an organization to have deep knowledge of their problems if they don’t act on them?  There are usually ingrained habits and policies that go against addressing problems occuring on the deep policy and organizational functioning level, but it’s what seperates dynamic living organizations from walking corpses.

It’s important to tease out the knowledge, and even more important to be comitted to acting on it.

Organizational Dynamics, Smart Folks 5 Whys

In case you haven’t heard, Better Place is the effort to completely wire-up an electric car infrastructure. It’s starting in Israel, and Denmark and Australia have also signed up. Tim O’Reilley sat with Better Place founder Shai Agassi for a solid half hour discussion at the recent Web 2.0 conference.

While at PresenTense, I heard Mike Granoff, the first investor in Better Place, tell a story of the formation of the company. While still at SAP, Shai pitched his plan to get the world off oil to Israeli president Shimon Peres, wanting the Israeli government to take up the charge. Peres called him late that night, and told him that it wasn’t going to happen that way. A government couldn’t do it; something like this is the job of a business man - “It’s your job”, he said. Shai protested that he was near the top of SAP, one of the most important software companies in the world. Peres responded - “I don’t know what you’ve got in the pipeline over there, but it better be some damn good software.” The next week, Shai left SAP.

The conversation jumps into the brass tacks of how the technology and the business will work. A lot of my questions on the business model were answered here. It’s a great to see Shai Agassi in action, and really worth watching the whole thing.

I’m psyched to trade in my gas guzzler - really psyched.

Smart Folks, The Creative Process Better Place, Energy, Israel, Oil

Hank William’s paints a bleak future for the traditional print newspaper industry. Readership is increasingly going online for its news, advertisers certainly aren’t interested in buying ads in unread print editions, and, unlike search ads, website display ads don’t work.

How is a cultural institution like the New York Times to survive? That’s the problem Mr. William’s article has had me thinking about all day. His solution, however, leaves me scratching my head. He wants to solve it by making the browser experience more like the newspaper experience - give them the power, he claims, and users will gladly fall back into familiar newspapers modes of browse and scan, making ads more relevant and saving the life of the venerable newspaper.

I don’t buy it.

I agree that display ads are less effective online than in print, but that’s just one piece of the equation. Traditional ads in general are losing their effectiveness. Print ads themselves don’t do as well as they did before the Internet. As a consumer, what use do I have for advertisements? They no longer inform, as they once did; I can ask questions online and get trusted answers instantly. With my needs well covered, I do my best to avoid ads in whatever medium they are found.

The online ad purveyors are busy adding in support for geo-location, but hyper-local ads don’t recover the utility that newspaper ads used to have. True, I may be interested in a new local restaurant, but when the local store will never beat the price of the online store, I don’t care if they’re having a sale. The only advantage they have over the online store is their location, and that’s a fact I can easily find out when and if I care to. There’s precious little that an advertisement can tell me that I will really care about.

What we’re seeing is not just a breakdown caused by a new interface to the same old content, we’re seeing the crumbling of a business model whose assumptions have eroded away underneath it. The new medium, as every major new medium before it, is entirely rewiring the way our society, our businesses, and our brains work. A browser with scan and pan isn’t going to bring back the relevance of traditional advertising.

So what will newspapers do to save themselves? Not knowing what else to do, they’re going to put the ads where people have to read them - in the story. Movies have done it with product placement and radio with announcer-read advertisements. The traditional reliance on ads will force their hand, and a good portion of the public will just learn to deal. The ads that are the basis of the business will begin to show on the face of the business, but I doubt that even this will save them. It will just be the last gasp of the dying enterprise.

With big-budget ad-supported players failing to make the turn, the real reporting is going to come from one and maybe two sources. The first is the massive number of plugged in people who are already becoming the nervous system of the planet. This source is a sure bet to remain a major force. The generation of news online is already a distributed and complex interweaving of parsed and recombined news streams - we can only expect that to grow and take on new forms.

The other source may or may not come into being. As the newspapers and magazines pass away and the organic news network gets noisier and noisier, there may be a thirst for the best of what the newspapers had offered - the investigation, the insight, the sharp analysis. If there are those who can provide what the network can not, if there are individuals who by their unique point of view can create content that the market desires, then we have all the makings of a natural news market - without the massive players and without the ad dollars. Those who can provide value will be valued. The market will drive the business, and it’s ultimately something very close to a subscription model that will keep good news alive.

Organizational Dynamics, Social Media Advertising, Marketing, Newspapers, Social Media

How do you draw the best out of people?

The question has been at the forefront of my mind for a number of years, and has made me a student of the art of human interaction. I’ve found that people flower in the warm wind of another’s listening. The deeper and purer the listening, the greater the potential. One who walks in this world with attention to others and belief in their potential leaves a trail of blossoming life in his wake.

The amazing work of 826 National comes down to this listening, this attention and belief. They’ve set up creative tutoring centers all over the world, changing the lives of thousands of kids, lighting up their eyes and their creativity. Dave Eggers attributes it all to ’shining a light’ on each kid. Most of these kids never had someone believe in them, someone really interested in their ideas. That’s all it really takes - one person, an hour a week, truly valuing them and what they do.

Believing in someone isn’t easy. Who do you truly believe in? Who do you truly think has great potential? I’m surprised at the ways I find to discount another person, to judge them or box them up. Recently, I realized that my helping someone can be a veneer over my lack of faith in them. I find that I can be “helping” because I don’t think they can do it on their own, because I don’t really believe in them.  That’s my problem, but it can hobble their potential.

Sincere belief means that I believe that the other person is far greater than I perceive, has the answers to his challenges within him, and has something to teach me. My belief in that goes a long way to making it manifest. It’s a discipline of loving, a discipline that brings new life into the world.

I’m starting to see, and appreciate, that in this world, I’m just a midwife.

In truth, there is no just a midwife. Can you image a work with greater importance? A work that so touches the intimate secret of life and creation?

May we all be midwives to the people we encounter, and to ourselves.

Organizational Dynamics, The Creative Process Drawing out the Best, Listening

I’m thinking about social networks, and an apple falls on my head. The geeks were on this train eight years ago, but no one noticed. And you know what? They’re still on the same train, and no one notices. FOAF, or ‘Friend of a Friend’ is a formal, computer understandable way of declaring who knows who. Put a bunch of FOAF documents together, and bing, you’ve got a social network. FOAF started a good long time ago, as part of the grass roots technical effort behind the fabled Semantic Web, but just like the Semantic Web, it never hit its growth spurt.

I googled FOAF - 6 and a half million results. Not bad.

Facebook? 36 million. “Social Network”? 15 million. OpenSocial? nearly 11 million.

And FOAF had a six year head start. Eight in the case of OpenSocial.

What factors make FOAF just a footnote? A few things -

1) It’s hard - FOAF is all about geeks, from beginning to end. Writing a FOAF document is hard, getting it online is hard, and doing anything with it is hard. The potential market of the technology is limited by its form. The technology was never put within reach of the masses.

2) It’s boring - Who cares if one computer coder is friends with another? The declaration of this knowledge is computationally interesting, but it doesn’t do anything. There’s no sizzle to sell. It creates a social graph, but there’s no socializing happening.

3) It’s artificial - In FOAF, the social connections aren’t created organically, they have to be constructed. If sending an email created a FOAF connection, that would be organic. As it stands now, someone has to go out and document reality. If you want to document reality, it’s much better if the reality forges its own documentation.

Let’s look at Facebook, on the other hand. It looses points on the technical purity and openness scale; it’s a big mean closed network. But it gets the three points above spot on.

1) It’s stupid easy to use - there’s barely any barrier to entry at all. Point and click, instant gratification, AJAX love.

2) It’s exciting - on Facebook you can see pictures of people who you might want to date. There has never been a more powerful engine for technical adoption. Period.

3) It’s organic - I create connections on facebook by going about my daily business - talking to people, showing off, looking for love, complementing others, planning a party, building a cause. It’s all sorts of organic; it’s useful.

Easy, exciting, and organic. Can we do the same thing for other otherwise doomed Semantic Web technologies? How do you make OWL easy, exciting, and organic? Would love to hear your insights.

Social Media Facebook, FOAF, Organic, OWL, Semantic Web, Social Networks

The language of marketing is the language of hunting. Who are we aiming for? What segment are we trying to capture? Who are we setting our sights on? What’s our target audience?

The language itself implicitly sets up a power dynamic, and it’s easy to fall into a mindset of manipulation. In this mindset, the market exists to be taken advantage of, fleeced, used for the good of the organization.

Taken on a more healthy level, the question of market is really the question of relationship. Who are we relating to? Who are we in conversation with? Ideally, the relationship should be one of full information and consent - not manipulation.

Here are a few questions to ask if you’re working to identify your market. Use the ones that make the most sense to your situation.

I’m currently working with a client on the question of market. Before facing the question, we had to do a good amount of work on clarifying the mission of the organization - you need some sense of who you are before you can come into a relationship. Even with that initial sense of mission, tackling the question of market is making them rethink who they are. Relationship can do that to a person.

Organizational Dynamics

Joel Spolsky, in case you hadn’t noticed, just writes intelligent insightful stuff. He seems to have been on a blogging break for the past few weeks, and I’ve actually missed him. Now he’s back, and his latest piece has my brain thumping. In it, he speaks about the 5 Whys, originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota.

(digression: When I was young, my father drove a Toyota. It must have been 20 years old. The antenna was missing, and the frame was beginning to rust away, but the car just kept going. When I went to buy a car, I looked at the Ford Focus. In Israel the Focus is actually a very sweet car; we get the European models, totally different than the US models. The Focus drove tight, had lots of power, and was kitted out with all sorts of cool stuff inside. Then I tried the Toyota Corolla. It wasn’t as sexy, it didn’t have all the gear - it was boring, and it was the same price. Then I realized - they must have put the money in to something. If it wasn’t the MP3 radio and kitted out interior, it was probably the things you can’t see - like the engine. I bought the Toyota.)

The idea behind ‘5 whys’ is to keep asking ‘why’ until you get to the root cause of a problem. There’s nothing holy about 5, fell free to add another few whys if it suits you. I decided to tackle a problem with the 5 whys, and at the risk of being overly self-referential, here’s what I came up with:

Problem: I’m not blogging on a regular basis

• Why? I find myself not possessed with ideas worth communicating.
• Why? I get involved in routine things, and not things that stretch my brain.
• Why? I somehow feel like doing really interesting things would be wasting time.
• Why? I get caught in a hamster mindset, where I have to do things that are immediately demonstrably valuable, but not really long term contributions.
• Why? I don’t maintain consciousness of the unique contribution my soul can make to the world.

The question I’m holding now is what to do with the realization. Better yet - knowing a low-level cause, and that cause being a matter of ingrained outlook, how do I bring myself into the more healthy mindset that I’d like to? How do I plant, deep down, the realization that the real valuable contributions I have to make to the world are coming from within?

The Creative Process 5 Whys

Every year for the past few years, a host of the brightest minds are asked a probing question. Their answers are intriguing and sometimes striking. It’s called the edge question, and 2008’s questions is ‘What have you changed your mind about?’ The results are at edge.org.

While we’re talking about what brilliant people are thinking about, have you seen TED?

Smart Folks Edge, TED