There are the ways we want to live our lives, the things we want to achieve, and the things we would like to do better, and the things we need to do. It’s important to make distinctions amongst these things, not only in understanding them, but in managing them.
Archive for Ideas
You’ve decided that working in an office isn’t for you. You don’t like doing the same tasks over and over again, you can’t stand the politics, and the commute is killer. More than anything, the idea that you have to sit in a certain spot between certain hours of every day is just asinine to you. So you go it alone - maybe you’re a business consultant, a writer, or a freelance designer.
I have a foot injury right now. The bottom of my foot sort of hurts. I could go to the doctor, but I don’t because of a couple of reasons. 1) I already know what he’ll say: “stay off it, keep it elevated, ice it regularly, and take ibuprofen” and 2) because while I’m one of the lucky Americans who has health insurance, my insurance totally blows. A simple checkup would probably cost me about $150.
Tried everything to save battery life on your iPhone? Disabled the WiFi? Disabled Bluetooth? De-cluttered your desktop? Stopped checking e-mail every five minutes, and still finding yourself tied to the dock with the headset just to have enough juice to make all of your phone calls for the day? Try the kadavy.net Battery-Saving Wallpaper, which you can download right now! Not only will it save you battery life, it will reduce your carbon emissions for the year by nearly half a pound!
Where do you usually go when you’re selling your car, looking for an apartment, etc? Craigslist, right?
And Craiglist works great for alot of things, but let’s say you’re looking for a roommate. First, you’re going to get a shitload of e-mails. Many of those e-mails are going to be totally irrelevant: from incompatible candidates, or people who generally didn’t read your post. You’re also going to get some spammers and scammers. When you finally sort through all of that, you’ll set up some appointments to meet with a few candidates. Many of them are not going to show up at all - they have no prior relationship with you, so there’s no damage to be done to their reputation by just not showing up. If you do finally find someone whom you’re comfortable living with, ultimately, they’re just a stranger - even if you get references, because those references are from strangers.
The problems of a socially “dumb” classified system
The problem is that something like Craigslist isn’t socially intelligent. It’s just a huge sea of anonymous listings. It’s oblivious to your social connections and doesn’t employ current methodolgies for building trust amongst members. With the influx of social networking over past years, people are able to maintain larger and larger networks of friends. It’s not uncommon for someone to have 400+ friends on Facebook. Shouldn’t these social connections be of some use?
Methinks also that as we start to have larger and larger networks of friends, we have less and less time for people whom we aren’t connected to in some way - thus the problem of the Craigslist “flake factor.”
If you’re looking for a roommate, you could let all of your friends know about this by sending out an e-mail to all of them. But nobody wants to be “that guy,” and you’re just being unrealistic if you expect your friends to forward that e-mail on to your friends. The trick is, getting that information in front of your social connections without annoying them.
So here’s a conceptual model of what such a system would look like. People’s needs are ported through a mechanism that understands their social connections. Those needs are then broadcast to those social connections through their “leisure portal.” What’s a leisure portal? It’s the “playground” of the internet. Huh?
The internet’s playground: the leisure portal
People are very protective of their e-mail inboxes. It’s their territory. So when you bug them with something that is irrelevant to them, they take offense.
Imagine you hated playing basketball. All of your friends know that you hate playing basketball. It’s okay to not like to play basketball. But there’s this one friend that comes by your place unannounced and says “hey, let’s play basketball.” and you say “I hate basketball, you know that” and then he says “well, I’m going to play basketball, tell your friends that I’m going to play basketball.” If he did that enough times, he probably wouldn’t be your friend for long. Getting impersonal e-mails from your friends is a bit like that.
So if e-mail is like “your house,” then a “leisure portal” is more like a “playground.” It’s not your home, you’re there in public space by your own volition. To the right of you, some of your friends are on the monkey bars, to the left, some others are playing kickball, behind you, they’re playing red rover, and in front of you, some other friends are playing chess. You aren’t obligated to join any of them, but you’re certainly welcome to - and you can always just go home.
Get it? A leisure portal is something that people come in contact with every day, usually during their leisure time. The technical equivalent of a playground. Something that, when you broadcast to it, doesn’t give your friends a sense of obligation to act, the way that a mass e-mail does.
Right now, the closest thing to a leisure portal on the internet is Facebook’s news feed. Hopefully you aren’t on Facebook trying to get some real work done - you’re just there to kill time and see what’s up with your friends. If you see in your news feed that one of your friends is looking for a roommate, that may be of interest to you. You may be able to help out, or know someone who can help out, but you may not. It’s not likely to bother you.
The plug
Sound familiar? Yeah, this is the conceptual model behind Through a Friend. Right now, Facebook provides the best system for bringing this model to reality. But hopefully it can be scaled up even further at some point.
One of the first web 2.0 type events that I went to when I moved to California was Super Happy Dev House, where I met Vinnie and the other guys from Meetro. At the time that company had as many as 8 guys living and working in a three-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto. It sounds like a totally crazy situation, but whenever I hung out there I found it to be extremely inspiring and energizing - they were passionate to the max about their idea (they still are, but now they have some real office space). Current.tv did a great job of depicting this arrangement and I want to share it with you:
As I was trying to assemble a dance playlist for a recent party that I hosted, I realized the shortcomings of the traditional use of the iTunes rating format: the only songs I rated were the songs that I _liked_ - resulting in a large mass of 4-star and 5-star songs - some of which were not uplifting enough to dance to. Thankfully I found enough danceable ones to make the party a success, but clearly I needed a better way to categorize my music.
After much thought, I have devised an emotion-based rating system. Here it goes:
1-star: Melancholy
These songs are friggen’ depressing, and with no hope of recovery. I was surprised at how few of the songs in my collection really fall into this category, so maybe I need to be more liberal in my categorization. What isn’t a surprise is that most of the songs that fall into this category are either Elliott Smith or Bright Eyes songs: “Angeles” and “Lua”, respectively, for example.
2-stars: Wistful
These songs are actually more depressing to listen to than the 1-star songs because they tend to allude - through lyrics, sound, or both - to things just lost or out of reach. This category seems to be dominated by Stars, Bloc Party, and Arcade Fire: “Lover’s Spit,” “Kreuzberg,” and “Intervention” as respective examples.
3-stars: Stable
Given that most modern music is based on The Blues, these may still be a little depressing, but are generally more soothing to listen to. These songs tend to mix subtle happiness and sadness for an overall “Stable” feel. This is where you start to see some Spoon and The Strokes show up: “Lines in the Suit” and “Automatic Stop,” as respective examples.
4-stars: Cool
Now we get into things that are perhaps danceable and have a generally more active feel. The spiraling bass line and breathy vocals of “Stars and Sons” by Broken Social Scene put that song in this category, and that crazy video-game sounding guitar solo in “Born Under Punches” by The Talking Heads is undeniably “Cool.” “Happy” and “joyous” songs would probably go in this category as well.
5-stars: Indestructible
These are those songs that make you want to dance, run really fast, lift heavy objects, leap tall buildings, etc.. This is where much of my hip-hop collection ends up, with N.E.R.D.’s “Brain” and Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ but A ‘G’ Thang” being a couple of favorites; and “Abra Cadaver” (no, not “Kadavy”) by The Hives, and Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” reppin’ other Genres. The ultimate “Indestructible” song goes - of course - to Spoon with “I Turn My Camera On.”
While there may be some criteria - or even specific characteristics of a song - that I point to to justify my ratings, _it’s music_ and thus this rating system is by no means scientific. I may even rate a song “Cool” today and later decide that it makes me feel “Indestructible” - it may depend upon my mood at the moment I rate the song. I have found the mood-based playlists this rating system yeilds to be pretty reliable. Does it work for you?
My mother recently sent me an article from the February 4th Omaha World Herald entitled Omaha: Creative, but intolerant. Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, and other related books was the keynote speaker at Omaha’s first Young Professionals Summit. It turns out that while Omaha ranks 11th on the midsize city Creativity Index, and has a “strong technology base” (what?), Omaha ranks 155th on the tolerance scale of midsize cities. Florida(the author)’s research indicates that cities that rank high in technology, talent, and tolerance lead in innovation, and Nebraska’s being the first state to ban gay marriage doesn’t help Omaha out with that third “T.” Business leaders present and future gathered to hear what they could do about this problem.
- Ego Capital
- Value to a user coming in any of a variety of forms, including personal effort, alterations to sense of self and personal worth, or social connections. A user is unlikely to invest Ego Capital if the return is likely to be a loss.
The startups of the late 90’s had the right idea in giving so many things away for “free”, but what they didn’t seem to understand was that if you give your users something, you should in turn get them to do something for you.
I have carried around a notebook for some time now, but the linear format of notebooks has never really suited me. Let’s say I’m out and about – here’s a scenario that may occur if I’m carrying around a notebook:
