7. Me dot org

November 21, 2012 No Comments

Over the next several days, I’m posting cartoons I drew for Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World, by Beth Kanter and Katie Delahaye Paine. I blogged about the book a while ago on Social Signal, explaining why I love it and why I think you should go buy a copy right now.

Chapter 7 is titled “How to Turn Your Stakeholders into Fundraisers: Social Fundraising and How Measurement Can Make It More Effective”. (After seeing an early outline, I wanted to call it “Turning Philanthropy into Philanthro-we“. How history might have changed if I’d ever hit “send” on that email.)

Beth and Katie suggest defining social fundraising as “people asking personal networks to give support.” If you’ve ever had a Facebook notification that a friend suggested you donate to a particular organization on Causes, or seen any of the endlessly inventive campaigns run by supporters of charity: water, you’ve seen social fundraising.

And it can work well. But taking it beyond just “let’s ask our supporters to put a widget on their blogs” requires fundraising expertise, social savvy, some decent technical chops… and smart measurement. If the Obama campaign’s message and tactics seemed to be constantly evolving, it’s because they were – in response to the data they’d analyze obsessively over what kind of appeals worked on whom, when, and under what conditions. (To put it in terms that I can relate to, “The Borg have adapted to our multi-phasic shielding, Captain – their last three appeals got through untouched and caused major donations on Decks 12 through 15.”)

Warbler as seen through a telescope — Flickr photo: Yellow-throated warbler by hart_curt

Segmenting your audience is key, too. Katie and Beth look at how Blue State Digital’s segmentation strategy dramatically boosted the chances that an email appeal from Autism Speaks would get opened by its recipient. (I love segmentation purely on the strength of the names marketers like to give their segments: “Furious Experimenters,” “Jazz-Inflected Repeat Adolescents” and “Regret-Tinged Revenge-Seekers”. Half of them sound like they were lifted from the pages of an Audubon field guide; come to think of it, the notes that accompany segmentation reports often have that observed-from-inside-a-bird-blind feel to them.)

And as the authors point out, the return you get won’t just be in the form of credit card authorizations. You’ll have a larger, more engaged network of supporters, ready to take actions ranging from advocacy to, potentially, organizational leadership.

(An aside: Turning stakeholders into fundraisers was thought for a long time to be fraught with danger. Sure, you’d probably get some lovely networked fundraising… but what if it went wrong? What if you ended up with fund-holders and stake-raisers? Almost inevitably, pundits warned, you’d have an angry stake-wielding crowd chasing people holding fistfuls of cash. But then it actually happened, and was called Occupy Wall Street. It turns out that crowd just uses their stakes to hold up hand-lettered banners and enormous effigies representing leading economists from the Austrian School, chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, slavish adherence to the ideas of Eugen Böhm von Bawerk has got to go!”)

6. “OMG, what happened to you?!” “I fell off our engagement ladder.”

November 19, 2012 No Comments

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Chapter 6 is titled “The Ladder of Engagement: How to Measure Engagement and Use It to Improve Relationships with Your Stakeholders”. The authors walk us through the idea of online engagement that draws users into increasingly greater and more meaningful actions. You might start by following an organization on Twitter, then commenting on their blog, then making a small donation, and then giving them your house and becoming their Executive Director, and wondering how all of this happened in just three minutes. (That, friends, is what great interaction design can do.)

With some organizations, it really isn’t a ladder so much as a step-stool. They have a very limited number of roles for their supporters, and can’t really imagine how they could possible accommodate someone who’d like to work outside those boundaries. “Oh, you’d, uh, you’d like to get more involved (gulp) beyond writing a cheque every year. (gasp, pant) That’s great, that’s just wonderful. (ragged, rapid breathing) Could, could you please hand me that paper bag to breathe into for a moment? Never mind – I’ll be fine. Gosh, the room’s lovely when it spins like that. (thud)” For them, there’s Beth’s previous book (cowritten with Allison Fine), The Networked Nonprofit.

5. A theory of change we can believe in

November 16, 2012 No Comments

-< ºº>•
” “

(That little separator was intended to be a hamster. So now you know why my preferred drawing tool is a stylus and not a keyboard.)

Chapter 5 is titled “Don’t confuse activity with results,” which ought to cause us all some deep-seated soul-searching. It’s so easy to fall into patterns of behaviour, trot out the same shopworn tactics for campaign after campaign, and never ask the basic question, “Is this actually getting us anywhere?”

Katie and Beth say it’s time we held our activity accountable. (Giant puppets at protest rallies, tremble; you may have just heard your death knell.) And they recommend placing that activity in the context of a theory of change: a causal chain that begins with your tactics and ends – we hope! – with some measurable progress toward your goal.

A theory of change allows you to demonstrate the value of something like social media, where returns can be indirect and qualitative, resisting easy conversion to a dollar value – but which may be every bit as valuable as a cashier’s cheque. Beth and Katie (whom I may start calling “Kanter and Paine,” because it sounds like either a Broadway musical-writing duo or a don’t-f*ck-with-us law firm) prefer that to talking about ROI, an accounting term that often doesn’t capture the value in network- and relationship-building.

That’s an excellent reason to develop a theory of change. Here’s mine: it’s a powerful tool for motivating people, especially if they’re skeptical that what you’re asking them to do will have an impact. Your supporters, volunteers or staff may be asking “Why will this e-petition work when every other one I’ve signed had no impact?” or “I’ve never posted an online video before. Why should I believe it will make any difference?” A theory of change can be the story of just how their action will help to change things — and can inspire them to tweak their action for maximum impact.

woman hefting cat in the air and kissing it for increasing her non-profit's CTR and fundraising results

4. You cannot resist the kitteh

November 14, 2012 No Comments

* * *

Chapter 4, “Measurement is Power,” is not the punchline to an elaborate pun on the meaning of “ruler”. (As awesome as that would be.) Instead, it looks at how you can take the insights you glean from data, and turn them into actions with bottom-line impact. Notice that engagement grows when you add a little personality to your Facebook posts (as Kearny Street Workshop‘s Lisa Leong did), and you can direct more attention to a personal voice… and ultimately bring more visitors through your doors.

As you begin reading this chapter, you will encounter the idea of KPIs: Key Performance Indicators. A chill may have gone up your back just now, and I understand why, but be advised that learning about KPIs does not turn you into a soulless automaton, eyes fixed on a limited set of metrics and dead to the richness of the world around you. Provided, of course, that you pace yourself, and follow these simple tips:

Do not learn about KPIs while having Excel and PowerPoint open at the same time.
Pause periodically – every 20 seconds or so should be about right — and meditate for a half-hour or so.
Wear something – anything – made out of hemp.
Never play golf again.

(By the way, this cat was just about my favourite thing to draw, ever, surpassing “giant robot destroying city” and “giant winged lizards destroying world“. I probably spent the better part of a day on her.)

The risks of hanging your graphs 90º off-kilter.

3. Come for the data. Stay for the insight.

November 13, 2012 No Comments

~~~

Brent Spiner IS... awfully pale. Also, Data. If you respond to Chapter 3 — “Creating a Data-Informed Culture” — the way I did, you’ll start with short-lived disappointment that it’s not about building a new society whose gold standard of conduct is embodied in Brent Spiner’s character from Star Trek: The Next Generation. (And if you read my write-up for Chapter 2, you’ll realize that cruelly taunting science-fiction fans is a hallmark of Beth and Katie’s writing. You’re also one of two people who reads the write-ups under the cartoons, and as the other one, I thank you.)

That brief let-down is followed immediately by surprise, delight, delighted surprise, actionable insights and, ultimately, firmer biceps — the book is heavier than it looks. You’ll learn the difference between being data-driven, where data dictates your actions, and data-informed, where data is one of the factors that guides you — a happier place for most non-profits. And you’ll see how an incremental approach — crawl, walk, run, fly — can allow an organization to adapt naturally and quickly to the demands and opportunities that measurement presents.

Spock does a victory dance when his algorithm beats Kirk's gut feeling to win an election pool

Depressing thought: in the 23rd century, they still have the electoral college

November 9, 2012 No Comments

Captain’s log, sup-… sup-… -lemental. OK, had a drink or two with Scotty and Bones while we watched the returns. Played a drinking game: every time you saw Wolf “359” Blitzer get excited about a result with fewer than 1% of the votes counted, you took a shot. We were hammered before the polls closed on Altair VI.

My gut told me it was going to be a huge sweep for Jonathan Archer Jr. (and forget that third party guy – it’ll be a cold day in hell before an Efrosian becomes president!) But in waltzes Spock with his, his, all his charts and graphs saying “Logic dictates a decisive defeat for Archer” and we just laughed.

So now it’s six hours later and my gut’s telling me something different, mainly that the Denebian burrito I had was a bad idea, and Scotty and Bones and I just lost three standard months’ salary in the election pool. And Spock’s just insufferable about it, saying he’d be happy to walk me through the algorithm in a simplified way that humans can understand.

But what he doesn’t (burp) – ‘scuse me – what he doesn’t get is that my gut was right. If it wasn’t for that ion storm that hit sector V-5, which totally killed Archer’s momentum, it’d be Spock pawning his communicator to Harry Mudd, and me booking two weeks in a beachside cabana on Risa. Also, Andorians and Vulcans reeeeaallly love to vote against the human, y’ever notice that?

‘kay. Little tired now. Jus’ gonna lie down for a…

(thud)

2. Hey, you got network in my nonprofit!

November 9, 2012 No Comments

Over the next several days, I’ll be posting cartoons I drew for Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World, by Beth Kanter and Katie Delahaye Paine. Here’s what I blogged about the book a while ago on Social Signal, explaining why I love the book and why I think you should go buy a copy right now.

Chapter 2, “The Rise of the Networked Nonprofit”, is not actually a reference to Terminator 3 (but does hint at one possible direction for a film adaptation, if James Cameron should be interested in optioning it). It reviews the central idea behind The Networked Nonprofit, the superb book Beth cowrote with Allison Fine a few years ago.

That idea: a new kind of nonprofit organization is on the move, one that lets go of rigid structures and expands its impact by making the most of socially networked supporters – many of whom don’t fit into a prefab volunteer role, but instead act as independent free agents.

One of those free agents turns out to have been sent from the future to safeguard Beth and Katie, because in a few years they’ll lead a—

No, wait. I’ll save that for the pitch meeting.

Election night sketchbook

November 7, 2012 No Comments

Here are my election night doodles. I posted them to my blog as well, but thought hey – y’all might enjoy them too. They’re surprisingly non-partisan (at least by my standards), apart from a crack about Mitt Romney’s dog.

I think part of the reason was seeing a few of the faces of Romney’s most ardent workers, who looked absolutely crushed. I know that feeling way too well; it’s the feeling of working your ass off for something you truly believe in, and can’t understand why other people don’t get. It’s thinking that things are going to be better at last, and then having that yanked away from you. No fun.

I’m not going to celebrate any less for remembering that feeling, mind you. But I think even a Tea-Party-loving, Red-State-abiding, guns-from-cold-dead-fingers-prying GOP voter may get a grin out of one or two of these.

Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: 1. Cute animal theory

November 6, 2012 No Comments

I can’t tell you just how proud, thrilled, delighted and giddy I feel every time I see a copy of Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World, by Beth Kanter and Katie Delahaye Paine (reigning queens of non-profit social media and measurement for organizational communications, respectively.) It’s a fantastic, potentially world-changing book… and I got to draw the cartoons for it.

I blogged about the book a while ago on Social Signal, explaining why I think it’s important (and why I think you should go buy a copy right now):

It’s a momentous book. Organizations from governments to businesses to community groups to nonprofits have all struggled with whether and how to engage with the networked social world, especially when resources are scarce and stakeholders are feeling skittish. Measuring the Networked Nonprofit opens up new possibilities for accountability, learning, innovation and greater impact.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll post my cartoons from the book. And I hope they’ll help prompt you to go snag yourself a copy. Whether you work for a nonprofit, a business, a government agency or just your own efforts to make your corner of the world a little better, you’ll find it a thorough, practical guide to having a far greater impact on the world — and knowing just what that impact is.

* * *

This cartoon kicks off the book’s introductory chapter, which starts with the emerging media director of the Human Society of the United States snapping a photo of her dog in a party hat. It’s related to Beth’s Cute Animal Theory, which owes something to both Nicolas Kristof and Ethan Zuckerman: “Ethan points out that the Web was invented so physicists could share research papers, but Web2.0 was invented because people want to share cute pictures of their cats. These same tools become very powerful in the hands of activists.”

So be nice to your dachshund, tabby or Betta fish. They may be the key to global transformation.

The new iPhone’s killer feature

September 14, 2012 No Comments

I’m picturing Tim Cook on the stage, wrapping up: “So: a new iPhone with our biggest display and best camera ever, a new line of iPods, and a whole new iTunes.” He starts to stroll off the stage, then stops and turns to the audience. “Oh, and one more thing…

“I’m unleashing a private army of giant levitating iPhones with high-powered lasers instead of cameras! Flee! Flee for your lives, foolish humans!”

You think people would be griping about camera specs or a $30 adapter? No, they would not. And as a matter of fact, yes, I am available to help write the next keynote, Mr. Cook.

Cartoon originally published on ReadWriteWeb

(Doctor to patient whose nose has impaled an iPad) No need to be embarrassed. We see a lot of using-a-tablet-on-the-treadmill injuries these days.

Run-time error

September 10, 2012 4 Comments

That looks painful, I know. But there’s no easy road to six-pack apps.

As someone who struggles with going to the gym, electronic devices may well prove to have been a life-saver for me. Without an ingrained workout ethic, it’s been hard for me to see a half-hour on a stationary bike as anything more than a sweaty waste of time.

Yes, I know it improves my lifespan over the long run, increases my endurance over the medium run and enhances my energy in the short run. But in a world of a million urgent deadlines, it takes a lot of self-talk to convince myself to take the time to get to the gym, change, work out, stretch, shower and get back to work.

But devices – they provide that immediate sense of accomplishment that working out, at least so far, doesn’t quite manage to do. I can listen to an audiobook while I row, read an O’Reilly tome while I run, or catch up on my favourite podcasts while I flail.

All well and good… but I’m getting pretty good at identifying moments when I’m dividing my attention instead of being truly present. The fact that I feel the need to multitask to feel productive, while I’m doing something that is objectively very productive, tells me I have some more work to do. There are mental muscles I need to work on in tandem with my lats and quads, wiring in some positive associations and finding a few immediate rewards.

Maybe those rewards come in the form of an endorphin rush, or the short-lived-but-gratifying muscular definition that sometimes emerges in my arms. Or maybe devices can come to my rescue again.

There are, after all, scads of apps (possible new word: “scapps”) devoted to encouraging, tracking and reporting your workout progress, and a slew of social networks centered around fitness and exercise.

Fitocracy caught my eye with the single phrase “turn working out in the gym into an RPG,” suggesting I can address both my basal metabolic rate and that conspicuous gap in my geekiness resumé around role-playing games. And the Kickstarter-funded Zombies, Run! had me at “Hello– AIEEEE! (gurgle)”

What’s working for you?

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

Mars needs megapixels!

August 29, 2012 No Comments

Everybody’s been ooing and aahing over the engineering triumph of Curiosity’s landing – which was, admittedly, pretty nifty. But to my mind, the real triumph doesn’t belong to the engineers. It belongs to the project managers.

Can you imagine how hard it must be to prevent feature creep on these things? Once you’ve agreed to a rock-vaporizing laser and a chemical camera, you just know somebody’s going to be banging on your door demanding 22.2 surround-sound and an optical Thunderbolt port. Before you know it, Curiosity has a wizard-driven interface, can format legal documents and integrates with Endnote. At that point, the only humane thing to do is take it around back behind the barn at JPL and give it a swift, merciful death.

Yes, the parachutes and rocket-powered sky-crane and all were amazing – well done, engineers. But it was project managers who said “no” to the eight-hundred-thousand-gallon shark tank (“Hey, you know what would make this even cooler?!” “Not a chance.”), and for that, science owes them a debt of thanks.

Certified!

August 28, 2012 No Comments

Originally published on ReadWriteWeb

So, speaking of certification:

Becoming an Eagle Scout is a big deal. It’s a lifelong title, and involves not only earning a fistful of merit badges, but organizing and leading a community service initiative. So returning that Eagle Scout badge in protest is a big deal, too… and as of today 150 one-time scouts have done it, in protest against the Boy Scouts of America’s decision to uphold its anti-gay membership policy.

I found out about it when fellow speechwriter Hal Gordon, who wrote for the Reagan Administration, blogged the letter he sent to the BSA (along with his badge), and linked to this Tumblr blog, Eagle Scouts Returning Our Badges. Have a look – the letters vary widely in tone, but I was struck by the passion and, very often, sadness.

On a happier note, have you checked out Mozilla Open Badges? To make it easier for people to get recognition for the skills and knowledge they’ve gained, Mozilla has created an infrastructure that allows organizations to issue and manage badges that people who earn them can display across the web. (Naturally, the first badge you earn is the “I really get badges!” badge.) You collect your badges in your Badge Backpack, and the idea is you’ll be able to display them on your blog, a company web site or your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. It’s still a work in progress, but this could be the beginning of something awfully great.

A cartoon essay supporting the iPad (and stylus) as a drawing tool

Is the iPad ready for use by hand (and stylus)? Here’s how I vote “yes”.

August 6, 2012 No Comments

Squinting? Here’s the full-size version.

A few months ago, Jon Mitchell wrote a great piece on ReadWriteWeb that spurred discussion about the viability of using your hand on your tablet for more than just pinching and zooming. He tried his hand (so to speak) with a stylus on an iPad, and found it wanting. Although I commented at the time, I wound up drawing a more complete response, and last week, ReadWriteWeb ran it.

The time elapsed is significant because of something that happened in the meantime: my birthday. More to the point, my birthday present: what Apple calls the new iPad and what everybody else calls the iPad 3. Doubling the resolution means my answer would have been more emphatic… not to mention drawn on a single screen instead of over two documents and pasted together in Photoshop.

Get out of my underwear drawer: mobile apps and privacy

July 20, 2012 No Comments

I like to think of the apps I load on my mobile devices as guests I’ve invited over. I want them to be themselves, relax, chat… but I also want them to have some level of respect for the place.

I don’t expect to find them looking through my underwear drawer.

But some apps do just that. (Provided you’re willing to accept “underwear” as a metaphor for your address book.) The moment you head to the kitchen to whip up a plate of cheese and crackers, they’re peeking into your medicine cabinet, flipping through your diary or perusing that photo album of awkwardly-posed boudoir shots you’d swear you’d hidden at the back of the bedroom closet.

App vendors will tell you (as they nervously scrunch and unscrunch your “Incredible Hunk” mini briefs) that they’re just trying to be helpful. And they would never, never use this information that they’ve just sent back unencrypted to their servers for anything except improving your user experience. Possibly also for a funny skit they’re doing for next week’s we-just-got-our-first-round-of-funding party. Did you notice your underwear is now sorted by texture? Isn’t that helpful?

And in the vast majority of cases, I think developers actually are trying to be helpful. They’ve had a cool idea, something that could be useful, and they can implement it with just a few lines of code. When most of your job involves seeing data in terms of its structures and relationships, it’s easy to miss the question of how that data’s owner feels about it.

Of course, there are vendors whose motives aren’t nearly as pure, and involve aggregate data mining (in the mountain-top-removal sense of “mining”) at best.

The point is, get out of my underwear drawer. Unless I’ve explicitly invited you over for that purpose, and believe me, it’s a very select few guests who fall into that category. (They’re the ones who get the good cheese and crackers.)

Boundaries, people.

(man on date) I'll have you know I'm plenty empathetic. I've seen every Khan Academy video on human emotion. Twice.

Emotional distance education

July 16, 2012 No Comments

I, too, know a little about emotion… like the way I feel about the online revolution.

We’re at a really amazing point in human communication. While digital technologies are being used in some trivial and/or mercenary ways, they’re also connecting us in fascinating, unexpected ones.

There’s a lot of unexplored territory here. And very often, you’ll find that people you know are communicating in unfamiliar ways, sharing things that haven’t been shared before.

Sometimes those will be mistakes. Sometimes they’ll be amazing innovations that lead to new possibilities. And most of the time, they’ll be somewhere in between.

For all of us, the trick is to avoid confusing unfamiliarity with danger. We should certainly explore the ramifications of what we’re doing. But take a good long look before you dismiss that strange thing your friend is up to on Facebook, or your sister is doing on her blog, as creepy, stupid or wrong.

Apart from the risks of judging lest ye not be judged, there’s one simple fact: it might not be too long before you’re doing it, too.

Cartoon originally published on ReadWriteWeb

“Hello world” problems

July 5, 2012 No Comments

Originally published on ReadWriteWeb

If you’re commenting on a tech story that involves a change that upset some people, and you’re not one of those people, it’s incredibly important to explain why those people are wrong to be upset. (Not that you don’t understand why they’re upset – that they’re wrong. See the difference?)

Problem is, you may be new to tech comment threads, and your instincts may lead you to make rookie mistakes, like:

putting yourself in the other person’s shoes
reading their comment past the first six words
reflecting before replying, while replying, or after replying

But don’t worry! Yes, you were wrong (see how easy that is to say?), but it’s never too late to learn how to dismiss other people’s points of view. Here are some classic moves that are proven winners, in the all-important sense that someone else loses:

Other people have bigger problems! They’re complaining about a bug? Point out that in Syria, the government is massacring their own citizens by the thousands. Yeah, that week’s worth of work that was lost thanks to that server failure doesn’t look so all-fire important now, does it? (The beauty of this is you can almost always find someone with bigger problems. “You only have three minutes left to live? This guy next to you has only two minutes!”)

You should be down on your knees in gratitude! They don’t like the new terms of service that pledges their vital body organs to a social network’s CTO? Tell them to stop bitching about the ***free*** service that the company is giving them out of the goodness of their hearts, asking only for their time, attention, content, data lock-in, personal information, clickthroughs, friends’ personal information and a multi-billion-dollar valuation the day they go public.

You upgraded too early! They’re complaining because printer drivers aren’t available yet for the latest version of the OS? That’s the price of living on the cutting edge! Suck it up!

You should have upgraded! They’re complaining because the only printer drivers available are for a version of their OS released last Thursday? That’s the price of driving in the slow lane, Grandpa! Upgrade or die!

You’re doing it wrong! They’re complaining because they can’t automatically post to GripPnar any more from QiggLope using the “Klarg This” button? That’s because they’re too stupid to use your clever technique, which uses a simple Python script, sixty-two metres of duct tape, a goat’s right ear, and a Beowulf cluster positioned in the exact geometric center of Stonehenge. Easy-peasy… unless you’re a moron.

You’re a prima donna! Ooo, Mr. Fancy-pants My-Smart-Phone-Can-Receive-AND-Send-Data is upset because the network was down for three days without notice? Why doesn’t he take his latte-driving Volvo-sipping Armani-eating sushi-wearing ass back to the lawn-bowling club?

Oh, boo-hoo! This is a handy one when you don’t actually have a coherent reason to disagree with someone. Also useful (and always funny and original, no matter how many times you say it): “Call the waaaah-mbulance!”

So that’s seven ways to avoid having to put yourself in someone else’s shoes (a proven cause of athlete’s foot) or see things from their point of view (a proven cause of pink eye). Got any suggestions of your own?

Not that I’ll be listening.

(one scientist to another) Okay, yes. With the benefit of hindsight, it's a lot more likely you said

Do you still want to see this Odd Particle I’ve found?

July 4, 2012 No Comments

We don’t really do cosmology here on Noise to Signal, unless and until someone creates a Large Hadron Collider for mobile devices. (Prediction: when that day comes, it will be on Android first.) But today’s Higgs boson announcement (or, maybe a little more precisely, today’s something-consistent-with-Higgs-boson announcement) is enormous.

Of course, I have to take that on faith, because any explanation of what this really means quickly spirals beyond my comprehension. This is going to be a tough one for the news folks out there to sink their teeth into, beyond variations on “At last, they’ve found something really, really important using something really, really expensive”:

Interviewer: So what have you found?

Scientist: Something consistent with the long-sought-after Higgs boson, a subatomic particle.

Interview: Wow. Just… wow.

Scientist: Indeed.

(ten seconds of dead air)

Interviewer: Sooooo… what are the practical implications of this?

Scientist: Ah, well, if we assume the universe math math math math math math, then math math math math physics math math math math math math.

Interviewer (hand over the telephone receiver, talking to the producer): Psst! Get me the guy who says the Large Hadron Collider is going to create a black hole and destroy the world.

I’d say our understanding of the universe may well have changed, but really what’s happened is the understanding of the people to whom we’ve delegated our understanding of the universe may well have changed.

Which is still huge.

What’s in a name? It’ll cost you $400/hour to find out.

June 29, 2012 No Comments

Here’s my personal history of the matrix.

Mid-70s:	I come across the word “matrix” for the first time, probably in the dialogue of a James Blish Star Trek novelization. I have no idea what it means, but from the context, it may be something interesting. I therefore pepper my conversations with it, condemning myself to a further decade of virginity.
Late 70s:	In math class, we learn about arrays and matrices. I’m terribly excited. This, in case you’re wondering, is the differential diagnosis for being a nerd.
1998:	I discover Alex has a predisposition toward expressing problems as 2-by-2 matrices. Also, she’s the kind of person who says “matrices” and not “matrixes”. My determination to marry her redoubles.
1999:	Alex and I see The Matrix in Toronto. Whoa.

And that was pretty much it… until tonight.

You see, my browser died in the middle of writing this, and the most recent draft I’d saved had next to nothing, which meant I had to go back to WordPress’s autosaved revision. (A fine feature, that – kudos, WordPress.)

That autosave was missing only one line of text… but what’s technology for if not the opportunity to spend five minutes searching for ways to avoid one minute of work? On the possibility* there was a more recent autosave, I did a little clicking on the very latest revision… which apparently meant I was commanding WordPress to compare a revision to itself.

That made the screen go completely blank, followed by a notification that the system was trying to avoid an endless loop, and then a self-destruct countdown. When the countdown ended, a black box appeared, along with green terminal-style lettering that typed out

Wake up, Rob.

And then

The Matrix has you.

This, it turns out, is a long-standing WordPress Easter egg. There’s been a fair amount of debate over the years over whether to remove it, but so far it’s survived.

I’m a little embarrassed that I had no idea it was there. But for a moment there, getting that message while writing about The Matrix freaked me the hell out.

* Actually, not a possibility – WordPress only ever maintains a single autosave. The More You Know™, people.

(TV news anchor) I've just been handed some breaking news... or to those of you on Twitter, 'that thing we've already been talking about for days.'

Broken news

June 22, 2012 No Comments

So, a cartoon about how digital technology is disrupting an older, established medium… drawn on my iPad.

I just got the iPad 3 (yes, I know, we don’t call it that… I do) with a much higher resolution, and drawing on it is everything I’d hoped for. It’s finally precise enough that I don’t feel I’m giving folks my second-best work when I’m using it.

But the thing I really liked is I could do this all as quickly as I did… right after seeing this tweet:

I need a cartoon that hilariously illustrates how news spreads through social networks. Anyone happen to have one lying around somewhere?

— katie (@katiemoffat) June 22, 2012

(I was going to point Katie to this cartoon, but it’s not quite what she’s looking for.)

(cave person) Sure, me think fire is cool. But me worry about its impact on our brains.

This is your brain. This is your brain on fire.

June 15, 2012 2 Comments

It isn’t easy to find the right balance between rah-rah bring-on-the-Bluetooth-brain-implants cheerleading and will nobody think of what it’s doing to the children?! fear-mongering. Certainly science doesn’t exactly offer definitive answers; Wikipedia conveniently gives you lots of evidence to support whichever position you feel like adopting.

(There’s also the argument that we’re pretty unlikely to turn away en masse from our screens, so let’s make the best of it.)

As a parent, I can see my kids being changed by everything they do, from playing with Lego to taking hikes in the Endowment Lands to learning to read to, yes, surfing the net. And as a guy who insists that the social web is transformational, I have to be open to the likelihood that we’re being changed just as surely as institutions and organizations are. But is there anything especially surprising about the observation that change changes us? Is there something especially insidious, or necessarily bad, about change that’s digitally mediated?

I circle around questions like these pretty often, but here’s where I keep finding myself landing:

At a time when we’re facing urgent civilization-level questions around energy, climate change, food security, massive income disparity and several other issues, we’ve also developed tools that can connect us in ways that were unfeasible one generation ago; fantastical two generations ago; and barely imaginable three generations ago.

We’d be crazy not to ask how they change us, but the idea that we should reject them out of hand because, well, have you seen the way kids congregate staring at their devices? strikes me as even crazier. We have to draw on those tools, and more importantly the connections they make possible, to answer those questions together.

Maybe Nicholas Carr’s right, and it’s turning us into shallow, short-term thinkers. (Attention, people who use tl;dr the way other people use commas: you’re not helping.) I find it easier to believe that maybe there’s some good in there, too, as Dr. Gary Small suggests, and there’s some hope of using the web to improve our thinking – while we apply a little attention to make sure we remain empathetic, decent people.

We are all webmakers now.

June 6, 2012 1 Comment

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” wrote A.J. Liebling.

So it was pretty lucky that just as the concentration of media ownership was peaking, social media arrived – with easily-accessible tools that allow any of us to reach an audience of, theoretically, millions.

(I try not to get too starry-eyed about this. The social web is revolutionary, but you’d have to be kidding yourself to think affluence and privilege don’t play a role in who gets attention and who doesn’t. Still, the explosion of content and self-expression has been remarkable, and anyone who thinks that’s all cat videos and why-did-I-eat-that-third-burrito tweets should have a word or two with Hosni Mubarak.)

But the social web – the truly social web, where we’re able to shape our own relationships for our own purposes – faces serious threats. They come from old industries that feel their dominance challenged for the first time in generations, new industries that see the ideal Internet user as a walking Visa card with an amusing overdisclosure habit, and governments that were never really comfortable with this whole border-transcending self-organizing hierarchy-flattening thing in the first place.

And many of the platforms and services that drive a huge chunk of the social web are playing both sides. That amazing free platform with so many features and such extensive reach is great – until they drop a function that was absolutely critical to you, or change their rules, or lose your stuff…

…or tell you you’ve violated their terms of service and you’re locked out, and no, you can’t retrieve your content or your list of friends and contacts, and no, they don’t have to explain any further or offer you a chance to defend yourself.

Freedom of the 21st-century press is guaranteed only to those who can make one.

Which is why I’m head-over-heels in love with what the Mozilla Foundation has done, launching a broad initiative around webmakers:

The goal: help millions of people move from using the web to making the web. With new tools to use, projects to create, and events to join, we want to help the world increase their understanding of the web and take greater control of their online lives.

Mozilla Webmaker includes a wide range of projects, including software, apps challenges, tools, education and more:

If you love the open web like I do, you’ll probably be pretty psyched by what these folks are up to. And if you enjoy the breathtaking capabilities for self-expression, creativity, connection and collaboration that the social web is offering to all of us, you’ll want to get involved.

BC Children’s Hospital Miracle Weekend

June 3, 2012 No Comments

The BC Children’s Hospital’s big annual telethon, the Miracle Weekend, is underway right now at miracleweekend.com. Working with the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation was one of Social Signal’s most satisfying engagements. And the online side of things is being co-hosted by two of the smartest women in Vancouver social media, Channing Rodman and Theo Lamb.

So how could I not draw something for them? Vancouver Canucks stars Daniel and Henrik Sedin are long-standing supporters of the hospital, and apparently showed up earlier today (and caused more than a few of the kids attending the telethon to freak out with delight). I missed the moment, but here’s how my iPad imagines it might have gone.

ROFL? No, RSID (Ruminating Silently In Despair)

May 28, 2012 No Comments

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

Sometimes I’m halfway through drawing something and it strikes me that I could take it from here in a few different directions. One might be funnier. Another might be more pointed. A third might give Alex a knowing smile. A fourth might crack me up but make absolutely no sense to anyone else (except a few people of extremely discerning taste, and I thank you).

It’s hard not to start weighing that decision strategically. Maybe whoever created the painting in today’s cartoon did just that, reasoning that funny stuff won’t be taken as seriously as bleak, painful, Mayor-of-Casterbridge stuff. (Wow: half a million Google hits on “mayor of casterbridge” and “depressing“.)

For me, the trick is to not overthink it, because that’s a sure route to paralysis. But I still second-guessed myself, and reworked a few things – from the conceptual (my first approach was too close to an earlier cartoon) to execution details (am I getting LOL syntax right?). After the cartoon was finished, I went back and changed “QUTE” to “CUTE” for the sake of clarity.

And that’s not counting the million other questions whirling around in my head, some reasonable, some… less so. “How can I hope to get any SEO leverage in a space as crowded as cat images? Who should be doing the talking: the man or the woman? Should they both be women? But if they are, will people think think it’s a joke about lesbians owning cats? Can I legitimately draw a cartoon about lesbians owning cats, and – wait, do I actually want to? No? How can I change this so Adobe will send me a free copy of Creative Suite 6? Will people see this as a commentary on the Greek debt crisis? All those guys at the next table are drawing with Microns; should I stop working digitally? Oh my god, how did it get to be 11 o’clock?“

I’d be lying if I said I’ve never thought about which approach would help a cartoon reach a wider audience, or make a better coffee mug. (Cough.) But ultimately, the goal is to create the cartoon I want to make, and then reach more of the people who will enjoy that cartoon.

So, LOL plus cat.

Let the healing begin.

(Speaking of a sure route to paralysis: so is trying to find a profound literary metaphor. I was about to launch into a “My Wacom pen must think it queer/to stop without a punchline near” epic poem, ending with “…and miles to go before I [Apple menu > Sleep].” Turns out I was confusing two Robert Frost poems. Also, confusing Robert Frost and Robert W. Service. Also, confusing a quick little writeup to go with the cartoon with a doctoral dissertation.)

Hold your horses there, Zuckerberg

May 21, 2012 No Comments

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

This is for every would-be Internet mogul who has yet to type </head> on their big project, but has already written the speech they’ll give when they ring the opening bell at the NYSE.

(I say this as someone who had very specific plans for putting the kids through university on the proceeds of our Second Life venture. Sigh.)

Not that there’s something wrong with dreaming of making it big when you read about the Facebook IPO or the Gurflr acquisition or whatever’s chewing up the trending topics in Silicon Valley this week. There’s a lot of pleasure in picturing yourself in the shoes of the latest tech gazillionaire.

But not nearly as much pleasure in walking in them. At least, not while they were treading the winding, rocky path you have to follow to get there: all that planning, building, reversing out of actual dead ends, plowing through the illusory ones, avoiding impending disaster, living through disasters that stop impending and start happening, nurturing a community of users, finding capital, running out of capital, getting hacked, making the wrong hire, losing the right hire to a better offer, finally gaining some traction and then promptly getting slapped with a patent suit, trying to decide when to hold back and when to scale…

…and knowing that for every Mark Zuckerberg, there are countless others who worked just as hard, were maybe just as smart, but who made just one wrong call, or had the dice come up snake-eyes at exactly the wrong time, or one month before coming out of stealth mode saw someone else launch with the same product.

It isn’t all or nothing, of course. It’s not like you either create Facebook or dress in a barrel for the rest of your life. Even when your web app dies a silent, unmourned death, you’ve learned something along the way, you’ve probably built relationships (and hopefully didn’t burn any), and if you have the appetite to set off on that path again, that’s capital you’ll be able to draw on.

Maybe more important is how you look at success. There’s room for a very few Facebooks in the world, and if that’s your definition of success, you’re almost certainly doomed to disappointment.

But if you see success in creating something brilliant or useful or entertaining that reaches – not multitudes – but enough people to make a real difference in the world, then you’ll see a lot more opportunity out there. And at least for me, letting go of creating everybody’s favourite thing creates the room to create nine people’s favourite thing.

Which, who knows? might well open up the creativity and experimentation it’ll take to create the Next Big Thing.

Renegotiation

May 15, 2012 No Comments

It happened to a friend not long ago: she showed up at the event where she had been hired to speak and met the organizer – who was wearing that patented sheepish grin that says “Now, don’t be mad, and above all please let me leave this room alive.” It turned out that my friend’s cheque wasn’t ready, that there were still a few hoops for it to jump through, but honest, it’ll be there soon! Five, six weeks, tops. Three months at the outside.

I’ve been lucky so far: I’ve been treated very well whenever I’ve spoken. Others haven’t been so lucky – and it isn’t always some last-minute hitch with money.

Sometimes it’s the empty room that you were told would be packed with cheering throngs. (“I don’t understand it – we posted about your speech on Craigslist. Once. Two months ago.”) Or an LCD projector that requires a dongle made in North Korean during the 1990s to Kim Jong-Il’s personal specifications. (“There must be even more pins!“) Or a little switch-up: “I know we asked you to talk about The Vision to Win, buuuuut… the last three speakers all spoke on that. So would you mind talking about advances in power density for molten salt batteries in electric vehicles instead?”

The Oops Files: forethought

May 9, 2012 No Comments

And Oops Files number three.

I’ve never quite understood why some people insist on considering the consequences of their actions. It totally spoils the surprise.

The Oops Files: attachments

May 9, 2012 No Comments

Number two in our oops files: forgetting to send the attachment. The only thing worse is when you then send a nagging note saying why haven’t you read that document I sent you?

The Oops Files: cc

May 9, 2012 No Comments

Having screwed up in a minor but still awkward way in an email exchange with a friend earlier today, I sent them a little self-deprecating image that I hoped

a) they would find funny, and
b) would prevent them from hating me, and prevent me from dying alone and unloved.

Then, after making a realistic appraisal of my chances of ever having a gaffe again, and Skitch still being open, I made a few more – just in case.

And I now give them to you, because I don’t want you to die alone and unloved, either. (Updated: I’ve moved them into separate posts for the sake of, well, for the children.)

Also, I think you just voided your warranty.

April 30, 2012 No Comments

You may have noticed that Pinterest has taken on new prominence here at Noise to Signal Global Headquarters in the past few weeks. There’s a good functional reason for that, as a quick look at the number of people who’ve been pinning my more recent cartoons can show you.

And there’s also a certain giddiness I feel when I see visual communication moving so firmly to the fore. I think – hope – we’re on the verge of a new age of visualization, where more and more of us are able to use everything from doodles to sophisticated rendering to explain, argue, persuade, imagine and entertain.

Sure, it’s being preceded by a wave of flotsam – not the least of which is the flood of mediocre-to-awful infographics that turn out to be neither. (I actually saw one today that has no graphics. It’s a table, filled with words. But it’s in bright text on a dark background, and there are many blocks of color, so it must be an infographic – and therefore a PNG file. It’s hard to imagine a more gratuitous screw-you to the visually impaired… not to mention to search engines everywhere.)

But I have every hope we’re soon going to see a new wave – tools large and small, shared expertise and an explosion of ideas and applications for images. Pinterest is just the pin-pointy tip of a very visual iceberg.

And here’s my particular chunk of ice and snow.

Notes from a session on digital activism

How nonprofits can protect digital rights (and themselves) post-SOPA: cartoon-blogging at #12ntc

April 15, 2012 2 Comments

One more session from NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference – this one featuring the EFF’s Rainey Reitman, Craigslist’s Craig Newmark and NTEN’s Holly Ross.

This one works a lot better as a bigger graphic. So if you’d like, here it is.

Awards luncheon: Cartoon-blogging at #12ntc

April 12, 2012 No Comments

Oh, sure, NTEN does a great job of recognizing technological innovation, community-building and superlative achievement (huge props to Farra Trompeter, this year’s NTEN Award honoree).

Yet there are so many more kinds of genuine excellence we could be celebrating, and these cartoons represent my modest suggestions for a few new categories.

Affection of displays

April 11, 2012 No Comments

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

The outrage a few weeks ago over the Etch A Sketch scandal (what to call it? “Shake-and-gate”?) was bad news for Republican front-runner Mitt Romney. But it was good news for one of my favorite toys of all time: Etch A Sketch is apparently having a big resurgence.

Which brings back some pretty fond memories. A lot of kids like me spent hours, hours leaning over their Etch A Sketches, twisting knobs with painstaking care, slowly creating images that would then vanish with a quick invert-and-shake. It was a lesson in impermanence and the virtue of nonattachment… and, at a less spiritual level, the ability to move your hands in one location to draw in another.

Thanks to those hours of Etch A Sketching, when the time came to operate a mouse for the first time, my brain wasn’t completely thrown. I not only recognized the separate location of movement and visual feedback, but welcomed it. And for a kid who’d managed to verrrrry carefully create the U.S.S. Enterprise with two knobs and a free Saturday afternoon, those first windowed interfaces held no terrors.

There may be some synchronicity at work in the timing of Etch A Sketch’s sudden surge in renown. It speaks to the 2-D image’s newfound status, whether it’s found in the explosive growth of Pinterest, the popularity of infographics, the increased emphasis on data visualization, the White House whiteboard (and Edward Tufte’s role as a White House advisor), or the growing prominence of visual practitioners like Dan Roam and Sunni Brown.

Communicating visually crosses boundaries of language and literacy; it conveys ideas quickly and memorably; and it creates social objects for resharing, pinning and posting. Of course, it’s also open to spectacular abuse; a little fiddling with colors, shapes or proportions, and you can create a highly persuasive but deeply misleading image.

All of this suggests to me that we might want to revisit our schools’ curricula. We place a lot of emphasis – rightly – on reading and writing skills, on how to construct a sentence and organize an outline and structure an essay. Visual communication doesn’t get nearly the same attention, which means we aren’t teaching kids (or adults) how to communicate effectively with images. And we definitely aren’t giving them the critical skills to know when an image is lying to them.

Visual communication is rapidly becoming crucial for anyone who wants to explain, persuade or inform… and that’s an awful lot of us. And we should be encouraging kids to develop the skills involved.

And until curricula make that leap, sitting down with them over an Etch A Sketch may not be a bad first step.

Dr. Changelove – making tech change happen in your organization: Cartoon-blogging at #12ntc

April 10, 2012 No Comments

Another cartoon-blog from the Nonprofit Technology Conference. (Thanks again to NTEN for having me, and Rally for flying me in! Catch the work Kate Rutter and I did at the conference here.)

This one’s from Dr. Changelove, or: How My Org Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Technology. It was one of the strongest panels I’ve seen in a while, featuring Rose de Fremery, Dahna Goldstein and Marc Baizman (who went out of his way to make me feel like a rock star, and then delivered a terrific Ignite talk on improvisation).

Unintended consequences

April 5, 2012 No Comments

It’s the dying moments of the Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco. I’ve been cartoon-blogging like a madman – updates to follow – but in the meantime, thought I’d share a sketch from the flight down.

TTYL!

Time to put the “not” in “notifications”

March 26, 2012 No Comments

I’m not sure when it happened. But at some point my laptop and smartphone stopped being places of work, creativity, conversation and leisure, and started being the dashboard of a highly-strung car. Suddenly, I’m surrounded by notifications.

Three new email messages. Five things just happened on Facebook. Four people have mentioned, DM’d or retweeted me on twitter. Six Google+ alerts. LinkedIn on the iPhone now feels the need to notify me that I can always check it to see what my contacts are up to. (That has to be the ultimate meta-reminder: an app reminding you that it still exists.)

And if I still don’t feel like I have the pulse of my system at my fingertips, I can install a shareware utility to notify me of all sorts of involuntary muscle movements on the part of my operating system and applications. “Backup complete.” “Word just updated itself.” “Photoshop just completed peristalsis.”

And it’s all too much. Because every one of those notifications conveys the same red-badged “deal-with-me-NOW” sense of extreme urgency, whether it’s a DM that my house is on fire and I should do something about it, or the announcement of the new Rabid Parakeet in Angry Birds. When everything’s important, nothing’s important.

The first few times I experienced notifications, I felt like the Terminator, with that cool heads-up display constantly alerting me to my surroundings, feeding me tactical data. After a while, though, it just feels like being 10 years old in the back seat with a pesky sibling who keeps poking you in the side.

Besides, once I have badges on my iPhone apps with numbers like “62” on them, the game is lost anyway, and all that those notifications are doing is rubbing salt into the wound.

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

Snarktivism

March 12, 2012 No Comments

Originally posted to ReadWriteWeb

By now, you’re probably familiar with the #stopkony phenomenon. If not, here are some main points:

Joseph Kony is the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has done truly horrific things to people, particularly children, in Uganda and now in the Central African Republic, DR Congo and southern Sudan.
The charity Invisible Children launched its latest YouTube video — an emotionally wrenching (and arguably manipulative) 30-minute piece that argues for Kony to be captured and brought to justice. The production values and style of the video are aimed squarely at young viewers.
The video exploded online, reaching 70 million views in only four days. That’s driven in part by the hugely emotional content, and by its explicit call to action: “Unlike any home- or corporation-made viral video, it can and does explicitly ask viewers to share it, almost to the point of a guilt trip. And share it methodically.”
As the hashtags #kony2012 and #stopkony trended on Twitter – driven in part by celebrity involvement, a target of the campaign – criticism mounted.

That criticism and the response to it have become a passionate debate over philanthropy and advocacy – from whether “awareness-raising” is a useful goal or one that saps energy and attention from the harder but more important work of building lasting change; to whether steering scarce resources and attention to arresting one man is a good idea; to how Western charities and their supporters can support positive change in countries like Uganda without engaging in a kind of western-savior cultural and political imperialism.

But along with that conversation, there’s also been some disdain for the thousands of thousands of young people who were moved to participate for the first time on any issue, let alone an international one. “Slacktivism” is the insult of choice. And the risk is that drowning their enthusiasm in derision will turn them off activism altogether. Or it may further alienate them from the organizations and approaches that are building lasting, long-term progress on self-determination, self-reliance and social justice – the kind that takes the big picture into mind.

Can those organizations learn from Invisible Children’s viral success? That would be ideal – but it’s not like they can treat the approach as a template. Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman says it well:

The Kony story resonates because it’s the story of an identifible individual doing bodily harm to children. It’s a story with a simple solution, and it plays into existing narratives about the ungovernability of Africa, the power of US military and the need to bring hidden conflict to light…. What are the unintended consequences of the Invisible Children narrative? The main one is increased support for Yoweri Museveni, the dictatorial and kleptocratic leader of Uganda….As someone who believes that the ability to create and share media is an important form of power, the Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good? Or is the wave of pushback against this campaign from Invisible Children evidence that we’re learning to read and write complex narratives online, and that a college student with doubts about a campaign’s value and validity can find an audience? Will Invisible Children’s campaign continue unchanged, or will it engage with critics and design a more complex and nuanced response?

In the changing world of volunteer activism – particularly with the rise of social networks – non-profits are finding they have to change too, often fundamentally. That’s one of the key insights of Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s book The Networked Nonprofit, which argues organizations have to become more open, and engage with their supporters more as peers and free agents than as volunteers slotted into pre-defined roles.

Harnessing the energy of a #kony2012 – and ensuring it does more good than harm – is one more challenge they’re facing.

Evernote: We are all one with the Trunk

February 27, 2012 5 Comments

Originally published on ReadWriteWeb

There’s always the risk when you first step into the world of productivity that you lose yourself — that you spend far more time immersed in productivity books, lectures, podcasts, videos and apps than you doactually being productive. That instead of Getting Things Done, you’ll Get Productivity Books Read.

I got into productivity kind of sideways. I read Susan RoAne’s How to Work a Room out of desperation shortly after leaving university; I offered to stand as a little-to-no-hope candidate for a political party, and I urgently needed a crash course in how to walk into a room full of strangers and actually talk to some of them. I was nervous, because the title sounded like the kind of icky insincerity I’d hate to embrace – but to my happy shock, her advice was excellent. True, that wasn’t a productivity book as such. But it was the gateway drug that led me to try out the Day-Timer system.

And then I read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It achieved the absolute sweet spot for any author hoping to sell sequels, in that it completely changed my perspective on personal productivity while in no way altering my behaviour. Again, not a productivity book as such… but it teed me up to read Getting Things Done.

Like 7 Habits, GTD changed my outlook but also started me down the road to some degree of organization. Anyone who’s seen my desk since then can tell you that hasn’t been a road without detours, hairpin turns, switchbacks and at least one head-on collision with the 18-wheeler of my-god-where-did-all-this-paper-come-from. (All of which inspired this at one point.)

But I’m back on the productivity straight-and-narrow these days. I’m using OneTask to remind me that what I’m doing right now isn’t tracking down interesting hashtags on Twitter; WriteRoom to bang out text without distraction; and a few OmniGroup and 37Signals products to figure out what comes next. And – efficiency of efficiencies – I managed to marry not only the most interesting and amazing person I know, but Earth’s best early warning system for life-altering productivity tools. (She’s the one who first clued me into Evernote.)

When I first posted this on ReadWriteWeb yesterday, Tom Davey commented to point me to Org-mode, a plain-text organizer/note-taker built on the Emacs text editor. Which is kind of appealing, but it’s not going to be my thing. Here’s what I wrote back:

Wow, Org-mode looks elegant as hell: simple, completely open, and easily sync-able across devices. Thanks for pointing me to it!

The lack of a GUI appeals to my inner Neal Stephenson. Unfortunately, the lack of a GUI also falls prey to my outer Rob Cottingham. I must have my eye candy.

For some of us, there’s something to that. I listened to the second episode of a new podcast,Mikes on Mics, last night, and they were talking about GTD. If I remember it correctly, @mikevardy mentioned that he just likes the look and feel of his favourite task manager, and @mschechter suggested that liking the way a place looks – either your office surroundings or your digital environment – means you’re much more likely to actually work there.

And while I’m mentioning Mike Vardy, I should add that I’ve been finding his blog a great read on all things productive.

What productivity gems have you uncovered? Or are you one of those amazing people who keeps lists of tasks, priorities, dependencies and deadlines in some hyperdeveloped lobe of your brain?

From our vaults: for the GTD crowd

February 25, 2012 No Comments

I’m in the middle of writing up the post to accompany this week’s ReadWriteWeb cartoon, which is about productivity tools. And I’ve just realized I’ve never posted this thing here. I made it and posted it to my blog several years ago after being very impressed with David Allen’s book, but feeling a little pessimistic at the prospects of my actually making it work.

As it turned out, the book really did make a difference. Nobody would ever mistake me for a professional organizer, but it helped me get more on top of things than I’d been in a long time.

He sees you when you’re surfing, he knows when you’re on Skype…

February 20, 2012 No Comments

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

It was just over a week ago that the Canadian government was preparing to table its new Internet surveillance legislation.

For the Conservatives, it was supposed to be a very good week. Tough posturing on crime has been a vote-winner for them in the past, and the only people who care about civil liberties are those herbal-tea-swilling vegan-sashimi-ordering bicycle-riding bleeding hearts* who’d never vote for them anyway – right?

And then Public Safety Minister Vic Toews went and said something that galvanized a community that went far beyond the herbal-tea-swilling crowd. Replying to a questioner in the House of Commons (or “House of Representatives” to Americans, Australians and New Zealanders), he said:

We are proposing measures to bring our laws into the 21st century and to provide the police with the lawful tools that they need. He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.

The government promptly rebranded the bill, hastily changing its name from “Lawful Access Act” to “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.” And all holy hell broke loose.

This being Canada, by “all holy hell” I mean there was a hashtag – #TellVicEverything. Twitter’s Canadian users bombarded Toews with the mundane details of their lives. One of the country’sleading voices for online freedom, Michael Geist, summed it up:

Yesterday’s Twitter-based #tellviceverything was the perfect illustration for how the Internet can fuel awareness and action at remarkable speed. Through thousands of tweets, Canadians used humour to send a strong message that the government has overstepped with Bill C-30 (my favourite remains @kevinharding’s Hey @ToewsVic, I lost an email from my work account yesterday. Can I get your copy?). Alongside the Twitter activity are dedicated websites, hundreds of blog postings from commentators on the left and right of the political spectrum, thousands of calls and letters to MPs, and nearly 100,000 signatures on the Stop Spying petition at Open Media.

By the end of the week, several of the country’s editorial pages that are normally pretty sympathetic to the Conservatives’ agenda had swung against them on this issue. A Twitter account appeared, revealing purported details of Toews’ personal life, and then went dark again. And the government was signalling it might be open to amending the bill, with at least one Conservative Member of Parliament saying it’s “too intrusive as it currently stands.”

This isn’t the first time our politicians have accused defenders of privacy and civil liberties of siding with child pornographers. But it’s the first time it’s backfired this spectacularly.

Maybe it’s because Canada’s net activists were spurred by the success of the fight against SOPA/PIPA in the United States (a fight many of us played some small role in waging). Maybe it’s because we’ve become a little more sensitive on online privacy issues, after a few high-profile clashes with social networking giants. Or maybe it’s just that we won’t tolerate being lumped in with terrorists, child pornographers, thieves and counterfeiters whenever it suits a politician’s or lobbyist’s communications strategy.

Whatever the reason, Canada now has a northern counterpart to the wired community’s newfound activism in the US. And #TellingVicEverything is only the beginning.

* Or as I call them, “my people”.

When commenters attack!

February 16, 2012 2 Comments

When I posted this on ReadWriteWeb a year and a half ago, I got into a back-and-forth with someone that got my back and my dander up, which I don’t have to tell you completely distracted me from actually posting it here. So, at long last, here’s a coveted LOST NOISE TO SIGNAL, sure to be a collector’s item.

No, it’s not all commenters on Digg. Or on YouTube. Or, or, or.

But a whole lot of them seem to be lying in wait to sink their teeth into the nearest virtual pantleg… or exposed jugular. The culture of vehement attack and merciless ridicule is still virulent in a lot of places online. (The whole “You Suck At…” meme is only the latest example.) (See? Proof that this was a long time ago. –Rob, 2012.)

I’ve heard the advice that the you deal with that kind of attack by growing a thick skin, having a sense of humour about it, and generally hardening your heart and pretending it doesn’t hurt. It’s the same advice we used to give bullying victims before we discovered it just encourages jackasses to become bigger jackasses.

Anyone building or managing an online community has a responsibility to keep the oil slick of aggression out of the conversational coastal wetlands. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lively or even heated disagreements, but that users aren’t aiming to actually wound each other. And that responsibility isn’t just to users; it’s to the business or organization behind the community, because that kind of toxic behaviour rubs off on their reputation.

I won’t pretend it’s easy, especially with the entrenched culture of an established community. But civil behaviour ought to be the expected norm of online community, not the welcome exception.

Siri, Get Me a Cepacol

February 13, 2012 1 Comment

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

Today’s cartoon may well be an exercise in envy. I’m using an iPhone 3GS, and it’ll be another 14 months (or 424 days – not that I’m counting) before I’ll be eligible for a free upgrade to a phone that lets me use that Siri-esque magic.

And voice-control easily the feature I’m most drawn to right now when I start looking covetously at other, more advanced, less diesel-powered Androids and iPhones. (Yes, this Mac fanboy is tempted by Android… even though my investment in iOS apps probably exceeds my retirement savings. Those things better appreciate in resale value over time, or my retirement isn’t going to come much before age 103.)

The thing that’s seized my imagination is the idea of adding to my task list by voice, the wayOmniFocus works with Siri. And just writing that makes me pause: is task management really the sexiest thing I can think of to do with voice recognition?

Well, probably not. But maybe the best thing about advances in mundane tasks is the way they free us to use the truly sexy features that technology has offered us for years: creating, writing, connecting, and yeah, cartooning. The truth is, I’m so far from making full use of the creative power of well-established digital networked technology that lusting after the cutting-edge stuff makes little sense for me. That is, unless I can rationalize that it’s to unlock more time and attention to creative endeavour.

Fortunately, rationalization is one of the skills I’ve practised the most in this business. Just 424 days to go.

Firestorm!

February 6, 2012 2 Comments

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

A while ago, I posted about one of the classic blunders in response to online criticism: deleting negative comments.

Let’s add another mistake to that list: silence.

I’m not sure there’s a force on earth that could have saved Susan G. Komen for the Cure from the social media firestorm that engulfed the organization this week. (Other than avoiding their original decision, which struck me as deeply misguided at best.) But lord knows their communications strategy didn’t do them a lot of favors – starting with their initial silence.

Whether the rationale is “Let’s hope it blows over” or “We can’t get internal consensus on a message, so let’s not say anything” or “Legal suggests we shut up”, silence does nothing to stop an online juggernaut from building. All it does is reinforce the impression of an organization’s critics that it’s out of touch with their concerns.

Back when the main communication vehicles were things like ads and news media, you could often take a good long time before pushing out a news release or sending a spokesperson out for a scrum. Not any more.

Two things can help if you find yourself in the Komen situation – especially if you need some time to gather the facts, reflect on your position and decide on your next move.

First, a crisis communication plan. Thinking about possible scenarios and developing a strategy for each one – including who responds, how and in what channel – means you don’t have to do that thinking when your fight-or-flight mechanism is competing with your higher reasoning functions for attention.

And second, an honest temporizing response. Replying to people that you understand how important the issue is to them, and promising them a more complete response within a few hours or days, and then delivering on that promise with a sincere and direct reply, can give you and your colleagues the time to move beyond a reactive, defensive response to a more effective one.

What won’t work is wishful thinking. Planning based on the assumption that nobody will notice what you’ve done – or that when they do, they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt – is some of the best fuel a firestorm could ask for.

To make a long story short

January 30, 2012 No Comments

Originally published on ReadWriteWeb

I’m somebody who can, uh, go on. At length. About nearly any subject. Ask anyone who’s taken one of my classes… or read one of my blog posts once I get on a roll.

So I can understand why I’ll get the odd “TL;DR” in response. And I try not to take it personally; instead, I look on it as a reminder to pare my text down, murder my darlings and generally indulge myself a little less.

That’s on a good day.

On a bad day, I mourn the rapid decline of human civilization, curse people’s can’t-be-bothered-to-read-anything-longer-than-a-tweet mentality, and generally grumble about “kids these days”. I imagine scenarios where the instructions for disarming a doomsday weapon are three paragraphs long, and nobody on the planet has the attention span required to get through them.

And I’m finding my bad days now outnumber my good days by about five to one, and rising.

In fact, there are times when I…

No! Wait! Don’t go – the post is almost over! You’re almost at the comment form!

State of the Union: What’s more, China is overtaking us on strategically crucial SERPs.

January 24, 2012 No Comments

Watching the State of the Union, I’m wondering what would happen if President Obama announced he was supplementing the Peace Corps by launching an SEO Corps.

Where were you when the sites went out?

January 23, 2012 No Comments

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

SOPA and PIPA, the twin bills before the U.S. Congress, may not be dead dead. But after the past few weeks of protest, culminating in Wednesday’s remarkable day of action, they’re not looking at all well.

Votes on both bills are now delayed indefinitely. (Or, to put it in terms the MPAA would understand, they’re in development hell.) Former sponsors are now fleeing for higher ground; the bills’ supporters are fodder for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

This doesn’t mean that victory is ours, that our enemies scatter before us as frightened rabbits, and that the sun of the unfettered Internet will shine for a thousand generations.

Big media will try again, and again, and again, and judging from the contempt that industry representatives expressed for the bills’ opponents, their next foray won’t be much more enlightened than this one. And both Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Lamar Smith released statements that stressed entertainment industry jobs but made no mention of the economic importance of the Internet. (Each made passing reference to “innovation.” This, in 2012, represents progress.)

“We should delight in the stand we’ve taken in favor of things like, say, notifications, and trials, and proof before censoring someone,” Clay Shirky wrote this week, “but we should get ready to do it again next year, and the year after that. The risk now is not that SOPA will pass. The risk is that we’ll think we’ve won.”

True. Sobering. And important.

But in the meantime, if you blacked out your blog, slapped a banner on your avatar, wrote a letter to the editor, or contacted a Senator or House Representative to let them know where you stand, you can take a little pleasure and pride in what you’ve accomplished. And then let’s work to turn this success into the enduring, effective movement we’ll need to make it last.

P.S. I’m in Canada, but I still took Noise to Signal offline on the 18th. The ramifications of SOPA/PIPA go well beyond American borders, I have plenty of American readers (and friends)… but most of all, I love the open Web, and I don’t like to see it threatened.

Great moments of 2011: Instagram was made for this

January 17, 2012 No Comments

Can we all acknowledge a debt to Rep. Anthony Weiner for providing the kind of crisis management case study that will make PR instructors’ lives easier for generations to come?

That’s it for our 2011 retrospective, except for two cartoons that never made it beyond the really rough draft stage. Here’s one about Kenneth Cole’s ill-fated Arab Spring tweet (the caption would have made it clear that this is any CEO speaking, because this guy doesn’t look a thing like Cole):

And this one was going to be about Facebook’s new Timeline feature:

Except that I realized it was actually just a take on this brilliant tweet from during Mark Zuckerberg’s demo back in September:

https://twitter.com/heyitsphil/status/116928096485113859

And that’s that, folks – now go do some funny stuff so I have things to draw this time next year.

Great moments of 2011: Thin-skinned

January 17, 2012 No Comments

I’m going to guess that for the student in question, this wasn’t the tweet she’d have chosen to see broadcast around the world. And maybe if we all applied that test each time we posted something, we’d have a lot less meaningless fluff in our activity streams… but what we lose in fluff, we gain in blandness.

Today is our big 2011 blowout sale – everything must go, and the price of each cartoon has been slashed in half, from the already-reasonable zero to the insanely ruinous zero. (How do we do it? Volume.)

Next up is the last post. Hope you like it.

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