Archive for September, 2008

  • By Scott Berkun on September 24th, 2008
  • 1 Comment »
  • Design

How hard to immigrate into the U.S? Awesome flowchart

I can’t say how accurate this thing is, but it’s both a great piece of design (By Terry Colon, formerly of Suck), and a polarizing commentary on immigration policy: this will either anger you or make you happy. I know for sure my great grandparents would never have made it through this – Instead of being here writing this, I, like they were, would probably be a peasant farmer somewhere in Eastern Europe.

And here’s the blog post it comes from with it’s own comment thread (Hat tip, metafilter)

What I’d like to see are: 1) similar flowcharts for other first world countries. 2) Similar flowcharts for 50, 100, and 150 years ago in the U.S.

New essay: how to pick a president

45 days to go. We’ve got wars, bailouts, and natural disaster zones galore. What’s the best way to decide how to vote? Here’s my take on advice for how to pick a president in 1400 words.

Essay #59 – How to pick a president.

  • By Scott Berkun on September 23rd, 2008
  • No Comments »
  • Web 2.0 / social software

Microsoft & the social network wars

Interesting analysis by fellow Harvard Business blogger John Sviokla about Microsoft’s missed opportunity to enter the social network game:

Microsoft’s Outlook may be the world’s Rolodex, but they have not figured out how to link up all the latent connections that sit inside our Outlook address books. Put another way, they have the ends of the network, but don’t know how to tie them together!

In your email is a latent network of most of the people you know, and how often you talk with them. The Outlook add on – not made by Microsoft – called Xobni (pronounced ZOBNEE, and named for Inbox spelled backwards) looks through all the mail on your machine and figures out who knows whom by who is copied on which emails. In other words, your emails naturally contain your social network. It would be easy for Microsoft to simply ask your permission to contact the people in your email list, and Outlook contact database, and ask them if they were willing to join your Microsoft social network.

(Sviokla’s full post)

There is a ton of social network data in our cell phones (who do you call/text most often? Talk longest with?) and email applications, and a simple app could mine that data and build, or at least enhance, networks from it.

The problem is that for many people Outlook is no longer the primary contact list. Anyone using Linked-in or Facebook depends on those sources as virtual contact lists. Facebook wisely offers to import contacts from many sources when you create your account.

The surprising thing to me is that there isn’t a wikipedia, or craigslist, of social networks. A free, non-corporate, social network that protects it’s users by charter against the pressures of corporate raiding of personal social information.

  • By Scott Berkun on September 22nd, 2008
  • No Comments »
  • Uncategorized

What wall street should be required to do

I don’t write much about politics and the economy, but the recent bailout makes that impossible. Best thing I’ve read so far, pragmatically speaking is this list of suggestions from Robert Reich:

My five nominees:

1. The government (i.e. taxpayers) gets an equity stake in every Wall Street financial company proportional to the amount of bad debt that company shoves onto the public. So when and if Wall Street shares rise, taxpayers are rewarded for accepting so much risk.

2. Wall Street executives and directors of Wall Street firms relinquish their current stock options and this year’s other forms of compensation, and agree to future compensation linked to a rolling five-year average of firm profitability. Why should taxpayers feather their already amply-feathered nests?

Read the full excellent, and thought provoking, post here.

How to free your inhibitions

Here’s a recent item from the mailbag/comment bag. Arjun wrote:

How do i free myself, kill my inhibitions and break away from any kind of mental consciousness i keep facing every time i want to do something really badly. I’m simply afraid, man. Afraid, i might hurt somebody or offend someone who i care for, might come across as selfish. Your talks are fun and exciting and an adventure in itself. Now, please help me in figuring out a way to just free myself from my other self. The lamb leads the lion in me so to speak. How do i reverse that relationship? I eagerly await your reply. Thanks so much man. Your the Man!

I’m not a self help guru, but that might be a good thing here as I don’t have a nice, kind, warm fuzzy fluffy answer for you.

I recently went to a bachelor party at a rented luxury house on a lake in Texas. On top of the boat dock, 20 feet off the ground was a swing: you grabbed the trapeze handle, swung out over the lake, and dropped into the water. Sounds cool, but it looked terrifying. Something about the angle of the water from that vantage point made it look unnatural. The result? A gaggle of 30-something year old men, standing on the edge, trying to build up the guts to jump.

One guy had done it. And when it was my turn to try I knew I had to turn off my brain in order to do it. Switch it right off – and decide before I put my hands on the trapeze that I was going to just jump without thinking. And that’s what happened. I jumped, and it was not nearly as scary doing it as it was thinking about doing it.

Two of my friends however spent the next hour, literally 60 minutes, standing on that ledge, the hot Texas sun beating down, looking down, trying different ways to think through the problem. A strategy set up to fail as this was not about thinking. While they never jumped, it was impressive to watch them fight a battle in their own minds for that long.

For some things in life there is no planning. No way to rationalize. It is either done, or not done. And the trap is the more you think about them, the larger the fear of doing them becomes. The trick is to be able to turn off that voice and operate without it. Create courage by denying the rational mind. And its a kind of self-knowledge to recognize when shutting off your mind is the only way to achieve what you want to achieve.

In your case things are perhaps easier. You can test your fear. Ask your friend if they’d be hurt if you wrote a book. Ask the people you care for if they can support you in trying to live your life differently, or to take a certain risk. GO AND ASK. If you never ask then the fault is yours. If you do ask for support and don’t get it from your closest friends, then you need to find new close friends. Ones who want to help you grow and be happy. Either way, in taking action you win. But in being passive and worrying, complaining, imagining, you make your own mind a trap, like my friends by the ledge.

Got a question you want answered? Put it in the mailbag or leave a comment.

Need a new web host – recommendations?

I’ve finally had enough of dealing with dreamhost. Love their features, but man, does stuff go down often. And today, not for the first time, all incoming email is bouncing. Just plain unacceptable.

I’m looking for a new webhost and could use recommendations. It doesn’t seem there is a decent source of web host reviews, and even the best i’ve found is thin – so I’ll hoping for advice from you folks, as you actually might care to see this site nice, stable and healthy.

My needs:

- I’m willing to pay more for reliability and decent support.
- Wordpress is my life. Prefer hosts that understand WP, or offers it by default.
- Need medium level bandwidth support.
- Easy non-geek management a plus. I’m smart, but want to spend as little time in shell/Unix as possible.

I’d also love to find a website transfer service that, for a fee, moves all of my domains and stuff from one host to another. Am I in fantasy land?

Suggestions much appreciated – Cheers.

« Older Entries | Newer Entries »

Scott's Bestselling Books
  • Confessions of a
    Public Speaker
  • Provocative and funny secrets from a veteran speaker, you'll laugh as you learn.
  • Buy now at Amazon Book Details
  • The Myths of Innovation
  • The classic bestseller on how amazing lessons from the past can help you innovate today.
  • Buy now at Amazon Book Details
  • Making Things Happen
  • The classic and bestselling handbook for any project leader, packed with tactics and stories.
  • Buy now at Amazon Book Details
Photos from Recent Events (view flickr stream)

You're reading Scott Berkun, All rights reserved unless noted. You can subscribe here Blog RSS Comments (RSS)