Jurgen Appelo over at Noop.nl put together a list of the top 100 blogs for software developers. My blog, the one you’re reading, slides in at #18, which is surprising given how little I write purely about software development these days.

Happy to be on the list - and if you now realize you hate this blog because of it’s lack of emphasis on making software, you now know where else to go.

Posted in Software/Web development | 1 Comment »

The UK culture secretary has fanned an old flame: PG/PG-13/R style ratings for websites. It’s an old idea, one some of you may know I had some involvement with back in the day. Internet Explorer 3.0 was the first browser to support PICS, a W3C standard system for allowing websites to be rated, and I was the PM for the IE team that built the feature.

The thing never took off, which most of me thinks is a good thing. However it did help in some way to prevent the Communications Decency Act from being enforced, and possibly influencing the 2003 decision to remove the indecency provisions from the Act.

PICS makes for a great study in the challenges of public policy, technology and censorship. The coolest concept it had was the ability for any rating system to be used, and for anyone to create one, dodging the entire problem of defining obscenity, good, bad or anything. It was a meta rating system: a system for creating and using rating systems, and tools for parents or administrators to decide how many systems to use and what permissions were allowed. But that was also the Achilles heel: there was never anything to market to parents. And when we did put one of the PICS supporting systems in the box called RSACi, a system designed by Stanford professors, it confused the issue on what PICS was, what Microsoft was doing and who these RSACi folks were. The only system everyone know was the movie system, and that was really all they wanted to see.

More problematic, no solution was offered for how to rate a zillion websites, or a zillion websites with a thousand pages. There was no real business in making a web rating system.

Worst of all, the project was an easy target for censorship and Orwellian nightmare fantasies (Lawrence Lessig wrote “Pics is the Devil”, Wired 5.07). It all turned out to be moot: few even remember what PICS was, much less use it. I’m not saying those fears were unwarranted, but the idea died for reasons that had little to do with what folks were so worried about. Here’s a good summary of the whole is PICS censorship question, written by one of the folks who wrote the PICS Spec.

PICS also makes an excellent case study in the history of innovation. The technology of PICS was truly novel and at minimum an interesting approach to a difficult, subjective, and highly charged problem. But it also divided people sharply, created new problems, had major flaws, and took on big risks, all factors in most innovations, successful or not.

And of course, in my entire experience with the whole world of parental controls and censorship, the funny thing was people rarely ever talked about the neighbor’s kid theory. It goes like this: who cares what you do as a parent if when your Johnny goes over to his friend Fred’s house, Fred being the child of parents who didn’t bother to install whatever magic software you do, they go to whatever websites they like. Kids are exceptional at figuring out which friend’s parents have the most lenient rules. They’re also always better at hacking new technologies than their parents are. It’s all running up a steep hill if you asked me. Technology doesn’t seem to be the solution here. (I do realize the “neighbor’s kid theory” doesn’t apply if the blocking takes place at the government level).

Anyway, there’s a ton of history in this story and lots to learn. And don’t get me started on the problems with the USA PG/PG-13/R/X system, oh boy does that have some problems. Anyway, it’s a shame none of it gets mentioned by the Telegraph. I’m sure this issue will come up every few years from now until forever.

See also:

• ESRB: The U.S. system for rating video games.
• MPAA: The U.S. Movie rating system. (And Roger Ebert’s excellent criticism of it).

Posted in Innovation, politics, pop culture | 6 Comments »

I’m sure you’ve seen this before:

If so, check out the good post it’s from: Not playing the blame game, by Thousandyone.

Posted in Management | 4 Comments »

If you’ve taken my advice (See vacation strategy) you should be enjoying a nice short week at work without any annoying people getting in your way.

Back in the day when I had a real office job this was my favorite week. I’d plow through all the stuff I hadn’t managed to get to for weeks, clean out my inbox and send those half-written emails. I remember many enjoyable days with few or no meetings, quiet hallways, followed by a week or two of feeling ahead of the curve in the new year.

If you’re looking for tips on other ways to use a quiet week, check these out:

• Getting things done with delete. You don’t have to manage what you can get rid of.
• Lifehacker’s top 20 of top tens. All kinds of good piles of productivity advice.
• Merlin Mann’s Inbox zero video. Based on his series of Inbox zero blog posts, this short video, filmed at google, offers good advice on how to take control of your email.
• (Fun) Yes, an actual fun thing. Good experience games is a great list of flash / web games that don’t suck. Updated often by GEL conference organizer and Bit Literacy author, Mark Hurst.

Posted in linkfest | 1 Comment »

One minor annoyance this week is everything everywhere in the U.S. is all about holiday this, holiday that. Well not here. Instead you get 99%, near full grade-A, typical weekly linkfestage.

• Archimedes and the 2000 year old computer. This is a great reminder of how much tech has been discovered, lost, and then reinvented elsewhere. The Antikythera is ancient Greek computing device found recently and we still don’t quite know how it works or what it does. (In an early version of a lecture on Myths of Innovation at Google, I talk about the Antikythera for a few minutes. Jump to ~10:40)
• Scientific attempt to create make annoying song ever. If you are forced to listen to bad Christmas music due to in-laws or being trapped in mall muzak hell, this might make you feel better.
• Key to good programmers is comfort with meaninglessness. Clay Shirky has this short piece on an interesting correlation.
• The NYT Year in Ideas. I usually find this too breezy, but there’s always a few gems I’m amazed I hadn’t heard of before.
• The mega-list of year end lists. Good fun if you’re into High-Fidelity-esque list making.
• Amazing photos of the recent riots in Greece. These will make you stop browsing the web, look carefully and think hard.

As a near the end of 2008 note: thanks to all you readers for buying my books, helping me get speaking gigs, and allowing me to live an independent life. If you’re bored this week leave a comment and a topic and I’ll post something just for you.

Posted in linkfest | 2 Comments »

This is informal research, but it sure raises some good questions (Why isn’t there a business school or psych dept. doing this sort of thing?).

My friend Konrad over at uber Seattle design studio Artefact put together a mini-study on the effects of different pitches for the same idea. The surprising result? Well I can’t tell you, only that it has something to do with mad-libs.

Go here for the full article (with charts!):How an idea is presented impacts its appeal.

Related post: the ever popular essay: How to pitch an idea. A topic I explored in the University of Washington course I taught on Creative Thinking (Syllabus in PDF).

Posted in Innovation, The Art of PM book, creative thinking | 3 Comments »

For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.

- Gibson’s Law

Posted in quote of the x | No Comments »

A curiosity of the recent coverage of the $50 billion Madoff scandal is the sense of shock and surprise that professional investors make big, possibly illegal, mistakes in 2008. The same year half our banks fell apart, major investment firms went bankrupt, automobile companies beg for money, and governors offer to sell senate seats for cash.

In times like these a book gets mentioned by some experts called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the madness of crowds. It’s a big fat book chronicling the silly, absurd things large groups of people have bet their money on and lost. Some read the book to feel smart smart that we ourselves didn’t do any of the stupid things our ancestors did. But these days an update to the book is well overdue: an entire chapter can be written about the delusional wonders of 2008.

I’m left with this opinion: there will always be pyramid schemes, frauds and market collapses. It’s inherent in complex systems, things like democracies, free-markets and blogospheres, that these things will happen. Unavoidable actually. I’m not saying we should accept them or not try to reduce their number and impact (hello, SEC, where have you been?), but they will always take place. The reason? Trust.

A pyramid scheme, often referred to as a ponzi scheme, is well defined by wikipedia as an unsustainable business model, where the people who invest are not aware of how unsustainable it is. (In a ponzi scheme, victims are mostly just out of luck, in a pyramid scheme, victims are often part of the crime since they promoted the pyramid).

As the story goes the legendary Charles Ponzi told his potential investors in 1919 he could return 40% on their money in 45 days. FORTY PERCENT. At a time when the interest rates hovered around 5%. Why was he able to get their money on such a ridiculous promise? For one reason: they trusted him. That’s it. He found a way to earn their trust. The details don’t matter for the moment. Lets ask what is trust?

Trust is using what you know about someone to compensate for what you do not know. I trust my brother. I’d trust him to, I don’t know, say, watch my dogs. Now once he has my dogs I can’t be 100% certain what he might do when he watches them. He might decide to cover them with chocolate syrup, or set them loose in the meat section of my local supermarket, I can’t prevent him from doing these things. But I trust he won’t.

Similarly you trust the staff at McDonald’s not to spit in your food, the woman behind you at line in the bank not to make silly faces at the back of your head, or the gas you pump into your car to be actual gasoline and not turpentine. Our daily lives hinge on trusting all sorts of things we are too ignorant or busy to verify. And from time to time some people will take advantage of this trust because they are mean and because they can. It might only happen 1 or 2% of the time. Small enough not to make us stop trusting these things. But fraud, abuse, and pyramid schemes will always exist as long as we are free to choose who to give our trust to. Laws penalize people after they betray our trust, not before.

Look at the list of people whose trust was betrayed by Madoff: Steven Spielberg; Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.); New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, fashion mogul, Carl Shapiro; real-estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman; the European bank HSBC; and on it goes. These high powered people, despite their teams of lawyers and advisers had their trust betrayed. It’s sad and shameful what happened, especially since many of their funds were tied to charities, but there’s nothing we can do to permanently prevent this from happening again. To hire someone to manage your money will always be based primarily on the wonderfully imperfect, intuition dependent, amazingly tricky thing called trust.

How do you decide who to trust? All I know is after writing this post, I’m looking at everyone I see with a suspicious eye :)

Posted in philosophy, politics, pop culture | 11 Comments »

• Why are phone keypads in that order? One of those ubiquitous designs we forget someone designed. Very cool to see the alternative designs they experimented with.
• The one man castle builder. The castle is real, and amazing. The man is, well, shall we say, passionate? If you’re into DIY projects or Hundertwassser style architecture, this is a must watch.
• Ten design lessons learned from Las Vegas. One of my favorite things about Vegas is studying how the casinos are designed: there’s tons of thinking going on most people never thing about. This is a good piece on learing about UI design from LV.
• Google, the Printing press and stupidity. Puts the whole question of whether tech makes us stupid into a good historical framework. Includes thoughts on Socrates, multitasking, wikipedia and more.
• Five centuries of board games. If you think the world of board games started with monopoly and Sorry! you’re in for a surprise. (via cynical-c).

Posted in linkfest | 1 Comment »

In the never ending pile of meeting tips, here are 5 five more:

• Making the meeting rooms 5 degrees colder than everywhere else. First it keeps people awake, second it gives them a biological reason to want to resolve issues and get out of the room quickly.
• Remove the chairs from the room. This is an old one, popularized by SCRUM for their standing meeting idea. If people have to stand they are less prone to rambling, to distraction, and have the sense they are on the way to something else, all good qualities for most status type meetings to have. I’ve always loved the 3 question model SCRUM advocates. Instead of resume length status reports, it’s boom boom boom, next. Love it.
• Have uncomfortable chairs. Just saw this on kottke.org. These are chairs designed to be uncomfortable or difficult to sit in at all, so people don’t want to stay long. The talking head chair is my favorite.
• Pick the right person to run the meeting. Some people are good at being meeting gestapos, and some are pansies. Don’t let a pansy run a meeting, even if the pansy is you. Someone has to put up an agenda, cut people off who ramble too far off the agenda for bad reasons, and keep the show on time so it ends early enough that everyone won’t be late for the next meeting.
• Split announcements from discussions. A meeting between 4 people where they are developing ideas, exploring alternatives and going deep is one thing. That’s a discussion. An entirely other thing are meetings centered on status reports, announcements, and other boring low priority stuff. Make the difference clear. If you’re doing the former, it should be a small group, and the meeting can go as long as it needs to. If it’s the later, it should be a bigger group, and it should be as short as possible (any discussions that last longer than 60 seconds in a status meeting should be tabled to a separate meeting of only the 4 people who actually care). If your team respects your ability to distinguish between these things, they will respect your meetings by showing up, in response to the respect you show them by not wasting their time.

See also:

• the popular post how to start meetings on time (The honest version)
• Chapter 10 in my book Making things happen, is titled How not to annoy people, and it’s all about how to run different kinds of meeting in the right way.

Posted in Making things happen, Management | 5 Comments »

I have this pet interest in books that people, myself included, refer to when making a point, even though they haven’t read them. Thoreau’s Walden is on that list. I read it last month and here’s my review.

It’s a curious book. It’s well known in our environmentally aware age, to be about a person who spent years living off the land, in harmony with nature. But that’s not quite right. Early in the book Thoreau makes clear his spot in the Walden woods, donated by a friend (Emerson), is just a few miles from town. He was not a hard core hermit or back to nature zealot, as one might assume. His ambitions were more philosophical than tied to a specific set of rules for what nature is, or how often he could talk to people or have them over for dinner. It was an inquiry, a thought experiment, and arguably an American pioneer in self-discovery and taking responsibility for learning how to live. This idea is popular today, perhaps in slicker form, in books where people spend a year following the bible or traveling by bicycle to see what happens.

I was surprised by the three distinct themes I found in the book.

One is an attempt to provide a do it yourself guide. There are several lists of things purchased with prices and sources. Thoreau is thrifty and proud. He refers to how inexpensive his life is often, and there are long stretches where he describes, on a line item basis, how much it cost to build, supply and maintain his house. It seems he had some interest in providing a how to manual of sorts, but he gets lost in his ideas. Kind of like a lonely shop clerk who keeps telling personal stories instead of getting you the ham sandwich, sitting in front of him on the counter, you came into the store for. And the details don’t age well as a practical guide as the prices for nails have gone up, and home depot puts a new spin on what it means to do it yourself. There are frequent journal style mentions of hunts, food procured from his garden, and other daily facts of his existence.

The second theme is transcendent prose. This was what I hoped for. He was a student of Emerson and it shows, with page long riffs on the strange nature of man, the potential for greatness, the limits of our cities and times, and on they go. Some of these totally rock:

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root”

“As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them as much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile and then given his body to the dogs.”

“The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I look him in the face?”

These are moving, potent, memorable words. If Thoreau achieved his goal of transcending normal existence through a return to nature, and sharing that experience with the reader, it comes through in these passages.

But the third theme of the book is thick, meandering, writing. He runs with the same rambling narrative for pages at a time, beating his own point into the ground or losing it altogether. Anne Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek captures the experience of being alone in the woods with a completeness well beyond Thoreau’s, simply because she provides a consistent, reliable and intensely fascinating narrative. Thoreau seems like the kind of fellow who spent too much time on his own, and his wandering mind, unaware of the confusion he creates in the minds of others, rambles around on its own selfish whims. He was a true recluse and I think it shows. Emerson, though long-winded, keeps his points in straight lines. Thoreau writes like strings of thread, thrilling when they lead somewhere interesting, but often they just get tangled up so tightly you wish he’d take more frequent care to tie them up into neat, memorable bows.

For a short book it is not tightly written and although it has great themes, I find it hard to call it a great read. And Emerson, for all his own verbosity, should have suggested more edits in Thoreau’s work than it seems he did (I understand Emerson played a key role in getting the book published at all, but I can’t find the reference). Perhaps I came to Walden too late, having read many books clearly influenced by Thoreau’s work. And although I respect the fact the book was written more than a hundred years before I was born, I can read Emerson’s collected essays with fewer complaints.

Check it out for yourself: Walden, by Thoreau. This is an online, and annotated edition.

I tend to avoid annotated editions on first reads, so here’s the edition I used: Walden, by Thoreau (amazon)

Posted in Book reviews, books, philosophy | 2 Comments »

Through the magic of netflix and xbox, I can now watch the 80s TV series MacGyver. And what a joyous snarkfest it has been.

I watched the show as a kid, and I’ve written about him in reference to creativity (See do constraints help creative thinking?). But watching the show now was mind blowing for reasons I never expected.

The pilot episode is an amazing cultural artifact all on its own. Pilots are always weird. Watch the first episode of your favorite shows and you’ll consistently find the humor and pacing off, the acting stiff, and the focus of the show often much different than what the show became known for later.

In this case it’s clear the pilot, and the whole show, were made well before the hyper realism of CSI, and the procedural logic of Law and Order. Back then you could get away with a TV hero who lives in a mansion sized NASA grade telescope laboratory, defuses the cheesiest looking nuclear missile in twelve seconds with a paper clip, does his own voice overs, works as apparently the only agent for a squad of the most incompetent secret agent bureaucrats ever on TV, charms the girl, defuses more bombs, stops acid leaks with food, while cracking corny geekish jokes and smiling in a way that suggests he wouldn’t mind an early death, a suggestion that redefines the meaning of bizarre given how frequently the writers remind us how good natured, polite and wholesome this country boy is as he does good things like save the world 5 times an episode.

Forget the fun of wild ingenuity and brains over brawn I remembered the show for - which is there in moments - instead the show works on an entirely deeper level as a time warp back through television history when this sort of fantasy was acceptable entertainment. The only way this show could work today would either be to go towards CSI, and become an inventors 24, or run towards satire and camp like Get Smart, making fun of hero shows by winking at the audience. But MacGyver sits right in the middle in no mans land, which makes the pilot episode a fascinating watch.

The pilot episode is also available online, for free on fancast.

Posted in pop culture | 6 Comments »