June 10, 2005

Getting Things Done

I haven't gotten around to buying David Allen's book of that name just yet, but I have been trying to organize my life a little better. I'm thinking long and hard about requiring all of our students, in the year before they go on the market, to subscribe to Merlin Mann's 43 Folders, if for no other reason to add a relentlessly practical voice to all the other voices they have to deal with as they write dissertations, apply for jobs, etc.

I myself have been making personal use lately of Ta-Da lists, and we're using Basecamp as a way of keeping track (keeping us on track) of what we're doing with CCC Online. I'm even thinking about trying out Backpack as a way of keeping track of the various writing projects I'm always engaged in.

The point isn't so much that there's a single answer for each person's needs, and in fact, my engagement with these various tools waxes and wanes. But I've been thinking a lot lately about how I might manage my workflow better--right now, my operative metaphor is an ice cream on a hot summer day, where I have to keep licking around the edges to keep it from dripping and running all over my hand, without ever sizably decreasing the amount of ice cream. My organizational habits have been learned tacitly, from colleagues and professors, and even then, I never really asked about them or gave mine much conscious thought. They just sort of happened, and I always figured that, as long as I didn't piss too many people off or let too much slide, I was doing fine.

That's pretty weak stuff, though, and it doesn't really put me in a position to give advice to our graduate students, most of whom would benefit from an organizational overhaul about as much as I would, I'm guessing. In fact, I'm wondering if something like Basecamp wouldn't actually be a really interesting way of organizing the various exam and dissertation committees I'm on: I could open up a project page for each student that she or he and I would have access to, and we could collaborate on to-do lists and deadlines and use it to keep notes of meetings as well as chart progress. Hmmm.

That's all for now.

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:52 PM | Comments (4)

April 19, 2005

"Yeah, I'm gonna need more RAM."

That was like the 2nd thing out of my mouth this morning. I spent a couple of hours today--if by "couple," I mean "as many as I could squeeze out of my day"--working over "The Hand that Feeds." And I should have a variation good enough for sharing in the next day or two. But what I learned was that I need moremoreMORE computing power.

Believe me or not, but I'm not really a power user. I tend to go with middle of the road specs on the machines I get, mainly because I'd rather spend what money I get on software and my attention on a broad range of things. I've found it exceedingly rare that I'll bump up against my capacity. But when Reznor says that he works on a laptop with a couple gigs of RAM, well, he's right to do so. I'm having to take some shortcuts to work with his file. I'm managing, but only just barely.

And oh yeah, I know next to nothing about music, and I have more respect daily for those who do. It's really opened my eyes, getting to unravel a fairly simple 3+ minute song.

And it's a whole lot of fun. Really.

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:19 AM | Comments (2)

November 18, 2004

Mecology revisited

I've been thinking lately about the week-by-week for my spring course, and have been figuring out what the course requirements are going to be. First week, we'll spend the time with some of the applications (MT, Bloglines, Furl, del.icio.us, et al.) that I'll be asking them to use during the semester. At the same time, I'm mindful of the question that many of us academic bloggers are asked (and which Madeline and I talked about on Wednesday): where do you find the time to do all of it?

The obvious answer to this kind of question is that it's not really an addition on top of everything else, but a reordering of priorities, a revision of what, this summer, I called "mecology," or "the various ways that I manage and organize my space, time, resources, memory, information, etc." We're more familiar with the idea of a media ecology, a macroscopic network of various media that are both complementary and competitive, amidst which we locate ourselves. But lately, I've been thinking about mecology as the personal version of that--it's affected by the dynamics of the larger media and information ecologies, but there is a degree of agency involved as well.

I started thinking of this again while reading Ton Zijlstra's account of a workshop/discussion with Howard Rheingold:

One of the more interesting things to me was when Howard Rheingold showed us the tools he uses in his personal information strategy. For the bloggers in the room there really were not many surprises. RSS, BlogLines, Del.icio.us, all with actual screenshots, came up. He stresses weblogs as his community filters for information. Most people I talk to blogs about seem to think they're publications, sources next to other sources like papers, where I see them as conversations. Howard spends some 4 hours in the morning engaging with his on-line community and sources of information, after which he spends the afernoon writing. He does keep an eye on IM and e-mail in the afternoon though.

Ton also observes "how little we actually talk about our info-strategies, and info-diet, and the tools we use for it," and part of this, I think, comes from the attitudes that danah boyd is critiquing over at Operating Manual for Social Tools:

The ways in which tools for mediated sociability are conceptualized and analyzed must shift. No longer can we simply study how the user interacts with the tool, but instead we must consider how people interact with each other and how the tool plays a part in that interaction. Note: people, not users. The tool is not a primary actor in sociability, but a tool that mediates. People should not be framed in terms of the tool, but the tool framed in terms of their use.

I tend to shy away from speaking in terms of tools, but that may just be my fondness for abstractions speaking. I'd say that the difference danah is writing about here is the difference between taking a pretty narrow, positivist vision of individual "tools" and adopting instead a vision that understands people at the center of individual mecologies, that include not only tools and texts, but other people as well, all densely interconnected. There are undoubtedly huge fields of overlap in use patterns, but I expect that there are also some significant differences in the ways that some of us take up certain media, applications, tools. I take danah to be claiming, in part, that it's a mistake to try and erase those differences in the name of usability or HCI.

Of course, there's a lot of inertia against this shift, and the question about "how we find the time" is symptomatic of it. And if there's a place where that inertia is drummed into us on a daily basis, it's academia, where we tend to think first in terms of "areas" to be "covered," as though blogging were something like 19th century poetry, an entirely separate area of inquiry, rather than something that cuts across the very activity of academic inquiry (or at least has the potential to do so). One advantage I'll have, though, is that at least some of the students will already have been blogging (testimonials!), so I won't have as tough a case to make. And to a degree, I'll be able to build this into course requirements, with the hopes that eventually, blogging and the like will become more than simply homework. And I think that one of the ways that'll happen will be for me to be more explicit about the ways that my own mecology has changed over the past year...

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:16 PM | Comments (5)

July 28, 2004

iPods rule (all your other appliances)

Steven Johnson was saying, just a couple of weeks ago:

Because what I need now in my iPod is not more storage space, or Mini-style color designs -- what I need is wi-fi. I want my iPod to double as an audio remote control when I'm sitting in my living room. I want to be able to call up any song on any computer in home network, and direct it to any set of speakers, right from the iPod scrollwheel.

I don't know that it's gotten to that point just yet, but the folks at engadget (a link caught at boingboing) now have a how-to column about turning your iPod into a universal infrared remote control. Pretty speedy service, and damn cool, to boot.

Posted by cgbrooke at 01:01 AM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2004

bloglines

As a couple of others have observed already, Bloglines has been up and running now for a year. In addition to a new site design that adds a few nice touches, they've added a service called clipping or clip blogs:

And we're really excited to introduce our biggest new feature:

Bloglines Clip Blogs

• The easiest way to create a blog
  
• Fully integrated with all your Bloglines news feeds
  
• One-click blogging from any Web page
  
• Subscribe to friends' Clip Blogs and get notified of updates
  
• Simply click on the 'My Blog' tab to set up your Bloglines Clip Blog
  
• Best of all, your Clip Blog is completely free -- just like the rest of Bloglines!

In addition, Saved Items have been renamed to Clippings, and you can easily move private, clipped items to your public blog and back again.

Interesting stuff. As Will implies, Bloglines has taken a pretty big step in the Furl direction with this, and I think it's a smart one. I like also how they're enabling various social features in their service--there was a point where I was thinking about switching over to Shrook, but Bloglines is keeping me loyal...

Posted by cgbrooke at 05:45 AM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2004

Safari, Sagoodie

I've seen this announcement in a couple of different places (and confirmed it): it seems that the next iteration of Safari will come with an RSS aggregator. This is both welcome and important. Why? Here's Doc Searls (whose feed was I think the first place I heard it):

It isn't just RSS that's getting huge. It's that more people are getting their Web services without the complicating container we call a browser. What we're stating to see is another Web, alongside the static one we browse like the aisles in a store, or the stacks in a library, looking for finished goods to read or buy. This other Web isn't served up the same way as the one we've been browsing for the last eight years. We see it in a news aggregator, or a blog, or a message on a phone, or a search through an engine that only looks for fresh goods. Yes, you can see it in a browser too, but it's different in kind from the static stuff. Most importantly, it's live.

As someone whose reading habits have shifted quite a bit from browser to aggregator, I'll testify to this. There are a lot of people for whom the question isn't only "what's out there?" but also "what's new out there?" And this means that all sorts of definitions will have to change in response (like interactivity, as I mentioned a few days back, but also hits, blogrolls, etc.). It's already added a whole new dimension to my own interaction with the web.

Posted by cgbrooke at 03:21 AM | Comments (3)

June 12, 2004

A little experiment

Will over at Weblogg-ed just made note of Seb's Bloglines tool, and says:

Now, if there was just a way to add that functionality to the end of each post, right next to the Trackback link...

I'm not exactly overflowing with technical skills, but I think I've managed it with a quick tweak to my MT template. I'll need to go to the individual & monthly archive templates and give it a try. Seems to work, though...I just used the BL script with the MTEntryPermalink as the URL, and put it in the template right after the comment and trackback scripts...

If someone's got a better idea for what to call it, besides "CiteLines" or "Seb's Bloglines bookmarklet," drop me a note...

And while I'm thinking about it: Seb, if you read this, is there a way to retrieve the number of results from Bloglines as well, and to put it in parentheses as part of the link?

Posted by cgbrooke at 07:30 PM | Comments (2)

June 11, 2004

Backtrackin

Sébastien Paquet's posted a groovy bookmarklet that allows you, with a click of a menubar link, to use Bloglines to find all of the sites that are currently linking to the page you're on.

Very nice. And this was in response to a post by Lilia Efimova, wherein she surveyed the various tools that allow us to trace links in the absence of (or in addition to) trackbacks...

Posted by cgbrooke at 05:40 AM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2004

Sim-bolism

From the Eyebeam reBlog comes this link, to VisitorVille, which advertises itself as "a cutting-edge program that takes a radical new visual approach to web analytics." Not for the faint of wallet, this--the service costs anywhere from $30 to $170/month. And even if I wanted to pony up for it (which I was thinking about doing for a month, just for fun and data), it is for the faint of OS (Windows only).

What's interesting about the site is that it tracks website visits/visitors/etc., and offers them to you in a Sim City-style interface:

When you have many visitors on your web site, it begins to resemble midtown Manhattan, and it's hard to get your eyes off the screen! Buildings resize and illuminate dynamically based on the number of people inside, their relative popularity, and how many visitors exited through them. Buses, taxis, and limos race around the streets; pedestrians walk across crosswalks; helicopters ply the air. It's all very real, because it's reflecting something that's also very real: Your visitors are human beings, and they exhibit human behavior. They are not abstractions, and with VisitorVille you no longer have to think of them as such!

Fascinating stuff. Way way beyond what I will ever need, but I could definitely see how this kind of interface would be fun for someone in charge of some hardcore, high-traffic architecture...

Posted by cgbrooke at 07:11 PM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2004

May I replicate fries for you with that?

I was out driving today, running errands, and I swept through McD's to grab a drink. Rather than having to chat into the squawk box, I pulled up and found a young woman standing outside about 10 feet away, taking orders. She did so on one of those notepad computers, not unlike the little portable units that you might see on Star Trek. Not quite as small as a Palm, but obviously much lighter than a laptop.

Next step: a swipe alley on the side of the notepad for one of my cards.

Next step: beam the drink directly to my cupholder.

Next step: merger with OnStar, for anywhere service.

You heard it here first.

Posted by cgbrooke at 07:15 PM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2004

So many reasons, so little blog

Johndan has a post today titled "Why I Hate Blackboard," wherein he details his struggle with nigh-unusable "OK/Download" menus that Blackboard offers. I'm sure that there are sites out there that do nothing but complain about good old BB, but until I find them, allow me to offer my #1 pet peeve about the system which is standard at SU.

I taught on BB this summer, against my better judgment, and had much the same experience that Johndan did. The painstaking, multiple acknowledgement process by which any change (no matter how small) drove me positively insane. It's a perfect example of what's wrong with one-size-fits-all software.

My particular tick, though, lasted a good 6-7 weeks into the 12-week session. I wanted my students to swap drafts, respond to each others' writing, etc., but for some reason, several people in the course would post their work, it would appear on our course bulletin boards, and then be impossible to download.

The solution was simple. Every OS that I know of allows users to use spaces in file names. Upload it to the web however, and when someone else tries to access the file, it stops reading the title after the first space. Basic HTML: no spaces in file names. However, none of my students, and I would estimate some 95% of the instructors in our program, have no way of knowing this. Maybe it's changed, but at the time, there was nothing in the Help menus or FAQs to solve the problem, and the tech people in charge of the system had no clue.

And the results? Students couldn't access each other's writing. Often, I had to ask students to resubmit their work to me over email (i.e., circumvent the system). I looked like a twit who couldn't exercise any sort of control over my virtual classroom. And Syracuse locked themselves into perpetual upgrades and thousands of dollars per year in fees for a system that desperately needs a usability overhaul. Lucky us.

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:04 AM | Comments (2)