Ive been doing alot of research lately about organizational methods. Now I dont mean corporate or business structure methods, but personal. How does one stay personally organized and focused. It has definetely become something important to me as I embark upon the next chapter of life as a husband. In order to give my wife a proper amount of time, Ive got to make sure I give myself and my work time as well. And that requires being organized.

Now I know there are a thousand and one sites on the web that can help with my tasks and goals, such as http://rememberthemilk.com, but these sites quickly become irrelevant to me as I spend more time inputing tasks than I do actually doing them. It just becomes a pain to make sure everything is up to date and the data is entered properly. In that same time I could have quickly written it down in a notebook and actually made some headway on my tasks. And it seems thats how one of the biggest Web Strategists today does it as well.

On a recent blog post, Jeremiah Owyang talks about how he uses a moleskin notebook to keep himself organized. It just seemed odd to me as I read it how someone who is so busy and on the move actually WRITES things down. But you know what, it works for him, and thats whats important. As much as I might try to pretend like a digital solution is the best for me, the quickness and ease of using good old fashioned pen and paper might be what I need to stay ahead of my ever expanding list of things to do.

I highly recommend you read his post, but more importantly, read the comments below it. It was great seeing the variety of methods people use to stay organized, and I’ve added a few to my list to try out.

ps. on comment 8 Michelle refers to writing “Morning Pages.” I did some research on what they actually are and they seem like such a great idea that I think Ill be starting tomorrow.

There has been alot of talk about Social Aggregators lately. Two of the biggest are FriendFeed and SocialThing!, but there are so many more out there. I joined both of these recently and have been getting my feet wet to see if they really are what everyone is cracking them up to be. I read some posts recently about how these services are changing the way Social Media folks are getting their news and information and something just didn’t add up. Robert Scoble’s post on this was one of the central discussions that got me thinking. Aren’t these the same people that were all up on RSS and how Feed Readers have become their central point of contact with everyone? I remember a video of Robert Scoble where he talked about how he at one point was reading around 1500 RSS feeds on Google Reader and how Google Reader is THE MAIN WAY he gets content.

Then came Gabe Rivera and his amazing Techmeme, the Newspaper for the New Web Industry. New voices bubbled to its front pages, and then sidestepped to make way for the big guys. Well along came Facebook and its innovations with the News Feed. All of a sudden this was the way people found new and interesting content. Well now that people have added thousands of Facebook friends the white noise has become too much and there is “too much app in the way.” Thus we have now moved on to these, Social Aggregators. The Streamers of your Life(not the girly kind that hang off your pink bicycle).

So what happened, have these methods of sourcing new and interesting content broken? Have the development teams stopped working on them? Absolutely not. If anything, these tools and applications have gotten better and better. Then why does the Social Media Elite have Attention Deficit Disorder when it comes to their tools of the trade? We get a hint of the answer in Robert Scoble’s post on how Social Aggregaters are his way of sourcing new content.

“I just switched all my home pages off of TechMeme to FriendFeed.

I find that TechMeme has become a Google News killer. All I see on it is big media companies (including me, who works at Fast Company).

I miss the individual voices and I think that’s really why FriendFeed has gotten my attention.”

According to Robert, its because these tools have lost their homely community touch. It feels dare I say “mainstream” to him. Oh its not just him, its many others who have followed this path but have just not said it. But the problem is that these people have not dug deep enough and looked at the core reason why these services just stop working for them. The services are better, the apps are better, so whats the problem?

The people are.

We in the social media industry have begun to fire on the same cyclinders as the startups we follow. A new service launches, we are right there with it, watching it grow and cheering it on. And then a competitor launches, and we jump on that one, loving the pureness of its existence and as the late great actor Peter Boyle of Everybody Loves Raymond once said, “I’m suckin in that youth.” Until a new industry launches atop the previous one, showing us a new path. This cycle has continued for years. This is because we as social media folks have Attention Deficit Disorder. We hop from one application to another, “sucking in that youth” during its growing season, watch it get picked up by the 1st layer of mainstream Social Media users, and look for our next victim, lamenting the loss of our late tool. But please understand folks, to a major degree, mainstream means success.

Now I’m not going to go into the nuances of what I just said, but at a general level, thats true. If High Quality professional content is bubbling to the top of Techmeme, that means Techmeme itself has been legitimized by its mass adoption. If Social Networks are becoming a fast and furious brain of activity too noisy to find the gold nuggets, that means thousands and millions more are using it. We are victims of our own loud mouths, yelling and screaming at how great this application is and then lamenting its loss when we move on. Trust me people, the applications are going to be okay without you, they will survive. But I’m not sure the social media folks will be able to. Guys like Robert Scoble will keep having one night stands with applications from now into the unknown future, because they crave that purity of discussion, but most importantly they cannot accept the mainstream. Even if the application is perfectly capable of offering what they need, you dont become a first adopter by hearing the words “you’ve got mail,” you become one by seeing that beta sign and smiling, cause you know your home.

Just for the weekend.

In a very smooth move, the ISP’s of Japan have agreed to monitor the usage of their users and ban them for sharing illegal files. If your looking for the raw news, you can see here from Mashable, Techmeme, and for some odd reason, this 630 comment post on Techcrunch. They all link back to the original article which was posted on Torrentfreak. It seems that organizations like the RIAA have been able to really make some ground in the past few months. They have been able to successfully get a legal victory against Rapidshare in Germany, and block access to the Pirate Bay in the Netherlands. There have been other major wins for them as of recent, and it seems like the tide might be turning. Or so the IP companies think.

What they have yet to understand is that the Internet has made it close to impossible to keep information locked up. DRM systems like Play for Sure and the Itunes system dont stand a chance against a distributed effort by nerds and hackers everywhere. Its like standing in the middle of the ocean trying to push back the water around you. That is why business models from the pre-internet days don’t work during the internet age. Dont worry RIAA and MPAA, your not the only ones in this boat. Governments all over the world are finding out just how impossible it is to keep information from their citizens. Block a site, and watch as your people use proxy websites to get there anyways. Here’s looking at you Pakistan.

Now there is something to be said for regulating the “tubes.” Problems such as pornography, phishing sites, and online casinos should be heavily regulated, better yet outright blocked. I am not of those that believe that all information, even harmful, should be free to be seen or unseen in the attention marketplace. Some things are simply harmful, in and of themselves. But the problem is that our current technology has not reached the point where we can open up to the distruptive but block the harmful. Sites such as Youtube and others are disruptive technologies that fundementally change the power structure in a given country. Gone are the days when Joe Politician can get what he wants people to hear on the 6 o clock news. Thus, technology such as Peer to Peer file sharing and issues such as Digital Fingerprinting are receiving so much negative press. Technology will always be changing, always evolving. Old technologies and methods will fall by the wayside, along with related industries and business methods. Until the RIAA and like organizations can understand this, they too will find themselves on the dusty shoulder of the road.

Show Notes1. Islamic Information Center
http://islamicinformationcenter.org

Rahat Hussein - Program Director

Update: No I’m not that big.

I’m back from the O’reilly Graphing Social Patterns Conference 2008. Mohammad and I got back in town after an exhaustive drive. All along the drive back though I couldn’t help but think about the events of the last few days. As he and I went from session to session, I started looking around me, trying to soak in the atmosphere, enjoying being around the very people I read about. But a curious observation crawled into my head. All these peoples heads were down in their laptops, while there was a live session, for which they traveled, occurring in front of them. Maybe 10% of the audience of about 500 were listening intently to the live talks. This seemed odd to me, as this was happening live, wasn’t everyone interested in what was happening? It drew me to a few conclusions:

1. The audience began treating this live flesh and blood performance in front of them as Time Shiftable. Instead of focusing intently on the information being given out, we ended up taking the same stance on the event as people take on podcasts, we want to listen when we want and how we want. And even if we have flown or driven from far away to attend, we can still push the events information to a time when I am interested. This is definitely something I have not seen anywhere else.

2.  An entire group of people simultaneously relegated the conference into the category of background Youtube Video. This is different from Time Shiftable, as with a video or audio playing in the background, people roll in and out of paying attention when they want. Instead of choosing between being at a conference and not, the choice is to be INTO a conference or checking my email. To be INTO a conference or working on my design. Its a whole different dynamic when you have all your life to choose from as To Do options, vs. leaving and staying.

3. The focus has been changed from the Attendee to the Projector. No longer is someone who attends these events someone who is coming to learn and enjoy. The Attendee is simply an extension of the conference. Yes they will gain something along the way, but as we stated above, not much. What is important though is where that information is channeled. Some goes towards video, others audio, and the majority blog posts. This has changed the dynamic of the conference, as instead of specific detailed information given out, which is what people used to conference for, to one of very general information, for the masses. I found many of the sessions were at a very basic level and truly could have been kicked up a notch.

While this was my first Tech Conference, it was not my first conference overall. I was able to see a vastly stark difference between those in the New Media World and those in the Old. I am definitely going to have to keep my eye out some more for these differences as I continue to attend tech events.

Photos Courtesy of Jeremiah Owyang 

Stupid Towel Holder. That and a myriad of reasons held us up this morning as we rushed out the door late to the first session. Not my fault people. We got here just as Charlene Li finished up.

So I didn’t really discuss the purpose or goals of why my coworker and I are coming. Aside from the work we are doing on several fronts, theres alot I have been looking forward to from the conference. Heres a few… 

1. I really want to be a massive sponge and soak up as much as possible. Although I have kept up with Social Media and the new web for several years, I have recently been involved in putting myself out there and trying to add my part to the great social conversation going on now.

2. Meeting some of the people I have been keeping up with and truly learning from would be great. I wont name anyone here, but my focus is on the researchers and strategists working with non-2.0 companies to help them come online.

3. Experience an industry event and how the players interact with each other. Through all the bickering I see on the web and disagreements, it will be interesting to see how these people interact with each other in person. Through the deeply different perspectives, a conversation forms. Its time to see the live version.

4. Along that same thread, I want to see how companies that are competitors interact and speak about each other. Its a whole new dynamic, competitors talking to each other and sharing information. To be honest it makes me uncomfortable to see myspace and facebook talk one after the other like I have seen so far. Tons of discussion around how great Facebook is, but how does Myspace feel about that. Are they thinking “we need to do all that?” Or do they see their user base as different and have accepted the techno elite will stick with Facebook?

Those are my personal focuses aside from the ones for Work. Then again, its all Personal, and its all work. I’m gonna have to get use to that. 

So looks like the O’reilly Graphing Social Patterns Conference in Sand Diego will be the first tech conference I go to. While I would love to act non-chalant about it as if its no big deal, I’m crazy excited! So I thought what the hell, lets make this a Series Post, about what its like for a first timer. I have no idea what to expect, how to act, let alone what to wear.

So my Co-Worker Mohammad and I left Orange County, about an hour and a half away, at 2 am. Ya fun times, its all about the road trip. Although for people in Southern California, an hour and a half drive is nothing, some people commute for over an hour. The people in the Bay Area know what I’m talking about. We drove and talked about how excited we were at meeting all the people we have been following for the past few years, and hopeful at all the opportunities this could open up for us. I couldn’t help but think though that we were setting our expectations a bit too high, so I said that we should just go expecting to learn and anything else that happens is icing on the cake. Coming on behalf of a startup, we wanted to be as frugal as we could, so crashing at a friends pad was the order of the day.

So its 4:00 am now, I’m sitting at my friend’s Mac(grrrr), and I cant figure out what I need to wear. I know I sound like a total girl, but like, what does one wear at a Tech conference? I’m sure at all the other corporate conferences its suits and ties up the wazoo. But with this chill attitude startups take, is everyone in flip flops and shorts?

So I’ll be updating throughout the day how the conference is going for me. I’m really excited, let’s go O’reilly!

So I’m starting to settle into my job, I guess Ill have to post about that later. Thigs have been very hectic. With trying to excel in the workplace, deal with the classes I’m taking, and be at home at a decent hour, its b…wait I’m forgetting something. Hmmm…

It feels wierd, Ive been here for so long. But its time, it definitely is. The teeth have grown long in this horse. What is it to say that I once came in looking and feeling so much admiration and feeling so much potential, yet leaving so bored and discontented. Plants need the sky to reach for, not a silo around them. One day, people will see this as not the way to treat young poeple. Quite frankly this is not the way to treat any people.

Show Notes:1. Thank You

2. Dua for Umm?

3. Video Quality

4. Responses to Comments

a. Day without the Internet http://www.shutdownday.org/

b. Tip of The Day: Image as a Link http://tinyurl.com/3atqmy