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Even the best of us can be taken by our technology.
Enjoy!
A few months ago I taped a segment with Leo Laporte for his show Lab with Leo. The show airs on various techy TV outlets in Canada, the US and Australia. Because of the delay from taping to airing and then encoding for the web, I hadn’t seen the segment until I found it last night on Google Video.
I’ve included it below, if you’re at all interested. The experience of doing the segment was excellent fun, and I’d recommend it to anyone. I even had makeup applied.
Lab with Leo Laporte Episode 135 — James Sherrett talks about the Personal Technologist:
Special thanks to Ryan Yewell, a Chase Producer for Lab with Leo, for stickhandling the whole process and my anxious questions. Thanks, Ryan!
To manage all the different Work Industries projects I use a web-based project management tool called Basecamp from design firm 37 Signals. 37 Signals are widely known as proponents of simple, clean software. In fact, they say as much on their front page:
We believe software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much to learn. We build web-based products that do less, work smarter, feel better, and are easier to use. We pay enormous attention to the details, interface, and overall customer experience of our products.
I’ve appreciated their simple approach to software with Basecamp, but one thing kept coming up for me. There is no way to see in one view all of the contributions of a person on a project. I found I remembered who had done something but not exactly when they had done it or how they had titled it. I wanted to be able to trace back their contributions.
Here’s my note to 37 Signals requesting they consider creating a way to see contibutions to a project by person.
Hi 37 Signalers,
I’m really enjoying using Basecamp and I have one thing that I’d love to be able to do - see the contents of a project by the contributor.
So the files, comments, messages - everything, really - viewed by who did it. I find I’m often (a couple of times a day) looking through messages or files for a particular contributed item that I know who contributed it but don’t know it’s title or when it was contributed. And I can’t always rely on others or myself to categorize things properly. So I’d love to be able to see the project by person.
That’s all. Keep up the excellent work!
~James
I’ll be interested to see what happens. I saw Jason Fried, 37 Signals’ founder, speak at the Web 2.0 conference back in 2004 and his plea for simpler, clearer software really struck a chord with me.
I tried to implement a similar philosophy in my web product management position at the time, but over time realized that the throughput of features was the core way a product manager was evaluated, as if we were in a manufacturing industry shipping widgets to stores instead of designing an interaction environment where each new feature had to be measured against the existing ones. I won’t go into detail about the type of innovations invented to keep the assembly line humming.
Has anyone else found they wanted to see their Basecamp project by person? Or, has anyone found a better way to do this already that I haven’t discovered?
More from the TED blog, a video of NYTimes tech columnist David Pogue on the inanity of software complexity that does a good job of ridiculing some of the accepted practices of software.
Highlights include an impression of Steve Jobs singing ‘Don’t Cry for me Cupertino’ at the 17 minute mark, and a demonstration of voice-recognition software with macros for spoken shortcuts to frequent responses (think about that one for second - say a short word or two and whole sentences can appear).
I’m particularly receptive to Pogue’s message because it points well to a need for a personal technologist / personal technology advisor, a service I offer through Work Industries. Here’s the pitch:
Who Needs a Personal Technologist?
If any of these symptoms sound familiar, we recommend considering a session with a personal technologist.
- Overwhelmed by the flood of information?
- Anxious about what you don’t know?
- Frustrated by gadgets that don’t work?
- Keep meaning to figure how to get that thing to work properly, if only you had the time?
- Caught yourself saying, ‘It can’t be this hard to…’?
- Not even bothered to call a customer service line?
These are the reasons that drove us to start a service to deal with technical overload, the personal technologist.
Modeled on the personal financial advisor, the personal technologist navigates the muddied waters of technology to take the pain out of technology and make the gadgets work for you.
Take the first step to technological freedom and learn more about Work Industries’ personal technologist service.
CBC is running a great 3-part series right now on the shifting landscape of media entitled, The End:
I watched the first segment, The End of Radio, on the web and really enjoyed it. (Sidenote: Finally (!) the CBC has moved away from the awful Real Player.) The topic is presented in a snappy flow, with enough detail and first-hand interviews to satisfy my geek tendencies while at the same time remaining accessible to a general, non-geek audience. I recommend it to get a great snapshot of what’s happening in audio production and distribution: radio, satellite radio, iPods and podcasting.
I learned the following items:
All that and a great closing from host Jian Ghomeshi. I’ll be watching the next two episodes later today.
Growing up one of the most memorable programs on PBS was Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting. I watched the show between other channels or while bored. It featured a white man with a beard and an afro painting incredible landscapes in half an hour. Sounds dry, but the effect of watching the painting come together is incredibly compelling.
Ross’ technique and TV persona was instantly recognizable. Talking to a few friends last night, we all knew The Joy of Painting and Bob Ross. We all had watched the program and remembered the ‘happy little clouds over here’ and the way Ross would ‘just pull this together across the water.’ He had little phrases for his techniques and he made it look effortless.
We got so into the conversation last night that we had to look up the show on the web. We found The Joy of Painting website and there was Bob’s smiling face, just as we remembered, with his landscapes. We browsed to the News sections and: whoa! What is this?
The Joy of Painting is becoming a video game! First thought: Odd! Second thought: Who will buy this? Third thought, after reading that the game was being developed for the new Nintendo Wii: Ohhhh. Yes. I see. With that new cool controller, painting makes sense. This could reach a whole new audience for video games. No longer just boys in different stages of emotional development that every other video game platform chases, but a new age group, gender, interest type. Very cool.
Will it work? Don’t know. What do you think?
Steve Krause writes a lengthy review / overview of two different approaches to music recommendations: Pandora and Last.fm. As he sees it, Pandora‘s algorithm-based approach is equal to the nature school of thought while Last.fm‘s behaviour-based approach is equal to the nurture school of thought.
Algorithmically, Pandora versus Last.fm is something like the nature versus nurture debate. Taking the nature side, Pandora’s recommendations are based on the inherent qualities of the music. Give Pandora an artist or song, and it will find similar music in terms of melody, harmony, lyrics, orchestration, vocal character and so on. Pandora likes to call these musical attributes “genes” and its database of songs, classified against hundreds of such attributes, the “Music Genome Project.”
On the nurture side (as in, it’s all about the people around you), Last.fm is a social recommender. It knows little about songs’ inherent qualities. It just assumes that if you and a group of other people enjoy many of the same artists, you will probably enjoy other artists popular with that group.
Like Last.fm, most music-discovery systems have been social recommenders, also known as collaborative filters. Although much of the academic work in the area has focused on improving the matching algorithms, Last.fm’s innovation has been in improving the data the algorithms work on. Last.fm does so by providing users an optional plug-in that automatically monitors your media-player software so that whatever you listen to—whether it came from Last.fm or not—can be incorporated into your Last.fm profile and thus be used as the basis for recommendations. Compared to relying on users to manually provide preferences, this automatic and comprehensive data capture leads to far better grist for the data mill.
I don’t have any experience with either music-recommendation system, but I love the way Krause connects software product design, data mining of enormous sets and basic psychology so people can understand the respective approaches. To me, this is one of the finest things an expert can do - make a subject approachable and comprehensible to a wider, general audience.
For some background on the N-vs-N expression, check out the nature-versus-nurture wikipedia entry.
What we’re talking about 
Lab with Leo episode 132 — Monique Trottier explains her top 5 email marketing tips.
Vancouver League of Drupalers — Monique Trottier warns of 6 email marketing mistakes.
Project Highlights
Did you know?In December 2009, global consumers spent more than 5 1/2 hours on social networking sites, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. 67% of these social media users visited Facebook during the month.
(Source: Nielsen Wire)
Vancouver internet marketing strategists James Sherrett and Monique Trottier are experts in online marketing strategy. Talk to us about internet marketing, web design, search marketing
and online business strategy.
Looking for the bee? Work Industries is now Boxcar Marketing. We don't have a bee, but we're still hardworking.
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