Recent articles in geekdom (page 4 of 8)

1. May 3, 2006 Keeping Up is for Suckers

   Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users blog is always great reading, particularly if you're interested in how people take in information. Though it has a definite tilt towards the world of Java development, most of the articles speak in general terms about learning and design -- you won't see any code here. Kathy's recent article The myth of "keeping up" really hit home with me. Loosely speaking, my day job is to monitor the entire realm of web technology. Realistically, this is one of those areas that is bigger than one person's brain. Even if I spent 24 hours a day reading about the latest web technology (let alone reporting on it), I wouldn't be able to keep up.

   So... it's time to let that go. You're not keeping up. I'm not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything. Sure, you'll find the guy who is absolutely cutting-edge up to date on some technology, software upgrade, language beta, whatever. But when you start feeling inferior about it, just think to yourself, "Yeah, but I bet he thinks Weezer is still a cool new band..."

   I never liked Weezer anyway. Kathy offers plenty of good advice for being selective and efficient about what you choose to stay on top of. She mentions jumping on aggregators, tools that collect information from many sources and distill it down into an efficient view. My aggregator of choice is BlogBridge (I even contribute code to the project, which is open source and cross platform), which has a whole range of subtle but indispensable tools that allow me to filter my information intake according to the amount of time I have available on any given day. Another item of advice that Kathy offers is to track down an expert in any field you want to learn and get a breakdown what things you absolutely must learn, what things you probably should learn, what things would be nice to learn, and what things you can ignore. Kathy goes on to suggest that technical publishers like SitePoint (where I work) should be thinking about these issues too, rather than just pumping out bricks of undigestable knowledge.

   There's an opportunity for all of us to help our users (or start a business around helping people reduce the info overload/pressure-to-keep-up stress most of us feel).

   I personally think SitePoint is doing a pretty decent job of this already, but there is always room for improvement.

2. Apr 18, 2006 Concerning Freedom

   Went with Lox and Tom (and, it turned out, John) to see a lecture by Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame tonight. He's an extremely talented speaker, captivating a full house for over 90 minutes without budging from his lectern or throwing up a single visual aid. With a couple of high-profile speaking engagements looming large in my calendar later this year, this approach gave me definite food for thought. Mr. Doctorow had a lot to say about the depressing state of media, business and technology, and the various visions that exist about where it might go instead, all of which has been widely covered elsewhere. He didn't say anything I hadn't read about before, but he did give renewed focus and clarity to my frustrations about this stuff. Added to my high-priority reading list: Creative Commons Australia, with plans to pledge my support in the very near future. As any talented speaker will do, however, he put into words a couple of clear concepts that struck home with me. I want to paraphrase them here so I don't forget them:

   • The biggest challenge facing content producers is not piracy, but obscurity. Of all the people who haven't bought my book, the vast majority failed to do so because they hadn't heard of it—not because they downloaded it from a file sharing network.
   • Perhaps conversation is king. The opening words of my book (“Content is king.”) are outdated. This seems clear given the relative values of the telephone and movie industries, and given that any healthy member of society would choose his friends over his record collection to have along if stranded on a desert island. Today's breakout media success stories as often as not seem to be exploiting the audience's desire to ask questions and share opinions about what they have paid to see/hear/do. Thankfully, the rest of my book is not so fragile.

3. Apr 14, 2006 Lost Out Back

   Check out my podcast! It's called Lost Out Back, and my friend John and I have been working on "lost episodes" for a couple of months. It's not perfect, but it's fun. I hope you think so too!

   A podcast about Australia by two unlikely candidates: a geek from the Great White North and a lad from the Emerald Isle.

   Episode two was put up just this week. I think it's way funnier than episode one. A feed is available if you're tech-savvy; if not, I'll put up an email notification option soon so you can catch every episode as it comes out.

4. Mar 27, 2006 Spam Subject Line #84

   Actual spam subject line:

   A $1000 iPod and 80 pounds of fat? Yes.

5. Mar 22, 2006 What is #46

   The English language by word frequency, with a slick Flash UI. (via Pito)