• How to be Creative | gapingvoid: Hugh MacLeod’s classic article on how to be creative, starting off with Tip #1: “Ignore everybody.”
• Pigeon-powered Internet takes flight | CNET News: A news report on the 2001 experiment to implement Internet protocol RFC1149, which allows Internet data to be sent by carrier pigeon. It’s not fast, it’s not particularly reliable.
• Welcome to my world, the “online community” that prefers to keep out of site | theage.com.au: A strangely misinformed article about online communities, which commits what I think is the great sin of assuming a social relationship becomes less valid when mediated online.
• Height | xkcd: xkcd is “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”, but this episode is a wonderful diagram of the universe drawn to a logarithmic scale, from the height of a giraffe to 46 billion light years out. It’s also available as a poster print (hint hint).
• How to change the product key for Office XP, for Office 2003, and for the 2007 Office system: I’ve had to roll out a lot of computers this weekend. Rather than spend 4.5 hours on each one, I set up one and then cloned them (at least where the hardware was identical). That meant they all had the same product key for Microsoft Office. This article explains how to reset it and change it back.
• Change the Windows Vista Key | About.com: I’ve had to roll out a lot of computers this weekend. Rather than spend 4.5 hours on each one, I set up one and then cloned them (at least where the hardware was identical). That meant they all had the same product key for Windows. This article explains how to reset it and change it back in Vista.
• How to change the Volume Licensing product key on a computer that is running Windows XP SP1 and later versions of Windows XP: I’ve had to roll out a lot of computers this weekend. Rather than spend 4.5 hours on each one, I set up one and then cloned them (at least where the hardware was identical). That meant they all had the same product key for Windows. This article explains how to reset it and change it back in Windows XP.

TechCrunch has some figures on Twitter usage. It seems my own Twitterings at 16+ a day makes me a “heavy” user.

March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

What’s most interesting is the rabid Twitter usage by active users — they send an average of 15 Twitter message per day.

My Twitter stats show that my usage is spread across my waking hours right across the week. Yes, Twitter has become a core communication tool — though I’ve said that before [1, 2]. Maybe you should follow me.

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

In just two months, Twitter has become one of my core communication tools. Non-Twitter instant messaging and Facebook have all but disappeared from the mix. Here’s why.

Actually, before that… If you don’t use Twitter, or if you’ve taken a look but don’t “get it”, watch this 2.5-minute video Twitter in Plain English from those wacky Canadians Common Craft. Love their style.

OK, back?

Like the character in the video, I was sceptical about Twitter. Why do people need to know every little detail of my life? Who cares? I said as much to Perth’s Twitterati late last year. But then I actually tried using it — and I “got it” immediately.

It’s not about what people need to know, but what they want to know. And, as the video, says, the people who care about you are interested in what you’re doing.

Perfectly-named

Calling this service “Twitter” was genius. Listen to real birds twittering, especially during their dawn chorus, and you’ll hear a constant stream of status messages. “I’m alive and healthy.” “This is still my territory, stay clear.” “I’m hungry, feed me.” “I’ve found some food over here.” “Storm coming! Quick! Quick!”

None of these messages necessarily requires an answer — just like typical tweets on Twitter. But you can act upon them or reply if you want.

• I’m hungry, going to lunch” can elicit “Hey I’m around the corner, I’ll join you.”
• “Firefox has just crashed again” can elicit “Have you tried clearing your cache? That worked for me.”
• “Stuck in traffic on the M4″ lets you know that another person, also coming via the freeway, could be late for a meeting — even if they don’t use Twitter themselves.
• “Finishing an article before 4pm deadline” tells you not to interrupt that person.
• “Finished!’ means you can now ask that person if they’d like a beer.
• “Great blog post about Julia Gillard [with a link here]” could lead you in a whole new direction. Beer or no beer.

Or not.

Twitter is, almost literally, the background clucking of so many chickens.

If you need to concentrate on work or a TV program, just tune out. It’s a permanent window onto my world — but that doesn’t mean I need to sit and watch what’s out the window all the time.

I also have tweets coming from ABC News, BBC News and 37signals (which tell me if there’s a problem with Basecamp). One courier company uses Twitter to inform customers of any delays.

Why Twitter works for me

The key factor is that Twitter adheres to the philosophy of small pieces, loosely joined. It’s a clear, simple tool that’s easy to connect to other tools.

• I can send or view tweets from the Twitter website, the mobile version at m.twitter.com, the Twitterific application for Mac OS X (that’s what I use most of the time), via SMS or via other instant messaging services. Whatever’s handy at the time.
• Ditto for the people following my tweets. They choose whatever’s handy for them. I don’t have to think about where they are at the time.
• Everything’s interconnected by RSS, which means I can do things like plug my tweets into this website.

Permanent versus Ephemeral

Twitter helps me distinguish between the things I want to publish for all time, like my longer essays, and the random day-to-day stuff which might be vital at the time but meaningless the next day.

OK, I’m still having trouble with that, because some tweets are worth keeping. But this is experimental stuff.

What do you think? If you already use Twitter, does your experience match mine? If you don’t, please join Twitter and follow me, and let me know how it goes.

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

Sometimes I do. Especially on days when things haven’t gone so well with clients. Then on other days I read stuff like Hugh MacLeod’s piece the quiet life of a writer yak yak yak. Explaining how he loved Hemingway and Graeme Greene, he says that even though their books were very different their daily routines were pretty much the same.

Basically, they’d live somewhere cheap, quiet and relatively conducive to getting a lot of writing done. The Florida Keys and Cuba in Hemingway’s case, the South of France in Greene’s.

They’d get up early each morning, then write diligently till noon.

Then they’d head for their local café, drink gallons of booze for hours on end, and stagger home late at night.

Then they’d do the same thing the next day. And the next. And the next. For years on end. Women came and went, friends came and went, children came and went, money and fame came and went, but the daily writing-booze combo remained the great constant.

I’m not sure I like the idea of staggering home drunk every night, but as somebody who likes to write, likes his beer, and likes the simple life, I can’t say I find their overall Modus Operandi unappealing.

On a sunny Friday morning in Sydney, in the city’s most beautiful time of year, I think I agree.

And now, back to reading a company’s office manual so we can build them a CRM system…

Yesterday a client asked:

My friends at [some business] wish to create a social networking section as part of their site, with home pages or profiles for each user. Do you recommend any third party apps for this or a currently operating system?

No, I don’t recommend the tools until I know what the job is.

That question is like being asked, “I want a motor vehicle, can you recommend one?” Before you could answer you’d need to know the requirements. How many passengers? An answer of “6″ means a people-mover, not a sports car. An answer of “40″ means you need a bus.

Does it have to go off-road? Land Rover time! Does it have to carry 3 tons of bricks? Well, you need a truck, not a car. Do you need to make a social statement with your vehicle? Then maybe you need a Rolls-Royce. Or a Porsche. Or a Ferrari.

Or a packet of Viagra.

Another client asked:

Is [software package X] any good?

Again, wrong question. “Any good?” Good for what?

“Is a Lexus any good?” Yes, it is — but not for driving across the Simpson Desert, or delivering packages, or transporting your basketball team or invading Poland with a section of infantry.

As I wrote this, I remembered that Hugh MacLeod covered this point in his piece social gestures beget social objects:

When you’re planning how to embrace the brave new world of Web 2.0, the first question you ask yourself should not be “What tools do I use?”

Blogs, RSS, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook — it doesn’t matter.

The first question you should REALLY ask yourself is:

“How do I want to change the way I talk to people?”

And hopefully the rest should follow.

The redoubtable Laurel Papworth, one of the country’s foremost experts in the emerging social media, has just posted an article Seven steps to building a social network. It, too, emphasises that it’s about the people and the connections you make, not the tools.

The key point for my anonymous clients is number 3:

3. Decide what features are needed. Differentiate your site from a plethora of others by including the features most relevant to your membership, such as the ability to schedule meetings or upload conference photos and white papers.

This differentiation of your product almost always means that you need custom-written software to deliver what you’re after — though that custom software might be a custom-written module that plugs into a pre-existing application framework. But that’s a technical decision that comes after you’ve thought about your community. Leave the boring technical decisions to the geeks.

Laurel also runs a one-day course on managing a social network around a product — the next one is on 7 March.

The problem for most businesses is that they’re looking for The Magick Solution. If only they buy the right stuff then they’ll be profitable or successful or cool or popular with the chicks. The world doesn’t work that way — despite what the advertising industry might tell us.

You actually have to think and do the hard work and get out there and have conversations with your customers.

But that’s hard.

As Hugh MacLeod points out:

The decision to raise the level of conversation isn’t economic. Nor is it an intellectual decision. It’s a moral decision. But whether you have the stomach for it is up to you.

Do you have the stomach for it? Are you willing to do the work? Or are you just hoping to buy a Magick Box of Social Media Dust and sprinkle it on your business?

We are the 801,
We are the central shaft
And thus throughout two years
We’ve crossed the ocean in our little craft (Row! Row! Row!)
Now we’re on the telephone,
Making final arrangements (Ding! Ding!)
We are the 801, we are the central shaft

So sang Brian Eno in the song The True Wheel from his 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

Eno says he wrote the lyrics while visiting New York:

I went to stay with this girl called Randi and fell asleep after taking some mescaline and had this dream where this group of girls were singing to this group of sailors who had just come into port. And they were singing ‘We are The 801 / We are the Central Shaft’ — and I woke up absolutely jubilant because this was the first bit of lyric I’d written in this new style.

Yes, apparently in the 1970s a musician wrote a song while under the influence of hallucinogens. Who’d have thought.

Society generally frowns upon people who make important decisions while under the influence. (By an odd coincidence, Hugh MacLeod posted some vaguely-related thoughts only yesterday, in dying young is overrated, revisited.) However the more I look, the more I worry that we’re governed as if our societies were hallucinating. And even worse, it’s as if they’ve forgotten how to remember the lessons of the past.

I’m worried that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish.

I reckon our societies aren’t just hallucinating. They’re suffering paranoid schizophrenia.

Instead of acting upon real data collected from the real world, we construct paranoid fantasies and then respond to those.

Our tabloid media report every threat, adding every scary adjective they can find, to convince us the world is a threatening place. Our politicians often like this, because frightened people will suspend rational thought and Demand That Something Be Done. Apparently politicians have even been known to help this process along by creating new threats for us to be afraid of.

1. The Howard government’s NetAlert campaign over-emphasised the potential risk to children online.

   The claim in the NetAlert advertising campaign that over half of 11–15 year olds who chat online are contacted by strangers does not appear in the government commissioned research.

   In fact, only 14% of the research participants said their mix of chat partners included people they hadn’t met. Even before NetAlert, three-quarters of parents had already discussed online dangers with their kids.

2. Massive energies are spent in the War on Terror (an abstract noun!) even though, as I’ve pointed out before, you’re far more likely to drown in your own bathtub.
3. Headlines constantly scream about Wild teen crime waves, even though children are safer than ever before.
4. Dr Mohamed Haneef.
5. Adam Curtis’ powerful documentary The Power of Nightmares explains how a vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world has been used by American Neo-Conservatives and Islamic Radical movements alike. The entire film is freely downloadable from the Internet Archive.

Our continual state of hallucinatory paranoia is made worse by a lack of long-term memory. Societies try things, and sometimes they don’t work — but that doesn’t seem to stop us trying them again.

1. Investors pour millions into Web 2.0 businesses they don’t really understand, even though the lessons of the first dot-com bubble were obvious.
2. The War on (Some) Drugs continues operating in a prohibition mentality, even though that’s been shown to fail so many times before. I can thoroughly recommend Richard Davenport-Hines’ book The Pursuit of Oblivion: a social history of drugs for gaining an understanding, and this BBC interview might be worth a listen.
3. When we designed mainframe computers, we learned that security was something that needed to be part of the original design, not grafted on as a “feature” afterwards. Then we connected PCs to the Internet, with fundamentally insecure operating systems like Windows and the original MacOS, and were surprised when they got hacked. We’ve started connecting “smart phones” to the grid, with fundamentally insecure operating systems, and we’re surprised when mobile phone viruses appear. And now we’re about to connect TVs to the Internet too.

Yes, I’m worried that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish.

So what can we do about it?

Well, I’m a big fan of Science. All that Age of Enlightenment stuff. Reason. Logic. Joined-up thinking. We should demand it of our leaders (political, cultural, religious), employers, employees and ourselves.

It’s heartening to see that Chairman Rudd is all for evidence-based policy development.

I’m a Labor moderniser. Always have been, always will be and what that’s on about is good evidence-based policy in terms of producing the best outcomes for this nation, carving out its future in a pretty uncertain century where things fundamentally are changing.

It’ll be interesting to see how PM Rudd handles situations where the evidence runs counter to Labor’s political imperative — particularly when compromise is needed to get legislation through the still-hostile Senate.

There’s a lot we can do as individuals to help kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.

1. Learn how to see though the tricks. I J Good’s paper A Classification of Fallacious Arguments and Interpretations provides a formal list of dodgy tricks, but Wikipedia’s articles on fallacy and propaganda techniques provide a great start. The classic book How To Lie with Statistics and the newer How to Lie with Maps are also great reads.
2. Turn off the crap. Rid your life of the tabloid media, including shock-horror newspapers and TV programs.
3. Demand to see the evidence. If someone claims some fact or statistic, don’t take it at face value. Use The Power of the Internet to check it out.
4. Spread the word. If you spot misinformation or faulty reasoning, tell your friends, family and colleagues. Make your coffee-break conversation more useful than whingeing about the boss or prattling on about lame TV programs.

This all reads like a manifesto, I know, and perhaps it is. Reason and logic are supposedly what makes us humans so special. And yet when it comes to managing our greatest creations, our own societies, we discard those skills and give in to the Hallucinating Goldfish.

It’s time to Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.

If 2006 was the year of Web 2.0 then 2007 is the year of social media. For individuals anyway. Australian businesses and politicians generally don’t “get it”.

Social media is mainstream. Two million Australians have Facebook pages and 3.5 million read blogs. MSN Messenger has 7 million users here, and even Ja’mie King says “I’ll MSN u 2nite” without explanation.

But few businesses use social media. Why? I suspect there’s two reasons, apart from an endemic inability to adapt and change. One is about the tools, the other is about business culture.

So far most social media tools have come from start-ups with funny names like Flickr and Twitter and YouTube. Media reports of the Next Big Thing are usually pitched as “look what those weird young folk are doing”. When the Next Big Thing becomes mainstream, the media ADHD attention span has moved on. So the impression is that it’s all a plaything for kiddies.

The second problem is that social media goes against the grain of how most businesses operate.

Back before the federal election, I said that politicians only see social media as a kind of TV, another outlet for their centrally-planned Soviet-style “campaigns”. Businesses have the same problem. They see 2 million Australians on Facebook and want to push their advertising at them. They see the social media websites as just another advertising medium to buy into.

That misses the point. Social media is about conversation.

Businesses are very bad at conversation.

Business usually want to pretend everything’s always perfect, and control all communication so it’s “on brand”.

As a result, when they try working with social media they tend to take one of two fundamentally wrong approaches.

1. They act like boors at a party, loudly parroting their brand message without actually participating in the conversation. No matter what’s being said around them, they hold up a sign with their logo and shout “Product X will make you trim and sexy.” Or whatever.
2. They set up their own private conversation forum — and then edit out anything negative.

Either way, people soon stop listening.

The first problem might be solved when social media tools come from mainstream providers like Microsoft. Windows Live Writer, a free blogging tool for Windows, kicks that off.

Interestingly, Microsoft itself is encouraging their staff to write blogs. Their corporate blogging policy isn’t 45 pages of legalese but a simple set of bullet points.

The second problem is harder, because it means businesses themselves need to change to embrace honesty, transparency and authenticity of communication.

Even Microsoft recognises this is a generational change. As one young employee said, “The old guard is highly competitive, the new guard is more collaborative… It’ll be at least another decade before the outside world starts recognizing the change that’s currently happening internally.”

Coincidentally, Hugh MacLeod has written about this very issue only today, in a piece about what’s starting to be called The New Marketing. His key points for me are:

3. The most important asset in The New Marketing is “having something worth talking about”. This makes certain marketing people squeamish. A lot of us grew up in an era of flashy commercials for rather uninspiring products, and something in our DNA makes us believe that’s the proper way to go about things.

4. If I had one big insight from the last year, is how The New Marketing has everything to do with how your product or service acts as a “Social Object“. Kudos to Jyri Engestrom for turning me on to it.

And:

10. Why is it so hard to explain The New Marketing to large companies? Because the people who work there are simply not prepared to relinquish the idea of control. Live by metrics, die by metrics etc.

The “mass media” of the industrial age allowed you to mass-produce your message for… well, the masses. The “social media” of the post-industrial age allow you to hold many, individual conversations, en masse.

Disclosure: Some of the ideas in this article emerged during a geek dinner where Microsoft paid the bill. This is an expanded version of an article originally written for Crikey.

Actually, I’m going to give you two sets of five. My really favourite feeds are from people unlikely to play this game, but I’m sure to read them every day.

1. Gaping Void, Hugh McLeod’s insightful cartoons drawn on the back of business cards. I also appreciate his observations on blog-led business marketing. I should also mention Indexed in this context, even though it’s not quite a must-read yet.
2. Freakonomics, the blog of the book of the same name.
3. I agree with Zhasper that The Bartlett Diaries is a fine political blog.
4. Josh Spear spends his days cruising around to see what’s cool. Lucky him.
5. Crikey. OK, I cheated. It’s an email newsletter, not an RSS feed. Sue me.

On a more personal note:

1. If I don’t start with Out to Space and Pong’s Flickr feed, I’ll be in serious trouble.
2. My friend and colleague Zern Liew’s Eicolab, even if he does have a rant against Apple today.
3. Man About Town, a personal blog by my friend Richard Watts in Melbourne — always an eclectic mix of personal anecdotes and arts reviews. I’d never reveal so much of my, erm, vices!
4. The Other Andrew‘s delightfully-written personal observations would continue to fascinate me, even if I hadn’t know him for years.
5. Bad Language by Matthew Stibbe is my daily fix of writing about writing.

Now, your responses please! And if you’re reading this but haven’t been tagged, I’d love to hear from you anyway. Post a comment! You know you want to!