tech ronin

Creative Class, Books, Blogging, Flat World

I was just reading Ross Mayfield's post from Les Blogs in the French Senate. He wrote a short stream of consciousness-like blurb about what Richard Florida was saying about the Creative Class:

anti-establishment, critical thinkers, autonomous action, self-fulfillment, self-expression, sharing collective action, community, learning and openness to innovation. These technologies become adopted through word of mouth. Some cultures adopting faster. Gap between creative and non-creative class is bigger than between countries....

Here's where I went with that. First, I've read The Rise of the Creative Class, and I wished I could see the full text or, better, a podcast of Florida's presentation. It occurred to me that blogging is a fantastic tool and community of the creative class. And I doubt if it got a mention at all in Rise of the Creative Class but it should have. I want to know what Richard Florida is thinking now about blogging.

From there I went to thinking that I want book authors to be blogging and not just blogging their book or blogging about everything else besides their book. I've heard Steven Berlin Johnson say on his blog that he can't blog about what he's writing. I question that.

These writers need to find a way to write about their ideas while they are being researched and in progress. The advantage to them would be building buzz, getting feedback, creating fans and creating community around their book ideas. Maybe they would find out earlier whether their book ideas had legs. I don't know, it might just be that I want to know what they think and have the ability to ask them questions.

In Richard Florida's case, I'll keep my RSS search going and yes I've ordered his new book, The Flight of the Creative Class. It may or may not address blogging but will fit nicely with my reading of late.

By the way, I'm liking The World is Flat and am on page 240. Here are a few Friedman's recommendations on how to thrive in a flattened world:

You have to constantly upgrade your skills. There will be plenty of good jobs out there in the flat world for people with the knowledge and ideas to seize them. I am not suggesting that this will be simple. It will not be. There will be a lot of other people out there also trying to get smarter. It was never good to be mediocre in your job but in a world of walls, mediocrity could still earn you a decent wage. In a flatter world, you really do not want to be mediocre.

If you are really good at what you do and are not falling behind in the technology curve, there's consolation in that. One likeable thing about what Dan Pink had to say in A Whole New Mind is that we should spend more time on fun right brain stuff. OK. All that digital photography I do and when I fiddle with the look of my posts and blog it's right brain exercise. Having time for sleep may be a problem, but you can't have everything I guess.

Technorati Tags: books | blogging | flat world | creative class | writers | whole new mind | flight of the creative class | richard florida | thomas friedman | dan pink |

The Future of Flickr Daily Zeitgeist

I saw the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist photo display-thingy over at Preoccupations yesterday and really liked it. Very nice way of telling people you are on Flickr and showing them a few of you and your friends' pix. I just clicked the get your own link at the bottom to, well, get my own. So there it is over below my own picture. Definitely cool because I don't know most of these folks coming up on the screen but, if I want to know, I just click the miniature photo to see a bigger version and find out who it is.

Once I clicked the get your own link, I could choose among these options for what would appear on my dz: Everyone's photos, Your photos, Your contacts' photos or You and your contacts' photos. When you click a choice, some code appears in a little box that you can copy and paste into your blog or website. I copied that stuff and pasted it into my TypePad left sidebar html. Published. Done. I supposed you have to have a Pro level TypePad account for this right now. Hopefully, if that's true, you'll have the option to get it into the basic and plus levels soon. I would love it to see TypePad getting more connected to Flickr. Repeat after me. Cooperation is good. Cooperation is good.

Flickr says this is just their initial release of daily zeitgeist and more features will be added. Wouldn't it be great to be able to more finely control what shows up on that little guy? Here's what I would do. First, I'm probably going to put up enough photos on Flickr to have it show only my photos - which would be one cool thing. Pick a photo set and it displays a rotating and random sampling from that. That would be cool for visitors.

But I would like to include pix of my Flickr friends as well. I have my dz set to show my photos plus the photos of my contacts. I would like to be able to deselect certain contacts or even better rate them or something so I can have more of one contacts photos than another maybe.

And I would also like to get photos from a group perhaps. Now I don't want three dz's on my blog, but can I rotate between maybe - my photos, my contact photos and then selected groups' photos?

If you had a little more granularity here, you could do other interesting things that I can only begin to imagine. All sorts of little creative presentations perhaps. Anyway, this things is cool and now all I wish is that I could change the white background to match the green in my sidebar.

After my brief flirtation with Flickr last Winter, I've been away from it. But I wanted some more contacts so that I could see different photos coming up on my 1001. Geek motivation, that. But I'm kind of introverted, so hey, whatever it takes. So I just started surfing my favorite bloggers' pages and seeing if they had a Flickr link. Many did and I went to their Flickr pages and added them as contacts. Easy.

Technorati Tags: Flickr | Daily Zeitgeist | photo streams | photos | photography | 1001 |

The World is Flat, Now What?

I'm just digging into The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman and am enjoying it. Lots of good stuff. I'm on page 29 and it is a 479 page book. I can already tell you one major issue I have with it, though.

There's a working assumption that globalization is overall a good thing. That's not so bad, but it seems that Friedman looks for every opportunity to sell it. He is already trying to make the case that even though outsourcing is moving jobs out of the US at an accelerating pace, it's all gonna be fine:

I firmly believe in the lesson of classical economists about moving work to where it can be done best. ...Work gets done where it can be done most effectively and efficiently. That ultimately helps the New Londons, New Bedfords and New Yorks of this world even more than it helps the Bangalores and Shenzhens. It helps because it frees up people and capital to do different, more sophisticated work, and it helps because it gives an opportunity to produce the end product more cheaply, benefiting customers even as it helps the corporations. ... India's growing economy is creating a demand for many more American goods and services. What goes around comes around. p.20 - 24

Wouldn't that be nice? This is the argument/religion of economics and the argument of the pro-globalization folks. Work should go to the lowest cost producer. That's efficiency. That drives the economy. There are some negatives in these low cost working conditions and for the environment (work goes where environmental regulation is least), but hey?

I have an MBA so I know this drill. I like the drill to an extent. But I live here in the US. I was born here and was planning to die here. But this whole leveling of the international playing field thing could be a problem for us high-living Americans. We are talking about the hollowing out of the American economy here.

Let me get personal and use myself as an example. I'm currently selling my Studio Manager software product 40% internationally and 60% in the US. Few of my sales are local and I rarely ever meet with my customers face to face. I talk with them on the phone and do a lot of emailing and every once in a while a client pays to have me fly to their location to provide training, consulting and customizing services. But most don't.

I doubt if a business like mine would exist except in these times where I can make my product known online and email my software and annotated pdfs, email and talk long distance very inexpensively. I'm on the receiving end of some of the benefits of globalization. I work out of my home. My employees are actually freelancers who work out of their homes and meet with me typically once or twice a week as needed. Work ebbs and flows - I have flexibility, they have flexibility.

But then there's the other end of the equation. I live in Mill Valley, California. One of the most expensive places on earth to live. Real estate is astronomical here. Labor costs are about as high as anywhere. There are places in the US that have a cost of living that is half of what it is here. Does my Mill Valley location help me economically? Not as much as it used to when I had a local business. Now I compete with software solutions that are made anywhere not just local consultants who have cost structures similar to mine.

I'm doing OK so far. There's still lots of cultural friction that is to my advantage. My product is in English and appeals to English-speakers (but individual customers have spent the time to translate it to Spanish and Japanese and a French version is in the works). Most of my sales come from the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. We share a relatively common culture and that produces a sense of confidence that plays a key role when software purchase decisions are being made.

But, longer term, I may have to consider moving to a place where it won't cost me so much to live so that I will be able to compete with low cost providers. To increase my advantage further, I should consider outsourcing some of my development. Perhaps I should have an English-speaking East Indian helping me with my FileMaker work. That's what this world is coming to.

The funny thing is that I know a FileMaker developer who has moved from Vermont to Panama in the last six months to save money and is now paying $400 a month for a three bedroom house. He has three brilliant Siberian programmers doing most of his development for him. He communicates with them by instant messaging every day. I have no idea what he pays them but he sells their time to his customers for $65 per hour. He's taking this globalization thing seriously.

I identify as a free agent. At this point in time, being a free agent seems very appropriate and adaptive. Working for myself, I have to be a generalist and handle all sorts of disciplines. I'm light on my feet. I keep current. I look for opportunities. I try to find ways to take advantage of new technologies and ways to land on my feet when faced with the inevitable ups and downs and twists and turns. I feel like a ... tech ronin.

Technorati Tags: Books | Social Trends | Economics | New Economy | Career | Tech Ronin |

A Whole New Mind Disappoints

Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind starts out well with three interesting chapters about our current predicament but what followed left me disappointed. I would give it 2-1/2 stars.

A Whole New Mind takes three well-argued and well-written chapters to convince you that right-brain talents and skills will be crucial for success in the years ahead. He does a great job in some respects in those chapters in outlining why (1) Asia will take away a great many US jobs, (2) good design matters and (3) left-brain skills aren't as valuable as they used to be. All true. But the rest of the book is 6 chapters of well-written but light-weight tips and resources. Given the weight and importance of the subject, I was expecting more.

Pink identifies what he calls six senses to develop: design, empathy, play, story, synthesis (Pink calls it symphony) and meaning. I agree these things should get more respect and it is more important than ever to develop them. I just wanted a lot more development. Pink says the six chapters are right-brain. Maybe. But I think most readers will feel a let down when they finish the book faster than they thought they would.

This might be the kind of book you should read in the bookstore. Read the first 3 chapters and skim the rest and you've got it. My response was to immediately order what I thought would almost certainly be a more substantive book, The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. The last book I read that generally pertains to this subject, China, Inc., by Ted Fishman, was more informative -- I gave that one 4 stars.

I wanted to like A Whole New Mind and if you can lower your expectations a notch and just view it as a good read and not expect something monumental, you'll be fine.

Technorati Tags: Books | Social Trends | Economics | New Economy | Self-Help | Career | Tech Ronin |

Flicker + 1001 = Tipping Point

Ultra cool. Instantly gratifying. 1001 has gotten me back into Flickr. I tipped with 1001 showing me my friend's latest photos. Tag photos. The blogger group's photos. Uploading from iPhoto. I've been spending the last few hours of my gorgeous Sunday afternoon playing with Flickr. Learning it. [1001's wonderful icon is by the awesome Mike Rohde.]

I was an early adopter with Flickr 15 months ago and got bored. I've been playing around with it here and there lately because of all the buzz, tagging, foto notes and generally great functionality. But 1001 got to me. Now I've got Mail.appetizer running in the lower right corner and 1001 in the upper left. This is fun. Perfect for your average ADD geek.

If you haven't already, get your butt over to Flickr and start playing around (I'm doing everything I want to do with a free account). Mac users must get 1001. By the way, 1001 is brought to you by Adriaan Tijsseling of ecto fame. Excellent work, Adriaan!!! Way to leverage the awesome stuff going on over at Flickr and your own desktop iPhoto tool in ecto.

I love that fotoNotes thang in Flickr by the way. It should spread like wild fire as far as I'm concerned. The best image annotation tool I've ever seen. I'll be busy doing lots of photo annotation from here on out.

Technorati Tags: ecto, 1001, Flickr, desktop tools, photo streams

Scored a couple Moleskine Reporter's today

I decided today to make a little search to see if I could find a vertically-oriented Moleskine Reporter. I first went to my local Barnes & Noble which carries Moleskine, but no luck. I did find the new A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink, though. I've been looking forward to this book for months. I'm sure I'll enjoy it. I could have saved some bucks by getting it at Amazon but couldn't resist - and at least I get B&N's 10% member discount.

So then it was on to my local high-end stationery store, Ideal Stationer's in Mill Valley's Strawberry district. I found their Moleskine section and thought they didn't have any. But then I looked closer and found that they indeed had both the pocket-sized and the larger reporter moleskines! Yay! I first got greedy and wanted to get two of each but calmed down enough to realize that I should test them out to see how well I like them before stocking up. They look really cool. That's part of the problem. Hard to resist.

I took my pocket reporter on my afternoon walk down to downtown Mill Valley to the Peet's Coffee & Tea and back. Since I don't tend to wear ultrabaggy jeans, the fit in my back pocket was a little snug. OK. But not ideal. But then, jeans really don't work very well to carry all my gadgets around. I've been using my iPod shuffle for music and I do wear it around my neck quite frequently - one more place to carry something. Cargo pants are really the way to go. I like my new black jeans from the Gap, though, so I might experiment with a little black leather fanny pack and see how that goes.

So, back to my Moleskines. Part of it is just the novelty. The new form factor is just more unusual and therefore cool. It is definitely a different feeling. More casual. More mobile. Less of a diary or journal kind of feeling. I love the way they look. Now it's just a matter of seeing how well they do in practice.

One last little thing. While at Ideal, I bought some clear Avery 5667 laser labels - 4 across and 80 to a page. I played around and got the format just right in FileMaker which has that label as one of the automatic format label choices.

I picked out 80 of my most frequently used contacts - friends, healthcare, hair salon, clients and colleagues and printed them. Then I pasted them into a pocket Moleskine address book. Looks great! I decided I want to have a phonebook that doesn't require a computer to get to. Sometimes I need a number and the computer is asleep. Then there are power outages. I plan to also paste these little addresses (a shorter list of them - maybe 20 - into my regular moleskines so I'll have my most used numbers handy.

Technorati Tags: Moleskine, GTD, A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink, labels, mobility

Tiger Available April 29th

Here we go again! We got the Apple event starting at Friday at 6 pm at the stores. This is going to be fun! I love these particular events and the last 2 (Jaguar and Panther) had 10% off sales. But the most important thing is that the wait is almost over.

Besides my most hoped for feature of increased speed, these are the things I am looking forward to the most:

Spotlight. I'm expecting a much better command of the great information I've been creating and collecting on my Mac. Includes what sounds like Quicksilver-like launch features. Including Cmd-Space to get into it.

Mail 2.0. Smart Mailboxes. Fully synch your mail between different computers.New transparent background synching hourly, daily or weekly. Resizes outgoing photos to small, medium, large or actual size and tells you how big an email will be created. It even creates slideshows!

Safari RSS. RSS support should be handy when I'm using a browser. RSS support should spread the gospel of RSS far and wide. Loads 1.8 x faster in Tiger than Safari 1.2 in Panther. NetNewsWire 2 should continue to be a major staple in my diet.

Address Book 4. Smart Groups. Hoping to see better multi-computer synching with .Mac. Prints a pocket-size address book too. Shared address books.

Dashboard. Seems great for the passionate amateur programmer. I'm sure I'll use a bunch of them. Know they'll look cool. Hope they are useful. Should help in customizing your machine to your own prefs.

iChat AV Wanna try this out with a couple friends. Got the iSight recently, so I'm ready to go. Hoping the increased true-to-life picture and crystal-clear conversation will finally make teleconferencing take off. I would love it if my customers and consultant colleagues would buy these so we could connect. The H.263 vs. H.264 comparison photos look convincing.

QuickTime 7. Looking forward to bigger and better movies on my computer screen.

UPDATE: I like Apple's comparison between Jaguar, Panther and Tiger. Looking at the comparison chart, it looks like the application upgrades and new things like dashboard may be less important than the vast improvement in security, graphics and other OS infrastructure. Actually, that would be my hope.

Technorati Tags: Macintosh, Mac, Tiger, OS X

New Sean Penn book is awesome

I love a good book. The new Sean Penn: His Life and Times is fine. Probably the biggest secret to its excellence is the interesting circle of friends that Sean has created for himself over the years.

The second key feature is the format. It is made up of excerpts from Sean, his mother, his father and his friends. The author inserts brief connecting/background content here and there to glue it all together. The excerpts feel like a conversation but I suspect the author skillfully created that effect by the questions he asked and the editing he does.

Here we have a movie star who is a great actor who impresses most with his integrity. And has succeeded on his own terms. Sean Penn fascinates.

Making movies is the dream job of our time: the pinnacle of fun and meaningful work. You want to know how he came to do this. If you don't like him, of course, perhaps you don't want to know.

I read a lot of non-fiction and really like biographies. A good biography occupies a middle ground between the INFORMATION strengths of non-fiction and the STORY strengths of fiction. Check out this excerpt to get a feel.

Google Maps Satellite Photos

This is the Golden Gate Bridge clipped from Google Maps new satellite feature. I was shocked that I could see the towers. Amazing!

I spent the last few minutes surfing Marin county seeing if I could find various landmarks including my home. Downtown. The high school. I love it.

You gotta try this out. It's a whole different experience zooming in on a satellite photo with the same ability to control the zoom and drag around the page.

I've got a map link in my bookmarks bar in Safari that takes me to google maps in one click. From there, I type my target - an address with a city and state or just a city and state. Then click the Satellite link and zoom and drag to navigate around the map. It moves with excellent speed with a broadband connection. To get back to the regular map, just click the Map link.

The Google Maps Tour now covers the satellite feature. It also talks about local search. Click local search and type in what and where and bingo - you see them on the map with links and addresses.

[via Twelve Black Code Monkeys]

Technorati Tags: google | google maps | maps | satellite |

Tiger much faster than Panther

There's an excellent first person account comparing a recent Tiger Beta and Panther running on two identical Powerbooks. The Tiger version was way faster. That's going to put a smile on a lot of faces. Especially among computer professionals who want the fastest possible machine but prefer to have that power in a portable form factor. Read it. [MacNet v2]

Technorati Tags: Macintosh, Mac, PowerBook, Tiger, OS X