Phil in SMH/Age Today

Nick Miller from The Age has written an article about me called Building a Better World. Its a good summary of where I’m coming from.

He draws a common thread through his various projects: “People power. With all these technologies, the barriers to entry fall away and anybody can start an international business or start their own TV station or become their own record label. This creates value and opportunity through a cornucopia of creativity, choice and diversity.”

2 Simple Productivity Tips

For the past couple of months I have been trying two productivity ideas that have revolutionized how I work. There’s no rocket science here, but they work and I though you guys may find them useful.

Turn off the sound for incoming IM: It can become impossible to concentrate on anything that lasts longer than 2 seconds when 5 people are talking to you via Skype in 5 word phrases. This tends to be most of my day and I was slowly going mad. Solution: Turn off sound alerts for incoming chats.

Create REPLY and ACTION folders in your email client: This is stolen from GTD. An Inbox with hundreds of emails in it is bad. Its paralyzing. I can get to a point where its easier to reply to no-one because the task of dealing with the list is impossible to get through. Here are my rules: The Inbox must always be empty. Always. When I check my mails I process them like this:

• Delete: No action is needed and I don’t need to keep the information,
• Immediate Reply: I can reply in under 2 mins.
• Copy to REPLY: I need o reply but it’ll take more than 2 mins.
• Copy to ACTION: I need to do something after reading the email.

I do this until my Inbox is empty. Then I go though my REPLY folder (which is mostly empty by the end of the day) and then the ACTION folder (which can have 10-20 items in because some tasks can be large).

The Inbox tip has the problem of a full inbox to deal with before you can get started. Merlin Mann helped me there with his tip for an email DMZ.

Windows Live Folders Registration: Grrrrr

MS Live Folders team, please tell me its not available in my region BEFORE getting me to sign up.

Traveling to India

I’m just catching my breath at Mumbai International Airport. The flight from Sydney to Mumbai was long but uneventful. The fun started when I got here to Mumbai. I left the plane to find a place with no signs. I followed the crowd, managed to find my bag and get through customs.

The first friendly man (this story has many) then asked if I was from Qantas and where I was going. “To Trivandrum on Air India” I said. “Go in there” he said sending me into this place where you wait for a bus to another terminal. The bus came and I went to get on it and a very friendly lady told me I needed to head upstairs for Air India. Hmmm. OK. “Its easy” she said, “just get the elevator”. I did so and found myself in a labyrinthine building site of airline offices. I wandered these for 10 minutes and eventually emerged in a departures terminal.

I queued for 10 mins at Air India and then a man helpfully showed me to the correct desk… Except it wasn’t - it was Delta. So then the friendly lady at Delta got another friendly man to take me to the right pace. He had my bag scanned and then took me to the Air India desk. The man there told me I was inthe wrong place and I needed to go to the domestic terminal.

“How do I get there ”

“Oh, its easy”

I just needed to go downstairs again to the bus transit place and get the bus to the domestic terminal.

This I did as I listened to groovy Indian dance music as it monsooned with rain outside. Finally I got to the right terminal but non of the Air India desks were manned. I went to the Air India office and they told me there were no flights til tomorrow.

Hang on - here’s my ticket. “Oh! You need to be over at the international terminal.”

“But I’ve just been there and they sent me here!!! Grrr.”

So I go back down to the transit bus to find a queue that I am told will be an hour and half before I get on the bus. Get a taxi I am advised.

So I step outside into the monsoon and a man with a big smile takes me to his taxi. A rickety black and yellow thing. He puts my case in the boot and the boot won’t shut properly. I look concerned. It’ll be OK he tells me! I get in the cab and so does his ‘friend’. I look anxiously out the back window to make sure my case stays in the boot.

His ‘friend’ tells me it’ll be 2100 rupees. What! An argument about the price ensued because I didn’t have enough… “Oh fine - just take me” and they ‘kindly’ took me to the ATM on the way… I was so ripped off.

We then drove through crazy traffic in crazy rain, beeping, spitting out the window, shouting obscenities. It was actually very comic.

Finally I got to the right place and after paying someone else to take me to the right place, here I am in the departure lounge waiting to get onto the plane.

Surprisingly, I’ve been quite light hearted about the whole thing even though its been a it confronting.

UPDATE: I told this story of the taxi to my buddy from Trivandrum, Jugs and he told me that it was only “by the grace of god that they didn’t take everything” from me.

Enso: The Simple Pleasure Of Perfect Software

Enso’s one-liner is “Love your computer” again, and I do! Enso brings a command line UX back to the Windows OS. I learned how it works in 10 minutes and its remarkable how it speeds things up. It’s also a pleasure to use.

Digg the Code: Subversive Art and its Very Best

During Soviet occupation, the Estonians gathered in concert arenas and sang subversive songs in the face of their occupiers. But you don’t have to be occupied by Soviets to be subversive.

Geoff Smith wrote a song about the recent Digg happenings.

The backing singers carry all the action. So clever.

Old Fashioned Licensing is Crippling New Video Business Models

Wonderland is reporting that C4 in the UK have just released a product that will allow users to download C4 shows on demand to their PC - 4oD. I love C4 and dived at the chance to watch their stuff from Australia and I was very happy to pay.

But I can’t because I am not in the UK. They can’t accept my money. I am assuming this is because of the old fashioned terms of their licenses which will be limited to UK audiences.

When is this going to fixed It’s fundamental. The internet is here to stay people and caging our media into geographically restricted borders is plain silly.

Principle: Can a 5 Year Old Use It?

Here is my new UI test principle for 2007. Can a 5 year old use it If not, it fails the test. I have noticed that my 5 year old son intuitively knows what to do with YouTube, World of Warcraft and Skype even though he can’t read.

Doin' it for love

What is it about ‘amateur’ products that is different from ‘professional’ products It isn’t ‘quality’ because amateur stuff is often better – certainly today when access to high quality tools is drastically leveling the playing field. I tend to agree with Dave Winer:

“Amateur is not below professional. It’s just another way of doing [media]. The root of the word amateur is love, and someone who does something for love is an amateur. Someone who does something to pay the bills is a professional. The amateurs have [more integrity than] the professionals. If you’re an amateur you have less conflict of interest and less reason not to tell your truth than if you have to pay the bills and please somebody else.”

Full Circle?

The world is turning full circle and perhaps when historians look back they will comment that the mass media phenomena of broadcast TV was an anomaly and not ‘how it is’ as we perceive it today.

Once, we knew something about the person we bought from. At the very least you could look her in the eye. For a while we saw nothing behind the TV ad campaign or the billboards. Today mass advertising is making way for blogs on websites where the people that make the thing tell us the story of how the product came to be. No one trusts what a company says about there own product any more but enjoys the power of the net to hear what other customers have to say.

Once, everyone was an artist. People made plays, songs, paintings to entertain each other. Then came ‘entertainment industry’ and entertainment was bought off a shelf and all shelves looked much the same with product from an elite professional corp. Now the circle arcs back around to create a cornucopia of creativity coming from all corners of humanity.

Of course, the circle does not completely join, but spirals outwards creating new things that are merely a taste of the past. As we find the human touch in things again through technology, the mass media world has changed its dynamic.