Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Nov 11
Barriers to Blogging – #1 – Distraction By Facebook, Twitter, News, Internet
What are the barriers to blogging? How could I write more than what I am already writing? What is preventing all the stories in my mind from being published? How can I make my workflow more efficient or better in some ways?
Those have been some of the questions on my mind lately, particularly as I decided to try the NaBloPoMo experiment of publishing daily articles on this blog for the month of November... but also, quite honestly, for the writing I do for my work.
I know many folks have told me that they are impressed by the fact that I write so much on a regular basis. But the truth is...
... I want to write even more.
You see, my head is exploding with stories waiting to be told. It is the curse of a writer... there are so many articles I want to write, so many tutorials I want to create, so many opinion pieces I want to publish, so many books/ebooks I want to author.
And so as I've thought about what are the issues blocking me, I decided to write a bit here about those issues.
Without a doubt, my single biggest barrier to creating online articles is...
... getting distracted by the Internet!
Well, to be more precise, by services on the Internet.
"Oh, let me just take a scan down my Facebook NewsFeed"... or let me just dip into my Twitter feed... or Google+... or "let me see what's new on TechMeme that I might want to write about"... or Hacker News... or MediaGazer... or (lately with the election) I wonder what's happening with politics over on Memeorandum or Huffington Post ... or the latest tech news at GigaOm or TechCrunch or Mashable or... or... or...
Pretty soon whatever time I had to write an article is gone as I become sucked into the vortex of whatever site or social network I visited.
Some time back on Facebook, my friend Donna Papacosta posted an image of a button that said:
BEING A GOOD WRITER IS 3% TALENT, 97% NOT BEING DISTRACTED BY THE INTERNET
I printed that button out and taped it - right at eye level - to the bar in the middle of the windows in front of the desk in my home office. There it sits each day to remind me.
This is a challenge. It is far too easy to get distracted by services and sites out on the Internet.
What I've wound up doing on days when I need to crank out some text is to shut down everything I can. Shut down Facebook windows. Shut down Tweetdeck. Shut down all the browser windows I don't need. Put my cell phone on mute. Do all of that to just...
... focus.
But, of course, for many of my articles, I need to pull up information on the Internet for the articles... which means that the temptation can be there to plunge back into the distractions. (Particularly now that Google+ notifications show up whenever you do a search. :-) )
And so I fight it.
I've also taken to going into my office and working on articles before taking a look at any of those sites. Aiming to publish at least one or more articles and then giving myself a moment to check those sites (and email).
And each day I have that button staring back at me reminding me...
Do you find this to be your biggest barrier to writing? What do you do?
P.S. I haven't yet found a definitive source of that quote. The farthest back I can trace it is to an October 2006 blog post that mentions the email signature of someone named Cyrus Farivar, who currently uses the quote as a subtitle on his blog. Perhaps he is the original author - I don't know. If anyone can find a source of the quote earlier than that, I'd be curious to know about it.
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Nov 10
When Facebook Starts To Become More Useless – Irrelevant In-Feed Ads
Yesterday I started to see Facebook become more useless. There, right in my NewsFeed, nestled between two updates from friends, was an advertisement for a laundry detergent I could apparently get at my local Target.
This was not an ad on the side of my Facebook display.
This was right IN my NewsFeed.
This is very definitely NOT the kind of ads I want to see - this is junk polluting my NewsFeed. I want updates from friends, family and brands/companies that I care about.
I understand Facebook needs to make money. I understand this may be the only way they have to get an ad in front of mobile viewers. (I saw it on my iPad in the Facebook app that doesn't have ads on the side.)
I understand all that... but that doesn't mean I have to like it! :-)
When I posted about this on Facebook, friends commented that they have been seeing this for some time, and that it has to do with friends liking a Page. By this logic because someone somewhere in all my friends perhaps liked a page about laundry detergent, I am now subject to their spam.
Maybe that's it... or maybe it is just Facebook trying to offer any advertisers a way to reach mobile users.
Either way, with this kind of junk polluting my NewsFeed, Facebook just got a little more useless...
Nov 10
Oops – Post Published On Wrong Site
Oops... this post was published on the wrong site - please see the article over on my Disruptive Conversations site at:
When Facebook Starts To Become More Useless - Irrelevant In-Feed Ads
Thank you!
Nov 09
Instagram Finally Becomes Useful With Web Profiles
FINALLY! Photo-sharing darling-of-the-media Instagram finally became useful to me with the rollout of web profiles where you (and everyone else) can see your photos. While I've had an Instagram account for some time, I haven't really used it too much because there was no web interface and so you could only manipulate images via the mobile client. That's fine for some usage... but it's hard to go back and find older images... and extremely hard to share with people who did not have Instagram.
Now, web profiles are here and, even better, they are available at very easy URLs. Here's mine:
http://instagram.com/danyork
The resulting page is laid out very nicely, with images changing periodically:
You can keep on scrolling down to see more and more of the images that you have posted. (And yes, it kind of looks like Facebook... which makes sense since they now own Instagram.)
This is a huge benefit to me because often I have found that I've wanted to go back and find an image I took in Instagram to use in a blog post - or just to show someone. Scrolling back in the mobile app is fine for recent images, but I haven't found it fun if the image was some time back. This web profile page lets me easily scan back through all the images I've posted to Instagram.
Even better - and this is that part I find most useful - you can easily go to the individual page for a photo, such as this one:
Now I can see the image and easily share the URL for the image to people. As far as now using the image in a blog post, I didn't yet find any way to embed an image, and I'm guessing that's not there yet. But that's okay, because I can just do a screenshot of my own image and use it in a blog post. The key is easily getting to see the image in a web browser.
Very cool to see... and as a result of this I expect I may indeed start using Instagram more!
How about you? What do you think of these new web profiles? Will you use Instagram more? (or perhaps even start using it?)
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Nov 08
Want More Likes and Comments On A Facebook Post? Include A Photo
Would you like to have more Likes or Comments on items you post on Facebook? Perhaps for your company's (or client's) Facebook Page? It seems one tip is to make sure you include a photo.
It's perhaps a bit of a "DUH!" thing, but a gent named Max Woolf just provided some data to back up that idea. He downloaded all of Robert Scoble's Facebook posts (via Facebook's API) and then analyzed the data. The graph shows the trend quite clearly (click on the image to see the full version):
In every quarter but one, posts with a photo had a higher average number of likes and in most quarters had more comments than posts without a photo.
Now, granted, this is data for a single person's feed, but Robert Scoble creates a large number of posts and has a great number of friends and subscribers. (Max Woolf provides a link to the source data for those who want to play with the numbers.) It also just seems to make sense to me given my own usage of Facebook. My eye is naturally drawn to links or posts that have photos more than necessarily to plain blocks of text.
In the comments to Robert Scoble's sharing of the data, Max Woolf indicated that he performed a similar analysis on the TechCrunch Facebook Page and came up with a similar result.
It will be interesting to see if someone else does a bit more exploration of this topic to see how it goes with a larger sample size, but I'll expect the trend to be similar. Part of the strength of Facebook's new design is its emphasis on visual display... helping highlight the photos and images on your Timeline. There's really no surprise that photos will attract more likes and comments.
But it's always great to see some data... :-)
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Nov 08
Big Day (Seven Hours!) Of IPv6 Meetings at IETF85 Today
Today’s a big day for IPv6-related meetings at IETF85 in Atlanta. In fact, there are five hours of dedicated IPv6 working groups, along with another two hours of a meeting with much IPv6 content. So yes, that’s a good seven hours of IPv6 goodness!
Reminder – if you aren’t at IETF85 in Atlanta, you can still participate remotely using streaming audio and Jabber chatrooms. (Note: if you have no clue about how IETF meetings work, you may want to scan the Tao of IETF first.)
Dynamic Host Configuration (dhc)
The day is starting right now (9:00-11:30 US EST) with the DHC working group focused on issues related to DHCP. Today’s DHC meeting agenda is not entirely about DHCP for IPv6, but almost. Should be some interesting discussions about failover between DHCPv6 servers and some other good topics around IPv6 address distribution.
IPv6 Operations (v6ops)
This is the big one today. Two back-to-back meeting sessions of the v6ops working group totaling four hours of time starting at 1:00pm US EST and wrapping up at 5:10pm US EST. A great agenda full of drafts and presentations around operational experience with IPv6. Some excellent pieces of work that we’re looking forward to seeing move forward. You can expect to see more about many of those drafts written about here on the Deploy360 in the weeks ahead.
IPv6 Site Renumbering (6renum)
The day concludes with a 1-hour session of the 6renum working group at 5:30pm US EST addressing issues around IPv6 address renumbering within an enterprise or other network. Should be some good discussion about the gap analysis document and also the next steps for the working group. I’m also intrigued by the slides around using IPv6 with an operational support system (OSS).
All in all, for those who are interested in IPv6 it will be quite a great (and long) day today. Looking forward to hearing more about the work people are doing to move IPv6 deployment forward!
Nov 07
Brilliant Video – Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL
How many of the issues in this video have you experienced while in a presentation? Either one you have attended or perhaps one you have given yourself?
I learned of this today via a link in Facebook or Twitter (I can't remember which) pointing me to a post from Mitch Joel back in January titled "How To Do Everything Wrong In A Presentation". It is related to the book Habitudes for Communicators by Dr. Tim Elmore. I've not (yet) looked at this book but I'm definitely intrigued. In his post, Mitch also recommends three other books, one that I have (Presentation Zen) and two others that I've heard high praise about. All of these kind of books will only make you a better presenter... and I've added these to my queue of books to read.
Kudos to Dr. Elmore and his team for coming up with a funny and brilliant way to highlight so many of the issues we unfortunately do experience in presentations.
How many of these have you experienced?
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Nov 06
Want To Watch Live U.S. Election 2012 Coverage Online Tonight?
http://gigaom.com/video/election-live-stream/
It's fascinating to look down that list. I grew up in the 1970's and 80's when we really only had 3 TV networks in the US on which to watch election results. Now we have a HUGE number of options. Consider that in this list we have:
- Multiple sites doing live streaming over YouTube.
- Multiple sites doing live streaming over Ustream.
- Some sites doing live streaming from their own sites.
- Many sites doing streaming out to their mobile apps for iOS and Android.
- Twitter setting up a micro-site to show election-oriented trends and tweets (and being used by many of the other sites, too, I am sure).
More than that, look at the different sources of these live streams:
- "Traditional" TV networks such as CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS (with six live streams!), and Fox
- Newer TV media like C-SPAN, Univision, MSN News, Al Jazeera and the Comedy Channel
- "Newspapers" streaming video such as the Wall St. Journal, New York Times and Washington Post
- Newer websites such as Politico and the Huffington Post
- An independent group watching voting problems
This list, too, is just the sites that GigaOm found and felt should be included. There are probably a hundred other lists floating around on other sites that include other livestreams not mentioned here. Plus the many sites that will be doing "liveblogging"... plus the sites livestreaming audio-only... plus the many mobile apps that people are using on their smartphones... plus the zillion other social networks. Mobile-photo-darling Instagram even got in the game by partnering with NBC to produce: http://electiongrams.com/
And all of these are (generally) available to people all across the world, not just in the US. There is no limit according to geography.
It's an amazing testament to the power of the Internet to disrupt traditional media and to encourage innovation ... and to potentially democratize the creation of content by allowing anyone to get in the business of streaming media.
Wherever you are tonight... as long as you can get Internet connectivity, you will have the ability to watch the US election returns!
I'm looking forward to tonight... and will probably be watching several of these streams as we look forward to learning who wins the election not only for President but also for the Congressional and local races as well.
Enjoy the evening!
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Nov 06
Watch The IGF 2012 Live From Baku (Featured Blog)
The Seventh Annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is underway now in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 6-9, 2012. Very appropriately, it is possible to listen in to any of the sessions remotely across the Internet. Details can be found here... More...
