Author Archives: Paul

Owning Rather Than Renting

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I love Facebook. I love Twitter, Tumblr and Google+. I love that we live in a time that there are tools and platforms that allow us to communicate, share (and sometimes maybe over share) and keep in touch across geographies and in ways never before possible.

Even with all of this love, there are a few things that give me pause about using these platforms. Ultimately, the single most significant thing is that when we use someone else’s platform, we cede control (and in many cases ownership) of not only the data created by our online interactions, but also how our data is used (i.e. our privacy). We make a bargain with the platform owner that if they provide us with a platform that makes it easy to share and connect with our friends that we allow them to own and use our data in ways that are advantageous to them.

This is all well and fine if you are thoughtful in accepting the terms of the deal – namely, that you have no control over the terms of the deal.

When it initially leaked that Yahoo was going to shut down Delicious, it didn’t ask the users for permission. When Facebook makes changes to their default privacy settings, they do so at their own discretion. One of my closest friends, a photographer here in Boston, commented in a recent online discussion that he had over 137,000 images on Flickr – followed immediately by “I f-ing pray they never go out of business or start charging by the pound so to speak!”

For his sake, I hope not either, but he really doesn’t have much say in the matter if they decide to make some changes.

Welcome to My Online House Warming Party

Personally, I’ve made the decision that I am no longer comfortable with the terms of this type of arrangement. I’ve decided that I’m more comfortable owning rather than renting my online participation and interaction (or at least as much of it as I can). For that reason, I spent a little bit of time during my vacation this week making updates and tweaks to my site to where I think it can serve as my primary mechanism and sharing on the Web. I’ve had this blog to share random thoughts for a while, but I’ve set up spaces to share links that I find interesting (mostly work related at this point) as well as any photos I think others might enjoy.

Working in the user experience industry, I am intimately aware that how I desire something should work is not the only factor that will determine its overall success. For me, this site is a way to share in a way that I find enjoyable and a mechanism to interact with my friends and other interesting people. In that vein, I understand that making it easy to connect and engage is extremely important.

Many of my closest friends and connections use Facebook as their primary social platform. For this reason, I’ve created a 2 aldgate dot net page on Facebook that you can subscribe to (or like) that will automatically update and appear in your new stream if you are interested in seeing when I post things on the site. I’ve also made it possible for you to use your Facebook identity to login to and make comments on this site. Most of the links and blog posts will be published on that page while probably many of the photos will be published to my own personal news feed. (Note: I’m also planning on trying to do the same thing for Google+, so if that is your personal social networking platform of choice stay tuned.)

If neither of those are to your liking, then I hope that you will just come, stop by and visit once in a while.

Two Final Thoughts (for now)…

First, I believe that being connected is important. In my effort toward ownership, I’m not planning to shut down or stop using my accounts on Facebook, Twitter or other social platforms. Like I said, I really do love these tools and platforms and how they help us connect and share. I’d love to see projects like Diaspora mature and give us a rich platform that allow us to share and connect while allowing us even greater control, but I’m not sure we are there just yet (but I do think we will be soon).

Second, if you are interested, I don’t think the cost of ownership is all that great. Most of what I am using, WordPress with a bunch of plugins plus ThinkUp, is free. My only real costs have been web hosting (less than seventy-five dollars a year) and domain name registration (less than ten dollars a year). The primary cost has really been a little bit of time to play and figure out how to piece things together (and quite honestly, I don’t really think you need to be all that technical).

If you are interested in knowing more, let me know and I am happy to share.

A Running List of Distractions

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One of the things that I have done over the years in the contents of various iterations of this blog is to post interesting links that I find here and there. I don’t know how I came up with the name, but somewhere along the line, I took to calling them Distractions.

(I probably could have shared more of what I find than I do, but with slow production rate of posts that I write, the distractions would have probably quickly overwhelmed the non-distractions…so I didn’t share these distractions all that often.)

Yesterday I came across Om Malik’s OmLinks link blog and just thought that was a great idea – to have a little blog off to the side specifically for sharing things of interest…so, late in the day yesterday, I created a Distractions link blog where I plan to post a more frequent running list of distractions.

So, if you are interested in being distracted, then you can maybe find some distraction there. I suspect that most of the items will be work related, but we’ll see.

Where something is particularly awesome and worth sharing, I’ll probably end up posting it in both places (i.e. both here and on the distractions blog).

Our New IBM Interactive Website

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If you haven’t checked it out already, a group of my colleagues have just launched the new IBM Interactive website. The site provides an overview of the practice (who we are, what we do, etc.) and highlights some of our work.

There’s also a blog called THINK!+FEEL, which at the moment, I am managing for the team. So definitely come and check that out and let us know what you think (or feel).

The Passing of Steve Jobs

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Like many others last night, I was saddened to learn about the passing of Steve Jobs.

My first real computer was an Apple //e that my parents bought for me and my sister for Christmas (from Lechmere in Manchester, NH) when I was thirteen. I don’t think that I’m overstating anything in saying that I think that Christmas was probably the best ever of my childhood…and playing on that computer for hours on end had a significant influence on who I am and where I am now.

I learned about the news like many others on my iPad via Twitter. Rather than the big news networks, I found the live stream coverage of Leo Laporte and those of the Twit.tv community better more comforting…which is another way to say that in many ways, Mr. Job’s accomplishments have continued to impact and shape my life in many ways that make it better.

I expect that his influence will continue for a long time. His ability to make technology pleasing and enjoyable and human will be one of the defining attributes of this period in history. I expect that in some ways, even though he is now gone, that his influence will be a significant force in shaping my fifteen month old son’s coming formative years.

Thanks Steve. You will be missed.

On Participatory Bandwidth and the Engagement Economy from Jane McGonigal

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“The truth is, the Internet is littered with underperforming, barely populated, or completely abandoned collaboration spaces: wikis that have no contributors, discussion forums with no comments, open-source projets with no active users, social networks with barely a few members, and Facebook groups with plenty of members but few who ever do anything after joining. According to Shirky, more than half of all collaborative projects online fail to achieve the minimum number of participants necessary to begin working on their goal, let alone achieve it…

For one thing, some participatory networks are more rewarding than others – and the most readily rewarding networks, aren’t as a rule, the one ones doing serious work. Online games and ‘fun’ social networks like Facebook provide the steadiest stream of intrinsic rewards. Their autotelic spaces – spaces we visit for the pure enjoyment of it. Their primary purpose is to be rewarding, not to solve a problem or get work done. Unlike serious projects, they are engineered first and foremost to engage and satisfy our emotional cravings. And as a result, they are the projects that are absorbing the vast majority of our online participation bandwidth – our individual and collective capacity to contribute to one or more participatory networks…

The problem is likely to going to get worse before it gets better. As it becomes easier and cheaper to launch a participation network, it will like become equally difficult to sustain it. There are only so many potential participants on the Internet. And as long as participation is designed as an active process requiring some mental effort, there are only so many units of engagement, or mental hours, each participant can reasonably expend in a given hour, day, week, or month.

To effectively harness the wisdom of crowds, and to successfully leverage the participation of many, organizations will need to become effective players in an emerging engagement economy. In the economy of engagement, it is less important to compte for attention and more important to compete for things like brain cycles and interactive bandwidth.”

From Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal.

Reinventing (Text) Books

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Having spent many of my junior high school afternoons in the bookstore that was managed by my mom, the reinvention of books (and other textual media) just fascinates me.

If this type of stuff interests you, then this video (Inkling 2.0 iPad App Demo) is definitely worth watching.