Laying Effective Idea Traps

I recently read two really great blog posts about writing — specifically, how to log ideas, improve concentration, maintain focus and enhance your craft. It got me thinking about the process of capturing ideas.

First, about those blog posts. One of them came from Chris Brogan. He wrote about generating ideas, spreading ideas and the process of cultivating ideas into written messages. Brogan talks about writing as not being something you sit down at the computer to do. It’s more like a habit, a reflex, an ongoing filtration of the world around you. Writing is reading. Writing is thinking about topics to write about. Writing is publishing. Writing is praying without ceasing.

The thing is, you have to practice writing when you can. I don’t think it’s good enough to say, “I’ll write every morning,” or “I’ll write after the kids go to bed.” When I say this, I understand that you have to find time where you can, but the actual practice of writing is something I want you to try doing all the time.

As someone who made a big production of finding an hour every morning to write or run, I appreciated this reality check a lot. Anyhow, go read the post. I won’t blame you if you don’t come back. It’s good stuff.

The second post was on 10,000 Words, a great blog that explores the intersection between journalism and technology.  The post in question listed five ways to improve your writing and concentration. The two that resonated with me the most were 2) Write down ideas when you have them and 4) Tame the web.

With regard to #4, the post quotes the anonymous truism, “Being a good writer is 3% talent and 97% not being distracted by the internet.” How true is this? How many times do we shut down Tweetdeck or e-mail to get anything done? Probably not as often as we should.

With regard to #2, back in college, I made the new year’s resolution one year to always carry a pen and notepad with me. For me, such resolutions were usually fleeting affairs, but this one I kept for years. I didn’t carry a bag then, so my notepad was perpetually in my back pocket, pen in my front pocket. I was writing more poetry then than anything else, so most of what I captured were ideas for poems, lines or verse fragments.

Now, I carry a bag and it always has a notebook in it. A lot of my ideas also come to me as I am lying in bed, waiting to fall asleep. It generally does not take me long to fall asleep, so there is a preciously small window of time when these ideas will come to me.  For this reason, keeping a bedside notepad within easy reach is critical. I love waking up the next morning to find some scrawled insight perched atop my alarm clock.

And of course, nowadays I have technology I couldn’t even have conceived of back in college. With my Blackberry, I am always e-mailing myself ideas that comes to me when I am out and about, whether it’s a blog topic or a point to make in The Project — not to mention ideas for work. I’ve also used Evernote a little bit, usually for more extensive writing I am doing on the go.

We often conceive of emerging technologies as facilitating new ways of broadcasting out, but what about broadcasting in? With technology, we are tremendously more empowered to talk to ourselves, and we can take advantage of much-needed system redundancy and backup. (More on this in a bit.) A tweet this morning by Brian Kenyon was particularly timely:

(I hadn’t heard heard of reQall before. Kinda neat.)

Memory: The Unreliable Narrator

What is the common denominator to all of this advice? It’s all about creating systems and habits that are more reliable than our weakest link: our memory. If we were computers, we would need to have a program running in the background all the time that captured critical bits of sound, image and text for later reference. All of these tips and strategies are akin to coding that program for ourselves.

We cannot trust ourselves to remember. It’s sad but true. The human memory is a strange and glorious function, but I wouldn’t trust it with an important new thought farther than I can throw it. When that thought arrives, you have to put on the brakes and make a note of it. Your memory is too busy remembering the lyrics to En Vogue songs you haven’t heard in 10 years to make lasting note of your epiphany. The other morning, as I was doing dishes and a Mountain Goats lyrics triggered an idea for The Project, I ran, wet hands dripping, back to my desk to write it down. I had no choice. I had to snare the idea while it was still alive.

The gap between having an idea and communicating it is wide and precipitous. We need to set up our own safety nets, to rescue our insights and ideas when they fall off the tips of our tongues or the forefront of our minds. That is writing.

I wondered why I happened to read those two blog posts so quick on the heels of one another, and then I looked at a calendar. January is almost over. The freshness of a new year and all the good intentions that come with it have been kicked to the curb, into the crust of a two week-old snow. People are losing sight of the focus with which they seized the new calendar. We need to be reminded of this stuff, our backpocket promises. We need to make it not a resolution, but habit. We need to always set our idea traps — and never let a good catch get away.

Photo by somegeekintn / Flickr Creative Commons

The Lament of Punxsutawney Phil

In a past life, I was a poet. And at one point, I wrote a terza rima about Groundhog’s Day. Enjoy.

The Lament of Punxsutawney Phil

I will not be your sundial this year.
I hear you clamor
across TV truck wires in the square,

waiting, but still I must put a damper
on your gathering.
See, I know I am just a paramour,

an annual fling. So cease bothering
me in my warm hole
with your boorish, portentous nattering;

I know the truth. I am not the first fool
you’ve tricked to go
into this prognosticative cesspool,

to be exalted on the Today Show
and kissed by Katie,
to be targeted, marketed, and sold

like a Tickle Me Elmer Fudd. Maybe
it would suffice to
confess: I’m afraid — of light, of Katie,

even of myself. (If only you knew –
my Peter Pan fights
with my shadow are quite angry to-dos.

I do not want to squint in the bright light
to see that sad thing.
I live in the dark for a reason.) Might

I read a note from Phil the First, whose things
still litter this den?
“A word to the next: You’d best see nothing.”

I know now what he meant; despite your yen
for this burly shrew,
my shadow’s the last thing you want seen then,

lest I be the scapegoat, the damned hog who
summoned another
cockeyed winter. So, when you give that cue,

my dark reflection will hide from cold earth
and still colder air.
And also, my name isn’t Phil; it’s Earl.

What Politics Reminds Us About Communicating on the Web

The last thing I want to do is start spouting off about politics on this blog. The recent Mass. US Senate special election did inspire me, however, to think about how the political foibles of unsuccessful candidates can remind us of some important web communication principles. I think I can do that without straying into partisan territory

Don’t Isolate Your Base - Consider your core audience(s). What do they want? What do they need? If you stick to an internally-focused, out-of-touch agenda, you’ll quickly lose support and interest. Similarly, you need to know when to broadcast and when to go niche. Just because red and blue make purple doesn’t mean your communications should be one shade of purple. Different audiences have different needs.

Be Authentic and Genuine; Don’t Pander or Equivocate – If you misrepresent yourself as a politician, the press and an increasingly savvy general public will sniff you out. The same goes for any other individual or organization. Also, by being yourself and being real, it will make it easier to connect, engage and build support. Be who you are. Your audience will respect you for it. You won’t win everyone’s support, but those who do support you will truly believe in you.

Own Your Story – Time and time again, politicians lie when caught in the act of one transgression or another. I’ve never understood why they always fall into this cycle, whether it’s Bill Clinton or John Edwards or Mark Sanford. It’s like they haven’t learned from each other’s mistakes. To apply this more broadly, there will always be one backlash or another. But the quicker you step out from behind the partition of denial and silence to address the matter head-on, the better.

Press the Flesh –  I saw lots of people post questions — some tough, some simply asking “Why should I vote for you?”, all real — to the Twitter accounts for Martha Coakley and Scott Brown. And whether you think it’s a fair or not, people judged the candidates by their responsiveness (or lack thereof). Presence, as always, is critical. If you’re there, you’re there, rain or shine. Being there brings expectations, so if you’re there but not present, you will not be living up to people’s expectations. A social media presence should be as real as a handshake meet-and-greet at North Station.

Be Charismatic - In politics, for better or for worse, personality matters. You could have an intuitive understanding of complex policy and brilliant ideas about how to enact reform of one stripe or another, but if you can’t communicate to and connect with the masses, your ideas will likely languish. When it comes to the web, political charisma translates to design and, more importantly, usability. People need a clean, functional interface and a clear path to the information they desire. Accessibility helps, as well. And the whole package needs to be nice to look at, to boot.

The web may have the advantage of lacking term limits — no one can vote your website off the internet — but it is still a democracy. And if we’re not doing our jobs right, the people will, one way or another, let us know.

Unreasonably Vigilant: Goodbye, J.D. Salinger

This is what Seymour Glass wrote to his brother, Buddy, who had sent him a new story to read:

When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished…I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined. Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. (From “Seymour: An Introduction”)

Today, J.D. Salinger died. Was he busy writing his heart out? One can only assume that yes, he was. Even if the pen was set down and the body was still, he was writing, writing, writing. Much like Franny’s Jesus Prayer, after a time, you are praying without ceasing. Writing becomes an unconscious act, like a heartbeat, internalized in our very being. Salinger may have withdrawn from public life and ceased publishing, but as the accounts go, he never stopped writing. He called publication “a damned interruption.” For him, writing was holy. A prayer to be uttered without ceasing. It was so holy, in fact, that he built his own monastery and shut himself inside.

I forget exactly how I became such a huge fan of Salinger’s work, but I know it wasn’t due to “The Catcher in the Rye,” which has had to grow on me over the years. Rather, it was his short stories, especially the works about the Glass family. What J.D. Salinger did so well was create compelling characters — flawed, complex, at times annoying, but always mesmerizing. It was as if they spoke in their own voice, not a voice an author assigned to them — that is how real they are. They pop off the page. I’ve read “Franny and Zooey” so many times and have such clear pictures of those two main characters in my mind, I could swear up and down I’ve seen them in a movie, or shared an Upper East Side walk-up with them for a year.

In truth, I’m grateful to Salinger for creating not just characters, but people. In the people he introduced to us, and that we got to know, so many readers found sides of themselves. Whether it was Franny’s religious crisis, Holden’s struggle to understand why people were the way they were or Buddy’s insecurity as a writer, I know I did. As Lee Anne said, he wrote “in a way that made sense and [told] stories that people are still afraid to tell, but can almost always relate to.” What Salinger did was write them them real — perhaps outlandishly so, but real nonetheless. And being real is scary. Salinger, thankfully, was unafraid.

In the same letter, Seymour offered Buddy this advice:

Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.

Tonight, all of Salinger’s stars are out. And we are standing vigil.

RIP leadpencil.net

On Sunday, I got an e-mail that was a long time coming, but even though it was no surprise, the words in the subject line smarted more than I thought they would.

“The Registration for your Domains just Expired.”

The domain is question was the first one I ever registered, leadpencil.net. It was 2001. I was 21, just beginning the spring semester of my senior year. I was, at that point, Over College. I was only taking three classes and was focusing on working more hours for my internship at Boston.com and applying for jobs. Over the previous year and a half, I’d become enamored with online journalism, and I was beginning to put all of my eggs in that basket. One step in that direction was purchasing my own domain. Goodbye, Geocities and Freeservers! Hello, shell account and unlimited potential!

I remember agonizing over my domain name. My first choice was littlebluelight.net, inspired by two songs: the Jayhawks’ “What Led Me To This Town” (which sports the lyrics “Blue lights are shining over my life”) and Miracle Legion’s “Little Blue Light.” I got talked out of it (too much KMart association) and settled for leadpencil, a name I thought was very poetic at the time but I soon grew tired of. Too late, though. I was branded. And the more your domain and domain-associated e-mail address get out in the world, the more daunting it is to disassociate yourself from them.

Having my own domain gave me the opportunity to play with HTML and, eventually, CSS. I built several iterations of my website. The first version actually wasn’t so bad, design-wise. I had pages for writing clips, my resume and a bio, but also — ill-advisedly, in retrospect — a link to my Diaryland site (a/k/a Angst Town). Eventually, I hosted a blog, which meant diving into the all-too-fun world of Movable Type installations. At one point, when I was at a crossroads between becoming more of a codehead or continuing to focus on writing, I built a page where I solicited milkshake ratings — for the explicit purpose of learning more about HTML forms. In time, I lessened my emphasis on code, but the HTML playground of those years gave me a basis of understanding that has served me well to this day.

The design screencapped above debuted in 2004 and languished for five years. I can understand why. In 2004, I got my current job. I got married. Life began getting a whole lot busier and crazier. There were more pressing things on my agenda than endlessly redesigning my website, as I was wont to do the previous three years. The website remained live, of course, with the resume updated as necessary and a couple of tweaks made now and then. And the e-mail address was still going strong, as well.

Beginning in 2008, I realized I needed to transition away from leadpencil.net. It took forever and a day for me to transition my e-mail over to Gmail, including updating my e-mail addresses with every online service from my bank to EddieBauer.com. And, of course, my friends. To tell you the truth, the bank and Eddie Bauer were easier to deal with Web-wise, I eventually put in a redirect to a Google Pages site I created. Then, I finally bit the bullet and set up shop at georgycohen.com, my new online hub and portfolio. Every few weeks over the past few months, Dotster would send me increasingly anxious (if only in my mind) e-mail reminders about my pending domain expiration. I thought about extending for another year, but I realized that even though a few stragglers might get an error when trying to e-mail my old address, it was time to cut the cord.

So why is this difficult? It’s just a domain name, for Christ’s sake, right? I guess that the expiration of leadpencil.net makes me think about who I was when I first registered it, my intentions at the time, the professional I wanted to become as I sat in my fourth-floor single and sent my resume to anything and everything web. I’m not sure exactly what I expected to get out of all that effort. So, nine years later, who have I become? I may not be working in the same kind of online journalism that I anticipated as an intern at Boston.com, but I am still working in web communications, a field that has evolved to become something that geeky 21-year-old me would marvel at (though perhaps think “been there, done that“). I think overall that she would be pleased with where I ended up.

I suppose that, with the evaporation of leadpencil.net into the domain name ether, this completes my rebranding. But even though I’m setting aside my leadpencil identity, I won’t soon forget my humble beginnings and how my little slice of Internet pie (or sip of milkshake, if you will) helped make me the web professional I am today.

On Conan and Kindness

I didn’t have a lot invested in the Conan O’Brien vs. Jay Leno standoff, but I followed with some interest. What really hit me, though, as it did many people, was the last bit of Conan’s goodbye speech on his last episode of “The Tonight Show”:

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

Conan has been lauded by the press and public alike for his classiness in this situation, especially with regard to his goodbye remarks. But this sentence has particularly resonated with many folks. Part of it is because Conan comes off as incredibly sincere and humble. But I think that another reason is because he mentions something we don’t talk about often enough: kindness.

You may think that “kind” is not a particularly noteworthy adjective. It means “nice,” right? I don’t think so. In my mind, being nice is more about being polite. Kindness, in my mind, implies a greater degree of sensitivity and thoughtfulness. Nice is something you might be because you’re supposed to be, or it will get you something; kindness is more about the other person’s feelings, whether it’s a close friend, a colleague or a complete stranger. In the end, I believe, it’s more important to be kind than to be nice.

Why am I seeing this line quoted everywhere? Why is this hitting home? I think because we all recognize the importance of kindness, and also how unique it is to see someone call it out. The concept has become special, which is great, in a sense. But I wish it didn’t seem like such a novelty.

Hearing this line, I recalled the National song “Baby, We’ll Be Fine,” where the insecure protagonist desperately tries to navigate everyday life. “All we’ve got to do is be brave and be kind,” he reassures himself. I’m not sure how Matt Berninger’s protagonist turns out, but I hope he meant being kind to himself. That’s an important side of kindness, too. We are often too hard on ourselves, too critical and too demanding. Let’s forgive ourselves a little bit. Let’s give ourselves a break. We can’t take anyone for granted, much less ourselves.

Anyhow, kudos to Conan. People say he’s one of the nice guys in show business, and that may be true. And that’s great. But if he’s one of the kind guys in show business? Amazing things are definitely in store.

Image by Clay Larsen

Stream Running Over

I have to admit, when all this “lifestream” business started coming down the pike, I didn’t know what to make of it. When people like Steve Rubel started singing the praises of lifestreaming via platforms like Posterous, saying it was just the next iteration of our increasingly real-time online lives, I didn’t see how it was different than any other kind of blog.

But when I finally sat down and looked at Posterous, I was amazed at how it was just the tool I’d been looking for.

I had been noodling a personal publishing conundrum for some time: if I have a piece of media, be it a photograph or video or text or audio file, and I want to publish it to multiple channels (say, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr; or maybe Twitter and Flickr, but not Facebook), how can I do that without posting the piece of content four times, in four separate places, reentering the same data multiple times? I wanted to learn how to COPE (create once, publish everywhere), and selectively at that.

When I examined Posterous, I saw that the e-mail-based publishing system they use easily allowed you to do that. After I’ve connected Posterous to my various social media outposts, all I have to do is e-mail post@posterous.com to send to all of them, twitter@posterous.com to just go to Twitter and Posterous, flickr+twitter@posterous.com to just post to Flickr and Twitter (which is huge, since many a fun photo of mine had been Twitpic’d but never made it to my Flickr archive unless I manually unloaded photos from my phone’s SD card and uploaded them),  or if I don’t want to flood my followers with images, I post it to just my Posterous blog. And so on. If I take the two minutes to add these e-mail addresses into my phone’s contact list, I can easily, and selectively, publish on the go.

And that’s what I’ve been doing with Georgy To Go, which has become my new go-to personal publishing platform. (I’ve also added it to the sidebar of this blog.) I’ve only been using it for mobile photos to date, capturing slices of life from my travels and commutes. But I’ve been really pleased with my Posterous experience so far, not only for the flexibility and control I have over my publishing, but because it’s given me a publishing outlet I did not have previously and allowed me to create new types of content. I love having a venue to showcase the weird, funny or poignant things I see everyday — to the point of this blog, finding the extra in the ordinary.

I titled this post after an Apples in Stereo song, but let’s conclude with a version of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” sung by Kermit the Frog, shall we? Into the blue again…

Who Lives in Our Content Village?

The other day, as I was walking up to the office, I was thinking about the different roles in the content creation and distribution process. For some reason, in that instant, my brain processed them in a somewhat medieval context.

You can look at artisans as content creators, crafting beautiful vessels of meaning. Alternately, that role is also filled by the town crier, broadcasting the news to all who are near enough to hear it.

What about the farmers, shepherds and the hunters? Both, to me, represent content aggregation. The farmers and shepherds tend and cultivate a community of content creators, while the hunters go right out and claim content to be, um, repurposed.

And of course, there are the craftsmen, the blacksmiths and carpenters who create the structures and mechanisms that store and distribute content — the crop silos and water towers of databases, the plumbing of RSS, the homesteads of websites.

Don’t forget the soldiers, the security in place to protect the village from outside threats. However, no village can survive in isolation; trade with other villages is essential to growth. The list of metaphors, surely, goes on.

The most important thing to keep in mind about our content village, however, is that all of these components are necessary. If one is diminished or removed, the entire system falls apart.

And what was it that Hillary Clinton said? “It takes a village.” To get the most out of content on the web, ain’t that the truth.

Photo by Bill Ward, Flickr/Creative Commons

Introducing Buzzup North, Feb. 3 at 8AM

Talking to Guido at the Buzzup I went to during vacation, I lamented that since I live and work north of the river, I probably wouldn’t be able to make it to another one. He had a good suggestion: start my own. So, I am!

The first official Buzzup North will be held Wed., Feb. 3 from 8-9AM at Oggi’s Gourmet in the heart of Harvard Square (location inside the Holyoke Center Arcade, where the Au Bon Pain is; directions). There’s no agenda. It’s just an opportunity to start your day by hanging and chatting with some fun folks.

RSVP for the event and tweet about it with the hashtag #buzzupnorth.

Hope to see you there!

Photo by kennymatic/Flickr Creative Commons

A Social (Search) Experiment

At some point, I clicked a link that enabled my participation in Google’s social search experiment. I had yet to really see this in action until a commercial break in Sunday’s football games. One of the Southwest Airlines “Bags Fly Free” commercials came on (not this one, but a similar one):

Watching the ad, which I really liked, I wondered how many of the actors were real Southwest employees. So I googled “southwest bags commercials.”

The first link went to a blog which answered my question to my satisfaction (most if not all of them). As I looked at the other search results, I saw the expected YouTube videos, but also Google’s social experiment come to life:

See that scrollbar area with the tweets? That was updating in real-time, with newer tweets showing up dynamically and pushing down the later ones. Heck, it even has a pause button.

It was surprising to see my Google search results updating themselves before my eyes, but also really cool. Right away, I felt part of a shared, immediate experience. (I felt the same way when I was trying to find out the name of the song in this State Farm commercial, and as I typed, I watched Google auto-complete my query: “state farm commercial guy in car singing.” Eerie.) Others had watched the commercial at the same time I had and felt compelled, in one way or another, to bring their experience to the web. But while it was a new and exciting dimension to my Google searching, it wasn’t specifically relevant to my query.

I decided to do an experiment of my own and try some other topical searches. Google queries for “iran protests,” “health care reform” and “florida cold” yielded no real-time results. Googling “jay leno” and “harry reid” and “green bay packers” (the football game on at that moment) brought up a real-time stream that began with several news and blog sites, shifted to some tweets and then went back to web links (though the Packers search query yielded all tweets in the real-time feed).

It makes sense that the real-time stream comes into play most prominently for events happening in, well, real-time. Topics like my first three searches will still carry the same level of relevance in 8 hours; the Packers game will not.

Breaking news has always captivated me since my first job at Boston.com, and living in a real-time web world — not just Google; think about Wikipedia during a developing story — only enhances the breaking news experience. But it’s about more than news. Everything is a breaking story. Everything is ongoing and developing. All the angles are out there on the web, and Google is putting itself in the role of aggregator. The early results are promising, but they label their endeavor properly: an experiment, still a bit rough around the edges.

The web is archival and always has been, but it is increasingly becoming a living document. And you know what Red said in “The Shawshank Redemption”: “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.”