When does the tangible become irrelevant?

18 Nov 2008
Posted by Ashe

The other night, I was standing at a local coffee shop with my friend, Matt, and glanced behind me through the window and noticed a video store. I wasn't surprised to see 3 guys standing at the counter looking bored out of their minds.

"You know, I wonder when these Blockbuster/Hollywood Video places will realize that their business models are becoming irrelevant." I stated plainly.

"I think they make a lot of money off things like video game rentals, though."

"Yeah, but there are services that let you download and play games or that will send you them by mail."

"True; I think Netflix just bought one of those game services, too."

With so many knowledgeable-enough consumers on the internet and the number of cheaper online alternatives to brick-and-mortar stores, how long will it be before walk in stores either disappear or dwindle down to the bigger box Walmart/Costcos?

We are already seeing it with places like music and electronics stores (like the recent news about Circuit City) - eventually these stores are going to stay in business purely for the need-it-right-now customers and the customers that need to be educated on the products. Radioshack was once a big force in it's market - their presence in the market is less noticeable now and people are seeing less use for them when they can get everything at places like Walmart and Costco.

Minimize time online. maximize productivity

06 Jun 2008
Posted by Ashe

I have neglected this blog.

I know.

I am bad.

But I have good reasons.

I went to SXSW:Interactive this year which was an amazing experience. I learned a lot, met a lot of my web idols, and met up with old friends. I got to hear both Paul Boag and Jason Santa Maria speak, both of which I was really looking forward to and thoroughly enjoyed. Did the required amount of partying (including teaching Aral about the Milwaukee one-drink-per-hand minimum), geek bowling (we even took second place), and shmoozing (with the help of my fellow Wisconsin coworking buddy, Marcus). The thing I appreciate most about the experience was one lesson learned: I spend far too much time in front of my computer.

I stopped carrying my bag to South-by on the second day. Mostly because it was just too heavy with the amount of gear I felt I needed to tote, but also because I found that I just didn't need it. All the people that I was keeping track of online were there. In real life. Pinging me on twitter. Why did I need to sit behind my lappy's screen?

Those that know me know that I am a compulsive email checker, you can almost always catch me on IM, and I am known to leave twitter up to F5 that baby every few minutes when I am bored. Yes, I do have a 9-5er. I sit in front of a computer the entire time. Then when I get home, I do freelancing work, Web414 stuff, and general socializing with my fellow tech geeks over IM.

Since I have been back from South-by, I have rarely taken out my lappy at home and have cut down coworking time to twice a week on Thursdays and Sundays. This is a pretty dramatic change for me, but it has made a huge difference in my day to day life.

  1. Get to the point. I have cut out as many time wasters as possible. I make gmail work for me, filtering everything (expect a post on that soon) and checking it as little as possible. I don't get every twitter to my phone and they are shut off between 8pm and 8am; only things said directly to me or mentioning the *two* words that I track actually go to my phone outside of those hours. Any social network updates that I am interested in (Flickr mostly), I pull the rss feed into reader for, so I don't have to actually go to the site to check manually (it's dangerous when I do: I get easily distracted and end up looking up crazy things like Lego Storm Troopers pushing discs into MacBookPros on Flickr. Yes, it exists. Look it up.).
  2. Get a hobby and schedule time to relax doing it. I gor burnt out sitting in front of my computer all the time - and plain bored! Having something else to do has given me a reason to pull myself back a bit. I just learned to knit a few months ago (thanks, Lyndzi :D!) and have gotten pretty well wrapped up in that. I have a ton of projects going at once. It's creative and fun - plus I can do it while listening to podcasts or waiting in line somewhere (I even do it when I go on walks, shh!).
  3. Stop neglecting your family and friends IRL. My husband and I get poked at by other people a lot for talking so much to each other online. We sit in our respective offices and chat while working. Boone and I have started a "no laptop/cell phone" rule on specific nights so we can spend time with each other playing board games (Carcasonne, anyone?) and watching movies (we are finishing up the Indiana Jones series currently). We feel like we are getting more quality time with one another while spending the same amount of time.

    When I cowork with friends I notice we sometimes IM more than we talk out loud while we are there. It's nice because you can respond in your own time, so it is less distracting, but is breaking down the way we should be communicating when we are together. We are friends because of the fun we have together, the things we learn from one another, and the uniqueness of our personalities - all of which don't shine through nearly enough over google talk.

  4. Stop stressing! Spending so much time online made me more and more unproductive. I chatted more. Watched more useless videos. Scanned more sites. I stopped keeping up on industry news and completing projects as quickly as I should. I felt my anxiety level rise when I was offline at the same time that my apathy level seemed to rise when I was online. By understanding that I am only allotted so much time online to play *and* work, I see more value in that time. The sooner I get what I need to done, the more time I have to play. And just watch those anxiety levels fall!

What do you do to minimize your time spent in front of your computer while maximizing your productivity online?

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Socially smothered

26 Feb 2008
Posted by Ashe

I have been struggling to keep up with the barrage of friend requests, pokes, messages, and all other manner of social networking-only emails that I can't take action on without going to the site and getting further distracted away from the act of just checking my email. I am absolutely smothered (and out of breath after that last sentence).

Don't get me wrong - I love how the internet has brought people together. I met both my husband and my best friend online, so I can't really complain - not to mention that I am making a career out of being on the internet and am continually making new friends because of it. Meeting new people and connecting is really important to me and to most people - which is how this whole social craziness got started. I just think that maybe we have gone a wee bit overboard.

The first step is admitting you have a problem

Frankly, I am ODing on social networks. I started making a list this morning of all of the social networks that I can remember having signed up for (obviously this doesn't include those I did while sleep walking or while watching an episode of Lost) - I'm sure it isn't a complete list, which tells you something. The only ones I use on a regular basis are twitter, flickr, upcoming, and last.fm; that is 4 out of a list of nearly 30. This also doesn't include sites and forums who, of course, don't have RSS feeds (or full ones, I refuse to subscribe to sites with partials because it goes against my Reader policy) that I get notifications from that I need to go and see that someone responded to my post or whatever the case may be.

I just can't keep up on these sites - by the time I get through the last site, someone has already poked me or friended me on another one. It's aggravating and kills productivity when I sit down to get through my emails.

Living as a recovering socialnetworkaholic

BarCamp time is the best and worst time of the year for me. I love the organization - getting things together and in their place, and then seeing all of the hard work pay off. I meet tons of new people who I have a lot in common with that massage the creative, crazy, tech part of my brain. And then they add me on every social network known to man the very week after. I do want to stay in contact with these people, which is why I provide all of my info on my moo cards that I give out at conferences - my email, phone number, and twitter are my preferred methods of contact.

I think people feel pressured to grow their networks on all of these sites, even if the reason they want to network with an aquaintance (vs a friend) doesn't do anything for them socially/professionally. Why do you add the people on the fringes of your social map to all of your sites? Are you hoping to grow that relationship via the network itself?

The only social network I have found that allows me to get to know people more by using it is twitter. A recent good example of that is my friend, Jason McDowell. He responded to one of my tweets about places that would deliver food in my neighborhood (he is about 6 blocks away from me) and we started talking from there. Now we meet regularly for coworking and I even roped him into Web414. I have quite a few friends who I have met in similar fashion - something that has never happened to me on Facebook or Myspace.

Evaluating your time spent versus your reward for using these services is a key part of freeing yourself from the social network trap. Most of my friends use twitter, it is easy to use (I generally respond via SMS and IM), and I have made the highest quality friends from the service; to me, the reward is much greater than the amount of work I have had to put into it.

A possible cure

These social networks all have their place, but when they are making your life more difficult, it is time to cut and run. For some people that isn't so easy, and I understand that. I, too, have a hard time turning away certain social networking things, especially when it's new and different from everything else out there.

If someone were to develop something that would tumble all the major social networking site's APIs into one app *just* for managing friends and messages, I think this would really help (I'll give you a brownie if you decide to do it). It could be something as simple as an AIR app that you loaded up once a day, allowed you to select all and accept or decline, allow you to block certain things, like facebook apps (dear lord, if I get another Zombie/Vampire/Soccer Mom request I may give up on the internet all together).

Share!

How do you deal with juggling all of your social networking profiles and messages?

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SXSWi - less than a month away!

08 Feb 2008
Posted by Ashe

I am a huge fan of tech conferences. I'll admit I get a bit giddy inside knowing the potential for meeting new geeks. Web414 was really the first place that I was able to meet new people on a regular basis and introduce them to our Borg-like geek ways. Through the various events we have been a part of - BarCampMilwaukee (1&2), BarCampMadison, and South by Southwest Interactive is a 5 day long conference focusing on gaming, design, development, programming, and how we use technology.

The rough schedule of what I plan on attending (session/panel wise) is below. I couldn't decide what to go to in some cases, so I left everything I wanted to go to on this list. If you want to meet up for breakfast/lunch/dinner/drinks or to just go to a session, let me know and we will hook up!

Mike Rohde, David Overbeck, and I will be leaving early Friday morning (you should hear all of the groaning that went along with my making *that* decision :D) and staying through Tuesday night. If you're interested in getting together during the event, let me know via twitter or the contact form and we'll arrange something.

See you in Austin!

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Yahoo to be Acquired?

01 Feb 2008
Posted by Ashe

Tech news outlets (and my twitter stream) have been aflutter about the possible Microsoft Yahoo acquisition. Some are wondering what Microsoft plans to do with the search and webapp company and others are making predictions about the downfall of Yahoo's industry changing services.

This isn't really *new* news - Microsoft has been attempting to envelope Yahoo since 2005 [source: wikipedia] and hasn't been able to break in. So I guess we'll see.

Implications of a Microsoft Acquisition

I won't say that I am the *biggest* fan of Microsoft products. They certainly have revolutionized modern software practices, but innovation seems to be on the slow (and safe) side. Vista helped them to catch up to where Apple had taken OSX, will quite a few things missing, the Zune was their answer to the iPod in a bigger, clunkier (and more cheesily buzz-worded - "squirting"? "squircle"?) package, although jumping into the gaming industry seemed to be a good move for them. Their web presence, however, has suffered and seems to continue to do so. I don't know much of anyone who uses any of their web services - Hotmail, even if it is "Live!", seems to be dated and clunky; it seems to be the Geocities (which, ironically, is a Yahoo-owned service) of times past - it had it going on at one point in time, but it's past it's prime and time to give in. Their hold on the search market is pretty slim and IE has become synonymous with a headache to designers/developers and there are some mixed feelings about the version targeting announcement that recently hit.

Google - possible competition?

Google's net worth is high and seems to only be growing by the hour. With their [so far] biggest purchase of YouTube, they all but killed off their own video service. Google's plan of attack seems to be to try and duplicate the flavor of the week and if they can't hit it, head over to the competition with their checkbook at hand. Gmail took a direct hit at Yahoo mail and Hotmail and, as far as my tech circle is concerned, Gmail easily won. That being said, what would be in it for Google? Are they ready to assimilate Yahoo's popular service into their Borg Collective?

What they have to gain and what we have to lose

If one of these deals does go through, you can pretty much expect the competition to disappear. Both Microsoft and Google have a lot to gain from the deal - their fledgling competing services can disappear and they can keep the stronger name that Yahoo has built.

Yahoo Search

Google buyout: Yahoo search disappears and Google gains their marketshare
Microsoft buyout: MSN Search disappears (does anyone use that, anyway?)

Flickr

Google buyout: Picasa's uploader replaces Flickr's currently broken one (don't even get me started on that thing), Flickr's newly added Piknik disappears and is replaced by Picasa (which is the better of the two, anyhow), we can have uniformly tagged photos both locally and on the web (cross-platform, too!), plus we still get to keep the social aspect of Flickr. The interface will probably be mucked up with Google Ads.
Microsoft buyout: I wouldn't doubt that the idea of creative commons on Flickr would disappear.

YahooMail

Google buyout: YahooMail dies a flaming death and the 15 people that use it shed a tear of joy when they realize how amazing Gmail is.
Microsoft buyout: Hotmail can be buried for good.

Upcoming

Google buyout: Upcoming gets laced into GoogleCalendar (from your calendar you will be able to add things to Upcoming and vice versa) and Gmail. See all of your Upcoming events on a GoogleMap
Microsoft buyout: Microsoft has an epiphany: someone might want to use the internet to bring people together!

Delicious

Google buyout: GoogleBookmarks dies, "add to delicious" links popup in GoogleReader, and "X number of users have delicious'd this" show up in search results - with the ability to sort results based on common tags & number of users that have it bookmarked.
Microsoft buyout: IE's bookmarks sync with your Delicious account automatically, a "add to delicious" button becomes a permanent part of the IE interface.

Yahoo IM

Google buyout: Google enable yahoo chat via Gtalk (just like AIM).
Microsoft buyout: MSNMessenger is never heard of again. No more MSN connectivity issues!

Yahoo Maps

Google buyout: GoogleMaps begins supporting all of our crazy Wisconsin addresses (like: W67N250 Evergreen Blvd), like YahooMaps already does.
Microsoft buyout: ?

Yelp

Google Buyout: Yelp results are put into searches (ie: restaurant 53212) and are added onto GoogleMaps, they improve the service adding hours of operation, pricing ($=$5, $$=$10 ...), etc
Microsoft Buyout: adds paid advertisements before the actual results

YahooNext

Google buyout: Google offers it's employees gold plated laptops to keep their little worker bee noses to the grindstone to pump out some amazing apps.
Microsoft buyout: Microsoft begins to understand the word "innovation" and gets some impressive projects to add to their directory of boringitude, Microsoft Live Ideas (with such amazing apps as a Calendaring system! You guys made Outlook, hello?!)

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