For various reasons, I had ignored my instincts in taking this job for many of the reasons I’ve just mentioned: the economy sucks. I had been laid off about a year and a half ago, and had been working freelance; parts of me were unhappy with the instability. So when I was aggressively recruited by a certain company in DC, I eventually succumbed to the hard sell and took the job. The salary ended up being somewhat less than I had hoped for, the benefits insignificant, but it was steady W-2 employment with paid vacation and a paycheck every two weeks instead of Net-whenever. So who was I to complain?

It’s been 4 months since I started. And it’s grown steadily more like freelance, only without the benefits of freelance. I’ve worked 10, 12, 14, and even 16 hour days, 6 at a time. While I’ve done this as a freelancer, there was always a much higher reward; instead, there was just another unreachable goal laid before me with insufficient tools and emails from co-workers doing the “weekend grind” on their projects intended to inspire me as my family life slipped into oblivion.

After a particularly frustrating day last week, I did some math, and realized that on an hourly basis, I had made more in my first job out of the Navy in 1990.

I realize that my frustration is born of my self-reliant nature, thanks to years of freelancing and telecommuting. I have become entrepreneurial, which inherently makes me a bad employee for companies who treat employment traditionally (“do what you’re told, as you’re told, for what we pay you and be happy about it”). If I don’t have skin in the game, a stake in the success that goes beyond a paycheck, then the salary quickly feels more like a leash than a wage. I could see the flaws in the system, but the boss knows how he wants things. I understand the business model of the company in detail, and rather than being given room to expand on it I am constrained by it. I understand what it was about me that just did not fit, and had no way to apply my talents in ways that would fix that.

Then there’s the difference between the job market and the freelance market. I am highly aware of what I am worth on the market, and of what the best use of my skills is; I track the value of my words like some track their company’s stock. I know what my knowledge is worth. While others in this economy cling to their jobs like a liferaft, I began to see mine for what it was: an anchor pulling me down.

So, I am re-entering the world of self-employment in one of the most uncertain economic times in decades. And I am smiling, because I am in control of my destiny.

1. A community starts to be created around some new site or service. Early adopters bring in their friends, and theree is a flurry of initial creativity.
2. The community  is “discovered” by a (tastemaker/early adopter/alpha blogger). The (site/app/service) is hailed as the “next big thing” by that (tastemaker/early adopter/alpha blogger). Expectations are inflated, often with the aid of the company that has launched the (site/app/service).
3. The hype bubble attracts large numbers of additional users, whose expectations are colored by the hype.  Many of them have no idea why they’re there, other than it’s cool.
4. The (site/app/service) loses its shiny newness, strains under additional use, changes to accomodate additional use, and/or fails to live up to the inflated expectations, dissapointing the (tastemaker/early adopter/alpha blogger), who then declares the (site/app/service)is (doomed/not good/not as good as the latest thing that came out).
5. Early adopters decide that it’s time to find something else to do with their time.  Only a few “old-timers” hang on, mostly for the sake of complaining about how good the community was before all these “newbies” showed up.
6. A newer, shinier place is found, and community is created around it, and the cycle starts again.

Something like this pattern is  currently playing out with Quora, a Q&A crowdsourcing site.  I recently introduced it to consumer readers on TechGoesStrong as the first salvo in a series on the whole genre of Q&A sites, which are legion. Unlike sites like Mahalo and Answers.com, anybody can answer a question on Quora (much like Yahoo! Answers (which is notorious for its spam) and Facebook Questions).

But unlike Yahoo! Answers and Facebook Questions, Quora’s answerers have been, at least initially, pretty high-caliber people who actually know what they’re talking about. Mostly. And Quora accounts are tied to Facebook and Twitter accounts, so there’s an extra social fabric to things. It’s sort of like a cooler, smarter Facebook Questions…started by two guys who left Facebook.

Anyway, Quora got heavy buzz early from alpha blogger Robert Scoble. He called it “the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years.”  And, lo, Quora saw a flood of new users pouring in.

Then, recently, Scoble reversed his assessment of Quora:

Turns out I was totally wrong. It’s a horrid service for blogging, where you want to put some personality into answers. It’s just fine for a QA site, but we already have lots of those and, in fact, the competitors in this space are starting to react. Mahalo just released a new version that has been getting lots of praise and at DLD I met the CEO of Answers.com and he said to expect a major update from his service (which has 1000x more users). Stack Exchange is growing faster than Quora and has many many times more questions and answers, plus I’ve found the answers are broader in reach, and deeper in quality (especially for programmers).

Also, he noted, people were getting “pissed” that moderators were mucking around with their stuff, and that people were lowering the importance of their answers to questions by voting them down or marking them as “not helpful”.

In this case, however, the usual hype/diss cycle took a different turn. As David Chen details in his post, The Ridiculous Takedown of Robert Scoble, the rabid pack of technorati turned not on Quora, but on Scoble, who was forced to back down from his less glowing assessment.  Another alpha blogger, Michael Arrington,castigated Scoble for “Scobleizing” Quora (in the original meaning of the term “Scobleized,” as anyone who ever attended a conference Scoble worked on in the late ’90s and early 00?s would use it):

“It’s a horrid service for blogging,” says Scoble. Yup. I agree. Quora isn’t a very good place for blogging. Because other people can edit or remove your stuff. It’s the sort of place where you have to behave yourself if you want to be heard. That’s exactly not blogging. The thing is, most of us have always known that. Quora is ostensibly a Q&A site. But that’s like saying a car is a device for burning gasoline.Or, in Robert’s case, he’s mad that his car won’t cook him dinner.

Touché, Mr. Arrington.  Scoble had a specific vision of what he thought Quora was, and then it didn’t work that way, and he lost his enthusiasm.  His misconception of how he could use Quora (primarily to extend his own personal brand) led to his dissatisfaction. Arrington is right.

However, one person’s “crowdsourcing” approach to make “a better Wikipedia”, as Arrington puts it, is another person’s “mob rule”.  A group with an agenda can, acting in concert, manipulate which questions get promoted to the top and which get buried…much like what used to happen on Digg. Remember Digg?

The problem with any community that depends on the kindness of the crowd is that the people who make the most noise generally end up having the least to contribute.  Instead of the “network effect”, you get the “unruly mob effect” — the value of the conversations happening in the community is diluted, and the interesting and useful content is drowned out by the noise of the crowd.

So…Scoble is right, too.  Sort of.

I’m not a big del.icio.us user.  Back when I worked with a certain Gillmor, he raved something about del.icio.us and the “attention-economy” and what-not.  I found it to be interesting when combined with other social media of the time (I think we called them “blogs” back then), and it demonstrated itself to be innovative enough that it gained a few copycats along the way. But I had this other way of sharing bookmarks with friends: by posting them to my blog and tagging them.  That way, I owned the data, and it was searchable, and anyone who cared about what I thought could subscribe to my RSS feed or see it on my blog (or eventually on Facebook or Twitter). And I had permalinks and all that jazz. Oh, and I could do that for free with several blog platforms. But that wasn’t playing in the attention-stream, I was told.  I guess I have attention deficit disorder or something.

Fast forward 10 years.  We have so many cloud-based social media tugging at us, wanting us to connect to friends and share that del.icio.us has long been lost to most people in the din of Facebook this and Twitter that.   Del.icio.us has evolved a little, but other services like StumbleUpon and Reddit.  And, while some brave pioneers have hung around, the fickle masses have wandered on to other things.

No wonder Yahoo has gotten bored with del.icio.us and has labeled it “sunset”.   It’s that attention thing again, or a lack of it–people have stopped paying attention to what people pay attention to on del.icio.us and would now rather pay attention to what their friends are doing in Farmville.  And since  del.ico.us  lives at the whim of a provider, with no terms of service and no export tool other than code-scraping, there’s the potential for all the attention that’s been spent on curating del.icio.us — curating, the latest buzzword for collecting links –there’s the potential that it’s all been in vain, for naught, and bound for the bit bucket in the cloud.

Of course, that’s the whole problem with magical cloud services, anyway. There may be terms of service out there, but there is not a whole lot that looks like a binding contract between cloud provider and user.  I could wake up tomorrow and find that Yahoo has lost interest in Flickr, and all my photos from the last 5 years have evaporated into so many purged pixels with no contractual recourse than, say, a refund on what’s left of my annual pro fee.  Google could turn off my mail. Facebook could declare me dead and purge my page. Like the Maryland Lottery, it could happen to you.

Do I have your attention?

At least providers like WordPress let me back up and export my site, and I have the code to run the blog someplace else, where I own (or at least lease) the server. But if the cloud is going to be both a metaphor for where applications live and a description of the substantiveness of legal protection that we have as users of the thing from having our digital works exist or not at the whims of questionable business models, then we need to have a way to own our data and move it and replicate it to cover our pixilated assets.

Wikileaks adds new focus to that — it is a model of what data portability should be.  Government siezes your URL because you pissed them off? No problem! The Bolivians will gladly give you a domain, and you can mirror–because YOU own the data, and can move it or duplicate it at will.  Sure, it costs something — money, in WikiLeaks’ case, to pay for hosting and domains and lawyers to fight extradition. In your case, it might cost sharing some of your data, and maybe your…attention.  To advertisements, or to other people’s sites, or whatever.

We pay sites like Facebook with our attention and our data. Mark Z. and his crew keep our attention with new features, and extract value from our data and our ad views to pay the rent.  We should have the ability to take our social network data and replicate it elsewhere, both while we’re using Facebook and when we leave, because it’s part of our identity.  There’s phone number portability by law… why not data portability?

But I’ve been going out of my fucking mind.

My current company is at least geographically relatively close, compared to previous employers — a 75-mile drive, an hour-and-a-half commute off peak. I spend most Mondays in the office just so people know I exist. It’s certainly less of a grind than my last corporate gig, where I spent nearly every other week flying to New England, and the folks at the office park Sheraton knew me by name. That job drove me to the edge, to dark places I never want to go again, with the lost hours in airports, on Southwest, on the 128 to Needham, in a bad hotel restaurant, in cubeland trying to figure out why things were so fucked and what it was exactly I was supposed to be doing since nobody knew I existed even when I was there.

But I digress.

There is a great deal of what I do that is best done in isolation, with no interruptions. I find that I write best in the dark hours, when the house is quiet, and there are no interruptions– or at least that’s when I am *able* to write. But the inspiration for writing has to come from a more social world, and my brain needs other people to engage it sometimes.

That became clear to me when I stood up and guided a session at the recent SocialDevCampEast here in Baltimore, and then participated in several more. Part of it is ego, and part of it is just plain human need — I like the feedback that comes with gettting up and talking and thinking on my feet, and I like talking about things I’m passionate about. As solitary as I am most of the time, I am a social animal, and given my usual isolation, I find that I need approval and acceptance all the more so when I get the opportunity.

In other words, I’m a needy, egotistical serial loner. Quite the personality profile.

But, as it turns out, a lot of other very smart people are also needy, egotistical serial loners looking to be more social. One of the conversations at SocialDevCampEast was about co-working.

Dave Troy, who I used to occasionally co-guest with on the Marc Steiner Show (on what was then WJHU, along with Eric Monti) , is leading ab effort to bring co-working in the style of Philadelphia’s Indy Hall to Baltimore. Co-working, for the uninitiated, is a social approach to independent info-working, providing the professional and creative benefits of networking and idea bouncing for those who might itherwise spend the day talking to their cat.

So far, the Beehive group has been meeting at Blue House, a Fells Point coffee shop, and doing Tuesday and Thursday “jellies”-sessions where people loosely show up and work in each other’s company and leech off the establishment’s wifi. But plans are in the works for an actual shared space in Canton.

I, unfortunately, have yet to get to a jelly. But I think I’ll be trying to frequent the shared space when it opens, being as it beats driving to Falls Church for a day in the office.

Government, especially local and state, loves the word free. And Google’s geospatial and other data standards have made them even more dear to them, since local government data has been locked up in GIS and other databases that would cost millions to integrate independently.

Also, it’ll make the transition to googlement that much easier when the googleplex takes over the world.

When you just got a nice, shiny, black Video iPod for Christmas, and have a house with no less than five functional computers in it (plus an ailing Titanium PowerBook), and find yourself trying to figure out how to squeeze a preorder for a MacBook Pro into your budget.

Sure, three of the computers in my house were bought by my employer. Sure, P.’s iBook isn’t nearly as fast as the new Intel Duo-based systems will be. (And, btw, I remember the last time Apple did something with the name, “Duo” – it wasn’t pretty. I had to pry mine out of its dock once when the engaging motor failed in the locked position.) Still, as someone with more computing resources on each floor of his house than it took to support all of the Apollo missions combined, I find it disconcerting that I am drooling over computerporn again.

Maybe that’s why Apple’s stock price is doing so well.

It’s less a pure blog and more of a mash-up of blog and aggregation portal. I’m using XSL transformations and RSS feeds to create a topical site that combines a regular blogger with all of the “traditional” editorial coverage we do on a topic. And, much to my chagrin, it’s all based on .NET.

One down, nine to go. This month.

Today, we look at New Orleans post-Katrina, at the arguments over funding, at the ongoing war in Iraq, and we say:”What the hell? Government can’t do anything right. They just let the status quo roll while people are dying and the crap gets deeper, and they keep giving the money to allegedly fix everything to their friends. But if you want to get anything really done, the government is irrelevant at best, and a hindrance at worst. People have to get together and fix things on their own, because we aren’t getting any help from those idiots.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Well, now someone has taken the whole thing to a new level. This Spartan Life is a talk show “filmed live” on XBox Live in Halo 2. It introduces a whole new problem to the talk show format–how do you carry on an intelligent conversation with a guest while people who have no idea what you’re doing are trying to kill you?

They even have Solid Gold Elite Dancers, and a DJ playing a soundtrack of 8-bit music on a GameBoy. It’s interesting and funny–and the video blog is hilarious.

Carton has started writing a weekly column for my day job. Considering he’s now Dean of Philadelphia U.’s School of Design and Media, it was kind of strange on the surface that MICA would ask him to come speak–it almost seemed like GM having Lee Iacocca come speak at a Chevy product launch.
But I was also there to network, and to find out about MICA’s graphic/digital design programs. Plus, it gave me a chance to check out the new Brown Center at MICA, the concrete and glass monster on Mount Royal that’s most famous here in Baltimore for catching a bullet shortly after it opened. And besides, I wanted to steal some ideas from Carton.
And here’s the idea I’m stealing today — to succeed with a product, in bits or atoms, you need to delight.

Here’s the context. After a whirlwind tour through the last 20 years of digital convergence and its impact on culture — and on the amount of available attention people have — Carton talked about how important design has become to the success of a product. Products (be they physical or information-based) succeed because of the total experience people have with them, and much of that experience is a result of design.

The Delight factor is what seperates the iPods, BMWs, Mini Coopers, Muvicos, Googles and such from the rest. People overlook the specs if something engages them in a way that goes beyond just the function of the product.

It’s a dangerous word, “delight.” When I hear managers talk about “delighting the customer”, it usually comes two seconds before they spew out the most idiotic drivel I’ve heard in that particular fiscal quarter. The word itself has lost most of its meaning in daily usage; people just don’t say, “Whoa, dude, this thing delights me.” Typically, it’s used in a sycophantic greeting (“Delighted to meet you!”) or ironically (“I’d be delighted to take that back to the kitchen for you, sir”).

I have a hard time working up to delight. Sure, I covet some of the things that hit the “delight” button hard, like the Mini Cooper, the latest PowerBooks, and so on. But creating a lasting sense of wonder about anything is pretty fucking hard to do. The butterfly on this blog’s header landed next to me on a broken asphalt parking lot…that delighted me, in that moment. Doing stuff with my kids delights me. It’s a real stretch to say that any brand of anything can come close to that level of emotional connection.

And really, that’s the challenge people trying to hack our emotional responses for a buck face these days. Everything has become experiential–everybody is trying to find some way to connect in a scripted, contrived way with the product-consuming public that you really have to do a good job of faking originality to get anyone interested anymore. Everything is derivative of derivative things. To “delight”, you basically have to:

• be original
• be “authentic”
• be inclusive
• not suck

Baltimore has plenty of places that pull that off for me. The fine folks at Atomic Books know how to pull off the experience for their market niche (Yo, Benn and Rachel! And congrats on the Emily Flake book making the Must List in Entertainment Weekly, by the by). The Karzai family has experience nailed at B and Tapas Teatro. WTMD has somehow managed to steal my iPod playlist and make it their programming.

The other key piece of what Sean Carton said is that eventually, the technology or medium used to deliver whatever connection you’re trying to make with people is irrelavant. It’s about making people feel like they belong within the world that the product/website/experience reflects. A cool, makes-you-want-to-come-back web site isn’t just about the graphics, the beveling, the font choices, or demonstrating mad CSS skillz–it’s dependent upon creating a connection with the audience. The content needs to speak to people at a whole level beyond just passing along information.

I look at the stuff my company does. Does it “delight”? I don’t think so. How do you “delight” IT people, corporate executives, etc. with a tech website? It’s hard enough to just suck less, let alone not suck.

But for those of us who only fall into the first categories, podcasting may carry a little too much of a footprint. If you haven’t mastered GarageBand or some other multitrack editing tool (or don’t own one), creating polished podcasts may be difficult.

For those who want all of the advantages of podcasting without the audio, I’m taking blogging to the next level in inaccessibility and security: Papercasting. Using a paper-based logging device (a notebook) with a Fischer Space Pen, I record up-to-the minute notes on the day’s events. Then I scan the page for the day and upload it–if you don’t have a scanner, a digital camera may do the trick if set for the appropriate image quality and focal point.

Here’s my papercasting plog (paper weblog).

Next, I have to figure out how to do a fax gateway so I can moblog from Kinko’s.

If you want to see a sample plog entry, click below.

Publish was once the magazine for people who used computers for graphic design and publishing. But it fell on hard times, and now it’s just a website of questionable utility.

So, I’m looking for people who are power users of graphic design, page layout and web design tools to help me make Publish better again. And knowing how many people there are like that in Baltimore (and who are bloggers in Baltimore, for that matter), I figured I’d start off by announcing that fact here. Comment here if you’re interested in finding out more.

I have now been working at home for over 10 years. Now, for two of those, I was spending a week of every month in the company office (in Palo Alto), so it was really only 3/4 working at home, and 1/4 living at the Palo Alto Sheraton from July of 1999 to August of 2001. But still.

I started working from home under less than ideal conditions. I was in the middle of a divorce, living in a one-bedroom apartment and sleeping on a broken-down sofa bed (shared with my two kids three days a week at that time) when I was offered a gig with a national technology magazine. The chance to make something approaching what was at the time real money to me, and ditch the hellish commute to Silver Springs every day from midtown Baltimore, was pretty appealing. There was only one problem: I was going to be running a review lab out of my one-bedroom apartment.

I got a bed, got bunkbeds for my two- and five-year old sons, and got my lease transferred to a basement two-bedroom apartment. The living room became my office, and the “master” bedroom became the living room/bedroom. I only met Paula because I put a personal ad in CityPaper; she affectionaly refers to the dwelling she found me in as “The Pit.”

Then I ended up having the kids full-time, and the rest is social studies.

Working from home dramatically reduces the opportunities for interaction with other humans. Mine is mostly with co-workers over the phone or by IM, or in person with other parents and the teachers at my kids’ schools. I used video conferencing for a while, but then I realized that people I worked with could actually see how pathetic my office looked, so I stopped doing that .

Dressing for work is important. Especially if you take deliveries from FedEx and UPS as much as I do. It’ s bad form to sign for a package after 11:00 am in your…er…sleepwear.

Business trips take on new meaning–they become almost like vacations. The boundaries between the domestic and the professional dissolve…there’s no commute home to clear your head of the BS of the day, so your spouse and family get you back still fully enraged. And there’s the lack of actual physical activity.

But other than that, it’s great.

Considering that they weren't even talking about ancient Egypt in the class–the teacher cribbed all of the projects from the woman she replaced, and hasn't modified any of them to match the current curriulum–this was a pretty stupid, makework project. So I had Jonah draw all of the heiroglyphs for the message he wanted to use (the first verse of “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”), and then scanned them into Adobe Photoshop to lay them out with their meanings. Then I printed off his code onto a piece of red construction paper, as the directions called for, and printed larger versions of the heiroglyphs themselves. He cut, pasted and colored the large heiroglyphs onto a poster board.

Time to complete this logistical challenge: two and a half hours.

Today, after dropping Jonah off at school, I came home and drew my own heiroglyph to show what I thought of his teacher:


Then I uploaded it to Cafe Press and made a T-shirt out of it. Maybe I'll wear it to the next parent-teacher conference.