Do you know what your IT manager's mother's maiden name is? No? Well, you may want to find out.

You have to trust the people you work with, and your IT staff requires even more trust. Like it or not, if you have an email server and a server administrator, your company secrets are in their hands. Unless, of course, you resort to government-esque tactics such as never using email. As long as your business interests are legitimate, you don't need to resort to such paranoia. Hire good people and trust that they're going to be worthy of the faith you put in them. You do want to make sure, however, that another person in the organization has access as well.

As far as contract work goes, you might want to include a password clause in your contracts. Just a simple statement that says at the conclusion of their work for you they will provide you with administrator passwords to all of the systems they install. Nothing terribly oppressive or threatening, just a little, 'when you're done, can you make sure and leave us the keys?' Better to ask up front rather than after the work is complete, you've paid for it and you have no access.

I saw part of the title to an article, "lets blind surf" and I thought of two things that had nothing to do with the internet. The first, being a good California boy, was the Beach Boys:


The second was that in all my time growing up at the beach I had never seen any blind surfers, while I had seen plenty of blind skiers.
As a kid, I had always admired the heck out of people who were willing to fling themselves down a mountain, around trees and other skiers without being able to see any of it, but I could never imagine what it was like until a few years ago when I was skiing above the treeline in whiteout conditions. Not completely blind but still very disconcerting.

This article, however, had nothing to do with sports. It has to do with internet access on the go. The blind can get around the internet via screen readers, but this software has to be installed on the users computer in order to be used. But what about when you sit down to use a computer that's not your own? WebAnywhere is a step in the right direction.



Now we just need to get web developers to do more to make their pages accessible. It's not easy. I was at a screen reading demonstration at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and they had a screen reader read a few popular web sites. It was an eye-opening experience, no pun intended. Of the four or so sites that were read, the audience could only figure out what one of them was, the New York Times. One of the things that became obvious is that the better your site navigation is for screen readers, the better your site navigation is for everyone.

It's hard to adapt, and it's hard to step back sometimes and develop products, on the web or otherwise, while keeping accessibility in mind. It's not any harder than skiing blind though, so it's time to stop making excuses.

I've always had a mild aversion to APIs. My early beginnings on the web taught me that sharing data was bad. Even between your own servers. That, and I've always had a hard time remembering what the A stood for. PI, that's easy, Programming Interface. Application, that's the hard part to remember. Applications are something that run on a desktop. A Web App is something else entirely. It's an Application Programming Interface.

I went to the Google I|O conference last week, and my mind was changed. Well, not so much changed as it was put at ease. APIs can be your friend! And they're not anywhere near as intimidating as they seem from a distance. Oh, and don't believe what you were told growing up, if you came of age more than 5 or 6 years ago. Applications belong in the cloud, not on your desktop. Google makes a pretty good argument for this as well.

One example was the Data Visualization API they were showing off. With this little API, you can connect it a spreadsheet that you have stored in Google Docs, share it with a coworker or someone at another company, and then show a chart or a graph based on that data on your site. Then when either of you update the spreadsheet, the chart changes to match. The price is right, too. It's free.

If you are so inclined, browse through their other APIs and such. It's not too hard to imagine that these tools will save people time, and allow for collaboration that wasn't possible way back in the dark ages. You know, pre-2004 or so.

Just when you thought it was safe to take a look at what the OLPC project was doing putting Windows XP on their XO laptops for children, comes news that the OS originally developed for the XO, Sugar, is going to be developed as a spin-off company called Sugar Labs.

The great thing about the XO project was that it was so bold. It wasn't just going to be a cheap PC, it was going to be a PC with revolutionary energy and networking features paired with an OS with a new paradigm for user activity. In many ways, it was ditching old conventions born of another time and another environment in favor of features that were designed to make the laptop an optimal fit for its intended audience.

It seems that this was too much to ask for. Now, instead, kids will end up with an innovative laptop using an archaic and derivative OS or they'll get to use an innovative OS on some company's cheap hardware.

I guess playing nice wasn't on the curriculum.

Oh well, sometimes the best of intentions are simply too difficult to pull off. My guess is that the real problem was sales related. If too many people balk at buying a laptop with a unique OS on it, and they'll buy it with XP, you put XP on it and get it into people's hands. In doing so, maybe you compromise a little bit of your soul, but hey, your intentions are still good.

I've been a big fan of alternative operating systems, so I'll be following what happens over at Sugar Labs. I used to boot up NeXT before it became Mac OS X, and dabbled with OS/2 before and after it became OS/2 Warp. I played with Be OS too. I remember the dark days of the Mac platform when their former CEO Gil Amelio was looking into selling Macintoshes running Windows NT. That would have been the end of Apple,  but that was a different time and a different place.

Of course, it's no big surprise that the XO won't run Windows Vista. Most companies won't run Vista on their computers either. Maybe this is an opportunity for Sugar Labs? That would be a really ruel joke to play on kids though, wouldn't it? They get XP while the corporate world migrates to Sugar? Not a very nice thing to do to the children.

Quick post today. I would love to ruminate on what being able to run Windows on the OLPC/XO in addition to Sugar means for the One Laptop Per Child Program, or OLPC's split with Intel or even more fun, their new XO-2 $75 laptop, but... there are issues closer to home to cover.

I tried to bolster our site a bit last night, and ending up knocking the site offline for a little over an hour. I couldn't get it back online.I had run into the same issue before but this time, none of the previous solutions fixed the problem. And by last night, I mean midnight here on the Pacific Coast of North America.

So what do you do in the middle of the night when your site is down and won't get back up? It's rare when this happens, but it does. A good service provider will make sure that when there is an emergency, they have somebody available to take care of it for you no matter what the hour. They get paged, and they take care of you. If that somebody is on your staff, lucky you. Most small businesses don't have that person. For Social Edge, I kind of function in that role. But last night it was beyond what I could do. I sheepishly filled out the after hours form and sighed deeply as I hit submit. A little while later I received an email letting me know that the required fix was implemented.

There's still work to be done, as I need to figure out why what I did caused things to stop functioning this time and not last time. Hopefully, when I try to implement the fix again it will be smooth. Moral of the story is, when picking a service provider for mission critical systems, make sure their support is 24/7 because you never know when you're going to need it.

Evidently, Social Edge is to Chinese search engine spider bots as David Hasselhoff is to Germany. The bots love us!

In wading through our recent slowdown, we found more than one cause for our woes. Turns out there were a couple of bots from search engines in China that were crawling our site, but they were hitting inaccessible pages, leading to, well, some huge error logs among other problems.

As a result, I've temporarily turned off  the wiki and added a couple of exceptions to our robots.txt file. A little more testing and I'll turn the wiki back on, but the fact that it can be edited with a login was problematic.

If only we had been Rickrolled.

But no, we had something else happen that was worse than having an 80's British pop star appear unexpectedly on our screen. Truth be told, I always kind of liked Rick Astley. Okay, fine, I admit it. I owned the album. On cassette.

Nope, we had a different kind of surprise sprung upon us, and just like when I'm the butt of a practical joke, I feel stupid today. I hadn't kept up with all of the security updates for our software here on the Edge, and some hackers took advantage of a loophole to send traffic through our site to other sites with what we'll call a less philanthropic, more capitalistic site with fewer discussions about social entrepreneurship. No content or user data has been compromised, just our bandwidth and my pride. As regular visitors know, SocialEdge.org has been very slow for the past week, and this appears to have been a major contributing factor.

Why do people do this? In this case, the exploitive method used somehow increased SEO results of this less than respectable site by taking advantage of our more respectable nature. At the end of the day, it's the same reason that you get SPAM in your inbox telling you that you can get a cheap prescription online or that some Nigerian nobility has died and their kin wants to give you a ton of their money. Somebody clicks the link and somebody else makes money.

I'm tempted to hand out the IP addresses of the folks involved to the internet community at large and see what kind of mayhem could be brought to bear on the perpetrators, but I don't need the headache that comes with misguided retribution. Instead I'm working with their ISP to try and shut them off. I've also upgraded our software to block the exploit and have removed what never should have made it's way onto our systems. There is still some clean-up to do, so bear with us and we'll be back to full speed shortly.

This process has also revealed some other issues that we can address that will allow us to make some improvements that should result in a better, faster and more reliable Social Edge. In the end I'm going to choose to view the glass as half-full and filling up. I'd almost like to thank the hackers for helping me to make Social Edge a better site. Almost, but not quite. I'd rather have them sit and watch the same Rick Astley video over and over again for as many hours as I have wasted figuring out what they did and how to fix it.

But hey, can you blame them? We can't all have jobs with a purpose that we believe in. Some people are left to peddle their misbegotten wares via thievery and deceit.

So hang in there, and we'll do our best to make sure that Social Edge performs as well on the back end as you do on the front end. You're an amazing community filled with amazing people, and you deserve nothing less.

In 20 years, will anybody think of Waterworld when Kevin Costner's name comes up in a conversation? Or will they be more likely to reminisce about Field of Dreams or Dances with Wolves? I would guess that Waterworld will fall more and more out of the publics' conscience, as fewer and fewer people reference it.

(If you missed Waterworld - and most people did, thankfully - it was sort of an anachronistic sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, with Jet Skis and gills.)

Then again, if people are interested in finding out about horrible movies of the past, it will float right up to the top.

Getting your content and/or media out into the ether may not return immediate results, but if it's tagged well and of high quality, it will rise to the top of appropriate conversations. Seth Godin blogged about a new site called Addict-o-matic. The link he posted was a search of Acumen Fund related information, and lo & behold, there were three X-Interviews with Acument Fund Fellows on the page that came up.

Good stuff, and a whole lot more enjoyable than Waterworld.

The Economist has a special report on the rise of digital nomads. It's fascinating to think that the concept of an office in the 20th century might be on its way to becoming as quaint a notion as a 19th century factory. Yes, factories still exist and offices will too, but it may turn out to be that the dominant work space paradigm in the coming years will have more to do with bandwidth and less to do with a single physical location. Of course, much of the world may end up being denied knowing the joy that is living in a cubicle farm. Yeah, like that's a bad thing.

Sadly, most of my adult life has been spent under fluorescent lights, and the thought of cutting ties with the cat-5 cable that connects me directly to the router in the data center in the next room is something that feels vaguely uncomfortable. I know that a lot of people are doing this now, from young urban adults who grew up with the internet, to people all around the globe, for whom mobile communications have opened up a lifeline to markets that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. But what about those of us who came of age when the network was something that only existed in a closet where only the geekiest of geeks was allowed to enter? What are the chances that we'll be able to cut the cords that make us so comfortable, basking in the artificial glow?

I think we can make the adjustment, especially if you look at the benefits.

I have worked with people on different continents for years, but until recently, I had never been that person doing their work from thousands of miles away. Seeing it from the other end showed me that yes, you can be productive away from your desk in ways that you could never be behind it. You can do your work while meeting people you could never meet in your office, seeing things you would never see from a cubicle.

One of the things that was interesting to me was the notion that nomadism reinforces your existing societal ties and make your relationships with your close colleagues much tighter. You have to rely on them to keep up their end of the bargain, so the interdependency creates more trust. Makes sense. Nomadism can't work very well if you're working around the clock and your co-workers are calling in to meetings from the beach or golf course. What was confusing to me was that people are concerned that your relationships with society would suffer. I think this would be true in a strict telecommuting environment where you kept to yourself in a home office, but not if you work a good part of the time out in public. I would think that this would lead to a greater overlapping of societal spheres, and a better understanding of everyone around you rather than just those who sit closest to your desk.

The technology that makes digital nomadism such a viable option continues to evolve. Recently, Zoho announced improvements to their online spreadsheet as well as a partnership that will bring their tools to China. Google's online apps are constantly being revised. Yesterday, I was able to use one of Mac OS X's Leopard features for the first time, Back-to-My-Mac. (Ironically, I had to boot into Mac OS X Tiger in order to update my router in order to take advantage of this Leopard feature.) I can now access my home system from my laptop from any wifi connection (barring interference). Now, my whole backlog of files and useful little doodads are available to me wherever I go. This is not just insanely cool, but also insanely useful to the digital road warrior.

What other technologies are being brought to market that enhance our ability to move desk work out into the real world? I'll try and take a look around and bring some of the more interesting pieces out of the shadows over the next few weeks.

I hate giving presentations. My hands get sweaty, I get anxious, and I can hear my pulse. I know that imagining your audience naked is supposed to help relax you, but I can't do it. Since when has anybody ever been more comfortable in a room full of naked people? I can't see you naked. I don't want to see you naked.

Last week I gave a presentation - on giving presentations. Ironic, eh? I'm comfortable with the prep, I like the process of organizing the points to be made into a narrative, and enjoy creating and designing the slides themselves. Just don't make me give the presentation.

One thing that was brought to my attention  this week  is the importance of prepping your equipment for a presentation. Yes, you need to make sure that you use fonts that are available on any PC, just in case. Verdana and Trebuschet are nice, plain san-serif (no squiggles) fonts that are on every PC and Mac. If you have included sound or movies make sure that your presentation system has good speakers and that they are turned up loud enough for the back of the room to hear.

Also important if you are going to switch from your slides to anything else on your computer - say, a live demo of a web site - make sure that you have set your computer's display resolution to the same thing as the projector. Usually projectors have a top resolution of 800x600 or even 640x480, while today's laptops can have resolutions upwards of 1920x1200. Make sure you practice your demo/presentation at this lower resolution or you might find yourself demoing a web site that looks unexpectedly horrible and unwieldy at lower resolutions. You can easily change your resolution in your control panels (Windows) or System Preferences (Mac).
Last but not least, don't forget water. Always have water available, even if you don't think you need it. Getting parched in the middle of a presentation is very unpleasant, and only amplifies your anxiety. Plus, if you get a question that requires a well-framed response, you can take a second to gather your thoughts while you take a sip. A very handy prop indeed.

There's plenty of advice out there on how to be comfortable while giving a presentation from people who aren't nervous about giving them in the first place. For the most part, I find the advice distracts from doing the most important things to get you through a presentation. Be prepared, make sure your equipment is prepared, and know your stuff. If you are passionate about what you have to say, and have the knowledge and supporting evidence to back it up you should feel good about standing in front of anybody and attempting to persuade them that your ideas have merit.

If not, imagining that they're naked isn't going to change their minds.

I'm giving a presentation on presentations today. Seems a bit self-referential, especially when the gist of the material is that your presentation is not your presentation.

Powerpoint, like nuclear fission, gun powder and disco music, is not a bad thing unto itself. It's how we use Powerpoint that is the problem. We create slide sets that contain all of the information we want to impart to our audience with nary a thought as to how to go about presenting the information to them ourselves. Flip from slide to slide, let the audience read the paragraphs of text we've put in there - or better yet, read it to them - and then sit down after the last slide that says 'in summary' or 'in conclusion' and get back to doing the work at hand.

None of us are professional presenters, and many of us hate the process of getting up in front of people and talking. It makes sense that we would want Powerpoint or Keynote to take over the heavy lifting, but if you want to create something for people to read, use Word, InDesign, or Quark. If you are giving a presentation, you want to sell something - an idea, a thing, or a perception - to your audience. Maybe you just want to convince your boss that the work you are doing has a point. If you treat your presentation as a sales opportunity instead of an obligation, you're more likely to get what you want from the experience.

Something else to keep in mind is that a presentation is an opportunity to tell the audience a story. Everybody loves a story, right? Make sure yours has a beginning, a middle and an end. Take your audience from the place where they are without the marvelous things you have to share with them to the place you would take them if they were swayed by your argument.

There are some very helpful guidelines for creating slide sets, that come from the masters of this particular art form. You don't have to be Steve Jobs in order to give a good presentation, as long as you follow these simple guidelines.

Seth Godin wrote Really Bad Powerpoint (PDF) a few years ago, and shares his rules for avoiding bad Powerpoint within (paraphrased):

1. No more than 6 words per slide
2. No cheesy images (clip art, etc.)
   
3. No transitions
4. Custom sound effects are ok, but use sparingly
5. Don't hand out print-outs of your slides

If you clutter your slides with text, people will read them instead of listening to you. If you hand out the slides, people will read ahead instead of listening to you and form their own opinions before you get a chance to shape them.

Guy Kawasaki has his 10-20-30 Rule, which breaks down as follows:

1. No more than 10 slides
2. No more than 20 minutes
3. Nothing smaller than 30 pt. font

Again, don't dump it all on the slides and expect your audience to pull it apart. That's your job, not theirs.

Finally, Edward Tufte has a couple of nifty quotes on the subject (& The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint to boot):

• "There are many true statements about complex topics that are too long to fit on a Powerpoint slide."
• "Simply use Powerpoint as a slide projector rather than as an informational tool."

Another really good point that Godin makes is that you should prepare a handout to give your audience after the presentation - and inform them at the beginning that you will do so, hence no need for note taking. Your natural inclination might not be to have all eyes on you, but when you're the one making the sale, you've got to make sure they are paying attention to you.

From a design perspective, avoid the built in templates that come with Powerpoint. Everybody's seen them, and if they haven't then you're using the ones that are particularly ugly. You don't have to do anything fancy, just be consistent with your fonts, avoid clashing colors, and use high quality images. If it's jaggy, ditch it for something more pleasing. Learn how to crop/mask images as well as how to align and distribute objects. If you have two pictures side by side, make them the same size. If you learn how to do those few simple things, your presentations are going to go a whole lot better.

As for the nerves, the sweaty palms, etc. that come with presentation jitters, I can't help you there. I will tell you that it gets easier to stand in front of people talking about things you care about when they are paying attention and are interested rather than looking away and trying to figure out how much longer they have to endure you reading what's up on the screen that they already skimmed in your handout.

More Resources

• Presentation Zen

• What Might Have Been if Al Gore Had Used Powerpoint Instead of Keynote

Back in my oh so heady youth, when a company would make a presentation about setting up an online store, coding the back end of an online store, or storing product information in a database, the preferred generic, non-industry specific products that were proffered for theoretical sale were widgets, or their interchangeable counterpart, gadgets. Every once in a while a rookie salesperson would combine the two into Gidgets, and was forced to endure a flood of questions on the viability of a store that sold nothing but surf cinema paraphernalia.

Of course, a lot of what we thought we knew about the internet way back when turned out to be wrong. Gadgets and widgets aren't generic placeholders for real products you might sell, they're actual things that you can use to help market your organization. Well, actually they're virtual, not actual things. Virtually actual. Well, those quick little apps for your desktop that you think are really cool for an hour or two and then forget about after that.

The web has gotten in on this now, with Google Gadgets being the latest entry. We've been using Gydgets for ours. (No, Sally Field and Sandra Dee have nothing to do with Gydgets - as far as I know.) In both cases, you are walked through what used to be called a wizard, and you fill in various options to create your widget, gydget, gadget, flibberdygibbit thingamabob. Basic assumptions are made, and with an RSS feed and a YouTube channel of your own, you can create a blob for people to stick on other pages to promote your pages. Only, the results are varied. This is what my Google Gadget ended up looking like:



Those missing images? Ascii code that wasn't translated correctly somewhere along the line. Blech. Was it worth it to figure out where? Nope. And so, my experiment with Google Gadgets came to a close, and I put a note in the back of my head to check back on it again sometime in the future.

Or to simply make a Facebook app via Netvibes. More flexibility, more exposure.

Google Gadgets actually hung in there better than the ones I tried before finding Gydget.com. I won't bother boring you with the names of busted widget companies, and just say that the lack of flexibility on these nascent tools leaves a lot to be desired at this point. Focus on your content, and if one of these gidget-gadget-widget-thingamabob makers comes up with something useful, use it. And if, like Gydget, there's an interface to track where your flibberdygibbet is being used, you too might be dissapointed to find that there aren't that many people out there interested in promoting your stuff over theirs:



Depressingly enough, the 9 spots where the Untangled Gydget is located? Yeah, they're all me. More depressing? That makes this our most popular Gydget. The nice thing is that they're built and don't require any maintenance, so if they start taking off later, yippee! We could start a campaign in ou newsletter to promote them, and maybe then we'd see some traction, but that's not really what Social Edge is geared towards. If you're trying to get your visibility up through a word of mouth campaign via your most passionate advocates, this might be worth doing. Otherwise, your time and energy is probably better spent applying for a Google Adwords grant.

I saw a Digg headline this morning that read 6 Habits to Avoiding And Overcoming Procrastination. My immediate thought was, "I'll have to read that later." Then I remembered that I had said the same thing about my post for Untangled yesterday. And last week. Sometimes the best of intentions aren't enough to get you to get things done.

So herein I give you my helpful tech hints for each of the 6 habits to avoiding and overcoming procrastination. As a professional procrastinator, this is sort of like listening to a politician talk about how not to lie, but hey, I'm throwing the caveat in up front, so proceed at your own peril.

1. Take It One Step At A Time
I'll start with GTD, or Getting Things Done. It's not tech, per se, but a lot of tech tools have emerged to support this project management methodology, for Mac or Windows.

2. You Don't Need To "Have To," You Need To "Want To"
So, you don't want to do something, just don't do it. Hmm... How about tools that take care of things you can't stand? One of the most underused features on the Mac is Automator. Very handy for ridding yourself of repetitive tasks. Another tool that is cross-platform and will help automate the processing of media on Mac or Windows is DeBabelizer. With either of these tools, you can change a "Have to" into a "Have to, but it won't take long."

3. Brainstorm Your Way Out
A whiteboard is the best friend of the brainstorm, as long as it is easily cleaned. When you want to structure your thoughts a bit more, and share them with others, where do you turn. On a PC, you use the old stalwart Visio. It's a very solid package that leaves little to want for. Unless you happen to be on a Mac, where it doesn't run. That's where OmniGraffle Pro comes in handy. It reads and writes Viso files and is pretty handy in and of itself. Omni's other products are useful too, particularly OmniOutliner. It's simple, but I use it almost every day to manage random flotsam and jetsam snippets of text and what have you. It's great for on the fly documenting of development processes.

4. Time Yourself
For Windows. For Mac. (P.S. VersionTracker. If you need freeware/shareware for Mac or Windows, this is a great resource.)

5. Eliminate Distractions
There are word processing apps that are designed to help you focus on your writing instead of formatting and everything else you could be doing with your text in Word, Pages, StarOffice, and other kitchen sink apps. WriteRoom is available for Mac, while DarkRoom runs on Windows. Prefer a web app? Okay, you got it. Personally, I see green text on a black background and I flash back to the terminal apps of my youth. And shudder. But it might work for you. Especially if you're too young to remember what a mainframe crash was like.

Other distraction eliminators:
For Windows.
For Mac.

6. Stop Being A Perfectionist
In the spirit of step six, I'll just quit while I'm ahead and hit publish. Then again, I'll mention that if you've been meaning to set up a blog, but you haven't figured out where you want to host it, or what software to run it on, just go to Blogger and get going.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, back to work. Or, I could...

Evidently, you can't get to YouTube from China:



Some of the videos on YouTube have been deemed unsuitable for viewing by minors. Because after all, what we do to each other isn't obscene, but watching video or looking at pictures of it is. If we teach our children how horrible war is, how will we convince them to die for us in the next one?

In the last month, China has ranked number six in terms of visits to SocialEdge.org, behind the U.S., India, the UK, Canada, and Australia, with the most visits coming from Beijing. So yes, it seems that you can read Social Edge in China, but you can't watch YouTube videos, so I guess no X-Interviews. Somehow, I don't think the X-Interviews are the most important thing they're missing out on.

Last year the U.S. blocked soldiers in Iraq from YouTube and 11 other sites as well, citing bandwidth concerns. Yay freedom, woo-hoo. There's always a perfectly "legitimate" excuse available when you want to quash dissent and stifle speech, be it in Tibet, Baghdad or your living room.

Okay, so the first thing I saw when I was reading about Apple's iPhone SDK announcement was that AIM was going to be available on the iPhone. Second thing was, yes, the $100 million iFund investment arrangement - seed money for iPhone development companies. That's a lot of money for development of a new platform. The third thing was the iTunes distribution channel. As an old IT supply chain guy, this warmed my heart. Finally, a digital distribution model for software that makes sense. I've been waiting patiently for years to see this happen at the computer level. Apple skipped ahead and made it happen at the phone level. This is fun stuff, if you dig supply chains. If not, well, let's just move on.

The iPhone as currently priced and distributed is not going to be widely distributed to the areas where cell phones and microfinance are changing the way such a huge swath of the world is doing business. Unless, of course, a large portion of those unlocked iPhones are being redistributed unlocked across rural regions globally. It's possible. At any rate, in a year or two it will be the reality.

Will we see microfinance utilities/applications spring up for the iPhone? I imagine we will. Other relevant apps across the spectrum of social entrepreneurship? Yes. The two questions I have are 1) what are they going to be; and 2) who's going to build them?

So, last week I was complaining about how monitors don't fold, so nothing on the web is above the fold. This week? Our New Entrepreneurs podcast series has been picked up in iTunes, and is featured in their New Releases section on the Podcasts homepage:


Above the fold? Not that important. More important is that it is at the home page level instead of being on the Government & Organizations section or even farther down in the Non-Profits section. In this medium, we're getting the same visibility as ESPN, Gallup - and clonepod. The net isn't constrained the way paper is, it is three dimensional, hierarchical... Are social entrepreneurs going to usurp the attention of those who want sports news? Video games? Politics? Probably not. Then again, why not?

Apple, thanks for featuring us. It helps us to see that the world isn't solely focused on sports stars, teenage pop-divas and the like. There is a desire for more relevant content, and it is nice to see a venue where that rises to the top.

Week before last I wrote about how I see conventional wisdom around the non-profit sector changing, and I definitely think that is the case. There are still a lot of nuggets of "conventional wisdom" that aren't necessarily that wise. Some exist in the non-profit world alone, but most exist in the for profit world as well.

Trivially, people continue to believe - and teach - that you should put two spaces after a period. There are now adults who have never used a typewriter, because they grew up with computers and word processing software that spaces type appropriately, and yet they were still taught "two spaces" after every period. It is interesting to me that paragraph indents have disappeared on the internet, and people have adjusted quickly to that, but two spaces after a period? Might as well ask people to give up eating desserts for all the trouble it causes.

Throughout history, we have developed technological innovations with limits that have been fixed or improved upon in further iterations only to have the original, limiting implementation remain the standard bearer. The most painfully obvious one is the QWERTY keyboard layout most of us interact with on a near daily basis. Originally, it was developed to slow people down so that the keys didn't stick together. More than 100 years later, and despite better designed keyboards being available, we continue to hunt and peck our way to carpal tunnel syndrome on the older, accepted, inferior design.

One of the corporate catch phrases that has followed me around for years is "above the fold." This made sense back in the days when print was king, and getting something "above the fold" of a newspaper really was important. Monitors don't fold. They have different resolutions, so what is above the fold on one is not necessarily the same on another. A device like the iPhone throws another wrinkle into the mix. How do you place your content or your advertising "above the fold" on a device that is tiny, and varies the resolution of the page you see? And as it turns out, if you want your advertising to be effective, "above the fold" might not be all that it's cracked up to be anyway, but people cling to what they know, even when things change and what they know is irrelevant.

Eventually, conventional wisdom catches up with technology, or vice versa. It adjusts the space after a period so that it doesn't matter if you put on or two spaces there, the result is the same. Indents, a casualty of early html limitations, are poised to make a return. "Above the fold" will fall by the wayside as page rankings, click throughs and other more relevant benchmarks take precedence.

What worked yesterday, what stopped working last week, what will work tomorrow - some, all or none of it will be relevant soon. In an ever changing world, it can be hard to keep up. The most important thing is to not waste time on things that used to work instead of applying new methods to accomplish the same thing better, faster or both.

Over in the discussions section, I'm hosting an event about Tech Solutions on a Shoestring this week. After writing the intro, I got to thinking about the difference between saving time vs. saving money on technology. Sometimes, spending more money buys you more time and the investment pays off. I feel that way about Apple's Macintosh computers which are ostensibly more expensive up front, but include cost savings over the long run. I bought a new desktop at home to replace my previous one - which has been running pretty much non-stop since February of 2000. It runs fine still, it just doesn't have the juice to run Leopard/Mac OS X 10.5, so I'm turning it into a back-up file server. The extra money that I spend on Macs pays off as a result of their longer life expectancy vs. PCs.

But that's not the only reason I predominantly use Macs. I don't like to waste time fiddling with computers when I could be using them to do the tasks I bought them for in the first place. My time is too valuable to me to spend time dealing with malware, spyware and viruses the way I used to when my time was split more evenly between Windows and Macintosh. This isn't, however, a post about converting PC users over to Apple users. It's just an example of an instance where saving time is more important than saving money.

Saving time is what we really expect from technology, and all too often, we're left feeling like we're losing time to our gizmos, computers and cell phones. Some of it is the fault of quirky software or unreliable hardware, I'll give you that. Every time Adobe's update software kicks on I try to cancel it as fast as I can so that it doesn't interfere with the work I'm trying to get done. Sometimes, I catch it and stop it before it wreaks havoc on my system, sometimes it runs peacefully and uneventfully in the background and sometimes it leaves me staring at the Mac's dreaded rainbow ball of "I'm too busy to do what you're asking, please hold the line."

(In writing that last little bit, I realized that I don't have to put up with that kind of behavior, and have now turned automatic updates off. A simple solution that will save me time later on.)

How we approach technology, however, is sometimes a much bigger time killer than it needs to be. Email is the most obvious example, and there are a lot of people out there have advice on how to spend less time in your inbox. It's starting to happen with social networks too, as the college crowds that lived in FaceBook when it launched start to head out into the real world, with the real time constraints that jobs and other obligations demand.

Not that email and social networks don't have their places. Twitter, to those that don't get it, can seem like an awful waste of time. With a bit of thought, it can become an invaluable aid. If you are using a tool and aren't getting much benefit out of it, stop using it. Are you in the business of being cool? Not many of us are. Forget about trying to keep up and instead, stick with what works.

This isn't a new conundrum either. I used to deal with GANTT charts a lot. People would produce them, I would produce them, we'd deliberate over them - and I found it to be an extreme waste of time. My work was always at the tail end of the projects, and the timelines were always a waste for me to review because they would change so often before I got my hands on things that I wasted countless hours prepping to do things properly only to get handed the work two weeks late. The only date that never changed? The deadline. So I stopped paying attention to GANTT charts, freed up a whole bunch of time and was a lot more productive.

Figure out what the biggest waste of time in your day to day existence is and then eliminate it. If that means only checking email twice a day, do it. Quitting your instant messenger client? Fairly easy. Ringtones can save you time too. Assign them to the people you absolutely have to talk to in case of emergency, and then ignore the rest. I rarely answer my home phone anymore, because people that call me there usually want to sell me something, a waste of time for them and me. There's a great scene in The Accidental Tourist where the phone is ringing and nobody who lives in the house is answering it - much to the consternation of a guest who just can't comprehend not answering a ringing phone.

Be it a ringing phone, a chiming inbox or a dinging IM alert, ask yourself - am I really being productive? If the answer isn't a resounding yes, ignore it. Put that time to better use.

Is it just me, or is the conventional wisdom about what has value in the world been shifting? I was in an airport in Chicago recently where the bookstore had Muhammad Yunus' latest book, Creating a World Without Poverty, as it's most prominently featured title. This was after I had seen an article about him in the in-flight magazine on LAN Air. Then I saw him on The Colbert Report:




What does it say about us that amidst all of the clutter that qualifies as news and entertainment in our media, that a microfinance banker from Bangladesh is capturing the attention of so many?

Yesterday, Guy Kawasaki blogged about the cleverest idea he'd seen in years. The iPhone? Nope. The MacBook Air? Android? Microsoft buying Yahoo!? Zune no longer being available in brown? Nope. PlayPumps. He's also recently interviewed David Bornstein. When your mainstream business gurus start taking note of what social entrepreneurs are doing, something is definitely afoot.

Attitudes on the environment are changing too. Seth Godin blogged today about how his changing view on the environment shapes two recent consumer experiences he's had. Can this kind of thinking lead to changes in how companies package their products? Apple is touting how much they've reduced the packaging for the MacBook Air. Will other companies follow suit?

Robert Kennedy guest blogged on Google's corporate blog about ILoveMountains.org and how it uses Google Earth and Google Maps. Granted, it's good PR, but they're doing it nonetheless.

So is the conventional wisdom changing? Or will we still be dealing with these issues from the same place we are today thirty years on?