Dimen Designs

Finally Reading Edward Tufte's Book

Posts to here to Dimen Designs have been sparse lately, partly from work and a re-evaluation of my blogging habits. Dimen Designs isn't dying but microblogging via Twitter and my An Expat in Lonon blog via Tumblr have taken over (http://anExpatInLondon.tumblr.com).

Regardless a few thoughts with sharing as I've been sick, uninspired, and diverting my energies to reading, which is a close substitute to not creating something yourself. Finished reading Neil Stephenson's 'Anathem' today and started Edward Tufte's seminal work, 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.' Tufte is a Yale professor who is famous for, among other things, being one of the earliest to decry that PowerPoint makes us stupid.

Here are his important takeaways, by chapter, as I'm 2/3 of the way through so far:

Graphical Excellence

1. It is the well designed presentation of of interesting data
2. Excellence consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, & efficiency
3. It gives the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with lest ink in the smallest space
4. Requires always telling the truth about the data

Ask yourself, how often does information or data get communicated, whether in PowerPoint, Keynote or in regular presentations, that meets the standards above for Graphical Excellence?

From personal experience, maybe 10-15% of the time. Data and information presented clearly and powerfully is how knowledge and insight is generated and remembered. More Tufte conclusions coming this week.

Why Can't I Easily Widgitize My Reading List?

  SynCh Adaptors 
  Originally uploaded by Ross Burton.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, which is why I haven’t posted as much lately. No excuses so why not merge the two and write about my reading list.

The problems is that I can’t easily use my Amazon wishlist on this blog to show you what I've been reading.

I can send people that link above and they can see my wishlist but I want a widget that displays my wishlist on my blog without having to navigate to Amazon. More than anything, I want a visual representation of those books, which is a lot faster and easier for people to grasp instead of a simple text list.

While I have a few of recent books in the left-side bar of this blog, I have to manually update that via Amazon and my Typepad typelists. It means going into the code and updating, which is a pain. But on Facebook, Shelfari takes care of this for me. I simply add the books I’ve read and then have an easy widget displaying my books. Amazon, why can’t you do that?

Amazon does have widgets but it’s not a simple click/export from my wishlist page, I have to go to my Associates profile, log in again, and choose the widget there. Shelfari wins this battle for simplicity and ease of use but there’s still one stumbling block: Shelfari on Facebook is closed.

I can’t export that Shelfari widget to my blog, it’s locked into the Facebook world. So I still do have a solution to a simple question, how can I use a widegt to display my books on my blog?

The solution?

Spending 10 minutes copy/pasting and ALT+TABing between browser tabs to synch my Amazon Wishlist and my newly created Shelfari account. Note, that’s my new Shelfari account via their website, not my Shelfari account/page via Facebook. Can I sync my Facebook Shelfari account with my non-Facebook Shelfari account? I don’t know but it’s not obvious (and it should be- that's the problem).

Here’s the result of that work, a widget that visually displays my recent and plan to read books:

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

In conclusion, here are my takeaways and remaining questions:

• Amazon- have a one-click feature for widigitizing your wishlist or reading list. You patented the one-click purchase feature (which is IMHO completely ridiculous), why can’t I make widgets with one click?


• Shelfari- can I synch my Facebook widget list with my non-Facebook widget list?


• Facebook apps are still closed to the outside world, creating redundancies for anyone trying to synch their multiple online presences or social networks.


• There’s money to be made in reducing redundancies and improving synchronization between online profiles and social networks. Hopefully OpenSocial or maybe even OpenID are addressing this exact problem. Jason and Mahalo are even addressing this challenge/opportunity by allowing people to view all of their social networks from one page.

Is Anonymity Killing the Internet? Is the Internet Killing Culture?

Andrew Keen, you’re on my radar because of two different sources: your quote in a TIME article on online anonymity and Calacanis’ Twitter post recommending your recent Authors@Google presentation.

If Jason is recommending that everyone in Web2.0 see your presentation at Google, then it sounds like I better know about what you’re saying.

I scanned the TIME article while at the gym last week and ripped out the page primarily because I disagreed with the authors’ conclusion that there aren’t many forums where the need to exchange information anonymously is not that compelling and that “if we are to save the internet, we need to confront the curse of anonymonity.”

Maybe it’s because I listen to 2600 or have a libertarian bent on freedom of speech and on regulating the internet, but I don’t think anonymity is going to kill the internet. But the subtitle to Keen’s book is how the internet is killing culture.

Hear Keen’s recent interview on KCRW’s To the Point where he says that free has serious repercussions: you get what you pay for. "The big crisis is for the content creators" because Google and YouTube are the ones making all the money from ad revenues that wrap around all this user generated content.

Perhaps the real dinger from this interview is Keen’s comment that bloggers don’t read or don’t like the printed medium because they expect everything for free. Perhaps hyperbole but I can’t believe he would say bloggers don’t like to read books.

And this is the part that Jason will love, Keen’s biggest complaint or concern with Wikipedia or Digg relates to the anonymity, that rather than a crowd contributing information it’s really just a small group of activists. Xeni counters that these sites are in their first iterations and that these sites are democractic, even if some voices naturally rise to the top.

I’m starting a fishing trip vacation for the rest of this week and next week so I picked up Keen’s book and will hopefully finish it and have a review to post later.

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Now playing: [email protected] - The Media Project #843
via FoxyTunes   

Woz at Politics and Prose

  woz11 
  Originally uploaded by easement.

The Woz spoke at Politics and Prose two weeks ago to promote his new book, iWoz, and since this was the night before leaving for Thanksgiving on Nantucket with my cousins, I haven’t had a chance to post about the event.

I’ve heard Woz before thanks to the 2600 crew interviewing him and knew some of his history, mostly the hacking (blue boxes and phone phreaking) and pranking stories, so to hear him describe his childhood and early computing work was fascinating. He likes to have fun and he’s passionate about what he preaches, whether it was about playing pranks or about how technology can help change the world. He was humble and gave great pointers about how to make do with less (not having money or access to all of the newest computer chips, he studied electronics manuals and self-taught himself chip design by drawing out everything- because he couldn’t afford the physical parts to actually build the designs).

What did I learn?
Woz pursued activities that he was passionate about and didn’t worry about if other people recognized the value: designing electronics on paper, while still in high school, was what he liked to do even though no one else would understand it or appreciate it. He used scarce resources to his advantage by creating the most efficient systems possible, reducing chips and saving power whenever possible. Here's a video from an earlier Woz book tour stop, with Guy Kawasaki interviewing him.

Use your limitations or scarce resources to your advantage because they can make your designs, products, or services more efficient and beautiful than if you had everything at your fingertips. See Jason Fried's "Small is Beautiful" presentation for more details.

Carr's Reaction to Benkler

From Carr's post on Benkler and Calacanis, I wanted to point out this small section:

The invention of the radio - the original "wireless" technology - spurred the creation of a vast network of amateur broadcasters, but that nonprofessional network was soon displaced by a smaller set of commercial radio stations that were better able to fulfill the desires of the listening public.

I quoted the section above because it's a discussion that I posted on earlier, whether the commercial media really delivers content that the mass audience really wants. I don't think it does, as Benkler asserts, so I disagree with Carr's notion that that commercial radio stations were better at fulfilling the people's desires.

Carr does good analysis as Calacanis noted recently but it doesn't mean he's perfect. This is just one part of Carr's post, which is well-thought out, so I don't think I'm joining the blog herd that so quickly jumps on people's mistakes. Remember what blogging is about (i.e. read Scoble and Israel's Naked Conversations), it doesn't need to be perfect but it should be coniserdate and self-correcting. The Gillmor Gang's 7/17 podcast, with Calcanis himself, addresses the flaming bandwagon that it so prevelant in the blogosphere these days.

I wanted to point that section of Carr's post because it address a question that I'm particularly interested in and because there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding the topic of mass media serving the public good. You can disagree with people and point it out without disparaging the person or their otherwise great post. A good lesson for the entire blogosphere.

Blogging Basics

I was talking with a good friend last night and asked about how it was going with the small golf and turf equipment company that he works for, how's business doing, etc. Not that I like to talk about work all the time but I have a general and honest interest in what people spend their time doing and how their particular industry or company works. Like I've told people, I always grabbed the sports section of the newspaper when when I was growing up-- and for the sports, which i don't usually care for, but because the business section was on the back page of the sports section.

Being a semi-active blogger and full-time blog-reader, I suggested that his company should have a blog, given that it's a fairly small, tight-knit industry where the end customers (golf course superintendents) want unbiased information and opinions before purchasing new golf and turf equipment. We went back and forth on the topic: would a blog would really work, would the customers find it credible, how would it compare to an already established bulletin board website for the industry, would putting out too much information dilute their role as the manfuacturers' reps, what would the sales guys think, etc. More importantly, he asked me how much time it would take; most importantly, I said that you have to be passionate about what you're blogging (that means posting often = a serious time dedication).

I think we agreed to both think about it some more. To that end, here's FutureLab's take on strategic blogging, perhaps a few levels of analysis above where my friend is but nonetheless good insight on how and where blogging fits into your marcomm strategy. This post might help my friends at work too.

Of course, you should have already read Scoble's book, Naked Conversations. If you haven't done that, shame on you. Go right now, drop the mouse, and read it .

Defining Great Leadership

I've posted before about Collins' book, Good to Great, (and who hasn't honestly, the thing has been on the NYT bestseller list for a long time), and this quote below led me to back to Collins' mantra of getting the right people on the bus:

Here's a definition of leadership that has stuck with me: 

Leaders are "people who leave their footprints in their areas of passion."
(HBS Working Knowledge)

Sounds very similar to the Five Patterns book I posted on a couple of weeks ago.

And I'm back from the Labor Day road trip, 1700 miles in ~28hrs. Here are a few photo highlights, or the only crappy shots that turned out from my camera phone. Remember, though, driving across Kansas isn't usually a highlight unless you stop to see the world's largest prairie dog. Maybe next time.

Currently Playing: Talib Kweli - Lonely People (on repeat w/ the Bose headphones rockin')

My Summer Reading (so far...)

I'm reading Good to Great (for the second time) and The Rise of the Creative Class right now as part of my ever-growing summer reading list. From an old Christmas present, a videotape series on being a good student and learner, I remember the speaker hammering the point that making connections between different ideas and topics that we learn about makes these concepts more concrete. Ultimately, we learn when we make connections between different subjects, having one of those "ah hah" moments when we realize that two seemingly discrete things that we've learned about are inter-related.

I experienced an "ah hah" moment with this NY Times article describing how Google's secret weapon of hiring Ph.D.'s is the company's real competitive advantage. Google has smart people on board and that what makes them special, so what?

No, it's more than that.
       1) Google has the right people on the bus, almost exclusively pursuing Ph.D.'s (a concept from Good to Great) and
       2) Google understands that highly intelligent and creative people like to associate with one another (a concept from The Rise of the Creative Class).

1. "WORKING in Google's favor is its practice of putting new Ph.D.'s to work immediately in the exact areas where they have been trained - in systems, architecture and artificial intelligence. Google, the company, may falter, but Google, the human resources experiment, is unlikely to be the cause."
2. "What trumps all else is Google's willingness to organize the entire company around the insight that top talent likes to work with other top talent, tackling interesting problems of their own choice."

I didn't want to jump on the Google-is-God-Is-Invincible-Is-Solving-World-Peace bandwagon, but it seems like the company is exhibiting concepts from both books, concepts that seem greatly interconnected (getting the right people on the bus & creative people like to associate together in their work/personal lives). Going out on a ledge to predict the future, unbounded success at Google would be premature but the seeds of its potential greatness are present. Will the company maintain it focus and dedication to its core ideology while also evolving in the marketplace? Could Google become the next H-P, which had two great pioneering business leaders who redefined corporate success? Time will tell.