Rich Mintz

I wanted to write something tonight about Graham Dunstan’s Arts Bloggers panel at the arts conference, because of all the half-dozen sessions I attended, it’s the one I think I got the most practical use out of. And it wasn’t just the panelists — the questions that were asked, and the people who asked them, sparked a wide-ranging conversation about the craft and the value of blogging as part of brand-building and audience-building.

One of the most thoughtful people who spoke up in the session (not a panelist, just an ordinary citizen like me) was Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, who runs the Queens Council on the Arts. She is, of course, a creative and prolific blogger herself, not to mention artist, and I was blown away to discover tonight that in between making memorable comments and taking her own notes, she managed to complete four perfectly fine line drawings on her iPad in her spare time during those 90 minutes we were all in the room together. But I digress.

One of the things I think I remember Hoong Yee herself saying during the session is that good blog writing gives the reader something to react to — it has the effect of drawing the reader into a conversation that is bigger than him or her, but that also welcomes him or her to join in.

This is in contrast to, say, a newspaper op-ed, which might try to convince you of something but isn’t particularly interested in your opinion. I’m reminded of Steve Rosenbaum’s Huffington Post column on the death of the “content strategy” and of Clay Shirky’s essay “Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus” — both of which, as it happens, I read earlier today.

Each in his own way is talking about the new ecology of social content — about the irrepressible human desire not just to consume, but also to respond and to create and to share. For most of us, through most of the history of media — and I’m talking about well into my own lifetime — consumption was the only practical option most of the time. What were we going to do, start our own newspapers? (Some of us did. In elementary school, I published something called the Mintz Prints.. But, again, I digress.) Now that’s all changed, and I agree with Clay — the genie’s never going back in the bottle.

The very best social media — this applies not just to blogs, but to any media that’s meant for a participatory public — makes you feel like there’s a party going on, and you’re invited. It does so by saying so directly (“What are your thoughts on this topic?”), but also indirectly: by playing out an exchange of ideas with other blogs (e.g., as I’m doing here), by quoting and referencing the comments of “ordinary people” whom the imagined reader can relate to, by facilitating the sharing of itself through social media tools.

When an organization establishes a reputation for this kind of social media, its online audience starts to grow more quickly, as readers begin returning of their own accord (without having to be nudged by, say, an email program) to “see what’s new.” (As Graham said in the panel, it’s important when they do come back that there actually be something new for them to see. Once you set up the expectation, you do have to feed it.)

I’ll have more tomorrow about what the panelists themselves said on these important topics.

As a subquest to my endless quest for personal productivity, I’m trying to get a more efficient system in place to handle the blog queue. I honestly don’t understand how the people who blog for a living keep up with everything (although I realize that some of them, like Andrew Sullivan, do have interns and/or the occasional paid staffer to throw at the problem).

I am generally speaking an adherent of the Getting Things Done tracking philosophy (slightly modified to fit my own personality a little better). If you’re feeling reductionist, this reduces to five principles:

• Keep only one* queue of “things to be processed/evaluated,” and process it regularly (e.g., daily) and systematically, into…
• One master list of things to do, ordered by project, on which you…
• Clearly identify for each project what is the single next action you need to take;
• Review the master list on a schedule (high-level review daily, detailed review weekly) to prune it of cruft;
• When processing the queue, do right now anything that you think you can finish in less than five minutes.

*I actually have more than one queue, but I process them into a single list.

(I won’t get into the philosophy or practice behind this, which are amply explored in David Allen’s books and in a host of cultish Web sites all over the place. But I will say it feels right to me.)

I had a pretty good system going, using the spectacular open-source Taskwarrior command line app. Unfortunately, two things happened. First, my task list got way too long to handle effectively inside a terminal window; and second, I got this iPad, which has Changed Everything.

Now I’m all about the cloud — about finding ways to make my data accessible from anywhere, on any device. And so I’m afraid that a command-line app that ties me to my laptop probably isn’t the right answer anymore.

The Evernote Web site turned me on to Nozbe, a GTD implementation for Web and iPhone that has a new iPad application that launched this week. Like Evernote, all your Nozbe data syncs magically across all your devices. I haven’t had much luck with task management software, which always feels way too heavy, but this one seems a little gentler, so I’m trying it out.

I’m testing it first as a blog workflow management tool. Right now I have my blog post queue stored in about five places: in Taskwarrior, in Evernote, in Google Reader, in my WordPress drafts folders, and in my head. That’s way too many places. I tried centralizing in Evernote, but Evernote (just like Gmail) is more useful as a storehouse of heterogenous, unstructured information that’s universally available and easily searched than it is as a taxonomic tool. So we’re going to test things out in Nozbe and see what happens. So far I’m optimistic. It can’t be any worse than my current tracking tangle is.

Beginning Thursday and through the weekend, I’ll be at the Americans for the Arts Half-Century Summit in Baltimore. More about my plans here on the Blue State Digital Blog. If you’re coming, drop me a line — I’d love to meet some real-life people there from among those of you I know only on the Internet.

UNC social media researcher Fred Stutzman (glamour shot at left) this week announced the release of Anti-Social, his social media-blocking productivity software for Mac OS X.

I have friends who swear by Freedom, Fred’s previous creation (for Mac and Windows), which disconnects the Internet on your computer entirely, for whatever interval(s) you specify, so you can get work done without distractions. Anti-Social is a narrower tool, locking you out of social media sites in particular, but leaving the rest of the Internet available.

We will leave as an exercise for the reader the question of Where This All Might Lead.

John Scalzi reminds us that the failure mode of “clever” is… “asshole.” There’s no parallel channel carrying nuance when you’re communicating online, and in asynchronous communications like email it’s hard to notice and correct a misalignment on the fly. So… if you don’t know someone well, don’t overreach in your first email communication; just say what you mean.

What’s funny to me about this is that if we’re talking about face-to-face communication, this is just common sense that everybody knows. Somehow online, everything is different, and we have to relearn all those basic lessons. (And I wish I could read the email to Scalzi that set off his semi-rant.)

I made fun of Nicorette’s TV ad at 11:10, on a blog that essentially nobody reads (no offense, Mom!). At 12:46, some GlaxoSmithKline social media coordinator (I assume) followed my Twitter feed. Things sure move faster than they used to…

What will happen to privacy expectations and tort law when facial recognition becomes cheap and mainstream, and encounters the public database infrastructure?

I’m in the process of updating my blogroll in the left rail. The list of people I read most religiously (“The Best”) is already up; the lists comprising the other stuff I read consistently or intermittently (“The Very Good,” “Honorable Mention,” and “Other”) are on their way.

My workday today included 3 social obligations, and they demonstrate how porous the boundary has become between the social media world and the real one, and how naturally younger people (and I’m generously defining “younger” to include myself) move from one to the other. Consider:

I had lunch with a friend (I’ll call him “Charlemagne,” primarily because that will make him laugh when he reads this) whom I met on IRC in 1994. I did shortly thereafter meet him in real life, but over the past 15 years the overwhelming majority of our contact has been online (these days, usually via instant messenger and Facebook). In a typical 60-day period I’ll talk to him online every other day and maybe see him once.

Then I had coffee with a woman I’ll call “Cleopatra,” whom I was meeting for the first time. (There was a professional context for the meeting.) I brought along “Napoleon,” a coworker of mine whom I knew on Twitter and Facebook for a year before I met him in person.

(By way of backstory, Cleopatra and I were introduced in email by a woman — I’ll call her “Victoria” — whom I initially met after she tweeted about me behind my back and a dozen people brought the tweet to my attention. I did later meet Victoria in person, once, for two minutes in a hallway; but I’ve exchanged dozens of tweets and emails with her — and because she works in social media for an organization I support, I see evidence of her online activity constantly.)

Finally, I had dinner with my friends “William” and his wife “Mary” (not their real names). I was introduced to William online by my friend “Hatshepsut” (not her real name), whom I did know personally, years ago, but whom I last saw in real life in 2005. I see her online every day. I’ve talked to William online at least weekly for almost a year, but have only talked to him on the phone once, and never met him until tonight. William and Mary and I made special advance plans to meet for dinner while they were here visiting New York, and we had a blast.

If there’s any evidence here that participating actively in social media impairs a person’s ability to negotiate real-world social relationships, explain to me what it is. Maybe I’m atypical — but I don’t think I am. That canard that the Internet is a place for social misfits to hide out is dead, dead, dead.

(Also, can you tell I’m in the mood to play Civilization IV?)

This deserves more than a tweet. Congratulations to Gene Koo and Rachel Anderson on the birth of their son Jacob, who entered the world this evening. Jacob (who I’m sure will eventually be reading this in some Internet Archive of the future, no doubt telepathically or via an implant or something) has the distinction of being the first human child whose impending arrival I followed moment by moment online from hundreds of miles away — via his proud father’s Facebook Mobile posts (on Android, natch).

To the Anderkoo family, all your friends and family, wherever they are, are thinking of you on this happy day. And to Gene (who is one of my colleagues) — we look forward to having you back at work soon, but not too soon. Enjoy these days that will never come again.