general

Thanks to WebProNews and Abby Johnson, who shot this interview at Blog World Expo 2008 following my “Microjournalism” panel with Doc Searls and Robert Scoble.

A picture tells… oh I’m a little too under the weather today to count up just how many words. We soft-launched the new website this weekend because of the New York Times Magazine article. When BusinessWeek, CNET and Web Worker Daily all included me today, the writing was on the wall to just announce the new venture…

We’ll be growing it all together right out here in public. I hope you’ll join us, and I hope you will find lots of value in what we have been building behind the scenes.

Warmly,
Pistachio

PS — Logo contest, anyone?

There’s a lot about Google’s overall UI/UX that bugs us, but this “comic” explaining the rollout of their new browser is really nicely done.

Mind you, it’s long. But even just sampling the first few pages I got a pretty convincing sense of what pains they’re solving and what Chrome does differently.

Play with storyboarding as a tool to flesh out your messages. Really great presentation decks have a lot in common with a storyboard. It’s a model and development tool to seriously consider.

Fascinated by the complexity captured in this map:

PresidentialWatch08 » Map

The circles represent political sites and blogs, color coded by category (political lean) and sized by authority (# of inbound links) or the magnitude of unrelated sites linking to it. This Map Key explains the methodology in detail.

The PresidentialWatch08 map is composed of the 533 most visible and influential websites and blogs - out of a complete dataset of over 4000 sites - using Linkfluence™’s proprietary crawl technology.

The map includes both social media and mainstream media outlets. The sites are divided into four different categories, or communities (manually labelled):

* Conservative
* Independent
* Infopit
* Progressive

Infopit are conversation starters, they can set the agenda. Most of them are mainstream media but a growing part is composed by social media.

Good information design should immediately give you an overall impression — in this case the balance, alignment and complexity of the political blogosphere — at first glance. Otherwise, the mass of data with no organizing principles or trends emerging obscures the information you’re trying to display.

In this case the model is not wholly self-explanatory, but once you dig in and see what they’re representing, I think it’s worth the energy it takes to parse it. If you’re still scratching your head after reading the Map Key, try this “notice” as well.

Unfortunately, I lost track of whose blog I found this on. Sorry!

As I jot this post my Gmail has outright coded (it’s unresponsive and throwing DNS errors. let’s call it “GFail,” shall we?), Twitter has been staggering for days, and today is the first day my “Remember the Milk” (task management) application has correctly integrated with my Gmail inbox all week. I’m re-starting Firefox to see if the Gmail problem is originating with me or going on outside of my system “in the cloud.”

Nothing to do with my MacBook and browser, but 15 hours worth of SMS Tweets sent last night have disappeared from my Twitter stream altogether (or never made it in), while at least one tweet posted at least 160 times in a friend’s stream.

So at the moment I’m frustrated by the downtime downside of all this “computing in the cloud” (conducting your daily work with online files, applications and services that you access through your browser). It’s a false frustration in some ways, because local applications and file storage go down too. And for a small business owner, it’s worse when they do because you’re the only one who can rally resources to fix them. But my experience this week reminds me how totally dependent my business is on a working browser. At least with the many glitches I’m experiencing I’m secure in the knowledge that 1) I am not alone and 2) someone is trying to fix them.

Tho come to think of it, I still don’t know whether this is a local connectivity problem with my new Time Capsule rig. Connectivity seems fine with certain applications, and falls to its knees with others. So, I am excited I can work from anywhere, but that also means that sometimes I can work from nowhere. Ipe.

Adele McAlear (@adelemcalear) of McAlear Marketing contacted a friend with strong ties to and knowledge of the Myanmar/Burma situation, and he produced this guidance on where to direct aid donations. Another good place is the Nargis Action Group Myanmar.

Dear Adele,

Here is also some other information that might provide helpful for your friend:

For those wishing to respond to the terrible devastation in Myanmar/Burma caused by the recent cyclone, it is recommended that you contribute to organizations that already have staff in place inside the country and so are not dependent on foreign aid workers. Some of these organizations are:

ADRA International
Myanmar Cyclone Fund
12501 Old Columbia Pike
Silver Spring, MD 20904
(800) 424-ADRA ext. 2372

CARE
151 Ellis Street N.E.
Atlanta, GA 30303
(800) 521-2273

INTERNATIONAL BURMESE MONKS ORGANIZATION (in cooperation with Avaaz.org) Avaaz is raising funds for
the International Burmese Monks Organization and related groups, which will transmit funds directly to
monasteries in affected areas.The monasteries are the only source of shelter and food for Burma’s poorest people. They have been on the front lines of the aid effort since the storm struck. Go here for more information.

Project HOPE
255 Carter Hall Lane
Millwood, VA 22646
(800) 544-4673

Save the Children
54 Wilton Road
Westport, CT 06880
(800) 728-3843

U.S. Fund for UNICEF
125 Maiden Lane, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10038
(800) 4UNICEF

World Concern
19303 Fremont Ave. North
Seattle, WA 98133
(800) 755-5022, ext.7706

World Vision
P.O. Box 9716
Federal Way, WA 98063
(888) 56-CHILD

(Compiled by M.L.)

This blog is link in the previous post, but their page on the cyclone is worth its own post, particularly for the map detail (which originated from Mizzima)

Cyclone Nargis « Rule of Lords

So the provocative question that Christopher Penn asked is this, can a boat from India get into any of the ports near the hardest hit areas? Were shipping facilities there also destroyed? How creative can we get?

Image via WikipediaOn Twitter, Friday, I admitted: I’ve been shamefully, intentionally, avoiding news about the cyclone in *Burma/Myanmar. It’s much worse than I’d imagined.

• @digitalmaverick yeah. pop 53 million. 1.5 million affected/endangered. 60,000 “officially” dead. Junta seizing supplies/barring aid workers
  
• Wall Street Journal article about the hope that at least this disaster could begin the end of the oppressive Junta regime.
• Will there be calls for an invasion?
• some social media context: Myanmar crackdown on bloggers

THE best idea I heard in 2007 was from Hans Rosling: approach international strife by connecting, one-to-one, with individual people outside our own cultures. Seek to better understand complexities behind the problems.

So I asked: Has anyone been able to find bloggers or other individuals in Myanmar who are getting word out from the ground?

Please subscribe to at least one of the information sources below and share them widely. (Twitter replies, Google and comments on this draft post turned up the following:)

FEEDS/TWITTER:
• @mmblogs is twittering links to Myanmar bloggers’ posts. (thanks @admore)
• @marshallk scraped this feed of Myanmar bloggers’ voices and also posted a widget (and code) in this post

BLOGGERS & DIRECTORIES:
• Rule of Law (tip: @stales)
• Rule of Law on Cyclone Nargis (LOTS of resources and a detailed map here)
• Global Voices Online
• Read this blogger who will be headed into the region shortly. She blogs on the Our World Community Ning group (tip: @jefdee)
• Myanmar Blog Directory
• Sharbar: Myanmar Blog Directory

NEWS SITES:
• Mizzima
• Irrawady
• Democratic Voice of Burma
• Here is an update from the Doctors without Borders Website

What can be done?
Not much. The junta government is seizing aid supplies and turning back relief workers at the borders. That government is itself extremely wealthy from Natural Gas sales to Thailand.

I don’t usually play at meme tag games. In fact, this one took me months to comply to. In the meanwhile Jane Quigley also tagged me, so this is really overdue.

Because, and only because it was Maggie Fox what did it, and because she tagged me in Such. Good. Company. I’m making an exception this one time. So here’re some weird things about me that you might not know. Whether you actually care is a different story altogether, but it can’t hurt to have a little fun.

1. Favorite adventure: hitchhiking around Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland in the summer of 1995. No offense, England, but I was having too much fun in Ireland and skipped visiting you altogether.

2. Most flawed climate research: living (the wrong) 7 months of one year (Sept. 94 - March 95) in Moscow.

3. Weirdest honor: nominated for President of a Sinn Fein group in County Clare.

4. Dumbest move: sleeping one night on the streets of Paris. (tho not at LeWeb3 when I stayed at the lovely Hotel Du Cadran courtesy of www.hotelsaparis.com

5. Jack-of-these-trades: Jobs I’ve held for pay for at least one week: first-grade teacher, waitress, prep cook, chef, caterer, purchasing agent, project manager, PR wonk, marketing exec., interactive television strategist, developing show ideas for cable TV, freelance journalist, and in retail selling specialty foods, equestrian gear and plants.

6. Best use of a state park: living in Hueco Tanks State Park, Hueco Tanks, TX for 2 1/2 months in 1993 in order to rockclimb full time.

7. Strangest home: I’ve logged 12+ months of sea time living in teensy bunks aboard the SSVs Westward, Corwith Cramer, and Robert C. Seamans with the Sea Education Association. I’m madly in love with the islands of Bequia and Saba as a result.

8. What’s my major? I studied Environmental Science and Public Policy, wrote my undergrad thesis on Social Analysis of Soil Erosion and published on soil erosion (in Science) and environmental racism. So naturally, I’m now in communications.

In turn, I tag YOU. (Call it self-service meme tag. If you want to play along, play along and link back to it here.)

I just FAIL at the Inbox Zero concept and related methods for taming the email beast. I know this so well that I’ve never really *tried* hard to get there. A few half-hearted, high-energy assaults on my inbox, adoption of some of the main principles, yes, but never achieved. And the progress I *do* make I never manage to preserve.

The truth is, a LOT of my email just serves as little flags of information that I can take in at a glance with no need to act on. The time it takes to find and delete all of these little flags, if I bothered, would be wasted. It’s enough to have them register in my brain via gmail or blackberry and then flow away in the stream that is my inbox.

What I *really* need isn’t inbox zero, it’s inbox infinity.

Inbox Infinity

I want my optimized inbox to automatically delete all messages on a rolling time frame, x weeks or days after receipt. With that as the default, I would set up rules for certain messages to auto-archive instead of delete. The bulk of messages received fall into the first or second treatment.

Everything else can then be batch processed using an “Inbox Zero” like system, where I respond, convert the message to a task, add an event to my calendar or tag and archive information I will need for later reference.

This in place, I’d only have to give mind and click-share to the messages I need to act on. The rest would just play their parts as messengers and beacons and then drift away on the river without my intervention. It’s a subtle difference, and might not sound like a big time-saver to many of you, but deleting and archiving by hand is actually a substantial (and worthless) part of my inbox maintenance.

What do you think? Are there hackarounds in Gmail that would let me do this?