We’re all stupid busy and it sucks. Tech IT Easy was started under the guise of studenthood which does not in any real way reflect “professionalhood.” 10-hour days are not uncommon in my line of work and it doesn’t leave much space for reflection–the real currency of writing.

So here’s what I propose.

1. form a group of tech/business enthousiasts (aka regular readers)
2. find a platform (e.g. mail, but I also favour the private wiki where texts can be shared privately and easily edited)
3. share ideas for blog posts and drafts and discuss those internally
4. release, not often, but qualitatively good pieces on technology / business / etc.

Why do I call this the Paul Graham model. Take a look at his essays. Under some of them (e.g. the Ramen profitasble essay), there’s a thank you to people that helped him edit the piece.

I’d like to hear your thoughts. If you’re interested in collaborating, either publicly or anonymously, and/or happen to know a good platform to do this on, leave a comment or send us a mail.

Thanks,
Vincent

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Looking back at your own writing is hard. It made me take a day’s break (that and lack of sleep) and wonder about whether life (on Tech IT Easy) was worth continuing. It made me question my ability to maintain this blog. Etc. etc. Recaps = hard. You get the idea.

But the other thing I noticed with June’s Recap (and noticed before on my recaps for S+FnR, but forgot), is that it enables you to draw a thread between your thoughts. Blogging every day means that, often, you don’t have the time to reflect much on what you wrote about before. But subconsciously you do, of course, and I like how I was able to relate different topics to each other. The same applies, incidentally, to living too hard…

The opposite of blogging too much is blogging too little, of course. That’s when you start thinking too much and don’t realise that people will have forgotten your one (imagined) bad post by the time you post the next one, and the next, and the next… So, dormant bloggers, get blogging!

That’s it really. Too short and introspective to post on TIE?
Vincent
(Picture courtesy of www.bennettlakehouse.com)

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It’s funny how our thoughts evolve from one day to the next. Which reminds me that we need to adapt our About page to reflect that a little more, as it’s about 2 years old. My thinking about Always-On Devices comes from a simple pain that I feel when I miss “a moment.” Sometimes I wish that I could… well Andy Warhol in Miraclemen phrases it much better than me.

In Alan Moore’s & Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Warhol’s existence is not painted in a very colourful light (pun intended). He has been resurrected as a machine into a society where money no longer plays a role and is very depressed. So his ability to record everything is really not very meaningful to him. Having only read this part of the comic last night, already my sentiments about Always-On are changing towards… and what would it accomplish?

I recently visited an Art Exhibition of independent artists in Maastricht and tested out a little what an Always-On Device would look like to me. I used my camera, a Canon 870 IS, as a recording device, which I held in front of me while walking through the crowd.

I managed to capture the people experiencing an exhibition, a piano player who was adding atmosphere to a room full of art, just hypnotically playing a few notes over and over. What actually intrigued me the most, I captured maybe two dozen miniature sets for the Maastricht Opera house. It was very surreal, the sets which were made out of cardboard and wood mostly, were 3-dimensional, and I was floating with my camera device around it and through it even, capturing it all at angles never deemed possible to me before. As if I was my own film-director.

Of course, apart from the disappointing battery-life on my camera, clearly not designed for video-recording, and the occasionally funny looks that I got, the real challenge is to make that data actionable—a big priority in everything I do. It is a matter of transforming the raw footage into a tight package that can be consumed by others, and the question is really, should this be the responsibility of the creator or of the consumer…?

With us having reached and surpassed the age of the mashup, it makes less and less sense to continue to try and re-invent the wheel, rather delegating that task across far more… interested people (in the area of video-editing at least), of which there is no shortage, as long as the tools and the specific community exists. Clearly, that kind of methodology requires a lax attitude about copyright.

To recap, so that it doesn’t seem like I’m entirely floating in thoughts, an Always-On Device would need:

1. A willing human recorder
2. A recording device designed for capturing experiences
3. A way to process that information into “usable bits”
4. A favourable legal environment
5. And a willing consumer

I’ll leave the question of “do we even want it?” for smarter people than me to decide. In the mean time, I will continue my search for point 2 and 3 on that list (more on this blog, if successful).

Until after Paris,
Vincent

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I know I wrote about rebooting the entrepreneurial brainstorming sessions. I kind of prefer an informal style of ‘idea generation’ though… Today, the subject is literature, of which there arguably is way too much. Sometimes it’s nice to read a ‘thin book,’ like The One Minute Manager or even The Alchemist.

What those books have in common is that they give you lessons in a very compressed space. But it works, because rather than doing a dry, point-by-point summary of the content published in much longer books, they do so in story-format. The One Minute Manager is about a man trying to learn about management and he goes on a kind of exploratory adventure to uncover the secrets. According to the book there’s only really three elements to effective one-to-one management [there's another book in the series, I'm reading now, on one-to-many management also], but I won’t bore you with them. The only thing to note is that I REMEMBER the lessons in the book perfectly!

The Alchemist is not a management book, it’s a self-help book about finding happiness and the meaning to your life. It’s again about an adventure and you follow this kid across the desert. Very simple principles, clothed in the format of an entertaining and exciting story.

No wonder these two books are best-sellers!

These last decades have seen a tremendous rise on various fronts involving the mass-education of mankind. From MBAs, to millions of published books, to billions of informational websites, it’s understandably overwhelming. As a result, you now get books teaching you (supposedly) “MBAs in a nutshell”, you get websites that sell you books in audio-format. And you also get websites that sell you book summaries for the busy executive.

Having read several of these, I have to say that I’m not impressed. Sure, I can read Crossing the Chasm in 5 pages, but what have I actually learned? How do the lessons that I read in bullet-point format translate into a language that my brain understands and remembers?

The answer is, if you ask me, to start a business that translates (boring / long) books into shorter books and doing so in story-form. Nothing is as exciting to business-folk like me, than reading a Harvard Business Review case-study. Because, it’s a (nearly) living example. I place myself into the antagonist’s point of view and learn about the challenges he/she has to face!

So this is my first “entrepreneurial brainstorming” topic: start a business that translates longer books into shorter entertaining stories and sells them to executives!

What do you think?

Vincent

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The point of this mini-series is to vocalise some of my thoughts about the creative writing process, which is something I only think about when I write every day, but not when I only write sporadically. I wrote this post last week Thursday, which illustrate its point perfectly. Another key to prolific writing is scheduling & bundling related tasks. Why?

• For one, blogging isn’t a job, and if it is, it usually isn’t a good job. You blog when you find the time.
• Second, bundling similar tasks is easier than interrupting other ones. When I write, I’m “in the zone,” so why not write multiple posts instead of one.
• Three, ideas come and go when they please. I sometimes wake up at 3 a.m. with an idea and just need to write it down. I don’t go, “oh I’ll just write it tomorrow,” because by that time my creative influx has usually gone.
• Four, researching complex posts can be time-intensive and sometimes happens weeks in advance.

Incidentally, a good book to read (part 1) about the idea of getting into the zone, is Neil Fiore’s “The Now Habit.”

On the note of research, I drew the below graphic about a year ago, trying to visualise how I research and write for a blog (in this case, Food ‘n’ Retail). I personally think it only works when you take research very, very seriously (which you should, but which also takes time). And yes, it’s also the way I visualise innovation in firms, very much inspired by portfolio management, which I wrote about before.

Three horizons, obviously, the first being where its all still one big mess which you run into (or which is where you purposefully direct your energy at). Second, comes the processing phase where you’re trying to organise all that raw data into something useful. Third, comes the moment when the world sees your stuff and responds to it. That essentially feeds back into the organisation to produce future goods that are better. In a blogging context, that is the main reason why I value comments so much, though I’m also conflicted about them—a topic for a future post perhaps.

I think I’ve gone a little beyond the intended scope of this post. But it also illustrates that any project, be it prolific writing, or the prolific creation of any kind of art of product, requires some serious planning behind it, i.e. the timing and combining of activities for a consistent outcome.

Vincent

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I think that I’ve said plenty this week about Tech IT Easy and where I would like to see it go. Now, the rest is all about making it happen. You should also take my words with a grain of salt, as I’ve been accused of being very goal-orientated before. Goal orientation is something like: taking climbing lessons to eventually climb the highest mountain or writing a thesis to fix a country. I set the bar pretty high, which is meant to motivate, but which can just as easily intimidate (me included).

Today’s post is about writing as I woke up with a thought about it. Blogging is an area with extremely low barriers to entry, which is why so many blogs exist. Anyone can blog and tell a story. But not everyone has a story to tell.

The great writers, which some of us dream to become perhaps, didn’t write to just write. They had, I imagine, a fire within them, that burned them day after day to produce what would eventually become a great asset in someone’s library.

I’m thinking Nelson Mandella’s “Long walk to Freedom,” Ram Charan’s “What the CEO wants you to know” (the equivalent of a blogpost of just the right size in books), Howard Schultz’s “Pour your heart into it,” (reviewed here), and many more which are on my shelves at home.

These books were written by people that had life-experience and just had to share that with the rest of the world. Sure they researched, but more often than not these author in particular just poured out the words. Even “Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world,” which I’m currently reading, was written by a professor that travelled the grasslands that gave birth to Khan (for an idea of how that would like visually, check out “Mongul“).

The point is that today I wanted to write about writing, because I’ve written a lot, too much, before in my life. I started blogging just to write, not having a clue what I would do with it. But I’m more and more of the opinion that the written language was created to preserve that which you want to communicate over time and to many people during its lifetime.

When you want to blog something, think about it a little (or don’t) and then just write that which you want to say. As soon as you start going down the path of having to still research what you’re going to say while you’re writing (a sure sign that you’ll end up talking out of your you-know-where), give up the writing, let the new information digest and try again the next day. Writing is a joy to read and to write when it flows.

Vincent out

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Trying to digest a cheesy crust pizza this noon, I was wondering if instead of a pizza I was carrying a baby. The good thing was that there would be two of us going back to work, even if the one was rather unqualified to give me hand. What a delight for my pizzababy to grow mentally through this early job! Apart from hanging around with Bruckner’s twins (le Divin Enfant) getting early to work will permit it to develop the working flexibility that parents preannounce and corporations tend to establish through rotation programs.

So, how often will it switch jobs? Every 3 years, two times a year, each month or…. why not several times a day?

Assumption: A job may less and less be outline of your style, status and skills, THE choice that you make in your self-creative youth and pursue with passion until your hands have shrunk and you mumble wisdoms on professional resilience to your children.

It seems (to me, to you too maybe?) that jobs get more and more project–centric, existing-skills based, time and locality indifferent.

with Theme-generated-tasks’ accomplishment  transforming into task accomplishment around a theme.

The digital business field, where change is well in advance, brings up a strong trend on segmentation of the classical notion of job.

Two examples on the internet can tell the story:

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

and

Innocentive

These two companies propose a per task remunerated employment, amazingly different as regarding necessary skills.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk mostly addresses the non qualified workforce and Innocentive the ultra specialized scientific one. The concept on both is that you’re hired on a per project basis, for a translation, to prove the Fermat Theorem or to fill in the ISO forms.

It is then highly important to have a personal job management system to handle contests you participate and your prizes, puzzle your profile and communicate with trusted professionals.

A sort of e-mployment survival kit to prevent you from e-xploitation.

This vast talent pool of potential Mechanical Turks, scientists and everyone between, also creates opportunities for providers of meta-HR services to aggregate and compose job particles into a real job.

Providers such as advisors, agents and therapists:

social engineers, serial trendsetters, legal timing planners for fringe technology testers (“get the trial before the action is criminalised with a law”), real life rehabilitation mentors (“get rid of Wii gestures when in the grocer’s”), tec-addiction therapists, viral marketing therapists/ digital image makers (banal already maybe), mini-krach recoverers, startup estate agents, other (attention, this is not a generic term, it can be a job where you are paid to differentiate and foster evolution), and so on.

A combination of a middlejob with a classical one or the mix of various middlejobs could result in a steady plus variable income, mental coherence and growth, an optimised planning and a life-job balance.

On the “which?” the question is open. On the “how many?” 2 jobs maybe ok while 3 or more could definitely assure the statics of the e-mployement construction. …

Job- memo for my pizzababy: Exercise with 3 or more jobs, with an hourly basis frequency, vary the status. In case you need help call your agent.

After it was digested I went back to work.

Georgia

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What does “photo editing” mean? Back in the old days, when coming up with a barely recognizable image was considered a feat, it probably meant nothing. Later on, for professionals and pretty skilled amateurs, it meant playing on successive stages of the chemistry process, using special gases that left particular imprints on the negatives, cutting and adjusting the latter, and so on. And then came the digital era. Nowadays, any mouse-able kid can do practically anything with a photograph: change the lighting, the colors, add a third eye to a friend’s forehead, etc. You get the gist.

But photo editing is changing once again. I came across a couple innovations in photo editing that show that efforts are being channeled towards what can be called “intelligent imaging”. To edit a photo today, you still have to understand the image: you and you alone know what is an object, what is a face, or where this object can (or cannot) realistically be; you and you alone can determine from where the photo should be taken, at what angle, with the focus on which object, etc. “Intelligent imaging” goes beyond that.

Better than a hundred words, two examples should do it:

- The first one is a video of conference by Dave Story, vice president of interactive design at Adobe. The website is in French, but the video at the end (in English) is the interesting part.

- The second one is a technology called “seam carving” (thanks Steve for the pointer), which is being developed in several universities and companies at this moment. The following video explains pretty much most of what there is to know. You can then download an open-source GUI software here if you want to try it out. For other examples and other software (including a Gimp plug-in), you can visit this Flickr group.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SSu3tJ3ns]

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