Scott Berkun's Blog, page 54

Get your name in Mindfire 1.1: just take a picture!

Among other writing projects, I’ve been working on a revised and cleaned up version of Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds.  The original printing had a long list of minor issues I’ve wanted to fix.

Here’s a partial list of what’s improved in 1.1:

Print version will have a more comfortable footprint: 8×6, instead of 9×6
Font size will be adjust downward slightly for easier reading
Nearly 75 minor typos, weird spacing issues, errant hash marks and other typographic oddities were corrected
Perhaps most importantly, a 1.1 edition gives me a chance to get more of you in the book

To get your name in the book, do the following:

Stand on one foot
Say “A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men” three times fast.
(This is the important one) Go take a picture of your copy of the original edition of Mindfire. Make it somewhere interesting, creative, or unusual. And don’t be shy: if you wish, you can be in the photo too.
(Update) the photo has to show the book cover somewhere, somehow.
If you have the digital edition, that’s fine. Photos of digital editions shown on devices count.
Post your image as a comment to this post

The people who take the 10 best photos will get their name in the acknowledgements, and a copy of the 1.1 digital edition.  Have fun!

Related posts:
Help me find photos for the new book
Contest: Most worn out book wins $100 prize
Photos from last night’s talk
Countdown begins: Mindfire book launch in 6 days
Book update: inside scoop + 1st draft complete

Lessons from blogging every day

I gave the keynote at WordCamp 2012 Seattle. They’ve posted the keynote talk and you can watch it online now.

I talked about Lessons from the history of the web and blogging every day.  Includes war stories from the early browser wars, insights into getting traffic and comments gleaned from running The Daily Post at WordPress.com, and more.

You can watch below, or for a large size version, go to wordpress.tv.

 

Related posts:
More on asshole driven development
CrowdSourcing Star Wars: A new hope
Lessons from the browser wars @ Google
The Future of WordPress: video
Wednesday linkfest

WordPress dev wanted for scottberkun.com

The design here at scottberkun.com is old and crusty, much like I am. At least the website is easy to fix.

I’ve been working on a new design for the site and it has come together nicely. What I need is a WordPress developer to both implement the design and handle all the little details to ensure a smooth transition for all the existing content here (1300 posts + 100 pages + dozens of rambles).

I’m looking for a WordPress dev, or shop, who has:

Craftsman like detail with UI
Passion for getting the little things right
Experience w/ annoyances of migrating a popular, high content blog to a new design

Leave a comment if you’re interested – make sure to include a link to your portfolio.  Cheers.

Related posts:
The future of WordPress: help wanted
The Future of WordPress: video
How WordPress.com is made
News: I’m independent again
Site update complete – now 100% wordpress

The paradox of political leaders

Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything. – Robert Rubin

We all know there are excellent reasons to have doubts about big decisions. When you deeply understand an issue, it’s clear there are good arguments on both sides. But when we look for leaders, we demand certainty. We are attracted to people who have bold convictions about both what is wrong and what is the right way to fix it. We are drawn to people who project demigod like clarity, dismissing their opponents as fundamentally wrong rather than having a different perspective, even though we know deep down that level of certainty can’t really exist.

Any leader who admitted uncertainty, admitted doubt, admitted that there may be more than one good answer, makes for an impossible candidate. We wouldn’t listen to them for long, even if our attention spans allowed it. Even though those doubts may be a sign of their wisdom, rather than incompetence.

We chase the mythical image of a leader, and demand candidates give it to us, yet when they are elected and reveal themselves to be human, or change their mind as an act of progress rather than deception, we complain we’ve been betrayed. But in a way we all betray the people who might make for better leaders, by ignoring them in favor of a fantasy.

 

Related posts:
This week in ux-clinic: How to cut a bad, shipped feature
The Paradox of Creative Confidence

The first scoop on my next book

The good news is my next book is well underway. As many of you know, I quit my job at WordPress.com a few weeks ago. It was time to get back to work filling the bookshelf and I’m happy to report some good news.

The next book is based on the journal I kept while working at WordPress.com. It tells the story of what I learned working for one of the most amazing companies in the world.

They do some amazing and unusual things:

Everyone works remotely – from home or wherever they wish around the world
They rarely use email – it’s mostly blogs and chat programs
Employees get as much vacation as they choose
Every employee works in support for their first 3 weeks
There is high autonomy – people decide how to work best and (to some degree) what they’ll work on
For the 15th most popular website in the world, they have only ~100 employees.

I worked there for 18 months and the book follows my journey from the first day through to the last. It explores all the great things I experienced,  learned, struggled with and discovered while trying to make great software.

I’m in the process of looking for a publisher. I have some editors I’d love to work with who I’m reaching out to, but if you happen to be an awesome editor at an amazing publisher, I’d like to hear from you.

If you leave a comment, I’ll make sure you get an email when the book comes out.

Related posts:
Update on my next book
Book update: inside scoop + 1st draft complete
Quote of the week
Is your book idea good? (Yes, I promise)
Confessions (new book cover and more)

Why you should come to Ignite Seattle 17 (Sunday August 19th)

Once again Seattle Ignite is venturing outside for a special family friendly event. If you’ve never been before, this is a great time to come. Each speaker has 5 minutes to talk about something important and interesting. If one of them is bad, don’t worry, by the time you notice they’ll be almost done. And if you love what one of them had to say, you can fiddle with your phone and learn more about them and their ideas. It’s fun, its fast, it’s friendly. And it will change how you think about how public speaking should be done.

Here’s the great roster of speakers. Many Seattle notables, speaking on fun and challenging topics:

Sol Villarreal, Engage Seattle (or, how I learned to stop worrying and love local government)
Steven Chau, My shirt does more than sparkle
Lisa Phillips, How to skate like a rollergirl
Charlotte Lee, Collecting Rubber Ducks and the Path to Mastery
Beth Goza, The Elegant Art of Waiting in Line
Rebecca Lovell, stop worrying and learn to love karaoke
Matt Jensen, From STEM to STICK: How to Raise Engineers
Donald  DeSantis, Manufacturing Awesome: Going viral in a crowded market
Edward Jiang, Learning about Technology by Building Cool Stuff
Shalendra Chhabra, America from the eyes of a first generation immigrant
Lisha Sterling, Unschooling For School-Schooling Families
Richard Johnston, Changing the World With a New Business Idea
Viv Ilo Veith, Brain kNew Information on Knoggins
Brad  Wilke, How I Made a Piranhaconda, Got Killed by Camel Spiders…And Lived to Tell About It
Alissa Mortenson Tyka, The Shame Project
Adam Tratt, Bullet Control Now!

When: Sunday August 19th, talks start at 7:30pm
Where: Fremont Outdoor movies (details here)
Tickets: $5 and sold online. Get them now. If available they’ll be sold at the door, but I wouldn’t wait.
Host: Brady is out of town, so I’ll be your guest host for the evening.

Related posts:
(Seattle) This Sunday – at Ada’s Books 4-6pm
Help me Teach Seattle How to Drive
(Seattle) Full day courses – interested?
(Seattle) Presentation Camp – Saturday April 4th
What I learned at Seattle Ignite 6

Why I hate Prezi

One of the many jokes about Powerpoint is how much time people who use it spend picking transitions between slides. They spend more time picking out animations, and which wipe effects to use, than they do thinking about what goes on the slides themselves. Or what their audience needs to learn and how best to convey those lessons. It’s like wanting to make a movie and spending all your time picking fonts for the credit reel at the end. It’s backwards and broken.

Because of how Powerpoint, and Keynote, are constructed, other common habits for creating presentations are equally flawed. The tools are slide centric, not presentation centric, and people instinctively follow the metaphor built in to their tools. Fundamentally I don’t care much about presentation tools as the tools are mostly irrelevant. You can make a good presentation with any tool and a bad one too. Like writing, the hard part isn’t which software you use, but how you use it. The important part is what goes on between your ears.

Popular presentation tools focus on slides, which should not be the focus at all. No one comes to listen to a lecture in hope of great slides. They want good ideas, expressed well, especially ideas that answer the questions that motivated them to attend the lecture in the first place. Most people I know, when informed they need to give a presentation, immediately begin making slides, and they may as well tie a noose around their own necks. There is no point in making a single slide until you know some of what you want to say, and how best to say it. If you make slides first, you become a slide slave. You will spend all your time perfecting your slides, instead of perfecting your thoughts. You will likely talk to your slides when you present, and not your audience, as you will have spent more time on the slides than you did practicing giving the talk itself. Sadly, I don’t know of any tool that guides their users properly towards how good speakers prepare.

In Chapter 5 of Confessions of a Public Speaker, I explain the best way to prepare for a presentation. You start by thinking about the audience. Why are they coming? What questions are they hoping you will answer about the topic? What are your well thought out answers? What is the best way to express those answers? Only after some hard thinking on these questions is there any hope a presentation will turn out well, and it’s only then that a speaker should start thinking about slides. And even then, slides should be a tool for drafting. Make the quickest and dirtiest slides possible, and then start practicing the talk. After each practice, improve how well the slides support what you want to say. Only then will the slides have the proper role as a prop, rather being the star and making you the prop.

I first saw a demo of Prezi years ago, and it seemed interesting. I liked the idea of a fully 2D space to work from. But as I used it I realized it had taken the things I hated most about Powerpoint, and emphasized them. Prezi bills itself on the ability to ZOOM, to MOVE, to TRANSITION. All the most distracting elements for would-be speakers, elements that distract them away from the quality thinking required to speak well.  Instead of thinking “I’m so proud of how I worked hard to explain this important idea so that my audience can understand it” they think “Here comes my favorite transition! Look at how the entire screen is going to rotate! WOOT!”. I can see how, in the hands of a skilled communicator, Prezi makes some things easier to do, but a skilled communicator would do just fine with any tool.

I’ve experimented with many different ways to present. If I want to have more control over how to represent things in 2D, I use a WHITEBOARD. Hooking up an iPad with a drawing app works wonderfully well as a virtual one. And it’s easy to switch between it and Keynote if I want to follow the basic structure of a slide deck.  I was deeply inspired by watching Bill Verplank speak at UIE years ago, where he simply drew as he talked. It was more dynamic than any software, and more personal too, since we all could watch him work with his hands. He’s not a dynamic speaker, but he doesn’t need to be, as the clarity and value of his ideas are strong enough on their own. I can’t draw like Bill can, but I’ve found working with a whiteboard, virtual or not, invites an audience’s attention in a way software can never do. And as a speaker if I work at a whiteboard, I can’t hide behind slides. It forces me to properly prepare too.

The people most drawn to use Prezi are those who are more enchanted by the pretense of style, rather than substance. To this day I have yet to see a Prezi presentation that would not have been better had the speaker used something else, including nothing at all. Many presentations would be better if the speaker just spoke, sans slides or any props at all. If they just spoke, they’d be forced to think hard about what they wanted to say, and not expect to hide behind whizzy transitions or obfuscated slides.

If anyone has seen a great talk done with Prezi, please leave a comment.

Related posts:
(Seattle) Presentation Camp – Tommorow!
Slides from tonights Seattle PMI presentation
Presentation camp – SF, March 21
How to show time during a presentation
Thursday linkfest

The culture of the scapegoat

How do we choose who we blame? And why?

In our own experience we know there are complicated reasons why bad things happen. It’s rarely one thing or one person. But yet when we blame others, we’re very happy to dump all the responsibility on a single person and rarely take time to investigate if they deserve it, which they almost never do. We pick an easy, defenseless target, and all the responsibility collapses on them. The rest of the story fades from memory.

I recently watched a fantastic documentary called Catching Hell: The Steve Bateman story.  It’s the story of the Chicago Cubs fan who interfered with a foul ball in the the 2003 playoffs.

And it’s fantastic.

It explores the story of both Bill Buckner and Steve Bartman. In both cases there were many mistakes made by their respective teams on the infamous nights that they lost, yet only these two small events, and two individuals, have had the entire responsibility for what went wrong dumped on them.

Even if you are not a sports fan, it’s a fascinating investigation into our how our culture, history, and memory work (or don’t work).

You can watch it on youtube (in ten parts). Or as one experience on Netflix Streaming. It was made as part of EPSN’s fantastic 30 for 30 series.

Related posts:
The Lefferts law of management
Quote of the day
On Truth, Daisy and This American Life
Ten things VPs never say
Right for the wrong reasons

Commutapult: the great commute of the future

I’m often baffled by which things online are popular, as it has little to do with what’s good. The most popular ignite talk seems to be How to Buy a Used Car, which is a good topic, but the talk itself disappoints. It’s not delivered well enough, nor the content good enough, to be worthy of its popularity.

On the other end of the spectrum is this wonderful talk by Mark Selander on a crazy idea for public transportation: The Commutapult. He’s an illustrator, and his talents shine in the Ignite format, where you have to show a slide every 15 seconds. But so far, few folks have seen it.

Take 5 minutes to watch: you’ll be charmed, entertained, and delighted. Is he serious? Is he not? You figure it out.

Related posts:
Attention and Sex: 5 minute video
Great talk: How to Solve a song
Wednesday linkfest + Confessions
Have you spoken at Ignite? Need your help
What I learned at Seattle Ignite 6

Jonah Lehrer and the facts

Recently Jonah Lehrer, a rising star science writer, resigned his post at the New Yorker. A journalist named Michael Moynihan identified fabricated quotes falsely attributed to Bob Dylan in Lehrer’s book Imagine. The book has been pulled from amazon.com and other bookstores. If you want a detailed account of what happened and what the passages were, Poynter has an excellent summary.

Months ago I critiqued an excerpt of Lehrer’s book in my popular article In Defense of Brainstorming. My opinion was, and is, he made claims the studies he referred to did not support.

I’ve read most of the major coverage about Lehrer and here are my thoughts:

It’s a sad story. He’s a talented writer. He resigned and apologized for the fabrication. We should be grateful this was dealt with quickly and publicly. It frees readers and scholars to examine his other work carefully and identify other fabrications, if any, in his other writings.
There is no excuse for fabrication. Writing is hard. Doing research is hard. But one hopes journalists have some sense of the truth and respect for other people who they are writing about and resist the urge for shortcuts of any kind.
But all journalists manipulate truth. When a journalist interviews you for 20 minutes on a subject, and then uses merely one sentence you said, they are choosing how to represent the truth. They are likely choosing the truth you said that fits the story they are already building. Is it true you said what you said? Yes. But will it be true in the context of the article? Maybe, maybe not. A 1500 word piece can not encompass the entirety of anything which means every fact offered is only a partial rendering of that fact, quote, person or event. Journalists have to decide what angle to take, what slivers of facts to use, and how to fit the pieces together. We hope they keep everyone’s integrity intact, but that is often wishful thinking. (Also see the use and misuse of quoting people)
Mistakes are everywhere. We assume writers are magicians. Fact checking, even in rare instances where it is done, is not a perfect process. If a popular book written in 1975 unintentionally misquoted a famous person, it’s entirely possible the mis-quote will become more popular than the real one no matter what anyone does. Dozens of new books and articles will continue to propagate that misquote. And in 2012 an author might find the same misquote reused by three different sources, which is enough for most people to assume that quote is valid to reuse. Any writer has to put some faith in his sources in order to write, and there are too many facts to check or origins to verify in any article to achieve certainty. Writing and history are imperfect even when we are all at our best. A book may consists of hundreds of facts or more.
We all suffer from Confirmation Bias. Everyone tends to choose an opinion and then look for facts. Writers are not immune. My critique of Lehrer in In Defense of Brainstorming was not about ethics, it was about standards. I don’t think he gave fair coverage of the specific research he cited, which is problematic if that research is the basis for making big claims. I was disappointed he did this, but many writers do. Few readers are diligent enough to read the studies to check the writers assumptions. I made a made a similar critique of Susan Cain’s NY Times piece in The Problem with the New Groupthink. It’s not unethical to have confirmation bias. However it should reduce your credibility as a writer and thinker, as good writers and thinkers should proactively work against their own biases.
I’m upset about lying more than the mistakes. Given that mistakes are common and hard to avoid, writers should be committed to finding mistakes in their own work and correcting them. It’s important the writer themselves facilitates that process. The most disturbing thing in Lehrer’s story so far is his lying over the span of weeks about his fabrication. That’s where, as a writer, Lehrer is out of rope. I wish more writers would invite review and lead the process. For the Myths of Innovation, I made a commitment to research accuracy and continue to invite readers to help improve future editions of the book by checking my facts.
Self-plagiarism is a stupid term. In unrelated incidents, Lehrer apparently reused portions from articles he had written for Wired magazine in articles submitted to The New Yorker. The term that has been coined for this, self-plagarism, is misleading. Plagarism is theft. The problem here is not theft, as the words he reused were his own. For a reader, there might not be a problem at all as they don’t care where the paragraph came from if it works well in the article. Publishers have a right to original material if they wish, so the primary issue is between the writer and the publisher, not the reader. As Gladwell has stated about this: “By the way, if I run across the same absurd allegation anywhere else, I intend to reproduce my comment verbatim. Why? Because I thought about what I wanted to say, I’m comfortable with the way I said it, and I see no reason to tinker with my own language for the sake of tinkering with my own language.” (source)

Related posts:
The use and misuse of quoting people
What copyeditors do
Have a novel in you? Prove it (National novel writing month)
Is speaking easier than writing? Some advice
Thursday linkfest