When I first become obsessed with the internet I was very hesitant to try social bookmarking. At the time, the only one that I had access to was del.icio.us. I would sometimes end up on their website and get pretty flustered. This initial learning curve is what turned me on at first. All of that information stored in such a simple interface. It was quite beautiful but I needed some learning before I could fully utilize the services.
The unique design scheme of social bookmarking is what attracts and deters people. Social bookmarking has turned “tagging” into a near art form that has been gobbled up by anyone interested in creating a more powerful user interface for their web application or service.
Tagging allows for incredible customization. Firstly, it does not constrain users as to what ways they can differentiate the content they are interested in. For instance, let’s say that Jimmy wants to collect articles for learning the Python programming language. Anytime he finds a website that serves this usage, he can add it to his social bookmarking webapp. When he is asked to tag the website, he — the user — decides how he wants to organize his content. Instead of a site giving him the popular ratings and usage of Python tutorials, he has the ability to set up experience levels (’beginner,’ ‘intermediate,’ and ‘advanced’) or perhaps tagging what particular aspect of Python is discussed in the article. This allows social bookmarking sites to maintain near infinite versatility without the need for deciding what users will want to organize their content under. Part of me wonders if the inventor of this versatile tagging interface was focusing on the DRY principle way too much and just coded a way for each tag to have a view of its own, but that’s besides the point: it’s a gorgeous use of technology and after I become acquainted with its ways, have become fully involved with social bookmarking, almost to the point of insanity. Continue Reading »
For a lot of people it is quite difficult to stay focused long enough to finish products. I know for me, I tend to start something and then fall apart or lose focus. When I am cleaning my house I tend to start in one room and then when I have to bring something into another room I begin cleaning there. For cleaning my house, it’s not such a bad thing and I end up getting everything done when I want to. But for more arduous tasks or tasks that I could eventually leave, it becomes a much bigger problem.
There are systems of organizing that require that you set a timer every fifteen minutes while you’re working on a project to keep you thinking and working on that project. The difficulty of this style of keeping one’s self organized has some difficulty for people like me that tend to lose track of things quite frequently and often subconsciously on purpose (read: AD/HD).
The blog, Simply Stated, has got an amazing post about staying constantly focused on the task at hand. Instead of setting egg-timers or stop-watches in which the act of setting the timer requires self-interest in the pro-action towards the next 15 minutes (something that those with AD/HD can attest to), Simply Stated suggests using a snooze button on an alarm clock.
Move your alarm clock to where you’re doing work and set it to go off 10 minutes after you start a project. When it beeps, assess what you’ve done and then hit the snooze button. When it goes off again, see if you’ve accomplished more in the next chunk of time. Keep hitting the snooze button until you’re finished with your project. People who can hyper-focus will find this method really annoying and won’t want to use it. But, if your mind frequently wanders, this could be a great tool for you.
One thought that I immediatly had was to connect this with Dave Seah’sPrintable CEO system. With his system you can watch your work throughout the day which provides another level of analysis and hopefully will bring you closer to habituating the correct activities during your day. This is especially true to his Emergent Time Tracker form. I have used this form to some success but had problems–like I mentioned earlier–with constanstly setting a timer.
Some people may consider their alarm clock a very annoying noise and consider presssing the snooze button so regularly to be worthy of causing some blood vessels to pop. Also, some alarm clocks do not allow you to set how long the snooze button will go off (I know that the alarm clock that I have only goes for 9 minutes). To this, I would say that you should go out and buy a fairly nice alarm clock that has the feature of being able to set the snooze time. The nicer alarm clocks usually have a better sound than the cheap ones which can tend to sound like a demon’s trumpet escaping from a cracked vent that leads to hell’s choral chambers (read: terribly annoying).
I will be attempting this technique as soon as I can get a hold of a nice alarm clock that doesn’t make my girlfriend want to murder me when it goes off in the morning. (Seriously, in a half-asleep state, I told her I was going to set my alarm clock and she started screaming at me, in the middle of the night, until I turned it off!)
Social networks have been at the top of the totem pole in terms of what’s cool in the world of web technology. Most websites and webapps have begun to add elements of social networking through comments, discussions, messaging, and content categorization and rating. There are sites now like Ning that allow people to create entire networks around any kind of idea they want. Ning has caught on fairly well and there are now active communities such as Blog365, Indiepublic, and my fledgling New Left Network. So Ning provides a really excellent and chic way to create and organize people into a network.
Over at Bricabox, the idea is to create the same atmosphere and implement them in a beautiful way but for content instead of people. I personally think the idea has a lot of potential. There is a similar engine out there called Pligg that allows for Digg clones. While Pligg has a lot of potential in itself, Bricabox is set up to be more open to any kind of content aggregation and categorization. (Check out the Mashable article here.)
I played around with the platform this morning and found it a rather compelling tool. I have been working out an idea about semantic news for a while now and I thought I would attempt to try and implement it in Bricabox. I ran into some problems with it but this is understandable. My ideas around semantic news have some potential to be a fairly radical launch. I don’t expect a product that just launched to be capable of some of the interactions I am looking for. But in the process of twiddling with it I did find it really capable of working with social content. It has a lot of customization that is possible and with a little bit of bling and intuitive design concepts they could mass market this. It doesn’t require a lot of work to figure out but I know that most muggles will find it fairly difficult.
All in all though I greatly enjoy the idea and implementation and I strongly suggest taking a peak at it and it’s capabilities. Here is a little video intro from their frontpage:
I am joining the Blog 365 movement (if it can be called a movement). I am going to blog 365 days a year and will hopefully gain some kind of award for following the rules of this competition. But I don’t really know if I will get anything out of this. In fact I doubt that I will get anything other than the satisfaction.
And my girlfriend is a little worried that this will turn into another technological obsession of mine. She keeps telling me that I better love her more than this blog :P. I don’t think that’ll be a problem.
I hope to divide up the activity on this blog between learning python and hopefully javascript as well as another half being devoted to my thoughts and academic activity. Something that will probably end up being discussed a lot is AD/HD and productivity because they are both things that I deal with regularly.
So I hope you enjoy! I don’t know if anyone will be paying attention, but nonetheless this should be fun! (I missed a day already this year, I am not sure if I should do a double post today to cover that time. I think I will just wait until I have too much material for one day :P )
A nice piece on laziness over at lifehack.org. Some helpful tips for controlling laziness. I personally would say skip the stress-related tips. In my case, I don’t have the time to be thinking about whether or not I’m stressed. Certainly there is an element of recognizing goals. This can be a helpful way of growing productivity.
Here is one of the tips that I generally disagree with, at least in terms of battling “overlaziness:”
Have “Lazy” Days. I put “lazy” in quotations because the end result is often the opposite. Having days where you try to do things as slowly as possible can keep you focused on the days when tasks threaten to overwhelm you.
Check out the article, nonetheless, because it has a lot of useful tips.
