vanderwal.net

Learned by Failing: Best Lesson was About Experience

This return back to blogging is hopefully unleashing quite a stack of things both here in this blog, but as well in Personal InfoCloud. It seems I will be using this to discuss personal tools, processes, and life stories that I often recount so to make things a bit easier (not sure who it is easier for, but there you have it).

Going Abroad to Learn a New Way

In 1988 I took my last semester of classes for my undergrad degree at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) in Oxford, England. I did this for a few different reasons: 1) I really wanted to study abroad; 2) I wanted to fill in a gap in my education's knowledge of history around European history; 3) It was a program on the study abroad flyer board at my college; and 4) It was much closer to my college girlfriend who was studying abroad in Lyon, France and I could still speak English (my French I had from an hour a day for three years in Montessori school from age 3 to 5 was more than a bit rusty). These may not be in the order of value I placed on them at the time.

One of the strengths of CMRS was it was run on the Oxford (Oxbridge) system of tutorials. My class load consisted of two tutorials and two lectures each week. Each of the tutorials required self-study (directed by a question given by the tutor and often one to four starting resources) so to fill a gap in one's knowledge and then write-up a six to 8 page paper each week on the subject. This was 12 to 18 pages of writing each week (or that was the aim) after learning as much as possible on the subject.

Learning By Failing the Lesson of Experience

One of the tutorials I had was focussed on the Early Northern Renaissance Art, which covered some of my favorite artists like Albrecht D%C3%BCrer, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jan van Eyck as well as the perfection of symbology in art, use of proper prospective, and incredible attention to detail. This tutorial required quite a bit of reading, but the introduction lectures to CMRS provide insight into gutting a book to help get through the large volume of reading needed.

I was doing rather well, or passably well in this tutorial and then came the last essay for the tutorial, "Compare and contrast the Early Northern Renaissance with the Early Italian Renaissance". I had purchased a two or three of the needed Northern Renaissance art essential books and used the libraries heavily, but I had nothing on the Italian Renaissance period. This being toward the end of term the libraries were rather bare. I read up on what I had in my Northern books and pulled as much as I could from general art history books covering the Renaissance in general. When I had as much as I could pull together for the paper I wrote what turned into a four page paper. It was thin on content, depth, and quality (having put off writing to get more time to find information).

I read my paper to the tutor that week. He was more than a little displeased at the lack of volume, content, and quality. I pointed out that all of the books that were on the list were not available and I pulled from the best resources I could find, which were rather lacking on the subject. He asked a very pointed question, "Have you ever seen any Italian Renaissance art?" I said I had, as I was a fan of museums and the prior summer I had been to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy (among many other art museums around Europe). The tutor asked what differences I could tell him between the two Renaissance. I went into some solid detail explaining the contrasts regarding texture, color palettes, sharpness of detail, focal points, skies, clothing, and many other large contrasts.

The Great Payoff of All My Undergraduate Courses

The tutor looked at me over the glasses at the end of his nose and bluntly stated, "That, Mr. Vander Wal, is an A paper, if not better. But, what you have written is a D paper at best. I only grade on what is written. Let my advice to you be: Trust your experiences more than what is written, as that is how we all advance. Let your own experiences trump that others have written or have not written and you write that down so to document it."

So, there in what was my last paper in my last class of my undergraduate career was the most valuable lesson I had learned in all of my undergraduate collegiate career. All the work and money that went into it was tied up in a wonderful bow that prepared me for the rest of my life like no other. I had many great learning experiences prior to this, but nothing with as much gravitas as this. It gave me conviction to examine and tear everything apart and question it with my own lens and one that had me pay much closer attention to my own experiences while trying to frame everything from experiences to learning from other's experiences where I lack my own.

As If Had Read

The idea of a tag "As If Had Read" started as a riff off of riffs with David Weinberger at Reboot 2008 regarding the "to read" tag that is prevalent in many social bookmarking sites. But, the "as if had read" is not as tongue-in-cheek at the moment, but is a moment of ah ha!

I have been using DevonThink on my Mac for 5 or more years. It is a document, note, web page, and general content catch all that is easily searched. But, it also pulls out relevance to other items that it sees as relevant. The connections it makes are often quite impressive.

My Info Churning Patterns

I have promised for quite a few years that I would write-up how I work through my inbound content. This process changes a lot, but it is back to a settled state again (mostly). Going back 10 years or more I would go through my links page and check all of the links on it (it was 75 to 100 links at that point) to see if there was something new or of interest.

But, that changed to using a feedreader (I used and am back to using Net News Wire on Mac as it has the features I love and it is fast and I can skim 4x to 5x the content I can in Google Reader (interface and design matters)) to pull in 400 or more RSS feeds that I would triage. I would skim the new (bold) titles and skim the content in the reader, if it was of potential interest I open the link into a browser tab in the background and just churn through the skimming of the 1,000 to 1,400 new items each night. Then I would open the browser to read the tabs. At this stage I actually read the content and if part way through it I don't think it has current or future value I close the tab. But, in about 90 minutes I could triage through 1,200 to 1,400 new RSS feed items, get 30 to 70 potential items of value open in tabs in a browser, and get this down to a usual 5 to 12 items of current or future value. Yes, in 90 minutes (keeping focus to sort the out the chaff is essential). But, from this point I would blog or at least put these items into Delicious and/or Ma.gnolia or Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 (this service was insanely amazing and was years ahead of its time and I will write-up its value).

The volume and tools have changed over time. Today the same number of feeds (approximately 400) turn out 500 to 800 new items each day. I now post less to Delicious and opt for DevonThink for 25 to 40 items each day. I stopped using DevonThink (DT) and opted for Yojimbo and then Together.app as they had tagging and I could add my context (I found my own context had more value than DevonThink's contextual relevance engine). But, when DevonThink added tagging it became an optimal service and I added my archives from Together and now use DT a lot.

Relevance of As if Had Read

But, one of the things I have been finding is I can not only search within the content of items in DT, but I can quickly aggregate related items by tag (work projects, long writing projects, etc.). But, its incredible value is how it has changed my information triage and process. I am now taking those 30 to 40 tabs and doing a more in depth read, but only rarely reading the full content, unless it is current value is high or the content is compelling. I am acting on the content more quickly and putting it into DT. When I need to recall information I use the search to find content and then pull related content closer. I not only have the item I was seeking, but have other related content that adds depth and breath to a subject. My own personal recall of the content is enough to start a search that will find what I was seeking with relative ease. But, were I did a deeper skim read in the past I will now do a deeper read of the prime focus. My augmented recall with the brilliance of DevonThink works just as well as if I had read the content deeply the first time.

Return to the Blog and Life

Things have been quiet here? Um, yes they have. The past couple years have been full of changes and struggles. It seemed that just as things were turning from a rough stretch on personal and work front, something would rise up and cripple that forward progress.

This past year it was my dad calling in June of 2009 saying he cancer of the stomach that had spread to the liver. He seemed to improve quite a bit by Christmas of 2009 as he and my mom came back to visit, which was quite wonderful. But, on the return home he started not doing well and they found a tumor on his brain. Things stopped improving after this and it became a bit of a rough road for him. Not paying close attention to my own well being it really had an impact on me. He was my best buddy and I knew time was running short.

In July of this year my dad died and while it was really hard to comprehend and sad, it was also freeing. Not only did that concern and un-noticed energy focus had shifted, but I also had the focus that the safety net of parents love, guidance, and all types of parental support had sifted from a set of two, to just one. But, I realized I still had two feet and put that energy and time back into work.

Time Spent Digging

During the past couple years during all the change and struggle, I've spent a lot of time sorting through the things I am deeply passionate about, which are many and fit wonderfully with the work I do. I have spent a lot of time digging quite deeply into social software and the whys and how it works, but more intrigued where it doesn't with the 90% of the world that make up the mainstream. I have a lot of writing I haven't posted or shared on this, but have some of it in workshops and presentations I have done in the past couple years. That will likely be finally getting posted over at Personal InfoCloud.

Over many years and as part of my formal education I have read much of the usual corpus of social theorists, whom I always finding myself having to set aside reality to embrace the theorists models enough to understand them, but then come back to reality and they don't fit as well as a whole. I've always been mindful of them, but as I have been digging back into my older frameworks of the Model of Atraction and Come to Me Web and how they helped me work through and understand interactions with information on the web and beyond to build and frame next generation services, along with helping others do the same.

This review and digging has lead me to a lot of understandings and realizations around the social web and echos all the years of building, managing, iterating, and maintaining social tools. The same problems always surface, which are the tools don't really allow humans to be social like humans are social with out a mediated interface. But there are basic understanding of how humans are social through tools as mediated interfaces that is counter to many of the ways many of the tools and services are developed and provided.

Now mixing the older Model of Attraction and come to me web frameworks for thinking with the models and understandings I have come to in the past few years regarding social software have really gelled. These ideas will be getting out there and have been the fodder for client work that is resurfacing now that the economy has become out of its dire state (for now).

About that Book

As many know I was writing a book on folksonomy for O'Reilly. That book hit a wall (no, not a Vander Wal), or a few of them and I was notified O'Reilly would not be publishing it. Early in writing it I got stumped by many things that I was seeing as they did not fit any of the social models being touted as core to understanding social in the Web 2.0 sense. It took me about 18 months to deconstruct all of what I knew, what others knew, and get to models I could use to think through some of the really strong values people were finding and the problems that people were having that seems completely counter to "how the social web works&qout;.

Following this there were many changes happening in my personal life that took attention and focus. But, at the same time the services and tools were changing drastically. Many of the really good tools that were addressing the hard problems, but not popular were shutting down. This was also happening for the tools for organizations to purchase and use internally (where my main focus has been). But, content for the book is still moving forward and I am looking for a publisher that fits well for it. Now that SharePoint 2010 has social bookmarking / tagging in it (although a really really rough interface for it) the book has much more value, so people deploying it can have a much better understanding of what is really needed to have it help remove the huge problem organizations face, of not being able to find and refind information they are sure they have when they need it. But, I am also free to blog much of what was heading into the book so it can get feedback and more eyes honing it.

Back Blogging?

Yes! I am back blogging. More non-work type posts will be here at Off the Top and work related content is over at Personal InfoCloud, but also am dropping odd bits in my Tumblr vanderwal blog. I am likely going to change the platform under this blog to something that I did not write in 2001 sometime in the next couple of months (nearly 2,000 post and categories to transfer).

Good Night Sweet Six Apart

Odd how news of business transactions hits. Today I saw Six Apart was bought by VideoEgg (yes, Six Apart that makes TypePad and MovableType). This news made me a bit sad and nostalgic.

Movable Type is Old Skool

As the young people used to say (they were still young back then) Movable Type (MT) is OG. MT was far from the first blogging platform, as Blogger and others like Grey Matter (this influenced the blogging platform under this blog a lot). MT was started by the couple Ben and Mena Trott out of their house in the dust of the test boom bursting. It was started as a blogging platform and build to be a well thought through platform for others to use. By 2002 it had been launched user tested and was the first underpinnings of Boxes and Arrows Magazine (as deployed by Jay Allen).

Those were good days and MT was a solid product. MT turned in to Six Apart and offered a hosted platform, TypePad, which my Personal InfoCloud blog is hosted on. The became the first real blogging platform company and it grew into a solid company.

The Show Goes On

The announcements around the purchase state MT and TypePad will continue to be supported. The big change is a new owner, a new company name (SAY Media), and possibly a new direction. I've had a lot of friends work at Six Apart or work with them.

The days of sitting up late talking blogging platforms in the early days at SXSWi and how all of this was more than just something the "broken one's" did. We have seen WordPress surface out of another platform and thrive as have many other personal sharing social platforms that have not only changed the web, but have also largely changed the world for the better. MT and other blogging platforms gave nearly everybody a printing press with a wider reach around the globe than any personal printing press ever had. As well the readers or people with affinity to the ideas shared, or even trying to get a new or different view.

I look forward to my new TypePad overlords and hope they are as inspiring and gracious as the kind, smart, gentle, and caring folks at Six Apart always have been. I also have my own hand rolled blogging platform that sits under vanderwal.net, as well as my vanderwal on Tumblr blog, and all those other social platforms I share things within and on. Be well Six Apart as you move from a blogging platform company with a name on the door, to our collective blogged memories.