// Internet Duct Tape

Distraction Free GTD: 32 Todo List Web Applications

Posted in Firefox and Greasemonkey, Getting to Done, Increasing Productivity and Simplifying Your Life, Technology, Web 2.0 and Social Media by engtech on October 05, 2007

Web Browser Tips & Tricks

The fine folks at LifeHacker have forced me to tip my hand with their post on using Web Runner as a distraction free browser. Web Runner is a tiny site-specific web application that runs using less resources than Firefox or Internet Explorer.

The whole idea behind a site specific web browser is that you want to access a web application without being tempted to access other sites. You want to access a site without being distracted by the rest of the Internet. A good example is an online todo list or GTD application. You want to be able to quickly access your todo list to add or checkoff items without getting caught in an Internet black-hole.

internet is a big distraction

(via Coding Horror)

To make things easier for everyone I’ve created a huge bundle of Web Runner web applications centered around accessing ToDo/GTD web sites. This is a list of the supported sites.

Want more sites added? Leave a comment.

Step #1: Install Web Runner

  1. Go to this page on the Mozilla Wiki
  2. Choose the Windows, Linux, or Mac installer
  3. Run the installer

Step #2: Download My “Distraction Free GTD” Web Bundle

  1. Download this zip file (Update 2007/10/10)
  2. Unzip the contents to a folder
  3. Click on a .webapp file to launch the web application you want

Every web app has hotkey history navigation (ALT+LEFT, ALT+RIGHT and ALT+HOME).

Leave a comment if you have any problems.

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60 comments

Magazine Review: October 2007 Issue of Inc. Magazine

Posted in Book Reviews, Startups and Business, Technology by engtech on October 05, 2007

I came to a rather startling discovery in the past month: magazines are just blogs with the added luxury of being able to read them while on the toilet or in the bathtub (but hopefully not both).

I picked up the October issue of Inc. magazine because Joel Spolsky of Joel On Software has joined the magazine. I’m a Joel fan-boy. Internet Duct Tape was inspired by Joel on Software. Here are some random thoughts from spending a rainy Saturday flipping through the pages. Can this possibly be entertaining or of value to my readers? I have no idea.

I’m going to give each article a +1 or a -1 based on whether or not I found it interesting and discuss it with a short blurb. You can read along with me on the online copy. Follow the bouncing ball.

-1 Editor’s Letter, Contibutors, and Reader Mail: I can’t help but think this stuff should be at the end of a magazine instead of at the front. Below the fold, if you will. Give the reader the most useful tidbits first instead of burying it in the middle.

-1 People Who Were Inspired by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: It didn’t sell me that the only entrepreneur’s name I recognized was the one from Doubleclick. Instead of a biographical tidbit about Ayn Rand, tell me what the book was about! How did they miss that there is a 2008 movie with Angelina Jolie in the works? Is Wikipedia the new Coles Notes? Where was the tie-in that Atlas Shrugged inspired the current hit Xbox 360 game Bioshock?

I’m getting the feeling that I’m not the core audience for this magazine.

+1 Netflix vs Blockbuster: Blockbuster proves the adage that startups are R&D for bigger companies by one upping Netflix’s business model. Bad advice from other entrepreneurs follows.

  • “Netflix should court CDs” – iTunes and digital downloads are already trailblazing the future of this industry, going up against iTunes on their existing strengths isn’t going to help Netflix. Isn’t CD by mail subscription also going up against Columbia House?
  • “Focus on being #1 service without lowering price” – Good, if obvious, advice.
  • “Focus on obscure films” – Every company needs to have a passionate minority at their core if they hope to have any success. This would have been good advice if Netflix was starting at a grassroots level, but they already have that core smaller audience from years ago.
  • “Hookup with a cable company” – I completely agree that they need to move to digital downloads. Always build the product that will kill your current product. But getting in bed with CableCos is courting the devil.

+1 Investor’s Guide to Inc 500: Bug VCs with the previous issue’s top 500 startups list. Bonus points for mentioning Massage Envy masseuse franchises that are a lawsuit waiting to happen. Bill Me Later is my pick from the list. They act as a proxy between your credit card info and other companies for people who are afraid of buying on the Internet. I also like Vocera who do star trek style voice communicators for hospitals.

+1 Even CEOs Have to Apologize for Screwing Over Workers: I appreciate the message, but felt there was a bit too much emphasis on assigning blame for why the bad decisions happened. Kudos for stepping up to the plate, admitting mistakes, and keeping the team in the loop.

+1 Applying Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to Companies: Someone’s written a book about the idea that companies need to fulfill more of an employee’s needs than just the paycheck. Interesting: customers are promiscuous meaning that even if they’re perfectly satisfied with service they might still switch to a competitor they’re also perfectly satisfied with. Article is fluffy, wonder if the book goes any deeper? No mention of creating fulfilling work, just increasing employees self-worth and attitudes towards themselves.

Is this like that bogus psychology from the 80s that encouraged self-confidence without merit and created a generation of self-entitled people who don’t understand why life isn’t handing them the success they deserve?

-1 Estate Planning: I pay someone to pay attention to this stuff for me. That might be stupid on my part.

+1 Is My Social Network Startup Worth Investing In? 55 Alive: Investors get to rip into a young startup. Startup wants $250k but most investors are advicing between $1 to $20 million. I love the VC who points out that common interest ties people together, not demographics like age group. We had a conversation about this last night at a dinner party discussing the people you knew in elementary school and high school that you reconnect with but it goes no where — because where you went to school is no indication of common interests. Same guy tells them to generate their own ad revenue without investors.

More good advice that they need to focus on building up local features. So true, what makes social networking sites work is if they become a communication tool for an existing friends group.

+1 Internet Video Beyond YouTube: Some good discussion on interactive webcasts, livecasting, and promotional videos. HelloWorld is officially my favorite company name ever. I’m so surprised there was no mention of Will It Blend or CommonCraft.

+1 Web Polls: Not enough information on the individual web polling companies, but the use cases of how businesses are incorporating them are phenomenal. Conclusion: don’t manage statistics gathering by hand, but be careful who you go with because it can go from $1,000 to $10,000s of dollars.

+1 Using Marketing to Improve Old Business: One man’s guerilla campaign to revitalize the NY Metropolitan Opera. My favorite example of traditional businesses embracing new media is the Brooklyn Museum’s Flickr page. I liked the idea of giving free tickets to the last dress rehearsal to create buzz and simulcasting the operas onto outside monitors.

+1 Update: An older story of a company in trouble and the advice the Inc. experts gave is updated with the results. Great proof that the magazine advice works.

+1 Questions and Answers: Inc. recommended a survey business support myspace, but ignore Second Life. Unfortunately, no mention of SL’s flying penii. They also give the sage advice that the average person sees 3,000 ads a day so advertisers have to work that much harder to be in the 1% of ads that people notice. Good advice with “do you even know who your audience is?” Huge bonus points for mentioning Made to Stick, one of the best books I’ve ever read.

How to maintain corporate culture: build stories around your brand, have bigger goals than “making money” and fire people who don’t fit with the culture you want to have.

+1 Money Management for Entrepreneurs: Good tip that you should have two financial advisors, one primary and one secondary so that if one doesn’t work out then you can transfer to the other while you look for a replacement.

0 Joel Builds a Shipping System: Reprint from Joel on Software.

-1 Entrepreneurship is Passion: all fluff, no content.

-1 Inc. Gear: hard to believe that this isn’t product placement.

+1 Pandora Story: Cover story about the Pandora music recommendation service. Turning your customers into fans will help you overcome all kinds of roadblocks. But what about your international customers?

+1 The Way I Work: The best interview question is to find out how someone copes with stress. Article focuses on stress management and using external creativity to unwind — maintaining relationships with your support network is more important than the job.

–1 Corporate Retreat: The usual on breaking down people to build a team.

+1 How I Did It: Success story in billboard advertising. Become an expert and buy advertising space that people aren’t using.

-1 Inc. Classifieds: Spam spam spam. Penis enlargement, asian brides, and buy my e-book. It’s like they have blog comments printed right in the magazine.

Overall Score: +7

After an underwhelming start I found some good content in the middle of Inc. Magazine and I’d read it again. Every blog is a self-run small business and every blogger is an entrepreneur, so it isn’t that surprising that I liked the magazine.

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4 comments

Blog Tip: Create a Link Post in 3 Seconds

Posted in Becoming a Better Blogger, Delicious, Technology, Yahoo Pipes by engtech on October 03, 2007

Bloggin Tips and Tricks

This is the successor to my post on how to build a weekly digest in 3 seconds.

One question I’m frequently asked is “how do you build those Best of Feeds weekly links?” The way I do it is pretty complicated, but I’ve found a much simpler solution that I want to share with you all. Building a list of links is something every blogger does at one time or another, and it doesn’t have to be hard.

Why Create a Link Post?

Link posts are great ways to share and acknowledge interesting links. Linking to other blogs is what makes the blogosphere tick. If you don’t routinely read and link to other bloggers then your using your blog as a one-way soapbox instead of as a medium for sparking communication and building relationships.

Link posts can be used for a variety of reasons:

  • Weekly Round-up
  • List of resources about a subject
  • List of group writing participants
  • List of contest participants

Here are some more tips from the experts on why create a link post

Step #1: Use Delicious to Save Links

I’m a delicious power user and it’s my favourite site for bookmarking interesting links. It integrates nicely with whatever web browser you are using.

This video explains how to use Delicious to bookmark sites

Delicious already comes with a way of posting a daily link report, but I don’t like it because I feel like I’m spamming my regular readers if my blog is filled with “links for 2007-10-02” instead of stuff I wrote myself. I much prefer posting once a week, or having full control over when I post my list of links.

But the delicious tagging system is so useful for building a list of links around a specific subject, and for attaching short descriptions around each link. For instance, I used the ‘project3’ tag when I was picking out my favorite posts from the Project 3 group writing project on Daily Blog Tips.

Delicious also integrates nicely into your web browser, no matter what it might be.

Step #2: Use Delicious Link Builder

I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe that builds a list of your del.icio.us links that you can cut-and-paste into a blog post.

  1. Put in your delicious username
  2. Optional: Filter your links by a tag
  3. Optional: Filter your links by date
  4. Optional: Limit the number of links (maximum is 31, this is a limit from del.icio.us)
  5. Click ‘Run Pipe‘
  6. Cut-and-paste the results into a blog post using your WYSIWYG editor

Delicious Link Builder

The Results

This is an example of a list from my delicious saved bookmarks.

That’s all there is to it. Bookmark web pages with delicious, then go into Delicious Link Builder when you want to make a list of them.

You can start by bookmarking this post. :)

Advanced Users – Pretty Cut-n-Paste

I use a Greasemonkey script in Firefox to make the output of Yahoo Pipes a little bit nicer.

  1. How to Install Greasemonkey
  2. How to Install a Greasemonkey Script
  3. Install Yahoo Pipe Cleaner

Advanced Users – Clone Your Own Pipe

If you’re logged into Yahoo then you’ll have the option to ‘clone’ my Pipe (Delicious Links Builder). This means you have your own copy of it and you can change the default values for the fields to whatever you want, eg: always default to your username, and to 7 days worth of links.

Advanced Users – StumbleUpon

If you’re using delicious to save bookmarks, you can also use another handy Greasemonkey script I created that lets you save web pages to StumbleUpon at the same time you’re saving them to Delicious.

Related Links

There’s Plenty More

See the full list of free software I have created.

You can get frequent updates about all of my new software, tools or blog themes by subscribing to IDT Labs by RSS or by email. Or you could just subscribe to my main blog, Internet Duct Tape.

Subscribe to feed

This post was written as part of the Geeks Are Sexy Ultimate “How-To” contest.

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45 comments

Digest for September 2007

Posted in Monthly Digest, Technology by engtech on October 01, 2007

Monthly Digest

Every month I publish a digest post collecting the best of Internet Duct Tape. Here you go! You can also see the digest for August 2007.

One Year Ago

Here are some articles that are still timeless.

Monthly Digest

Lifehacks

Blogging and RSS

Social Web Applications

Books

Best of Feeds

My weekly best of the net link round-up.

Popular Posts

What’s hot this month.

IDT Labs Software Updates

IDT Labs is where I track free software I create.

 

  • [DELICIOUS/STUMBLEUPON] Delicious Stumbles crossposting tool

    Last Greasemonkey script this week :) With Delicious Stumbles I get all of the super-useful features I like about delicious (speed, recommended tags) but I also teach StumbleUpon more about what I like without having to spend all that time cutting-and-pasting between two accounts. Submit a page…

  • [WORDPRESS] Comment Ninja

    My WordPress Comment Ninja extension is available for beta test. Try it out and let me know what you think! Respond directly from the comment administration panel on your dashboard Respond by comment, email or both (without having to cut-and-paste your response!) Respond using your email…

  • [AKISMET] Akismet Auntie Spam Helper for Akismet v2

    Version 2 is out, but you probably already know that. Read more about it. Akismet Auntie Spam is a maintenance script for WordPress administrators. One of the problems with the Akismet spam protection service is that sometimes it misidentifies a real comment as spam. WordPress has a spam recovery…

  • [FLICKR] Cut-and-paste to blog with CSS classes and credit link

    Makes it easy to do an OLE cut-and-paste Flickr photos to your blog (ie: WordPress using TinyMCE) and give the proper attribution This script makes it easy to cut-and-paste photos from Flickr into your blog while still including a credit link to the photographer. creates CSS classes around images…

  • [PHOTOBUCKET] Log Me In Already!

    Takes you directly to your album if you visit http://photobucket.com while already logged in. Because it’s too annoying to have to click “My Album” every time. IDT Labs is a blog for news announcements about software, tools or blog themes created by InternetDuctTape.com . Subscribe…

  • [GMAIL] Quickly Open Compose Mode

    Turns off clutter when directly composing gmail messages (IE: clicking on a mailto link) One thing that annoys me about Gmail is how slow it can be to load. This becomes a real problem when you force all mailto: links to open in Gmail. Gmail Quick Compose redirects all “compose mode” links…

  • [WORDPRESS.COM] Stats for Pages

    This is a Greasemonkey script that adds stats to the Edit Pages panel on WordPress.com. IDT Labs is a blog for news announcements about software, tools or blog themes created by InternetDuctTape.com . Subscribe to InternetDuctTape by RSS or subscribe by email .

Digest for August 2007

2 comments

Best of Feeds – 30 links – programming, productivity, code, socialsoftware, socialnetworking

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on September 29, 2007

RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.

Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).

Legend

  • saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
  • inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
  • diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

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5 comments

When is it time to get a new iPod?

Posted in Asides, Contests, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio by engtech on September 28, 2007

Death Clocks use statistical information to let you know when you are going to die based on your habits (with smoking and obesity being the worst factors). The iPod Death Clock (via) is an interesting little web app that figures out how much longer your iPod has to live based on the serial number (how old it is) and how you use it (while running, on the bus). Needless to say my 3rd generation iPod is getting on in years.

I happened upon a blog called Contester the other day that tracks Internet freebies being given away by other bloggers. Blog contests are a great grassroots way to advertise your blog (if you aren’t too spammy about it — some of them are). They’re usually worth entering because you have a 1:20 to 1:50 to 1:200 chance in winning depending on how popular the blog running it is. A few people are giving away iPods, and hope I win one as my iPod is on it’s last legs.

One of the downsides to owning an iPod is the iTunes music store. The music has DRM copying protection measures that are a huge pain in the ass. Enter the new Amazon MP3 store that sells music for cheaper than iTunes without any copying protection — you’re free to do whatever you want with the music you own. Luckily there are also quite few blogs giving away Amazon gift certificates or straight up PayPal.

Becoming a Better Blogger

There’s also a couple of sites offering books for bloggers that I want to read.

There’s also a contests for professional logo design

It’s crazy how this idea of promoting your blog via holding a contest has taken off like hot cakes. It makes me a little sad though that it seems like some people are losing their focus and writing/participating in contests all the time instead of writing blog posts that share information, help people, or at the very least entertain.

And on a slightly different note, someone is finally doing one of these contests for a real cause instead of personal gain:

Ultra-runner Tim Borland is running 63 marathons in 63 days in order to raise funds and awareness for the A-T Children’s Project in their quest for a cure or life-improving therapies for ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T). A-T is a rare, neurodegenerative disease that affects children, giving them the combined symptoms of cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, and cancer. Children with A-T — born seemingly healthy — are usually dependent upon wheelchairs by the age of 10 and often do not survive their teens.

To run with Tim, join a tailgate party, or make a donation, please visit the A-T CureTour website. There, you can also view the daily video blog produced by filmmakers who are making an independent documentary on the A-T CureTour and enter a contest to Win a Nintendo Wii.

Hard not to participate for something like that.

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13 comments

7 Tips for Learning the Declutter Habit

Posted in Lifehacks, Technology by engtech on September 27, 2007

Lifehacks and Productivity

The roots of clutter come from the same social forces that said collecting comic books and stamps were an “investment”. I don’t know if it comes from corporate greed or from a post-World-War-2 generation where things were so scarce that suddenly everything had value and hoarding became a way of life. But collecting for the sake of collecting is a life habit that you have to break before you find yourself retired and living as a shut-in because cardboard boxes are blocking your doors.

Why declutter? It frees up your house and it frees up your mind. Your possessions own you as anyone who has ever had to move repeatedly over the course of several years can attest. It was moving twice in one year that finally got me to get rid of CDs I no longer listened to and textbooks I hadn’t looked at since university.

Tip #1: Your material goods hold little resale value no matter what you paid for them. This is a hard lesson to come to terms with because you know how much you paid for something. It is particularly hard for electronic goods since they are so costly upfront but become obsolete so fast. Good luck re-selling your bulky CRT monitor set in the age of LCD.

The media format wars means that even if you build up a VHS, DVD, CD, vinyl or cassette tape collection then it will be obsolete in ten years and within twenty years you won’t even own a device that can play them back. Does your new computer have a 3’5″ floppy drive? Changing media formats mean that owning a media collection for the sake of collecting is a useless endeavor.

Tip #2: Digitization is your friend. Photos, music, TV shows and movies can all be stored compactly on your computer hard drive or on DVDs. Have a good backup strategy though because hard drives will eventually fail on you.

Tip #3: “Have I used this in the past year?” is the question to ask when it comes to clothes, shoes, kitchen appliances, all that stuff in the garage or the work shed. Only keep what you really have use for. Your brain plays tricks on you like telling yourself you can lose that 20 lbs in only a few months.

Tip #4: “Will I watch or read this again?” is what should go through your head when it comes to book or movie collections. Lifetime collections should consist of only the favorites you will re-watch or want to share with others, everything else is collecting dust.

Tip #5: Don’t be overly sentimental! When I was 9 years old I convinced my parents to haul a lobster trap back home with us from our summer vacation. It sat in the back of the yard falling apart for years if not decades. Did it inspire any memories of the trip? Not anymore than the easily portable and easily storable photos we had taken with it. Sentimental is keeping things that have special meaning to you — not keeping everything you’ve ever come in contact with.

Tip #6: Renting is more economical than owning. It might not be true when it comes to real estate but it’s definitely true when it comes to books, dvds and any other form of media. Libraries are free. A $6 rental fee is still much cheaper than $25 new or $11 in the bargain bin. Even if it the movie or book is worth becoming part of your lifetime collection then you are still ahead because of all the times when it wasn’t.

Tip #7: Find your downstream ecosystem. When I declutter my only concern is passing things on to someone who will make use of them. It would be nice to recoup some of the cost but the sad fact is most things lose value so fast these days that the effort to regain any of the initial value is wasted.

For small items there are sites like Amazon, Ebay and specialty sites. For large items there are local listings on Facebook and Craigslist. Clothes can go to second hand stores and the Salvation Army. Childrens books and stuffed animals are well appreciated by schools. Local libraries accept books, CDs and DVDs which they then resell to raise funds. With a little digging you can find a non-profit organization that refurbishes computers for underprivileged youth.

The secret to learning how to live a clutter-free life is to realize that items don’t hold their value, that economically renting is cheaper in the long term for single-use goods, and to know how to get rid of stuff in a way that it doesn’t go to waste.

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42 comments

Blog Tip: Creating a Blog Maintenance Start Page with Netvibes

Posted in RSS Syndication, Technology, Technorati, Twitter, WordPress.com Tips by engtech on September 25, 2007

Bloggin Tips and Tricks

In Blogger GTD, Leo mentioned that it was a good idea to have one inbox for all your blogging related notifications. I hate cluttering in my inbox, but I do agree that it makes sense to have a single point of reference rather to spend 5 minutes checking some information in one place and then spend 5 minutes checking information in another place. As Skelliewag says, those 5 minutes add up over the course of a day and by the end of it you’ve wasted an hour.

Directing everything to my inbox would never work for me, but it is possible to have a single start page for all your blog maintenance activities using Netvibes. If you aren’t familiar with Netvibes it is a combination of an RSS feed aggregator and a widget platform. It is analogous to iGoogle (but works better). In simple terms Netvibes lets you put lots of information in one place and look at information from several web pages on a single page.

blog maintenance netvibes start page

If you’ve never tried it out before then please visit http://netvibes.com — they let you play around with a default page even if you don’t have an account.

This is what I put on my blog maintenance start page. Replace internetducttape.com or engtech.wordpress.com with your blog URL.

Column 1: Comment Administration and Social Site Monitoring

blog maintenance netvibes comment monitoring

The first column is for things that I want to respond quickly to — comments and checking to see if my site is submitted to Digg or Reddit.

Box #1: Comments RSS feed: http://internetducttape.com/comments/feed

Or you could use my WordPress Comment Extractor / WordPress Trackback Extractor to get only the comments or only the trackbacks.

Box #2: Shortcuts to WordPress administration activities using the Netvibes Bookmarks widget.

Bookmarks: http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?module=Bookmarks

I add the following bookmarks:

Box #3: Social Site Submission Watchdog is a custom Yahoo Pipe I created.

Click on this link then

  • change your blog URL
  • click on Run Pipe
  • copy the RSS link to Netvibes

Column 2: Blog Stats

blog maintenance netvibes check blog stats

It’s a bad idea to check your blog stats multiple times a day, but is it so bad if you’re also checking blog comments, emails and instant messages at the same time?

Box #1: This will only work for WordPress.com bloggers, which is too bad because it’s a great way to check stats at a glance.

WordPress.com Mobile Widget: http://gamespotting.net/wordpressnetvibes.html

Box #2: Technorati Rank from RSS. Another custom Yahoo Pipe. This one is a little more complicated to install because you’ll need your Technorati API key.

Click on this link then

  • change your blog URL
  • find your Technorati API key and cut-and-paste it
  • click on Run Pipe
  • copy the RSS link to Netvibes

Box #3: Filtered Blog Reactions from Technorati. This is another custom Yahoo Pipe. It shows the blog URL as the title and links to the front page instead of directly to the post.

Click on this link then

  • change your blog URL
  • click on Run Pipe
  • copy the RSS link to Netvibes

You could use this RSS feed instead: http://feeds.technorati.com/search/internetducttape.com

Column 3: Direct Communication

netvibes blog maintenance communication twitter

I use the second tab as a way to keep a quick check on how I stay in contact with other bloggers — through Gmail and Twitter.

Box #1: Gmail: http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?module=Gmail

I use a dedicated Gmail account for blogging — I don’t receive any personal or work related email with that account.

Box #2: Twitter Replies RSS feed: http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.rss

This shows some of the power of Netvibes — you can view password protected RSS feeds.

Box #3: Twitter: http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?module=Twitter

Create Your Own Blog Maintenance Start Page

This gives you a few ideas of how I use the service, but the possibilities are endless.

For instance there is a Facebook widget: http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?module=Facebook

Not to mention several widgets that let you directly embed a web page. Using those generic modules you can embed Google Reader into Netvibes and other crazy stuff like that.

What are you going to put on your blog maintenance start page?

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70 comments

Only Two Days Left to Win Graphic Design Services for Your Blog

Posted in Asides, Contests, Group Writing Projects, Technology by engtech on September 24, 2007

In 3 Surefire Ways to Advertise Your Blog on a Shoestring I recommended running a blog contest as a great way to create buzz, build links, and get the attention of potential new readers. It sounds like David Airey Graphic Design was listening because he is running what has to be the biggest blog giveaway contest I’ve ever seen (click to see rules). The prize pool is large enough that I thought it was a Problogger contest at first glance.

Running through the contest sponsors is a good list of blogs I already subscribe to: David himself, DoshDosh, I Love Typography, ProBlogger, Daily Blog Tips, InstigatorBlog, Business Blogwire, Andy Beard Niche Marketing, Make It Great! and Lorelle on WordPress (where I am sometimes a guest blogger).

This is a great idea and I’m very impressed with how he has managed to rally a community around him to provide prizes. If you run a blog yourself then you should enter the contest in the next two days.

You could be a winner. I got my new logo from a contest on Daily Blog Tips.

3 comments

Best of Feeds – 22 links – programming, blogging, tips, javascript, rails

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on September 23, 2007

RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.

Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).

Legend

  • saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
  • inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
  • diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

  • 9 Techniques to Promoting Your Social Web Application

    How do you build a web app that has traction, gain users and hopefully explodes virally? I’ve been paying attention to this space for far too long and this is a round-up of the tricks and techniques successful and not-so-successful social web applications use to promote themselves.

  • The Problem With Social Web Applications

    This is an exciting time because unlike traditional software that runs on your computer [1], web applications are created as social software where you have a friends list, collaborate on a document with multiple people and it is easily to share information and communicate. The downside is these…

  • Best of Feeds – 55 links – programming, firefox, blogging, tips, lifehacks

    Tags: blogging, books, business, debugging, del.icio.us, delicious, development, digg, facebook, firefox, funny, games, geek, humor, life, lifehacks, management, organization, productivity, programming, security, smo, socialbookmarking, socialnetworking, socialsoftware, stumbleupon, tips, video

This Week at IDT Labs

  • [DELICIOUS/STUMBLEUPON] Delicious Stumbles crossposting tool

    Last Greasemonkey script this week :) With Delicious Stumbles I get all of the super-useful features I like about delicious (speed, recommended tags) but I also teach StumbleUpon more about what I like without having to spend all that time cutting-and-pasting between two accounts. Submit a page…

  • [WORDPRESS] Comment Ninja

    My WordPress Comment Ninja extension is available for beta test. Try it out and let me know what you think! Respond directly from the comment administration panel on your dashboard Respond by comment, email or both (without having to cut-and-paste your response!) Respond using your email…

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Comments Off on Best of Feeds – 22 links – programming, blogging, tips, javascript, rails

9 Techniques to Promoting Your Social Web Application

Posted in Software, Startups and Business, Technology, Web 2.0 and Social Media by engtech on September 21, 2007

Social Software and You

This is a continuation from The Problem with Social Web Applications.

“web applications are created as social software where you have a friends list, collaborate on a document with multiple people and it is easily to share information and communicate. The downside is these networks consume a lot of attention and too much time is wasted building profiles and adding friends – for some of these sites building a profile and adding friends is the only utility they have.”

Putting the inherent problems of social web apps aside, how do you build a web app that has traction, gain users and hopefully explodes virally? I’ve been paying attention to this space for far too long and this is a round-up of the tricks and techniques successful and not-so-successful social web applications use to promote themselves.

I’m completely excluding any technique that relies on spending money. It’s a given that you can buy traffic and attention through various mean. Instead, I’m focusing on the self-powered techniques companies can use to build organic buzz and word of mouth advertising around their web application.

Technique #1: Beta Invitations

The easiest way to generate buzz for your social web app is to create an artificial scarcity for applications. You can email invitations to people every day and they won’t give you a second glance, but if invitations are hard to come by then the invitation becomes a valuable commodity instead of easily ignored spam. Gray market economies grow around beta invitation trading, even if the accounts themselves are seldom used.

Beta invite success stories: Gmail, Joost, Pownce

Gotcha: “Blog Friendly” Beta Invitations

The gray market beta invitation economy that you want to generate buzz is built off of the back of bloggers. Invitations are an easy way for bloggers to provide value (or the illusion of value) to their readers at no cost other than time. How bloggers feel about your beta invite campaign, and your application, will come from how easy you make it for them to send out invitations.

Medium lets me invite people by posting a URL on my blog. All of my readers who click on that URL can get into the Medium beta and are added as ‘friends’ with no effort on my part. Compare this to Joost invitations require a cut-and-paste of every email address into a desktop application. Sending a single Joost invitation will take me at least a few minutes because I have to load a desktop application. It could potentially take much longer if the desktop application needs to be updated.

Gotcha: Scarcity of Beta Invitations

One way sites screw up is by giving away too many beta invitations up front. If you are using manipulation to create buzz around your product then you need to create artificial value by implying that the people who have access to your service are more privileged. If anyone and their lolcat can get in then how do you create the false sense of hype that comes from people talking about a product you don’t have access to? It’s like the false economy around diamonds.

Technique #2: Social Engineering Trickery

A social engineering technique that works very well for getting people to accept their user account is to say “your friend created a profile for you!” It’s cheesy but it gets the invited user to sign-up. The easiest way to engage someone’s curiosity is to make it about them. People are always interested in themselves, and in what other people may have said about them.

Examples: Spock and Yahoo Mash

Technique #3: The Video Demo

A very effective technique for creating interest in your product before the doors are wide open is creating a video to promote the service and show how people can use it. The iScrybe calendar is a great example of a video that went viral and created a lot of buzz around a product that still hasn’t materialized (disclaimer: I’m a beta tester).

CommonCraft has created a business behind making videos that explain product in simple no-frill terms that somehow work better and remain more interesting than the flashiest demos.

Gotcha: Leaking Features to Early

The only problem with giving a video demo of a product doesn’t exist is you give your competitors that much more time to copy your features. By the time you release you’re competitive advantage might no longer exist.

Technique #4: The Press Release

I’ll let this video CommonCraft developed for PRWeb discuss the value of press release kits for generating buzz.

Gotcha: Spamming Bloggers with Press Releases

As a blogger, one of the dangerous of having your email address on your About Me page is the number of press releases you receive. I’ll reluctantly admit that I do occasionally write a blog post about a service that catches my eye. However, the method of contact has also made me ignore sites like CrossLoop.com that I later realized was very awesome and solves a problem I often have about how to fix someone else’s computer remotely. Why is your application different than any other of the many emails I have received?

Technique #5: The Address Book Import

Always make it as easy as possible for people to invite their friends to use your social web app. The email address book is the only existing workaround to the “social graph problem.” Make it as easy as possible for users to invite or connect with their friends using address book import and supporting the major webmail sites (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail) as well as instructions on how to upload from Outlook or Outlook Express. Plaxo even offers a free javascript widget so ANY social website can offer address book import with little effort.

Gotcha: Giving Out Your Email Password

Jeff very correctly points out that giving out your email password is ridiculously stupid, since a malicious site can hijack your login information for any website and potentially gain access to your credit card or banking information depending if you use the same email address for everything. There has also been more than one case of startups sending emails to your contacts without your permission (see SixDegrees.com, Quechup and RapLeaf).

Gotcha: Address Book Import with Custom Invite

If you are going to brave the address book import (admittedly I do it often) then it is imperative that the invite sender can customize the message to the invitees. Thanks to the wonder of “automatically add anyone you’ve ever had an email conversation with to your address book” technology, if you do full address book spamming you might be contacting people who have a very loose connection to you. LinkedIn does it right by giving the sender several precanned invitation messages that can be customized at will. Another technique is to limit the number of invitations someone can send at once to prevent spamming.

I had a shock this weekend when I sent Yahoo Mash invitations out and my custom email invitation was never sent — instead they were given that spammy ‘engtech created a profile’ message. I went to the trouble to explain why I was sending the invite, what Yahoo Mash was about, and linked to a TechCrunch article about the service. This is what they saw instead:

Success stories: LinkedIn, Plaxo

Failures: Yahoo Mash, Quechup, RapLeaf, sms.ac…

Don't send out stupid invitations like this one

Technique #6: Leverage Existing Success

In all aspects of life success can breed success. Would Paris Hilton have been in the limelight if she wasn’t the heiress to a ridiculous fortune? When larger companies launch a new web application they need to leverage the success of their existing sites. A common complaint when Google or Yahoo launches something new is that it doesn’t integrate well with their existing portfolio of web applications. Use the success and lessons learned from existing applications to slingshot your new web application into stardom. This is much easier to do when it is the same small team developing the application.

Success stories: 37signals

Technique #7: Corporate Superstar

One of the easiest ways to get buzz about your web app is to hire someone who is well known in the industry. This can be a detrimental factor because their involvement can overshadow the product itself or bring too much attention to a product before it has had a chance to mature. However, I think there is always more of a positive factor because it is easier to improve a product than it is to build the kind of buzz these people bring to anything they are involved with.

Examples: Jason Calcanis, Guy Kawasaki, Kevin Rose, Marc Andreessen, Joel Spolsky, Aaron Swartz

Technique #8: Send Out the Bacn

Social sites try to keep you interested by sending ‘tickler’ emails whenever any little action happens related to your account on their site. These emails are functionally useless, but they drive you back to the site. It’s not spam, it’s bacn — useless emails from a website that you’ve given permission to contact you. It’s the worst form of permission marketing and smart sites will set a sane default where they only contact the person once a day at the very most. Stupid sites will quickly see their emails detected as spam since clicking the ‘Report Spam’ button is often much easier than creating an email filter or finding out how to unsubscribe or change notifications.

Very few sites get that if you’re going to email someone that they have a message, you might as well include the message with the email. Even fewer sites understand that people should be able to respond to the message directly from email. Improving the customer experience always trumps increasing page views or any other metric.

Sites that get it: Twitter, StumbleUpon

Sites that don’t get it: Facebook, Yahoo Mash

yahoo mash bacn spam

Technique: Don’t Require an Account to Try It

(update because I forgot it the first time around)

One of the absolutely best ways to promote your app is to let people use it without requiring an account to sign in. OpenID hopes to provide a universal account that you can use anywhere, but other sites like Geni and JottIt bring you directly to the application and only prompt you to create a user account when you want to store your information.

Technique #9: Solve a Problem

The easiest way to build buzz around your web app is to solve a real problem. Many “web 2.0” sites are repeating what has been available in desktop software for decades. For the ones that do something original, it often serves no real purpose. Messaging friends? I have email and instant messenger programs. Writing documents, spreadsheets, calendars? I have office suite applications. Translating desktop software gives decreased performance with the ability to easily collaborate and access documents from any location that has Internet access.

There are very few web applications that solve a problem that desktop software never did well. They add real value to a user’s life in a way that is new and innovative. Desktop software never handled music discovery (last.fm) or photo sharing (flickr and now Facebook) as well as their web counterparts. Too many web applications are social for no reason or offer solutions without a problem to solve. As my blog friend Steven says:

Adding value to one’s personal pool of knowledge or giving to another’s doesn’t depend on vast numbers of useless contacts. Value comes from one to one communication and then following whatever paths that come from that conversation.

Bonus: The Yahoo Mash Report Card

Last weekend I had a chance to check out Yahoo’s “we were too cheap to buy Facebook, let’s get that egg off of our face” entry into the social platform war with Yahoo Mash. The experience inspired this post. How did Yahoo Mash rate?

+1 point for creating approximately 2 hours of ‘I want a beta invite!’ buzz
+2 points for convincing me that Mash invites had some value and I could earn some social capital by sending invites to everyone on my address book
-10 points for refusing to send my handcrafted invitation that explained what Mash is and why I was sending out invitations
-20 points for sending that ‘engtech created a profile for you!’ spam instead of my custom invitation
-3 points for being ugly
-2 points for not having any utility beyond creating a profile
+2 points for the ability to edit other people’s profiles — something different
-4 points for not leveraging all the other Yahoo services I use
+5 points for introducing me to Yahoo Avatars — much cooler than Mash

my yahoo mash avatar

Links You Can Use

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The Problem With Social Web Applications

Posted in Startups and Business, Technology, Web 2.0 and Social Media by engtech on September 18, 2007

Social Software and You

This is an exciting time because unlike traditional software that runs on your computer [1], web applications are created as social software where you have a friends list, collaborate on a document with multiple people and it is easily to share information and communicate. The downside is these networks consume a lot of attention and too much time is wasted building profiles and adding friends — for some of these sites building a profile and adding friends is the only utility they have.

Brad Fitzpatrick touches on this with his social graph problem — we need a way of moving our social network around with us as exportable and importable data. Read/Write Web has an overview of the issues behind the social graph problem. Companies like Facebook and MySpace capitalize on the network effect — the more of your friends who utilize the site, the more useful the site is to you — while Plaxo is one of the companies who are targeting the problem of creating a portable social network you can use on any web site.

There are two fundamental problems with using social web apps. The first is the lack of a unique identifier on the web — you know who you are but there is no way for two websites to know that you are the same person. Email addresses are one way to solve this problem. OpenID is another way to solve the problem of identity on the Internet, but it is fraught with it’s own issues such as too many providers / not enough consumers, who owns your OpenID and how trivial it is for someone to steal your OpenID authentication through phishing. OpenID is better than captcha for leaving web comments, but I wouldn’t trust it with my credit card information.

The second problem with social web apps is social network fatigue. The average person has the time to actively use 2 to 5 social web sites and become part of a community on them. No one has the time to be part of more sites than that, and we get burn out from having to create accounts and add friends on sites after site. This is called social network fatigue and has spawned spoofs like BugrOff and Social Networking Rehab, as well as applications like Delicious Stumbles and Social Poster to make it easier to maintain profiles on multiple sites.

If you’re a new social software company then it’s hard to attract users because of all the incumbent sites who already have their attention; if you’re an old social software then it’s hard to keep users because so much of the initial addiction comes from adding friends. (Not that they’re really your friends, but you know what I mean)

Tomorrow I’ll explain the techniques used to promote a social web applications [2].

[1] Of course, having a dedicated application on your computer is usually a million times more efficient than running an application in a web browser.

[2] aka Why Yahoo Mash Sucks

Related Posts

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Best of Feeds – 55 links – programming, firefox, blogging, tips, lifehacks

Posted in Best of Feeds, Technology by engtech on September 16, 2007

RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays [1]. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.

Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).

Legend

  • saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
  • inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
  • diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

This Week at IDT Labs

  • [WORDPRESS] Comment Ninja

    My WordPress Comment Ninja extension is available for beta test. Try it out and let me know what you think! Respond directly from the comment administration panel on your dashboard Respond by comment, email or both (without having to cut-and-paste your response!) Respond using your email…

  • [FLICKR] Cut-and-paste to blog with CSS classes and credit link

    Makes it easy to do an OLE cut-and-paste Flickr photos to your blog (ie: WordPress using TinyMCE) and give the proper attribution This script makes it easy to cut-and-paste photos from Flickr into your blog while still including a credit link to the photographer. creates CSS classes around images…

  • [PHOTOBUCKET] Log Me In Already!

    Takes you directly to your album if you visit http://photobucket.com while already logged in. Because it’s too annoying to have to click “My Album” every time.

  • [GMAIL] Quickly Open Compose Mode

    Turns off clutter when directly composing gmail messages (IE: clicking on a mailto link) One thing that annoys me about Gmail is how slow it can be to load. This becomes a real problem when you force all mailto: links to open in Gmail. Gmail Quick Compose redirects all “compose mode” links…

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[1] A little late this week because of login issues at wordpress.com. That’s also why there’s twice as many links as usual.

2 comments

Delicious Stumbles – Post to Delicious and StumbleUpon at the same time

Posted in Becoming a Better Blogger, Delicious, IDT Labs Software Development, StumbleUpon, Technology by engtech on September 14, 2007

Social Bookmarking and Social Voting

Delicious and StumbleUpon are two different social networks that let you save websites you like. Delicious Stumbles is a time saving tool for the Firefox web browser that will let you update your StumbleUpon account easily when you bookmark pages on delicious.

This video explains social bookmarking using delicious.

Yesterday Muhammad Saleem announced the Social Media extension for Firefox that lets you quickly browse how a site is saved between delicious/digg/reddit/stumbleupon. I’ve been hitting the same problem from another angle — how to quickly submit from one social bookmarking site to another.

I’m a hardcore delicious user. I use it to save everything. That’s how I build those “Best of Feeds” posts on Saturday. One problem with being a hardcore delicious user is that it means I’m not as active on other social networking sites. If I like something I save it to delicious and then get back to whatever I was doing.

I find delicious to be the quickest site for tagging and the easiest site for searching through pages I’ve bookmarked before. The problem is that I also wanted to submit my saved sites to StumbleUpon. As a blogger, StumbleUpon is a great source of traffic — not to mention a great way to find interesting sites to share and find people who have similar interests. Dosh Dosh has a great post on why StumbleUpon isn’t just a source of traffic — it’s a great tool for anyone. By crossposting the sites I find interesting to StumbleUpon as well as delicious I improve StumbleUpon’s ability to find pages I like.

Delicious Stumbles

With Delicious Stumbles I get all of the super-useful features I like about delicious (speed, recommended tags) but I also teach StumbleUpon more about what I like without having to spend all that time cutting-and-pasting between two accounts.

  • Submit a page you’ve saved to delicious to StumbleUpon using the same URL, title, tags and description
  • Use delicious’ super-quick tagging features instead of StumbleUpon’s really slow tagging
  • Stumble any of your existing bookmarks
  • Stumble a page while you’re saving it to delicious

How to Install

Delicious Stumbles works best with the “old” Delicious extension.

Show Me How It Works

Save a page how you normally would on delicious. But before you click Save, click on the Submit to Stumbleupon link.

delicious stumbles submit to stumbleupon from within the delicious extension

This will open up a new tab to submit on StumbleUpon with all of the information already prefilled.

delcious stumbles stumbleupon submission

You can even go back to any pages you have saved before on delicious and quickly stumble them.

delicious stumbles submit to stumbleupon from within the delicious extension

What Are You Waiting For?

If you use both delicious and StumbleUpon then this script can save you at least a minute every time you submit a site. How many sites do you submit a week? Install it now.

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Managing Spam Maintenance with Akismet Auntie Spam Version 2

Posted in Building a Community, Firefox and Greasemonkey, IDT Labs Software Development, Technology, WordPress, WordPress.com Tips by engtech on September 13, 2007

WordPress Tips and Tricks

Akismet Auntie Spam is a maintenance script for WordPress administrators. One of the problems with the Akismet spam protection service is that sometimes it misidentifies a real comment as spam. WordPress has a spam recovery console that I like to call the spam inbox.

akismet auntie spam helper script for akismet administration

Have you ever stuck your hand as far back at you can into the crannies of your couch and pulled out what you found? That’s kind of what going into the default Akismet spam inbox is like. It’s a dark and evil place, filled with things that will make your eyes burn. You only wanted to find the quarter you lost, but before you know it your hand is stuck and something is touching you back.

Akismet Auntie Spam is a kind old lady who will come to your house and give it a thorough cleaning. She’s not afraid of the dark corners, particularly the spam inbox because she knows exactly how to handle the creepy crawlies hiding out of sight.

Akismet Auntie Spam is not a WordPress plugin. It is a script for the Firefox web browser that will work with any installation of WordPress or WordPress Multi-user — that means you can use it with WordPress.com, Edublogs.org, Blogsome.com and any site that is running WordPress with Akismet. Version 2 is a complete rewrite from scratch, and it is much less complicated now. There are no knobs and buttons for users to twiddle with — it works out of the box, the same way for everyone. Auntie Spam is here for one reason and that’s to save you time.

Akismet Auntie Spam is in no way affiliated with WordPress or Auttomatic — it’s a script I created to make it a hell of a lot easier to watch out for false spam.

How to Install

Slight gotcha: if you are an old time user of Akismet Auntie Spam (from before August 2007) then you’ll want to uninstall your old version before installing the new version of the script. Find out how to uninstall a Greasemonkey script.

What Does Akismet Auntie Spam Do?

Much less time is spent navigating your spam inbox. You can see it all on one page, and it doesn’t take nearly as long to scroll through as it would without Akismet Auntie Spam installed.

  • Fetches all of your spam comments and displays them on one page.
  • Sorts spammers by the amount of spam they’ve sent.
  • Shows only the first line of spam, so less time is spent scrolling.
  • Completely hide obvious spam.
  • Automatically checks for a new version of itself every two weeks.
  • Install it once into your Firefox browser and it will work with *ALL* your WordPress blogs.

Show Me How It Works

Go to your spam inbox on your WordPress dashboard console.

wordpress comments akismet dashboard

Auntie Spam will immediately kick in and download all of the spam at once — no navigating between 10s to 100s of individual pages of spam.

Akismet Auntie Spam will automatically download all of your spam

You can do something else like check your RSS feeds while she grabs all of your spammy comments and organizes them.

Auntie Spam has finished downloading

Spam is sorted from newest to oldest and categorized from most spammy to least spammy. She groups spam by identifying the computer it came from, so surprisingly enough the more spam you have the easier it is to look through it all. She even summarizes it all by only showing the first line.

Spam is compressed - only the first line

Auntie Spam hates those idiots who keep sending you spam again and again. They can be completely ignored.

obvious spam is completely hidden

As you read through all the comment summaries, you may come across one that looks like it isn’t spam. Click on the ‘# comments’ link and Auntie Spam will show you the full text of the comment and give you the option to mark it as not spam.

Click to see the full comment and to mark it as not spam

Once all the spam is loaded there no need to reload it all because you want to search for something specific — hit Ctrl+F and use Firefox’s built in page search.

Search from within your browser instead of using the website

When it comes to de-spamming marked comments, or deleting all comments, Auntie Spam gets out of the way and things work the same way they always have.

despaming or deleting all comments

all spam deleted -- no spam found

If Auntie Spam is doing something you don’t want here to, you can return to way things have always been with a single click on the Greasemonkey icon and reloading the page.

turn greasemonkey on and off

What Are You Waiting For?

If you’re running WordPress and you’ve ever had to go dumpster diving for a comment that was accidentally marked as spam then you need Akismet Auntie Spam.

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44 comments

Do You Make These Mistakes with Wikis? 9 Ways To Build a Wiki That Doesn’t Suck

Posted in Technology, Wikipedia, Writing Better Documentation by engtech on September 12, 2007

Wikipedia and Wikis

There’s something about the hint of fall in the air that has always appealed to me. It’s my favorite time of the year, and as the seasons change I find the motivation to apply change to my own life. Last month I had the epiphany that I’ve been far too busy and I need to get a handle on the way I spend my time. The Internet is buzzing about using David Allen’s Getting to Done system to be more productive. There are a hundred and one different software tools you can use with the system; for the past week I’ve been using a personal wiki software called d-cubed/d3 gtd to do it.

Astute readers may guess from the title that there’s a rant coming up, and I want to prefix to say that I have nothing against d-cubed/d3 gtd. It’s good software. I respect Tom, the guy who built it, and appreciate what he’s done and how he’s been available for help. I’m still using and enjoying d-cubed/d3 gtd. No, my beef is with the entire foundation behind d3: that dark Hawaiian voodoo called wiki.

What Is a Wiki?

“Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.

Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.

Like many simple concepts, “open editing” has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.” — Ward Cunningham, creator of Wikis

The first time I saw a wiki was in 1996 and I remember being struck by two distinct thoughts: “wow, that’s ugly” and “why would I want to let people edit what I write?” Fast forward eleven years later and one of the most popular sites on the Internet is Wikipedia, a publicly editable encyclopedia. My uncanny ability to predict what’s going to become widely popular explains why my stock portfolio is doing to badly (damn you, Microsoft Zune).

This video from CommonCraft does a very good job of explaining what Wikis are good for. The wonderful thing about wikis is that wikis are wonderful let you quickly edit a web page and let more than one person collaborate on a document.

You might recognize that video from a post I wrote on LorelleOnWordPress that includes other videos that explain RSS, Social Networks, and Social Bookmarking. How Stuff Works gives even more information about how wikis work and what they are good for.

Wikis in Practice

The two strongest features of a wiki is that 1) anyone can edit a page and 2) it is quick to do an edit. Put those together and the power of a wiki is that they make it trivial to correct mistakes in the current document you are viewing. Wikipedia shows the power of collaborative editing — what is hidden is the massive effort and time sink that people put into it.

“With enough eyes all bugs are shallow.” But any programmer can tell you that a project with poor communication between different contributors always turns into SNAFU. There is great benefit to having many people improving a document through collaborative editing, but not if they aren’t all heading towards the same final result.

Photo by gadl

Small Scale Wiki Personal or a small group of people Works well
Medium Scale Wiki 10s of people Can grow out of control if there isn’t a clear vision and people don’t own things
Large Scale Wiki 100s or 1000s of people Usually a public wiki where some contributors are actively acting against the best interests of the wiki
Massive Scale Wiki 10000s of people Works well because there are enough contributors to handle the massive amount of work involved

I’m not an expert on wikis by any means, but I have used PBWiki, TWiki, TiddlyWiki and Wikipedia before. I’ve used wikis in multiple contexts from personal information storing, to corporate intranet backbone to internet social software. Wikis seem to work best on the small scale and massive scale. It’s in the middle with a medium/large number of collaborators information gets confusing. Like some plants, wikis tend to grow the same way no matter who is building them. Wikis grow wide and shallow, not narrow and deep. This makes them perfect for something like a dictionary or encyclopedia, but not as good for document tracking on an Intranet. Wikis favour a large number of pages at the same level instead of a tree hierarchy.

Creating a wiki is a grassroots process.

How Wikis Should Be Organized

  • Administration
    • Forms
    • Time Tracking
    • Vacations
  • Engineering
    • Project1
      • Design
        • Product Spec
      • Verification
        • Verification Spec
        • Verification Environment
        • Verification Plan
        • Regression Results
      • Validation
    • Project2
  • Manufacturing

What Wikis Really Grow Into

  • Administration
    • Forms
    • Time Tracking
    • Vacations
    • Phone Numbers
    • Board Room Booking
  • Engineering
    • Project1
    • Design
      • Product Spec
    • Verification
      • Verification Spec
      • Verification Environment
      • Verification Plan
      • Verification Review Minutes
      • Action Items from Friday’s Review
      • How to Run a Test
      • Lab Tracking
      • Regression Results
      • Validation
    • Project2
  • Manufacturing

Wikis tend to spread out wide rather than have a strict hierarchy — and this can make it very hard to find what you’re looking for.

“Wikis are great for ad-hoc arrangement and re-arrangement of data, but they don’t respect existing data. And with 2-million-plus documents in dozens of formats sitting in our document management system, we need to respect existing data. Wikis will be useful to the extent they enable us to re-use, remix, reorganize, review, and extend those documents. What is needed is a wiki that is created, edited, and saved in Word.”
http://barelylegalsubstance.chattablogs.com/archives/027444.html

Why Do Wikis Suck?

If you aren’t familiar with wiki software (and you’re still reading?!) you should skip this section. I’m not talking about a specific wiki implementation, but general wikisms I’ve noticed in the various wiki software I’ve tried. If your WikiFlavour doesn’t have these problems then give yourself a pat on the back because you dodged a bullet.

The inventor of WikiWords should be shot

  • I understand that the core of wikis is that they can be quickly edited but creating links haphazardly is the primary reason why wikis grow like weeds instead of carefully tended gardens.
  • Having non-standard capitalization (CamelCase) automatically links to another page on the Wiki is only useful approximately 10% of the time.
  • The other 90% of the time you have to go back and re-edit a page to remove unintentional WikiWord links.
  • It promotes writing everything in lowercase to avoid the unintentional creation of WikiWords.
    CamelCase is the dumbest linking structure ever invented. Even the Wiki page on Wikipedia agrees with me:

    “Originally, most wikis used CamelCase when naming program identifiers. These are produced by capitalizing words in a phrase and removing the spaces between them (the word “CamelCase” is itself an example). While CamelCase makes linking very easy, it also leads to links which are written in a form that deviates from the standard spelling. … There is no easy way to determine which capital letters should remain capitalized. As a result, many wikis now have “free linking” using brackets, and some disable CamelCase by default.”

Wiki syntax reinvents the wheel

  • Wiki software uses its own syntax for formatting text in an effort to be more human readable than HTML.
  • Wiki syntax succeeds in being more concise than HTML, but more often than this means your normal punctuation or capitalization is being misinterpreted as wiki syntax.
  • Non-standard — different Wiki software uses different syntax.
  • Is learning wiki syntax really easier than HTML? <b>bold</b> is easier to remember than ”bold”.
  • WYSIWYG HTML editors are a solved problem thanks to software like TinyMCE — using wiki syntax is much more complicated then learning a WYSIWYG editor that essentially works like every other wordprocessing software you’ve ever used.
  • If I don’t like having to learn a non-standard formatting syntax when switch between 3-5 different programming languages on a weekly basis, then how do normal people feel about it?

Wikis create an information sink-hole

  • It is hard to import information into a wiki from other sources.
  • It is hard to export information out of wikis (eg: RSS feeds).
  • Wiki data remains stationary, when users want filtered data moving at them via email or RSS.
  • Where’s the API? Wikis are intended to make it “easier for humans to edit” documents, but corporate wikis can benefit from automation like updating a report or a log on the wiki instead of sending updates by email. Wikis need an API so that it is easy to create scripts to add or edit pages on a Wiki.

Large scale wikis become chaotic and disorganized

  • Multiple collaboration means no one owns anything — organization comes from someone having a vested interest to organize and maintain.
  • Information is hard to navigate consistently because there is no unifying vision to the structure.
  • Large scale wikis turn into a flat hierarchy of documents with no hierarchy.

Having multiple editors *requires* tracking changes

  • With multiple editors on a document, version control and discussion of changes become essential requirements.
  • All changes should be saved and easily backed out of.
  • Need the ability to protect pages (lock) from edits.

Wikis and Search

  • Using WikiWords as titles makes it near impossible to build a decent search system. Wikis usually generate overly concise URLs or incomprehensible URLs with no meaning.
    • Always have to click on search results to see what the document really is because the title isn’t descriptive enough.
    • The default search results are usually “what search found first” with no attempt to sort by relevance.
    • If I’ve learned anything from GMail it’s the power of search+tags. So the problem with finding information in a Wiki is really a problem with search.
  • Search isn’t as big a problem with publicly accessible wikis because you can use Google. It is a much bigger problem with personal/intranet wikis. Data goes into the wiki but good luck EVER finding it again.
  • The ability to “Jump” to a specific WikiWord is
    • usually misinterpreted as a search form
    • encourages the use of short WikiWords that makes a large scale wiki more of a mess
    • is sometimes case sensitive which adds much more complexity than entering search terms for a specific document

Plugins

  • Many wikis offer plugins for adding additional functionality.
  • Adding plugins creates another layer of complexity and potential conflicts with upgrading the core software.
  • Developing custom plugins can be a huge time sink — it’s nice to have the ability to do so, but it should be a last resort.
  • Dependence on plugins can create chicken-and-egg scenarios that complicate upgrading the wiki software.

Plugins that greatly improve the wiki software’s functionality should always *become* core functionality. This is a classic problem with all software that supports plugins — at some point they need to be packaged together into a distribution so that the majority of users can appreciate them instead of living in the dark age.

Building Wiki Software That Doesn’t Suck

You know what a wiki is, you know why wikis end up sucking, and if you’re still reading this far then you’ve probably used a wiki yourself. Some wiki software gets it right, but unfortunately the core distributions of many WikiFlavours are still missing some of these essential features. This is a list of what I think *every* wiki software should do to improve the WikiExperience for everyone.

1. Make It Simple to Edit, Not Just Quick to Edit

1.1 Disable WikiWords and CamelCase

Users have to create links by hand instead of unintentionally creating links because of capitalization. It will lead to meaningful document titles with headings longer than JimsListOfBugs.

1.2 WYSIWYG text editor

Let Ctrl-B bold the selected text! Contributors should not have to write in all lowercase with no punctuation in constant fear of accidentally embedding wiki syntax.

2. Help Me Find What I’m Looking For

2.1 Indexed search that orders by relevance

I’ve mentioned before that wikis need to build meaningful URLs that are human readable. They also should be able to rank pages based on what links to it, and to do something smart like click tracking where if I always click on result #6 when I search for product plan then MAYBE it should be one of the first results.

2.2 Navigation clues

Wikis need to support effective navigation with good titles, breadcrumbs, and easily created tables of contents. When I’m looking at a page I should be able to easily the parent hierarchy and child pages, as well as neighbouring pages.

3. Never Lose Data

3.1 Store and track changes

Wikis need version control for every change and easy rollback for all edits. Users need to have notification, watchlists, and easy changelogs. This is mostly a solved problem to various degrees, but it’s still surprising that some personal wiki software doesn’t support this.

3.2 Refactoring

I’ve said that wikis grow like weeds and that need a gardener to prune them. Refactoring and reorganizing pages needs to be simple to do and well supported. Information should be easy to move and automatically leave a forwarding address behind.

3.3 Discussions

Each page on the wiki needs to have a behind the scenes discussion page where direction can be agreed on, differences can be debated and issues can be captured in a message board / forum format.

4. Getting Data In and Out

4.1 Document management

People are going to want to attach all kinds of documents to wikis: from office documents like pdf, doc and xls, to traditional media files like images and video. These attachments should be treated the same as wiki pages when it comes to search and version control.

4.2 Wikis need APIs for in/out

One of the things people often complain about is importing/exporting data from a wiki. They’re meant to be easily human editable, but for some reason they overlook that you likely have a existing information in another format that you want to merge in and retain as much formatting/linking as possible. If there is an easy-to-use API then data can be moved around by writing scripts.

Conclusion

Wikis are very powerful when used correctly, but unfortunately there are 51 flavours of wikis and what has become best practice in advanced wiki software can seem painful archaic in software that still follows in the footsteps of the WorldWideWiki. Yes, I’m looking at you WikiWords. Wikis are becoming the defacto standard for modern corporate intranets, while they are undoubtedly better than the static and out of date web sites that existed before the still have a long way to go in some areas where intranets have always been weak — namely search.

Any day now Google will be opening up registration for it’s JotSpot wiki software. It’ll be interesting to see if they can get over their product schizophrenia and intelligently integrate wikis with wordprocessing, spreadsheets, slides, blogs, email, calendar, rss readers and build an intranet solution that far outclasses anything currently available. They have all the pieces, and the killer knowledge that everyone is missing — how to build an intranet search that works over all the formats.

It’s sad that downloading documents from the corporate intranet and using Google Desktop search is still 95 times more effective than using intranet search.

Links You Can Use

Related Posts

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Best of Feeds – 22 links – lifehacks, blogging, facebook, firefox, productivity

Posted in Best of Feeds, Technology by engtech on September 09, 2007

RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.

Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).

Legend

  • saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
  • inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
  • diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

  • How Procrastination Dashes Made Me a Better Worker
    • 43Folders recommends setting a procrastination dash to attack tasks you’re having trouble getting started on. The (10+2)*5 system suggests doing 5 intervals of 10 minutes of work, followed by 2 minutes of “me time” as a way to get yourself on a groove and find your flow. It’s a…
  • Adopting Getting to Done
    • Last week I wrote a post about the 3 steps to be successful at anything: be happy (position of strength), know what is important (goal setting, heading in the right direction) and be disciplined (execute the tasks to achieve your goal). The great thing about writing “productivity” posts is…
  • Quotations from The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1978)
    • I’m going to celebrate Labour Day with the only book I’ve ever read that captured what it’s like to work at building integrated circuits. The Soul of a New Machine is a Pulitzer Prize winning book written in 1978 by a reporter named Tracy Kidder. Hat tip to Scott Rosenberg, or rather to…
  • Best of Feeds – 35 links – design, programming, blogging, socialsoftware, javascript
    • Tags: blogging, design, facebook, gamers, humor, ideas, javascript, productivity, programming, socialnetworking, socialsoftware, startups, tips

This Week at IDT Labs

  • [PHOTOBUCKET] Log Me In Already!
    • Takes you directly to your album if you visit http://photobucket.com while already logged in. Because it’s too annoying to have to click “My Album” every time.
  • [GMAIL] Quickly Open Compose Mode
    • Turns off clutter when directly composing gmail messages (IE: clicking on a mailto link) One thing that annoys me about Gmail is how slow it can be to load. This becomes a real problem when you force all mailto: links to open in Gmail. Gmail Quick Compose redirects all “compose mode” links…
  • [WORDPRESS.COM] Stats for PagesThis is a Greasemonkey script that adds stats to the Edit Pages panel on WordPress.com.
  • [WORDPRESS.COM] Open 5 Blogs at RandomI’ve created a short little script that will open five WordPress.com blogs at random when you press ALT+SHIFT+W .

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How Procrastination Dashes Made Me a Better Worker

Posted in Increasing Productivity and Simplifying Your Life, Software, Technology by engtech on September 06, 2007

Software

The biggest problem with the Internet is that it’s entirely too easy to get distracted. We’ve all wilfed at one time or another — what started as an innocent task-related web search ended up down some rat hole of links until you’re reading a web comic about falling into a couch and confronting the dark nebulous force of Lost Things. Stupid internet, so bright and shiny and full of useful and entertaining information.

43Folders recommends setting a procrastination dash to attack tasks you’re having trouble getting started on. The (10+2)*5 system suggests doing 5 intervals of 10 minutes of work, followed by 2 minutes of “me time” as a way to get yourself on a groove and find your flow. It’s a great system, and it really works, especially if you use the Instant Boss software.

Instant Boss procrastination dash productivity dash 5*10+2

Instant Boss is a tiny software app that will let you know when your 10 minute / 2 minute timers are up. If you want to take a longer break than 2 minutes (because you’re saving an interesting article, or writing an email to a friend) then it will keep reminding you to get back to work every minute on the dot.

Instant Boss procrastination dash productivity dash 5*10+2

It’s one of those great little applications that works exactly as specified. I highly recommend it.

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Adopting Getting to Done

Posted in Getting to Done, Software, Technology by engtech on September 05, 2007

Lifehacks and Productivity

Last week I wrote a post about the 3 steps to be successful at anything: be happy (position of strength), know what is important (goal setting, heading in the right direction) and be disciplined (execute the tasks to achieve your goal). The great thing about writing “productivity” posts is that the people who really know you well know how hypocritical you are being.

I imagine don’t work 80 hour weeks that keep you at work until midnight on the weekends should be included in the happiness part. — AJ Valliant

I’m an avid video gamer, and one of the worst lessons that video games (particularly the online shared world MMORPGs) teach people is that success can always be achieved by spending more time. That’s a bald-faced lie as Seth Godin illustrates in this post:

You could argue, “Hey, I work weekends and pull all-nighters. I start early and stay late. I’m always on, always connected with a BlackBerry. The FedEx guy knows which hotel to visit when I’m on vacation.” Sorry. Even if you’re a workaholic, you’re not working very hard at all.

Sure, you’re working long, but “long” and “hard” are now two different things. In the old days, we could measure how much grain someone harvested or how many pieces of steel he made. Hard work meant more work. But the past doesn’t lead to the future. The future is not about time at all. The future is about work that’s really and truly hard, not time-consuming. It’s about the kind of work that requires us to push ourselves, not just punch the clock. Hard work is where our job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie.

Seth believes that success is a factor of taking apparent risks that the status quo believe is unsafe. I’m more interested in how to reach the my goals in less time. I want to improve my time management skills by getting tasks/ideas out of my head and tracked so that I don’t lose them and don’t have to think about them all the time.

I’m shopping around for one of the many a “Getting to Done” implementations, so that I can join the cult.

What I’m Looking For

  • Able to use the same system for different aspects of my life (personal, work, blog)
    • Skills I build up using this system should improve multiple areas of my life
  • Low overhead
    • Organizational systems can be huge time sinks in and of themselves
  • Mostly automated
    • If it feels like work then I won’t have the discipline to follow through with it — I want to spend all my discipline on completing tasks
  • Low “hack” value
    • I like to “improve” things. The system should be robust and well supported so “improving” means installing a plugin, not developing one from scratch

The key point is that I want to use the system to get all my tasks done in as little time as possible, not to spend time playing with the organization system. I want to choose something that works, and stick with it as long as possible.

Why I’m Looking For It

There’s been a meme going around about blogging productivity tips, and I’m sad to say that it was a large inspiration for why I’m deciding to adopt a time management system. Too often I get sucked into looking at stats, reading RSS feeds and commenting on other blogs instead of doing a few key tasks on my own blog and then doing something else with my time.

What I’ve Settled On

I’ve decided to go with D3 for the following reasons:

  • Built-in projects/actions/context/reminders support
  • Based on TiddlyWiki, an actively supported wiki system
  • Stored as a single file that saves itself which means it’s very portable and easy to backup
  • You can even keep it on a thumb drive and always carry it with you
  • Large community of hackers/tweakers who offer lots of support

It has a ridiculously simple installation — all you need is a web browser (Internet Explorer and Firefox both supported). Download the file from dcubed.ca, open it, and start working with it. You can keep the file on your local hard drive, or on a portable thumb drive. I also tried it on a network drive and there seemed to be some latency issues.

If you’d rather store your D3 online (like me), then you can sign up for an account at TiddlySpot that supports several flavours of TiddlyWikis, including D3. I like it because you can password protect it, and have the ability to update offline. It even supports RSS.

The only issue I can see so far is that it is a bit on the slow side if you turn autosave on. What I’d really like it a background autosave that saves any changes after being idle for 5 minutes. It’d keep the application feeling fast.
d3 gtd wiki

Different Aspects, Different Tools

I’ve created separate D-Cubed wikis for different contexts in my life

  • Personal – used for groceries, bills, planning (online)
  • Blog – used for ideas, reoccurring tasks (online)
  • Work – used for task tracking (offline)

D3 is a computer-based solution, so when I’m away from the computer I use a notepad and a camera phone. Quite often a picture is all the information I need to remember to look up a movie/game I’m interested in renting or to research a product I want to buy. Notepads are great for quickly capturing ideas that can’t be conveyed in a photo.

Once I’m at the computer I go through the notepad/camera phone and

  • do the action (if it’s short),
  • decide not to do the action (easiest choice), or
  • add the action to my D3 list

This adds some filtering upfront before it goes into D3.

What Works For You?

The only downside I can see is that D3 isn’t dead simple for non-tech people. I feel that this is offset by the advantage I get from being able to use any plugins that work with TiddlyWiki. Should I have gone with Remember the Milk? Is time management for sissies, pansies, and cat-loving shut-ins? What do you think?

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Quotations from The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1978)

Posted in Book Reviews, Hardware Engineering, Technology by engtech on September 04, 2007

I’m going to celebrate Labour Day with the only book I’ve ever read that captured what it’s like to work at building integrated circuits. The Soul of a New Machine is a Pulitzer Prize winning book written in 1978 by a reporter named Tracy Kidder. Hat tip to Scott Rosenberg, or rather to James Fallows, for turning me on to this book by comparing it to Dreaming in Code. If you’ve read the book, you’ll probably find this interview with Wired (2000) interesting, as it catches up with the old team.

soul of a new machine

Rather than pontificate on what the book meant to me, I’m going to cut and paste some quotes from another reviewer on Amazon.

Review by B. Marold (Bethlehem, PA United States)

When it was first published, the book was a narrative of what was then `modern’ technology, where the central processing units (CPU) or `brains’ of commercial minicomputers and mainframe computers were built up on large circuit boards from individual, specialized integrated circuit chips, with each chip integrating dozens or hundreds of discrete components. This compares to today’s microcomputers where the entire CPU is placed on a single chip incorporating tens of thousands of discrete functions, all taking up no more room than the average credit card. Now, the book is more a history of how this technology was developed, and yet its picture of how people work in teams developing technological projects will probably never go out of date.

The irony of this book is that the computer being developed by the team described in this book, a 32 bit Eclipse computer developed by the Data General corporation, a competitor to the larger and very successful Digital Computer Corporation (Digital), did not really achieve any major breakthrough in technology. While it was intended to compete with a new generation of Digital VAX machines, it ended up being just barely faster than VAX’s in a few special tasks. In fact, in a conversation I once had with some Digital engineers, they said that when they went head to head with Data General in bidding for a computer sale, the only thing they had to do was bring out Kidder’s book to demonstrate that the Data General box was yesterday’s news. Data General may have had the last laugh, as ailing Digital was bought out by Compaq, which has since merged with H-P, further submerging the once great Digital presence in the commercial computer world. Meanwhile, Data General is still around, albeit not the presence it once had when the `minicomputer’ was the great alternative to the IBM monoliths in the glass houses.

Favorite Quotations from The Soul of a New Machine

Computer were relatively scare, and they were large and very expensive. Typically, one big machine served an entire organization. Often it lay behind a plate glass window, people in white gowns attending it, and those who wished to use it did so through intermediaries. Users were like supplicants. The process could be annoying. P14

A company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success. Demand for its products would be soaring, and the owners would be drawing up optimistic five-year plans, when all of a sudden something would go wrong with their system of production. They wouldn’t be able to produce the machines that they had promised to deliver. Lawsuits might follow. P33

A heroic metaphor for success in the computer business: “The major thing is avoiding the big mistake. It’s like downhill ski racing: Can you stay right on that edge beside disaster?” P35

[Seymour Cray and Co.] had come to build what are generally acknowledged to be the fastest computers in the world, he quintessential number-crunchers. Cray was a legend in computers, and in the movie Cray said that he liked to hire inexperienced engineers right out of school, because they do not usually know what’s supposed to be impossible. P77

[On joining a high tech company] Going to work for the Eclipse Group could be a rough way to start out in your profession. You set out for your first real job with all the loneliness and fear that attend new beginnings, drive east from Purdue or Northwestern or Wisconsin, up from Missouri or west from MIT, and before you’ve learned to find your way to work without a road map, you’re sitting in a tiny cubicle or, even worse, in an office like the one dubbed the Micropit, along with three other new recruits, your knees practically touching theirs; and though lacking all privacy and quiet, though it’s a job you’ve never really done before, you are told that you have almost no time at all in which to master a virtual encyclopedia of technical detail and to start producing curcial pieces of a crucial new machine. And you want to make a good impression. So you don’t have any time to meet women, to help your wife buy furniture for your apartment, or to explore the unfamiliar countryside. You work. You’re told, “Don’t even mention the name Eagle outside the group.” “Don’t talk outside the group,” you’re told. You’re working at a place that looks like something psychologists build for testing the fortitude of small animals, and your boss won’t even say hello to you. P79

Wallach had now spent more than a decade working on computing equipment. He’d had a hand in the design of five computers — all good designs, in his opinion. He had worked long hours on all of them. He had put himself into those creatures of metal and silicon. And he had seen only one of them come to functional life, and in that case the customer had decided not to buy the machine. P93

That was what made it fun; he could actually touch the machine and make it obey him. “I’d run a little program and when it worked, I’d get a little high, and then I’d do another. It was neat. I loved writing programs. I could control the machine. I could make it express my own thoughts. It was an expansion of the mind to have a computer.” — Alsing, P126

There’s no such thing as a perfect design. Most experienced computer engineers I talked to agreed that absorbing this simple lesson constitutes the first step in learning how to get machines out the door. Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West was the voice from the cave, supplying that information: “Ok. It’s right. Ship it.” P158

He would bind his team with mutual trust, he had decided. When a person signed up to do a job for him, he would in turn trust that person to accomplish it; he wouldn’t break it down into little pieces and make the task small, easy and dull. P173

“With Tom, it’s the last two percent that counts. What I now call ‘the ability to ship product’ — to get it out the door.” — Rasala P188

Above all, Rasala wanted around him engineers who took an interest in the entire computer, not just in the parts that they had designed. He said that was what was needed to get Eagle out the door on time. P199

The very word, engineer, dulled the spirit. It was something your father might be interested in.

Typically, a machine gets built and sent to market and in its first year out in public a number of small, and sometimes large, defects in its design crop up and get repaired. As the years go by, the number of bugs declines, but although no flaw in a computer’s design might appear for years, defects would probably remain in it– ones so small and occurring only under such peculiar circumstances that they might never show up before the machine became obsolete or simply stopped functioning because of dust in its chips.

“The way to stay on schedule is to make another one.” — Rasala P246

“It doesn’t matter how hard you work on something. What counts is finishing it and having it work.” — Holberger P252

[Small companies would] announce a new product and then for one reason or another they wouldn’t be able to produce it in sufficient quantities to meet their obligations. They’d asphyxiate on their own success. But a small company had to court disaster. It had to grow like a weed just to survive. P312

Almost every commentator has assured the public that the computer is bringing on a revolution. By the 1970s it should have been clear that revolution was the wrong word. And it should not have been surprising to anyone that in many cases the technology had served as a propr to the status quo. P317

Most computer companies have boasted that they aren’t just selling machines, they’re selling productivity. But that clearly isn’t always true. Sometimes they’re selling paper-producers that require new legions of workers to push that paper around.

But maybe a time would come when the computer would run every aspect of a person’s life. “Then we get tired of it. We start growing plants or something. Maybe slowly we will turn around and go away from it. If computers take something away from us, we’ll take it back. Probably a lot of people will get screwed before that happens.” — Holland P325

“I’ll stop asking questions and let you go home. You look tired.”
“It’s a long-term tiredness,” said Rasala.
“Going home won’t solve it,” said Blau. P334

“That’s the bear trap, the greatest vice. Your job. You can justify just about any behavior with it. Maybe that’s why you do it, so you don’t have to deal with all those other problems.” — West P367

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