Archive for the 'People' Category

Blandness is for Wimps

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Victor Nicollet
on September 1, 2010
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Oh, what a sad place the world has become! With so many people producing content—books, blogs, videos, ads—you need your content to be outstanding in order to be noticed. As in, standing out of the unwashed masses of uninteresting produce.

Anger

An exceptionally popular blip on the late-1990s radar was a one-man web site by a hateful bile-spewing megalomaniac whose defining characteristic was that he drew genitalia on greeting cards: Maddox (which is surprisingly safe for browsing at work as long as you don’t visit the greeting card page). Maddox was outrageous. He would write short, sweet and unambiguous sentences like «animals are made to be eaten» and string them together to create complete articles that brought up the image of a crazed man frothing at the mouth in front of a computer in a suburban basement. It was something you would show your friends, if only to make fun of the author and publicly denounce his views. For the french equivalent of Maddox, try Odieux Connard.

Anger and fury are old. Even the bile-spewing is passé. These days, if you can’t vomit napalm from your fingertips on demand, you might as well give up and go back to posting financial advice and generic emo poetry.

Euphoria

And then, there’s endorsement. Turns out, being euphorically happy about something works as well as being maniacally angry about it.

Penny Arcade ran a short strip and news post in late 2009 about Torchlight, a Diablo-esque video game. They didn’t say the game was good, or excellent, or must-have, or 9.5/10 or any of that standardized low-power vocabulary. Tycho wrote:

Runic Games is doing the Lord’s work, in an robust and unambiguous fashion.

And I hate him for that with unrelenting passion, because of the many hours I spent playing Torchlight after that. My basic rule for video games is this: if I can level up, then I will be addicted.

There are three benefits to giving outstanding, sincere compliments, as opposed to outstanding insults.

1. Complimenting someone makes you feel better. The experience you get from quality restaurants is heavily influenced by your expectations. If you expect to have a good time, then unless something goes wrong unexpectedly, you will have a good time. And, if you expect to have a bad time, then you will have a bad time.

2. Sincerely compliments help build friendships. People are always happy when you compliment them, especially if they felt insecure about that very thing. And if you help people feel better, that’s one less step to go to make friends or «online allies»

3. Outspoken, public compliments send out a message: if you’re great and you need some publicity, make sure I notice you. All publicity is good publicity, they say, but most of us would rather not be on the wrong end of the angry-rant-zooka.

Naomi Dunford

One of the best euphoria-powered blogs I read is Naomi Dunford’s IttyBiz. When she has a good experience with customer support, she doesn’t write a bland ten-word sentence about it:

I have a confession to make. I have a crush on Leo Babauta. Now, disclosing this little juicy morsel in such a public fashion is probably unwise. It shows my hand and significantly lessens the chance that he will ever allow me to guest post on his blog. It might make things awkward, us being in love and all. However, dear readers, I have promised to be honest with you and honest I will be.

Her entire blog is a temple dedicated to the idea that if you’re not outstanding, you don’t exist. Let me say that again: if you want to exist, you have to be outstanding. Does she exist? Well, do you remember René Descartes? He doubted the existence of everything, and through logical reasoning he deduced that two things existed for sure – himself (cogito ergo sum) and Naomi Dunford.

I read many blogs for their content. I read Naomi’s for the experience.

You Might Enjoy

A quick reminder: if you happen to know of people resources, blogs or products that are 1° great and 2° not as popular as they deserve, drop me a line by e-mail or in the comments below.

The Link Pyramid Scheme

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on August 30, 2010
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Let’s start with a classic idea. Something like an oft-repeated quotation:

A smile costs nothing but gives much. It enriches those who receive without making poorer those who give.

A good starting point. Now, what should we try to collide this with? Let’s try random Wikipedia articles:

A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, without any product or service being delivered.

So, the thing about a pyramid scheme is that people at the top get a lot of money (they started the scheme), but the people at the bottom lose money when the scheme runs out of steam because they cannot find another layer of people to pay them. But what if the pyramid involved smiles instead of money?

Your new job is to find two people you know and explain to them that you’re running a smile pyramid scheme. They have to smile to you, and to me (you can send emoticons to victor@nicollet.net). Then, they each look for two more people and explain that they’re running the scheme. The four people on the third layer have to smile back to the second-layer person who entered them into the scheme, and they have to smile to you (but not to me, unless they really want to). Instead of two smiles, you get six! A 300% return on your smile investment!

The pyramid propagates this way until people are sick of smiling at everyone. When it finally dies down, no one has lost anything because of the “costs nothing, gives much” theorem above. But a lot of people were enriched by the experience.

I agree, this is silly. What else is great for the receiver and cheap for the sender?

The Backlink Pyramid

Internet links. When I link to someone from this blog, I usually make them happier because they get some additional readers out of it. On the other hand, linking to someone does not cost me anything. Sure, if I keep linking to uninteresting or annoying sites, I’ll get myself a bad reputation. But I can spend weeks linking to good content websites without having to worry.

Your new job is to find two websites or blogs you know and explain to them that you’re running a link pyramid scheme. They have to link back to your blog, and to mine. Then, they each look for two more people and explain that they’re running the scheme, and so on. By asking two people, you get six links.

Are you afraid of asking people for a link to your blog? Right. Try saying that to your “Retweet This” button, your “Google Buzz” button, your “Share on Facebook” button or any number of social bookmarking buttons you have set up on your blog. We actively yearn for people to link to us. We comment and trackback. We write guest posts. We follow on twitter in the hopes of being followed back. Asking for links is nothing new.

The real problem is that there’s no way to make sure the second layer tells the third layer to link back to you. In fact, they might just start a pyramid of their own, ignoring you altogether. People are like that.

The Backlink Pyramid Watches You

The Backlink Pyramid Watches You

Why not add a middleman? Some sort of Backlink Pyramid Scheme service that works like this:

  • Alice uses the service and registers by entering the address of her blog. In return, she gets an url such as linksche.me/mhBx89 that she posts on her blog.
  • Bob reads Alice’s blog and follows the link. There, he finds a registration page that includes a link to Alice’s blog.
  • Bob registers for the service using that page, enters the address of his blog, and gets his own url such as linksche.me/261pFb that he posts on his own blog.
  • Charlie reads Bob’s blog and follows the link. There, he finds a registration page that includes a link to the blogs of both Bob and Alice.
  • Charlie registers for the service. The cycle continues.

To be part of the pyramid, you need to start on someone’s registration page, and the software will automatically add a link to your recruiter on your own registration page. So, as long as the second layer manages to find a third layer, you are guaranteed to get your additional links back.

What the service is saying, basically, is that if you join (for free), you’ll get a registration page that will let you bring other people on board. These people, in turn, will spread around a registration page of their own, and there will be a link to your blog on each and every one of these pages.

Would This Work?

I’m dying to know whether this is yet another flamethrower idea, or if it could actually work. So, I’ve written the software, registered http://linksche.me/, and set up a registration page.

0

Get on there and create yourself a registration page of your own. This might get your blog some publicity. If you don’t have a blog, point to your Facebook page or to your LinkedIn page or your Twitter feed or to the page of a cause you support. I’m sure you’ll find something. Then, start posting links to your registration page on your blog, Facebook, Twitter…

There are basically two ways this could play out.

If we don’t bring enough people on board, then nothing happens. We go home, forget about that silly idea and move on to the next interesting shiny thing like the iPhone 5 or something.

If we manage to get a critical mass in the Pyramid, then people will start hearing about it and will try to jump on the bandwagon before the entire scheme inevitably runs out of steam. The media will notice that there’s a rush to join, buzz will happen, and awareness will increase. This, in turn, will further increase join rates. If things go this way, we’ll be the tip of the pyramid, getting tens of thousands of visits. This could play out like the million dollar home page all over again, except that instead of one person getting all the money, the early joiners will all be getting a lot of web traffic. And I’ll be happy because my idea worked. Hell, I might even get enough ad money out of the traffic rush to pay for the hosting.

Let’s get this ball rolling!

Where Has The Magic Gone?

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on August 13, 2010
in People
. 1 Comment

Last month, Chris “powerpig” McVeigh uploaded this image to his flickr account:
Picture of Darth Vader riding a chipmunk
Yes, this is Darth Vader riding a chipmunk. In the days of yore, one would say that the image was edited, tampered with, or fake. Today, we say that it has been photoshopped (or shopped). This goes a long way to show how iconic Adobe’s software has become. I still remember the early days of Photoshop 6.0, when the splash screen still showing the 33 authors and 14 patents of the software.

Except that this image is not photoshopped. Chris McVeigh uploaded a video a short while later to explain this fact:

I understand that my chipmunk photography can seem unbelievable at times, and I’m used to getting questions such as “How did you do that?” and “Is it all Photoshop?”

As this video will show, it’s all happening right there in front of the camera. I get no satisfaction out of a composited photo—the challenge for me is to capture the chipmunk engaged in a real and rather extraordinary situation.

The challenge. If you’re in my generation, you’ve been in school at a time when only the nerdy computer users ever managed to print the papers they handed in. And other people looked at them and said «wow, this is so cool, you must have used a computer» with a tinge of admiration in their voice—or was that fear? Back in the 90s, using a computer to print documents was surprising for a 14-year-old.

And now, the magic is gone. Kids look at you in disbelief when you suggest they write their paper, then go back to copy-pasting Wikipedia articles.

People used to be amazed when they saw an actual programmer. Software was some kind of magic resource that appeared in the bowels of huge mega-corporations with thousands of engineers and millions of dollars in budget. A few people had heard about shareware, yes, but those were the exception. When you showed people that you could program computers, they would all go «oooh» and «aaaah» and beautiful young girls would ask to have sex with you (or at least, that’s what the pictures in the pop-ups said).

That magic is gone as well, with the rise of the reclusive anti-social geek stereotype.

And yet… A few days ago, I was commuting in the Parisian subway. Next to every subway door, there’s a map like this one:

plan-de-metro-bonne-definition

Sitting next to the door was a young girl with an HTC smartphone I did not recognize. Her head was literally inches from the map on the door, at a perfect reading distance. And yet, she fumbled around the cell phone interface and launched a subway map application that, for all practical purposes, was just an on-screen version of the map next to her. And then, she fingered the screen some more to scroll her current position into view.

Such a reliance on magic technology can only mean one thing — the geeks have won.

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Blue Man Group – The Outsider

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on August 9, 2010
in People
. 1 Comment

The Blue Man Group consists in several musical theatre troupes, acting all around the world, that follow the same conventions: three characters designed to be identical (the same size, the same body shape, the same blue latex bald caps and black clothes, and no voices), acting as outsiders to our modern world.

This is a short video of an interview with founders Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink:

My favorite quote here is from Matt Goldman:

The group of three is the smallest contingent where you can have an outsider.

Find two other people and start discussing something. Could be a topic in the news, what you ate for lunch, a project you’re working, or a new start-up.

Sometimes, one will be talking and the others will listen. He is the outsider.

Sometimes, two will be discussing the topic while the third listens. He is the outsider.

Sometimes, two will agree and the third will disagree. He is the outsider.

Sometimes, one will have the solution when the other two are lost. He is the outsider.

We find the 2vs1 situation inherently remarkable, fun or interesting, because it makes it easier to see what is the norm and who is anormal. The outsider introduces creativity and disruption into the mix, where the two others provide stability and prevent the entire thing from going astray too much. As long as you switch roles often enough, there’s enough energy in a group of three to keep a discussion going forward for a while.

Three people is an entirely different group dynamic from only two people (and of course, the group dynamics of being only one person are different as well).

  • One person is excellent for eliminating communication costs (maximum efficiency when you know what has to be done). If you can do it alone properly, then do it.
  • Two people are good for high-bandwidth information transfer, because there’s no interruption.
  • Three people are good for thinking outside the box, for creative meetings where one acts as the disruption and the other two are stabilizers. Less than two stabilizers leads to a situation that is too unstable. More than two stabilizers prevents things from going forward.

What are you trying to achieve? How many people do you really need in that meeting?

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My Ideas Love Having Sex

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on July 30, 2010
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They’re like that. Blame them. Actually, blame Matt Ridley, who gave a rather interesting 2010 Ted talk titled When ideas have sex. It’s just over fifteen minutes of pure sexy goodness:

To stand on Matt’s shoulders, I would say that as time passes, we are becoming better at sharing and combining ideas.

We improved how the ideas are packaged: that’s our ability to turn complex systems into black boxes. Almost every single thing we use today is a stack of countless layers of abstraction. In the 300 milliseconds this article took to reach your computer, it was encoded as HTML, sent over the HTTP protocol (which enables you to ask for a piece of data and receive it), which in turn is built on top of the TCP protocol (which enables you to communicate data to someone else). And your TCP uses the underlying IP protocol (which enables you to communicate fixed-size data packets to someone else). And IP is just a protocol used by routers to talk to each other, but the actual transmission involves fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, and relays, and error-checking. And there is not a single person on earth who can explain, in detail, what happens at all points during this transmission. Let alone understand the underlying physical properties of the cable and the routers and the processors in the routers and the transistors in those processors.

I know HTML, I kind-of-get HTTP, I understand the basic principles of TCP, I think I heard rumors about IP, and I honestly don’t know how data is actually transmitted over the ocean. Maybe there’s satellites?

We’re not standing on the shoulders of giants anymore. We’ve built a pyramid of midgets, with thousands of layers, and no one has any deep knowledge about more than one or two layers above and below.

And then, we improved how ideas are shared: that’s our ability to hear the ideas of thousands of people within the same week. Homo Erectus didn’t get to meet thousands of people in his entire life. The internet, with the ability for anyone to push their ideas forward for anyone to hear, is helping us.

First, we moved from the “no one talks to strangers” approach to the “one talks to the couple of strangers they meet every month” one when we started trading stuff in early history. Then, missionaries, books, radio and television finally introduced the “a few people speak to a lot of strangers” which, as long as those few people had great and original ideas, was even better. Now, we’re moving to “many people speak to many people“, which is less efficient as a whole for spreading ideas: there are more people talking, but you still only have 24 hours a day to listen to other people, which means the previously well-spread ideas get less audience. Where one church or one radio channel could be heard by everyone, now there are so many sources of information that none can get as many listeners as before.

On the other hand, this many-to-many universe means there’s a lot more potential for two ideas to meet. Instead of having idea A breed with ideas B, C, D; now you have pairings A-B, C-D and E-F. More pairings means more potential for an unexpectedly great outcome. As a society, we don’t need to help good ideas survive—we manage that quite well already. What we need is a way to help more good ideas emerge.

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Fwoosh!

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on July 26, 2010
in People
. 4 Comments

I have a fascination with flamethrowers. I’m lazy and I love fire, so anything that can let me burn things without having to stand up will get two thumbs up from me. One of the nice things about World War II is that they actually used flamethrowers on the battlefield.

Remember, back in the 1940s. Guns were scary because you knew they could kill you. Your brain is telling you that people die because of guns, so you’re scared. Artillery and mines are about the same, except for the russian roulette aspect: you know you can be blown to shreds, but that’s your brain talking.

But a flamethrower? You’re scared because you see that it can kill you. It’s your animal instincts. Animals are not afraid of guns, but they are afraid of flamethrowers. Nothing spells death like a fiery orange cloud.

“Yes, you love flamethrowers. Now get to the point”

The point. Right. What did flamethrowers actually not do in World War II ?

Work.

They didn’t work. They’re big, scary, macho killing machines, shinier than an iPhone 4 on your birthday, and they just didn’t work.

Turns out, they have a shorter range than almost every single gun in existence, and they look like giant flashing “shoot me from a distance” signs whenever you use them.

Has this every happened to you? To have that great idea, the one that looks like a real winner, the one that’s sure to work and make you millions? And a short while later, you find out that reality disagrees with your analysis?

Do you have any tips or techniques to avoid spending too much time on a flamethrower idea? Or how to recycle it once it goes bad, so that all the time you spent on it will not be wasted? Or how to actually distort reality into accepting your idea as the great world-changing concept you believe it should be?

Please tell me.

Related Posts Barbecues

I’m Twice the Man I Used to Be

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on July 13, 2010
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Like so many of us, I spent a lot of my early career suckling (metaphorically) at Joel Spolsky’s teat. Although he’s stopped writing, the archives are still a gold mine for people who might not know about him yet. For instance, back in the 2001 stone age of computing, he came up with this particular bit of knowledge about multitasking:

On the individual level — have you ever noticed that you can assign one job to one person, and they’ll do a great job, but if you assign two jobs to that person, they won’t really get anything done? They’ll either do one job well and neglect the other, or they’ll do both jobs so slowly you feel like slugs have more zip.

I’m not really into the whole « choose an idol and become a fan » thing, so whenever I read something online that makes sense, I start looking for the special cases: those boundary conditions where it stops making sense. Not only is it fun to nitpick about things written nine years ago, it’s also excellent food for thought.

Multi-tasking is a necessary evil. While a 1991 genius programmer could write a new OS  from scratch for a whole six months, stopping only for brief restroom pauses and keyboard-pillowed naps, he would miss the early stages of Linux and fail to contribute his efforts to a larger project.

pillow-keyboard

Your brain needs a co-pilot. While your main thought process spends all day working on a given task, there should be another smaller thought process that deals with the « why am I doing this? » question. What is important here is that the co-pilot should look at the work being done with a different pair of eyes in order to ask the relevant questions, without being blinded by the assumptions that have not been context-switched out yet or the emotional involvement related to sunk costs. Four eyes are better than two. That’s why there’s an actual co-pilot on most commercial flights.

It helps if you have an outspoken, annoying co-pilot personality. One that isn’t afraid to speak out when something is boring, demeaning or a waste of your time and money. One that can bullwhip you into correcting a nasty situation instead of letting it rot slowly. The kind that you’d love to punch. In the face. With a pineapple.

(And in case you were wondering, the title is a Duke Nukem quote from Balls of Steel).

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Suicide Bomber Training Camp

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on July 5, 2010
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When you’re doing something, there’s this nice equation that can help you determine whether you’ll be successful:

Chances of Failure = Forces of Evil – (Brains + Experience)

The Forces of Evil are constantly working towards your untimely demise. For instance, suppose you have an important meeting with your investors. Having spaghetti for lunch is a good way to get tomato sauce on your clean white shirt. You can predict this if you’re smart (brains), or you can know this because it’s already happened (experience).

The Italian Forces of Evil

The Italian Forces of Evil

Predicting potential issues is great. You get to avoid problems you have never encountered.

But there’s a limit to how many things you can predict, especially in a short amount of time. Geniuses who can predict everything and plan accordingly are the stuff of legends and fiction. By contrast, learning from experience is far more efficient: all you need is a good memory.

Besides, having experienced a problem first-hand lets you recognize a solution when you see it used by someone else. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to convince non-technical people of the benefits of source control when they’ve never had their documents overwritten by someone else?

While useful, learning from the mistakes of others is less efficient. You don’t have the searing, vivid memories of your own failure to drive the lesson home, and you don’t have a detailed recollection of all the little things that went wrong.

Sure, sometimes it’s hard to learn from your personal experience, especially when once-in-a-lifetime situations. The cost of trying again has a huge impact on how experienced you can become.

At one end of the spectrum, we have suicide bombers. They never get a second chance. At the other end, we have modern computer programmers. They can fail as many times as necessary, because it only takes an edit-rebuild-run cycle to try again. And the ideal place to be is…

…in the middle. Because there won’t be any searing, vivid memories of your failure if it can be overcome within three seconds.

All of you here have one hundred thousand bad drawings silly mistakes in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.

Anonymous art institute instructor, quoted by Chuck Jones, adapted by me

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Understanding Social Media

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on June 30, 2010
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Every single thing that has ever happened on the internet can be explained using two very simple rules.

Rule 1 : there is too much content available.
Rule 2: some of that content is too interesting to miss.

As a consequence, most people on the internet mostly spend their time looking for the content that they want to see. And any tools, tips, techniques or tactics they can use to find that content will be successful.

Suppose you’re looking for specific content, such as the name and location of a nearby restaurant.

You can ask an automated service for the information—here, automated means that your query is processed in real-time without human intervention, even if the data was originally typed in by a human being. Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to have a specialized service for your question (Qype for restaurants, Stack Overflow for computer programming…) Sometimes, you have to resort to a general-purpose system (Wikipedia, Google…)

A recent evolution : if you’re looking for a product or service, chances are that providers of that service will have optimized their web sites to appear at the top of the search results for that query, making Google a good way to find product or service providers. This might create an artificial monopoly, as Google provides the best results, thereby prompting most users to use Google, thereby prompting most companies to optimize their web sites for Google, thereby helping Google provide the best results.

You can ask your friends and acquaintances. Depending on how specific the question is, you might get a very good answer from a trusted friend, or a set of blank looks. If you know an expert in the field, he might at least be able to point you in the right direction (an expert could be someone who eats in restaurants a lot, and can therefore point you to an appropriate automated service). This could be done by mail, or through networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Viadeo…)

A big Facebook early win was to move from “I can find someone who might know, and send them a private message” approach that originated with e-mails and was perpetuated by LinkedIn et al, to “I can just publish the question, and all of my friends will see it”. This ability to tell everyone you know without being perceived as an inbox spammer is one of the core communication advantages of the new social network generation.

You can ask random people who might know about it. This is the general idea behind discussion forums and bulletin boards: many people who share a common interest huddle together, other people come there to ask questions about that common interest, and the well-informed old-timers answer. This is usually the last (and best) recourse when looking for extremely specific information.

A classic problem for such communities is to leverage the answers once the asker has moved on. The crudest technique for doing so is the FAQ, and it’s generally the only one available in real-time mediums like IRC. Search engines may be able to find discussion threads in forums, but they are rarely in an easily readable form because they rely on context and reading through several pages of replies, or sometimes even trees of replies. A big advantage for Stack Overflow is to have participants write in an easy-to-search, easy-to-read-later format, even if it feels less natural than standard message boards.

You can ask people whose job is to know about it. This is the typical “customer support” situation where you pay for having access to someone who can answer your questions about a certain topic. Assuming that the system works as advertised, the results are of a higher quality: these people are trained to provide information, very familiar with the problem domain, and effectively act as an authority that can be trusted.

Lately, a lot of companies started using Twitter to handle customer support. There are no serious technical benefits to doing so, especially since they also have to handle standard by-mail or by-online-form support for those people who don’t use Twitter. The real benefit is to differentiate yourself from old-school firms who don’t give a damn about customer support: customers will notice that you made an effort to set up a Twitter account, and they can look at the history for that account to see how serious you are about it. Twitter is basically an embodiment of show, don’t tell for customer support.

The other side of the coin is receiving information that you’re not actively looking for. You’re glad that someone sent you that link to I Can Has Cheezburger even though you weren’t looking for cute cat pictures in the first place. It’s like randomly browsing through the comic book section of your book store to find new comics worth reading, except that you want to spend as little time as possible looking for good comics, and you want to read only those comics that you like.

You can find a large website with interesting content. If the website is large enough, chances are that you’ll spend a while there before you run out of content. The only requirement is that the content should be consistent. Not having a specific editorial line can hurt a lot because readers don’t know what to expect (yes, I should be showing instead of telling). Examples include the entire I Can Has Cheezburger network, Cracked, Snopes and even Wikipedia. Obligatory XKCD reference:

People like “Best Of” lists for a reason: they’re afraid of ending up reading mediocre content. And even if a blog or website does happen to have quality content everywhere, you will run out of content sooner or later because you consume content faster than they can produce it.

Another possibility is to find an average website with quality outgoing links that you can follow. It’s the main reason why many “echo chamber” blogs are so successful despite contributing no quality content of their own: the mere aggregation of quality content from other sources is, in itself, an added value that readers will be grateful for. How often does one see original content on, say, Ajaxian? The same goes for Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and similar bookmarking, link-rating and link-sharing applications.

The trouble is that link-sharing sites can be perverted. Loopholes exist, and as advertiser awareness about social media grew, they managed to kill it. The main reason is that these sites aggregate anyone’s opinion, which includes the opinion of people who really want you to see their own content.

The natural solution is to only listen to people that you believe have an interesting opinion. Could be your Facebook friends. Could be Twitter accounts that you are following. The key element here is not “I know these people and trust their judgment” as much as it is opt-in. You actively choose who you start listening to.

Penetrating this kind of social bookmarking is harder for advertisers, because they can only be heard by those people who are listening to them. Penetrating e-mail was easy (hence, spam), penetrating anonymous link-sharing was easy, but as soon as you have to convince people to listen to you before telling them anything, you need to start being remarkable.

Last but not least, you can subscribe to web sites you like. The reasoning is that if a web site has interesting content, and if it’s frequently updated, then there’s a fair chance that it will have good content in the future. And you want to be notified when this happens.

The issue is that there’s no standard way of being notified. Not in the technical RSS-vs-Atom sense, but rather because person X likes being notified through RSS because he loves his feed aggregator, while person Y likes Twitter more because everyone will attempt to describe their new post in a clear 140-character title, and person Z would rather get updates by e-mail because they don’t want to learn any more software, and so on. It’s almost mandatory for blogs to deliver content updates through several channels, because plain old RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore.

In the end, it’s a constant fight between people who want to find interesting content, and people who create uninteresting content and want others to read it. The internet is slowly evolving through natural selection, as people use solutions that eliminate the noise and keep the signal. Looking for the next big trend on the internet is as silly as wondering what new species are going to emerge: it’s all about mutations, and mutations are random.

Seven Steps for Fast Learning

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on June 17, 2010
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Learning an entirely new concept does not happen overnight. On the other hand, there are ways you can follow to make it happen faster or avoid reaching a dead end. Here are seven simple, three-word steps you can follow:

1. Find someone knowledgeable. By this, I mean a real person that you can meet face-to-face or on the phone, not some random person on the internet or, worse, a manual. Then, ask them to talk about the topic. If you found someone who is passionate, they’ll throw a flurry of sentences at you that are probably way too complex for you to understand. Grasp what you can, ask questions if it helps, and don’t be afraid to come back later if you have more questions or need written references.

2. Write everything down. If you’re not familiar with a topic, you are bound to forget everything you hear or read. By writing things down, you are doing a second pass on your short-term, which helps you commit that to a longer term. And besides, you’ll have it in writing for future reference. Mind maps do help: they don’t contain a lot of details, but their graphical nature helps bring back detailed memories.

3. Unravel the threads. Any domain is like a web of related concepts. You ultimately need to understand all the major concepts and relationships, and you will learn a lot of minor details along the way. So, follow the links as often as you can: every word you hear, every concept you discover should be written down so that it can be explored later on. This is a good time to start looking for manuals: Wikipedia can do a fine job explaining the general idea, but you usually need more practical textbooks or courses for the finer details.

4. Never stop exploring. It can be tempting to decide that you understand a given concept. In fact, we do it all the time because we simply don’t have time to become an expert at anything. Think you know what a backorder is? There are probably many concepts you have never heard about, or never thought were relevant, that may completely change how you look at backorders if you take the time to examine them closely. Every new concept we discover can change the way we look at things we took for granted.

5. Try explaining it. Find an audience that is unfamiliar with the topic and make yourself understood. Participate in online forums and discussions on the subject (you might want to do it anonymously at first). Thinking of an explanation or practical application for your theoretical knowledge will highlight any grey areas you might overlook. Confronting human intelligences with your ideas follows the nothing ever goes according to plan theory, which forces you to look at the subject in a different light in order to communicate.

6. Sleep on it. When you keep a lot of concepts in short-term memory, it’s easy to forget what is right, what is wrong, and what is an outdated assumption. Flushing things out of your brain by sleeping or doing something else for a while will keep only whatever ended up in your long term memory. Then, you can go back and fill the holes through more thinking or reading, thus eliminating any inconsistencies as you find them.

7. Practice, practice, practice. No amount of reading or thinking about a topic will make you into an expert. The devil is in the details, and most teachers or resources take those details for granted… or left as an exercise to the reader. Do your homework: you can learn what? from books, but how? is something taught only by experience and why? is for you to meditate on.

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How often do you get paradigm-shifted by a new discovery that changes everything you thought you knew about something? This once happened to me very often, but the frequency is starting to decrease. I must be getting close to knowing everything :)

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