TV snow, soon to join the record-needle scratch and the dial tone in technology oblivion.

It’s well-known that the entertainment industry has its own distinct and secret language. Variety magazine’s slanguage is infamous, in which “mitting” is applause, a “skein” is a TV series, an “oater” is a western, and, most confusing of all for a veteran Internet developer like me, the major TV networks are called “webs.”

I was in a meeting last week with some hard-core video people. No, they weren’t pornographers, rather they were video technology people who live and breathe video tech in all its myriad forms: broadcast, satellite feeds, microwaves, video tape, DVD, high-def, cable, streaming over the Internet, you name it.

They had their own jargon as well, beyond Varietyese. There were the countless technology acronyms and obscure formats, but there was also a hefty dose of outright code words for everyday familiar terms. They used the word “linear” to mean plain old “cable TV”, for example.

Most confusing of all was they way they used the term “broadband” whenever they were listing all of the different channels by which video can be delivered (as in “We can provide you with a feed via linear, [list of incomprehensible acronyms], broadband, you name it.”)

What did that mean? Is there some kind of broadband delivery channel that is distinct from dial-up channels?
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It’s not bragging (in fact, it’s probably a little embarassing) for me to say that I am an expert user of Microsoft Word. I can do just about anything I want with it, and I understand most of Word’s idiosyncracies and tricks. Still, the UI has always seemed to get in my way. For example, there are a ton of buttons I never use — so for kicks I decided to see just how many.

Here’s the epicenter of MS Word’s toolbar, as it appears when you first install it:

Even at a glance I see a bunch of buttons that are complete mysteries to me. Remember, I am a self-professed Word expert. And I honestly have no idea what these buttons (in purple below) are used for. I’ve never used any of them.

I do know what these buttons (in red below) are supposed to do, but I’ve never used any of them. They’re almost all features I that can invoke either through keyboard shortcuts (for the tasks I do a thousand times a day) or through menus (for those I do twice a day or less).

These buttons (in green below) are the only buttons I ever use. I use the second row of formatting options all the time because they are convenient and absolutely appropriate as buttons. (I have no excuse for using the Save button when ctrl-S is faster, I suppose, but I guess I like the illusion of security of pressing a visible button.)

The funny thing is that I know that there are millions of Word users who use these buttons all the time (and who have never used keyboard shortcuts). And there are millions of Word users who use the pull-down menus for every single cut-n-paste task they ever do (something I find painful to observe).

And, of course, there are those people who don’t use Microsoft Word at all.

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Who’s the boss?

The only people I ever see actually using Blackberrys tend to be high-level executives. Why is this?

It’s simple: Because they can get away with it. Only the boss can sit in a conference room twiddling around with a Blackberry, their attention a thousand miles away, while everyone else is working on the problem at hand.

Still, how does this explain the cultural difference between executives and their Blackberries and teens with their mobile phone SMS messaging? Is it only because of the enterprise email integration inherent in Blackberrys, something kids and non-business users don’t need? Or is there some other reason? Is it something about the keyboard-based UI?

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On the left is a nicely-configured Dell Latitude D620 laptop as you’d see it in Dell’s Medium & Large Business store. On the right is the exact same computer if configured in the Small Business store:

Not only does the Small Business store offer a significantly lower price to begin with, but they also automatically include the advertised $250 discount special.

Basically, Dell is taking advantage of the fact that large businesses often have bureaucracies that don’t have the time or inclination to seek out discount pricing. So they simply charge them 40% more and laugh all the way to the bank.

I shudder to think how much they charge the Government for these.

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Because I often work very late or come in very early to the office, I have been able to observe some demographic patterns on the subways in the AM hours. It’s interesting to see how the ethnic, class, professional, and gender makeup evolves as the morning hours go by.

(Please forgive the generalizations inherent in ad hoc ethnography):

3:00-4:00 AM
Drunks of all sorts, club kids, and winos. Late night workers, busboys, getting off their shifts. Only a handful of people per car. 6:1 male/female ratio.

4:00-5:00 AM
Transit workers changing shifts. Maybe 6 people per car. All male.

5:00 AM - 6:00 AM
Blue-collar laborers, minorities, immigrants. Half the car is asleep. Maybe 20 or 25 people per car. 9:1 male/female ratio. MORE…

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Khoi just posted a great idea for a desktop application, which he calls Blockwriter: It’s a lean and mean text-writing app that (a) hides all other applications, and (b) allows you to disable email and even all network connectivity completely. The idea is to help people focus on writing tasks by blocking access to all other tasks. Even the application itself is distraction-free by having almost no features at all (how often have the customization options in MS Office apps caused me to spend an hour tweaking my toolbars and display options to get them just right?)

As an easily distracted person myself, I have an idea that I consider a little more hardcore than Khoi’s. It’s the “nuclear option” of anti-distraction tools. I don’t have a fancy name or URL for it yet, but for now let’s call it The Exorcist. Here’s how it works:

The Exorcist is a browser extension with two components. The first is a browser “Exorcise” button, and the second is a simple web-based configuration interface.

Whenever you find yourself continually distracted by a particular web site, whether it’s reading your favorite blog, posting to your own blog, surfing porn, whatever keeps you from real work, you simply click the Exorcise button in your browser toolbar.

You will then be asked to confirm the Exorcism. Take a deep breath, click Exorcise!, and the Exorcist will then completely block that site from your computer for the duration of your choosing. It could be for an hour or two, or it could be until you restart your computer. If you’re serious about going cold turkey, you could even exorcise the site from your computer forever.

From that moment on, whenever you try to visit that site all you will see is a notification that “This page has been Exorcised.”

Of course, there would need to be an emergency tool for undo-ing the “forever” option. I think it would be something along the lines of using a password and restarting your computer, something really inconvenient to do. The whole idea is that telling yourself “NO” is a lot easier than telling yourself “YES”.

Advanced features might permit the user to block all web sites, or even (as Khoi’s Blockwriter does) block all internet access completely, including IM and email. Needless to say, neither of these should be permitted to last forever.

Now get back to work!

UPDATE: Lifehacker has several proposed solutions called “Invisibility Cloak” to do stuff like these. They’re too hard, however, to turn on. One of the commenters, however, had a cool idea to connect his blockages to his calendar app, so he could open and close his blacklists according to his workday schedule.

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Gotta clear out some final SXSW loose ends so I can go on with my life!

At least they wont ever change this one, I guess.

• Virginia Murdoch suggested the creation of a Society for the Preservation of Paul Rand Logos. I could not agree more. I have a message for companies currently sporting a Paul Rand Logo: You Do Not Need A Redesign. If you do it, it will suck. I still can’t beleive that any design firm would have the audacity to actually accept such an assignment.
• We went to see a show at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center entitled “Technologies of Writing“… It was a fantastic show, with comprehensive examples of writing tools and technologies from around the world and through all of history, including: mysterious Mesopotamian pre-cuneiform objects, Linear-B decryption documents, a Gutenberg Bible, Gertrude Stein’s exquisite stationary, a sample page of Charlotte Bronte’s insanely tiny handwritten manuscript, a vitrine dedicated to the history and techniques for the manufacture of pencils, an early dictaphone, and so much more. It’s a tour de force, really, and anyone interested in information, communication, and even just writing, should pay this show a visit. Many kudos to the curators: I hope it goes on tour.
• I had the great pleasure of meeting most of the members of the crew from Pixelworthy, a talented web firm from my birthplace and hometown, Philadelphia.
• I thought that the SXSW Web Awards show was a little boring, but perhaps that’s only because Behavior didn’t win either of the awards we were nominated for! Still, there was one highlight: After one winner thanked God for his professional success, the very next winner solemnly thanked… the Giant Spaghetti Monster! The audience roared with approval. Bravo!

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Less than two weeks after getting back from SXSW, off I go to another conference! Late tonight I’m flying out to the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in Vancouver. I was actually on a panel at the 2003 Summit in Portland, but the timing of my business work for the past two years prevented me from even considering attending the interim summits.

But here I go again, getting active in the professional communities I belong to again. I’ve recently resumed reading and even posting to the SIG-IA list, and of course there’s this here blog.

Hopefully I’ll finish the last of my SXSW reports before the IA Summit opening keynote!

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Three great new books, all of which came out within the last month or so, were hot topics at SXSW 2006. What’s especially exciting to me is that all three of them are about subjects I am deeply interested in, and all of them are written by people I know and respect.

I’m reading all three of them pretty much in parallel right now (in addition to plowing through the final chapters of Don Quixote), so here’s a little (p)review of each of them.

Ambient Findability
This is Peter Morville’s first solo effort, and it’s a trip. Peter, with Lou Rosenfeld, is the co-author of O’Reilley’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web… aka, “the Polar Bear Book”. Peter is an outspoken advocate of “findability”, or the ability of a system to help people find what they’re looking for.

“Ambient” findability is Peter’s way of envisioning a future world (or perhaps describing the current world) in which information is findable — in theory — by anyone, anytime, anywhere. Ambient Findability the book is a sweeping portrait of findability in all its forms: he goes deep into findability on the web and the mobile space, but he also examines how findability has functioned for humanity historically and even biologically.

This new O’Reilly book, already being called “the Lemur Book”, is the first O’Reilly animal book that I have seen printed in full color, both on the cover and internally. It’s jam-packed with interesting material, but still short enough to finish on a plane trip or a weekend (or in my case 5 or 6 subway rides).

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
Adam Greenfield’s Everyware, like Ambient Findability, covers a lot of ground, but in Everyware’s case within the seemingly narrow topic of ubiquitous computing, the not-so-theoretical idea that in the future computers will be embedded into our physical spaces so deeply and thoroughly that meatspace and cyberspace will in many ways become indistinguishable.

I’ll just say up front that I think Adam Greenfield is a genius (and, apparently, a ninja). He’s managed to write a technology book woven out of a dozen diverse themes, including futurism, science fiction, culture, art, humanism, and even ethics. The book goes beyond simple technophilia vs. technophobia, and should be a required read for any person interested in even one of the above themes. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to predict that some of what Adam says in Everyware will be cited and quoted by future thinkers for many years to come as we continue to deal with the ramifications of ubicomp.

In addition to being a scintillating writer (his blog, v-2.org, is fantastic), Adam is a compelling conversationalist and speaker, as well: I had the pleasure of chatting with Adam 3 times at SXSW, and his one-man “panel” presentation of the Everyware concept was riveting and deeply thought-provoking for everyone in the audience.

Getting Real
37signals has been evangelizing the concept of “getting real” for several years now, at conferences, at workshops and on their blog. Finally, they’ve compiled their thoughts into a digital book, downloadable from their web site. Getting Real was also a large part of 37signals’ Jason Fried and Coudal Partners‘ Jim Coudal’s keynote address at SXSW.

“Getting Real” simply means that a company should examine every one of their supposedly standard ways of doing things and consider whether or not they are really necessary at all. Everything from creating a detailed functional spec to holding team meetings is called into question. It’s project management minimalism, a direct extension of the minimalism espoused by many interface designers, including 37signals.

Whether on the blog or at a conference, the “getting real” concept generates a lot of heated discussion. I also have some strong opinions about many of the “getting real” ideas, both pro and con. But I ultimately think the book is a useful read, even if you don’t actually put any of their advice into practice. We all waste time and energy doing unnecessary work and building unnecessary features just to please a boss, a client, or an imagined customer need. Having a philosphy that allows a team to step back for a second to make sure they’re focusing on the real problems can only help.

The trick, for me, to reading this book is simple: You have to understand where it came from. A few years ago, 37signals transformed from a client-focused web design shop into an independent software developer. They’ve been steadily documenting their insights and opinions about this profound business metamorphosis, focusing particularly on how their ability to product high-quality products has improved dramatically once they were able to control their own process. Their enthusiasm, some would say smug glee, at this liberation is palpable in everything they do. But if you can get over that obstacle and look for tips that apply to your practice, there’s a lot to glean. For example at Behavior we take much of Getting Real with a big grain of salt: As a web development shop with diverse clients with genuine service needs, a lot of Getting Real is too lean and too mean. But for internal projects, smaller and more intimate clients, and ad hoc situations where nimble thinking is required to get past problems, Getting Real has a lot to offer.

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Once we bought books to help us meet interesting people. Now we join internet social networks.

I am not a liveblogger (yet), so my notes from SXSW 2006 are emerging only now, a week later. Over the next few days I’ll be gradually synthesizing my notes and posting a few thoughts about my experiences at SXSW.

First I want to talk about the most important part of SXSW, or any conference: The people you meet, the conversations you have, and the connections you make.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

This was my second year attending SXSW, and for me it was a lot better the second time around. The first time (last year) I only knew a handful of people — almost all of them exclusively virtually — so I often felt like the new kid at school.

But this year I arrived already knowing (or at least recognizing) a lot of people, so I was able to meet and talk to even more interesting people by virtue of having already-established social connections, people who were happy to continue extending the chain of introductions.

In fact, a major theme of the conference was the power of social networks, at least in the social software sense. MORE…

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