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Justin Kistner

Socializing in the business world


Panic attacks: Voters unload at GOP ralliesYesterday

“People need to understand, for moral reasons and the protection of our civil society, the differences with Sen. Obama are ideological, based on clear differences on policy and a lack of experience compared to Sen. McCain,” Weaver said. “And from a purely practical political vantage point, please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive.”

“Sen. Obama is a classic liberal with an outdated economic agenda. We should take that agenda on in a robust manner. As a party we should not and must not stand by as the small amount of haters in our society question whether he is as American as the rest of us. Shame on them and shame on us if we allow this to take hold.”

via Politico.com

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How to use the WordPress bookmarklet for fast blogging and reblogging (screencast)October 8

During my WordCamp presentation, I shared that the WordPress bookmarklet, called Press This, was the Jesus. I use it for two primary reasons:

  1. To quickly create microposts, and
  2. To reblog from one blog to another.

I use password-protected WordPress installs to coordinate blogging activity with other people. I recently converted Press This for use in a theme so we can easily reblog anything shared in that back channel. The bookmarklet works by passing data through the URL. So, to add Press This to a theme, you simply a link to your theme formatted like the URLs spit out by the bookmarklet, but using WordPress template tags to populate the content. The receiving WordPress install will process the link created by both the bookmarklet and the reblog link exactly the same, which is to spawn your blog’s admin in a new window with the content prepopulated. Now, you have a chance to remove any sensitive content, add context, and any other edits you need to complete your reblog.

See, I told you Press This was the Jesus ;)

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All Media Is SocialOctober 7

“…in reality, none of these behaviors are new. If you think about all of the social tools and behaviors happening today, in almost every case there is an equivalent comparison to activities in the past.”

via birdahonk

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Context is the new kingOctober 6

The first dot com bust aligns almost perfectly with the generally accepted inflection point between web 1.0 and web 2.0. Economic forces killed tired business models in favor of new and better ones. Well, here we are again. Economic forces are threatening to kill off many 2.0 businesses in favor of tech that improves productivity, not the ones working on luring eyeballs. Expect consumer innovation to slow as the available money shifts from the hands of advertisers to Enterprises hungry for productivity innovation.

Evidence that the party is coming to a close:

  • Yahoo! merger
  • Kleiner-Perkins announcing they won’t invest in 2.0 any longer
  • Failed economy pushing for tech that will maximize productivity

The rise of meta data and the birth of context

Web 1.0 connected people to content. Web 2.0 connected people to each other. Web 3.0 will push contextualized content to people. Some are calling it the semantic web. It has to do with distribution like RSS, SaaS, and APIs. Application architecture is overtaking the idea of a “page” as the basic building block of the web.

The economic impact of this is the loss in inventory as pages disappear in favor of applications, dashboards, and aggregators.

The next Holy Grail of collaboration is to kill the 28% of our day spent on distractionsOctober 2

In June the NY Times reported that the average information worker is distracted for 28% of their day. Unstructured email communication makes it difficult to stay focused. I know I loose focus daily from some of these email offenses:

  • Rambling thought dumps
  • The “FYI” atop a monster string of replys
  • The CYA email that the sender incorrectly assessed needed to be CCed to you
  • Noisy DLs

So, if unstructured email is a distraction, what’s the solution?

Ultimately email is just a way to communicate. It’s not the one to blame. It is the lack of structure that allows people to ramble off topic, play “I didn’t get that email” games, and forward long conversations. IBM and its clients have known this for years, which is why they’ve earned and defended market share with their Lotus software. Lotus added much of the structure around email that was needed to make it productive.

But, mail, electronic or otherwise, isn’t a silver com