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  Steve Spalding 9:22 pm on July 11, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: creativity (5), fairness, flow (48), risk (2)

  The path of innovation is not from obscurity to acceptance, it’s from anger to ambivalence.

  Whenever there is a change to anything people consider valuable there will be blow-back. If Facebook adds a change to their terms of service, it can be pretty much guaranteed that some portion of the people who track these things will throw a hissy fit about it. That’s the sign of a strong and vibrant democracy, but it is also not a good reason to change course.

  They are going to complain about privacy and fairness but like anything else, give them some time and distance and you’ll see the mental costs of continuous dissatisfaction begin to take their toll and these same people will forget just why they were so upset in the first place.

  I’ve seen this happen over and over again when companies change their terms or seriously revamp a feature set. If I could give any advice to a company getting this type of blow-back it would be to listen, smile and wait. If after a month you are still hearing the same thing, then it might be time to start getting worried.

   

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  Steve Spalding 9:20 pm on July 11, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flow (48), information (16)

  The only part of my High-School geometry class I remember really enjoying was reading Flatland, which is a fantastic fictional account of the life of a point as she transforms into a cube.

  We really should let go of some of the fixations we cling to when it comes to organizing information.

  There is no reason we can’t use comic books to teach quantum physics or “autobiographical” accounts to drive home concepts like ethics. The line between education and entertainment is in serious need of blurring.

   
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  Steve Spalding 9:17 pm on July 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flow (48), information (16), storytelling (3)

  I apologize to any professors who may be upset with me comparing them to House. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, and really I could have picked The Jersey Shore.

  There is almost no difference in importance between the latest episode of House and that last lecture you attended at the University.

  Human beings are creatures of analogy, we learn by comparing new information with frameworks we have developed from previous bits of information.

  That is why the power on the web and elsewhere is not in the ability to convey information efficiently. Efficiency is for computers and style guides. The power is in being able to package information into analogies, to paint something interesting with your words and videos.

  This is one of the reason you’ll have a lot easier time remembering that last episode of House than you will the lecture. TV producers make no qualms about the fact that what they do must be entertaining.

   
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  Steve Spalding 9:13 pm on July 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flow (48), fun, writing (6)

  I sometimes wonder how much writers block is just us realizing how incredibly boring we can be.

  If you haven’t noticed up until this point, this is a distinctly imperfect book and assuming that you are reading this I figure that is a large part of its appeal.

  In our rush to be cast into the socks of Professionals with a capital P, we who call the Internet home have become exceptionally boring. We don’t take chances with our forms, and we don’t have fun with what we do anymore.

  This is fun to write.

  It’s messy, it’s scattered and what it lacks in narrative flow it makes up for with incoherence. But, it’s fun, light and up to this point more interesting to this humble author than almost everything he has put together in the last few months.

  That has to be worth something.

   
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  Steve Spalding 9:08 pm on July 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: creativity (5), filtering, flow (48)

  You’re either making stuff, or making people look at stuff.

  The world we live in is split between those who make things and those who help people find things.

  Both making and filtering are a necessary form of creation when faced with an exponentially increasing information.

  That leads me to a business model of the future – the Guide, someone whose job it is though technology or expertise, to cut through vast tracts of information and lead their charges to the kernels of truth that they need.

  There is probably a science fiction screenplay in there somewhere.

   
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  We live in a world just chock full of pe...

  Steve Spalding 9:03 pm on July 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ideas

  Last minute musing before lunch

  We live in a world just chock full of people with brilliant ideas and other people who are actively ignoring them.

   
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  Steve Spalding 9:01 pm on July 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: information (16), writing (6)

  I want you to see the first draft of this, it was spectacular — spectacularly awful! See what I did there?

  Funny story,

  I keep sitting here trying to come up with clever things to write. This whole “one draft” business is murder for someone use to being able to hit backspace on his life. The truth though is one that I think has wider applications for anyone who produces content – if I am working to try to remember something, it probably wasn’t half as clever as I thought it was after all.

  Information is like that, we retain those things that are important to us and forget the ones that are junk.

  Instead of trying to pull quips from the ashes of our imaginations, maybe we should spend a little more time considering those things that stuck out.

   
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  Steve Spalding 8:58 pm on July 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flow (48), futurism, predictions

  I edited out a funny crack about Farmville for you. In fact, I edited out a lot of great stuff about Facebook to bring you this.

  Well since this is supposed to be an idea book, here is an idea to chew on:

  Why are we so quick to ignore history?

  If I were to tell you twenty years ago that there would be an Internet company with hundreds of millions of subscribers all paying upwards of $20 a month for the honor of sorting through spam emails and checking sports scores you would call me crazy – then ask me what the Internet was.

  If I would have told someone who was born ten years ago that the company I was talking about was America Online, they would look at me funny – then ask me what America Online is.

  The point here, ladies and germs is that we are all trapped by our spectacular lack of imagination. It’s hard for us to predict which of the shiny, new things that we think are so important today will actually turn into revolutions and which will pass quietly into the pressure cooker of time.

  Since we are awful at these kinds of predictions, we would be wise to take a more measured approach to our pet revolutions. Instead of saying every neat, new widget we run across will redefine the way we see the world, instead we could look at it as a fancy next step in a process that never ends, the process of building out the future.

  They are GPS coordinates rather than citadels.

  The real question should never be what we have and why it is so darn important, it should be what will eventually usurp it and why, because if history tells us anything the two things we can be sure of is that the future will always look a lot different than the present and that given enough time, everything dies.

   
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  Steve Spalding 8:56 pm on July 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flow (48), information (16)

  This is as close to an introduction as you’re likely to get from me

  The interesting thing about this project is that I get to start it without an outline. This is the first and final draft all etched indelibly in ink, on this page and if you happen to be reading this you are getting real time access to my musings without the benefit of either an eraser or an editor.

  What is this all about?

  I guess we we’ll have to wait to see what it ends up becoming, but if I were taking a bet, I would say that it will be about information, how we look at it, and how technology is shaping the way we use it.

   
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  Steve Spalding 8:55 pm on July 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flow (48)

  So I’ve decided to post a book project I was hashing out. The basic idea was to take 28 days worth of thoughts, mostly put together in book stores, and see what turned up. Here’s what happened. Some of it is great, some of it is silly but all of it represents a great sketch of a month worth of thoughts. You can find this particular text under the tag “Flow.”