Ben "Abe" Yagoda pens a dispiriting piece in Slate about the Economics of Freelance Writing (summary: it's a buyer's market, they pay scale is unchanged in unadjusted dollar amounts since 1978, it's dispiriting, but getting your word in print is good).
Interesting to note that Ben Yagoda has these issues - a published biographer (his Will Rogers bio is a good read). And that he appears to have moved to shore up his income by heading the J program at the U of Delaware - ah, academia!
I look forward to the Romenesko take on this.
So there's a very cool barcamp video available now. Not just cool because it looked like an interesting time (even if I don't think it was him, it was odd to see what looked just like the back of Andrew's head... also nice to see some faces from conferences I've seen before in motion).
But it's particularly cool that they used the music of My Morning Jacket in the video. And that they appear to be on tour!
Now, the barcamp idea is a great one. And I think a decentralized bar camp would be aces. We should do one in Chicago. We'd need some space (Threadless? Imaginary Landscapes?) and connectivity. Doing a mass BarCamp with hookups to the others... yowza!
Technorati Tags: barcamp, mymorningjacket
Real Time Collaboration got a bit more interesting on the Jabber/XMPP front yesterday with two announcements. What's interesting is that they hit both sides of the RTC space - the corporate and the consumer.
The first is the soft-roll of Google's jabber service, talk.google.com, complete with handy client for Windows users.
The second is the announcement of Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g. Pitched in the media as a Sharepoint competitor, it also bundles in XMPP/Jabber for RTC 'significantly enhanced for secure, archivable, enterprise use'.
We now have another pair of fronts in the flanking attack on the old proprietary (AIM, Yahoo, etc) networks for RTC, which is a good thing. It continues the move Microsoft's made - in their Live Communication Server - to SIP/SIMPLE, which enables federated authentication to those older networks, as well as opened up new options for various partners to prepare products to extend this service to those necessary elements like groups, archival searching, and the like (full disclosure - my former employer offers such a product).
All this change is good but it does leave some decision points which are distinctly hazy. I suspect that the SIP/SIMPLE camp will have - at least for now - a leg up in the enterprise space. Oracle's product isn't due until March 2006, but MSFT LCS is more current, if more troublesome for entrenched enterprises to deploy. MSN is still a very popular client in the world, and LCS offers a federated mechanism to handle namespaces for customers not on an enterprise's direct network.
But if one was touching the consumer space, or in the social software space, the lure of a flood of users coming in through the marketing muscle of Google with an open standard client would be very strong - especially since the open toolkits exist and have been tested over several years by many eyes. Though any of these entities could just as easily spin their own Jabber server, the presence of a well funded entity lends more credence, perhaps.
Technorati Tags: collaboration
When I showed up at TAMU back in 1984 and moved into the dorms, the first person I met was this husky guy out front tossing horseshoes with some friends (the pit was right near the Law Hall tree in the photo linked above). Later that day when hauling in my belongings I met him again on his board - this in the days when street skating was coming back into prominence, but skating at TAMU was, well, not.
This stranger turned into my friend Kirk. One of the things I have to thank Kirk for was the introductions he provided into the Texas punk scene of the early 80s, notably the Big Boys. The news this week that Randy "Biscuit" Turner died brought back those days in a quick rush. I never got to see the Big Boys, but later I got to several shows by Bad Mutha Goose, a follow-on band with Big Boys member Tim Kerr. They were loud, funky and - since this was Texas in the summer - sweaty affairs.
When I try to imagine seeing Biscuit's art, and in so many of the pictures of him, I keep coming back to hot. The hot satisfaction of loud music in close spaces, musicians, artists and fans packed together in a shared experience (this closeness is why club shows trump arena shows most of the time).
While the web doesn't lend itself to that, but Jon Lebkosky's thoughts and Ed Ward's recollections of Biscuit bring things a bit closer.
Technorati Tags: punkRock, bigboys
For the past couple years I've been a butterfly around the GTD space. I've read Allen's Opus ("Getting Things Done"), as well as the second compilation of newsletter pieces ("Ready for Anything"). I've listened to the now out of print "Getting Things Done FAST!" seminar recording (or is it a reenactment?). And I'm an active lurker (e.g. few posts, many reads) in the 43Folders Google group and the Yahoo GTD group.
They've proven helpful - I think I do, in fact, get more done. My 'system' is in a bit of a shambles, though. I'm not acting on all the actions I intend to, nor do I yet have a full corral of all the projects and actions I have in place for the near term. My projects list remains a mix of 'must do soon' and 'hrm, someday'. As a whole the system seems to get better week by week as I regather, but I'm still in the sissyphean stages of piles and incomplete lists. I'm not consistent in a weekly review, and this week I even found myself, as I juggled incoming needs, in the position of not referring to my lists at all (this may be normal, assuming I can trust that the items on the list were indeed 'less important' than the items in front of me...).
I can read and muse all I want, but nothing will succeed like commitment and action. I've now got a deadline to get my thinking - if not my act entirely! - together. Thanks to the generous "self-directed" portion of our corporate training, I'll be attending the daylong bootcamp "GTD: The Roadmap" when it's offered here in Chicago.
Some early reports from the Roadmap seminar are positive indeed. Terrie (from ORA) posted one report that brings up some of the rocks to be covered. In a different context she reports that one of the values she got from participation is just getting 8 reasonably uninterrupted hours to think about all this stuff. Buzz "Activewords" Bruggeman also files a report (I believe this is his second conference) with some good commentary tacked on.
The Chicago seminar is 24 days away, time enough to review my sources, rebuild my lists and rejigger my system to manage with the fluidity to get me to the next hump. Follow along, my small readership, as I propose to post my progress regularly.
Technorati Tags: 43folders, gtd
Much percolation (travel, reflection, etc), but for the moment:
No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster
That said, congratulations to Matt now that he's made the announcement public (confession: I had a preview). His signing on to work with SocialText not only brings more great brainpower to an already absurdly overstocked team, but also brings two friends together in one working environment, always a happy occurrence. ST made the right choice, and I feel sure Matt did as well.
Idly: does mixing feedster claim and technorati tags cause a dogs and cats living together circumstance?
Technorati Tags: socialtext
So it turns out I got namechecked in an OSCon Blog Entry by Andy Lester.
The irony is that I'm actually in PDX, but not at OSCon. Not in PDX for long though - Seattle tomorrow!
Technorati Tags: oscon, andyLester
