This is so great - saw this at MIT a few years ago and so pleased to see how much further this concept has evolved since then. Imagine if all those complex tasks you perform today with a computer, keyboard and mouse - could be done with gestures, simply by moving blocks around? Sounds like child's play you say. Well, have a look at this, forget touch screens and go for blocks instead!
Contrary to popular belief Al Gore did not invent the Internet. Nor did it magically just appear one day in 1992.. in fact the history of the Internet goes back much further than that, and this neat little video tells the story of all the different elements that led to what we take for granted today, or are (in the case of some of the most prolific Twitter users) addicted to!
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Technorati Tags: history, Internet, movie, technology, video
A recent report published by Pew Internet creates a fascinating picture of the on-line media habits of the 12-17 year olds. Some findings at a glance:
Some curious facts about teen blogging
Apparently, girls continue to dominate the teen blogosphere; 35% of all on-line teen girls blog, compared with just 20% of on-line teen boys. The gender gap for blogging has grown larger over time. Virtually all of the growth in teen blogging between 2004 and 2006 is due to the increased activity of girls. Older teen girls are still far more likely to blog when compared with older boys (38% vs. 18%), but younger girl bloggers have grown at such a fast clip that they are now outpacing even the older boys (32% of younger girls blog vs. 18% of older boys).
Beyond gender and age, two new developments emerged in this survey in the demographics of teens who blog. While there was little or no variation in blogging activity among teens according to household income or family structure in 2004, both variables have become important indicators in the 2006 data. Teens living in households earning less than $50,000 per year are considerably more likely to blog than those living in higher-income households; fully 35% of on-line teens whose parents fall in the lower
income brackets have created an on-line journal or blog, while just 24% of those in the higher income brackets have done so.
An even more pronounced contrast is evident when looking at teens who live with single parents vs. those who live with married parents. On-line teens living in single-parent homes are far more likely to have shared their writing through a blog; 42% of these teens keep a blog compared with 25% of teens living with married parents.
Hmmm.. curiouser and curiouser as Alice would have said. I particularly wonder about the propensity of kids of divorced parents to be blogging, are they just venting their spleen or have they learnt to express their thinking more as a result of the complexity of their family life compared to those with both parents still at home?
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Ok ok so you figured I'd gone a bit quiet over Christmas - no surprise really as no doubt all of you have had Decembers similar to mine, trying to finish off everything in time for the holidays and still remain sane. Well Christmas did finally arrive and I went and got myself a long-awaited addition to my musical arsenal: the Yamaha Tenori-On, radically turning electronic music-making on its head through the innovative new user interface. I'll write more later, but here's a demo of how it works:
A couple of links: Global Yamaha site;
UK site for Tenori-On
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A great article over at the Economist.com reminds me just how fragile our brave new (Internet) world is. Several sources have been lamenting the exponential increase in on-line traffic and the subsequent slow-down of speed this will inevitably result in, but moreover it is not just a matter of sheer numbers of people and devices - but also of the volume of data flowing back and forth. As our appetite for on-line video has taken off big-time and everyone and their grand-mother now setting up sites with streaming video, down-loadable video, pod-casts and playing games hosted on-line it is not surprising that the pipeline is getting jammed.
A big surprise (although in a way I'm not surprised) is the enormous bulk of traffic generated by spam (over 90%!) and as it is only in the interests of us customers, phone companies and other large ISPs haven't really bothered to do anything about this, because it would simply cost too much to fix. Personally I'm grateful for the e-mail quarantine system on my in-box, yet still the occasional spam wiggles its way past the jaws of the spam-stopper - suggesting I follow a link to go watch some ungodly assault on women in various imaginative ways or cheap(! not free!) pirated software from some strangely named individual. This of course presuming I don't have yet another security-alert that my account has been unlawfully accessed by a bank I don't even have an account at, prompting me to send all my security details to some Phisher sitting with his finger poised at the buy-button of his favourite e-commerce/porn site waiting for a ride on my card or indeed some Nigerian wealthy official offering me a cut if I help smuggle money out of the country. Honestly, how stupid do spammers think we really are and no, thanks, I don't need Viagra either - I'm a woman in case you haven't noticed..
Not only is it about the increased bandwidth of data continuously accessed - it's also about those hoards of 'smart' little devices that simply refuse to even talk to you unless they have all connected to the net and checked for updates first. And then there is social networking, suddenly creating a captive audience for all that video you shot at the weekend, not to mention P2P file sharing which of course explicitly relies on you to not only download, but upload too. Don't know about you, but my Internet slows down to a crawl as soon as I attempt to upload anything other than blog posts. So now roll on TV-networks, Hollywood studios and everyone else who have discovered that making money with advertising is far more lucrative than charging people to watch your content - if you have it, they will come and better still - if they are watching, advertisers are paying.
Oh and what else - come the Digital television revolution, meaning that the 700-megahertz frequencies used by channels 52 to 69 of old-school analog television will become available to be auctioned off to mobile phone companies lusting for the their long range and broadband capabilities. Bring on mobile television and improved Internet browsing from your handset - in fact, hold on to your hat as the new Android operating system launched by Google, make it ever easier for other handset manufacturers to provide the features hankered for by consumers, i.e open access that have none of the restrictions the big carriers impose, like not being able to download games from other makers, browse the Internet freely or make VOIP calls from a Wifi hot-spot. It will suck to be a phone operator soon oh and guess what, all that traffic from your mobile will also be on - you guessed it - the Internet.
Interestingly, the beauty of freedom in the form of open-source is becoming more attractive too, making it harder for us to part with old trusted toasters of computer equipment, given another lease of life with the sleek Gutsy Gibbon adaptation of Linux. So not only can you forgo the latest OS to make a dent in the information superhighway, Nicholas Negroponte of the OLPC initiative has frightened a lot of big-time computer makers into having a go at making cheap equipment themselves, not wanting to lose out on a potential market measured in the hundreds of millions.. oh and I forgot to say - they will all be on-line too, along with all those old bangers you would have resigned to a computer graveyard in the past, but now with user-friendly Linux on them, even they can join in clogging up the arteries of the on-line world - reminding us how it felt having dial-up.
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This title I actually came across on a T-shirt, which I found hilarious, because an all consuming worry recently made me buy yet another external hard drive, this one now a Tera-byte (1000 gigabytes) to use to back up my various data currently spread across other external hard drives and my computer(s).
This is it - my volume of physical possessions is gradually decreasing (i.e new music albums, printed photos, design visuals, printed matter) as I rejoice in the space efficient way of storing all this information on my computer. Equally it fills me with worry to know that a growing part of my life in the form of memories and content I value is living not readily to hand to be leafed through, touched and felt, but as a collection of zeroes and ones on a hard disk that may just one day decide not to start, or get infected by a virus or God forbid just be carried out in the pocket of some enterprising burglar. I can't quite fathom him running off with my library of books which take up half of our living room, or the vast collection of academic paperwork, but hard disks are far more juicier a price and guess what? If you don't like the content on it, you can always erase it (!) and put something else on it instead.
I'm also really excited by the new operating system from Apple, called Leopard or OS 10.5, which has this nifty feature called Time Machine, which keeps track of all the versions of files on your hard disk so you never accidentally lose a file again. However, I did spot a problem with this though - where it addresses the problem of backups in the past where everything is more or less backed up and it can be arduous searching through your backups to find specifically the one file you are looking for - if you lose your entire hard drive on your computer and have to start from scratch, I'm not sure Time Machine can help with restoring everything all at once.
That means incremental backups of your entire system are still worth while - having it all, done regularly, ready to be restored in its entirety at the touch of a button, backed up on a drive you hide somewhere in a secure place away from your computer, just so that should things get nicked - your memories aren't one of them.
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A great post by Scott Adams, the famed creator of Dilbert has got me re-thinking this whole blogging thing, well - re-thinking it for the fourth time at least as those of you who read this blog will notice.
He says:
I’ve decided to blog less. I posted daily (mostly) for two years, with the theory that my efforts would be compensated in four ways.
1. Advertising dollars
2. Compiling the best posts into a book.
3. Growing the audience for Dilbert
4. Artistic satisfaction.Readership of The Dilbert Blog is growing rapidly, but at about the same rate people figure out how to use RSS feeds to get the content without the ads. So there’s no longer a correlation between how hard I work and the ad income I earn..
My book based on the blog posts, STICK TO DRAWING COMICS, MONKEY-BRAIN! got great reviews for content, but angry reactions in people who feel that other people, who didn’t read the content on the Internet, and never will, should not buy the book..
I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read Dilbert..Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably “I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.” Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it..
I enjoyed being relatively uncensored, and interacting with the readers on fun topics. That’s why I will continue blogging, albeit less controversially..It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.
So all this nonsense about social media and blogging and how it all makes us famous.. naah, it's more likely to make us (in)famous as Scott puts it so well above. So here are my top 4 reasons:
I'm your classical definition of a knowledge worker. I used to be a skill worker (people employed me for my skill in translating complex ideas into designs that sold toys). Now they employ me to make sense of a ton of stuff happening around us and suggest ways for the business to cope with it all. That means my brain is devouring information continuously to stay ahead of the game. Some ideas stick around and mature into business opportunities, others are forgotten about. Much like you have to clean your office every now and then, I like to clean my mind by putting some thoughts down in a post. Utterly selfish I know.
- Cleaning up the mental jumble known as my brain
- Hoping that these insightful posts would in 2 years remind me of insights I had 2 years ago and then promptly forgot about
- Writing for other reasons than work!
- Gathering the best posts (as voted by visitor numbers) into a book
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Back to that time of the year again, I'm busy collaborating with people across the company and externally to pull together insights and inspire a new bout of business development for next year. It's a fascinating subject, mapping the competitive landscape around any company, because some things you can control and knowing about them in advance will really help and other things, well, they just happen and sooner or later some of it or all of it will have an impact on you too, whether you like it or not.
For my own sanity's sake I keep following a 3-pronged approach when it comes to understanding trends, an approach I originally came across courtesy of Unilever and having chewed on it for quite some time, I've come to the conclusion that it is a very powerful way to understand the difference between cause and effect in the arena of trends.
The word 'Trends' in itself has become somewhat of an overused term and tons of institutions now deliver trend reports of various calibres, sometimes causing more confusion than clarity and this because everything is muddled together: Macroeconomic drivers meeting consumer anxieties in some niche expression through one single on-line service provider isn't exactly a trend, it is an expression, which may be the correct expression to capitalise on a nascent consumer trend, but it's longevity as a business is dependent on other factors in addition than the survival of the potential trend that spawned it. Thus it has to be evaluated as an expression, not as the mother trend - if that makes sense?
Back to the 3-pronged approach: Firstly we must seek to understand
So bearing this distinction in mind, it is easier when you come across anything labelled a 'trend' to understand whether this is in fact an external or internal driver, a consumer response to the former in the form of behaviour or indeed an expression of the trend in the form of a business.
By keeping a keen eye out for the drivers, both internal and external over time it becomes possible to stay ahead of the curve so to speak, to anticipate trends and expressions, rather than merely notice more and more obscure new businesses cropping up. This is hard and of course it helps constantly being on the look-out for many different kinds of information, sources and so on, but also consciously engaging in monitoring something will gradually make you more sensitive to small changes and being able to identify the crucial indicators in a field that tell you when something is about to change.
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Some years ago I worked on LEGO Exoforce and inspired by the exoskeleton that Sigourney Weaver uses in the Alien movie, in addition to the Manga inspirations of Gundam and NeonGenesis Evangelion, the exoskeleton robots operated by tiny mini-figures took form.
Little did I know that only a year or two later, the technology would be available not just to play with as an idea in a toy, but something for us to try out for real. This video demonstrates the exoskeleton and sadly, here it is shown as something for the military to use, whereas I could see tons and tons of uses for it to help people in their day-to-day activities. Imagine no longer needing a wheel chair, just step into your exo and off you go.. dancing, running, walking up the stairs, playing ball - you name it.
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Now this is intentionally a controversial title for a post, but hear me out. I'm not saying that we no longer need people who know stuff, in fact we will need them more than ever before - but what I am saying is that information and expertise is becoming so ubiquitous (through the Internet) that some of the models for profiting from expertise and insider knowledge are rapidly becoming redundant.
So back to the post. Let's start by a poignant example. Here in the UK estate agents have been running amok with property prices of late and been trying their best to prop up property prices all around the country. Why? Because the higher the sale price, the better their fee (as it is often calculated as a percentage of the final sale price). So whether you like it or not, it is in estate agents' interests to get as high a price for a property as possible. [Don't even get me started on whether it is reasonable to pay half a million pounds for some house built over a century ago, where heating mostly benefits the pigeons outside and no angle in the house is 90 degrees, making office chairs on casters spontaneously migrate to one corner of the room.]
Anyway - the game has been that of poker: If we tell you the price is going up and you better get on the property ladder soon, (pandering to the human weakness of dreading to lose out) people invariably believe it and more often than not in recent years, have been extending themselves far more than what could be recommended to just get on that property ladder.
Interestingly this began changing not too long ago, first with Nethouseprices, an on-line facility that keeps track on the actual price for which a property was sold. Certainly this began drawing a lot of interest and curiosity from people, but there was still room for estate agents to jump in the middle and say - 'weeeelll, that was then... this is now and I tell you it is hotting up big time!'. What do I mean? Well, the prices listed on Nethouseprices are lag measures - they only tell you the news AFTER it has happened. It's like saying - I would like to lose weight and tracking your weight only by getting on the scales every morning. The scales will tell you your weight at that precise moment in time, but not whether you are likely to be losing some weight anytime soon.
Well, I hear you ask - how could you measure the likelihood of losing weight? By finding a lead measure instead. So if you measured how often you took some exercise and how many calories you burned every time you exercised, offsetting that against how many calories you took in and going on the theory that if you burn more calories than you eat - you will find that sooner or later you begin losing weight. That's a lead measure. Keeping track of that will tell you before you get on the scales what the scales are likely to tell you. How does this apply to the housing market?
The fact is that the housing market is catching up too and instead of reporting lag measures (i.e the price at which properties were sold and no use to you since the property is no longer on the market so you can't jump in and buy it instead!) we, the consumers are beginning to have a chance to peek into that precious secret folder that only estate agents and individual sellers had access to before - that is, how much the price is coming down WHILE the property is still on the market. Ooops! The emperor no longer has any clothes as PropertySnake, interestingly named to be the opposite of the property ladder, will show. PropertySnake tracks how much prices of properties have fallen over time and by looking up areas by post-codes you get a good sense of the overall trend in that area in addition to what is happening to a particular house. If you then are so intrigued by what you find, you can look up with what estate agent that house/flat is listed with by clicking on the listing.
It is also a step on from traditional price comparison sites, which have mushroomed recently, because again - although those sites compare the prices right now, they seldom give you any indication of where the market is going. The same phenomenon is what happens at Ebay - because everyone can bid whenever they like and only by keeping track of something over time can you see whether the demand for that is heating up or not, it means your powers of detecting broader trends are limited to your own power of observation and whatever little software widget you might have that gives you the bids that are just about to close so you can bid in the last few minutes.
All those are still tactical tools, and up till now the strategy has been left to experts, but as we begin to see with house prices and no doubt with other areas too - the last vestiges for insider knowledge is becoming undone.
Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past ...a really big discontinuity has taken place.. This is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century. Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video-games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives. (Marc Prensky)
With this realisation in mind, a radical re-think of education and skills development is needed. It's no longer about a teacher at the head of the class-room lecturing a bunch of disinterested students, too busy txting their friends, but about ways to utilise children's competencies and curiosities in the digital fields to improve learning. Another layer to this is the growing digital divide, where said media is becoming more and more important in our lives, but the rate of technology adoption and access is of course the greatest in the Western world, where developing countries are often left behind.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media lab, pioneered a solution to this growing problem through his One Laptop Per Child initiative, where the goal is to create a hundred dollar laptop, available to kids in the developing world to ensure they will not grow up to be the Digital have-not's whose abilities to learn, network and build a livelihood for themselves is hampered by a lack of key skills. As Negroponte puts it: "Any nation's most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children's innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children's machine designed for “learning learning.”
Drawing on 10 years of research, product development and success as a consumer robotics pioneer with LEGO MINDSTORMS®, LEGO Education, The LEGO Group's educational division, today begins testing of creative curriculum solutions in three schools in Brazil to establish the best technology platform for bringing 21st Century skills to students ages seven and older in underserved and developing countries.
LEGO Education is exploring how to harness technology to bridge the physical and virtual play worlds to provide advanced teaching methods that integrate science, math, engineering, language, social skills, and more. The plan is to provide selected classrooms with concept products that foster the hands-on, minds-on creative play for which the LEGO(R) brand is universally known. Ultimately LEGO Education is aiming to provide cost-effective, high-impact, versatile tools that foster creative exploration and learning for those schools and students who need it most to prepare for the future.
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First I would like to dedicate this post to Mum of a LEGO Kid, because you just convinced me to drag myself out of my self-pity (I have a cold!) and reflect on what were my Aha-moments from last week's Conference on Social Media and User-generated Content.
So a rather intimate affair, we were around 50-60 people in total and from a refreshing variety of companies ranging from CNN, Yahoo, Coca-Cola, Deutsche Bank, TripAdvisor, E.On, Honda, Habbo Hotel, Spannerworks and many more. Although initially I was expecting something bigger, the frankness of the discussion and the willingness of people to share their thinking and ideas was great - it seems a smaller conference is more conducive to that, rather than a bigger one where you never get to know everyone there.
Interestingly, there were also plenty of different approaches to the subject matter - from literally how to do corporate blogging by VisitBritain.com to my own talk about how we at LEGO strive to not only involve lead users in our product development, as was the case with LEGO Mindstorms NXT, LEGO Hobby Train and now the LEGO Universe MMOG but also have created ways for everyone to design their very own LEGO products via LEGO Factory and are gradually setting up structures to open up our business platform to our fans and LEGO certified professionals, creating an business ecosystem around LEGO.
Honda contributed with a case studies of their recent marketing campaigns on 'Hate Something Change Something' and 'Hondamentalism', both which I thought were brilliantly executed campaigns, but somehow I was a little disappointed not to see a truer user-focus from them - i.e users really having a big say in what Honda does, more than just interact around the campaigns.. perhaps it is hard to do as a car manufacturer, but somehow I would like them to be different and do it anyway! (call me a hopeless romantic!)
Coca-Cola talked about how coke music was the spring board for many a young aspiring artist and how the community here took off - of course needless to say, music has a strong tribal effect particularly on young people so hats off to Coke for making it happen. Another piece of inspiration came from Yahoo, whose Yahoo Answers is an interesting way to create discussion around a topic and find answers to all your questions, whatever they may be. Not that revolutionary you may say, but think of it this way - Wikipedia is great if you want to find the explanation to something you have stumbled on, but aren't sure of the details. Yahoo answers is great if you have a question, but don't know the answer.. You with me? Hmmm... perhaps not the best explanation - but essentially I'm trying to say that here community interaction is focused around problem solving, where the collective brain of hundreds of thousands of Internet users can come to your rescue whatever the problem.
Also, I can't help but love the pixelated world of Habbo, created by my fellow Finns at Sulake Corporation - also a massively multi-player on-line game, this one primarily at teen-agers and very funny in its approach to characters, locations - you name it.
So ultimately if I was to distill my thoughts from the conference without making this too long a post it would be this:
Last, but not least I'll do a plug for our friends at Spannerworks, who have created a no-nonsense guide to all things social media in a nifty E-Book you can download and dazzle your friends with in-depth knowledge. Or as Forrester research puts it ‘Social Computing is not a fad. Nor is it something that will pass you or your company by. Gradually, Social Computing will impact almost every role, at every kind of company, in all parts of the world.’ Forrester Research, Social Computing - How Networks Erode Institutional Power, And What to Do About It
For a while now I have been drowning in information. I suspect you have too. It is a phenomenon, which seems to grow exponentially the more time we spend on computers. Back in the day when emails and bulletin boards were a fairly new invention, chances were that you only came across a website if Yahoo had indexed it or some kind soul had the grace of including the link in an email to you.
These days we have RSS readers, still a ton of links in emails, Reddit, Digg and all the other sites designed to help you sift through the countless news stories and blogs that enter our virtual consciousness every day and encourage you to go read it. Oh and there are email updates, news bulletins, special offers and whatever else pinging your in-box in addition to all the spam mail that you either have or have not successfully managed to filter out.
Invariably work also involves not only keeping track of a lot of people's opinions and concerns about any one thing you happen to be doing in addition to scouring the net for the latest research and findings on that topic as well as news headlines, analysis and more, which may help illuminate the topic and subsequently help you have some ideas or better still, make some decisions and help you prioritise whatever it is you are doing.
So what are the tools available to help you. Many and plentiful, all different and often not many that talk to one another. If you are like me and have to not only engage in business development, but also back up whatever you think/want/recommend with facts, figures and insights - you will have, much like me, developed a squirrel-like capacity to keep hoarding research and reports on a number of topics, because you know they will come in handy one day. I sometimes feel like the character Scrat from Ice Age, obsessively hunting insights in an organisation awash with them, but not always able to see what is right in front of its nose.
Frustration 1: Outlook
Now Outlook is one main pipeline through which things land into my consciousness. Sometimes its a mail from a colleague, another time its a question or enquiry, or it is a generous soul from somewhere else in the organisation who thinks the research they have just done could be of use to me. Invariably it always is, but seldom right away. So what do I do. I started saving everything onto the Desktop initially, into folders organised by topic. This because when I'm logging on remotely it's a pain to get hold of big reports and invariably sooner or later, I begin getting those annoying reminders that 'My inbox is over its size limit'. The trouble with this arrangement is that over time, the reports become harder and harder to find and more over, if there are many of them it is particularly annoying to keep looking through each one of them when I have a photographic memory of what the page I'm looking for had on it, but can't remember in what report that page is in. So over time, things end up in the bottom of your virtual pile, so to speak and you end up forgetting about them more often than not. Moreover - the reports also end up being separated from the mail from the person who sent it to you, which, in a large organisation can be a problem if their name is not on the actual report.
Frustration 2: Web Browsers
Invariably the majority of my computer use these days is spent with a web browser open. A lot of useful content can be found on websites, along with maps, graphs, photos, videos and so on. I began book-marking sites a long time ago and sooner or later had to reinstall my computer and lost all those bookmarks to my great indignation. Having learnt from my mistakes I then started backing up my bookmarks only to find that my bookmark lists just kept growing and what happened to them was a similar phenomenon as what happened to my research reports - they fell into the bottomless pit of bookmarks, where site names and links no longer can help remind me why I have book-marked that site in the first place, so without visiting it I won't know, but equally - I don't feel like aimlessly going through my bookmarks in search of the thing I can remember but can't find.
Frustration 3: On-line book-marking
Thinking I had found a clever way around my problem with browser bookmarks I jumped onto the on-line (social) book-marking wave and after trying out del.icio.us and a number of other sites with similar features I eventually settled for Netvouz, for no other reason really than I found it easier to search and find links here, I could choose whether to make my book-marked links private or public and it had a useful import feature from my web browsers. In fact it was really easy to get clicking away as I had the Netvouz bookmarklet installed as a button in my browser so before I knew it my bookmarks had grown to about 800. A similar phenomenon as what happened with my research and browser favourites began to happen, as (lazy as I am) I always ended up skipping the 'write a description here' of the link you are about to bookmark. Then a crucial thing happened. I got a new computer and alas, equipped with a completely fresh browser I had a heck of a time trying to remember what the book-marking service was called. All I could remember was the green and blue button I used to have installed on my old browser, which of course disappeared along with my old computer. Call me scatty, but after Googling the term 'social bookmarking sites' and ending up with a long list, the name Netvouz finally rang a bell and I was back there, then of course trying to remember what my password was, after over a year of having it in a shortcut along with a 'keep me logged in' cookie. So still stuck with the same problem, but this time not on my computer, but on a remote server.
So what to do. In fact I have been trying to get myself out of this conundrum for a while. With varying levels of success. Here's what I found.
Solution 1: Make presentations often!
This, albeit entailing a lot of work, is not altogether a bad idea - as it forces you to plough through all your research and notes and use what is usable and discard the rest. It's a valid excuse for going through your stuff, evaluating if you need more info and using what is relevant. If you are good, you embed links in your presentations so you can have those handy later when you wonder where that piece of information came from. So despite the benefits of this exercise forcing you to push your thinking and evaluate the knowledge you already have - yes, the downside is that it is incredibly time consuming and only worth while doing if there is someone desperately after that kind of condensed knowledge.
Solution 2: Keep a blog/Wiki of your ideas and to-do's that only you can see
This I thought would be a good way to keep growing a body of knowledge, as Wikis are easy to add to as and when you need to. There are also solutions out there that you can have running on your desktop or USB stick should you suddenly be out of luck with regards to an Internet connection. Services I have tried and like to varying degrees are PBWiki, free as all good things in life, TiddlyWiki which does the on-line/offline syncing business really well and you can lock it with a password too if you like and lastly Tiddlyspot, which hosts a variety of different iterations of Wikis for you to choose from, one particularly good one is the Monkey GTD, a Wiki version of the popular Getting Things Done methodology. Having tried all of these I can't say I didn't like them, but because they are in a browser and some are on-line, I did end up 'forgetting' about them slightly, as they seemed not so in your face as a desktop application would be. I don't know if this makes sense. Perhaps it is the fact that as they are all visible inside your normal web browser, you end up closing them by mistake or forgetting to save or whatnot, because you don't associate web applications with productivity software..? I'm guessing here, but despite my initial enthusiasm of using them, I did find that over time I forgot to go update them and also, adding images and videos was a sheer pain in the butt, not to mention sharing the content, if you didn't want to share it with the entire world. PBWiki allows you to give select access to people and create PDFs of stuff, but that's not good enough.
Solution 3: Make the Most out of Outlook
Forgive me, task lists - although a good invention, never capture the amount of detail I would like to remember. Besides you can't mix media in outlook unless you use the other Microsoft Applications to view them. A pain, and there are only so many things in life a calendar can help you do. When your job is to put together a document on why your company should do X instead of Y, then blocking out that time in your calendar only goes so far to actually helping you achieve that task. Here the important thing is not who you will be meeting with and for how long, but the sources that you may draw upon and notes to yourself in what order to approach the task. Here having a deeper content creation element would be useful.
Solution 4: Scrybe
I was very excited when I heard about Scrybe, an application that marries an on-line scratch-book with a calendar and reminder feature. In fact, I thought this would be the answer to my prayers, but after a week of fettling I can comfortably say that it is a glorified version of Microsoft Outlook. Yes, it allows you to copy parts of websites, add images and videos and so on. But here's the caveat: only if those elements are also on-line! What about all the crap sitting on your desktop? Forget about it. Also, really infuriating is the fact that more and more websites these days are made in Flash, and those images/visuals can't be captured into Scrybe's notebook. Not to completely trash Scrybe - it is a beautifully done calendar, something for Microsoft to learn from - but the bit I really wanted: the on-line scratch book is simply not versatile enough.
And the Winner? EverNote!
So the winner? Hard to believe really after all this ranting that there is an application I'm actually happy with. In fact more so for every day I use it. Evernote is genius in its simplicity. It has it's own database, which initially (annoyingly) installed itself into MyDocuments folder, which is out of bounds for me as soon as I'm not connected to the company's VPN, so after some juggling around I managed to get the database onto my desktop instead, where I can access it regardless of internet connection.
Evernote is free for the version that does pretty much everything apart from PDA syncing and hand-writing recognition, and installs handy buttons into Word, Outlook, Excel, FireFox and Internet Explorer, which allows you to select content (whether it be text, visuals or whatnot) and save it into Evernote and categorise it according to subject. There is also a universal clipper feature that covers all the other applications that don't have an Evernote button installed into them, in fact whatever you can copy and paste you can stick into Evernote. It is a truly remarkable application for its simplicity and adding online content couldn't be simpler. You copy a bit from a site you like, paste it into Evernote and Evernote automatically includes a link at the bottom to the page your note came from, should you want to go back for the full kaboodle one day. Did I mention you can search, set up to-do lists, jot down expenses, encrypt text, email notes to others and so on. It is soooo useful I can't believe it's taken this long to finally create a digital scrap book that can deal with both online and offline content in a way where you can still find stuff. Aah bliss. Go try it for yourself!
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I had a strange experience the other day. Someone I met for the first time told me they had 'Googled' me before our meeting and were intrigued to find all this stuff about me, including this blog. Now forgive me folks, but on one hand here I am, with a blog being seemingly progressive and 'out there', in with the times and all that and the fact is that most of my friends don't read my blog, at least not regularly anyway, because they prefer to talk to me in person about the topics I blog about and many more things, rather than read about them on my blog.
Can't blame them really, but this has also caused a certain disconnect for me, where usually I would meet people and it would be me making the first impression and eventually this person would discover I had a blog, which would be more of a curious 'aha' moment for them, rather than something they would use to form an opinion about me even before meeting me. However, this, as I mentioned, was all turned on its head just the other day. The insecure person in me immediately wondered 'what do they think... do they like what I write or do they think I'm a total nutcase??' Anonymity on the web at least (most of the time) means you will never get to meet the people in person who think your blog is a bunch of ramblings and that you are truly nuts.. but it may all change!
Fortunately this individual was very complementary, or perhaps just a supremely a nice person who couldn't bring themselves to tell me just how bad they thought my writing was, but fortunately at least saved me the embarrassment of telling it to my face. Of course you will all rush to tell me that I should have thought of that when starting a blog and to this I reply: I did! Initially I was very much in two minds about whether I should blog under my real name or anonymously, and initially I did blog completely anonymously as I was experimenting with content and style and so on.
Eventually I settled for the 'a little bit about everything' approach that you find on this blog - stuff I think about and find that writing it down into a post helps me structure my thoughts and move on and think about new stuff... clearing my mind if you like. So my blog has now become a bit of a scratch book of thoughts and sometimes pretty personal too - in the same breath I have abandoned anonymity and even sport a button to my Linked-in profile now for all those who wonder who I am and why I'm interested in all these diverse topics (hopefully my profile goes some way to explain this..here's me hoping anyway!)
The scary thing is though that the more I have become 'exposed' through this blog, the more people, prospective employers, clients, you name it all use Google to check up on people they are about to make contact to. On one hand we are seeing extremely personal confessions on blogs and various social networking sites and on the other hand we are seeing more and more people having to pay the price for that as it seems that there are still employers out there who are looking for people who are literally the 'blank' canvasses - with no clearly defined and perhaps 'jarring' personal identities to try to mold into an organisation where individualism is a fault, not an asset.
Some are talking about how young people in particular should be much more careful about what they do reveal on-line as that digital trail will follow them forever - there are even companies devoted to destroying information about you on the net these days - service comes at a pretty price though. The one place not even they can reach are the news archives of various papers - once you end up there you are on the net forever. So where does that leave us? It seems that the arena is wide open for the debate on a set of 'net ethics' of sorts - what is acceptable to take into account about a person in terms of background checks on the net, versus what is advisable for individuals to reveal on-line?
Ultimately some things are personal and although revealed on-line on say a social networking site, they should remain as such or be considered as such by a company seeking to employ that person. Also those who devote countless hours to blogging and so on are in fact industrious minds to whom a blog is one outlet, but give the person a challenge to chew on that same industrious mind can be put to service for the benefit of a company, as opposed to being seen as an overtly extrovert destroyer of 'the way we have always done things in this company'. What do you think?
Web 2.0 is on everyone's lips - it's attractive to users, because we become the authors, publishers, content creators and between us we can create infinitely more value for each other than a company can on its own. Context is the content. Marketeers are intrigued by this prospect too, because it means new, potentially more cost-effective ways to target their audiences, spreading word of mouth and if you are lucky, being able to measure the effect much more precisely than you ever could via say TV or print-advertising. There is a prospect of creating more bang for the buck and moreover, learning more about the likes and dislikes of your consumers.
In the wake of this growing phenomena, there is an exponential growth of seminars, lectures, conferences and events to explain what web 2.0 is, what you can do with it and how best to make use of it. Countless executives are invariably crammed into a room, where some net-savvy individual extols the virtues of blogging, viral marketing, you name it and the room is filled with various degrees of perplexed individuals who are beginning to realise that the entire paradigm they have structured their careers and lives around, is shifting into the unknown and many traditional practises will have to change if they are to survive.
Your Audience is Active - not passive
Traditional communications theory used to focus on measuring and analysing the effect of media on the people exposed to it. Audiences were considered passive and we all wanted to know what watching TV really does to you, does it make you buy more, more stupid, more obese etc? The truth is that audiences are active, they consume media based on its uses and gratifications gained. That goes for TV too these days - having a Tivo box makes the traditionally passive act of TV watching much more active as you can choose what you want to watch, when, skip the ads and teach the thing to tell you next time something is on that you might enjoy. This becomes even more acute when we move towards on-line media - users decide what they do, where they go, what they watch, who they talk to and so on. What others have said is easier for them to find out, and what is on their mind is easier to broadcast to everyone around them too.
If You Want to Talk, You Must Show You Care to Listen
Traditional marketing operating from a paradigm of passive consumers that need to be engaged, first be reminded of their inadequacies and then told how to overcome them still wants to approach Web 2.0 with the same attitude. It's still about trying to sell people some smokescreen and appeal to their fantasies and desires, but that will not work anymore, not in the traditional sense.
Imagine you are sitting at a table with a person you have never met. You begin a conversation, politely you try to find out who they are and so on. Imagine then if this person behaved as if you had just pushed the 'play' button, out comes some random message about who you should be, what you should do to be like that, what they are selling and how good it is. So you patiently wait till the end of this litany and ask again. You want to know about the person behind that statement. Are they nice, do they have integrity? Do they care about the same stuff you do? Again the same mantra. What that is, is a one-way broadcast, like radio and TV advertising, because the medium didn't allow talk-back - but nowhere is that approach becoming obsolete quicker than the web.
No longer is it about 'what do we want to communicate - it's about 'what do we want to facilitate!'
Web 2.0 is a dialogue, it's a start of a love-affair, it's a discussion that takes twists and turns depending on who is having the conversation and what the topic is. It's fun to talk to someone if they show they listen to what you have to say and respond accordingly. It's even better when they can put you in touch with other people just like you. It's extremely boring when you feel like you are talking to a wall. It's really that simple - but what it means is that smokescreens become harder to maintain. After all, not everyone is David Copperfield and besides, if everyone's rating everything and all views are public - you don't even want to be David Copperfield, you have to be you and be good, because what goes around comes around.
Build Good Karma
Buddhism is a very useful in this context and may even one day become the foundation of the new world-wide company ethic - but the basis is simple: refrain from bad behaviour, do good and remember that karma comes back to haunt you - good or bad. So can your company handle that level of openness, can you genuinely say that everyone in your company respects your consumers and tries their utmost to be fair, do the right thing and never lie? Marketing in this context becomes less about convincing people something is great, but more about setting the structure and motion in place for responding to what people want, encouraging them to work with you and always, always, always making sure you are honest, respectful and humble. In product design we always used to joke that you are only as good as your last project. How true is that - in the world of web 2.0 you are only as good as the last consumer experience you delivered.
No I'm not referring to Hillary Clinton's book, nor her speech on the topic of children - but I am borrowing the same (origin unknown) African proverb that claims it takes a village to raise a child. In fact, I'm building on it to refer to the Internet, the global connected village it has made the world, we are all connected, not necessarily by six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon but in fact by 3rd degree via LinkedIn (or Myspace, Bebo, Facebook or whatever takes your fancy).
For me it has been a revelation that by humbly starting to publish this blog here in my corner of London, UK, there are people as far as Kiribati who magically stumble on this site and moreover, can be bothered to read what I have to say. Truly humbling. Big up to Kiribati I say! This global village of ours has also taught me some very valuable lessons, some of which I agonise over in a previous post about the pain of trying to come up with consistently good quality material. Not sure I succeed consistently, but mainly due to the kindness and patience of my readers, I still have an audience..
I recently came across a brilliant study from Forrester research by a guy called Jaap Favier, Dutch perhaps I endeavour to guess? Anyway he has managed to pull together some great insights about how group dynamics are driving social media on the net and how this connectivity means companies need to change in order to stay relevant for their consumers. Sounds complicated, but on a larger scale I feel companies need to learn what the village has raised me to believe over the years:
Content is king -> CONTACT is king
It's not about the stuff, it's about whether you care to listen what people have to say, whether you can help put them in touch with each other and provide them with ways they can not only help each other, but create things together with you. Are you a good citizen and do people even want to know you? If you are evil, chances are they don't. Often only when you go look for friends do you discover what people really think about you. Don't let it get that far.
The Medium is the Message -> The RESPONSE is the message
Can you get people to care enough to get involved, can they respond to you, to others, do things change based on their response? You get what you give, if you are rude and deceitful, chances are you also foster that behaviour in people around you.
We call the shots -> THEY call the shots
Don't think you know it all. Don't even attempt. There are people out there who know your company, product, service you name it better than you do. They do call the shots whether you like it or not. A smart thing would be to learn from what they have to say and be humble.
KEEP IT REAL
Only if you are honest, true to what you promise and deliver it as good as you say it is, people trust you. To be trusted you have to keep it real, always. No lies, no cheating, no screwing people over - they find out soon enough and others even sooner, so be good and the world is good to you back. Most of the time anyway!
It's funny - yesterday we had the last episode of the Apprentice, (for now) where our pet magnate Sir Alan Sugar got himself a fresh faced new apprentice, Simon, willing to work 'his cotton socks off' as he bluntly put it when asked why he should be hired. Sugar, true to his name, subsequently presented Simon with some unsightly pairs of cotton socks that he could 'work off' in due course. Although not the most experienced of contestants, Simon's happy-go-lucky attitude and kindness got him quite far and moreover made him a master at dealing with some of the more prickly contestants in the show.
The complete opposite was Katie, fired from the show last week. It seems that in her case, common decency took a left-turn and avoided her altogether. Certainly, courtesy of having a blog you learn first-hand how quickly the Internet bites back and let's you know faster, sooner, and more sharply how much you suck, even when your best-friends stay silent. It felt almost sadistic and certainly voyeuristic to sit there watching Katie spouting her horrific comments about her fellow contestants to the camera and then select comments being revealed to the fellow contestants by programme directors.. pausing to focus on the furious candidate, squirming in their seat, rolling their eyes. It just amazes me that no one from the real or virtual village has played their part, taking Katie to one side, giving her a really good hiding and reminding her just what it means to be a citizen in the global village. Sir Alan Sugar did it sort of, a little yesterday - but all she did was smile. Knowingly. Thinking she still calls the shots. Think again.
Sounds too good to be true, right? I shall confess to my utter nerdiness by telling you a little secret about my childhood - I first got on to programming on a Commodore 64, back in the day when they still had tape drives to read programs. OK, this will confine me to the history books for some of you, but I can tell you that at the time I was very envious of my friend who had a 5.25" floppy drive.. OK OK, enough dwelling in the past, but needless to say - programming in those days involved either the Basic programming language with code on numbered lines and a lot of complex if this then goto something else, or if you were really hard core, you were into Machine code, which to the untrained eye simply looked like a jumble of letters and numbers. As the story went in those days, Basic was the long convoluted way to do things and Machine code was the efficient way to squeeze power out of the machine.
I know, I know - but in the day before we even had desktops and mice, it was simply wonderful to manage to get a sprite (the name for a graphic element made up of pixels) moving across the screen, but somehow incredibly painstaking and not very rewarding. READ: it didn't sustain my interest for very long. Instead I moved on to music and even figured out machine code, but only in terms of converting notes into music the computer would play. Sounds crazy, but the hexadecimal system was actually very efficient at dealing with notes, instruments and even how hard a note was played for such an otherwise simplistic system. Even to this day I believe you can still go on iTunes and subscribe to a pod-cast of tunes made exclusively with Commodore 64s..
Anyway - to make a long story short; my adventures into programming land started with Commodore 64 and remained somewhat sporadic until I got carried away with HTML, Macromedia Director and Flash, but still, simplicity was a far cry from what those programs required you to know and learn before even attempting to create functionality. If only things had been as simple and easy to get your head around as the newly launched Scratch programming language! Given the amount of interest exploding around this you may also want to check out this link, which goes to the weblog on Scratch.
The beauty of Scratch is that it is like building with LEGO bricks, each block is a behaviour or function - you just snap them together on screen, visually! rather than with complex strings of words and references - to create more complex behaviours and strings of functionality and moreover, you concentrate on WHAT you want the program to do rather than HOW to accomplish it. The how almost becomes an intuitive consequence of deciding what you want to do in the first place and kids all over the world are already embracing it, creating animations, games, movies all sorts of things from this great box of tools. A timely reminder of the fact that we should not get bogged down by our tools, but our tools should indeed be an intuitive interface to enact upon an idea.
Here are some links to articles written about the public launch of Scratch yesterday
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6647011.stm?ls
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/05/15/with_simplified_code_programming_becomes_childs_play/
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/15/1420238
http://digg.com/software/Scratch_A_New_Programming_Language_to_Introduce_Kids_to_Coding
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9719468-7.html
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may07/comments/1817
http://www.huliq.com/21750/creating-from-scratch
http://www.macworld.co.uk/education/news/index.cfm?newsid=18035&pagtype=allchandate
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2070
http://crunchgear.com/2007/05/15/scratch-because-your-kid-cant-do-fortran/
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No, I don't mean Apple's lovely music-making software, but a community site called GarageBand, my latest addiction introduced to me by a friend only days ago. My music-making has seen a break recently, mainly because of other distractions, but also because when you are making your own tunes just for the fun of it, there's only so much you can shower your friends with and if they don't get what you are trying to do, your inspiration can take a dip. Not so say I only do tunes to get a pat on the back, it's more that when you are making music you really appreciate the feedback from fellow musicians.
That is also the beauty of this site - GarageBand excels where so many others have failed. It builds a community around independent music, people who haven't even got signed up yet, and the act of reviewing other people's songs before you even are allowed to upload songs yourself. Ahh, easy you say - but no, comments like 'this sucks' or ' your mother was a hamster' don't cut it on this site, as before your reviews go anywhere they have to be reviewed by other users who give you points on how well you articulate your points and how useful the review was to them.
True democracy - this helps not only the good stuff to trickle up to the top in the charts running on Garageband.com, but also all the bands to get useful feedback from their peers and not just some random comments or people trying to suck up to them. You have to complete 30 reviews, before you get to post your first song so this does take a bit of time to do, but again that is the beauty of it - good things come to those who wait. Too many sites instantly give away all their goodness to the extent that you lose interest in about a week, where other sites, like this one, grow on you.
So there you are, trying to be your most verbatim best, giving useful pointers and descriptions of stuff thrown at you (yes you can choose genres! I'm sure I wouldn't give very good ratings to the Country & Western lot, not because of malice - just because it isn't my thing) and having reviewed tracks in the Jazz, Electronic and Electronica genres I must say I'm particularly impressed with the quality of Jazz on Garageband.com.
A sad discovery, however, is that this site, a little weighted to the American audience, still doesn't have a genre called Drum&Bass, which does exist in America too, usually under the name 'Jungle' and a little too aggressive in my liking - but the really good stuff you'll find under the sub-genres of Jazz-step and Intelligent Drum & Bass - the output of which mainly comes from Europe. So once I'm as far as ready to upload my own tracks onto Garageband - I shall have to decide whether my Drum&Bass numbers should be classed as 'Electronic', 'Electronica', 'Dance', or 'Techno' to comply with Garageband's collection of genres.
Not sure what I'm on about? Go check out Beatport or TrackItDown for some great examples of what Drum & Bass can offer. Needless to say - this stuff is not mainstream in the sense that if you expect to hear it on Top 40 countdowns - forget it. That is also the beauty of Garageband.com - the real stuff, coming straight to you without some record company exec deciding what you should be listening to - for the people by the people, brought to you by web 2.0 put to the service of building a great community. Amen.
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"Everybody has a novel in them, so they say. Wouldn't it be better, though, for a million people to club together to write one? This is the theory behind an initiative launched this weekend by Penguin Books, in collaboration with students at De Montfort University in Leicester. They plan to create the world's first 'wiki' novel, fiction that will be concocted online by millions of contributors across the globe. Until the end of the month anyone can join in to help write the novel, which has the provisional title of A Million Penguins.
The site is A Million Penguins and, so far, just a few days into the experiment, the novel is into its seventh chapter. The project has been designed as part of a study module at the university. Students involved are based across the world and include the director of Booktrust, Chris Meade. The term 'wiki novel' has been coined for an online book from the internet term 'wiki' which is the name of a website that allows the visitors to add to and edit content, often without the need for registration.
Previous attempts to throw open the editorial process using the web have not had a smooth track record, however; chaos ensued when the Los Angeles Times threw open its editorial processes to internet readers. But Penguin is optimistic. The company's digital publisher, Jeremy Ettinghausen, said the contribution of the students on the university course had already been hugely helpful in shaping the launch of the novel." ( Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent, Sunday February 4, 2007, The Observer)
What I want to know is, is it any good? Listening to authors speak about their novels it is usually a complex affair, many interlocking threads are kept initially apart to entice the reader to gradually piece things together, then things get turned on their head and eventually the novel ends in a surprising way, which makes all the pieces fall in place and make sense again. Well, of course not all novels are like that - but to cite an example for the purpose of discussing: can those intricate turns and twists of a plot realistically be delivered by people who don't know each other, don't work together necessarily even to the same goal? I decided to take a peek and this is what greeted me in the prologue:
The Emperor gazed ponderously over the city of London. Although he had long grown bored of the invisible control he and his ancestors had exercised over the human race, since abdicating three hundred years ago he had become increasingly remorseful at his decision to set them free. For over three hundred years now the human race had been left to do what it wanted, severing the intricate planning of generations of past Emperors. They had proved themselves to be absolutely useless, relentlessly engaging in a nonsensical frottage of sex, violence and gimcrackery that they attempted to pass off as art and politics. And now the planet was melting. It was a mess.
For the past fifty years The Emperor had been patiently executing a plan to regain control. His plot was at a critical phase, one that could, if he could pull it off, re-establish coherency in the world. In his current guise as the director of Penguin Books, hiding his appearance with a hard hologram that enveloped his portly black and white body in that of a gregarious businessman, he was in a position of immense psychological power.
Just then came a knock at the door. He turned from his office window overlooking the Thames as Jeremy entered, the head of Penguin online. The Emperor had been judiciously manipulating Jeremy to develop a tool with which he intended to get the human race back on course and regain the benign, paternalistic control that was so badly needed – A Million Penguins. Outwardly A Million Penguins was an optimistic creative writing experiment. But in the depths of its structure lay the most powerful psychological weapon that had ever been invented.
Sounds like this could be fun. I like the little jibes at Penguin and the digital publisher, Jeremy Ettinghausen in all this - there is a taste of the beginning of a Batman movie hidden in there somewhere, or maybe it is just the reference to penguins that is setting my mind off. Also, let's presume this becomes a runaway success - how many more of these kinds of stunts can be done until people (rightly so) start demanding a share of the proceeds? Truly quality material needs to be matched with some reward or perhaps getting your name in print is enough? And what is it about Penguins - we had the March of the Penguins, then Happy Feet, now a Million of them... is the world obsessed with Penguins or ...?
No I'm not joking - there isn't a funny punch-line coming. There is at last a service set up specifically for all those of us who have ever wondered what it would be like to work as a ... chocolatier? fishing guide? car critic and writer? pit crew member? you name it - they have thought of it! Almost - they should add toy designer to their list just to get people like me a little more respect - designing toys is actually really hard! At least good ones anyway - but I'll leave that to another post.
Vocation Vacations specialise in setting up vacations where you get to try out your dream job - is it really all that it's cranked up to be, is this something so much fun you could easily do it for the rest of your life? Changing jobs and even vocations is very hard work - it's hard to get started and its even harder to sustain your interest if you run into difficulty. This could just be the perfect stepping stone to give you a taste of what you have been dreaming of and supply you with the necessary energy, ideas and advice to make the switch permanently.
Or then not - I don't know to what extent you cover the annoying things that there surely has to be with any job you take on - the question is are the nuisances small enough in the big picture to not matter - or will the prospect dealing with those nuisances in fact make you grateful you don't have to do this new job for the rest of your life.. I would like to hear testimonies from both camps, not just the evangelical 'Vocation Vacations Changed My Life', but then I can be a cynic.. only at times.
I like the thought though - also what an interesting thing to do for a vacation! Beats lying on the beach watching over-weight people slowly cook themselves to a nice pink colour. Coming home with a head full of ideas always puts a spring in your step and changing your outlook on life also feels good - knowing that you are not trapped in one job/scenario for the rest of your life, but that there is other exciting things out there and the step between dreams and reality has just been reduced with a significant step. That is something not to be sniffed at - life is too short not to aim for the sky, to follow your dreams and do your very damnest to try reaching them.
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