Beyond this blog, I’ve written for, or have been written about by, many places. Here’s the most comprehensive list I have: a combination of my by-lines and mentions by others.
All you need to do is leave a comment by the end of today that includes a quote from any of my books. I’ll pick a winner tomorrow morning.
Most of the world is curved. Other than some man made things, everything bends. Rivers, streams, trees, and coastlines are all less than straight. Even the paths we make when we find shortcuts through cities have arcing angles, and rarely run in straight lines.
Putting things in order has value and right angles have their place. Order can give clarity and simplicity. The city grid ensures neighboring streets are in parallel and not curved away from each other, which is a blessing when in a foreign place with a poor map. But organizing requires conformity, and conformity creates a tyranny over perception. While our universities divide the world into academic subjects, the world itself is not divided at all. The world has an infinite number of ways to be looked at. A bridge is not just engineering, it’s physics, commerce and aesthetics too. A person is not merely a name, they are biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, and metaphysics all at once. They can be a neighbor, a brother, a friend, a nemesis, simultaneously. We are multitudes and we, and everything in the universe, posses elements we may never define and that defy categorization.
The tyranny of category is when we think a thing is only what we have labeled it to be. A master of taxonomy and judgement has the illusion of expertise, since they choose what label an idea, or a person, is given. But like an olympic judge for gymnastics, the ability to score a performance on a scale from 1 to 10 is not the same as the ability to perform gymnastics itself. If you show me a soufflé, I can tell you what category of food it is, and judge it on how it compares to others I’ve eaten, but that does not give me the skill to make one. A film critic can harshly criticize a movie, but not possess any of the abilities required to make any film at all. The ability to categorize and critique has the pretense of superiority to creation, but not the substance.
In some cultures there is a tyranny of taxonomy. Nothing can be done without being categorized first. And that categorization limits the potential of the idea or the person since in a rigidly taxonomic environment, moving between categories is not allowed. The categories are primary, and the reality is secondary. It’s no surprise that these cultures produce square and lifeless things. Their obsession with order is contrary to the nature of ideas, and the world. Without constant reminders that categories are malleable inventions of convenience and not manifest in the world itself, the possibility of free thinking and progress is denied.
[in the second drawing] order has been imposed on chaos. We can now say that the wiggle goes so many squares to the left, so many to the right, so many up, or so many down, and at last we have a number… However much we divide, count, sort or classify this wiggling into particular things and events, this is no more than a way of thinking about the world: it is never actually divided.
I will mark this post intentionally as uncategorized.
There have only been a few posts so far, but this one by Ben Huh is likely to provoke many people to share some great stories. As documented in the videos below, Ben decided to be one of the first people to ever jump off one of the largest natural arches in the world, while wearing a FailBlog t-shirt (a blog his company runs).
Title: I jumped off a cliff
YOU ARE HERE
On Friday, May 18th, just after sunrise, I stood at the edge of a 150 foot tall natural rock arch in the Moab desert looking over the side, ready to jump. There were an infinite number of reasons why this was a bad idea.
Just how did I get here?
In February, a viral video of the insane jump off Corona Arch was making the rounds. It had accumulated more than 10 million views. So that same month, when Francisco Dao, organizer of the 50 Kings conference asked me if I would do the jump. I didn’t hesitate at all. It looked exciting and fun.
Fast forward to last Friday, I hesitated the morning of the jump trying to pick out what I would wear. I unknowingly brought a FAIL Blog t-shirt. If I wore it, would I be tempting fate? Would it be funny? Would it scare everyone else doing the jump? What if I really did die wearing our own branded shirt?
Friday morning at 5:45 am, the guide showed up to pick up 12 brave souls at our lodge in Moab, Utah. Out of 27 conference attendees, 12 signed up. But there were only 11 waiting in the dark before sunrise. Just one person, Paul Carr of PandoDaily, was missing. He had talked himself out of it after listening to the guide at the rappelling excursion the previous day with Sarah Lacy, his boss.
“Our guide said it was crazy,” Sarah told me, looking directly into my eyes like a negotiator trying to convince a jumper off the Golden Gate bridge. “You can’t use the rope more then four times because of the force. Do you know how few people have done this? You guys are nuts.
“He said people have died doing this.”
It turned out Sarah was correct. The person who invented the jump had died doing it – albeit at a different arch. Sure, but people also die from vending machines that fall on them.
“Sarah, it’ll be totally fine,” I said. “No one is going to die.”
“Whenever I start working on a song, I immediately try to forget everything, to empty my hands and head of anything that may be hanging over from another song or album. I try to approach it like, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever played guitar. What am I going to do?”
– The Edge, U2
This is basically the idea of Shoshin, or beginners mind.
There’s something familiar about Kobe Bryant’s description about the style his coach, Phil Jackson uses. As this article explains, his teamates sometimes get upset when Jackson zings players in the media, but Bryant says:
“…when you’ve been around Phil for as many years as I have, we all understand that he likes coaching publicly,” Bryant said. “I think it’s important for the new guys to understand that. Ron, Pau, guys that kind of have issues with that, that’s how he coaches. It’s fine. Just let him do his job and go about your business.”
When someone you trust conveys private messages in public, you are being abused. They are enlisting the shame and shock of hearing feedback for the first time in public as a way to to intimidate you into behaving the way they want. It’s both insecure and immature. It happens every day in some workplaces and families, where people with less power are constantly surprised and belittled in front of their peers.
It’s a weak way for people in power to abuse their influence. They are confusing the fear it creates in other people with respect. Victimizing those around you only makes everyone weaker.
A stronger way for someone in power to communicate is to speak directly and privately. Giving the other person a chance to consider and respond, things denied when messages are expressed for the first time in front of strangers.
Dave Winer, who’s known, in spite of his wishes, as the inventor of RSS, wrote about the myth of the sole inventor, a topic I spend an entire chapter exploring in The Myths of Innovation (Chapter 5: The Lone Inventor).
Winer explains he didn’t invent RSS alone – there were too many contributions to name anyone, including himself, as “the inventor”.
This is refreshingly honest. When an idea succeeds there are often dozens of people claiming to be its parent (See my review of The Social Network). And for the media it’s a stronger story to mention someone as “the inventor of”, however inaccurate it might be, than to say “one of the inventors of” or “someone who contributed to the invention of”. Everyone’s ego benefits from these consolidations of credit so they grow in popularity regardless of their substance.
As evidence of Winer’s point: I worked on a project similar to RSS years before the name RSS was coined. I’d never say I actually invented RSS, instead I’m one of many supporting stories of Winer’s point.
Working on IE4 in 1996 we created an XML based standards proposal called Web Collections, and submitted a draft to the W3C in March 1997. We even shipped a feature that used it in IE 4.0 beta 1, called Sitemaps, which led to a U.S. patent. The motivation was we realized browsers were dumb and wanted websites to have a smart way to tell browsers about how pages were organized or updated.
Sounds impressive perhaps. But at the time few people cared. Even now, clearly, few people care 🙂
Moreso, Castedo Ellerman, a colleague working on another IE4 project called Channels, submitted a similar use of XML, called CDF, a few days later as part of our push technology offerings.
Netscape followed close behind with MCF in June of 1997 (It’s possible they submitted something to the W3C earlier, but I couldn’t find it. Hotsauce, the Apple based metadata system they more or less acquired existed earlier but not in a standard based form – if you have a more accurate history please share).
RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Guha at Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9.[4] In July 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a new version, RSS 0.91,[2] which simplified the format by removing RDF elements and incorporating elements from Dave Winer‘s ScriptingNews syndication format.[7] Libby also renamed RSS “Rich Site Summary” and outlined further development of the format in a “futures document”.[8]
At the time Netscape’s RDF was a competing proposed standard with Microsoft’s CDF. It was at the peak of the browser war, and there were many competiting ways to do things on the web offered by both companies.
Why are Web collections and CDF omitted? The reasons are simple:
The line for when an idea begins is arbitrary. All ideas are made from other ideas. When precisely an idea becomes it’s own concept is not a matter of science but opinion. This is a matter of convenience. It would take pages of names and ideas to comprehensively identify everyone who pursued any idea, and to sort out which of them were influenced by what work others were doing.
MSFT abandoned the ideas. The GM of IE 4.0 cut the sitemap feature, the only real use of web collections. And CDF was known mostly for the ill-fated Channels feature, part of the push technology (which Wired proclaimed would end web-browsing altogether). The uses of these proposed standards faded – and standards only thrive if they are manifested in software people use. Netscape’s standard lived on in code.
No one has spoken up to offer other pieces of history further upstream. Winer mentions CDF and Microsoft, but not Web Collections.
But this is not an unusual story – the complexity of origins, competitive approaches to a similar idea, and failures of acknowledgment or comprehensiveness is the norm.It’s just inconvenient to take a close look at the origins of things, so mostly we never know. Read up on the invention of airplanes, light bulbs or anything and you’ll make similar patterns of discovery.
Of course I didn’t invent RSS. But I did work on something that influenced what did happen. Such is the life of people with ideas.
Why? Plans are in the works.A small team and I are crafting some fun PR plans for the book in the month of October.
One big plan I can tell you about: Wed Oct 13th is Myths of Innovation day. The goal is to see how high we can get the amazon rank for the book to go. Interested in helping? Here’s what you can do.
If you blog, plan to write a post about the book on Oct 13th
Plan to post on facebook/twitter with a link to the book on Oct 13th (Facebook event here)
Ask other bloggers/fb’ers you know to do the same
Consider buying the book as a gift for a friend, on Oct 13th
I’ll link back to all of #1 and #2 that I can – everyone wins!
Please mark your calendar! Over the next week I’ll be explain all the fun stuff we’re doing, including prizes, competitions, events and other fun, but wanted to announce the date. Hope you’ll help.
Leave a comment if you can do any of the above – then I can follow up with you if necessary. Cheers!
If you’d prefer to get updates from this blog on facebook, today’s your day. There’s now a fan page, and it will always show the latest updates from my blog – if enough people like it, I’ll do special prizes and fun things there too.
The original edition was published in 2007. It was a charming little book, that disarmingly changed how people thought about ideas, so they could be more successful working with ideas on their own, at work or in life.
The original was a popular book. It was a bestseller for O’Reilly Media, and got praise from all kinds of places, like lifehacker, slashdot, MSNBC, the NY Times, and even got me on as a co-host of The Business of Innovation series on CNBC. It was an amazon best book of 2007, and a finalist for the 2007 Jolt awards. And most important of all, it’s actually fun to read.
This new edition gave me a chance to make the book even better.
MoreUseful: Four new chapters. One major chapter called “Beyond Hype”, focuses on putting the lessons from the book to work in your life, and three heavily revised essays on creativity, pitching ideas and staying motivated.
Tighter: We fixed typos, broken references, and errata.
Prettier: Shiny, dramatic cover (we lost the rotary phone, but C’est la vie).
Handier: travel-friendly size, w/ clever flap-o-matic design (keeps your place)
Better: Every chapter was cleaned, washed, and buffed, with improved references, and some additional stories.
If you’ve never read it before, now is the time. It’s the best edition ever made (ok – there are only two editions, but still).
The book hits stores early September, but is available for pre-order now.
I’ve been looking for choice examples of inflated claims and promises among people working in social media, for my talk next Tuesday, Calling BS on social media gurus.
If you’re someone who believes in the value of twitter, social media or even web 2.0m who do you think is giving you a bad name? Or making bad arguments?
I’m hoping if you know of a link, blog post or video I should see, you’ll leave a comment.
Disclaimer: I’m just getting started – so far not all of these are bad or even misleading, but they are interesting examples as points of reference. I’m trying to find a wide range to look at and examine.
1. Among other videos and papers I’ve been watching, this popular one is a highly produced, and often fascinating combination of statistics (his blog does list references – kudos) – but I’ll be looking at how they’re used in misleading ways.
Social Media Adoption By U.S. Small Businesses Doubles Since 2009
Small Businesses Mainly Use Social Media to Identify and Attract New Customers
And in his analysis, it appears they included email as social media in their categorization.
3. Brian Solis’s Unveiling the new Influencers, is a dazzling piece of writing, but has more hyperbole per paragraph than I’ve seen in some time. He’s completely entitled to his opinion, but writing like this is so speculative despite its bold claims, that it deserves attention.
4. This is more in the web 2.0 category, but it was one of the first. Its quite interesting and well done, and stays clear of misleading stats or other rhetorical tricks. But it still does take several positions and assumptions worth questioning:
What I’m looking for:
This list so far is pretty tame. Do you have other favorites, both honest and manipulative, you want to make sure I study and include in the talk? Videos, papers, blog posts, anything goes. Thanks for the help.
?
A funny thing about the human mind is we tend to believe what we want to believe. We are prone to allowing what we want to have happen distort our reasoning on how likely it is to happen.
My recent post on the future of UI will be boring has disappointed some. They think I want the future to boring because I predict it will be so.
This is wrong. I’d love new and better things as much as anyone.
However, having studied the history of change and progress I know how many factors are involved for change of this kind to happen, and how many of those factors have nothing to do with how much better a particular new idea is. My prediction is based on what I think will happen, independent of whether I want it to happen or not.
If you strip away what you want or don’t want for a moment, your odds of seeing things clearly go up. I’m not saying I’m right about the future, only that there is a distinction in my mind between things I want to have happen and I things I think will happen. It’s a very useful distinction to be able to make.
It should be possible to:
Believe in something you hope doesn’t happen (e.g. death)
Want something even if it’s improbable (developing superpowers as you age)
Accept that things happen regardless of whether you believe in them or not
Work for something you want despite the odds (changing the world for the better)
Very cool – people ask me all the time for this, but there’s no easy way for me to sign/sell books. Well, now thanks to Powell’s you can get one shipped to you if you want.
If you see this post, it means you're looking at the new, improved, ISP-upgraded stage.scottberkun.com/. There are a few kinks that will take a few days to sort out, but most things should be working fine.
The last few posts are in limbo, but will be transferred here shortly. Magically (Hi Jamie).
Please leave a comment if you notice anything amiss. Thanks.
Not only will doing this make you feel good and support efforts to protect privacy, you also get a nice shot at several $75 gift certificates for amazon.com.
