New Music for My Cornflake Soul

Do Dashboards Make Any Sense?

Over the Summer we had a student intern working with us in ETS. She was a very talented artist working to build her digital skills. In addition to all of the Adobe tools she was working with, we asked her to help us build some new styles for the Blogs at Penn State. We wanted her to make some things that would better appeal to students in some very specific contexts and disciplines. A couple of examples included something that would be more generally representative of a digital portfolio and a note taking blog. She could easily do the design work, but a larger, perhaps more important conversation emerged from her work with us. Blogs are too hard.

For quite some time Brad Kozlek and I have had an ongoing conversation about how to reduce the friction in using any old school blogging platform. For this post, I am calling any platform that generally separates the content creation from the content presentation as old school. I know it is hard for those of us used to blogging that the notion of the Blog Dashboard is confusing as hell, but it is. When you add to it that the URLs are sometimes so wildly different between where you go to write and where you go to read and things get even crazier. Our platform requires me to not only remember that to create content you need to go to http://blogs.psu.edu, log in, navigate a content management system, find the right menu that allows you to create a new post, create the post, and publish it but also to view that content I then have to point my browser at http://personal.psu.edu/cwc5/blogs to view it! When you step back it is bordering on crazy town. I then have to go back through that process to edit a post. I think that is out-moded and may be keeping people from getting it.

It honestly reminds me of the gripes I have had with tools like ANGEL and Blackboard for so long. Why force people into interfaces to accomplish tasks that should be so much more fluid and straightforward?

Clearly it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine a platform that still gives power users the ability to manage from the Dashboard, but one that also eliminates the need to ever see or travel to the Dashboard. In the World of the One Button Web it is easy to never really have to see the Dashboard to publish once a bookmarklet is setup … but again, that is a concept that is lost on most. Furthermore, the emergence of Twitter and Facebook as a place that allows users to both create and consume their own content at once has created a pattern of interaction that is 100% different than that of the Dashboard to Blog paradigm. New bloggers aren’t raised on Dashboards, they are raised on simple boxes within the flow of the content that allow them to publish.

To that end, we are embarking on a project that could eliminate the need to use or see the dashboard. A personal publishing space that allows its owner(s) to instantly create from the context of the site without ever moving away from the content itself. I’m sure people think this is crazy, but what we are moving towards is something that we feel could get us over the hump of people really embracing the blog as a real platform for personal content management. What we are thinking about is below.

Simple, but really different. All you do is remember where your website is and once you have logged in most of what the Dashboard is used for (composing, editing, and deleting) is available from a Quick Compose right on your blog. If it is a class blog, any member of the class can instantly publish to the space without the overhead of the Dashboard. Simple but very different.

Long term the vision is to offer this as really a one button solution. Students would arrive at their personal space for the first time and with a single click they have a blog space sitting there that they can instantly start publishing to. After they get comfortable with the notion, they may decide to dive into the Dashboard to mess with styles, templates, and all the power that a content management system like MoveableType has to offer. But then again, they may just enjoy the ability to type, read, and share instantly. Anyone have any thoughts?

Seeking Emotions

Occasionally we encounter emotions at random. More often, we have no choice, because there’s something that needs to be done, or an event that impinges itself on us. But most often, we seek emotions out, find refuge in them, just as we walk into the living room or the den.
Stop for a second and reread that sentence, because it’s certainly controversial. I’m arguing that more often than not, we encounter fear or aggravation or delight because we seek it out, not because it’s thrust on us.
Why check your email every twenty minutes? It’s not because it needs checking. It’s because the checking puts us into a state we seek out. Why yell at the parking attendant with such gusto? Teaching him a lesson isn’t the point–no, in that moment, it’s what we want to do, it’s a room we choose to hang out in. It could be something as prosaic as getting involved in a flame war online every day, or checking your feeds at midnight or taking a shot or two before dinner. It’s not something you have to do, it’s something you choose to do, because going there takes your emotions to a place you’ve gotten used to, a place where you feel comfortable, even if it makes you unhappy.

An interesting thought from Seth Godin in a post titled, “The places you go.” Makes me think about my daily patterns of interaction. Do I do things that make me unhappy because they are safe? Do I need to walk into these “rooms” (as Seth calls them) out of some need to generate an emotional state or do I actually need to go there because of my work/life demands?

It may require a little more conscious effort to better understand my own behavior. I think at times I am seeking some sort of emotional experience in an unconscious state — even if those reactions are negative in general. I can say that lately I may not be seeking out emotions on the positive side of the equation … and at the end of the day I know that without balancing the equation things get out of whack.

More.

Something to bring a smile?

My Last Google Wave Post

Damn Google Wave, I hardly knew you. After all the hype it is now gone. Google canned Wave about two years after they first showed it off to cheers. I recall watching the demo while on vacation and being blown away. The pieces that were shown were literally transformative in their execution. Too bad people just didn’t get it in a mainstream sort of way. Not that I really did after I finally got into the developers’ sandbox. If I am honest, I haven’t even logged into Wave in the last six months. It never made its way into my workflow and it never solved any sort of problem for me.

At the end of the day it failed to fill any sort of void for most people and I think that has to do with the fact that it wasn’t built to fill a void. It was built to be transformative and mind blowing. I am convinced that aspects of Wave will make their way into Google Docs, Sites, Gmail, and their other properties — you know, the tools that were built to do specific things. Imagine Docs with a Wave like panel that allowed teams to dialogue in real language while co-authoring something. That’s a feature I could use right now.

I am actually really impressed that Google killed it so quickly (and sad) … sort of restored my faith in the fact that they release stuff as beta and in this case saw it just wasn’t happening. I need to eat a little crow at how much attention I paid to it in its pre-release days, telling everyone how much this was going to change things. In the end it did a ton of stuff, just not for a ton of people. Again, seems amazing to me that Google could just kill it. Maybe that is the transformative lesson to learn here?

My Pre-Blog Challenge

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the long-term value of this space since my six year post last month. The thing I have been thinking about is how to bring “pre-blog” work back to life within the context of today, but with the original content of yesterday. I know that sounds really odd, but as I have been thinking about how killer it is to have six years worth of writing and sharing available in this space I have come to the conclusion that I have neglected things from the years prior to that.

My friend and colleague, Scott McDonald, and I are constantly talking about how important it is for us to become curators of our own content — sort of like personal librarians. Not really to expose the work more widely, but to have it in a way that it is organized and managed. With all this in mind I recently went through a couple of boxes of 3.5″ floppies left over from middle school, high school, and college to see if anything is still living. What I found was disappointing in that very few of the disks were still readable … to my point, I let all that go away. What I did harvest I tried to make sense of and organize in new digital archives.

Stack of Floppies

Yesterday, Brad Kozlek and I were talking about some of these ideas and I mentioned that I might start putting some old content here to work it into this space. I want to find a way to bring it into the larger story this space tells about me … and that story certainly started well before my first post here in 2004.

So, with that in mind, the month of August will be my Pre-Blog Challenge month where I will attempt to get as much old stuff in here as I can. At the moment, I am using the category PreBlog to organize all of it. I am also dating back to the original date that the files themselves have on them … so my archives now stretch back into the 1990s … I am hoping to find some even older items as time goes by (I might even have to retype some stuff). My only rule is that I cannot edit the content (as much as I might want to) and have to let it simply hang out as it was when written. I’ve already discovered some interesting things about myself by reading my own words 15 years later. I am also sure as I go along some of what I post won’t be text, but might include old video, pictures, or audio. Who knows. Anyone else doing something like this and want to join in my new one something a day challenge?