wicksite turns 1 month old
July 11, 2007
Early on in any relationship you tend to celebrate the small anniversaries. My relationship with this blog just turned 1 month old! Pop the champagne!
Why did I start the blog? And why am I going to keep it going? No, it’s not out of sheer, unbridled vanity. It’s because I like to write, and the reason I like to write is that I like to share. I’ve always experienced that sharing a lot, perhaps more than you are comfortable with, has far more positive consequences than negative.
So thank you to everyone who has visited, and especially to those who have taken the leap of faith and subscribed to wicksite. It’s nice to know that people are reading.
So here’s my call for you, dear reader. As you no doubt have seen, in the first month I’ve experimented with a lot of topics and styles. So what was your favorite post or posts? And why? Let me know via comments below or just email me.
Also, in the next month, or the next year, if you like a post forward it to at least one person and tell them to check the blog out. The more the merrier.
Some stats: 20 posts, 12 comments, 326 total views
[Photo Credit: Jana L'Esperance]
The unplayable lie
July 10, 2007
Playing the game of golf can teach you a lot about life – and many a golfer has waxed philosophical to the point where these life-lessons-I-learned-by-playing-golf are well documented. Having never been a very good golfer myself, the only thing the skill part of the game has taught me is to swear creatively and at length. But some of the most interesting lessons in golf have little to do with your ability to skillfully swing a flimsy metal club and make it hit a tiny white ball exactly where you want it to go. They are more about the decisions you make while you are on the golf course.
My favorite lesson is the “lesson of the unplayable lie.” Oftentimes when playing golf, and especially if you play like me, your ball will end up in places where it shouldn’t be: against a tree, down a gopher hole, in the middle of a construction site, etc. The rules of golf state:
The player may deem his ball unplayable at any place on the course except when the ball is in a water hazard. The player is the sole judge as to whether his ball is unplayable.
In the situation where you declare a ball unplayable, you have to take a penalty stroke, drop it nearby, and continue on. The thing that gets you is that last sentence – it is at the player’s discretion, and no one else’s, as to whether the ball is unplayable or not.
Our culture teaches that generally it is a good thing to be tenacious and to keep trying. Don’t be a quitter, quitters never win. Take risks in order to succeed. When as a golfer you find yourself looking at a ball buried in scrub brush, that conditioning kicks in. Even though you might have a 1 in 1000 chance of getting it out of there, you certainly are going to give it a try. You’ll be the one who pulls it off.
Later, when you are penciling in that 14 on the scorecard after hacking it into the woods a few times, you realize that had you declared it unplayable initially, you probably would have gotten away with a 6 or 7. And you would still have that club that you threw into the woods after the 11th stroke induced a profanity-riddled fit of rage.
Learning to be completely honest with yourself, recognizing the unplayable lies when you see them, and not being afraid to quit when you see one – is the lesson. In your personal or professional life, are you staring at any unplayable lies right now?
A web business is no longer just a website
July 9, 2007
It used to be that if you wanted to start up a web-based business that would sell, for instance, monkey-based decor (my mom would keep you in business all by herself), you would go out and buy a domain name like www.barrelofmonkeys.com, build a website, launch it, do some online ad buys and search engine marketing, and away you go.
That is no longer the reality. Now every web business plan may include, and probably should include, a plan for building a widget that a web user can install on their MySpace or Facebook page (monkey art for your personal profile!). Perhaps another gadget that users can start up on their custom homepages like iGoogle, MyYahoo, Netvibes, or Pageflakes (monkeys in the news!). Oh, and you’ll also need a version of your presence available for mobile devices, and perhaps a custom version for more highly interactive devices like the iPhone (buy monkey items on the go!). For some web businesses, their whole success is based on these extensions.
Your home website is still important, but the internet is changing – expanding in reach and getting more distributed – such that it’s a fallacy to think that your online business can be competitive if all you have is a website.
Everything’s relative in Geni
July 5, 2007
It seems like everyone is launching a social network these days , especially since the big ones are worth billions of dollars now. It’s getting kind of ridiculous – there are even online social networks that help you launch your own social network.
Amongst all of the noise, a few original ideas still float to the top – and these seem to be niche networks that serve a particular audience in ways that the general-use networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) can’t or won’t. I came across one a few months back that is really fantastic: Geni. Geni is built completely around the idea of family networks, and appeals to the genealogist in all of us.
Of course, like any idea for a website it isn’t the idea that counts: it’s the implementation. And in this area Geni is really getting it right. When you first visit Geni you create a simple box for yourself on a family tree simply by entering your name and email address. Then you can build your family tree, adding relatives and inviting them to join the site if you like. The website brings you into the experience very gradually, and it gets addictive fast. Before I knew it I had pulled out the book my grandfather wrote about our family, Tributaries and Rivulets, and started to put in everyone. In less than an hour my tree included 43 people going back 9 generations (picture below, with me in the bottom left of the tree)
You can go deeper by opening up individual profiles and editing them, adding pictures and family stories. If you spent some time on it, you could really make Geni a fantastic shared repository and asset for your family. And with genealogy software compatibility as a priority, it’s clear they plan to serve the serious genealogists and treat your data with respect – though competition from Ancestry.com will be tough if you are really in research mode.
Geni’s thoughtful (and viral) approach is being rewarded, as they just recently celebrated passing the 5 million profile mark. They are getting a lot of impatience for new features (a good sign for a startup), but as long as they continue to implement as well as they have so far, their following will continue to grow.
Moving down the food chain
July 5, 2007
The experience of strapping a backpack on and hiking miles into the wilderness to spend a few days is one of those things I have enjoyed doing since I was very young. Leaving your job, most of your possessions, and civilization behind results in a long list of standard benefits: decreased stress, good exercise, fresh air, quality time with friends or family, beautiful natural scenery, etc.
But one of the most important benefits is that of perspective. When the technological world recedes and the natural world replaces it, anyone who is in the wilderness gets a profoundly different sense of their place in the world. Put simply, you aren’t at the top of the food chain anymore. In fact, you’re pretty fragile compared to the other things that live in the wilderness full time.
When you are “backcountry” in North America, the threat of an attack by a bear, or a mountain lion, or a swarm of vicious chipmunks, is actually pretty remote, but you sense its possibility as you trudge among the trees. You take precautions, making lots of noise as you walk (most bear attacks happen when a hiker surprises a bear) and putting all of your food and toiletries in a bearbag that you hang from a tree away from your campsite every night. (My friend Chris is one of the bravest guys I know but fears bears more than anything – he is so fastidious about the bearbag that he has earned the nickname “bearbait.”) Of course, the results of not taking these precautions is well documented in popular movies.
It’s fascinating to think how the wilderness was once our world too, and how these precautions used to occupy the same mental space that looking both ways before crossing, driving with your seatbelt on, or drinking liquor before beer now occupy. Taking a trip into the woods is like taking a trip back in time. In an abstract way it’s almost like flipping through an old family album to get a sense of history. And in the same way, when you return to the present, alternate universe of commutes, status meetings, and happy hours, it’s easier to handle. While that client presentation is tough, you don’t have to worry about being dinner. That is, until a grizzly wanders into your office and starts wreaking havoc.
For Pixar it’s fundamentals, not technology
July 2, 2007
Pixar, the small movie house that has produced so many excellent computer-animated films over the years, is cleaning up at the box office again with its recent release of Ratatouille, a movie about a rat with culinary inclinations. I personally love Pixar movies, and though I haven’t caught this one yet, I will eventually. It looks great and is getting great reviews, which is nothing new for Pixar. Starting with Toy Story in 1995, they’ve made a habit of churning out great movies using highly innovative computer animation techniques. NASA makes use of Pixar’s technology, and some even speculate that their ideas are used by Apple and others for user interfaces.
The man beyond Pixar is veteran animator and producer John Lasseter, who had an interesting quote in an interview he did a few years back when the studio was releasing their last big movie, Cars:
The most important thing to do as you are learning to do animation, is don’t get seduced by the software or the tools. Take time to learn the fundamentals of animation, hand-drawn or computer. It’s not about the software; it’s about what you do with it. Learn basic design—learn how to draw—because even with using computers, [drawing] is still the easiest way to get your ideas from your head so that you can communicate with other people.
So often I see people bypassing these fundamental classes that teach you basic design, basic drawing: “These things are boring…I want to be making stuff with all these new tools that are out there!” But the most important thing is to realize that the tools will change, and they have tremendously in the time I’ve been working, but it’s always what you do with the tools that makes the difference. It’s the story, it’s the characters.
Lasseter’s quote rings true, for even as my initial reaction to Toy Story (and every Pixar movie since) was an appreciation for its stunning visuals, in the end it’s the heartfelt core of all of their movies that makes me a fan (and has kept Pixar #1 despite scores of imitators). This idea is true in a broader sense as well. Technology is most frequently just a vehicle for human creativity, and any technology-driven enterprise is simply an empty shell if there isn’t something genuinely human in its center.
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