Will we ever be alone with our thoughts again?

For the last few weeks, I have been heads-down reading a book I had abandoned half way through a few years back. A classic in its field, the book is called Diffusion of Innovations, a book that I think I came across through a citation in the more popular Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I am glad I picked up the book and more importantly, was able to finally finish reading it! I gained some very interesting insights which I hope to share with you in the upcoming posts.

In the meanwhile, as part of my daily browsing ritual, I came across this interesting article in Gizmodo. Needless to say, the picture was a huge incentive for me to click through the article although it had very little to do with the post itself (clever marketing ploy, I must admit!) What kept me reading through the article however, like any movie with a flashy promotion, the content itself, which resonated strongly with me.

Back in the days when technology was a luxury rather than part of life, I used to spend (and probably so did you) generally daydreaming or just plain lost in thoughts. Some of my fond memories of childhood involved creating stuff out of clay with my cousin, inventing new games, or just lying down under the shade of a tree for hours. However, of late, my every spare minute is mostly consumed with checking Facebook, Blackberry, or browsing aimlessly though I know that there is nothing to check and there is no new message that is life-threatening.

While I don't think I have degraded to the extremes mentioned in the article, I have been guilty of sneaking a glance at my Blackberry while at a signal, walking from the car to the store, or checking for messages that are not there when the person I am with is on another call or simply stepped out for a minute.

As much as the new age of connectivity is trying to bring people together, I think it is also prying us apart from our inner thoughts, which I don't think is a good thing. As Elizabeth Gilbert said in her TED talk, sometimes inspiration comes in waves and to me it's many times when you are lost in thought or even just alone. By letting the waves pass us by because we are already consumed with the Pavlovian pings of the Blackberry, I think we lose golden opportunities to get innovative and get in touch with ourselves and wonder if we, or our future generations will slowly start losing this process of thinking long term and instead get lost in the then and the now.

While I can hear my wife saying "I told you so" behind my back, I think it is important to take some time out and just be lost in our thoughts so that we can find ourselves once again.

In the end, I want to leave you with one image from my favorite artist, that sums up the feeling.

How people respond to content online

I came across a great article called 9 ways people respond to your content online by Rajesh Shetty today, thanks to Guy Kawasaki's tweet that I am following. After reading, I can't help feel that Guy himself is ignoring the article, as sometimes I feel he just posts way too many tweets for me to keep up, resulting in me doing Spam, Skip, or Scan! However, he can be excused because of sharing some great articles like this.

In short, Rajesh says that people perceive content in one of the following 9 ways (quoted directly from the article):



Negative Return of Investment on Interaction

1. Spam: If your content does not provide a reasonable ROII (return-on-investment for an interaction) for the reader or is self-serving or simply useless, the reader will mark it as spam. Posting something that may be assessed, as “spam” is the fastest way to losing credibility.
2. Skip: The reader makes an assessment that he or she won’t lose much by reading it. In this case, the reader has not written you off yet but if you consistently create content that is worth “skipping,” the reader might write you off.
3. Scan: The reader thinks there are only a few parts that are of relevance and wants to get right to the core of the content and skip the rest.

Transform

1. Stop: The reader is touched by the article and stops to think about the article, it’s relevance and what it means to him or her personally and professionally.
2. Save: The content is so good that the reader might want to re-visit this multiple times.
3. Shift: The article is transformational. The reader is so deeply affected (in a positive way) by the article that it shifts some of their values and beliefs. In other words, this piece of writing will transform the reader and make him or her grow.

Leverage and Engage

1. Send: The content is not only useful to the reader but also to one or more people in the reader’s network. The reader simply emails the article or a link to it to people that he or she cares.
2. Spread: The reader finds the article fascinating enough to spread it to anyone and everyone via a blog, twitter or the social networks that he or she belongs.
3. Subscribe: This is the ultimate expression of engagement and a vote of confidence that you will continue to provide great content. When the reader wants to continue listening to your thoughts, he or she will subscribe.

He goes on to suggest some things to consider to re-think the way you write online content. I think this is a great way to look at how you create online content. In addition to his thoughts, I feel that you can still improve things more than just the content.

• Make it easy for readers to ignore (1-3) if you can't avoid having some content in that category. An example would be to mark it in the title with a specific type or prefix that your readers will know to ignore better. Thus, you can remove the prefix for content where you want your readers' attention. This would be great for Twitter, for example.
  
• Make it easy for readers to read (4-6) by proper spacing and lot of visuals to enhance their pondering capabilities. Visual cues are always great to help improve your thought process as people tend to think visually. If you have a transforming point, better to add a bunch of visuals to strengthen that point. For example, your blog content can be improved by adding some visuals.
  
• Provide unobtrusive tools to facilitate readers to perform (7-9) without having to search for it. Lot of systems do this already by providing links to share, send, or social bookmark and it's a great use of unobtrusive technology.

Kudos to Rajesh for a nice article.

Blogging again!

Not that anyone cares, but it took me ages (as can be seen from my last post) to get back on track to start blogging again. I have lived through one of the biggest hurdles to blogging that one can go through - I am not doing anything interesting, so what exactly can I blog, and that too daily?!

It's a fairly easy state of mind to get into, especially if you are working constantly. I got a chance to take a breather and realized that I have quite a bit to blog actually. I read a lot, I surf a lot (and no, I don't spam-a-lot!). That's good fodder for the blog.

As a software consultant, I always end up getting another doubt. Consultants by profession, are supposed to get into the heart of the problem, understand it quickly, and provide a solution. In most cases, we have to pretend that we know all the answers to build customer's confidence and then, in the background, cram as much information as possible to be one-step ahead of the questioners. This poses a problem with blogging. Let's say I get into a new domain or technology. It's hard to blog in the process of learning for the fear of letting the customer, who may potentially stumble upon the blog, that I am learning. And once I am done learning, I move on to other things, and end up not blogging about what I learned. A kind of a catch-22 situation I guess.

Well, in any case, I have taken my keyboard up again and hope to put it to the page. Let's see how long it lasts this time.