Author Archives: Suw Charman-Anderson

01.17.05
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Procrastination, thief of… ooh! wanna watch a movie?

Procrastination. It’s a killer. It’s the bane of my life, and probably yours too. I’ve been working for myself for the best part of eight years and, although I am more self-disciplined now than I was when I started working as a journalist, being stuck in a small room 24 hours a day and having no clear delineator between work and leisure hours does mean one can slip a bit too easily into the ‘all waking hours are for working’ mentality. That, in turn, results in parts of your brain rebelling and then procrastination sets in and I’ll finish this post when I’ve updated my iPod…

There are a whole bunch of theories about time management and why the desire to sit and mindlessly rip CDs into iTunes is more attractive than the thought of doing $arbitrary_task, but recently I’ve read two accounts of dealing with procrastination that I rather like.

The first is from Phillip J Eby, who looks at procrastination and perfectionism from a programmer’s point of view, discussing the inhibitions that cause procrastination in terms of filters in his brain that prevent him from starting work:

I was previously aware in a general way that my impossibly-high standards for myself can get in the way of accomplishing things, and the other evening I blogged about precisely that. What I was missing was that this is actually something I can get my hands around, as it were. It’s not just some sort of abstract concept, it’s a concrete, specific behavior that occurs in a particular context: when considering options for doing something, I’m validating them against criteria.

Instead of allowing himself to start work on a first draft, if you like, he was attempting to force himself to start at the end by producing the finished thing. This is something many creative people do – we compare our first efforts to other people’s final draft without ever taking into account the blood, sweat and tears it took them to achieve it. When we don’t find the comparison favourable, we become insecure about our abilities and this is, in my opinion, the root cause of most creative blocks.

Eby goes on:

[…] I think I know how to fix it. The primary inhibition code I found in my head is, “don’t do the wrong thing”. This is a simplified form of the actual code, of course; it contains a mixture of ideas such as not making mistakes, not redoing work, doing what is justifiably correct with reference to external criteria, and so on. But the primary intent is to “avoid wrong action”, where “wrong” is defined as “not right”, and “right” is a function call to everything I know about what “right” might be, be it with respect to “right for business”, “right morally”, “right technically”, etc. […]

Anyway, the fix is ridiculously simple: just bump down the priority on those criteria, putting a filter in place to only inform me of issues with potentially serious or costly consequences that cannot be undone. Cutting and pasting documentation and doing some rephrasing of it doesn’t count as serious consequences. Another way of thinking about it is this: don’t tell me what’s wrong, tell me if there’s something to do that’s right. (With the exception of serious irreversible consequences, of course.)

In other words, stop being so picky and just get on with it. Unless what you are doing is going to result in death or dismemberment, don’t think about how it might be wrong, think about how it might be right. You can tidy up the loose ends later.

It’s like when people say ‘I don’t know where to begin’ – the answer is ‘Begin anywhere – wherever you begin is the beginning’.

This point of view is supported by Steve Pavlina who writes a great piece on overcoming procrastination. He looks at some of the reasons why we procrastinate, beginning with:

[…] Thinking that you absolutely have to do something is a major reason for procrastination. When you tell yourself that you have to do something, you’re implying that you’re being forced to do it, so you’ll automatically feel a sense of resentment and rebellion. Procrastination kicks in as a defense mechanism to keep you away from this pain. If the task you are putting off has a real deadline, then when the deadline gets very close, the sense of pain associated with the task becomes overridden by the much greater sense of pain if you don’t get started immediately.

He also suggests a few ways to get moving on a task:

  • Realize and accept that you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do
  • Think of starting one small piece of the task instead of mentally feeling that you must finish the whole thing. Replace, “How am I going to finish this?” with “What small step can I start on right now?”
  • Give yourself permission to be human. […] Realize that an imperfect job completed today is always superior to the perfect job delayed indefinitely.
  • Guarantee the fun parts of your life first, and then schedule your work around them.

It’s a good read, and I’m going to try the 30-minute method myself tomorrow in an attempt to get done some of the things I need to clear up before I go to Boston on Wednesday. Put basically, the 30-minute method is working at a task for 30 minutes then giving yourself a reward regardless of result. The promise of a reward (always have been one for self-bribery) and the fact that anyone can concentrate on anything for 30 minutes usually results in you achieving more than you would if you tried to complete a set task or work for longer.

As Pavlina says, “Don’t worry about finishing anything. Just focus on what you can start now. If you do this enough times, you’ll eventually be starting on the final piece of the task, and that will lead to finishing.”

01.16.05
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Making use of tags and tagsonomies

Technorati really have been busy recently. As well as the new features I mentioned last week, they have now introduce a new tag search facility which allows you to search for posts that have been marked with a Technorati tag:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]</a>

For example:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/suw" rel="tag">suw</a>

Technorati then pulls in any blog posts which have been thus tagged or categorised (it treats the categories as tags), along with photos from Flickr and bookmarks from del.icio.us, and collates them on a single page.

The link text does not have to be the same as the tag and could even be made invisible by linking to a space, although having discussed the matter with Kevin Marks, who clears up a couple of questions about tags on his blog, there are good reasons why that is not a good idea.

Firstly, linking to the same text as the tag gives people a link straight to the relevant tag page so that they can see who else is using that given tag, a bit like having the Technorati cosmos link on each post. It gives people clues about how you are tagging your posts, which may in turn encourage them to use similar tags so that your tag search results overlap, e.g. if two people are talking about tagsonomies then by tagging their posts as such, they both show on the same page and become part of the same discussion.

As Stephanie Booth points out, this is a very similar effect to that of TopicExchange, which I have used on occasion and found to be useful. TopicExchange works by collating trackback pings so is easier to use than Technorati tags, but Technorati probably has more reach and a better search facility. However, TopicExchange is run on a central server, whereas the Technorati tags are not only distributed, they are also open to being spidered, freeing up the tag data for other services to use.

Another reason for keeping your tag URI and your tag link text the same is that of spam. It’s fairly obvious that the Technorati system is open to abuse, as pointed out by Nootropic, but they are already aware of that possibility. Kevin Marks is very experienced at identifying spam, and is looking at ways to keep the database clean – one way of spotting tag spam would be if the link text did not match the tag.

All in all, this is an interesting way of using emergent tagsonomies to pull together diverse datastreams in one place. As it happens, I’ve had a number of different conversations recently with friends about such things, and this is a useful first step along the way to creating a single entry point for a variety of sources.

I do, as usual, foresee a couple of small problems. The Technorati tags at the moment need to be inserted manually in the markup by the blogger and, as anyone who has worked with taxonomies and tagsonomies knows, laziness wins every time – many people have a tendency to simply not bother adding metadata, no matter how useful it is. You only have to randomly browse the Flickr to see that not only do a fair proportion of users not tag their photos, many don’t even add meaningful titles.

A way round this would be for the blog tools to provide a specific ‘tag’ field for people to add in their metadata more easily, although it would be better if the software could somehow suggest tags for you. That is, though, getting in to the realms of metadata autodiscovery and automatic classification, which is far harder problem to solve than it first appears to be.

Perhaps another option would be for Technorati to use its keyword search facility as well as the tags, so my ‘Suw‘ page would show the most recent tagged blog posts and a selection of the most recent ‘Suw’ keyword search results. I would also like to see Technorati pull in other data streams, such as Furl bookmarks, (not everyone uses del.icio.us), or 43Things tags.

Another problem is one which bedevils all tagsonomies and that is the issue of synonyms and plurals: Do you tag using ‘tagsonomy’ or ‘tagsonomies’? Perhaps Technorati could use a Google Suggest style solution to this, so when you search for ‘tagsonomy’ it asks you if you would like to also see the results for ‘tagsonomies’ as well. It would also be good if one could use Boolean search operands in the tag search facility so that you can create complex search strings rather than being limited to one word or phrase.

Overall, Technorati tags are going down rather well, and I am looking forward to seeing how this project develops. I’ll even try to remember to tag my own posts properly.

Technorati tags: tags, tagsonomy, tagsonomies, technorati, taxonomy, taxonomies, suw

01.12.05
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Tom Reynolds on BBC Radio Scotland

My good friend Tom, who keeps a blog called Random Acts of Reality about his work as an EMT, recently took part in a BBC radio discussion about bloggers who write about their jobs. You can listen to it in the BBC Radio Scotland archives – but click this link before Monday when the archive refreshes.

Four people took part in the discussion, including one employer who was rabidly anti-blog, and who started off by accusing Tom of racism. I suspect he’d taken a brief look at Tom’s blog, and misinterpreted a discussion about which languages might be useful for Tom to learn, (he works in a borough of London where there are a lot of non-English speaking immigrants) and immediately spotted an opportunity to attempt to bring Tom into disrepute. Not an intelligent tactic, considering that he was doing on the radio precisely what he was accusing bloggers of doing online – speaking without due thought and consideration.

Hmm, paranoid employer, demonised blogger… I see a theme emerging.

01.12.05
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First UK blogger fired for blogging

In the first case of its kind in the UK, blogger Joe Gordon from Edinburgh has been sacked by his employer Waterstone’s for a few mildly negative comments he made about his job on his satirical blog, The Woolamaloo Gazette. Joe was warned shortly before Christmas that he was going to be subject to a disciplinary hearing for gross misconduct for bringing Waterstone’s into disrepute, but due to the festive season the hearing did not take place until 5th January. The hearing found that he had ‘violated the rules’ and he was summarily dismissed.

In dismissing Joe, though, Waterstone’s has prompted a massive backlash and huge amounts of very negative publicity – the story has been covered by BoingBoing, The Guardian, The Scotsman, The Bookseller, and The Register. Matthew Whitaker, who is a fellow blogger and a friend of Joe’s, is keeping a round up of all the press this story receives, and there have been a huge number of supportive comments on Joe’s own blog with many people writing to the company to complain or promising to boycott Waterstone’s completely.

As a bookseller with 11 years experience at Waterstone’s, and as someone responsible for organising many of the book signings that have taken place in the Edinburgh branch, Joe has the support not only of the blogosphere but also of authors such as Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross, and Richard Morgan.

All in all, this has turned into a major PR gaffe for the company – the blog-savvy media here have all been aware of the possibility of someone getting sacked for blogging because it’s happened several times in America, and they’ve been just gagging for a story like this to unfold here. I predict that it will be picked up now by the wider media, that Joe will get a whole lot of useful legal advice and support, and that Waterstone’s will end up with a large serving of egg on their face. Which will stick.

In the US, employment law exists but is weak – if you challenge your former employer’s decision to dismiss you, you are very likely to wind up on the heap marked ‘unemployable’ even if you win, but the situation in the UK is very different. Tribunals and unfair dismissal cases are taken more seriously, not just by the unions but by people in general. When someone gets fired unfairly, we tend to come down on the side of the employee. We like our underdogs.

My hopes for Joe, on a personal level, is that he gets the support and advice he requires to successfully challenge Waterstone’s and that he gets recompense for his dismissal which, on the face of it, looks very unfair. I also hope that he gets a far better job than the one that he was fired from. But looking at this more broadly, this case brings to light the fact that there has been in general a lack of thought about the issue of bloggers mentioning their work on their blogs and what that means. We need now to have some calm, sensible discussions about the repercussions of what has happened.

More to come when I’ve had a think about it.

01.11.05
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A good week for Technorati

In a week dominated by discussion of Six Apart’s acquisition of LiveJournal, Technorati has had its fair share of news.

Developer’s Contest

Technorati announced their developer’s contest winner, Joshua Tauberer, whose GovTrack uses the Technorati API to track the status of bills on the floor of Congress. This entry fits in neatly with Technorati’s interest in tracking politics, which it did in the run up to the Presidential election via a dedicated area on the site.

I would, however, like to see Tauberer and Technorati spread their interest a little wider than home-grown politics and develop GovTrack to look at data from other countries. Whilst Technorati is an American company, they have here an opportunity to broaden a few horizons by acknowledging that their user base is global and that in order to be truly useful applications of their API need to be global too.

It’ll be interesting to see what Technorati does next with the code that’s been written for their API. At the moment, it’s all dispersed around the web with varying quality of instruction for users. Having got this far, it would be good to see Technorati bring together their winners (there were five runners-up) and help them groom their code further for more widespread public use.

Boolean Operands and Watchlists

Dave Sifry announced last week that Technorati now allows you to create watchlists (cosmos searches that you want to keep an eye on) from keywords using complex search terms. Once your watchlist has been created you can use the RSS feed to keep up to date with new items as they come in.

In your keyword search, either for a cosmos or a watchlist, you can now use “” to enclose a set phrase, () to enclose a sub-phrase, and the Boolean operands OR, AND and NOT. (Note: the CAPS are important – don’t use lower case). This allows you to get very specific with your searches and weed out a lot of the cruft that can get in the way of good results.

But as far as I can tell, they do not have wildcard symbols, which is a shame. If I want to look for “social network*” where * equals any ending, I have to think of the variants myself – ‘social AND (network OR networks OR networking)’. Nor can I replace a word in a phrase, e.g. “too * to be true” to find ‘too good to be true’ or ‘too fishy to be true’, or a letter in a word, e.g. ‘stac?’ to find ‘stacy’ or ‘staci’, as you can in Google.

Another limitation is that you can’t sort your keyword search results by authority – it will only display the most recent entries. If, for example, you are searching for information on a current event and you want to see which entries have most links, you are going to have to wade through all your search results and pick them out by hand. That’s a shame because the authority view would be very useful when trying to get a feel for how the blogsphere is reacting to big news.

Quick Claim

Technorati have also now made the blog claiming process easier. Whereas before you had to insert a piece of code into your blog template so that Technorati could verify that you really do own the blog you say you own, you can now do that using your blog username and password. This allows Technorati to call your blog API to make sure that the URI, username and password all match, thus verifying your ownership.

This new Quick Claim works for all the major blog vendors such as TypePad, MT, Blogger and Blogware. Joey deVilla has a great ‘how to’ for Blogware users but the principle is the same for all blog platforms.

Technorati Searchlets

Finally, Technorati are now providing searchlets – code that you can add to your blog to provide a search facility. The code is automatically customised for your blog and allows users to search either your blog individually or all blogs indexed by Technorati.

Technorati have been developing some useful services over the last few months, and I’m glad to see them continuing this trend. I would, however, like to see them address some nuts and bolts problems with Technorati, such as the discrepancies between ‘most recent’ and ‘by authority’ URI search results, and between your own cosmos stats and your stats as displayed in a someone else’s cosmos; the listing of internal blog references (i.e. when I link to a post of my own) in that blog’s cosmos; and the inability to cleanly deal with blog hosting companies whose software creates two URIs for the main page, e.g. http://chocnvodka.blogware.com and http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog.

I would also again like to state that the Technorati site needs a redesign – its navigation is far from optimal, forcing as it does the user to keep going back to the main page in order to get to different areas of the site. I dislike websites that have their content divided into silos that you can’t jump sideways between, particularly sites as small (in terms of pages, not database size) as Technorati. Their navigation at the moment is dire from a usability point of view and it desperately needs fixing.

Disclosure: My personal blog is hosted at Blogware, and I am a friend of Kevin Marks at Technorati. At least, I hope I am, after this.