magpie's shiny things

Once again the nag­ging ques­tions of on-line iden­ti­ty, authen­tic­i­ty, and dis­am­bigua­tion have come across my radar screen. Josh Clark over at GlobalMoxie post­ed a cou­ple of times this last week on both Spock and Wink. //engtech had a guest post on rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment by Tim Nash ear­li­er in the month, and claimD and openID have shown up in most of the top tech blogs at some point in the last quarter.

We’ve already seen some of the pre­dictable con­se­quences emerge. Among them: iden­ti­ty theft for both prof­it and revenge, fir­ings for on-line activ­i­ties that don’t fit corp. images, and the iden­ti­ties of anony­mous par­ties (unin­ten­tion­al­ly) revealed through third parties.

Now I’m wait­ing to see what the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences of this on-line iden­ti­ty cri­sis and the attempts to fix it will be. Stay tuned.

This morn­ing I read Dan Russell’s series of essays on sense­mak­ing. Dan is a sort of meta/mega sense­mak­er. He tries to make sense of how peo­ple try to make sense of things. These essays won’t take you long to read and they aren’t hard to grasp.

But you may have on of those aha moments. I did; and now there is a new sign on my bul­letin board that says:

How to Make Sense:

1. Define — what was the ques­tions again?
2. Collect — who knows?
3. Organize — where does this go?
4. Iterate — lath­er, rinse, repeat.
5. Do — now what?

Now I know what it is that I actu­al­ly do all day. Explaining why I should get paid for it is anoth­er matter…

I was cruis­ing the librar­i­an blogs this after­noon and came across Pam Berger’s essay on the skills that we need to learn in order to make good use of the infor­ma­tion resources on the web.

In par­tic­u­lar her thought that “Hypermedia envi­ron­ment encour­age broad accu­mu­la­tion of infor­ma­tion, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly deep explo­ration.” struck a chord. 

I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing what tools and tech­niques her read­ers have found use­ful to encour­age deep read­ing and consideration.

I have recent­ly wast­ed two days on a not-so-good book. It’s not the 5 or so hours that I spent read­ing the not-so-good book that I regret. It’s the time I spent try­ing to decide what to write about the not-so-good book, indeed whether to write about it at all. Time spent read­ing (almost?) any­thing isn’t wast­ed. Even if all I learn from a book is what the not-so-good think­ing on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject looks like I have got­ten some val­ue for my time. The time I spent think­ing fur­ther about the not-so-good book, how­ev­er, is time that I could have spent think­ing about some­thing more interesting.

I will always be grate­ful to Annie Lamott for intro­duc­ing me to the con­cept of “Shitty First Drafts” in Bird by Bird. I am now begin­ning to under­stand that there is a sec­ond, equal­ly impor­tant, direc­tive: “Spell check it and pub­lish it.”

Getting the draft out of my head is only a start­ing point. We per­fec­tion­ists, cow­ards, and pro­cras­ti­na­tors can use the shit­ty first draft to alle­vi­ate the sting of “not get­ting start­ed” and yet still not accom­plish the need­ful thing.