magpie's shiny things

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.

We all know that a lit­tle knowl­edge is a dan­ger­ous thing. It’s also often exact­ly what is need­ed for the occasion.

So here I am with a new web­site, a cou­ple of blogs to look after, and a image port­fo­lio to build for the DH. Problem is… the in-the-house IT guy does­n’t do web. Networking yes, Windows man­age­ment yes, hard­ware trou­bleshoot­ing, yes. Web — no.

I need a lit­tle knowl­edge. This week­end. Continue read­ing “A Little HTML is a Dangerous Thing and I Know Where to Get It”