Early Adopters

I went to an eLearning meet a few years ago in Cupertino. I never met any one in the group before and there were some interesting discussion on learning tools. Towards the end I asked them whether any of them blog. The strong reaction, I got, surprised me. “Blogs are for people who do not have anything else to do” said one person. “Who wants to watch pictures of cats and dogs and read people’s rantings” said another. I was not sure what to expect, but these pre-conceived notions gave me all the signals I wanted. I never went back to their monthly meetings.

Why am I recounting this story now? I was reminded of it when I started reading Why Journalists should use Twitter a couple of days ago.

I recently mentioned to a colleague of mine, who also is a freelance journalist, that I’m researching an article about Twitter. “I hope you really trash this service”, was his answer. “This is nothing else than verbal diarrhoea.”

The early adopters are a fascinating bunch. These are the people who are active on Twitter, sign up for several product betas, try almost every product as time permits, read Technorati/Techmeme/ Reddit/ Digg,/eHub/ Slashdot and countless blogs. They remind  me of the robot in the Short Circuit movie that keeps asking for “Input” and devours vast amounts of information.

These are great people to follow on Twitter, blogs and other forums. If you are start-up, these are your little angels. They will tell you whether your product/serviec sucks, give you great suggestions for improvements and if they like your product will tell everyone who may listen to them.

I still have not figured out what motivates early adopters. Is it because they have a high Curiosity Quotient? Or is it because they have a compulsion to make the world a bit better? Or is it something else? These people are one my sources of inspiration.

LinkLog: What Kind of Software Would People Actually Pay For?

A great blog post and  a discussion thread on reddit. Some snippets (read the blog for a very insightful discussion):

Software that re-defines a category (Google and Amazon come to mind)

Software that saves businesses (and individuals) money (figuring out the benefits to your customer)

Software that helps business earn more money (making it compelling)

Piggyback off where people are already spending tons of money (choosing your marketplace)

Become easier to choose and you become harder to leave (by building and managing excellence)

shrink a market or disrupt your competitors

Get bold initial customers who will take the risk and are willing to share their experiences.

You don’t have to be the guru of an industry; you can often make a huge difference by bringing a computational perspective to the domain (think how you can apply technology to solve real problems)

Find out what they have to do but hate doing and find a way to simplify or automate it.

This is the kind of blog post that I would book mark and read several times, think about it, find more similar ones. It will also be a nice exercise to keep this list some where and grow it based on actual experiences of successful products. Peter Christensen’s articulates so well some of the things I kind of know but never really reflected a lot about.

I think blogs are the best knowledge sharing network you can think of especially If you are lucky to discover ones like Peter’s.

Invitation to Python Developers from Guido

Thanks to @reddit here is the invitiation (dated May 1, 200

I'm inviting the Python developer community to try out the tool on the
web for code reviews. I've added a few code reviews already, but I'm
hoping that more developers will upload at least one patch for review
and invite a reviewer to try it out.

To try it out, go here:

    http://codereview.appspot.com

LinkLog: Cognitive Surplus?

This post triggers a whole bunch of thoughts and ideas. Clay Shirky talks about Social Surplus and Cognitive Surplus. Some nuggets:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively…

The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible…

People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

It’s [cognitive surplus] so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

There are all kinds of interesting and useful projects cropping up all over the web. They promote the architecture of participation. Some of them are physical meets, some of them are shared col laboratories mostly powered by wikis and many of them promote sharing. I have my own experiments in this space - one on teaching and learning and another in setting up an incremental innovation lab. I will report my progress in a few months.

Steven Pinker: Human Intelligence

In this TED Talk,  Steven Pinker talks about the way we use words, how we learn, and how we relate to others.

Human Intelligence consists of:

• A repertoire of concepts (objects, space, time, causation, intention) useful in social, knowledge intensive species
• A process of metaphorical abstraction: conceptual structure bleached of its content, applied to new abstract domains

LinkLog: The Most Important Skill

What is the most important skill to get a lot of passionate users? From  You can Outspend or Out-teach

The most important skill today is… teaching.

Because what you believe in, you can teach. And teaching is the “killer app” for a newer, more ethical approach to marketing. While in the past, those who out-spent (on ads, and big promotions) would often win, that’s becoming less and less true today for a lot of things–especially the things designed for a younger, more-likely-to-be-online user community.

Kind of a markets-are-classrooms notion. Those who teach stand the best chance of getting people to become passionate. And those with the most passionate users don’t need an ad campaign when they’ve got user evangelists doing what evangelists do… talking about their passion.

LinkLog: Getting Better at Getting Better

From How to be an expert

In theory, again, anyone willing to do what’s required to keep getting better WILL get better.

LinkLog: Do What You Love

From a Non-Programmer’s Apology, Aaron produces one of the best articles I have read - “To be or not to be” a programmer.

Learning is like compound interest. A little bit of knowledge makes it easier to pick up more. Knowing what addition is and how to do it, you can then read a wide variety of things that use addition, thus knowing even more and being able to use that knowledge in a similar manner.⁵ And so, the growth in knowledge accelerates.⁶ This is why children who get started on something at a young age, as Mozart did, grow up to have such an advantage.

But there is another, more important motivator - interest.

And even if (highly implausibly) we were able to control the circumstances in which all children grew up so as to maximize their ability to perform the most important tasks, that still would not be enough, since in addition to aptitude there is also interest.

A quote in his notes, provides some clue on how to tackle such dilemmas - where you are good at one thing but would really like to do something else.

“when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t ‘good’ at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.”

Related The Definition of Work (originally titled “It is hard to find work you love”)

Worlds that Connect to our Words

I don’t find as much time to sit down and read a physical book. It is easy to read tweets and blogs and reddit posts. I am always there in front of the computer. It is not just a tool for working. It is also place to listen to podcasts, watch msnbc video clips of democratic primaries, catch some music and generally dream.

But I sat with the book again, and I feel compelled to get back to the machine and share a para.

A feature of the mind that we will repeatedly encounter in these pages is that even our most abstract concepts are understood in terms of concrete scenarios. That applies in full force to the subject matter of the book itself. In this introductory chapter, I will preview some of the books topics with vignettes from newspapers and the Internet that can be understood only through the lens of semantics. The come from each of the worlds that connect to our words - the worlds of thought, reality, community, emotions and social relations.

I would highly recommend starting with this video from TED

Presentation: How to Write Pythonic Code

The topic was interesting enough for me to investigate. But what I found in addition to a nice presentation was the way it was made.

In case anybody wonders how the slides were produced: I creatd them using rst2s5.py, a tool included in the docutils distribution that takes a reST source document and turns it into HTML suitable for the browser-based S5 slide show system. I also integrated Pygments to colorize the Python source code of the examples.

Link to the whole tool chain along with templates here.