i went to the heather gold show last night with sean and sean’s friend gordon from the internet archive. the show last night was on continuous partial attention, which is a term that seems to intuitively makes sense to anyone who has experienced it. heather had a variety of guests on to talk about CPA (although oddly, that abbreviation wasn’t used at any point in the evening), either about how this was a bad thing that should be stopped because it’s destroying our brains, or how it was an okay-to-good thing that was just part of our natural evolution as human beings. this is somewhat glib, but i’m going to go ahead and lump the invited guests into one group or the other here:

• CPA as bad thing: micki krimmel, doug pray
• CPA as good thing: derek powazek, lane becker
• CPA as other thing: justin hall, liz belile

i put myself in the ‘CPA as good thing’ camp, and I had the opportunity to go up on stage and sit with everyone and discuss my own experience with CPA for a few minutes. alot of the conversation focused on how our technology and our online lives takes time away from opportunities for self-reflection or just being with yourself. personally, i do most of my reflection in the shower, since the threat of electrocution generally provides me with a great opportunity to put down the laptop and just spend a few minutes with myself. the shower is where i think over whatever great puzzle is challenging me at the time, be it at school or work or in my personal life, and try to integrate the puzzle into the background of my daily thought pattern. and then, for the rest of the day, i subject myself to the noise of existence– random conversations, blog posts, chats, whatever, in a fierce attempt to find whatever idea or image changes my perspective from the problem into a solution. sometimes problems spend a few hours in the background, sometimes they become these persistent themes that last for weeks and weeks and get woven in with other problems.

my point in all of this is that doing CPA is a great thing for me– it’s not just that i have this need to constantly be aware of what is going on in the world (although i do), it’s that being exposed to all of these different ideas has become critical to my thinking process. it seems like every year my intellectual and professional life becomes more about insight and intuition and less about logical deduction and sequential processing, since so many of those tasks have been outsourced to the computers all around us. it’s like my ability to tie disparate ideas together has become how i differentiate myself from my tools.

(aside: i wrote this post over the course of several IM conversations, two phone calls, a face-to-my-face-looking-at-the-computer conversation, and three panel sessions, including about 75% of bruce sterling’s closing rant, which has been delightfully angry.)

books related to this post: of human bondage, the rise of the creative class

Labels: math, sxsw

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i’m hanging out right now in the platinum lounge at sxsw- it’s quiet and a great place to write a couple of things before i head over to wait in line for kathy sierra’s keynote. my first session of the morning was on turning your internal, fun projects into revenue generating businesses. this is my first sxsw, and i’ve been struck by two things so far– the oddly comforting feeling of being in a room full of people who are just like you, and the extent to which business and play mixes here. one of the guys asking questions during the session was from ebay, and he was responding to a comment by ted rheingold of dogster (which I really have to think about signing indy up for) about how affiliate marketing was not, in general, a good way to earn revenue for a site. the ebay guy was talking about how much success that the ebay affiliates had had with various kinds of auction programs and what not, and it was an interesting perspective– he didn’t come off like a shill for ebay, which he of course is, so maybe that’s a complement to how exceptionally good his shilling technique was.

the conversation also focused on selling, marketing, and building out a company, and i thought the most interesting comments were by the panelist who seemed most out of place– gabe rivera of techmeme. the techmeme family of sites is exceptionally cool and addictive, and gabe does it all by himself- all of the tech and all of the ‘business’ oriented stuff. i think that’s a large part of the appeal he has in the tech community- he makes something cool, and he does it in that idealized lone-gunman style that so many of us wish we could emulate– he serves as the counterexample to the annoying business folks who say we can’t do it without them– and geeks love counterexamples.

i think the one thing i would have liked to have heard gabe talk about is why he went with sponsorship for techmeme, instead of doing contextual advertising. i can think of my reasons– his site is really as much of a webapp as it is a content site, and since seo is hard for his site, i could see where good contextual advertising would be as well. the predictability of the sponsorship model must also be nice from a stability perspective- especially as he indicated that he went without salary for a year in order to get techmeme going. it might also just be that a sponsorship-oriented advertising model fits better for techmeme- so many geek bloggers have an obsession with getting a post on techmeme’s front page in as large a font as possible (an obsession i share, i’m not afraid to admit), that it’s become an important hub of buzz for all of us, and companies want to grab a piece of that mindshare on a regular basis and are willing to pay for it. the sponsorship seems to fit in best with what techmeme is all bout– and maybe that is really what the point of that talk was all about– doing a business built around something you would do for fun is a great way to figure out what you’re all about, and that’s the core thing we’re all after.

P.S.– I’m finishing this post up after hearing kathy sierra’s talk on usability, which was amazing and I’ll try to say more about later, but the one practical effect it’s had on me right now is i’m very conscientous of using contractions in my writing now, so as to sound as human-like as possible.

Labels: sxsw

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