Mindjet responds to resource useage issues

I've been aware for some time of concerns that some MindManager users have been voicing over issues which manifest as high consumption of CPU and RAM resource when using the product.

Mindjet have published an update today that illustrates they've been listening, working on the problem and now believe they have a structured way forward to attack some of the issues.

The route map consists of some specific changes that will be made to how MindManager utilises CPU and RAM resources coupled with some advice on using MindManager on a tablet.

Whilst MindJet make the point that they only have data on 80 users suffering with these problems out of a user base of over 800,000 I think the issue has (so far) been a model of how blogging can help companies listen to user issues and respond to them.

Tags: Mindjet, MindManager

State of the Blogosphere

Dave Sifry has published his quarterly State of the Blogosphere report. This is my view of the findings:

• Technorati is now tracking more than 57 million blogs (although only 55% are active)
• The blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days
• About 100,000 new weblogs are created each day
• About 1.3 million posting are made per day
• There is a strong correlation between frequency of posting and Technorati ranking.

Boy, is the blogosphere getting big. I'm glad I was among the "relatively" early adopters because my ranking, pathetic though it is, still puts me in the top 1% 0f active blogs. Cool. Is it cool to say cool these days?

Tags: Technorati, Blogs, Blogging

MediaFire free file hosting...

I'm trying out the free file hosting service at MediaFire, and I'm using it to share the mind map files that I talked about in my previous post.

Creating an account is as simple as providing your email address and picking a password.

Uploading couldn't be simpler and the service provides unlimited uploads / downloads and unlimited file sizes, for free (it's all ad supported). The upload progress page is quite spiffy:



and they make the process of sharing your file once uploaded as easy as can be...


I don't want to sound like the prophet of doom, but I've seen a number of these services come and then migrate to a pay service. Bottom line - I hope MediaFire manages to secure enough ad revenue to provide a basic free service in it's current form ad infinitum.

As it stands this is a great, no-nonsense, file hosting service.

Tags: MediaFire, file hosting

RSS Primers

I starred a post in Google Reader to come back to at a later date and blog about. It was something Steve Rubel wrote about the best primer on RSS that he's seen to date.

I must admit that I usually send people who ask me about RSS to the BBC primers either here or here.

I thought Wikipedia made heavy weather of it, even the section on "usage" (which is effectively the introduction) was a bit technical for the average reader; quickly descending into XML's, Atom's, and client sides.

I googled "RSS primer" and the number one hit also get's technical pretty quickly; less than a page in and we're looking at what an RSS file looks like.

Where do you send people for a good introduction to RSS?

Tags: RSS, RSS Primer, Steve Rubel

The fedaration against bullets (FAB)

For the past year or so I've been interested in my approach to producing presentations. Google Desktop Search tells me that Robert Scoble blogged about Beyond Bullets in March 2005, although I think the source of Robert's post was this post by Steve Rubel.

I mention this because I can't believe I haven't blogged about Beyond Bullets before now. I occasionally run across posts like this one, which makes a headline out of the hypothesis that bad PowerPoint is costing something like $250m dollars a day in wasted time whilst the fine print points out that the problem isn't the software, just the way that people use it. And there's any number of this type of post with a headline about the many ways to create better PowerPoint but when you get to the source you find it's good advice only if you're going to keep approaching presentations in the same old way.

Beyond Bullets was the first time that I'd come across a radically different approach to PowerPoint. Here is my short version of the book:

Bullet points are easy but they are an obstacle. They make the atmosphere formal and stiff. They tend to make people confused and unclear. They "dumb down" critical thinking. The alternative? Tell a story; (1) write a script to focus your ideas. (2) storyboard the script to clarify ideas and provide the foundation for the words and visuals (3) engage with your audience.

When I first read the book I mind mapped my learning. The mind maps I created with supporting files are available here. If you have trouble downloading drop me a mail at steve.newson@gmail.com and I'll email the file to you.

Cliff Atkinson, the author of Beyond Bullets, also writes the Beyond Bullets blog, although it's been silent since July, 2006. I hope Cliff will blog again in the future. If you're seriously interested in creating better presentations then I highly recommend the book.

UPDATE: Kathy Sierra who writes the awesome Creating Passionate Users blog has some great advice in this post about adding graphics to your blog, book or presentation.

Tags: Beyond Bullets, Robert Scoble, Powerpoint, Presentations, Mind Manager, Mind Mapping

Penguin goes shopping...

I promise I'm not trying to takeover from Cute Overload, but this is priceless...



Tags: Penguin, Cute

Zune has installation issues...

You have to feel for the guys at Microsoft sometimes. If catching up with the iPod wasn't hard enough already the first reports trickling out from pre-launch sales of the Zune suggest installation isn't going to be straightforward for everyone.



"Embrace and extend" may have been taken care of. Extinguishing the iPod is just going to take a bit longer.

Tags: Microsoft, Zune, iPod

I'm not usually this lucky but...

If it wasn't already obvious to regular readers of this site I'm a big fan of MindManager from Mindjet. I've had access to the application for the past couple of years through my former employer, but have been unable to use my maps for the last several weeks since starting my new job. If I'm honest I haven't had time to miss it properly as I've been so busy settling in to my new role.

A couple of weeks ago one of the GTD blogs that I subscribe to - What's the Next Action - reviewed MindManager and announced a competition with five MindManager Pro 6 licences as prizes. The prizes would go to the finest, most original, thoughtprovoking or best-coloured mindmaps on any topic of choice. So I submitted one of my maps and thought nothing more about it.

So I was hugely pleased to read that I was one of the winners.

The map that I submitted was the one I made of my CV (resume). The judging panel called it innovative and original. Scott Herrick commented on the results on his BizBlog and thought the map was cool. High praise indeed.

As Scott pointed out I wrote about the creation of the map in this post.

I'm so glad to have MindManager back in my toolkit.

Tags: Mindjet, MindManager, Mind Mapping, mindmapping, GTD

Launching a takeover...

Ok, so I have the front end:



... now I just need a spider, an indexed database, a few servers, some power and the big G better watch out!

Something tells me Sergey and Larry don't have much to worry about for a while.

Follow the link to create your own customised Google homepage (at least until the takedown notice arrives).

[Link]

Tags: Google, Joke

My link blog...

You know me by now, any chance for a gratuitous picture of a panda and I'm you're man.


This picture was taken at the WoLong Panda Center in China by ynts060701

It's also from one of the first posts on my link blog which you can find here, or you can subscribe here.

Tags: Panda, Pandas, Google Reader

When I'm 65...

Speaking of motivational quotes here's one from the great George Burns:

"Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples."

I hope I feel the same when I get there.

Tags: Motivation

I feel the need, the need for speed

I've read some of the commentary about Marissa Meyer's speech at the Web 2.0 Conference in which she offered some insight into what Google have learned about speed, the user experience, and user satisfaction.

The lesson, Marissa said, is that speed matters. People do not like to wait. Do not make them.

I hope the Google Reader team were listening. For various reasons I've recently moved from Newsgator to Google Reader as my aggregator and I have to say that for the most part the experience has been excellent.

Things I like:

(1) Starred Items - I can mark an item as starred to come back later and blog about it. This means I can keep the reading process and writing process separate when I want to.

(2) Shared Items - makes it easy to share blog posts with my wife, so I don't have to keep emailing her either the post or a link to the post. She can subscribe to my shared item feed so I don't have to say "Honey, did you see that post about...." anymore. Robert Scoble took this feature one step further and turned this functionality into his link blog, simply by advertising the page / feed details. There are some problems with layout on the page view, but the feed works perfectly well.

(3) River of News - I never really got the argument about a "river of news" until I started to use the "All items" view in Reader. I show only the new items in the expanded view and use the Next / Previous buttons to advance through my unread posts as a river of news. I don't usually use keyboard shortcuts as a rule and I know that I could use the j / k keys for Next / Previous movement, for some reason I personally prefer the Next / Previous buttons. Each item I land on is automatically marked as read. I can "star" or "share" as I go. I can also email or tag items but I don't use the email feature often and haven't used the tagging feature at all. I don't have to use the river of news view and when I want to, I can zero in on feeds that I'm interested in at a particular point in time. What I have noticed though is that I do get through the reading process faster than I did using folders in Outlook. I haven't changed the number of feeds I'm reading so unless everyone is suddenly writing a whole lot less than before the river of news approach is definitely speeding up how fast I can get through my reading.

What is less good is the time it takes to load items into the view. As I move through my river of news it appears that the reader loads twenty items at a time but it seems not to load the next 20 until you get to the bottom of the current twenty, so I'm continually waiting while the reader is "loading next 20 items".

To be fair Google Reader is still a beta product and they're probably still working on improvements. As Marissa has pointed out though, speed matters.

Tags: Google Reader, Newsgator, Robert Scoble

Motivation

According to the blurb on the website, the Quotations Page is the oldest quotation site on the Web, established in 1994. They have over 25,200 quotations online from over 3,000 authors, and more are added daily.

The quotes are broken down into categories, one of the categories is called "Motivational Quotes". It's possible to subscribe to a feed from this category that sends your reader four quotes per day.

Two recent quotes were particularly relevant to my ongoing fascination with Getting Things Done, so I thought I would share them:

"Life is too complicated not to be orderly." (Martha Stewart)

"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials." (Lin Yutang)

These are the sort of quotes I like to use as an email tagline, although my favourite tagline has always been a project management line:

"Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine."

Tags: Motivation, GTD, Getting Things Done

FogBugz as a Help Desk application

I've mentioned recently that I'm a fan of the work of Joel Spolsky.

At my last place of employment I implemented Fogbugz to replace the defect tracking and enhancement management tool we were using at the time and I found that it made light work of that task with the added bonus of an impressive reduction in costs. I was particularly impressed by how uncomplicated it made everything compared with what Joel would consider "high ceremony" equivalent bug tracking tools. I found it to be software that epitomised the whole "less is sometimes more" ethos.

Reading Joel's blog this morning I picked up today on a great article by Kiere on using Fogbugz as a Help Desk application. The back story is that Kiere was looking for a Help Desk system but due to budget constraints (we all know about those, right!) decided to take a look at how he was using Fogbugz and for the investment of a bit of thought and with a few tweaks here and there he's got a functional help desk ticket system together with a knowledge base. Very cool stuff.

It makes you wonder how often software purchasing decisons are made on the strength of "I need one of those" rather than thinking about leveraging exisiting tools first, which is an obvious question to which part of the answer is that you need smart people who can make the intellectual leap which identifies the possibilty in the first place.

Knowing that Joel has read Kiere's article I also wonder if he's planning on a few changes in the next version of FogBugz to make operating the software as a Help Desk tool a more obvious component of the marketed functionality.

Tags: Joel Spolsky, FogBugz

What do you mean I didn't win...

This was just too funny to pass up. Keep your eyes on Faith Hill's reaction to NOT winning the female vocalist of the year gong at the recent Country Music Awards show.



There has been some suggestions that Faith was only joking but I'd have to agree with those who think that's a last ditch attempt at damage control.

I'm sort of reminded of one of Colin Powell's lessons:

"Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it."

I'm also a closet Carrie Underwood fan.

Tags: Faith Hill, Carrie Underwood, Viral Video, Humor

The hiring decison...

One of the smartest guys I know is Joel Spolsky, and I say that even though I know him only through what he writes on his blog.

He's just posted some really interesting views about interviewing, set in the context of hiring a programmer. I particularly enjoyed his perspective on the hiring decision…

If, at the end of the interview, you’ve convinced yourself that this person is smart and gets things done, and four or five other interviewers agree, you probably won’t go wrong in hiring them. But if you have any doubts, you’re better off waiting for someone better.

The optimal time to make a decision about the candidate is about three minutes after the end of the interview. Far too many companies allow interviewers to wait days or weeks before turning in their feedback. Unfortunately, the more time that passes, the less you’ll remember.

If you’re having trouble deciding, there’s a very simple solution. NO HIRE. Just don’t hire people that you aren’t sure about. This is a little nerve wracking the first few times—what if we never find someone good? That’s OK. If your resume and phone-screening process is working, you’ll probably have about 20% hires in the live interview. And when you find the smart, gets-things-done candidate, you’ll know it. If you’re not thrilled with someone, move on.

I'm not sure if Joel has read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell but this is what Gladwell would call rapid cognition, that moment when you know something without knowing why.

Gladwell makes some important points about unconscious bias that can creep into the hiring process. The example I remember best from the book is about height. It's possibly no surprise to learn that overwhelmingly the CEO's of big companies in the US are white males. What Gladwell discovered was they were also overwhelmingly tall. Whilst it's possible for companies to argue that the small percentages of women and minorities within the management ranks is simply reflected into the executive ranks; the same argument doesn't seem plausible when applied to height.

Gladwell argues that this is an unconscious bias; that there is a stereotype of what a leader is supposed to look like which is so powerful that when someone fits we become blind to other considerations. I wonder what a stereotypical programmer looks like.

Tags: Joel Spolsky, Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

Getting the world to switch to XML didn't work?

Tim Berners-Lee is a British national treasure. He is the de facto inventor of the World Wide Web. If I've understood (correctly) the research I've done this morning the creation of hypertext is generally credited to Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart. Tim linked the idea of hypertext to the DNS and TCP protocols of the internet as he developed and designed the HTML language and - ta-da! — the World Wide Web was born. [DNS is about how computers find each other and TCP is about how computers exchange data with each other]. Tim built the first web browser, editor and web server. He created the first listing of other websites (which I guess is the forerunner of Yahoo).

Today Tim is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C) and you've probably guessed by now that he has a blog; on which I read this morning that something is up in the world of HTML standards. The first thing I hadn't realised was that the underlying specification for HTML hasn't changed since Xmas Day 1999, and Tim goes on to talk about setting up a new group to move the HTML specification on in small steps in the direction of a well-formed language, without explicitly stating that the destination is XML.

I thought this was the killer quote in what Tim said:

Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world.

I wonder what the blogosphere will say today about how well the switch to XML has worked. I'll be monitoring the conversation on Techmeme.

Tags: HTML, XML, W3C

One of the best panda photo's I've ever seen...

This is Hua Mei in a photo taken at the San Diego Zoo



Picture originally uploaded by muzkid.

I found this via Pandafix.

Tags: panda, Hua Mei

Scrybe, maybe not

Yesterday marked four weeks in my new job. I spent today getting organised, which was mainly about getting back into the GTD habit. So when I took a break to catch up with my blog reading I was immediately drawn to a post by Robert Scoble directing me towards the latest tool for getting organised: Scrybe. The blogosphere is eagerly anticipating the launch.

The registration page describes Scrybe as "a groundbreaking online organizer that caters to today´s lifestyle in a cohesive and intuitive way. Simple solutions for some age old problems."

I signed up for the beta and watched a video of some impressive ajax trickery. What stood out for me, from watching the video, was the way you can get Hipster PDA style functionality out of the product via the papersync feature. I liked that a lot.

However I don't see this as a product that is in danger of replacing my Outlook / NetCentrics GTD add-in combo anytime soon. The lack of an email client, or integration with an email client, means there is no seamless way of moving projects / tasks / next actions from email to the to-do lists. Email is my primary source of next actions, so seamless integration is critical to my organisational process. To-do lists are integrated with the calendar, so I couldn't see easily how you’d operate lists for different contexts (@Home @Office etc) within Scrybe.

At the end of the day a whizzy interface isn't a substitute for process. The GTD process has become an integral part of my day to day approach to being organised, although circumstances sometimes force me off the path, temporarily. The achievement of stress free productivity will always remain more important to me than how flashy the toolset is.

UPDATE 1: I've updated this post to add a link to the YouTube video which is well worth a look, even if it's for no other reason than to see a really classy example of a pre-launch video covering an overview of the product and some of it's distinctive features. As Michael Arrington points out this approach helps the company control the message in the phase before the product is launched.

UPDATE 2: Mathew Ingram shares the sentiment that salivating over the product before it's released and we get to try it out for ourselves is a bit premature.

UPDATE 3: Although Technorati seems to have indexed my post it seems to have missed indexing my tags. So the third reason for this update is to see if updating my post will get Tecnorati to pick up on what it seems to have missed earlier. If not I might get lucky and the blogosphere's most responsive CEO, Dave Sifry, might pick this up and help me out (again).

Tags: Scrybe, GTD, Getting Things Done, Personal Productivity, Robert Scoble, Dave Sifry, Technorati

Scott Adams, triple Nobel laureate?

Scott Adams, the cartoonist creator of Dilbert, might, according to some informed financial sources, be in the running for the Nobel prize in Economics for his Unified Theory of Everything Financial. Today he's staked his claim for the Peace prize.

I don't know what he's thinking, surely he's on the shortlist for the Literature prize. Or does he secretly think a hat-trick is on the cards?

He's a funny guy and I love the way his mind works as reflected in both the Dilbert comics and on his personal blog. I think the USA should regard him as a National Treasure.

Tags: Dilbert, Scott Adams, Nobel Prize