SAST Wingees

More on Story Telling

Story telling has caught the IEEE’s fancy as well. Bob Colwell writes an interesting column in the IEEE Computer magazine (this column is available free online). In the most recent issue, he has talked about Story Telling. He has a pointer to another interesting book, which I have added to my to-do list. (Jerry Weissman’s book – Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Prentice-Hall 2003).

Could the Katrina disaster have been averted?

An article (link below) by Mark Fischetti in the October 2001 issue of Scientific American talks about the Coast 2050 project, which would have prevented this disaster if it had been funded and executed. Very very sad. (Via NYTimes, Scripting News).  The ever-amazing Wikipedia has some excellent coverage including the link to the Scientfic American article.

Scientific American: Drowning New Orleans [ CIVIL ENGINEERING ]
A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city

Unsung Blogger of the WeeK #1

As many have been doing, I have also been thinking about how the blogosphere can improve the discovery of new blogs. David Sifry says there are over 14.2 Million Blogs.  Even if we consider only the blogs that are updated weekly, it is around 1.84 Million Blogs.
If you only look at the Top 100/500.. lists it is obvious that most of the blogosphere is “Invisible” (the term  “Dark Blog” is being used for blogs that are password-protected). I have decided to start this new series to take on this problem of uncovering more of the Invisible Blogosphere.  In my humble opinion, if each one of us does this, we may uncover a few more interesting ones. As the first one in this series, I would like to highlight the accomplishments of Joe Kissell of  Interesting Thing of The Day. He is not exactly unsung, because he recently made it into the Feedster Top 500 but his accomplishments are  somewhat unsung, I think. I have been a huge  fan of Joe, ever since I  stumbled upon his site almost 12 months ago.  He made a commitment to write 1 article every day since June 2004, and after passing through some testing times, he managed to meet his commitment. Yes,  Peter Rojas, Om Malik and other Uber Bloggers write a lot of posts but the range of topics and the research that goes into every one of Joe’s articles is staggering . He is currently taking a vacation from Interesting Thing of the Day and I sincerely hope that he resumes. Here is a short interview with Joe that I conducted over email (lots of things to learn here):
1. What motivates you to keep writing almost every day?
Well, I should mention that the site is currently on a summer vacation of sorts, so the articles showing at the moment are repeats from last year. However, I did post articles every day for a solid year, and will return to regular (if  not quite daily) posting Real Soon Now (sic). To be perfectly honest, the only thing that kept me posting such long articles daily for that period of time was the fact that I’d made a public commitment to do so (and, of course, that those people who paid for a subscription expected to get their money’s worth). I wish I could say it’s because the site was paying me a decent salary, but until recently the income has been trivial. I also wish I could say it’s the deep sense of satisfaction I get from the writing process itself, but that’s true only on a rare occasion. But even without money or warm fuzzy feelings, the one thing that spurs me to keep going –and to keep making the site better–is the huge number of messages I receive from people who like what they read on my site. It’s no exaggeration to say that a single compliment can keep me going for days. 2. How do you identify such varied topics? Is there any secrets you can share?
I travel as much as I can, and many of my ideas come from the places I visit. And I read a lot–on dead trees as well as online. Lots of suggestions for topics come from my readers. But probably the biggest source of ideas is sitting around brainstorming with my wife, who is very smart and creative. 3. What methods do you employ to overcome the “Blogger’s Block”?
You know, it’s funny. I’m seldom at a loss for topics on Interesting Thing of the Day, but on my personal blog (I Am Joe’s Blog,jk.alt.cc), that happens all the time. It’s usually because I’m trying to come up with something extremely unusual, exciting, or interesting–and those things just don’t always appear. But if I lower my standards a bit (as it were) and just talk about whatever’s on my mind, even if it’s fairly mundane, I often find that turns into some of the most popular material. In any case, once I’ve chosen a topic and get a few sentences written, I almost never get stalled. (If I do, I go for a walk. That solves everything.) 4. What are your Top 5 Unsung Blogs ? (please include only those that are not in any Top 100/500 lists).
Disclaimer: I don’t read very many blogs, and most of the ones I do read are in the top 100 or so on everyone’s list. However, I do like these:
i. But She’s a Girl
ii. Jeff Carlson (.Thought)
iii. Kirkville
iv. Darren Barefoot
v. Going Postal 3000 5. What are your current book recommendations ? (1 or 2 is sufficient).
Right now I’m reading (and enjoying) How Proust Can Change
Your Life by Alain de Botton, and The
Secret Life of the Seine by Mort Rosenblum 

Google desktop’s sidebar may hamper your productivity

As Sibu has observed, this is not a good move. I installed the Google Desktop 2.0 (GD) including the sidebar. As Brad Hill says, it takes up a lot of real estate (yes, i am aware of the auto-hide feature).  More importantly, when it is on, photos from your hard disk appear, news articles appear and whatever else happens depending on the plug-ins. As I pointed out earlier about My Yahoo, these sort of interrupts affect your productivity. It will really help if Nikhil Bhatla, GD Product Manager, read this brilliant article in the IEEE Software Magazine about the impact of interrupts on your productivity (Via Interruptions.net, an organization focused on the positive and negative effects of interrupts).

P.S. I love the Google Desktop search index for your desktop. It is a phenomenal tool. More on this later.  

Visuals to support your story-tellling

The group of managers, that I mentor, completed their story-telling exercise successfully. Some of the stories blew away my expectations. But looking back, we realized that the visuals that we used in the supporting powerpoint deck were not that good. The group’s next exercise is  to narrate a story with a supporting powerpoint that has good visuals. As i was pontificating on this subject, one of the managers brought up the point that heavy usage of visuals causes her to switch off. That point intrigued me – what is the right amount of visuals to use in your presentation ?  I turned to the blogosphere for advice and landed on Cliff Atkinson’s blog that deals with presentation techniques. He mentions, in his insightful post titled “Shocked by Complexity“, about a term called “map shock” – coined by Dr. Don Dansereau. Make sure you read Cliff’s excellent interview with Don linked from the above post. Cliff has also posted an interesting article on Story-telling  with several good links. He wants to call it Story Making, which I liked a lot as well. Finally, Sibu recommends these books by Edward Tufte, considered to be one of the leading experts on visualization.

   1. Visual Explanations    
   2. Visual Display of Quantitative Information   
   3. Related amazon recommendation