To reclaim productivity lost to responding to e-mail, an I.B.M. employee shifted his means of communication to other tools.

I like the idea here. It’s not for everybody, but clearly something has to give. Too many of us spend too much time toiling on email — we aren’t controlling our own schedules or task lists, as we’ve let ourselves be sucked into a Faustian bargain that seems hopeless.

It’s not going to be easy (if it were, we’d all have freed ourselves from email’s tyranny, wouldn’t we?). But if we don’t try new ways to break free, we never will break email’s grip. Try something different!
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Lore Sjöberg is hilarious. I’ve listened to his Alt Text podcasts for Wired for years (his dry delivery style makes the audio performances even better than reading his commentaries). In fact, with George Carlin’s passing on my mind, it strikes me that Sjöberg is something like the George Carlin of geek technology. This commentary isn’t his very best, but it’s a good sample of the way he skewers traditionally accepted ideas.

Humans have been attempting to send messages to the stars since … I’m going to say the early ’70s. I mean, theoretically some caveman could have yelled, “Hey! Stars! You suck!” a hundred thousand years ago, but he was an idiot. But of all the messages sent into space, which ones are good? Which ones conform to quality standards? That’s what I’m here to tell you.

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Years went by without pictures. It became too hard to be the family archivist in an age of ever-changing technology, especially for someone like me who fears any gadget more complicated than a cocktail shaker. Every time I tried, a battery died or a memory card went missing or I pushed the wrong button or accidentally taped over someone’s piano recital.

I liked this comment after her oldest daughter complains because there is only one viewable family video left: “She got good at guilt at college,” Slatalla observes. And she demonstrates how technology challenged she is in this exchange:

“Look how young your father looks,” I said. Clementine picked up the Mino, examined it briefly and said, “That’s because you forgot to peel the plastic off the lens.”

It’s a fun article and a quick read.

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Social etiquette requires you to make some small talk, inquire about your colleague’s interests, etc. In other words, in person (and on the phone) we should — rightly — interact with peers in a friendly, personal way, because that’s the right way to act. But that’s not terribly efficient, and if you can get the info you need, instead, through a 30-second instant message chat and then get back to work with a quick, “thx so much, ttyl” then I can see why it has been found to be less intrusive.

Employers seeking to decrease interruptions may want to have their workers use instant messaging software. Research shows that when IMs are used as a substitute for other, more disruptive forms of communication such as phone, email, and face-to-face conversations, they lead to more conversations on the computer, but briefer & more productive ones.

And it is respectful to IM someone to say, “got a minute?” because that gives them a much easier “out” if they really don’t want to be interrupted. Instead of feeling they are being rude by telling you on the phone, “hey, could you call back later?” they can accept your gracious inquiry by saying, “can you call me at 1?”

IM certainly does have a place in business. But there’s more work to be done to define just what that place is.

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Roger Cohen’s NYT column, “The Obama Connection,” starts off with a play on Bill Clinton’s famous line from his first presidential campaign (“It’s the economy, stupid”): “It’s the networks, stupid.” Ironically, it’s Bill’s wife and heir-apparent, Hillary, who is implicitly the “stupid” one this time.

More than any other factor, it has been Barack Obama’s grasp of the central place of Internet-driven social networking that has propelled his campaign for the Democratic nomination into a seemingly unassailable lead over Hillary Clinton. Her campaign has been so 20th-century. His has been of the century we’re in.

I’d already been following Obama’s use of the Internet for fund-raising and organizing and energizing volunteers (see, Adios, Sound Bites & Fat Cats – Obama is Changing Politics and Barack Obama Is Rocking the Youth Vote and Obama Supporters Are Hip and Artistic and Home Agents Calling for Barack Obama). Cohen’s column nicely connects the dots and lets the picture emerge more clearly.

As Joshua Green chronicles in an important piece in The Atlantic, Obama has used social networking and his user-friendly Web site to develop the money machine, and the youthful engagement, that has swept him forward.

So, I found Green’s article, “The Amazing Money Machine,” and read that, too. It’s longer and more in-depth, so if you just want the highlights, Cohen’s column will do the trick, but if you want the full, fascinating story behind Obama’s fund-raising success, don’t miss Green’s account:

Obama is a gifted politician by anyone’s measure, but what distinguishes him from earlier insurgents is his ability to fully harness the excitement that his candidacy has created, in votes and in dollars. Three forces had to come together for this to happen: the effect of campaign-finance laws in broadening the number and types of people who fund the political process; the emergence of Northern California as one of the biggest sources of Democratic money; and the recognition by a few Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that the technology and business practices they had developed in their day jobs could have a transformative effect on national politics.

Obama’s campaign is yet another Silicon Valley start-up. We’ve seen these stories play out before, but never on the political stage.

“They’ve gone from zero to 700 employees in a year and raised $200 million,” Steve Spinner says of the campaign. “That’s a super-high-growth, fast-charging operation.” It’s also one whose growth curve is coming into sharper focus. The Obama campaign has not yet assumed a place in Silicon Valley lore alongside Apple, Google, and Facebook. But a few more months could change that. The hottest start-up in the Valley right now won’t make anybody rich, but it might put the next president in the White House.

If you’re as fascinated by the rapidly changing potential of technology as I am, and as hooked on politics as I admit to being, this is an inspiring story.

Learn all about it in a great post by David Szetela, at Search Engine Watch. He’s got great tips on using Google Adwords in his blog’s archives, too, so take a look through them.

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Eventually, someone will come up with software that greatly eases the burden of managing a high volume of e-mail. But in the meantime, we perhaps should look to the past and see what tips we might draw from prolific letter writers in the pre-electronic era who handled ridiculously large volumes of correspondence without being crushed.

I found one of the suggestions quite amusing, yet at the same time so obvious: “a secretary.” I recall when every manager where I worked had an administrative assistant. And I watched as the number of those positions dwindled and more and more managers took on responsibility for their own correspondence. Now, here we are years later and maybe the most obvious solution really is to hire more secretaries.

This was the solution Thomas Edison used in pre-electronic times to handle a mismatch between 100,000-plus unsolicited letters and a single human addressee. Not all correspondents would receive a reply — a number were filed in what Edison called his “nut file.” But most did get a written letter from Edison’s office, prepared by men who were full-time secretaries.

I’d take a secretary in a heartbeat! But I don’t think that’s going to be forthcoming any time soon. But I have taken one step that has helped a bit. I turned off the “ding” notification for my work email, so I am not constantly interrupted by the arrival of another missive. That’s in line with this suggestion:

Today’s advice from time-management specialists, to keep our e-mail software off, except for twice-a-day checks, replicates the cadence of twice-a-day postal deliveries in Mencken’s time.

Sounds like a good idea. I think I’ll try it.
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No longer is it just a TV advertisement, a radio ad or a full-page ad in the local city newspaper that is influencing the youth vote. Heck, it’s not even MTV that is affecting the youth vote anymore. It is the world of social media that is having the greatest effect on energizing that youth vote.

It’s a good case study of how to market effectively using social networking sites — and how not to, in the case of Clinton’s campaign.

I’ve been watching both of these candidates closely, especially what they are doing in the online arena, and I have to say that Barack Obama’s team is much more “on their game” when it comes to this medium. Our voter registration offices here in PA have been buzzing about the record number of younger registrants. By watching both candidates closely and examining what they are doing in the online space, you can begin to understand why one is totally captivating the youth vote, and the other is not.

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Alaska Airlines introduces a surprisingly pleasant virtual assistant on its Web site.

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