There's a saying, technology changes, people don't. Yet, when we consider the impact of technology on our daily lives, some very interesting observations surface

A pen now feels awkward to hold and as such, our penmanship is deteriorating.

It's now common to sit at a dinner table with family and friends where some are actively communicating with others, listening to music or gaming via mobile devices.

We are redefining the perception, boundaries and thresholds for privacy as we once knew it.

The future of the art of long form writing is at risk of becoming shrtr and less formal #forrealz.

For some, technology encourages immersion and introverted experiences in public settings, reducing the natural human dynamics of engagement. To counter, coffee shops and cafes are becoming laptop and WIFI free.

For others, social networking online is converting introverts into digital extroverts, rewarding participation with confidence boosting actions such as responses, likes, friend requests, shares, etc.

To connect with other human beings now in the future is not only changing, it's evoking a sense of Digital Darwinism. The mantra of Engage or Die! was born to make the point that what was, what is, and what will be are no longer linked to all we know and instead, demand an expanded perspective.

Social networking is pervading led by the clicking, connecting, and sharing of hundreds of millions of Internet denizens around the world. While Facebook is the digital equivalent to your online residence, Twitter is reflective of the me in social media. Twitter is not a social network, it is a series of disparately connected personalities linked through friendship, admiration, education, and context. How we embrace and invest our persona in this paradigm says more about the future of digital culture and ourselves than we might imagine.

With the introduction of Apple's new pseudo social network Ping, conversations lit up Twitter ultimately sparking a trending topic, we don't need another social network. Indeed, there is a prevailing sense of social media fatigue (aka social network fatigue (SNF). But as good friend Sarah Lacy recently said, If You've Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG.

At a recent Girls in Tech event hosted at KickLabs in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams inferred that Twitter is actually a cure for information overload. Williams likens Twitter to a recipient-driven medium where people who have something to say can now find and reach the right audience, That's a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better in a world of infinite information.

@Ev also discussed the future of relevance and how Tweets will adapt to your interests. He compared the experience to Google, Google is very good at I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer. Twitter is more I'm interested in many things, I don't know what I need to know.' What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don't have to pay attention to everything, but you don't miss the stuff you care about.

The State of the Evolving Egosystem

Over the years, measuring the impact of Twitter as a medium, proved difficult and elusive as details and numbers did not emanate from Twitter itself. Third-parties using APIs helped us paint the landscape to visualize the tremendous proliferation of what started as a microblog and later evolved into an intricate system for sharing, discovering, and voicing our inner monologue. To help, Williams posted details, stats, and direction to the Twitter blog. As a result, some very interesting usage patterns and adoption rates were revealed.

First, Twitter boasts over 145 million registered users. In April at its inaugural Chirp conference, Twitter announced 105 million users tweeting upwards of 65 million times a day. The number of active accounts however, remains unknown. As Twitter better explains its mission, purpose, and value system to everyday consumers, the number will only continue to grow.

Evan Williams also shared a glimpse of the Twitter ecosystem and how individuals connect to one another. If the Web is Dead Twitter users have yet to hear the news. Twitter.com and m.twitter.com account for 92% of all access and communication.

Social Science Will Reveal the Future of Social Networkings

I believe that in order to truly understand technology, the internet, social media and its impact on society, business, and culture, social science becomes paramount.

Social science is the study of human society and social relationships and its role in the evolution of Twitter, social networking and the future of online societies is paramount. While we focus on the future, we must also look at the past and the present to find meaning, purpose, and insight to steer progress. This rapid evolution requires study in order to navigate change and define a course of action and the passage ways to what lies ahead.

As technology and the internet affect human behavior and culture, understanding how we got here will help us affect where we are going. The future of communication, relationships, and education is in your handsand your status updates, tweets, likes and connections.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Facebook
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Twitter CEO Ev Williams posted a blog entry Thursday with an update on the microblogging service's usage, which continues to grow sharply. More interesting than the numbers, though, was the message written between the lines: Twitter now has 145 million monthly users, and for the marketers who want to reach them, Twitter is the only way to go.

The numbers don't lie. Third-party developers, who played a large role in Twitter's early growth and buzz, just don't matter.

The passive-aggressive blog post is a Silicon Valley art form, and Williams, who helped push blogging into the mainstream with his earlier startup, Blogger, is surely a master of the medium. A chart Williams includes tells the story: After Twitter introduced its own iPhone and BlackBerry apps, on top of its own website, SMS, and mobile Web versions, it now controls the top five most popular ways people access Twitter. No third-party app amounts to more than 4 percent of Twitter's audience and the most popular of those is TwitPic, a photo-sharing service.

You'll also note that third-party clients continue to play an important role for many people, Williams writes in the most anodyne of tones. He gives a nod to services like TweetDeck, which power-user social-media marketers adore for pumping out their endless messages to followers. And 300,000 apps connect to Twitter using a technology called OAuth, which allows them to broadcast messages through the service. Foursquare, the fast-growing location-based check-in service, is a notable example; users can announce to their friends on Twitter when they arrive at a venue.

But those followers, by and large, are getting those messages on Twitter.com, which is used by 78 percent of Twitter's audience. One in seven are going to Twitter's own mobile website. And Twitter's text-messaging service still reaches a bigger audience than users of Twitter's iPhone or BlackBerry apps.

The real question is who Williams wrote this blog post for.

One possible audience: Twitter's developers, who continue to be restive after Twitter moved to buy the leading iPhone app, Tweetie, and announced its intentions to take over key functions currently provided by third parties, like TweetMeme's button for publishers to share stories on Twitter, now rendered outmoded by an official Twitter sharing button. By sharing these statistics, Williams effectively puts them in their place, reminding them that while they may still have their uses, they don't drive Twitter's value anymore. Twitter's a casino, and while a few developers may make money, the house always wins.

The other audience: Would-be acquirers. Google Friend Connect, a technology used by the search giant to link its properties to other Web services is mentioned as a third-party app. But it only counts for 2 percent of Twitter's audience. If Google wants to get Twitter's juice, in other words, they can't just hook up to its servers. They've got to get serious.

There's no reason to believe Google and Twitter have renewed acquisition talks, as PaidContent founder Rafat Ali suggested yesterday on Twitter, naturally.

But Google desperately wants to counter Facebook in social media. Twitter's the only player with a meaningful social network anywhere near Facebook's scale. If Google's long-rumored Google Me social product doesn't pan out, if its shopping spree of social acquisitions doesn't coalesce into a coherent strategy, will buying Twitter be its Plan B?

Williams, who sold his Blogger to Google, surely knows how this game is played. Consider his post just another smart move.

[Photo: Joi Ito]

Tags: acquisitions, passive-aggressive blog posts, Social Media, social sharing

Companies: Google, Twitter

People: Ev Williams

Shared by Jesse Stay
I wish they'd go with the number their competitors are going with - number of active users. Just stating # of registered users is an unfair comparison (unless they really want Facebook to start touting the number of registered users on their system). My own estimates show only about 30% of Twitter's numbers are active, based on a sample of 5-10 million users I have cached.

Mobile use of Twitter has climbed by more than 60 percent since April, when the company introduced its official iPhone client, Twitter CEO Ev Williams said in a status update posted to the company's blog. The Twitter founder also said that the microblogging service has 145 million registered users, up almost 40 percent from the number it had four months ago.

Williams said that 16 percent of all new users to Twitter start using the service via a mobile device now, compared with five percent before the first official mobile client arrived in April with the purchase of Tweetie which was renamed Twitter for iPhone (the company now has official clients for BlackBerry and Android as well). Almost half of all users access the service via a mobile device regularly, Williams says, and the Twitter CEO argues that the decision to develop and/or buy official Twitter clients played a big part in this growth:

We did iPhone user tests and confirmed that even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called Twitter. This kept them from using Twitter at all.

What's interesting is that based on the statistics provided by the Twitter founder in his post, almost as many people use the Twitter mobile website as use the iPhone or the BlackBerry apps put together. This could be because new users of the service prefer the website when they are just starting to get a feel for Twitter, and then develop a need for dedicated apps once they become more frequent users.

Twitter's purchase of Tweetie was controversial at the time, because the company was seen by some as targeting third-party developers and applications or hole-fillers, as they came to be called after a post by Union Square Ventures partner and Twitter backer Fred Wilson. Some of those tensions were smoothed over at the company's Chirp conference for developers in April, where Twitter made a point of reaching out to the third-party app community. The company has also worked with app developers to implement the recent switchover to using OAuth as authentication for the service.

Twitter recently launched a new app for the iPad the first app that the company has built from the ground up which Liz wrote about and James reviewed.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

The App Developer's Guide to Choosing a Mobile Platform

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Spencer E. Holtaway

At its core, Twitter is a recipient-driven medium, said CEO Evan Williams in a public conversation tonight in San Francisco, Calif. What does that mean? Williams, an unusually theoretical CEO, is happy to explain. He spoke at a high level about the ideas that drive his company (which is now up to 145 million users). Williams contended that the medium of Twitter is (gasp!) actually well-suited to handle information overload.

Williams, on stage at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabs, compared Twitter to email, where information overload can be incapacitating. The problem with email is that it's sender-driven, and sender-driven media doesn't scale, he said. On the one hand, the recipient hates email for being spammy because the sender is motivated to send as much stuff as possible because it's free. On the other hand, the sender may be dissatisfied because she's not reaching the right audience for whom she may not even have email addresses.

Blogging (Williams was previously the founder of Blogger) and Tweeting can be different (and better) than email, he said, because people who have something to say can find their audience. That's a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better in a world of infinite information, he said.

That's also a contrast to Google, said Williams, which serves more purpose-driven needs versus Twitter's focus on an interest-based world.

Google is very good at I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer, he said. Twitter is more I'm interested in many things, I don't know what I need to know.' Where Google is more likely to be gamed by a company like Demand Media, Twitter is a different beast.

However, there's still the problem of filtering information on Twitter. What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don't have to pay attention to everything, but you don't miss the stuff you care about, Williams said. He said more such products were on the way.

Williams cited Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said recently that more information is now produced in two days than was in all of time before 2003. Williams said automated streams of information from services like Fitbit and Blippy in addition to the proliferation of media will only add to that problem.

Williams also said to expect forthcoming products that would help filter relevant tweets around events, similar to what it's doing with location. This would go beyond the user-developed convention of hashtags, he said, though he didn't elaborate.

FitBit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related research from GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

Report: The Internet of Things: Anywhere, Anytime, Anything

Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Twitter CEO Ev Williams wrote just now on the company blog that mobile usage of the site is up 62% since in just over four months, and 16% of all new Twitter users are starting out on mobile devices as opposed to web signups (this number is up from just 5% earlier this year).

In the days before Twitter started issuing official apps on a platform-by-platform basis, the company wasn't seeing the kind of mobile adoption it had hoped for. Williams wrote, Even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called Twitter.' This kept them from using Twitter at all.

The company adopted a new strategy for mobile; rather than leaving all the mobile app development to third parties, Twitter decided to consolidate efforts. In the short term, this caused some consternation for third-party devs; however, looking at Twitter's stats, it's clear the company did the right thing for its shareholders and bottom line.

Twitter acquired Tweetie in May this year; this was our first indication that Twitter would be creating and distributing its own mobile apps for a change. Tweetie was revamped and renamed Twitter for iPhone in May. A BlackBerry app was released in April, and the company's official Android Twitter app was released later the same month.

Twitter is also seeing strong growth in its mobile site and SMS service, and Williams notes that third-party apps such as TweetDeck continue to be valuable and important parts of the Twitter mobile landscape.

And as for the long tail, Williams writes, There are a tremendous number of other apps that people are using, not necessarily as their main Twitter client, but as an alternative way to create or view Tweets. The number of registered OAuth applications is now at almost 300,000 this number has nearly tripled since Chirp [Twitter's developer conference, which was held in April in San Francisco].

While the above chart shows percentages of unique users per app, we'd also love to see a breakdown by volume of tweets.

Has your own mobile usage of Twitter changed or grown at all with Twitter's releasing several official apps? Do you still use third-party applications for tweeting on the go? Let us know what you think about these stats in the comments.

More About: apps, Mobile 2.0, twitter

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When I read Twitter CEO Evan Williams post tonight about the state of Twitter from a mobile perspective, the first thing that jumped out at me what that Twitter for Android, an app Twitter worked hard on, isn't even in the top 10 most-used apps for the service. But Williams also used the post to whip out some impressive numbers. Chief among them: Twitter now has over 145 million registered users (though presumably less than 150 million, or he would have said that). And there are now nearly 300,000 registered apps in the Twitter ecosystem.

The latter number above is technically the number of registered OAuth apps in the ecosystem (and includes multiple instances of some apps). Twitter made the switch over from basic authentication to OAuth a few days ago, leaving behind some apps, such as the old Tweetie (which was reborn as Twitter for iPhone). Williams says this number of registered apps has tripled since their Chirp conference which was only this past April.

Other big numbers thrown out there by Williams:

• Mobile users have jumped 62% since mid-April
• 16% of all new users to Twitter now start on mobile (it was 5% before Twitter started doing branded mobile clients)
• 46% of active users use some sort of mobile Twitter experience
• 78% of people who interact with Twitter still do so through twitter.com though that number includes people who use more than one app
• m.twitter.com is the second most-used Twitter interface at 14%
• SMS and Twitter for iPhone are tied at 8%

Lastly, he throws in that Twitter's Promoted Products (read: their first big monetization pitch) has exceeded our expectations. No word on if that means Twitter has turned a profit, but that seems pretty unlikely. Still, revenues are undoubtedly growing.

William Gibson: We never imagined that AI would be like this originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Nina Paley's Mimi and Eunice for 8/20/2010:

Nina's comment on the strip: "I love my Libertarian friends! So it is with love I poke gentle fun at them."

[Hat tip to William Benzon.]

The problems of the Middle East will be with us for the foreseeable future. They are primarily the responsibility of the peoples of the area, but they also affect us closely, for the Middle East provides 80 per cent of the oil required by the European economy, is crossed by the major trade routes between Asia-Africa and Europe, and could be the seedbed of a war. The question then is whether we can find in the steps leading up to the Iraqi coup d'tat any clues to what lies ahead for Jordan and the Arabian peninsula.

In our talk [Polk writes], I found no sign of animosity toward me or even, as I expected from his autobiography, toward America and Americans. After preliminaries, I asked what he saw ahead and how the Afghan tragedy could be solved.

In reply, he said, " it is very hard to devise a way, but we should know that fighting is not the way. It won't work. And it has many bad side effects such as dividing the people from the government." ... It was clear that he was thinking in terms broader than Karzai. He meant that the Afghans must have an accommodation to government, per se, if they are heal their wounds and improve their condition.

The only realistic way ahead, he went on, "is respect for the Afghan people and their way whereas America is now relying wholly on force. Force didn't work for the British or the Russians and it won't work for the Americans." The word "respect" often figured in his remarks, as from my study of Afghanistan and the Arabs and Iranians, I knew it would....

So how do the Taliban see a post-US-controlled Afghanistan? I asked.

He replied that "it all depended on how it comes about. If it comes through negotiation, then probably the Taliban will be content with genuine participation in the government, but if it comes through force, then the Taliban will take everything."

I asked about what he has been doing since his autobiography was translated. He perhaps did not quite understand my question and said that he was in Guantnamo until he was released. He suddenly asked me how old I am and, when I replied with my august status, he said "good. There was a man in Guantanamo who also was old and he was gentle with me. The younger men were not."

Gowalla Highlights is a web-based product that currently consists of 18 place-based questions that query members about their favorite date night locales, watering holes, spots for people watching or celebrity sightings, etc.

The power of the product is in the aggregate. Gowalla users will be able to discover the best places in town, as determined by popular vote, and easily find new coffee spots or bars to try out when visiting a foreign city.

The feature itself is both simple and enjoyable to use. Gowalla users will find the Highlights section accessible from their profile page. From here, they can respond to unique prompts and share the places where big and small life moments took place. From the Highlights page, users can then check out the places that matter to their friends and view the most popular among all members.

Highlights is essentially a way to surface the best places for any given city.

We were inspired to create Highlights when we started building Gowalla for iPad. It got us thinking about how we could visualize places in interesting ways, said CEO and Co-Founder Josh Williams.

Williams also believes that Highlights will power insightful trends around places, settle local taco shop wars and have important ramifications for businesses.

He also indicates that Highlights functionality and data will trickle down to the iPhone and Android apps in about a month. The idea will be to help expose members to nearby popular places with popular determined by the number of enjoyable experiences users have had rather than total checkins. Developers can also expect Highlights data to eventually make its way inside the API.

By turning on Highlights, Gowalla is tapping its current user base of 450,000 users to tell place-based stories in a way that could really drive home the utility of the mobile location-based service.

Images courtesy of Flickr, brutha nick

More About: geolocation, gowalla, gowalla highlights, places

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I've heard from two sources close to the Digg CEO search that there were a glut of good candidates. That's something companies always say, and I frankly found it hard to believe.

I don't necessarily mean that as a knock on Digg. I was surprised there were a ton of great CEO candidates to run any company in the unsexy critical-mass-but-not-flavor-of-the-month categoryperiod.

Both sources told me the same thing: The existence of a secondary market means that top talent is churning through startups faster than ever. While Digg's eventual hire was Matt Williams formerly of old-man-of-the-Internet Amazon, sources told me that potential candidates were also coming from hot, pre-IPO Web darlings.

I've asked around and had a few entrepreneurs and VCs confirm the trend: The secondary market is upping the talent churn to levels not seen in the Valley since the late 1990s. Then, it was because companies were being started and going public within 18 months. Now it's because a new Wild West asset class of secondary private stock trades are having a similar effectwith everyone in Silicon Valley's new favorite substitute for the IPO.

I was particularly surprised to hear some entrepreneurs and VCs say they are getting senior management candidates from Zynga. Zynga?! Isn't Zynga still newly hot enough to be the one doing the poaching? It bears noting that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus is a hard-driving entrepreneur, and some of those looking for other jobs may not be exactly missed, just as the revolving management door in the early days of Facebook wasn't necessarily, shall we say, unwelcome.

Still, assuming this as widespread as I'm hearing, is this a good thing or a bad thing for the Valley? It depends on what you do here. If you're looking to climb the corporate startup ladder, it's great because you can respectably job hop and still cash out at a faster rate. If you're good, or at least able to make people think you are good, you move up with each hop. But if you're looking to build a company, the trend is brutal because the talent is churning too fast to, well, actually build a real company.

At a high level, there's an argument that it makes the Valley's greater ecosystem more mercenary and one that it makes it less mercenary. It's more mercenary because startups attract more people who want a quick equity flip. Remember the scourge of blue-shirts-and-khakis in the late 1990s? No one wants that back, except maybe the Bubble Lounge. On the flipside (pun intended), at least the mercenaries have a way to get outmeaning those who stick around are those who care about the mission. And we're not talking about an immediate flipthis new reality only holds for the companies hot enough to have a secondary market for their shares or a big deal like those being done by Elevation and DST. It's by any measure, still a pretty contained scourge compared to 1999. But it's also one that by its very definition includes the companies startups are most likely to want to poach from.

But one thing it does for sure is cement the Valley as the place to start a consumer Web company. It is apparently easier than ever to assemble a team if the hype, valuation and idea are right.

If you didn't think the check-in was a commodity before Facebook launched their Places feature, you likely do now. But Gowalla has known that for awhile, and that's why they've been moving to extend the service and build on top of the check-in. Comments and photos came several months ago. Today brings another nice addition: Highlights.

The best way to think about the feature may be to think back to the 25 Things About Me meme that spread throughout Facebook last year. The meme asked you to answer a set of 25 questions and send the answers to your friends. Gowalla Highlights is similar in that they want you to tag about 20 real world places based on a set of criteria. For example, you're asked to name you favorite Date Night spot, the place you think has the Best Tacos, your Alma Mater, and your favorite Watering Hole, among other things. Each of these answers reveals a bit about who you actually are, and where you spend your time.

Where this gets really interesting is when you bring the social graph into it. So, for example, if I check-in near a spot where a friend of mine asked his wife to marry him, I'll get a message alerting me of that. Or if I'm looking for the best taco place in Austin, Texas, I can visit the Highlight page and see what the masses are voting for. There are a lot of potentially interesting uses for this when it starts to get populated with a lot of data.

And co-founder Josh Williams knows that. He thinks of Highlights as sort of a replacement for the atlas. In 2010, what was the best scenic view point in Seattle?, Williams wonders. With Gowalla Highlights, he'd be able to tell that.

Williams notes that the idea behind Highlights came about in a sort of odd way. While the feature is launching today in beta on the website version of Gowalla, they actually thought of it while building the iPad version. Williams says that the way you can manipulate a map on the iPad made this social geo atlas idea make a lot of sense. With that in mind, it shouldn't be surprising that Gowalla is working quickly to bring this feature to both the mobile apps (in about a month) and the iPad (shortly after that).

They chose to put this on the website first because it's easier to test and built it out there. Williams notes that close to 50 percent of Gowalla's active users now visit the website on a weekly basis to see their Passports (Gowalla profiles), look at pictures, or comment. As they add more features, such as custom Passports, this has been growing quickly.

But obviously, mobile is still the key to the app. And Highlights is going to make the experience better. It's the latest step in what Williams calls the intersection of people and places in other words, it's the latest step beyond being just a check-in service. You'll note that you don't have to check-in at all to use this feature.

But the truth is that Gowalla always has been more than that. At first, it was all about virtual items based around check-ins. That aspect never really took off, and it has since been depreciated (but is still around if user want to use it). Now it's all about this real world interaction with places. Williams notes that Gowalla's Trips feature has been working well, and hints at another new feature due shortly as well.

As with the rest of Gowalla now, Highlights will be a part of the API. Williams says he's excited to see what kind of visualization tools people come up with using this data. I'm excited to see what my friends consider to be their Take My Breath Away spot.

Editor's note: This is a guest post from Cal Newport of Study Hacks.

I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years, Steve Martin recalls in his 2007 memoir, Born Standing Up. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success. If you do the math, this sums to fourteen years of hard work before Martin saw returns on his investment.

Fourteen years.

That's a long time to remain focused on a goal without reward, especially when the path is ambiguous (The course was more plodding than heroic, Martin recalls). But as he makes clear in his book, Martin found a Zen peace in the simplicity of his pursuit. He describes with relish, for example, the importance of diligence in becoming a star a term he redefines to mean the ability to not work on unrelated projects and he labels loss of focus as an indulgence that success cannot afford.

Martin's story should resonate with those of us interested in the minimalist lifestyle preached here at Zen Habits. He injected minimalism into his life by orienting his world around a single passionate pursuit: innovating stand-up comedy. For Martin, there was never any doubt what his Most Important Task would involve each morning, and jettisoning unrelated commitments and distractions came naturally. As he discovered, when you know what your life is about it's easy to sidestep all that threatens to clutter it.

In other words: passion breeds simplicity.

Even if we agree on their value, however, how do we find these simplicity-generating passionate pursuits in our own lives? This is the thorny question I address in this post.

Passion Paralysis

Faced with the task of identifying their passion, most people have one of two reactions:

The first is a frantic search of their lives with the aim of uncovering some magical pursuit that unmistakably sings to their soul. As a writer of student advice, for example, I frequently receive e-mails from young people that begin: I'm trying to decide what my passion should be (If only it were that easy.)

The second reaction is paralysis: faced with the life-changing importance of this discovery, many people freeze hoping for a sign from above that will make things clear. (Spoiler: This can be a long wait.)

Neither of these approaches succeed, as passion is not something that can be forcefully identified, and though it sometimes bubbles up serendipitously, this is not something you can count on happening any time soon. So what's a passion-seeking minimalist to do?

I found an answer in an unlikely place

Do Less. Get More.

In the winter of 2009, I began researching a book on college admissions. Inspired by the type philosophy taught here at Zen Habits, I sought students who followed a Zen path through the college process getting into good schools while still living uncluttered and authentic high school lives. It soon became clear that the students who pulled off this feat shared a common trait: like Steve Martin, they had organized their life around a passionate deep interest. (This interest, in turn, made them irresistible to admissions officers weary of reading the files of chronically over-scheduled and stress-addled applicants.)

To make my book useful, I needed to discover how such passionate interests are formed. After months of research, I arrived, finally, at Penn State University, where a professor named Linda Caldwell had made a career out of studying interest formation.

Excited by her results, and wondering how to translate them into everyday life, I gave her a call:

You need to be exposed to many things, she told me. You should expose yourself even though you might not know if you'll be interested.

When you find something that catches your attention: follow-up; see if it sticks.

In other words, discovering passion requires a dedication to unstructured exploration. You have to leave large swathes of free time in your schedule (a technique I call underscheduling), and fill this time with the exploration of things that might be interesting. Of equal importance, when something catches your attention you must leverage your free time to aggressively follow up.

As Caldwell's research reveals, true passion can't be forced. You can participate in personality tests and self-reflection exercises until you drop from exhaustion, but it's unstructured exploration coupled with aggressive follow-ups that most consistently leads people to a life-consuming interest.

Here are some examples of this idea in action:

• In a gap year following high school, Ben Casnocha booked an open-ended trip around the world. He left his schedule undefined, traveling with only the general goal of journaling and meeting interesting people. During this process he noticed a recurring interest in writing. Because his time was unstructured, he was able to aggressively follow-up on the interest by calling up his contacts in the publishing industry. His efforts led him to a book deal and he went on to finish the manuscript in the exotic international destinations left in his trip. He continues to write professionally today both on his blog and in magazines; he's also a frequent commentator on NPR.
• In 2003, Dee Williams, a toxic waste inspector, was living in a spacious bungalow in Portland, Oregon. (Depending on the source, it was somewhere between 1500 to 2000 square feet of luxurious living.) Her time was consumed by the standard traps of middle class life: an extensive remodel on her home, car problems, the struggle to pay bills, and so on. A committed environmentalist, she realized she was tired of walking the walk and wanted to talk the talk (I was a slackavist, she recalls), so she simplified her life, selling her house and moving into an 84 square feet tiny house made out of found materials and parked in the corner of a friend's yard. This move to simplicity opened time in her schedule for exploration. She soon stumbled into a community of people who were using tiny houses as a way of promoting sustainable living. She left her job as a waste inspector and started Boxcar Woodcrafts, a small woodworking company, and now dedicates her newly copious free time to teaching classroom programs on green living and sustainability.
• As a high school student, Maneesh Sethi was adamant about leaving free time in his schedule. (During his senior year, for example, he arranged a schedule that allowed him to return home after lunch each day.) He filled this free time with exploration: among other pursuits, he became Internet famous for demonstrating how to transform a tube sock into an iPod case. A computer enthusiast, Maneesh found himself one weekend afternoon at a trade conference where he met an editor of programming books. This led him to discover that the editor was considering a book on computer game programming for teenagers. Leveraging the free time in his schedule, Maneesh aggressively followed-up on the opportunity, sending over a collection of sample chapters, and finally convincing the publisher that a he, as a teenager, was well-suited to write their book for teenagers. This led, among other things, to a follow-up book, and a recurring segment on a TechTV show. Maneesh now writes full time about living an unconventional lifestyle.

This advice can be hard to follow at first. When we think about passion we think about action: we want to start doing big things right now! But the reality of passion is more subtle. You have to do less to get more in your life. It's a virtuous catch-22: by embracing a minimalist lifestyle now, you are more likely to develop the passionate interest that will support the lifestyle in the long run.

Put another way: take a step back; relax; then open your eyes to patiently take in all that's out there.

Read more from Cal at his blog, Study Hacks, or subscribe to his feed.

The library was established by Bucks County PA farmers who combined their finances to order books from Philadelphia and from England.

Steeped in history, the private Newtown Library was founded on Aug. 9, 1760. Ben Franklin would be proud of the library. In fact, his picture is the focal point of the library's historic signboard.

Sunday September 12 will mark the grand finale event of the Newtown Library Company's 250th anniversary celebration. Music will waft through the air and historic characters will mingle with the crowd.
It's going to be an old-fashioned Sunday afternoon event, said Karolyn Fisher, librarian of the Newtown Library Company.

Dubbed the 250th Birthday Bash, the event will feature appearances by several historical figures, including William Penn, Ben Franklin, Edward Hicks and Beulah Twining. Bucks Local News.

[This is a guest post by Roy Peter Clark. He was indirectly quoted in "Flacks and hacks and brainscans" (11/23/2007), but the "analysis and criticism" that he mentions can be found in "Slippery glamour" (7/4/2008), "Don't tell Sister Catherine William" (7/5/2008), and "Funky a" (7/7/2008). I admire him for being such a good sport about the whole thing, and I urge readers to respond to his invitation to read his new book and to comment "thumbs up, thumbs down, or thumbs sideways". Substantively and politely, of course.]

About two years ago, my work became the subject of analysis and criticism on Language Log. At the time I was not familiar with this community of language experts and students and was not prepared for what was about to happen. Under a category of comments called Prescriptivist Poppycock (gotta love the alliteration), I read folks who questioned my scholarship, my credentials, and my writing. I am not complaining about this. I would like to describe what happened and how I responded to it.

In brief, the criticism, some of it harsh and uninformed, helped me straighten out some crooked thinking about language, a process that resulted in the recent publication by Little, Brown of my book The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English. On August 22, Ammon Shea gave the book high marks in the New York Times Book Review, calling it very much a manual for the 21st century.

I write this on Language Log not to tell you that my success has proved some of your commentary off the mark. Quite the contrary, I have often said now to friends and colleagues that had I not been roughed up by the Language Loggers, I could not have developed the muscle tone to write the book.

Let me explain how all this came to pass.

I once heard an interview with a famous songwriter who was asked What comes first, the lyrics or the melody. To which he responded: What comes first is the phone call. My phone call came from a Little, Brown editor, Tracy Behar, who had worked with me on a previous book Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. Published in 2006, more than 75,000 copies are in print, a success that Tracy wanted to turn into a sequel. Would you consider writing a book about grammar? The answer was no, until they offered an advance, and then the answer was yes As long as you let me define grammar' as broadly as possible.

My idea was to write and publish about a dozen pieces on rhetorical grammar on the Poynter Institute website, an influential source for journalists and other writers. My goal was to 1) to work out in print what we would mean by grammar; 2) to understand what I knew and what I needed to learn; 3) to find a voice that was congenial and curious, more the eager student than the pedantic teacher.

Later, a young friend of mine, Jason Fry, an expert on online news, argued that it was not a good idea to write and publish on the web material that was not fully cooked. I would not be judged by my eager transparency, he said, but by my mistakes, assumptions, and miscalculations. He was right. Someone, perhaps it was Mark, sent me a message that my essays were being discussed on Language Log. I'll be the first to admit, that the work you saw back then was not fully cooked. In fact, it was half-baked.

By then, the water was a little too bloody to stick my hand in (saw the movie Piranha yesterday in 3D). In spite of my silence, I read all the comments, took them seriously, and used them to draft a personal plan of research and writing. I learned what I could write about language with confidence, as well as areas I should avoid.

As a result of this experience, I had little hope that the book would be a critical success and the glowing review in the NYTBR came as a complete surprise. Because of it, Little, Brown went into a second printing, less than two weeks before the book was first released. Here are the lessons I learned from my encounter with members of this virtual community of language thinkers and workers.

• The Internet is not a pleasant little garden. There are more snakes than robins, and no writer should enter without being prepared to be handled roughly, at times venomously.
• If you are willing to venture in you can learn an awful lot, including from commentators who are, at times, uncivil or worse.
• When you comment on a person's work, especially when he or she is not part of the conversation, it's good to envision that person a real and not virtual as someone who you might run into the next day on the cafeteria line.
• In an area as vast as language, there are many so-called discourse communities that sometimes express themselves as factions: linguists, poets, journalists, deconstructionists, semanticists, composition teachers, prescriptivists, descriptivists, free lancers, and many more. All pilgrims should be prepared to encounter reflexive misunderstanding of their motives, values, and intentions.

Finally, I am not suggesting for an instant that the revisions you would find in Glamour of Grammar from two years ago would meet the highest standards of this group. So I invite anyone to get a copy, and offer a summary, review, or critique. Thumbs up or thumbs down or thumbs sideways, I promise to respond in a spirit of collegiality and with a shared passion for language, literature, and the craft of writing.

Digg, which is in the midst of a hot-button redesign, has hired a new CEO, long-time Amazon executive Matt Williams, as TechCrunch first reported today and Digg has confirmed. Williams was most recently general manager of Amazon's payments initiative, and before that led the company's web store for three years in both roles serving as a liaison to other online merchants. He joined Amazon when it bought his company LiveBid.com in 1999 in a move to compete with eBay.

Williams, according to a co-worker's recommendation on LinkedIn, is great at defining goals and processes and driving for measurable deliverables and skilled at building teams. Those talents could certainly be useful for Digg, which launched a redesign last week that had been over a year in the making, and had been interrupted by layoffs and an executive shuffle in April when founder Kevin Rose bumped Jay Adelson out of the CEO spot.

Rose has since said publicly that he'd rather work on product than be CEO. (His actual words to All Things D were that the chief gig was a pain in the a** that I would never wish on my worst enemy. Astonishingly, that recruiting job worked on Williams!) On the other hand, Williams' background seems to be more in serving merchants than consumers, which is something Digg is being accused of doing now: giving preference to publishers over regular Joe users. Williams also doesn't seem to be terribly active in social media himself; I can't find an actively used Digg or Twitter profile for him.

Rose noted in a blog post that Williams had been involved in Amazon's community efforts earlier in his carrier and said that Williams would handle the day-to-day business while Rose will remain actively involved in the product. Williams said he believed in the potential of this new platform and that There is so much innovation yet to come.

The Digg redesign (known as V4) had trouble getting out the door, is buggy, and has been panned and mocked by Digg users, especially long-time devotees of the site. Digg is racing to respond with fixes, including adding some old features back to the new version. Still, you can't fault Digg for trying to do something bold, after languishing while sites like Twitter and Facebook became better ways for many users to stay abreast of the news through links shared by friends. Rose said in the All Things D interview he looks at the next four to six months as a small window for Digg to show itself and investors that the company can do something different and make it work. Now it's up to you, Mr. Williams!

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Future

Tomorrow's WikiLeakers may have to be sneakier than just dumping military docs onto a Lady Gaga disc. The futurists at Darpa are working on a project that would make it harder for troops to funnel classified material to WikiLeaks or to foreign governments. And that means if you work for the military, get ready to have your web, email and other network usage monitored even more than it is now.

Darpa's new project is called CINDER, for Cyber Insider Threat. It's lead by a legendary hacker-turned-Darpa-manager. CINDER may have preceded Pfc. Bradley Mannings' alleged disclosure of tens of thousands of documents about the Afghanistan war from Defense Department servers. But the idea is to find someone just like him. By hunting for poker-like tells in people's use of Defense Department computer networks, Darpa hopes to find indications of indicate hostile intent or potential removal of sensitive data. The goal of CINDER will be to greatly increase the accuracy, rate and speed with which insider threats are detected and impede the ability of adversaries to operate undetected within government and military interest networks, according to the defense geeks' request for contractor solicitations on the project.

That took on an increased urgency last month after WikiLeaks dropped 77,000 Afghanistan field reports into the public domain. While Admiral Mike Mullen's furious blood-on-its-hands reaction got all the press coverage, Defense Secretary Robert Gates' response appears to have been the more lasting one, policy-wise. Gates fretted that a casualty of WikiLeaks' document dump would be the Defense Department's years-long initiative to push vital information down to the front lines, so lower ranking officers and enlisted men had the sort of high-level battlefield views that used to be the province of their commanders. All that's been jeopardized by Manning, he said, the soldier accused of being WikiLeaks' inside man.

We want those soldiers in a forward operating base to have all the information they possibly can have that impacts on their own security, but also being able to accomplish their mission, Gates mused in a July press conference. Should we change the way we approach that, or do we continue to take the risk of future leaks? Gates partially answered his own question however cryptically by adding, There are some technological solutions, though most of them are not immediately available to us.

That's where CINDER comes in. But the program Darpa envisions would establish patterns of malign behavior, distinct and quietly detectable from the normal Defense Department information user, to expose hidden operations within networks and systems. That carries with it the likelihood of a big data or meta-data-mining operation. Or, as Steve Aftergood, an intelligence-policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists puts it, a sort of system-wide surveillance of Pentagon networks. After all, how else to tell normal network usage from abnormal usage?

Indeed, Darpa expressly recognizes CINDER's likelihood of intercepting false positives. So Darpa doesn't want CINDER from focusing on any individual user it wants the program's as-yet-unbuilt algorithms to uncover the malicious missions that they undertake. If we were looking for the insider actor himself, we might not detect someone who performs a single, isolated task and we run the risk of being inundated with false positives from events being triggered without context of a mission, Darpa explains. It gives instructions for would-be designers to expressly identify the kinds of missions its detectors will hunt so as to minimize inundation with a glut of benign data.

But some of the examples Darpa gives of those fiendish activities sound difficult to distinguish from normal usage. Anomalous missions [may] be comprised of entirely legitimate' activities, observables and the data sources they will be derived from, Darpa notes. So CINDER researchers should make use of logs and accounting information that tracks allowed activities rather than depending entirely on alerts from monitoring systems focused on anomalous or disallowed activities. Feel any more comfortable executing your boss' order to find him information on roadside bombs in your area?

Then again, Darpa has people on hand who know the difference between benign and malicious online actions. In February, the agency hired Peiter Mudge Zatko one of the hackers of Boston's L0pht collective, who famously told a congressional committee in 1998 that they could shut down the internet in 30 minutes as a program manager for cybersecurity. I don't want people to be putting out virus signatures after a virus has come out, he told CNet when Darpa hired him. I want an active defense. I want to be at the sharp pointy end of the stick. Next month, Zatko, CINDER's program manager, holds a pair of conferences with potential researchers.

And not all traditional privacy advocates are so concerned about CINDER, since it's not hunting the private Internet. CINDER's might indeed involve the automated collection of lots of benign, incidental data about individual users in order to establish a baseline of normal' activity, notes Aftergood, an anti-secrecy critic of WikiLeaks). But I would think that the privacy implications are limited, since most employees should not be conducting personal business on classified or other official networks anyway.

A full-blown CINDER application is still years away. But at least one precursor effort will be the Defense Department's forthcoming cybersecurity strategy, due out, according to Deputy Secretary William Lynn, before year's end. How much internal monitoring will that strategy's active defense authorize?

Photo: USAF

See Also:

• Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole
• Cybersecurity: Here's What Really Worries the Pentagon
• How To Stop Cyberattacks: Diplomacy. Well, Maybe.
• Cyber-Security Czar Quits Amid Fears of NSA Takeover
• WikiLeaks Drops 90000 War Docs; Fingers Pakistan as Insurgent Ally
• Top U.S. Officer: WikiLeaks Might Have Blood on Its Hands

Gallery: HP Labs' Memristor Milestones

Continue reading HP Labs teams up with Hynix to manufacture memristors, plans assault on flash memory in 2013

HP Labs teams up with Hynix to manufacture memristors, plans assault on flash memory in 2013 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Digg has hired Amazon exec Matt Williams to be their new CEO, we've confirmed. This ends a months-long process that began with the ouster of former CEO Jay Adelson in April. Founder Kevin Rose has run the company since then.

Williams has been with Amazon for more than a decade since 1999. He is currently the GM of Consumer Payments. But he has held a variety of jobs GM Webstore, Director Tech Alliances, Director Community & Cross-Merchandising and Director, Auctions and Marketplace.

Rose will become chief architect going forward, we've heard, a position he's held in the past.

Over the past week Hip-Hop artist, 50 Cent, took control of his Twitter account and went on a tweet rampage. He threatened to kill people, posted pornographic images, issued defamatory statements against other artists, and also made racist statements. His Twitpic account was suspended due to the pornographic images. But his Twitter account is still up and running.

If that weren't enough, last Sunday, Denver Nuggets forward, Carmelo Anthony and his wife Lala got into a Twitter fight with exhibitionist Kat Stacks. Allegedly, Carmelo offered $5000 cash to anyone who would physically harm Kat Stacks. He also allegedly threatened her with physical harm. As a result Stacks has filed charges against Anthony.

Is Twitter becoming the wild, wild west of social networks? Twitter does have Twitter Rules in their Terms of Service Agreement that outlines Rules of Content for posted content. Specifically Twitter prohibits:

1. Impersonation

2. Trademark Infringement

3. Violation of Privacy

4. Violence and Threats

5. Copyright Infringement

6. Promotion of Illegal Activities

7. Spam Abuse

But considering 50 Cent's Twitter account is still up and running and other Tweeters are also guilty of violating Twitter's Rules of Conduct, does Twitter actually enforce these rules? Twitter states we do not actively monitor user's content and will not censor user content, except in the above limited circumstances. Twitter basically covers themselves with this statement and considering the millions of users on Twitters, it makes sense. But is Twitter motivated to take action against violaters, especially if they are celebrities and have millions of followers like 50 Cent? The rapper even bragged that @ev (Evan Williams), co-founder of Twitter, gave him a call and said he was the best thing that happened to Twitter. This may or may not be true, but it is an interesting statement.

Carmelo Antony's Twitter account was deleted but we don't know if Twitter deleted his account or the NBA forced him to delete his account. His statements to Kat Stacks are a federal crime and if proven he did in fact make the statements from his computer or mobile device, he could potentially face jail time and suspension from the NBA. Carmelo and his wife are now claiming his Twitter account was hacked and he did not send the criminal tweets.

Whether Twitter enforces its Rules of Conduct are debatable. However, when Tweets are written and sent, they are forever in cyberspace regardless of whether the user deletes the tweet or their Twitter Account. Tweets are public records and can be used as evidence in any civil or criminal litigation. I previously wrote a post on the Do's and Dont's of Twitter. Many of those Do's and Dont's included several of the above Twitter Rules. But regardless if Twitter kicks violators off Twitter or not, engaging in Dont's can get you sued, jail time, and fines.

So be careful what you tweet. When in doubt, just don't.

Digg v4 is not a redesign, not a reskin, it is a 100% rewrite. It's completely new design, code, architecture, and infrastructure. It has almost no relationship to the v3 system whatsoever.

Social news site Digg is currently in the particularly bloody throes of its fifth user revolt and, unlike revolts one through four, we've heard that Digg is absolutely positively not capitulating to users on this one.

Has Kevin Rose finally decided to heed our advice? It's not so cut and dry according to former Digg engineer Ian Eure who wrote They Can't Go Back on his personal blog earlier today. One reason they can't move backward? Talent, Eure emphasizes, in underline.

Even if they still have the systems and the desire to roll back, they don't have the talent to maintain Digg v3. Nearly everyone who built and worked on the legacy Digg codebase has left the company. When I started at Digg, the engineering team was: Joe Stump, Matt Erkkila, Eli White, Steve Williams, Steve French, Kurt Wilms, Nancy White, Bill Shupp, and Micah Snyder. Operations had Ron Gorodetzky, Scott Baker, and Tim Ellis. Except for Matt, everyone else has moved on. There were others, but those people were the core team that made the legacy code work, and they're gone now.

This makes sense. At the moment the Digg v4 Top News page is basically aggregating feeds from other aggregators like Reddit which is an algorithm flaw that needs to be fixed, now. Before your next episode of Diggnation, even.

The amount of pain that the power users are feeling makes for good drama and great headlines, but is secondary to the major coding issues and design flaws allowing competitors to garner traffic off your site. If your business is about aggregating eyeballs, it's crucial to keep your eye on the ball.

Comic: Ncomment