Alan’s Kiloblog

Seth Godin is about to make a whole new batch of people miserable, by tuning them into the horrors of RSS, but he does not tell you about the horror. He is saying that it is a little radio. No, no its not. RSS is like a thousand disembodied voices screaming inside your head. It will drive you mad. Imagine opening up your email inbox and in addition to the 3,000 unread messages sent directly to you, you have everything that was published on the websites you visit regularly, sitting there, in your inbox, with a six digit unread count. It’s an inbox nightmare. Spare yourself. Do not use RSS.

Switched TheBayouBoogaloo.com to a simple structure.

Used to do the long structure like http://kiloblog.com/2007/04/23/why-I-like-to-put-mustard-on-blueberry-pancakes, but who cares when I posted, really? It makes the URLs long and makes finding something via auto-complete in the browser pointless. I’m probably not going to write about my tangy, sweet breakfast taste sensation more than once. Certainly, I would not have to explain myself more than once.

My new structure is http://TheBayouBoogaloo.com/post/volunteer-2007. Because I’m able to edit the post slug, I choose one that would not be long, and not collide with a call for volunteers in 2008.

I’m asking those that are volunteers of Think New Orleans to familiarize themselves with Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Getting Things Done is a philosophy of time management for the knowledge worker. The old school, the A-B-C checklist that you configure everday, doesn’t fit with the modern office life, where the next email message can send your day in a drastically different direction.

At the core of Getting Things Done is the notion that if you keep things track of things in your head, you’ll feel overwhelmed, you’ll use your mind for storage and not problem solving. You track things on paper or in a planner. The other key to Getting Things Done, is that when some new bit of information comes your way, you decide what you need to do about it, as it arrives.

To my mind, most New Orleanians were thrust into the world of knowledge work a year ago Tuesday. We need to learn how to cope with the overwhelming flow of information, as a city. Applying the tenants of Getting Things Done is probably the way to go.

There is a blog in Ann Arbor called Ann Arbor Is Overrated and the maintainer of said blog can launch a rolicking discussion simply by posting that he’s out of town. The premise of the web site, that Ann Arbor, Michigan is overrated, attracts many Ann Arborites, who know that their adorable city can be full of itself at times. The format is oddly effective. Something clipped from the newspaper, offered with backhanded comment, and poeple begin to draw their own conclusions. How do I run this racket in New Orleans?

I’m pulling together a Open Space Lunch on Tuesday at 11:30 am at Cafe Reconcile. One of the principles of Open Space is invitations, so I’m sending out personal invitations in email. If you have not recieved one, it is because there is no way I can write a personal invitation to everyone I know, so I wrote three invitations with two or three people addressed in each invitation. It was a means of introduction.

With so many projects, and so many people showing an interest in Think New Orleans, it is hard to find the right organization model. It would be a loose model, and it could learn from open source development, but in open source you have a source control system. You have a product that is also on the Internet, while our product is much more physical. I’m hoping that the Wiki can be that source control system, and I need to think of it as analogous.

I totally forgot out this word, productivity. I just wrote, “We are not about identy web sites, flashing things, rather we are dedicated to helping nonprofits and neighborhoods use the Internet for collaboration and productivity.” Collaboration and productivity, using the Internet as an office network.