The Rise of the Amateur Professional

Charles Leadbeater, social entrepreneur and author of We-think, gave an interesting presentation at TED about the emergence of the "amateur professional." He argues along the same lines as the authors of The Global Brain: essentially the internet and other social technologies are facilitating "network-centric innovation" by leveraging talent outside the organization, mainly from consumers.

It's a very interesting video, particularly his anecdotal example of Tim Chang, an entrepreneur in China who has a customer base of 250 million and who is servicing them with a staff of only 500, of which most of them are consumer/developers. He's providing the platform and "stickiness" and they're contributing the development talent.

A few quotes which stuck:

"You don't need an organization to organize and solve really hard problems."

"The more radical the innovation, the more the uncertainty, the more you need innovation-in-use to figure out what the technology is for. More and more innovators don't know the exact use; lead users will help direct the application."

"Users into producers, consumers into designers."

Highly recommend the video.

Rainmeter

While doing research (eg procrastination) as part of my thesis recently I found/installed and customized Rainmeter, a lightweight metering desktop system.



I've become attached to it as I feel it's continually pushing state to me. I particularly like the simple, highly configurable aspect of each meter, or "skin." Each of them updates about every second and while that seems like it would eat CPU, on my laptop it only consumes about 5%; I'm running 3G of memory.

I also like the variety of skins available. You're able to download desktops from others and pick and choose each individual skin to use from each of them. Lastly I like the lightweight desktop RSS news feeds. I pull Google News feeds and find it very convenient to look there rather than browsing over to a news site.

It is tedious, though, to customize each skin as, personally, I had to first get into administrator mode then make manual changes to .txt files. Dragging around the desktop can be difficult for the smaller skins; click to selection takes some time. Lastly and least impressive is that the meters won't re-orient themselves when the screen is resized (eg, when I lock my laptop into the bay to use my desktop monitor).

Overall Rainmeter is fairly impressive, but the technology is still in the early adopters phase. Once developers can start building customization environments, I think adoption will pick up considerably.

Cool Tools

I've been tweeking my laptop a lot lately, given that it's the best laptop ever created by mankind (still, three years after I bought it). When I started MIT I decided to buy a Lenovo X60 tablet and installed OneNote on it. This combination is extremely powerful, especially if you want to hand-write notes and draw graphs. Among its other cool features, OneNote will convert all hand-written text such that it's searchable; it does the same with speech, btw.

I added more RAM and increased the HD capacity which meant that I had to move all my content to the new 320G drive. This was absolutely painless with Acronis' True Image software. With the trial download, I simply backed-up my entire HD an external HD, swapped HD's, and restored to the new drive. Very simple.

Since I run Vista (because of the tablet functionality) I've been modding my environment to be more *nix like. I found WinRoll which compresses most terminals, eg



Taskbar Shuffle is another cool little tool. It allows you to drag-and-drop taskbar icons and minimized windows:



Here’s a full feature list:

* Reorder your taskbar buttons by dragging and dropping them
* Reorder your tray icons in the same way
* Reorder tasks in a grouped button's popup menu in the same way
* Middle-click to close programs on your taskbar
* Works with UltraMon taskbars
* Tweak taskbar button grouping

If you run more than a few applications at a time, you'll definitely find Taskbar Shuffle useful.

I have a few other suggestions for cool tools but I'll leave that for the next post (hint: checkout Rainmeter).

Book Reviews: Outliers & Talent is Overrated

Dont'cha just love it when you read two books back-to-back which perfectly compliment each other? In the case of these two books it was likewise serendipitous as I read Talent after reading Outliers and it answered questions left unanswered by Outliers.

Gladwell's Outliers, The Story of Success suggests that world-class talent (the likes of Mozart, Bill Gates, et. al) isn't god-given, eg, these people weren't born with this innate talent. Gladwell details how they went to extraordinary lengths to practice and perfect their respective crafts. Not only that, but each of them had the opportunity to practice. Bill Gates had a contact at a local library which allowed him practice on a computer terminal for hours/days on-end. At the time, in the early '80's this was just unheard of as these resources were shared and demand far outstripped supply.

Now, does that mean that if you simply practice a lot (about 10,000 hours in Gladwell's estimation) you'll end up as world-class talent? In fact not. Gladwell makes a pretty convincing case that this activity you're concentrating all your talent should be cutting edge and/or within an industry which is near its tipping point. When the PC industry had just started to tip it just so happened that Gates had over 10,000 hours of software engineering experience. By the time Mozart was 16, he had well over 10,000 hours of study, an opportunity given to him by his father Leopold, who was a was a composer, conductor, teacher, and violinist.

Anyway, the book left me with a lot of unanswered questions, like, "How do I study?", "Do I need a mentor?", "How will I know when I'm world class?". After I finished the it--in one sitting btw--I just happened across Talent in an airport terminal. It seemed interesting enough, but it wasn't until I started reading it did I learn that it perfectly complimented Outliers.

Geoff Colvin's Talent is Overrated, What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else introduces the concept of deliberate practice. In doing so, he confronts the myths that talent is innate (it isn't), you have to have a certain IQ (turns-out that about 130 is good enough), defines deliberate practice and then, if that weren't enough, suggests principals which could be applied within many contexts (a framework?). At the end of the book he talks about the underlying driver to all this: passion.

Whereas Gladwell suggests 10,000 hours of effort and stops there, Colvin goes further and suggests specific learning techniques. Used together these books could really up your game. I recommend taking a weekend to read them.

Back!

Well after nearly a year, I'm back to blogging! The absence was caused entirely from laziness. I had my blog hosted on another site (under the fqdn of jabz.us), they "retired" the server and I never got around to moving the blog, updating the name servers. Until today!

A lot has happened over the past year and I intend to change the focus of the blog to reflect my new situation: I've been running a business and doing a significant amount of project development and market analysis within the Web2.0 space. As well, we've been architecting data models for a client's sensor product. Very exciting times, indeed.

Stayed tuned for details.