Hacking the Good days…

I picked up on Danah’s post commenting on Clay Shirky’s post on ‘A Rant about women’,

It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.

I am usually very private and do not discuss anything personal on my blog, but this topic is too close to heart and here is what I learnt:

1. Stereotypes sometimes contain some good schemata for us to quickly categorise and ‘manage’ people,  but not always true: My experience tells me that there are men who suck as self-promotion, there are also women who put themselves out there and talk themselves up.

2. You don’t need to talk and act like a ‘man’ to get respect.  You need to be good at what you do and be proud to tell other people succinctly. This does not discount your respect for other people, but it means that you are STRONG enough to stick to your gun when you guts tell you that you KNOW what you’re talking about.  People can doubt you, but not yourself.  Same lesson for men and women.

3. Everyone has their own insecurities and things that they wish they are better at.  I am still struggling at times of projects that I have no prior knowledge to – but do I rant/share my fear?  To be honest, I would just do it.  Research, ask questions, think, use your bloody brain, talk to someone who is good, hire someone to do the part you are not sure about and focus on your strength.  At the end of the day – focus on the deliverable – if you’re passionate and conscientious about your clients’ work, it comes across.  Whether you are a man or a woman.

4.  I love how Tom Coates put it in bigger perspective,

And while encouraging people to spot the talented and the creative, we should also be considering how we shame those people who self-promote without creating. The financial collapse has taught us that rhetorical bubbles divorced from reality are a danger to us all. We’re already approaching this point – our industry has become venal, insular and dominated by marketing. We have come to value the wrong things. And if we want a continued vigorous, creative, free, open and equal environment, that’s something we have to fix. It’s not something to aspire to.

Time to get real.

5. Finally – I am not actually arguing against Clay, I just want to clarify that women and men might communicate differently, but none needs to be arrogant/ego-maniac to gain respect.  What I note is that when I work with younger people (I’m sorry to generalise), they tend to focus too much on ‘what I can learn from you’ and ‘how I can help’ instead ‘I know what I am talking about and here is what you should be doing.  I can help you with this and that’.  To be fair, I do see more men talking with the latter perspective, which is pretty handy in building confidence with people you work with.  Having said that, I do talk like that too… and I’m a woman.  Damn proud of it.

In sum, the key thing is:

Don’t let other people decide who you are.  You know best, and with trust and compassion in yourself you stand tall. A weak ego usually comes big, because they need all the fluff to fill in the room.  But there is little substance, or foundation of trust in it.  When it bursts, nothing stays because it’s all air in it.

A small but strong ego is a beautiful ego.  It is quiet.  But when it speaks, people listen.

Have been researching more on the business side of social media due to a recent project and it seems really challenging to wrap the space so I am keen to share with you the thought process.

1. Social media, like all media, is a medium for people to connect
2. Social media is defined as digital medium that allows people to distribute information to one another or to many in a low-cost, parallel distributed way (i.e. once a message is sent, it can easily be cascaded and spread out)
3. Human beings intrinsically connect to satisfy their emotional and social needs, and seek empathy when something elicit their emotional response (e.g. fall in/out of love, winning a competition, had a bad day at work, best friends getting married, stress of moving homes etc)
4. Just like it is comfortable to watch episodes of Friends where it feels like people you knew all along are there with you, Facebook/Twitter or even your old school emails provide you with a digital venue to meet and greet and connect with people that you like (hence interested in what they are up to)
5. Social media, hence, is an extension or convenience for us to connect, just like a community cafe in the town where you read newspaper and get greeted by familiar faces on Sunday mornings
6. Social media also provides ample information for people to compete and distribute their achievements (linkedin profiles) for social capital gain (oh I know this person who can help our company does that), but at the same time can back fire as a medium on ego-stroking oneself (e.g. facebook updates on how someone bought another race car with photos etc..)

Now the business side is what boggles me.

1. Marketing sees that when there’s something that everybody looks at and ‘ENGAGEs’ with, it is a channel (the ‘billboards’ where they can make a lot of money in getting people to notice and buy a product)
2. Marketing sees that ’social media’ is one of these venues
3. Now how does marketing ‘capitalises’ and ‘leverages’ social capital?

Here I hope we can take a step back and look at the human side of social media.  If your product helps me connect and share my feelings/thinking (e.g. Wordpress), I would genuinely really like you and I would spread the word for you when someone asks me what blogging platform I recommend.  Or if my good friend develops an iPhone app that rocks, I would gladly review the app and put some good words (genuine, of course) in the app store, not because I am doing that for you per se, but if I find something useful, I would want to share and help other people find the same thing too.  But if the app sucks, I would help my friend to improve by giving him offline recommendations because I know online reputation counts.

Now what I am not sure is if a big brand comes along and ask me to re-skin my blog to promote their brand so that my visitors would constitute their ‘page impressions’.  This is where traditionally marketing having a hard time to understand.  Social media is NOT a traditional billboard.  It is an intimate part of my daily life.  Imagine if you are a new father/mother, you won’t ‘brand’ your kid with Pampers outfit to promote the brand, but if Pampers works really well for your child’s skin, you would naturally recommend it to other parents (whether via social media or just a simple chat over coffee).

In a nutshell, social media allows users to get their words out fast and more exponentially, but ultimately your product needs to deliver.  Get the product right, then people would do the talking for you.  Social media helps getting the words out faster, but that’s both for good and for the worst.

Here is a Chinese story,

There were two brothers who lived on the 80th floor of a building.

They went out together for a party without noticing there’s no lift service on the day.  The brothers were very frustrated when they realised that they were kind of doomed, but they decided to slowly start climbing the stairs flight by flight.

By the 20th flight, they decided that they were going to drop their heavy knapsacks and planned to pick them up the next day.

By the 40th flight, they started to blame and yelled at one another for not being attentive and missed the notice.

By the 60th flight, they came to accept fate, slowly and peacefully they inch up and eventually reach to their door.

Only then, they realised they left their keys in the knapsacks…

If the keys are like our dream and passion and vision when we have in our 20s: With all the pressing needs in life, like paying off loans, getting a mortgage, finding a partner, raising children, many of us decide to set our dreams aside.  Eventually we work hard and move up, from the beginning till the end, in our 40s we start blaming one another for not having the vision and strength to carry forward.  And then we come to accept fate and become serene for the rest of our journeys in our 60s.  At the end, do you have the keys with you?

Where are you and your keys?

I read the story and something switched today, thought it’d be nice to share with you.  Thanks for swinging by.

Someone made me happy today, and I thought I was happier and I defined that as (1+x%)happy. And then I was asked ‘can you be more than 1 happy?’

Got me thinking,

Happiness is a 1/0 thing.
Imagine you are a happy person, you make someone happy, and that someone makes someone else happy, like butterfly effect it triggers down.

1/0 happiness seems like a probable notion. Sorry it does sound like an xkcd strip :).

But something said by a yogi inspired me the other day, ‘Have no fear. Not courage, because courage is a reaction to fear. Have no fear, and peace be with you. And that is beautiful’.

So it got me to conclude that ‘Be not sad. Not happy, because being happy is a reaction to sadness’.

Well doesn’t make too much sense, does it? I think it’s time for a good glass of wine.

A wonderful thoughtful exercise created by Erik on Flickr, beautiful.

‘The water of the valley stream is always flowing.  It races on, not pausing for even an instant.  Its sound, to me, is the sound of time.

The water of time glistens on the riverbed of the universe.  Though theirs is a much slower flow, Human beings and all things that have life flow.  Thought and culture, too, flow.  That all these appear to be unchanging is but illusion.

We make every effort to keep things as they are, because human beings, alone, lament transience. Yet no matter how we grieve or protest, there is no way to impede the flow or anything.  If we but see things as they are and flow with them, we may find enjoyment in transience.  Because human life is transient, all manner of figures are woven into its fabric.

[...]

When we listen subconsciously to the sound of flowing water, does it not seem to create a rhythm?  Yet not a single drop of water passes over the same rock twice, and the murmur of water rushing over a rock is constantly changing.  Sameness is but an illusion of the human ears, eyes, mind.  Water has once flowed along a riverbed can never retrace its course. Human life is no different.  It is only our mundane eyes and minds that see yesterday as being the same as today.

Enlightened eyes and minds should recognise that each moment has a form different from that of any other moment.’

Shundo Aoyama. (2001).  Zen Seeds (pp 1-2). Tokyo: Kosei Publishing Limited.

Buddhism maintains that the source of suffering is our inability to accept impermanence.  In ’secular’ geek terms, you won’t wake up thinking that all the data of your unback-up hard disk can be all gone for no reasons.  Obviously I cannot articulate as beautifully as Aoyama in her book Zen Seeds, hence reading her book is like looking at flaking candle flame for the first time – so magical, but yet so natural and non-contrieved.  I wish we possess enlightened eyes and minds and recognise that each moment IS different, be peaceful, see that there is nothing we can do and enjoy it as just it is.

Okay Staples tagged me on this meme on the five things that keep me in check, so get ready for my reflective post!

My five things:

1. Talking to friends and family – I need to *share* my life, whether it’s something ups or downs, news just random ephiphanies.  My friends make me happy and calm me down.  And I hope I have the same effects on them…

2. Exercise – Yoga, running and a bit of resistence training and random classes – anything that makes me move and sweat is good!  I am a keen believer that sweating once a day makes you happy.  And pushing your body a little further from its comfort zone also builds confidence.  Doesn’t seem to be that direct but once you start doing that, you can’t do any less!

3. Quality food – vegetables, fruits, lots of fibre and occassion freshly grilled salmon fillet with honey and mustard saurce or freshly steamed sea bass with ginger and spring onion… the list goes on!  Good, fresh food makes me super happy, and feel good too.  Sadly I have to confess that I need my occassional dose of McDonald’s fillet O’Fish.  Horrible, I know.  Sometimes I even get migrane the next day I have one, but it’s sooooo delicious.  Oh well.

4. Detox your skin – When I first came to London I get irritated by the low humidity and the lime-rich water.  It was only when I realised at a ski trip that by going to sauna and exercise crazy for 6 days, my skin restores itself!  Skin is definitely the largest organ in the body and when you treat it nicely but proper exercise (sweat), exfoliation and moisturisation, you get happier too!

5. Thinking about thinking – this is key.  Sometimes people call that meta-cognition, it’s the ability to analyse you own thinking critically.  I am chicken-little – super risk adverse and sensitive, so very little thing can make me very stressed out, obsessed for a while, or just down for a bit.  But sometimes if I think about, ‘hey if i were xxx in the same situation, or if it’s not me in the situation but xxx, how I would be feeling now?’.  Having this mind-floating experience helps calm me down and makes me realise the importance of not to sweat over small stuff.  And everything is small stuff.

Finally as my yoga teacher said yesterday during the meditation, ‘Think about what really you are, instead of the external pressure that try to tell you what you need to be.  What is it that you truly want?  Who are the real you?‘

What are your top 5?

Blogs are great for asynchronous communications and documenting your streams of thoughts.  But when everything is within a few clicks from search, your blogs are who you are to many.  Recently I have been struggling to assess what I want to do with this blog.  So i’ve done some research – what blogs are for to you guys?

1. A professional window to share your knowledge and join the conversation

Social Media Gurus like Jeremiah Owyang use blogs as his professional medium for outreach and aggregates information as well as shares knowledge.  By opening up his blogs on various topics, he manages to attract a critical audience of the social media industry while also puts himself in the spot light among the social media practitioners.

To me it’s a bit like what Chris Rock says about relationship, ‘For the first three months, you are not you.  You are a representative of you.’  Probably blogs are not an ideal medium to fully represent who you are (i.e. no drunk photos, please), but blogs are much better medium as the representation of one’s professional self.  Great for networking, industrial visibility, connection with the like-minded.

2. A scrapbook on what you are reading and interested in

Christian Heilman (aka CodePo8, Yahoo! Developer Network’s EU evangelist) sees blogs as a place where he tosses all the pieces he thinks of in one place where he may have to refer back to. Blogs to him are his scrapbook (and obviously the world is his playground). :)  Umber lady geek DivineMissN (who dearly saves delicious bookmarks for me, literally thanks!) is definitely a queen in blog-cious-streaming. Whoops.  Did I just create a new word?

3. A platform for you to keep in touch with people that works better with pull information rather than push

Remember those friends that call you at 11:30 pm and keep on rambling about how their lives are (completely disregard of whether you are busy or, dare to say, care or not)?  Blogs are great medium to share what you are up to, especially for geeks on the go – you might not have the time or enough drives to call someone up and talk about BarCamp London and how it’d go – but once you blog about it, people who care will find you and will keep in the loop on what you do.  And better yet – it only takes them 2’secs to leave you a comment, or track-back if they’re blogging anyway.  Great for keeping in touch with people that you kinda care, but not enough to pick up the phone.  (Note: I am not saying that calling someone or meeting someone for a coffee is bad – but there are friends that you do truly care while you just really want to know that they do well, and you are perfectly aware that they work 14 hours a day!).  However, it seems that Facebook does serve very well for this purpose for the non-bloggers in this world… So does Twitter.

4. An alternative medium outside emails and phone that helps open communications and reduce correspondence volume

Luis Suarez, the star of IBM social software branch, is known for his say-no-to-email initiative that inspired my last blog post.  Although I get mixed feedbacks from you guys, it is hard to refute the idea that we save time to build information on top of existing one, rather than to create information from scratch.  Wikipedia is a good example.  Documenting information about Hong Kong on Wikipedia is likely to benefit thousands of internet users, as opposed to those junior highschool projects where you start from scratch and only your parents and your teachers get to see what you’ve accomplished.  Not to mention no one else can build on top of you brilliant work.  Because of the hypertext-trackable nature of blogs, it is obviously a great medium for knowledge to be documented and grow on one and others while benefiting anyone who care enough to check out the strain of information.

5. A personal yet paradoxically open space for you to share emotions that you might not share with your mom, but in a form of poems with people you may never meet

Are you ready for this?  I’m getting contentious, as usual.  Blogs can be an environment similar to the Alcoholic Anonymous clubs – where you meet people that you never knew, but who are going through the same kind of issues at the same time as you do and would really love to hear about your emotions, experience and feedbacks, vice versa.  A good use of blogs in this context is MacMillan’s use of blogs for cancer patients and their family to share what they go through.  Just like [hypothetically example, totally] your highschool best friend might take no interests in your stress in planning for a Bali holiday when she’s about to be sacked from her investment bank (and hence you go to tripadvisor instead of calling her), blogs become this paradoxically open space for people to share their most intimate reflections, thoughts, doubts and dreams.

Now, what is your blog? Probably this question is much easier to be answered in retrospect than when you set out to start a blog.  For me (yup it’s all about me me me here, I’m sorry), I am stuck because my blog has always been my personal playground, scrapbooks, and thinking pads to share some very naunced reflections.  But working in the social media industries, gathering all the insights and learnings, I feel bad not sharing those with a wider audience outside my firm.

You might ask, what’s stopping me?  Well, being a keen observer on the sociology of collaboration, and as someone who is hyper risk adverse (which makes me a good social policy paranoid), I have, frankly, no appetitte for unfriendly strangers.  Let me give you an example. Kathy Sierra, an amazing techkie lady who founded the Creating Passionate Users blog, attracted an amazing crowd of followers and supporters, and I was truly very inspired and concurred with her observations and learnt a lot from her.  Sadly she stopped her blog at the peak if its development due to malicious personal threats.  Why?  In Chinese, we say that ‘Being at the peak also brings you frosty chills’.  It’s great to have the attention of the people that think alike, who care about the future of technologies, pursuing our passions, being people closers.  But we must not forget that there are those who are hurt, angry, and frustrated.  The more prominent you are, the more likely you attract those attention as well.

All in all, I feel comfortable enough back to blogging now.  And probably there is no point about pre-determining and risk-assessing everything you do.  Or perhap there is?  Don’t have the answers here.  Thanks for bearing with this long post.  Hope you have a great time blogging, sharing, and learning from one another.

I always thought that chimps are beautiful animals, especially the silver black ones, until I came across Howard Bloom’s article from Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace on ‘Who’s smarter: chimps, baboons, or bacteria? The power of Group IQ.’ [thanks Lok for bringing over the stone-heavy book all the way!!]

The article is fascinating not just because of the chimps, but also Bloom’s argument on why Group IQ matters – defines by how well animals adapt, solve practical problems and hence their chances of survival. I’ll get back to the chimps in a minute, but let’s start with Bloom’s mesmerising argument – bacteria is definitely his favourite among the three. Imagine billions of years ago when ‘each asteroid that thwomped it, the earth woggled like a pudding. [p.255]‘ Bacteria re-engineered itself to ingest granite, and that’s pretty impressive. Always groups as trillion, and functions in as trillion, bacteria adapts by being truly the first parallel distributed processing system even before human came around.

With this, think of computing system invented by us, human, homo sapien – we have only learnt to harness the power of parallel distributed processing in computing in the last couple of decades, and in collaboration through the internet in very recent time (e.g. Wikipedia, Project Glutenberg, FLOSS etc). It’s ironic that we seem to be inventing something new but we are yet actually only starting to mirror the law of nature in its most fundamental way?

Going back to the chimps – Bloom points out another key point – he thinks baboons are second to bacteria to have higher group IQ than chimps despite their smaller brains. Can you guess why?

Baboons functions as groups in hundreds where chimps only functions in dozens. Hence once a rare-breed baboon who has a hacker-mentality (i.e. non-conforming, curious, wanders and constantly seeking new ways to do thing), survival hacks efficiently spread to hundreds of baboons. This comes rare in Chimps. So when human (aren’t we evil?) replace the forest with dumps, baboons adapted to good finds in dumps, where as chimps did not.

Now ready for the sad part? When baboons split in opposing groups, they might hurt one another but they don’t wipe one another out. But when chimps split into groups – they kill all the males of the opposing gropus, and only leave the ‘most delicious and fertile’ female. In human terms, the pursue of systemic genocide.

And guess what (you probably know already) – chimps and human share ~99% of gene. Perhaps size doesn’t really matter, does it?

Sometimes updates like this make me suspect that if it’s me being dumb, or new solutions have become too convoluted.  Older versions of Wordpress by default have a simple menu option of ‘blogrolls’ where you show off your links, and the changes are reflected one you hit the ’save’ button. Very simple and slick.

But since version 2.5, ‘Widgets’ are introduced, and the original ‘blogroll’ menu button is gone. In general I like the new admin interface, but it is almost a nightmare to find out where to change/update, or hide/show your blogrolls. Given my frustration I decided to share the new changes.

The main difference is, updated blogrolls in 2.6 has become a two-steps, separate process.

1. Go to ‘Manage’ -> ‘Links’:

Make sure you click on the number on the right hand side instead of the word ‘Blogroll’ itself, since it will take you to changing your definition of ‘Blogroll’ (such as renaming, adding description) instead of the links themself.  Update your blogroll links from there, you can also rename ‘blogroll’ to anything and define different catagories here.

2. Then navigate to ‘Design’ -> ‘Widget’

Make sure ‘Links’ is one widget that you have enabled, and ‘Save Changes’.  This step is to ensure your sidebar shows ‘links’ (aka ‘blogrolls’).  Yes, confusing, I know…

Ta! Can’t believe it took me 45 minutes to figure this out, but a general search shows that quite a lot of people share the same frustration.  I still love you though, Wordpress.

Spend your every minute as if it’s your last one.

You think that’s a cliche until someone you care might be leaving you for good.

Dave kindly spotted Kate Reider’s story,

I read a very sad story today about a young, female singer-songwriter from my hometown. Her name is Katie Reider. She developed a rare facial tumor that took away her ability to perform, her left eye, and eventually her voice.

Her brother, Rob, was a classmate of mine and a fantastic guitar player. He was one of the rare people that managed quiet confidence and self-awareness even in high school. I remember being really impressed when he won a local ‘best guitarist’ contest on the local hard rock radio station — when his entry was played entirely on acoustic guitar.

Anyway, this site is dedicated to exposing Katie’s music to 500K people in one year. I highly encourage you to go there, read her story, and download Katie’s songs for a small $1 donation. If you like Patty Griffin, The Weepies or The Swell Season you will like Katie. Her albums are also available on iTunes, just search Katie Reider.

I urge you to visit the site, scroll through the photos and witness how Kate fought her battle, listen to her music and ponder on what really means to be here and now.  I was profoundly moved – hope you feel the same.