Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

As I am new to the blog world as a writer (not a reader), I am now enjoying getting notified with TrackBacks to my posts. Not only I amazed about how people has even found my posts after just few days blogging, but it also letting my find some other interesting people on blogsphere. The latest one came from Noah which I met at Mind Camp as he co-organize with Ario the session on information overload that I attended. In his recap of MindCamp he linked (or should I say tracked back?) to my recap on that session and that let me find out the blogs of the two organizers. I am really bad for names so I have a hard time remember the names of most of the people I talked to and very few people were exchaging business cards, something I got really used to do after so many years in Japan.

I can see in his blog that Noah is also reading Getting Things Done which was discussed at the session and is waiting me in my mailbox in Seattle so I can start reading it this weekend when I am back there.

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Alex Barnett has put together an OPML list with the blogs of the attendees of the Seattle Mind Camp (thanks Alex!!). You can get the file here. Unfortunately, it does not work in my computer unless I take the first two lines out, it gives a syntax error there. My RSS Reader (Jet Brains Omea) will also not read it unless I remove those first two lines and the same issue displaying it in my browser. At first I thought that the issue was because I am using a Japanese OS laptop but today I tried on Jim’s laptop (a US one) and he is having the same problem. I do not want to edit the file locally but point to the one in the server so when Alex updates it the changes will get reflected in my RSS Reader as well (that is in fact one of the cool things of having a OPML file) so modifying the local one is not a solution. The error says that the tag xml:stylesheet in the second line is invalid. Any one having problems with this or has any idea of the solution?

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I attended the meeting organized by Chris Phirillo were he was showing gada.be (a search engine that is like the Web 2.0 version of Meta Crawler) and that was supposed to be about OPML. On the gada.be topic, I think that the cool part of it is the idea of using the URL as a way to pass the search term. That is really innovative and I have not seen it anywhere else and it will certainly help when you are in a low bandwidth device (avoid going to the search engine page first) or on a small device like a cell phone (less typing). I also like how OPML is used as the main interface, that allows me to track a particular search topic from my RSS Reader using multiple sources without myself manually adding different feeds as I was doing so far. As for aggregating search results, there is nothing much new there (besides searching into Web 2.0 sites rather than just the "conventional" search engines) and the real value added I think that will come if the site can actually cluster or merge the search results and provide a consolidated view rather than a laundry list of all results. Meta Crawler actually does a decent job on this (yes, they are still around). Chris mention that he is looking at adding this into the future so look forward to see it. On the OPML discussion, I think that people focused too much on the technology itself rather on the problem which again is how to get access to the information that we need, deal with the information overload and avoid the inherent biased provided by any particular search engine. When the discussion was getting interested, we were kicked out by the people coming to the same space for the next meeting. Other interesting thing is that while we were having this deep discussion on OPML there were projecting Manga on a wall in the room next to us, welcome to the world of Mind Camp….

Btw, here is a pick from that session where Jim and I are sitting on the far right.

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One of the discussions that I attended at Seattle Mind Camp was about how to deal with the information overload that we are suffering these days, emails, blogs, Web sites, more emails, more blogs, you know. Well, I went there thinking that I was going to get to know all this neat tools that will help me be more efficient reading blogs or dealing with email and what I took from there were pretty good low tech advices like the following:

l         Forget about complex rules to categorize email and just separate incoming email in two folders, the emails that you are in the To: line (higher priority) and the ones that you are in the CC: line (lower one)

l         Do not read your email certain work hours a day and have someone else letting you know whether there is anything urgent that you need to take care during those hours (assuming that person also gets copied on the same important emails that you get)

l         Follow the Get Things Done methodology. This actually has a tech component since you can get an Outlook plugin to do so. I already bought the book and once I finished it I will report about it here. The plugin has a cool button that says “Delegate” which is already creating nightmares into one of my direct reports that was with me in that meeting (hello, Jim, are you reading?).

l         If you travel and you cannot read your blogs so you get thousand of unread one’s when you are back, just mark all as read and assume that if there was something really cool there someone else will tell you. Do not attempt to catch up reading (I have done that and I can tell you that you can spend the whole weekend doing that).

l         Use the phone more often rather than relying just on email for communication.

l         And the best one, have an upper bound on how many blogs you read, let’s say 20. If you really want to read a new blog, give up on some other one from your RSS reader list.

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Jim and I were one of the many people that got lost following Google Maps instructions to go to Mind Camp. In our case, it was even worst because we were following Google’s instructions with my laptop being online via my 3G Verizon PCMCIA card but we also had a GPS in his car (a Garmin I think) that pointed us to exactly the same wrong place. Why? Very simple, both Google and that GPS receiver use the underlying data from the same data provider, Navteq. So it is Navteq’s fault that we got lost, not Google.

Lot’s of people in the meeting were claiming that Google is evil (wasn’t their motto “don’t do evil” and wasn’t Microsoft the evil one? How quickly things change in a couple of years….) but in this case is not their fault that we got lost.

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Too much has been post already about this in spite of only finish two days ago so I will be brief (see the Seattle PI article for a good summary or search for mindcamp10 in technorati). It was a very cool gathering, I had a lot of fun and I want to attend again in six months when Andru organizes this again (big thanks Andru!!). I went there with Jim, Michael and Kirk from my company (and yes, we also got lost by looking at Google Maps, more on this on a separate post). I really like the format (a self-organizing event) and how that facilitated the free flow of discussion. Some of the meetings were more structured (Jeff Barr even had pretty slides in his Amazon’s Mechanical Turk presentation) while other where more like everyone talking at the same time and going totally off topic in the middle but both styles were good in their own terms. The dinner was even better than I expected from a geek gathering (no microwaved pizza). I met a lot of interesting people as well which was my initial goal and I even hooked up again with a person I met two years ago in Tokyo and I had not seen since. I will be posting about some of the topics separately.

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