I have been signing up to all sorts of web2.0 tools looking for a way to leverage my list of feeds. Many tools come close but have yet to offer quite the functionality with the level of completeness I have been after.

Matt Cutts, on commenting about the new Google customised search features, had this insight to share…

When I played with the first version, I wanted to avoid the standard stuff
where you plug in 1-2 sites and get a custom search engine that isn’t
blood-pounding-ly exciting (”Oh, a search box, and it searches. Great.”). So
what I did was take my feeds (I was using Bloglines at the time) and exported it
as an OPML file. Running a command like
cat export.opml | grep "title="
| cut -d'"' -f6 | grep -v '^$' | sort | uniq
was enough to get the
blog urls that I was reading (not the feed urls), and I threw those urls into
the custom search engine.

And just like that, *BOOM* I had a search engine that
covered 70+ blogs in the search/SEO industry. If I searched for [bug], it would
return search engine bugs, not bugs in general. OPML-import was so much fun that
the Co-op folks promised to support it (I know that importing from Bloglines
works; importing from Google Reader might still need a tweak to the OPML
parsing). It’s nice that every blogger can have a custom search engine that is
centered around their interests.

Smart guy, cuts straight through the gloss to a key use of this functionality. Hopefully they support a regular OPML import/sync from a fixed url (say a public newsgator OPML file…) so I can keep an engine up to date based purely on my web development blogs.

Combine that with certain del.icio.us links and now I have a massive information resource minus the majority of noise (you see I am not in the habit of bookmarking splogs and the like…).

In the mean time my dummy spit over that post still has me looking at other engines… A suggestion from a commenter got me back looking at snap.com. I’ve gotta say - its actually a joy to use! A recommend giving it a shot, its got liberal use of web2.0 features but in ways that really aid usability. The best feature by far being keyboard support.

Robert Nyman wrote recently about the difficulty to get buy-in for accessible web pages. His article speaks to a greater issue however of the difficulty for organisations to address the detail of generating quality. I define quality to mean not only those aspects of a products finish that benefit an end-user but also those that benefit those that support and maintain a product.

The strategic decision makers often talk to short-term benefits as reasons
for taking short-cuts on quality. Sometimes I think the Google Offline Spider’s Archive maybe handy in settling once and for all how the short term thinking had lead to issues such as poor stickiness or excessive bug reports or that high exit rate from page x.

I have had various QA tester and QA Manager roles in my past (it was even my entry into my current company!). From this vantage point it often feels like the last thing anyone wants outside QA is a quality product.

Things aren’t generally that bad - of course once you experience different roles around the workplace you do realise that quality is being achieved despite conflicting incentives. I’ve done in-the-trenches development (I continue to moonlight with this every once in awhile to satisfy my hobby interest and to make sure I maintain a reasonable understanding of the work at hand), content direction and production, marketing and various managerial roles as well.

Developers and content producers generally are striving for quality in the face of deadlines, distractions and the conservative decisions of their managers (spending time on both sides of the fence I acknowledge that sometimes those decisions represent excellent risk management and othertimes fear/laziness of disturbing the status quo). Managers deal with distraction, the competing needs of other managers, the goals of the organisation and that estimating accurately is HARD.

In my post detail versus perspective I had discussed the trap of fiddling with details whilst the truly valuable contribution to the success of your organisation languished. This is not in conflict with achieving quality in your work as often quality (attention to detail, usability, accessibility, reusability, literate code - whatever it is that provides ongoing benefit inside and out of your ogranisation) is that truly valuable contribution.

So how do we all ensure we contribute to an overall environment of quality? There is no way to guarantee it but you can certainly do more than ‘your little bit’. To understand and facilitate others in their efforts to contribute to the quality of the product of your workplace is important. If QA request consideration to their workload and throughput then give it. In fact support any of your domain experts when they are suffering friction from decision makers when trying to address issues within their domain. And evangelize the aspects of quality that are key to your own domain succeeding.

This post is not going to be the tipping point for this blog however it is interesting to think about which one might. The beauty of setting up a blog is that it is almost like writing a secret journal and then leaving it behind, open on a bus. You are really writing for yourself in the first few posts - or even worse - for no one, not even yourself (see my soccer posts for a case in point ). But I did not start this blog for myself - I am familiar enough with my own ideas that it is redundant to write them down purely for my own edification.

I read most of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point last year. I didn’t finish it because I felt it was a fairly flawed work however I did rapidly finish all of (the not-un-flawed) Freakonomics. What was it that I felt unsatisfied about with Tipping Point? Afterall I believed in the concepts Gladwell was discussing - they led me to the book in the first place. Unfortunately Gladwell spends too much time trying to be compelling.

My first annoyance with this book came with the Paul Revere annectdote - something that Gladwell returned to so often that I eventually threw the book down the reference after the reference that caused me to utter “If he mentions Revere one more time…” (you can add fist waving to your mental image if you want to).

Excuse me, everyone else, for a sec… Malcolm, if you ever read this - the Revere annectdote was weak and unverifiable. You chose it because it was something close to the American psyche - a story parents told to kids. For chrissake - Revere is not just his name - it describes how the American public relates to the legend of this man. It worked from an illustrative standpoint however you drew it too close to the core of your argument by so regularly returning to it. With artifice at the core your book felt as compelling as the news they wrap fish and chips up with.

Freakonomics appealed to me more as it stands as more than just opinion supported by fairytales. It is not without its own transgressions from the objective to the subjective but only a fool would expect any work to be purely objective. This wouldn’t have mattered for Tipping Point if it was purely a documentation of the phenomena of social inflections. However part of its appeal was that it explored how ideas travelled and how small changes could lead to big ones. Of course that is appealing, it smacks of efficiency, of complexity theory and most of all it hinted at a magic well of infinite success if such phenomena could be harnessed.

But I didn’t believe the Paul Revere story the first time. I didn’t think I needed to - I saw it as a great illustrative story which could be supported by actual research. I didn’t expect it to be used to prop up the research! Most telling was the coincidental cross-over between Freakonomics and Tipping Point. Both discussed the extraordinary drops in crime in New York.

Gladwell posited that the Broken Windows policy of Mayor Giuliani was responsible. Freakonomics much more convincingly put forward the idea that changes in abortion laws twenty years earlier as a reason for the reduction in crime. Big changes versus small changes. It seems to make sense that the work put in should be closer to the magnitude of the resulting flow-on changes.

Broken Windows policy is not a small policy to implement however it is piecemeal. It doesn’t confront the root cause of a problem but rather addresses smaller outward manifestations of it. I liken it to the The Sorceror’s Apprentice. Or a knight trying to fight an infinite-headed hydra. The truth is you cannot expect to affect change by pushing around the edges. Changes in abortion laws meant less children growing up in broken homes. That meant less disadvantage and eventually less crime. It didn’t mean making small changes and relying on some magic flow of social change to catch on pay it forward.

All that makes sense to me and my experience thus far. Do I believe it? Not really. Not yet. Its a set of ideas to continue exploring. Just because Malcolm Gladwell can’t enlighten me to the mysteries of complexity doesn’t mean I don’t think knowledge of how things interact can lead to an advantage. I hope to explore some of these ideas (and many others) here. If the world can truly be manipulated (and my theorizing concludes that it can) then by rights, hard work should get these writings to an audience that is wider than my social sphere. The goal is to accelerate my learning and to feed that back.

Damn its good not to have written about Soccer. Bring on Italy.