I borrowed an i-mate to capture some small thoughts of our trip as we traveled. I didn’t write much because even with the K-JAM’s QWERTY keyboard it was pretty painful to type.

First a precious few thoughts from near the end of our flight into Istanbul. 20+ hours of travel, the second part of which, with a higher majority of Turks onboard was much rowdier than I’ve ever been used to on a flight.

We are one hour from Istanbul and the flights children are getting restless. Feels a bit like a family birthday party - a bit much after 20 something hours of travel and a full-on work day before that.

Our first challenge once we are free from the airport will be to tram to Sultanahmet and try locate our hotel. We will likely walk past the blue mosque and other locations of interest along the way but the yearn for a hot shower should stymie the temptation to linger too long.

Tomorrow’s tour should see us back there anyway but with someone who knows what we are looking at.

Later in the trip I revisited the memory of our first day and wrote a second document on the K-JAM - this time evidentially more stalwart, more determined to capture my thoughts…

Arriving in Istanbul airport saw us stumbling around until another traveller, a german I think, confirmed our feeling that a visa was required. No trouble, they are purchased for 20 lira right next to immigration.

A wait in a throng of european tourists and then we were through hurtling into the airport, bags arrived at the conveyor belt just after we did and so after all that flight we had slipped easily into Turkey without a hitch. A friendly Turk at the info desk pointed us to the metro and showed us our line and changeover on the map.

The metro is modern, efficient and runs on time. We experienced a brief amount of confused delay at the changeover as we searched for corresponding names on our map but nothing too stressful though as it was still mid afternoon and the weather was perfect and we were soon on the correct tram to Sultanahmet.

From the Sultanahmet tram stop you could spy the minuets of the Blue Mosque. To welcome us, it almost seemed, the prayer song began to ring out from the speakers placed atop each of the mosques towers and we were drawn towards it like argonauts to the sirens.

The clerics voice was alternating from tower to tower to create an omnipresent effect and did I mention it was maddeningly loud? Deliriously tired by this point and knowing we could only be not more than 100 metres to our hotel it became impossible to think clearly to determine how we could locate the small street our hotel was located on when the map we had did not name small streets.

We decided to sit and wait the cleric out in the beautiful warm environment however when it was obvious the cleric had much puff and as far as we knew might continue throughout the afternoon we started looking for other maps. Found them - covered in calamine lotion of course. Note to self; carrying containers storing liquids in a plastic bag is always a good idea. Try do that next time.

Hotel found, only a step or two off the main street we were quickly checked in and up to our room, remembering too late the guide books advice to tip the bag boy. Exhausted we soon were snoozing. I woke a few times feeling guilty we were sleeping through the end of what appeared to be a stunningly beautiful day in Istanbul but the exhaustion of 40 waking hours won out.

Well that feels good to have got that to print (its been trapped in the phone for weeks waiting for my rescue). I hope to follow up later (probably days, hopefully not weeks) with more fragments of my trip and a few photos at some later point as the trip for me was quite perfect and magical.

Catchy title maybe; but hopefully anyone who is or will be experimenting with Twitter might consider this post and draw some value out of it.

The Steve Rubels and Robert Scobles of this blogoworld (notice its hard to refer to virtual domains, I keep choosing different ways to refer to the world of online information, I will continue to until I find one I like) are heralding Twitter’s importance via their virtual pulpits. After about a month of my own experimentation with the service I suggest tread with some caution when signing up for Twitter alerts to your phone or workplace IM.

For a basic description on Twitter see my previous post  ‘Tweets are the Ultimate in Disposable Content’.

Few of us have jobs which benefit from that much interuption and very little of the content available through Twitter currently could concievabley be relevant to our minute-to-minute activities at work. We cannot draw the same value out of the content as those whose jobs it is to evangelize web usage and cannot benefit from the immediacy of republishing new technologies the minute they hit blogland. I am not saying the hype around Twitter is necessarily wrong - there is useful or entertaining information on it but , like blogs it will be more useful to you at a time when you choose, for a task you determine.

As I covered in my earlier post, the value the author places on their own words is linked to the audience’s percieved value of the content. Lets put it this way there will never be twittershelves built for storing your favourite tweets from the Shakespeare’s and Dylan Thomas’s of our times. You will wait for them to publish a book and then you will buy that for your bookshelf because you know that a book will be the fruits of their considered thought and effort.

I think acknowledging that this will be how people value individual content items on Twitter will also will drive how people value Twitter overall. One of the key variables in the Twitter value equation is in the timeliness of the information - only timely information that truly provides value in being timely will serve the audience. This is not to say there wont continue to be a constant streams of banal chatter… it just means that this content will have an erosive impact on the audience - taking more from them than it gives.

To avoid being owned by your inflow of everyone’s presence information I’d suggest for now, switch it off. Then, have a think about what you will get out of it and how you might distill this information source down to an information flow that is there when you need it at a rate that will truly benefit you.

Steve Rubel has good suggestions about how to filter and utilize content (see his Gmail nerve center articles) however remember, he takes this stuff to the extreme. I don’t know enough about the particulars of his job to comment but for own jobs, I suggest thinking about what your job entails and determine how much of a need there really is to be up to the minute with all the comings and going of the internet.

Is this actually something you could catch up on once a week (or even a month!) and instead spend those valuable minutes or hours lost to Twitteruptions and use them to being productive in the actual tasks pertininent to you being a valuable employee (or betting on the dogs, whichever suits you best)?

I am interested in other people’s experiences with Twitter - let me know if you are using it, wont use it or stopped using it.

In the realm of written content there has always been a relationship between how much work went into the piece and the depth to which consumers engage with it. Now I know this may sound like a gelatinous concept but bear with me as I explain.

Books generally render deeper, more memorable experiences than magazines; magazines more than newspapers; newspapers more than pamphlets etc. But even these pulpier written forms will yield more attention (and retention) from the reader than content on the web.

The rise of the blog has introduced an even faster medium which is more catered to scanning and bulk consumption - sort of like reading’s equivalent of fast food.

The active nature of computer screens mean reading from them is tiring and the sheer amount of content available without the physical restrictions of the real universe mean content can be shifted and consumed much quicker. We write content so it can be easily scanned - we try to remove anything that might cause friction with the user getting our core messages. The messages themselves can be delivered in many ways, in bite-size chunks. You do not interact the same way with this information as you would a book or magazine.

To help picture what I mean - imagine working your way through the same amount of individual texts as you have in your most recent blog reading session and then imagine doing that using a paper-based media. You are in a bookstore, tearing through page after page, jumping from book to book like a maniac, leaving a wake of cast-aside material trailing behind you. You move through content like pacman through pellets.

The atomicised web-based content accelerates our desire to move through content quickly looking for small morsels of cerebral nourishment, each nugget of which can excite a brief sensation of satisfaction. These small rewards encourage a desire for more as well as an impatience with content that doesn’t instantly satisfy.

This is not to say that there is not great content on the web, there is plenty, but the best content knows what it is, it knows how much attention the user has to give - for similar reasons, McDonalds never tried to sell you McCaviar.

Well it was only a matter of time. I have now recieved the demands from the blackmailers.

Of course I’ve kept the police out of it as per standard blackmail practice. May be if I just do what Genes Reunited wants it will give me back my ancestors?

I just got the following in my gmail…

It so happened that I’d been wondering what happened to my ancestors, and now, according to this ransom email, apparently its Genes Reunited that has them. I am not sure what they want them for but I want it known that I plan not to negotiate.

You can’t give these people an inch - even if they’ve got your ancestors.

I was mucking around on 43things.com recently. I thought this was pretty funny…

It reminded me of that classic scene in ‘The Life of Brian’:

Brian pleading to his followers ‘…You are all different!’ making a point about them not needing to follow anyone.

‘We are all different!’ they return, agreeably.

‘I’m not!’ cries a dissenter in Godelian irony.

Now as far as I understand it, 43things.com is about listing things you have yet to do… arguably if you are one of 73 others wishing to be unique you are possibly already having difficulties. More likely, of course, the other 72 put ‘be unique’ in just to see how many others had, meaning there’s probably 72 other blog posts with a similar screenshot to above.

Maybe I’ve got more work to do than I thought…

In these days of Google-mania it seems that Google has become the ultimate yardstick. I think this is strange as there is nothing standard about Google - it is the outlier, the edge-case and not definitely not representative of the market at large.

An unreasonable amount of speculation around Google and the companies seen to compete with them has an unnatural effect on people’s interpretation of the state of a business or validity of a strategy.

We’ve seen google become a verb (and yes people are googling on Yahoo as well) but to me the past-tense variation of this verb (’googled’) has another meaning, that of companies affected (positively or negatively) by the overblown nature of the Google-myth at present. To put this word in context I think Yahoo is currently being partially ‘googled’. ‘googled’, to a company undergoing this phenomenon, is probably also a synonym of any number of slang words for coitus.

Google products entering new spaces cause people both inside and outside companies in the same space to make irrational decisions. Strategies change, stock prices drop and, from my experience, often for naught - many companies will report that Google entering their space, despite their initial panic and countless crisis meetings, actually saw an upturn in their own businesses.

A phrase I have always been fond of is ‘the elephant in the room‘. It evokes a brilliantly comic scene in my mind of some very sincere looking people talking whilst carefully ignoring an elephant which is perched in the corner of the room. This image visits me frequently when reading discussion about the state of the Yahoo business. It seems that many posters, enamoured with the creativity of Google’s endless list of products, fail to acknowledge the presence of the most successful publisher on the internet.

I certainly don’t want to downplay the issues at Yahoo, they clearly have structural issues which need to be addressed but I can’t help but just point at that friggin elephant that just sits there quietly blinking in the corner. Its a room with glass windows so the general public can see the elephant and they actually spend quite a bit of their time looking at it. It collects their mail for them, provides them news, helps them shop… sure, it looks like a patchwork quilt because many groups of talented frankenstein-like specialists helped put him together whilst carefully avoiding talking to eachother… but he’s always doing more for the public and his public go to him first when they are in need of information or a tool.

Meanwhile, us, the industry-types, the money-people, the other animals in this room are all looking at the chimpanzee that can poop primary colors and are throwing it peanuts.