I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to manage my time and all the information that comes at me every day. I know a lot of you do too. Many of us run our own companies, are working on cool projects that absorb all of our attention, and are constantly trying to find balance.

In that light, then, the premise of Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age seems a bit out of left field. The idea is that we have so much free time we just don’t know what to do with ourselves, so in leiu of any better ideas, we watch a lot of TV. And if watched even slightly less TV, we’d have time to do things that actually mattered. Like edit Wikipedia. Or create lolcats. Or at least, that’s the premise on the face of it, which for me made the book difficult to read. Because I don’t watch a lot of TV. Nor does anyone I know. And anyway, what’s the  difference  between relaxing and recharging by watching a bit of TV vs. reading a book? Or enjoying the sunset. Or taking a nap.

More on all of that in a bit, but first, here are some thoughts I did get from the book that weren’t necessarily related to the implied premise,  but that I found way more interesting.

The rise of “citizen journalism”

Shirky points to many examples where the ability of regular citizens to become reporters of the world around them has led to amazing things. And it’s true. Iranians can tweet about the elections to let the world know what’s happening there. The Sudanese can text incident information to help organizations map out needs. These uses of technology are awesome, but I don’t know that they’re the result of a cognitive surplus. They didn’t come about because the Iranians and the Sudanese were watching too much television and found new uses of their time by way of technology. They came about because people had a new mechanism to capture and broadcast what was happening in their lives. Anne Frank didn’t have Twitter, so she used pen and paper.

The surplus here isn’t the time we spend watching TV. It’s increased access to technology. Shirky notes that “the chance that anyone with a camera will come across an event of global significance is simply the number of witnesses of the event times the percentage of them that have cameras.”

So much content: what to consume?

This idea of citizen journalism isn’t universally embraced. I was at an event a few weeks ago and listened in on a conversation about how blog content isn’t vetted and can’t really be relied upon in the same way that traditional journalism can. Shirky does address this, quoting what the novelist Harvey Swados said in 1951 of the advent of paperbacks:

“Whether this revolution in the reading habits of the American public means that we are being inundated by a flood of trash which will debase farther the popular taste, or that we shall now have available cheap editions of an ever-increasing list of classics, is a question of basic importance to our social and cultural development.”

Shirky notes we didn’t have to choose. We could have both. As it stands today with what’s available to us on the internet, be it vetted material from professionals, or ad-hoc creations from amateurs. In either case (and it’s really more of abroad spectrum than either/or), the same as with books or TV or any other type of information, it’s up to us to be careful consumers. Clay Johnson says we need to consciously consume. He asserts that our abundance isn’t with time, but with information. I know that’s certainly my situation. Time is the most precious possession I have, and I never seem to have enough of it. But information? I’ve got that in spades. It threatens to bury me alive.

In Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, David Lipsky recounts David Foster Wallace describing this back in 1996, even before we had Twitter and YouTube competing for our attention:

“I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. And how am I going to sort those you, you know? …I think a lot of people feel — not overhwelmed by the amount of stuff they have to do. But overwhelmed by the number of choices they have, and by the number of discrete, different things that come at them… the number of small insistent tugs on them, from a number of different systems and directions.”

As we are provided with more ways to create, we have more to sort through to consume.

Fail a lot in order to succeed

I first started thinking about the idea of valuing failure when reading the The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. In it, the author Eric Weiner describes how in Iceland, practically everyone is a painter or a poet at least in part because the Iclandic culture doesn’t have the same view of success and failure as the American one does. You don’t have to be a good painter to be a painter. Just paint! When you aren’t constrained by success metrics, you feel freer to try more things. Weiner writes “If you are free to fail, you are free to try.”

Shirky is advocating this idea as well. The act of creation is what’s important, even if it’s bad Charmed fan fiction. And while I certainly think anyone who wants to write poetry should go for it, I also find the notion of failing a lot in order to succeed to be interesting. We tend to fear failure.  Shirky describes how failure helps us succeed using a book metaphor: “If there was an easy formula for writing something that would become prized for decades or centuries, we wouldn’t need experimentation, but there isn’t, so we do.”

User-generated content: are we giving something up for free or getting something for free?

Shirky writes about services like YouTube and Flickr, “it can seem unfair for amateurs to be contributing their work for free to people who are making money from aggregating and sharing that work.” He notes Nicholas Carr’s use of the term “digital sharecropping” to describe how content creators are being potentially ripped off. But are they?  Shirky concludes that (amateur) content creators don’t mind because they are creating for love and not for money.

I dunno. I think that at least in some cases content creators don’t mind because they don’t look at it as “digital sharecropping” — giving away their labor to others who profit. They look at it as a fair exchange of services. The content creators get a place to host their work, the tools to share it with others, and wide visibility — for free! This is something was difficult, if not impossible, before the web, and something that we tended to pay fairly hefty prices for in the early days of the web. And this (mostly free) opportunity is what makes much of what Shirky celebrates in his book possible.

Why we share

Shirky references a 2006 NYU paper called “Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue” that describes what motivates us to voluntarily contribute to groups. In addition to personal motivations such as autonomy and competence, the paper describes social motivations around connectedness and sharing/generosity. Yahoo’s recently released reputation model addresses the personal motivations, but not the social ones. And the social ones can certainly be motivating. Shirky calls this, in part, “go[ing]  public to find people who think like you.” He says to ask of users:

• Are their desires for autonomy or competence being rewarded?
• Are their desires to feel connected or generous being rewarded?

He asks these questions to answer the question of why people would share, create, and build  communities, but I think they are also create questions to ask when building a new community and attempting to encourage user participation.

We don’t want things for the sake of those things; we want what those things provide

I think this is an important idea for anyone making any content available, building any product, appealing to any audience. Shirky brings this up to explain why older people would adopt email. It’s not that they wanted to try out the latest technology. They wanted what all of us want: to communicate with others. He writes “no one wants e-mail for itself, any more than anyone wants electricity for itself; rather, we want the things that electricity enables.”

But this notion goes well beyond his point. No one cares about your features or that you’ve worked really hard on your product or about all the data you’ve just made available as an XML file. They care about solving their problems, doing things that make them happy, making their lives better. Focus on how you can help your audience do those things and you’ve got their attention. (I talked about this during my 60 seconds as part of the Influencer Project.)

The value of combinability

Shirky writes “if you have a stick, and someone gives you another one, you have two sticks. If you have a piece of knowledge — that rubbing two sticks together in a certain way can make fire — you can do something of value you couldn’t do before.” And here too is another new surplus the culture of the web gives us. By sharing knowledge, tools, failures, successes, ideas, we can better combine them for sums much greater than the parts. He notes that the  community size has to be big enough, sharing has to be easy, there should be a common format or way of understanding the information, and then, there’s the last component, the one that technology can’t solve — people. Can we work well together? Do we understand each other, trust each other, want others to make what we do better?

Build rules as you need them

Don’t spend time creating a solution to a problem until you have a problem. I think this holds true of online communities, ways of iterating online products, and even building startups. When I started my company a couple of years ago, I didn’t set up any processes at all. I’m building them out now as I find I need them, based on experience of what’s been working and not. If I had set everything up in advance, I’d still be spending just as much time now adjusting it.

What about TV?

I think that if Shirky had relied less on the idea of using TV time for more productive things, the book would have been stronger. I clearly found much of what he wrote about interesting, but I got distracted every time he’d bring the point back to how dang much we watch television.

Shirky and I really aren’t so far apart on how we think about human behavior. He writes that “human motivations change little over the years, but the opportunity can change a little or a lot, depending on the social environment.” But then we diverge: “the raw material of this change is the free time available to us.” In truth, the stats point at televison viewing at an all time high over the same period that Shirky notes the explosion of creation and sharing online. We aren’t watching less TV in order to upload cute videos of our cat to YouTube. We’re doing both.

Do we really watch that much TV a day?

This was the first point that distracted me. I started wondering what those stats really mean. Most people I know who do watch TV tend to do it while they are getting ready for work in the morning, and eating breakfast, and writing their college essays. How much of that time is really spent solely in front of the TV? Because you can’t really make a lolcat in leiu of watching TV while you’re ironing your clothes.

David Foster Wallace talked about our excessive TV watching way back in 1990 in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction“. In that essay, he describes a 1985 book called Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life. This book paints a picture of a future world where TVs will not just feed what the broadcaster wants passively, but will be an “interactive net” of everyone’s TVs and we’ll go from “passive dependence” to everyone being “their own harried guy with earphones and clipboard”. The author, George Gilder writes, “we will, in short, be able to engineer our own dreams.”

The book’s portrait of how we would do that are different than what’s come to be, but the general idea isn’t so far off.

Is community engagement and creation really better than and a reasonable alternative to TV?

Shirky asserts that creation — any creation — is better than mere consumption. But is that true? Is creating a lolcat and sharing it really better than relaxing to an episode of 30 Rock? And what about the percentage of those hours we spend watching the news (or possibly The Daily Show) to learn about the world? I know that in my case, I watch TV when my brain is unable to do anything else. I’ve been working for 16 hours, I can’t even process words in books very well, and I need to distract my brain so that I can get some sleep. In those instances, I find TV useful in ways that editing Wikipedia couldn’t be.

Shirky notes, “the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.” Implying that a creative act always trumps acts of other kinds, I suppose. Explaining why it’s better to play World of Warcraft (acknowledging that some may think of this as “grown men and women sitting in their basements pretending to be elves”) than watch TV, he says “at least they’re doing something… however pathetic it is to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience: it’s worse to sit in your basement trying to decide whether Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.”

Maybe for Shirky it is. Not that I’m a TV apologist, but one could say the same of reading: it’s a solitary activity (generally more so than TV), you aren’t creating anything or doing anything as you read. Or as you sit on a bench and watch the water. As I wrote at the beginning, it’s the insistence in the book to always bring everything back to the time we waste on TV that I find fault with. I’m not at all saying that creating and sharing and being social are bad things.

And certainly too much TV is probably not great. Going back to Wallace again, who rather famously had a love/hate relationship with TV, likened television to candy.

“What if you ate it all the time? Real pleasurable, but it dudn’t have any calories in it. There’s something really vital about food that candy’s missing… There’s nothing sinister, the thing that’s sinister about it is the pleasure that it gives you to make up for what it’s missing is a kind of… addictive, self-consuming pleasure.”

And at least in part, he agreed with what Shirky would later focus on in this book, as well perhaps agree with me:

“It gives you a certain kind of pleasure that I would argue is fairly passive. There’s not a whole lot of thought involved, the thought is often fantasy like, ‘I am this guy, I’m having this adventure.” And it’s a way to take a vacation from myself for a while. And that’s fine — I think sort of the same way candy is fine.”

And perhaps Wallace also would agree with Clay Johnson’s assertion that our problems with information overload are around what and how we choose to consume. Wallace noted that his book Infinite Jest wasn’t an indictment of entertainment, but was about our relationship to it.

“Why am I getting 75 percent of my calories from candy? I mean that’s something that a little tiny child would do, and that would be all right. But we’re postpubescent, right? Somewhere along the line, we’re supposed to have grown up.”

Shirky also maintains that we are shifting from strictly consumption around TV to “opportunities to comment on the material, share it with friends… and discuss it with other viewers”. I’d argue that we’ve always done that, we simply didn’t do it so publicly and we did it with our friends and coworkers rather than strangers around the world. Sure, it’s easier to share fanfiction now than it was on the 70s when we had to mimeograph ’zines and send them through the mail, but is Shirky really saying fanfiction is how we should spend our supposed “cognitive surplus”? (Particularly since writing fanfiction about TV shows (and commenting on them, labeling them, and so forth), at least, has a prerequisite of watching the shows in question on TV.)

Those who want to create and share and be communal are and always have been. Those who want to watch TV will. And many of us will do both.

Early in the book, Shirky writes, “this book is about the novel resource that has appeared as the world’s cumulative free time is addressed in aggregate.” But once you forget about the free time and TV aspects of the book and focus on the rest, it seems that what’s he’s really saying is that our human tendencies to create and share that we’ve always felt regardless of the free time we have available can now be done globally and at scale, and there’s real value to be harnessed from that.

The following is a guest post by Vanessa’s conscience.

Hi world, you usually don’t to hear from me, but after being seen at a conference with my new phone, there is a need to set the record straight. In the past I may have said some bad things about the iPhone calling it the “shiny iPhone of uselessness” and labeled it “inferior to my AT&T smartphone“, but … you know … times change … and sometimes a girl can change her mind. Sure the iPhone has its limitations, like no keyboard, but the browsing is unmatched. What good is a keyboard on phone with sub standard display? If you’re thinking about it … it’s OK … come over to the iPhone side we’ll get thru this together …

Ahem. Hey all. It’s Vanessa, taking back my blog. It may in fact be true that more than one person came up to me at SES and said they noticed I had an iPhone. It’s possible someone brought up last year’s SES San Jose when I was photographed in an anti-iPhone competition. And it’s also possible that I talked Michael Gray down from the iPhone ledge last year in a long rant about form vs. function and substance vs. flash. (It’s possible that someone took over my blog to let everyone know the iPhone truth.)

Convergence. And Urbanspoon
I think what finally sold me was the promise of convergence. And the Urban Spoon app. And the addition of 3G.

Pretty doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t work
The iPhone isn’t perfect. It crashes a lot (although less often than my Windows Mobile phone). I downloaded the update, so hopefully that will get better. I’m considering bringing my phone back to an Apple store actually to see if I can swap it for another one, in case mine is extra wonky. It seems to drop calls and freeze far more often than the iPhones of other people I talk to. 5 dropped calls in 15 minutes with full signal strength is a bit much, right?

And almost as irritating are the times when I’m using Google maps when completely lost only to have the maps application crash. Because then I’m just more lost. The other day, I had the added frustration of being lost, being on the phone trying to get directions, and using Google maps, only to have the call drop over and over and the maps app crash again and again. Perhaps Apple is just telling me not to travel.

Application ecosystem
But the iPhone also has a lot to like. It’s easy to install applications, which means there may be some mass adoption, so app developers make money, which could spark the ecosystem and cause more apps to be developed.

I think Apple could be hindering app development by being such a black box though. If too many apps get pulled without explanation, then developers may not want to risk spending resources creating applications they aren’t sure will stay up. Will developers abandon the iPhone platform for Google’s Android once it’s available since Android doesn’t seem to have that risk? Only if the Android phone and supported apps get similar adoption as the iPhone. And I’m just not so sure about that.

The best apps to try, according to Twitter
Speaking of iPhone apps, I twittered the other day asking about people’s favorites. Here are the winners of that very unscientific poll.

• The aformentioned Urban Spoon app: The basic idea is that you shake the phone and the wheels spin and the phone tells you where to eat. Which is cool enough, because how much of our lives are spent trying to figure that out. But you can also lock down one or two of the three options (neighborhood, food type, or price) for more granular choices, and from there, you can get to a restaurant profile that tells you the overall rating, see reviews (both critics and users) and get location and contact information. Just as cool is the “near me” feature, which doesn’t include spinning wheels, but when you’re walking down the street or staying in a hotel with non-existent room service, and you’re really hungry, you can just choose “near me” and it will list what’s available based on your GPS location. Which is way better than wandering aimlessly.
• Facebook: @detlev said he liked Facebook on the iPhone better than in a regular browser. I agree — it’s much more streamlined and not so cluttered.
• Twitter apps: Several people mentioned different Twitter apps they like. I’ve been using Twinkle, but lately I’ve realized it doesn’t show me the latest updates. I’ll get one person’s latest, and then nothing for days. @stewtopia mentioned Twitteriffic, so I might try that next.
• @jasoncrawford suggested Whrrl, which I’m going to check out.
• @nathanbuggia said he likes Dobot Todos, which I had never heard of, and who could use a bit of search strategy help. He’s also a fan of the NY Times app, and the Labyrinth game.
• jheitzeb suggested the White Pages app, which I have used a few times and find to be very slick.
• @natala likes Brain Challenge, although sadly, it crashes my phone, so I can’t try it out.
• @kristyann likes Shazam, which tells you what music you’re listening to. Several people were raving about Shazam at SES San Jose, so I downloaded it to see what I was missing. I like the idea of making a list of songs to buy on iTunes later. Although shouldn’t you be able to buy them at the time? Since you are on the iPhone already after all.
• @andruedwards suggested OmniFocus, but as it’s not free, I need to figure out exactly what it gets me over free organizational software before I take the plunge. I do need better task management, so maybe this is what I need.
• teampoop mentioned Guitar Toolkit, although I think you have to be a guitar player to appreciate it.

But back to the reason for this blog post. Michael Gray wanted to out my hypocritical iPhone ways. (And I came clean in a WebProNews interview the other day!). And according to his Twitter feed today, he’s trying to sync his calendar and contacts to something that just might be Apple-powered. And then I got this suspicious email from him:

“I use Urbanspoon to keep track of my most and least favorite restaurants. If you use Urbanspoon too we can compare notes on the best places to eat.”

Urbanspoon has apparently won him over too. Apple should start sending them royalty checks.

Batteries, just like liquids, must now be protected from becoming terrorist-style weapons or catching on fire by being enveloped in that wonder-material: the Ziploc bag. Had the TSA seen the episode of Cranky Geeks I was on a few months ago, they would know that what protects us from the fiery inferno of battery blazes is paper, not plastic, and I worry that an entire nation will be destined for a tragic demise of flames and heartbreak, all because the government doesn’t keep up with technology via videocasting rants and is leading us astray with protection clearly only suitable for guarding against the danger of 3.4 oz or less of water, shampoo, and toothpaste.

In short, beginning January 1st, all lithium batteries must be either in a device they power or in a plastic bag in carry on luggage. If in checked luggage, even if in the super-flame retardant, fantastically amazing plastic, the batteries could turn the plane into a fiery ball of destruction. It’s only by the grace of a perfectly aligned universe that we’ve all managed to escape such a fate before now.

As with those hazardous liquids, limits apply to these perilous batteries. According to the TSA Guidelines:

Under the new rules, you can bring batteries with up to 8-gram equivalent lithium content… You can also bring up to two spare batteries with an aggregate equivalent lithium content of up to 25 grams… For a lithium metal battery, whether installed in a device or carried as a spare, the limit on lithium content is 2 grams of lithium metal per battery…. The limits are expressed in grams of “equivalent lithium content.” 8 grams of equivalent lithium content is approximately 100 watt-hours. 25 grams is approximately 300 watt-hours.

I’m sure those working security will have no trouble measuring lithium content in my necessary-like-water-and-air bag of electronics. I see only smooth airport days ahead.

I completely understand that consumers should read their warranties and that businesses are not charities and that sometimes Wired magazine makes mistakes. And I have been involved with technology long enough to know that it’s all shiny and sparkly to distract us from the fact that it doesn’t work, often breaks, and to brainwash us into thinking that “I guess I have to reboot” is a functional method of operation.

So when my new Vista-esque Sony laptop with the fantastic screen and the DVD-only mode turned out to be a string of salesperson-uttered broken promises, deathly blue screens, and unexpected shut downs, I considered it to be a normal, operational computer. When the shift and control keys stopped working, I didn’t bat an eyelash and simply remapped them to function keys. So I had to train my fingers to move up rather than sideways for capital letters and copy and paste. This is the way of Windows. But when the k key and the 0 key and the l key randomly stopped working… well, that started to get in the way of my productivity. Then 10 minutes it took to get out of sleep mode didn’t help either. Nor did the USB ports that only worked when they decided the air was exactly the same temperature.

I broke down and called Sony. After the requisite half hour hold, I talked to someone who said they’d be happy to have me send the laptop back so they could check it out. And if they decided the problem was under warranty, they would fix it and send it back. How long would that take? About 14 days.

Let me interrupt my sad, sad story to revisit what I said before. I know this is how their warranty works and Sony is delivering exactly the service is promised. And it’s easy to say that consumers are dumb not to read these things and know what they are getting into. But I don’t know that consumers are stupid.

Instead, I think that consumers enter into a kind of contract with a company during a purchase. I pay money in exchange for a reasonable expectation that the thing I’m buying will actually work. We don’t put a great deal of emphasis on the “what if something goes wrong” part of the deal because if we expected the item not to work, we likely wouldn’t buy it in the first place.

But my laptop didn’t work and it’s my only working computer right now. How do you think I would do without a computer for 14 days? Right, I may as well go without coffee. Or the air.

I asked the nice Sony rep if any options were available that would enable me to exchange the non-functioning laptop for a functioning one. He said I could call customer care and they would help me with that. Great! I called the number. And listened to lots of ads for Sony products.

Tip #1 for phone support: don’t try to sell things to people who have problems with your product and are patiently waiting on hold for help. This happens to me all the time and I cannot imagine a scenario in which the person finally reaches a real person and says “well, I was originally calling because this thing you sold me doesn’t work, but forget all that. Now I’d like to buy more stuff from you!”

I finally got through to a person who said I had called the online sales number and she could only help me with purchases directly from them. Well, I bought the laptop at Fry’s. I had to return it to them, then. I had tried that and they said they had a 15 day return policy; after that, I had to call Sony. She helpfully gave me the first Sony number I had called. I explained that I had already talked to them, so perhaps there was another number I could call? Nope, that was the number.

Tip #2: Educate the employees who answer the phone. A customer with a problem isn’t likely to be made super happy by waiting on hold a half hour, only to be caught up in Dante’s seventh circle of phone scavenger hunt hell.

She eventually transferred me back to the original tech support line. I talked to an amazingly unhelpful person who explained about the warranty and how the whole send back for 14 days thing is in writing. I completely understand it’s in writing. I get that they are doing exactly as they promised. But they sold me a laptop that clearly doesn’t work and some amount of working with me might have caused me to write a blog post about how Sony confidently backs up its products and supports its customers and goes beyond what they have to in customer service rather than writing, well, this blog post and quoting forum posts like this one that I perhaps will link to with anchor text from the title of the thread: don’t buy a Sony Viao–

They will not even lend me a replacement because it did not fail within 2 weeks. 2 weeks? Is that all that they can comfortably commit too?
This has made me rethink my policy of buying Sony for its reliabilty and quality. I accept that things can go wrong but the first rule that I instill with my team is that the complaint must be dealt with promptly and resolved a quickly as possible.
Clearly Sony do not subscribe to this principle.

So what’s a girl to do. I sadly have two other laptops — one with a broken screen and one that randomly shuts off every few minutes. Apparently, I’m a poor steward of technology. I figured I’d better get yet another laptop, and I’d better do it fast. I could get a cheap PC, but those don’t seem to have a great track record with me and besides, I’ll send the Sony off for its 14 day tour and get it back fixed, so I don’t really need yet another Windows laptop.

I know. I can barely bring myself to type it. Me, the champion against all that is unholy and wrong about Apple holding the world prisoner with its shiny, shiny lure of nonfunctionality. That same me walked into an Apple store and exchanged large piles of money for a Macbook Pro.

In my defense: not only is the Macbook Pro very very pretty, but all I had to do was take it out of the box and turn it on and I was online in about 15 seconds, as I admitted recently when I was a guest on SEO Rockstars.

I’ve now had the Mac for a couple of weeks and while it’s not the perfect utopian paradise, with frolicking, scantily clad fairies, unlimited lattes, and showering gold that one is led to believe — it does occasionally freeze or not understand that a full signal wireless connection means I should be able to get on the internet — it’s BILLIONS of times better than my Sony laptop of doom. One forgets how much easier it is to get things done when one isn’t restarting from the blue screen of shattered dreams and unsaved documents every ten minutes.

The biggest drawback of the Mac is that I know absolutely nothing about it. Give me a PC and I’ll fine-tune your registry settings, reinstall your drivers, and work from the command line. Give me a Mac and I’ll… well, I’ve almost figured out how to launch applications. I’m going to use bootcamp to install XP on a partition (although someone on Twitter suggested vmware fusion or virtualbox instead), but I’m going to keep the Mac OS too and see if I can figure out how to do more than just gaze at it longingly.

Will I become one of those crazy, hippie Apple-loving fanatics who likes Apple just a little too much and who smugly tells everyone I “think different” with no ironic nod to that phrase’s grammatical incorrectness? Will I trade in my bursting-with-function Smartphone for the shiny iPhone of uselessless?

In the unlikely event of such distruption in the natural order of the universe, I give you all license to remind me of my English degree and smack me in the head with one of my many nonfunctioning iPods.

USA Today ran an article on Friday that mentioned my conflicted relationship with email that ultimately caused me to declare email bankruptcy. My friends, reminded of my woes, immediately reached out to support me. If only everyone had friends like I have…

So, how has life changed since email bankruptcy? Did the world collapse into burning inferno of email nonresponse? Did bankruptcy hurt my email credit score and force me into one of those high-interest email loan programs you see infomercials for on late-night TV? Have those whose emails I jettisoned started a Facebook group called “those who were shunned by Vanessa’s email bankruptcy and are plotting revenge”?

Amazingly enough, life has gone on. It was much easier to manage incoming mail without the deluge of 15,000 messages threatening to collapse the email system entirely. Anyone who needed a reply emailed me again. And this time, I was actually able to reply.

But I have a long way to go. I can see the email gathering forces, manning battle stations, and attempting to take me over once again. Everyone has a different data management style, and I think I’m learning some things about myself.

• I do a terrible job of deleting mail. I’m not sure why this is. I am an anti-pack rat with my physical belongings. I am merciless in shedding things I don’t need. And yet I’m unable to delete mail that offers me valuable business opportunties in Nigeria.
• I need to reply to mail right away. When I don’t, I get so much new mail that it completely pushes that mail that I’ve read and not replied to right off the page.
• My phone is great for staying caught up with mail, except that if I read something that I really can’t reply to on my phone, it can easily get lost on the email avalanche.
• I am still terrible at folder management.
• I have too many email accounts and I should probably consolidate them in some way.

It is better than it was, but I’ve by no means mastered the art of email nirvana. Ironically, the USA Today reporter contacted me while she was writing the story. She sent me an email. So, of course I didn’t see it until after her deadline had passed.

As I have mentioned before, I’ve been looking for some good music for my iPod. (And as I’ve also mentioned, Apple is a cunning, manipulative technology spider, luring us into its non-functioning web, then leaving us lonely and musicless, yet coming back to Apple for more, and in fact, my new iPod has decided to wreak vengeance upon me for writing such words and has introduced me to a new music mode called silence. The menus work, the music plays, but sound is not forthcoming from headphones, speakers, or car radio axillary jacks. But I digress.) I got some fantastic suggestions, both in comments and in email and have been furiously GIVING APPLE EVEN MORE MONEY IN RETRIBUTION FOR CONTINUING TO FAIL ME and downloading songs from iTunes. As soon as my iPod is working again or I finally escape the cult and buy an .mp3 player that actually works, I’ll report back on my favorites.

But in the meantime, I’m returning to the old school world of CDs. Hakia gave away a CD at BlogHer, so when faced with a musicless commute this morning, I figured I’d give it a try. Of course I loved it. What’s not to love? Songs about search! All the lyrics are from search results! Listen for yourself.

I’m not sure exactly what they’re going for with the first song, “Search for Better Search”. Well, OK, I think they’re trying to say that search is kind of sucky and we need something better. Hmm… what could that be. Maybe something like Hakia. I don’t know. Just a random thought that came to me. But it doesn’t really come across that way. It comes across as search is a hopeless pursuit, doomed to failure and spiraling depression and despair. Why try it at all. It’s a really fantastic song though. Filled with things like searching for lost childhoods and finding them for twenty five cents on eBay.

The second song, “Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road”, seems to conclude that this is no chicken or no road or that chickens can’t cross roads or maybe that asphalt is hot. Then there’s “The Guy You Work With”, which might be about a zebra. Also at one point, someone apologizes to his beard.

The whole thing is a crazy hodgepodge of words and images and music and I’m not sure that it supports Hakia’s notion of extracting meaning from natural language. It’s more extraction of nonsensical musings, well-suited for a night of pondering philosophy, possibly with mind-altering substances. Although perhaps that’s the search experience they’re going for, so who am I to judge.

I talked to the search evangelist for Hakia when I was at BlogHer. He said their biggest challenge was adoption, and I can see that. Although I suggested that a related challenge might be getting people to change the way they search. Hakia shows promise with natural language queries, but doesn’t generally provide a search experience beyond the other engines with the typical 2-3 word queries that searchers perform. So unless searchers change how they query, they’ll have no motivation to switch. Or maybe Hakia’s marketing plan is to be like that show that used to be on MTV, during which fledging bands handed out flyers all over town and tried to get the most people to come to their last-minute shows in divey bars. They’ll convert searchers one .mp3 download at a time.

Speaking of .mp3 downloads, I would review the rest of the songs, but I have to go fetch my lost childhood now. I hear it’s going for cheap and I don’t want to be outbid.

This post is about the iPhone. Well, kind of. I don’t actually have an iPhone as my willingness to own devices for which I pray the magic fairies will do their glittering dance of wonder and functionality is limited to just the iPod. So far. Since I don’t have one, this post isn’t a review or a comparison or really anything useful about the iPhone at all. In fact, I’m not sure why you’ve even read this far as you probably already have an iPhone and can just go talk on it. Or maybe you’re reading this post on your iPhone in which case those Flickr pictures I have at the bottom of the are probably loading really slowly. (Haha! Just an iPhone joke! I’m sure that EDGE network did you just fine!)

Jason Calacanis compared the Blackberry and iPhone and Robert Scoble compared the Nokia N95 and iPhone. But what about my shiny new phone?

Speaking of my shiny new phone, my Blackberry days are over. I know it seems crazy. I was addicted to that barely functioning box of electronic joy, but I’ve traded it for even more joyousness (who thought that was even possible, I know). I typed on many keyboards and did lots of geeky research and finally settled on the HTC 8525, available here in the U.S. from AT&T. It runs Windows Mobile and has 3G so it’s basically a very small computer at broadband speed.

How does the 8525 stack up against the Blackberry?

• The screen is much bigger and better and you view it in either landscape or portrait.
• Touch screen. Seriously how did I do without that before?
• Sure, you have to dial a number on the touch screen, which can be problematic, particularly when driving, but have you tried dialing on a Blackberry?
• I can use it to power broadband on my laptop. I could never figure out how to do that with the Blackberry and at one point was told I had to pay this huge extra monthly fee. I don’t know why it’s different, since I had it through AT&T as well, but all I know is that I can tether the 8525 to the laptop with absolutely no problem.
• It’s Windows, so its apps are more flexible than the Blackberry.
• They keyboard is better. For one thing, some of the keys just make more sense. Like you can type a period without needing the shift key. Sure, it’s harder to type with one thumb, but I think I’ve figured out how to do it with the 8525, I just need a little more practice.
  
  

How does the 8525 compare to the iPhone?

I can’t do a true comparison since, you know, I don’t actually have an iPhone. I know, I am the lamest comparsion writer-type person who ever compared. Feel free to stop reading now and spend the rest of the evening mocking me. I would do the same for you. For now, I rely on what I read on the Internet. And on the Apple demo video. (Mostly what I got from the demo is that the iPhone is very, very pretty. So pretty you want to dress it up in frilly pink outfits and give it dainty little Cinderella glass slippers and sprinkle it with glitter. Also, did you know that the iPhone is revolutionary?)

I admit, the display does seem super sexy. I can’t really argue about that.

mostly I need to carry the internet around with me
If it is, as Calacanis says, more a web device with a phone built in, I’d prefer my web at the highest speed possible, which isn’t EDGE. Sure, WiFi, but that’s not available everywhere and mostly, you have to pay extra for it. And Scoble is comparing a Linux Smartphone to the iPhone, but neither have the functionality of Windows that I’m looking for. (I know, some people would say that the phone being powered by Windows is a drawback, but I’m mostly a Windows girl at heart. There are Mac geeks and there are Linux geeks and there are… are there any OS/2 geeks still around, you think?) I read that if you’re downloading something, any incoming calls are directed to voice mail since the non-3G connection can’t take the added load. (Alton Brown might call that a unitasker.)

What about the camera?
I don’t care all that much about the camera quality. It is nice to have a camera that isn’t super crappy, but as I tend to lug all kinds of electronics with me all the time, I generally have my 10.1 mega pixel Cyber-Shot with me anyway. And those who know me know that I also tend to carry another phone with me too that I use as, well, a phone. (I lug around a second phone, you say? Look how thin it is! It’s like carrying a feather. Who doesn’t have room for a feather?) I had previously used the Blackberry and now use the 8525 mostly as a portable computer. It’s just not practical to carry around a laptop in your purse all the time (although it’s practical to carry around the laptop more often than you might think). The 8525 works pretty well as a phone though, particularly in conjunction with a bluetooth headset.

Then there’s the cat factor, of course
So what does the iPhone have that makes it so much better? Well, you can put one on your cat. Dude. You can totally do that with the 8525 too.

But it’s revolutionary!
You can sync with your contacts on your computer? Make a call with a touch of the screen? This is “revolutionary”? The first mobile computing that fits in your pocket? What the hell are they even talking about?

Typing: the added thrill of living dangerously at no extra charge
And there’s only the touchscreen. No keyboard. I know. Everyone says it’s great. Maybe it is. But give me the choice at least. I’ll be typing faster on this virtual keyboard than any other small keyboard if I only just trust the intelligence of the keyboard? Look. I used to work for Tegic. The predictive text company. I know all about intelligent keyboards. I worked on SloppyType and T9. T9 works pretty well. And maybe Apple’s come up with something even better. But I know how these predictive/corrective typing systems work. I’ve seen the code. And I can tell you that most sets of keystrokes map to more than one word, particularly when you’re working with quadrants and multiple potential keys like you are with a virtual keyboard. All I’m saying is that you should look your text over before you hit send unless you want to end up sending really interesting messages. Especially to say, your boss. Trust me. (I notice the demo features very little typing. I type A LOT on my phone.)

We all need more iPods in our lives, right?
It’s the best iPod ever? Well, that’s great and all, but I already have an iPod. Several actually. And if you can really only get a 4GB or 8GB and that storage is for all the phone apps as well as the music with no removable storage, I fail to see how it’s better than my 80GB iPod.

I’m as free as a bird now…
The iPhone doesn’t have removable battery or SIM card? No instant messaging? (Maybe through meebo though.) Really? No removable memory card? I tend to need an extra battery to swap if mine runs low. You may say that the iPhone has such greater battery life that I wouldn’t need to do that, but really, I’d at least like the option, just in case. And I travel to Europe sometimes. It’s nice to just buy a prepaid SIM and pop it into my phone. And it would also be nice to be able to unlock my phone and take it to another carrier if I wanted. And since I use the phone as a mini computer, I like having removable storage. I can only run apps that work with Safari and can’t download unless I’m connected to a computer? And does it even support Outlook?

I know, I know. I’m judging. I haven’t even tried it. I should give it a chance. Maybe I’ll borrow yours.

And apparently, you can’t use your existing headset to listen to music on the iPhone. I just bought these nifty Bose headphones for my iPod and they’re a little too pricey to just toss aside because Apple decided to change it up. Apple syndrome indeed.

Apple is hyping up the “simple” design. Simple is just another word for limited functionality. I like my flexibility. Don’t box me in! The iPhone is starting to sound like The Man, trying to hold me down. Well, I’m living free with my 8525!

(Don’t shun me for my unhipness. And maybe every so often, I could just look at your pretty iPhone screen? Just a peek every so often?)

This post is not about the iPhone.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way and everyone on the internet has abandoned this blog to look for more iPhone posts in a frantic rush of mice and keys like those people in that It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World movie — the first one, not the remake, which was mostly kind of lame and didn’t have exactly the kind of trampling and stampeding I’m thinking of. The remake was more iToaster-level stampede. Although it did have Seth Green in it. But he doesn’t always make the best movie choices. He went from The Italian Job to Without a Paddle? Really? But I feel as though I’m getting way off track here.

The iPod is this magical device of song and love, with its scroll wheel and portability and proprietary file formats. We all have them. I now have three. But why do we all have them? What is it that makes us compulsively continue to buy these crappy disposable devices that die without warning, use software that crashes our computers, and cause us to spend hours lighting candles to the gods of musical electronic equipment, praying our iPod will one day work again? Does Apple send crack through those hip white headphones?

Other music players exist. Why don’t any of us buy those?

A couple of years ago, I got a 40 gig iPod. One day, it inexplicably stopped working. Big exclamation mark: blue screen of death, apple-style. What the hell was up with that? I can hear you already. It’s several years old. Why am I complaining? Which is proof you’ve soaked in too much of that apple crack. Would you say that if your two-year old washing machine stopped working? Or your TV? (OK, you’d like the excuse to go buy a new TV, since two years of TV time is like the difference between a 12″ black and white with rabbit ears and a technicolor wide screen, but still. You might whine a little.)

Of course, when I did a search, I found lots of articles about what to do about this problem. Anti-Apple sites with crafting instructions on how to turn your useless iPod into a nice paperweight or doorstop? Amazingly, no. All the sites meticulously detail how to restore the iPod, with tips and tricks. Lovingly caress the iPod and talk to it softly! It might just feel taken for granted! Knit it an iPod cozy! I’m surprised it’s not called the “iPod exclamation point of life” or something.

Anyway. I followed all the instructions and everything worked for a while. And then the iPod died again. And again. And I got really tired of knitting cozies. I’m not even that good at knitting. So, I gave up and stopped listening to music. You might find this approach to be extreme, but I was really busy and the music had to pay the price.

And then I was given a shuffle, and I finally could once again listen to Britney at the gym again. All was well with the world. (I suppose how much you agree with that statement depends on your perspective on pop songs sung by barefoot, red bull-drinking, Lindsay Lohan BFFs. But the important thing is that I my workouts now had a soundtrack.)

The shuffle is great, but it’s fairly limited. You can’t keep all your songs on it and if you want to listen to something in particular, you have to keep pressing that skip button again and again and again and… dammit, where’s that song already!

I recently took a long drive in a car with no radio, and blessed the Apple gods when I found that my iPod had miraculously come to life. And then I cursed Apple for turning me from a person who expected consumer goods to work properly into someone who was grateful when they did.

But of course, the iPod joy was shortlived. It got me nearly the whole drive, but eventually decided to try something new. No exclamation point, but it would play a few seconds of a song, then freeze, then eventually skip to the next song, play a few seconds, freeze… Like an evil music preview mode with less preview and more maddening irritation.

Yes, I’m sure if I did a search, I would find an array of sites explaining just the right soothing tone to use when coaxing the iPod back to life. You see, this particular behavior means that it could tell you weren’t using authentic iPod headphones and it was upset by the non-approved, differently colored replacements. Or you know, whatever causes evil skip mode. But I was done. The iPod and I were going our separate ways.

So what did I do? And here’s the very worst part of all.

I bought another iPod.

Apple syndrome. Like Stockholm syndrome but with more gadgetry.

I went into the Apple store. Shuffles, nanos, video iPods… I asked someone where the regular iPods were. The store employees were apalled to find a person who was not fully up-to-date on Apple inventory. Did I live in a cave? There are no more “regular” iPods. There are video iPods. There are nanos. There are shuffles. Which do I want? I said that I wouldn’t need anything if my iPod hadn’t decided to die, but since they are disposable and all, what can you do. The guy looked at me like I was crazy. (And obviously, that I wasn’t buying one of the many other music players available proves that I am.) What was I talking about? No, he had never heard of iPods that stopped working.

Maybe I had Apple syndrome, but that guy had drunk just a little too much of that tasty Apple kool-aid and I’m suspicious that someone snuck in and added a little vodka to the punch bowl when the teachers weren’t looking.

So, I gave in and bought an 80 gig video iPod. It was shiny and bright and would make all my dreams come true. Of course, it came with no software and no charger but I would take my box of incompleteness and like it! Seriously, I would have liked to have downloaded my songs without needing internet access because as it happened, I didn’t have internet access where I was staying (I know! The world has gone mad!) other than from my phone and downloading iTunes with a phone-powered connection isn’t as fun as you might think, especially when it disconnects minutes before finishing and you have to start again. But I soldiered through.

And eventually, I even had music, just in time for the return drive. Oh Apple, I love you again with your musical sweetness and auxiliary connection to my speakers.

BUT THEN THE IPOD FROZE.

It’s two days old. It wasn’t cheap. And already it’s a doorstop. I was driving, but found a place to pull over that had a signal for my phone and I was off searching again. Turns out that if my iPod freezes, all I have to do is hold down the menu button and the center circle button until the Apple logo shows up. Well of course I do! Why didn’t I think of that! I have a better idea, Apple. How about make it so that the iPod doesn’t feeze. Just a thought. You know, toss it around and see what you think.

So now everyone is out buying iPhones and as someone who has just handed over money for more Apple non-functionality, I completely understand. But I do have some advice. It’s the menu and center circle buttons that you hold down. And you should start learning how to knit now. Practice on sleeves for whatever actual working phone you are chucking the iPhone for. I hear the iPhone doesn’t take kindly to poorly knitted covers.

I read a lot of blogs. I like keeping up on what people are talking about — things people like, stuff that’s new, the issues. I’m also pretty busy during the day: email, meetings, actual work squeezed in between email and meetings. So, my blog reading goes a little like this:

Email, email, phone call, email… OK, need a break from email. Oh! Feeds! That looks interesting. I’ll just open that in another tab and get back to — phone! Right, email, (twitter), write this blog post, wait, wasn’t I doing something else? Oh feeds. Meeting now. Break during meeting as everyone’s getting dialed in. I’ll read a few more feeds. Hey, that seems interesting, and that too. I’ll just open these in tabs. Oh this one has a full feed. I can read it right here. Oh, meeting’s starting. I’ll mark that as new and come back to it.

Wow. Where did all these tabs come from?

By the end of the day, I have managed to get through all of my feeds in 30-second increments. Sometimes, I still have 50 tabs open at the end of the day, but hey, Bloglines doesn’t have any bolded items, mocking me, so I can at least feel like I’ve accomplished something. (And then I give up and close all my tabs and read SearchCap to find out what I’ve missed.)

Now, imagine throwing video into that mix. By the time I got the headphones on and the video downloaded, I’d be on to designing some new feature (or, more likely, answering more email). I’d only get to hear three words at a time, which just doesn’t seem very satisfying. I can sometimes have podcasts on the in the background, and those are easy to download and listen to at the gym. (I have a working shuffle! I can once again listen to things while I work out! And I can still do email at the same time.) But videos?

I realize this is my own personal shortcoming, my short attention span that accelerates my multitasking tendencies, but why can’t all videos come with transcripts, like closed captioning for those of us with attention deficits? (I realize also this wouldn’t work so well with videos of cute jumping cats.)

Am I the only one with this problem?

Last night, as I was driving around helplessly, looking for just one post office that would take my tax extension form and tell the IRS that I did indeed mail it in time, I turned to that one shining beacon of brightness, that ray of hope, always with me, the one I can count on to bring me through my times of confusion and darkness. My blackberry.

And it failed me. Oh sure, it had all its signal bars and its happy screen glittered in the, er, car light. But my pleas fell on deaf ears. It stared at me silently and refused to solve my post office woes. Um. Not that I think my blackberry has ears and eyes or a mouth and talks or anything. Don’t be crazy! It’s not like the blackberry is my only friend like that soccer ball in that creepy Tom Hanks movie! I don’t dress it up! Much!

The point is that all my blackberry would give me was error messages. Can’t talk to the server. Danger Will Robinson. Etc. This was a problem not only because I needed to find a few more post offices to hit up (the USPS web site helpfully noted that many post offices would be postmarking until midnight, but unhelpfully failed to mention which ones), but because I was planning to head to the gym after, and how was I going to do my email with an unresponsive server?

And more importantly, aah! I am without an internet connection! Why didn’t I bring my laptop with its glorious wireless card? What if I need the internet? Ahem. Not that I need the internet. It’s just, you know, nice to have around. Just in case.

This whole situation was, of course, a tragedy, but I did at least have my GPS navigation system and well, my regular mobile phone. Surely I had some technology that would save me. I found a post office with a helpful sign (paper! and magic marker! who knew that even existed anymore!) that told me another post office had the droids,er, postmarking, I was looking for. And indeed it did.

And I managed to spend my time at the gym with one of those old-fangled books, the kind with paper and type and pages you can flip. And then I rushed home to my precious, precious internet and checked email just because I could.

This morning, techmeme tells me that it wasn’t that my Blackberry had turned on me, it’s the whole network that’s down. My favorite headline is Backberry users helpless after outage”. We’re helpless! We can no longer communicate with the world around us! Helpless! I mock, and yet, I understand. I especially like that the company has advised those who use blackberries as “a major way of communication” make back up plans. Like maybe actual talking. Crazy, I know.

There is a lesson here for site owners. Yes, that we blackberry users are crazy and need to get out into the sun (but the sun’s glare makes the blackberry screen so hard to read), but also that we really do rely on our mobile devices and use them religiously to get information. If you don’t travel a lot, you might wonder why, but as someone who’s on a plane up to a couple of times a week, I can tell you that sometimes a blackberry is all you’ve got. (The planes I’m on are full of business travelers. If you look around before we take off, all you can see are a sea of blackberries. The other day, a flight attendant she would pry them out of our fingers so we could get the plane up in the air.) I don’t even want to think of my email backlog if I couldn’t snatch a quick few minutes here and there (on the plane, on the rental car bus, walking through the airport, driving down the road…) to get in some replies.

No, the lesson is not the crazy. The lesson is that please, please think of us crazy ones in your viewership. There are more of us than you think. At least if the planes I’m on are any indication. We want to browse your web sites but we have these funky mobile browsers and not-quite broadband speed. And we get to your sites and we are faced with slowly downloading images and no text. Or sad lonely error messages that tell us our browsers don’t support all the fancy javascript. Or the Flash. Or that the page just isn’t supported at all (status code 400? why oh why would you give me a status code 400?). Some of the saddest cases are the airline sites. What sites would mobile users likely need more than airline sites? And yet, when I load up so many of them, they tell me that my browser isn’t supported. No easy access to confirmation codes, or flight status, or last minute reservations. What has this world come to?

I’ve done a lot of speaking lately about site structure and optimization. And more and more, I say, and I honestly have the real-world experience to back it up, make sure your site loads well and is readable in mobile devices and screen readers. It won’t just help with search engine optimization. It will help me, sitting on the plane (or, um, driving in the car), just wanting to load your web site.

Think of me!

Of course, currently, I am blackberryless, one of the millions in the western hemisphere. I can only be thankful I’m not in an airport this morning to hear the pitiful screams and zombie faces of all the business travelers who just don’t know what to do. But I’m fully expecting my good friend, er, blackberry to return to me soon. If not, I guess I should start shopping around for soccer balls.