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Podcasts were my gateway drug into audio books. Some time around 2007, I started listening to more books than I read. Some of my first audio books were Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, beautifully read by George Guiddall. I often listened to those books while wandering around the Maltese countryside, so that place and those stories are inextricably linked in my memory.

I’m a big audio book booster. Like podcasts, they make exercise–walking, running, hiking, cycling–slightly less loathsome for me. I find myself advocating audio books to lots of friends and colleagues, but I seem to generate few converts. Is it the technical hurdle of downloading them to a mobile device? Or is it their ‘books on tape’ reputation, that they’re only suitable for senior citizens with poor eyesight?

I suspect that they’re not as well-understood as they could be. Here, in point form, is an introduction to audio books:

• I’ve also used Audible. I like their subscription model, and in earlier days they definitely had the best selection (I haven’t done a comparison recently). They also sponsor a number of my favourite podcasts, and I want to reward that. My wife and I are  the platinum plan at the moment, which means two credits per month for $23. In my experience, nearly all books are one credit per book. The credits roll over up to a certain number. You can, however, put your account ‘on hold’ for a while, which means you stop paying but you retain your credits. I’ve done this a couple of times, and it’s a handy feature.
• You’ll consume books at a slower rate because you have to listen to every word–speed readers need not apply. Books range from five hours (for The Great Gatsby) up to 40 or 50 hours (for a really long Stephen King book or the latest Game of Thrones novel). I’d say most are in the eight to 15 hour range. Because there’s no way to skim, I find florid writers a little intolerable. I have a love-hate relationship with George R. R. Martin because he cannot resist describing every pigeon pie and quilted violet doublet in excruciating detail.
• I prefer fiction for listening, though well-written non-fiction–Malcolm Gladwell or Michael Lewis, for example–works too. I find that the average business book becomes laborious to listen to. They’re often written lazily, and so they demand too much of my focus to maintain a consistent sense of the text.
• Narrators matter more than you’d think. I never really pick a book based on the narrator, but it’s always nice if I recognize them. I sometimes experience a weird cognitive dissonance when I hear a familiar narrator in a new context. I grew familiar with Scott Brick, for example, while listening to him narrate Justin Cronin’s books. I’m currently listening to the excellent Devil in the White City, and he narrates that one as well. I find myself constantly expecting vampires to climb out of the foundations of the Chicago World’ Fair.

If you dig podcasts, then consider trying an audio book. They’re the same as books, except you insert them through your earholes.

Back in February, I read this ‘ask me anything’ on Reddit. Reddit users group-interviewed a former airline pricing analyst, asking questions about fares, overselling and luggage. This answer, about when to book a flight, particularly interested me:

Generally, months in advance. About five months from departure we get an idea of how flights are filling, so we might launch a promotion for sales (say) 6 to 8 weeks prior to departure, which is lower than the ‘default’ lowest fare. Unless you can buy standby tickets, tickets bought late will almost certainly be the most expensive bought for that flight.

We had plans to fly back to Vancouver from France in June, so I decided I’d try to track a couple of flights to see how their pricing behaved. I’m aware that there are sites like SkyScanner that do this automatically, but I had the foolish notion to do it myself.

I picked two departure dates in May, and tracked two flights–the from Air Canada and one from Lufthansa–for each date. I checked the price of the flights every other day. These are the results (click to enlarge)

Here’s the spreadsheet I used to track the prices.

This is strictly anecdotal, of course, and I didn’t faff about with clearing cookies and such. I don’t pretend that there’s much here that we can apply to buying future tickets.

I was surprised to learn that you could have bought the May 7 Air Canada flight the day before you left for just $50 more than if you’d bought it three months earlier. I’d assumed that flight prices generally trended upward as they approached the departure date. Evidently, that’s not always the case.

I’ve been playing video games for 28 years, and I’ve been finishing games for about 25 (those first few Infocom games proved too tricksy for my impatient early adolescent brain.). Though it may not seem so to the casual observer, many games are finishable. That is, they have a narrative arc–a beginning, middle and end. Clearly that’s not the case with Pacman, Angry Birds or most sports games, but many games for the PC and consoles want to tell a story where you control the hero.

Until recently, finishing any game provoked a slight sense of satisfaction, accomplishment and relief. Even when my friend Albert and I spent six solid hours beating the Stygian Abyss on his Apple II, I recognized it as a trifle, an unworthy chore. It feels about the same as winning at a recreation sport (assuming you’re not a testosterone-rich toss-pot). It’s worth smiling about and raising a glass to, but that’s about it.

In recent years, though, I’ve finished some games and felt like I’d just finished watching a great movie or play, or reading a good book. You know this feeling. It’s as if you’ve been changed by the work of art, like I’m a slightly different person after experiencing it. Pauline Kael wrote that “good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again”. The Greeks called that feeling catharsis. This is a recent and radical change in my experience of games.

Maybe Games are Art

Though this feels like a tectonic shift in narrative games, I believe that it’s the result of many small improvements in storytelling. These changes, in aggregate, push certain games across a kind of event horizon. What games evoke this feeling for me? The most recent was Mass Effect 3. Before that there were the Portal games (I previously wrote about Portal as the perfect short story of a game) and Half Life 2: Episode 2.

What do these games have in common that are different from others? Great voice acting, for one. The Mass Effect games, in particular, are peopled with legitimate mainstream actors like Martin Sheen and Carrie Anne Moss. You feel the difference. By the standards of games, the dialogue is excellent as well. There are legitimately funny jokes, and, rarely, lines that cut to the bones of a scene. While I do think better ‘graphics’ has something to do with this shift, it’s not really a question of verisimilitude. It’s more that these games pay closer attention to mise en scene. They’re more tonal, in some way, and manipulate mood better.

Like good acting performances, these games have a soul, and there’s truth in them.

Roger Ebert–I mourn his passing–infamously argued that games weren’t art. In truth, I mostly agreed with him. Most games are awful juvenile reveries; I almost never see a sophisticated treatment of a theme in a game, and I’m rarely surprised by how a game’s story plays out. I recently watched Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, and Chris Hecker had a great observation about games. I’m paraphrasing here, but he said something like “nearly all games are about power fantasy, which is pretty cheap and predictable. What would a game be like if the objective was to fall in love?” (More on this theme from Chris).

Comparing the history of movies and games, I’d say that games are barely into the ‘talkies’ era. I look forward to the era where being moved by a game is the rule, instead of the exception.

After nearly 6000 entries on this site, this is the first recipe I’ve ever posted. I learned how to make this from James. I subsequently showed it to Theo, and she kindly typed up the complete recipe.

“There-in Lies the” Rub

Ingredients

• Salt
• Mexican Herb mix (paprika, cumin, coriander)
• Bouquet (two springs fresh rosemary, four sprigs thyme, six sage leaves)
• Brown Sugar

Instructions

1. Each ingredient makes up a quarter of the whole mix.
2. Add one quarter salt (or a little less if you don’t like your beer can chicken too salty.)
3. Add one quarter mexican herbs.
4. Add one quarter bouquet herbs.
5. Add one quarter brown sugar.
6. Take a picture, post to Instagram, and then mix together.

The Stuffing

Ingredients

• “There-in Lies the” Rub
• Half-loaf of day-old bread
• 1 white onion
• 2 apples
• 2 big sticks of celery
• Olive oil

Instructions

1. Acquire a big bowl to place all the ingredients in.
2. Cut bread into cubes.
3. Cut onion into cubes or chunks.
4. Dice apple into cubes.
5. Cut celery into big pieces.
6. Add a generate amount of olive oil and mix together in your bowl.
7. Add five heaping table spoons of the “There in lies the rub” Rub (or whatever is left over from your Beer Can Chicken coating. More below.)
8. Let sit until it’s ready to go into the oven.

DB’s BC Chicken Glove

Ingredients

• One five pound chicken
• One tall boy beer
• Olive oil (you’ll need lots so don’t worry if it’s cheap)
• “There in lies the rub” Rub

Instructions

1. Set the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Empty and rinse chicken (remove any of the guts).
3. Take your tall boy beer, open, remove the tab, pour one-quarter out into a glass and enjoy.
4. Punch some holes around the side, high up, maybe six. This is necessary if the top gets blocked and you want to avoid a beer can chicken bomb.
5. Take a cookie sheet or oven pan and cover in aluminum foil.
6. One person holds the chicken by placing their hand in the orifice — just like a chicken glove.
7. Generously pour olive oil over the chicken, on both sides, while the other wears the “chicken glove” and rubs it into the chicken.
8. Start spooning on the rub all over.
9. Let the olive oil and spices catch and drip over the pan. It will only add to the stuffing flavour later on.
10. Place the tall boy in place of the glass. Mount chicken over top. If you’re lucky, the chicken’s legs will touch the surface of the pan to form a solid tripod base.
11. Carefully carry the pan over to the oven–the bird may be tipsy–and put it inside.
12. Add stuffing to the bottom of pan and around chicken at one hour mark (you want the stuffing to cook for about 45 minutes).
13. Cook 5 pound chicken for 1.75 hours or until done. Cooking time may vary depending on the size of your chicken.
14. Once ready, pull out of the oven and pierce the skin between the thigh and breast with a knife. If the juice that runs out is clear, it’s ready to eat. If it’s pink, more cooking still needs to be done.
15. Take a length of aluminum foil and wrap around the standing chicken to keep the heat and moisture in for 15 minutes while it sits.
16. When ready, pull the chicken off the beer can–this part is trickier than it sounds–and carve.

This meals goes nicely with beer, wine, and a beet and goat cheese salad. Appetizers should include French cheese, sausage, and artichokes dipped in mayonnaise.

In recent years, Web of Change has been the most important event I attend each year. It’s a gathering of really senior people in the social change space in a wilderness location. Most years, it’s an exceptionally well-run event with a real focus on building a trust network among attendees. I’ve made new friends and colleagues there, and gotten plenty of work through those connections.

For the past couple of years, I’ve wanted to convene a similar event for marketers. It wouldn’t be exactly Web of Change, because marketers wouldn’t share the same sense of common cause, but this new event would share a lot of the same goals.

• Mid-level and senior marketers would attend.
• The conversations would be about strategy, not WordPress plug-ins
• We’d build a trust network amongst peers
• Most importantly, it would be non-douchey

So, this summer, we’re launching Fireworks Factory. It’s an intimate, invite-only conference for smart web marketers. We’re holding it on Galiano Island, a ferry ride away from Vancouver. It’s going to be very small in this first year–there won’t be more than 50 people in attendance. We made this video to talk about what the conference will offer:

If you’re a marketer, please check out the conference details and consider attending. We’d be delighted to have you.

Why is it called Fireworks Factory?

I wrote about this on Capulet’s blog:

We lived in Malta for a year in 2007, on the small island of Gozo. Each town on Gozo has a week-long religious festival–Malta is the most Catholic nation outside of the Vatican–punctuated by fireworks and pyrotechnics. These explosives were all homegrown, crafted in a community-owned fireworks factory on the edge of town. Men from the village would spend time there building and testing fireworks, in the hopes of outdoing their rival towns. Occasionally, something horrible would happen.

Still, they were communal spaces where something risky and breathtaking gets imagined and created. That seemed like a good metaphor for the kind of conference we want to run.

Why is it invite-only?

I’ve always been conflicted about invitation-only events. Web of Change vets all of its attendees, as does TEDx Vancouver. We’re applying the same logic as Web of Change: because we want to ensure the right level of people are attending. We’re planning quite a conversational, two-way event, and as such we want attendees who have confronted complex, strategic issues. There are, after all, tons of events for a more general marketing audience. Even that makes me a bit leery, but it’s the simple reality of a small, targeted event. I can’t imagine what filter TEDx Vancouver uses.

Lately, I’ve been making this assertion:

The only person responsible for your out-of-control email inbox is you.

You may have seen this email charter that’s circulating around the web. It takes a kind of tragedy of the commons approach to overflowing inboxes. While better email etiquette can’t hurt, it’s only half (or maybe a quarter) of the problem. We all need to own the problem of our inbox.

It’s 2013, and we now have enough tools, tricks and best practices to keep our inboxes under control. Even Bill Gates manages, and he’s probably busier than most of us.

Your inbox is not a to-do list

I was recently talking to a colleague about this, and he asked for my advice on how to better manage his email. This is what I wrote to him. I’ve written versions of some of this advice in a previous post. These recommendations are quite common, so productivity keeners aren’t likely to find anything new here.

1. Your email software is not a to-do list. Maintain a separate task list, preferably a digital one that you can access from multiple devices (like your phone, if you’re in a meeting without your computer). I use a task list called Remember the Milk, My colleague uses one called Things. Try a few and pick your favourite. Incidentally, your brain isn’t a to-do list or a calender, either.
2. Set aside dedicated chunks of time for your email. Maybe 30 minutes to start the day, and a few other similar chunks throughout the day. Try not to obsessively check your email at other times. Train your coworkers that if they need to reach you urgently, they should use instant messenger (IM) or the phone. Incidentally, every office in the world should adopt an IM system. This would significantly reduce the amount of email you receive from colleagues.
3. Your inbox is a loading bay, not a warehouse.You aren’t answering email, you’re processing it. For every email you receive, ask yourself “can I deal with this in less than three minutes?”

   a) If yes, then answer it immediately and delete or archive it.

   b) If not, assign a task to it and, if possible, associate the email with the task. We use web-based email, so it’s easy for us to include an email message’s URL to a particular task in our to-do list.If you need to follow up on an email you sent, create a to-do item on your task list. Don’t leave the email in your inbox.

4. Create rules and filters.You almost certainly get a bunch of email that you never want to read. One of our clients, for which I have an email address, sends a daily email message to the entire head office staff to announce that the deli delivery has arrived for lunch. Speaking of email etiquette, this is pretty irresponsible, as only 10% of staff are interested in the delivery. If you’re not one of them, create a rule that removes it from your inbox and you’ll never see it again.

   It seems like a tiny effort to delete an email every day, but those clicks–and the irritation they engender–add up.Also create rules for any bacn that you want to read eventually, but are not going to deal with immediately. This also goes for email lists and email messages sent to work groups which aren’t essential for you to immediately read. Filters are a key aspect to what separate email experts from email noobs.

5. Do you really need folders or labels? Assuming their email software’s search works well, I discourage people from using email folders or labels unless they absolutely need them. I can search for and find an email 95% of the time. That 5% isn’t worth manually sorting and filing email messages every day.
6. If you’re writing more than 200 words, it’s probably faster to just call. If you need a record of the communication or feedback from more than one person, then author a document in a collaborative tool like Google Drive so that it’s easier for people to collaborate and comment on it.
7. Trust the algorithms. As far as I can tell, we’ve largely defeated email spam. I almost never get email messages from Nigerian princes or erection pill purveyors in my inbox anymore. Likewise, you can begin to trust tools that will do more filtering for you. Gmail seems to be pretty good at sorting by importance these days, and I also use SmartLabels from Gmail Labs to filter my inbox. More than one colleague loves SaneBox, though they’ve been unable to convince me that it’s much better than what Gmail offers.

There are loads of other tips, tricks and tools that will help you manage email, but these are the ones I use on a daily basis.

In truth, though, the essential quality of good email management is discipline: to process email religiously and to adhere to the best practices you discover. I find that email is the first thing that gets abandoned when I get busy, which is ironic, as it’s critical to managing and resolving that busyness.

I’ve found that when I live abroad, I have more free time on my hands. I’ve never quite figured out where this free time comes from, but I assume it’s because I have fewer social demands, and I do very little getting and spending.

For the first time in a couple of years, I’ve found time for some side projects and hobbies. Two of those–both collaborations–recently came to fruition, and I wanted to share them.

Weight Watchers for Friendship

Last summer at Web of Change, my friends Tim and Alia pitched me on their idea for a new project. It was a simple, yet strangely radical idea: as adults, we are pretty bad at being friends, and we need to get better. Their idea was to launch a kind of Weight Watchers for friendship, and they called it Lifeboat. Here’s the spiel:

The average American adult reports having only one real friend.Paradoxically, in an age of Facebook and always-on connections, a growing body of science proves what we already feel deep in our gut: we’re actually lonelier and more isolated than ever before. The way many of us use the internet is only making the crisis worse.

The solution isn’t to retreat from the web. It’s to aim higher—to re-think what friendship means in adulthood. Indeed, it’s time to explore uncharted relationship territory—academic research, philosophy, expert advice and our own heads and hearts—for a better path forward.

Lifeboat is a movement of people rediscovering deep friendships. We’re not offering grand solutions or complex schemes, but instead, simple things that work. Here you’ll find our unique content on the art and science of friendship—full of inspiration, learning and practice. It’s designed to help move us beyond fast-food-friendships and become self-assured friendship pioneers!

I think their timing is perfect, and it’s got potential to be pretty huge. And I’m not just saying that because we helped them with their marketing strategy and some content pieces. I genuinely think many people feel profoundly lonely, and are hungry for better, richer friendships.

Regular readers will know that I’m leery of anything that’s remotely woo-woo or overly self-helpy. I wouldn’t have gotten behind Lifeboat if I didn’t know Tim and Alia well, and that their work would be built on a foundation of solid research.

Become a Noble Arsonist

This winter, I co-wrote a free e-book with Julie and Theo Lamb. It’s called The Noble Arsonist, and here’s its spiel:

Download our free e-book full of tips, tricks and hard-earned wisdom on web marketing for NGOs and companies that care. The book includes case studies of campaigns by Greenpeace, LeadNow, Mountain Equipment Co-op and others!

It’s got a lot of the wisdom and best practices we’ve learned and developed after working with NGOs over the past few years. We’re hosting it on a single-serving site (I’m a little obsessed with those these days) that also serves little tips for communicators.

Since I started using Instagram, there have been times when I’ve wanted to share a short video instead of an image. Because Instagram is so much about mood, atmosphere and tone, I’ve wanted to share a few seconds of the wind along the canal, or the busyness of a Paris subway during rush hour. For those moments, video seemed to be the superior medium.

Along came Vine, from Twitter, which is Instagram for videos of up to six seconds. To use an old term, it’s video micro-blogging for the masses. Twitter seems to have undertaken a minimum viable product approach to Vine, as it has a simple user interface with no editing tools or filters.

You can, however, make cuts on the fly by starting and stopping the video. I’m reminded of how we used to ‘edit’ on camcorders, before we had digital tools. You built your video in consecutive order by pushing the red button–on and off, new scene, on and off. Shooting multiple shots to build a six-second video has seemingly become the default behavior.

This act of assembling shots over time–even if it’s only a minute or two–makes Vine a different beast than Instagram. For most users, I think that Instagram is about capturing a spontaneous and fleeting moment. Meanwhile, the emergent behavior on Vine is to construct a narrative over time. This is neither good nor bad, it’s just more different from Instagram than it might first appear. It’s also much more artificial. In order to cut a video together, Vine users must make a more consciously artistic gesture.

I’m almost always wrong when I make predictions like this, but I see Vine finding a humble but sustainable place in the social media landscape. Perhaps like Vimeo, it will have a small, loyal user base and will occasionally get a burst of mainstream attention.

Ghosttown+

Google+ (pronounced Google Plus) remains a really boring ghost town. It’s more like of those half-constructed sub-divisions built during the recession: there’s a little activity but mostly it’s all quiet and weeds. I’ve genuinely tried hard to engage and be engaging on Google+*, but I’ve failed miserably on both counts.

The two most common defenses of Google+ that I hear are:

• It’s not about building a rival network. It’s Google’s attempt to capture your social graph to provide better search results and show you more relevant ads. That’s possibly true, and there’s no question that Google+ can positively impact your site’s search engine optimization. However, most of these benefits are felt by Google, not by the end user.
• Google+ isn’t a social network, it’s an interest network. That’s great, because I’ve never had a place on the Internet to talk about the  Canucks.

Google+ may very well destroy Facebook, but it’s got a ways to go. Consider that publishing and technology titan Tim O’Reilly has been encircled by (meaning he’s being followed by) about 2.2 million people. His posts average about 100 ‘pluses’ (the equivalent of ‘like’s) and about 40 comments. Counting in some shares, too, that means he’s engaging with about 0.0001% of his audience. And I think he’s doing a really good job.

Knowing that people love to use a new medium to talk about that medium, I asked a question about Google+ as interest network yesterday. It was Friday around noon PST, which seemed like a time when plenty of the roughly 6000 people following me might be using the tool. I’ve received one comment, and it wasn’t really an answer to the question I asked.

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, it’s a chore for me to go post and interact on Google+. That may change. Google has mountains of money and pretty much unparalleled reach online, so I wouldn’t count them out.

* A tedious footnote: I recently undertook a baroque process to merge my Google+ account with one of my core email addresses. That meant that a year’s worth of posted content and activity disappeared from my account. It was no great loss, but now it looks like I’m a new user. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I’ve been spending roughly half an hour on Google+ a week for the last year.

Paying to Socialize

When I was about 23, Julie and I traveled around Costa Rica. It was early December, and we spent a few days at the beach at a near-empty resort. The beaches were beautiful, the grounds were lovely and there were almost no other guests. That’s what App.net feels like right now–an abandoned country club.

App.net is an audacious, rather generic social network that has one unusual characteristic: people had to pay to use it. This was an audacious and controversial idea, but they achieved their threshold of 10,000 users, and so have embarked on a plan to build an advertising-free social network. I felt pretty conflicted about the idea. On the one hand, I’m quite anti-advertising. But on the other, I don’t like the idea of a kind of posh retreat for the technorati.

It’s all a bit academic at this stage. I’m only following 20 friends thus far, and only one of them has posted to App.net in the past week. I gather that lots of the 10,000 users who supported App.net were endorsing the idea of a commercial-free app with their money.