My Cities 2006

2006-12-25T00:00:00Z

Following an Internet meme, my travels in 2006:

(only cities where I spent a night count, and the * means I visited multiple times on non-consecutive days)

Arlington, VA *
Baltimore, MD
Richmond, VA *
Aruba
Luray, VA *
Montreal, Quebec
Shenandoah National Park, VA
Virginia Beach, VA *
Springfield, VA
Santander, Spain
London, UK *
Delray Beach, FL
Spruce Rocks Wilderness, WV
Los Angeles, CA
Brooklyn, NY
Dewey Beach, DE
Falls Church, VA *
Anchorage, AK *
Seward, AK
Hope, AK
Denali State Park, AK
Fairbanks, AK
Boston, MA
San Francisco, CA
Charleston, SC
Pittsburgh, PA

And next year… hopefully even more!

Hello, 2007

2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

Looking for the right way to start off the year, I left the New Year’s Party in northern VA at 2 AM, then drove three and a half hours down to Virginia Beach to watch the sunrise from the beach over the Atlantic Ocean.

Watching the day start, the sun begins to illuminate the clouds, changing the blank dark sky into a layered cake of contrasting dark, ominous clouds. The dull light begins to illuminate individual clouds, providing the foreshadowing of a far brighter source over the horizon. The clouds near the horizon shade us from the bright light, while the dark, heavy clouds at the ceiling begin to show their increasingly colored underbellies. The sun becomes ever more confident, burning the heavy clouds at the ceiling and back-lighting the haze at the horizon, searing the sky bright orange and red. The first pinprick of pure light bounds through, then extends its hole in the sky into a growing ball of orange. Surprisingly quickly, the hole becomes the sky, the orange haze loosing its tint, spreading its light from the horizon to the rest of the sky down past the horizon, enveloping the land.

And I had it all to myself. Just me and my camera, alone to share the new year’s sunrise.

And then I drove home. I’ve never had so much coffee…

Winter Camping

2007-01-29T00:00:00Z

The Dolly Sods Wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest in WV is a place to be reckoned with during the winter… and Bryan and I certainly experienced a little bit of reckoning the weekend of Jan 27-28, 2007. Temps in the teens, wind chill bringing it down to possibly sub-zero, hiking through snow up to a foot deep and snowdrifts up to our waists at times, fresh snow showers, exposed ridges with winds whipping across the wilderness… an exulting experience.

The misleading lure of travel

2007-03-28T00:00:00Z

Why do we travel?

Do we travel for ourselves, or do we travel for the glory?

As I contemplate all the places I want to go, I still wonder in the back of my mind why I travel. Is it for personal fulfillment and enrichment, or an escape? Is it the joy of being foreign, or being different? Is it the need for a constant reminder of what I have? Do I need the occasional disruptions and requisite uncertainty to let me properly appreciate the regular rhythm of daily life? What is the lasting impact of a trip on my life?

Perhaps it all depends how we travel.

As much as I fly to far-flung parts of the world (out of the necessity to maximise time at my destination), being parachuted into foreign locales is no joy. The journey is the opportunity to adapt and understand the context of the destination.

It is the difference between being a tourist and a traveller.

The journey of a traveller allows one to experience the environment on a deeper scale, while being dropped into a new place as a tourist just brings the joy of feeling different, of being foreign. It is a temporary, fleeting feeling, whereas the traveller can draw on his experiences far after his journey. The enduring impact of the mode of travel cannot be underestimated.

With that in mind, Thursday I am off for a real journey…

A Misplaced Day

2007-04-15T00:00:00Z

I took a walk today through a land of swollen streams and rivers, pouring over their banks into the paths. Clouds filling the sky dumping the merciless rain ceaselessly throughout the day, people encased in their homes, their cars, or layers of waterproof gear.

I expected this weather and had prepared to brave it during long walks throughout the journey, ready to convince myself that the conditions would only make the achievement more fulfilling. The added discomfort would add to the experience, make it more meaningful, more wild, more of a test.

But that was for the last two weeks in Scotland, not today in Arlington, VA. Who would have thought that I could spend two weeks hiking and travelling in Scotland, in early April, in the Highlands and Lowlands, and not see an ounce of rain or a cloud in the sky? Locals, travelers, tourists alike, all were amazed by the weather, noting that this was luck beyond all possibilities and hopes.

I should have seen today’s weather at least one of those days. But I won’t complain.

One more day, Ashburn, VA

2007-04-26T00:00:00Z

A delay in the schedule.
One more day before departure.
Another long line.
One more taxi ride.
One more hotel.
One more early wake-up, one more hotel shuttle.
An extra flight, an extra airport, another layover.
An extra hotel meal, an extra airport meal.

All because of a glitch in a belt, a joint, a switch, a rotor, a piston or some other mechanical problem serious enough to cancel my flight.

* * *

The commotion was the first surprise. I stepped into the terminal already checked in, everything crossed off the list, perfect seats already selected, everything running smooth. Until I stepped inside the doors.

Not quite pandemonium, but the anxiety was obvious. The air rippled with the energy of anger, hidden under the surfaces of faces, but ready to leap out and strike given any opportunity. Everyone’s personal plans now changed, schedules unknown, personal traumas created by the mechanical glitch- and everyone willing to share.

My first thoughts were no doubt similar – dismay, anger, disbelief, confusion, resignation. I set to motion- asked for some information, got on the phone, worked quickly to fix my schedule, to beat everyone else to the last seat on the next flight, to get my schedule back on track. The mind started evaluating options, working out timing, figuring out schedules, timetables, measuring trade-offs and best-case and worst-case scenarios. I estimated how quickly I could get re-booked, how quickly I could take care of things here at the airport, how I could get home and avoid the deadly rush hour traffic that is soon to grip the area.

And then, a peace settled over me. What is the rush?

The thought ran through my head, straightened my spine, brought a smile to my face, released the nervous energy in my body, cleared my mind and coursed a sense of freedom through my veins.

What else do I have to do? Where else do I have to go?

How did I get so anal?

In a flash, I realized how my life had been lost in routine. The routines that I had chosen and created for myself had changed the way I think, the way I live.

No more.

Peace.

The Crew

2007-05-05T00:00:00Z

I enjoy the present, but I sustain myself with thoughts of the future. Whether vague, undetermined and unrealistic or completely settled and practical, the events to come give purpose and guidance toward the decisions I make every day. Living today to maximize today and tomorrow.

This trip had sustained me for quite awhile.

* * *

How did we find ourselves in Scotland?

Bryan and I had talked about the need to embark on a meaningful journey once a year. Kevin was the first to propose this trip to Scotland and the West Highland Way, the seed being planted in a conversation in a pub a year back.

Instead of letting the idea linger, Kevin and I quickly sorted out the practicalities and set our plans. A long-distance, popular, iconic trek in the Scottish Highlands, stretching 95 miles north of Glasgow to Fort William. Delving into the countryside, crossing the hills and wild moors, skirting the lochs and rivers, navigating the mountains and looping into the small towns, the trek seemed like a great blend of experiences. Once we started discussing the idea with friends, we found like-minded compatriots in Bryan and Fran, and the plans were set.

The reality of the upcoming hike still had not settled in once I landed in Glasgow. Walking around the city, it just seemed like a normal wandering around a city full of indecipherable accents and a distinctive sense of fashion. Out at the pubs, the hike still seemed a distant thought.

It was by design that the hike plans had not yet been decided, as Kevin and I had preferred to punt on the detailed decisions on daily mileages and places to stay until we were on the ground and had a better feel for how it would pan out. We needed to be there to gauge the weather, look at the daily route in detail, ask about places and towns to stay, see how our bodies held up.

But tonight was not about acquiring the lay of the land. No decisions necessary tonight. Just being there was enough.

Get On The Bus

2007-05-12T00:00:00Z

Airports bring out a range of emotions, from dismay, bittersweetness, or sheer joy in arriving or departing. Confusion, anger, relief, any emotion marking one’s passage.

Arriving in Puerto Vallarta was nothing but excitement. Excited about the next couple weeks, excited to be meeting friends, excited about doing a lot and doing nothing.

No bags checked, wide awake, hotel already booked (not a typical course of planning for me), just step off the plane, clear customs, all I had to do was get some pesos, get to my hotel, and relax.

The ubiquitousness of big banks and ATMs has made getting local money a relatively painless task almost anywhere in the world. But while the means of transportation (taxi, bus, boat, etc.) are relatively similar around the world, using them can be quite different.

As usual, whereas most people were either picked up by loved ones, yet-to-be-loved ones carrying big cards with their names, resort buses and greeters, or dived into the taxi touts, I turned the other direction to figure out the scene. Armed with a map and some pre-trip research, I stepped outside the terminal to catch a local bus.

Why a local bus? Why not? After saying no to the numerous taxi touts, and wanting to try something different, the local bus seemed the hardest, least comprehensible, but also most fun and cheapest route.

After a little wandering, I get to what seems like a bus stop, marked by people getting on and off different buses stopping, rather than any formal signage. With a decent understanding of the city layout and the possible routes, I figure out which bus I need to catch, wait, and hop on the next one that appears to be my route, pay the driver the 5 pesos, and walk down the aisle.

Stares.

Stares do not bother me, they are normal around the world when you enter an area, a bar, a restaurant, a world away from the typical tourist zones and invade the locals’ life. No worries – just smile, be happy, good things will happen.

Blissfully happy to be in Mexico, to be on a rickety bus, to be bouncing through Mexico, on my way to the beach, relaxation, good times. I stand in the aisle, and as people come and go I am able to get a seat.

Large roads, small roads, stores, shops, houses, people lingering, waiting, running and shouting all bounce past. Trying to figure out where we are, I look for trends, for turns, to try to geta sense of direction and place on the route.

More people get off than get on. Roads are getting smaller. We are going uphill, not downhill towards the sea. I start to think about the places written on the front of the bus to indicate the route (painted on the windshield in a haphazard script, by the way).

The bus turns up a small road, comes to a stop. The last three or four people get off. The bus turns off. The bus driver gets up, looks at me, and gets off the bus. Dead quiet, sitting in a small square, nothing around. Hmm.

And of course my Spanish is “very limited” to please, thank you, sorry and how much. None of which seems to be useful in this situation.

I pull out my map, and after some thought, retracing the route I think we took and comparing all of that with the places written on the bus windshield, I note the success and failure that led to me being the only person sitting on a non-moving bus in the middle of nowhere.

I got on the right route. But in the opposite direction. Instead of being at the ending terminus close to my intended destination, I am now sitting at the other end, in a small square in a small town outside Puerto Vallarta.

Not bad, really. Eventually the bus will start again and continue the other way. Right?

I get up, walk down the bus, peer out to see where the bus driver went. Nowhere to be found. There are, however, a couple of other people looking at me with a cross between boredom and bemusement. “Stupid gringo”, I imagine them thinking. Which is partially correct.

After a couple of minutes of shared bemusement from by them and me, a new person gets on the bus, begins to fiddle with the controls, fills up a water jug, and turns on the bus, starting back down the route. All the placemarkers, stores, restaurants, roads and people return, just in the opposite direction. Past the airport, now sure of my original mistake and comfortable that I am going the correct way, a little wave of relief passes over me.

Of course, I am still not completely sure where to get off, but the confidence in unshaken. Sometimes the fun in travel is not knowing exactly where you are.

Lesson: Get on the bus. But ask questions first.

Trail Magic

2007-05-13T00:00:00Z

I should have passed on the second goblet of Bailey’s.

Bailey’s is best consumed for taste, whether over ice, with milk, in coffee, mixed into other drinks. Anyway but straight, without ice, in a half-pint steel goblet. Frankly, knowing that we had roughly another 3 miles to go until Drymen, I should have passed on the first half-pint, just partaking in a couple of sips, gently nursing the goodwill of our hosts.

But turning it down seemed such a waste.

* * *

We started Day 1 of the West Highland Way in a state of unknown.

City skylines often give a glimpse of the world outside. Oceans lapping up against their shore, rivers running through the city, mountains towering over the city, hills stretching for miles, or the never-ending stretch of suburbs, highways, the fruits of industrialization. Think Denver or Anchorage for towering mountains, or Chicago, New York, Sydney for skyscrapers or sweeping urban vistas.

Glasgow, however, gives no such clues. Smokestacks and low-lying urban development provides no indication of the land outside the urban wilderness, and the Way was still a bit of a mystery in our minds.

Taking a taxi to the start of the hike did nothing to change that impression. The start of the hike is a stone obelisk on a high street next to a Marks and Spencer, and the beginning of the hike is along paths cutting through suburbs and local parks.

But given time, things begin to open up, and glimpses appear. The nervousness begins to fade, the body adjusts to the pack, the boots flex to the feet, paths open up to hills, the suburbs begin to fade and everything begins to settle.

* * *

“Trail magic”, to the best of my knowledge, has a variety of definitions but it refers to acts of goodwill, hospitality or assistance to hikers from strangers. After a solid lunch at an outdoor pub (a harbinger of days to come), we began to discuss where to end the day’s hike. Given our late start, the leisurely pace, and no need to rush, we set Drymen as the goal.

Enjoying the sunshine and the rolling hills, we reveled in our luck with the weather (Scotland, April, bountiful sunshine?). Bounding a bridge over a stream and passing a couple of houses along the Way, we encountered a friendly couple (Rory and Jackie) and an offer of a drink. Obviously a couple of drinks up on us, it was too good an invitation to pass up. The initial hospitality turned into friendly banter and some interesting conversations, including a wide-ranging discussion on the nature of cross-cultural differences between Scots, English, and Americans.

A bottle of Bailey’s later, the second goblet seemed indeed a bit less of a good idea as I continued on, mind and body slightly “off”. Hiking took a little more care than it did an hour previously. Rhythm lost. Adjustments necessary. Taking pictures took some thought.

Happening upon the rope swing was another stroke of luck; while it might not fit the strict definition of trail magic, finding the rope swing came at a perfect time to take a break and enjoy the sun, and my lingering giddiness from the Bailey’s only enhanced my joy.

That night, a pint and a good meal at the pub in Drymen was the perfect way to round out the day. In our minds, body and soul, the difference between the start and the end of day could not have been greater.

Where tourists and travelers meet

2007-05-29T00:00:00Z

Starting the day, we prepared to push ourselves on Day 2 of the Way for a 21 mile “long day” to set ourselves up for a five or six-day hike. The goal was to gun for Inversnaid, a small town on the map that would have a couple of places to stay, a fairly typical stopping point for Way hikers.

“A couple of places to stay” turned out to be entire description of the place, which was more of an outpost rather than a small town. The Inversnaid Hotel was the obvious and easy choice as the place to stay for the night, as it was the only one (of the total of two) places to stay with available rooms.

It was here where we came to meet tourists and travelers alike, sharing different goals, experiences, journeys and styles of travel, but all enjoying the ride.

* * *

The hotel, perched on the idyllic shores of Loch Lomond, offers a full range of services that makes sense given its remote location: accommodations, full breakfast and dinners (reservations required), bar and nightly entertainment. With its easy access to boat tours and ferries across the loch by its own harbour, easy access by road and an ample car park, and its prime location on the West Highland Way, it makes a good stop for visitors to the area.

By my guess from our stay, it does a roaring trade to two disparate groups: Way through-hikers and pension-age English tourists.

Arriving at the hotel, everything already taken care of by Bryan, I was simply happy at not having to hike any farther and knowing that I would soon have a shower, dinner and a pint. Walking through the hotel, waiting for dinner, lingering in the waiting rooms, I realized that The Crew was in the minority, since we were not English, over-55, or enjoying a nice little holiday on the Loch. Given my disdain for tours, pre-set menus, limited choices, and everything that smacks of the packaged experience, a bit of cynicism crept in. Mocking the hotel, the other people at the hotel, the upcoming dinner, the night’s entertainment; in my mind’s eye all of it was less meaningful than what we were doing, less taxing, less of an experience, less real.

After the night’s conversation and experiences, however, I admit I was wrong to mock. All of these people are out here, enjoying their lives and travels in their own way. So what if the night’s entertainer was only good because he was tremendously corny? So what is the crowd was good only through the irony of the place, the time, the music, their constrained feet-tapping, their love for the corny music?

Who is to say my way is better? My view switched, Bryan and Kevin were “right”, I was wrong to mock. The important thing is that they were out there, each living their way.

Obstacles

2007-05-30T00:00:00Z

Routines start to settle in by day 3 of the West Highland Way. Wake up, slowly pull your stiff legs, knees, back, feet out of bed, each tendon gently reminding you that they are there. Slowly eat an enormous breakfast, put on the various layers of hiking clothes and organize the pack for the day. Prepare feet for the hike and squeeze on the boots, and hike.

And hike.

So simple. Not easy, but simple. Follow the Way. Eat when needed. Rest when needed. Think if you want to. Revel in the views around you. Just take a step, then another, then another.

Of course, obstacles are everywhere. Each step is a bit different: looping over flat ground, grinding up switchbacks up a hill, bounding down a hill in a half-run, tip-toeing gently over rocks ready to fall away under your boots, picking your way through stumps and roots along the river, navigating boulders and trees across the trail, criss-crossing ruts in the trail worn by water, crossing streams and rivers, pounding onto stiff wooden bridges, softly stepping through sand and loose dirt.

The obstacles are not limited to the land, of course. Sheep scatter far before you reach them, but cows are a bit more obstinate- despite attempts to shoo them from the Way you are met with a blank, vacant look that shows no recognition, nonetheless any intent to move. While I tried to shoo, Fran demonstrated his greater experience at dealing with cows by just plunging past them, with as much insouciance befitting avoiding a cow.

The most numerous obstacles, though, are man-made. The Way cuts across a checkerboard of private and public plots of land scattered over the Highlands, each surrounded by a fence to keep animals in and out.

Crossing each fence, via a stile or a gate, is a little different, a puzzle. The simple ones, mere steps over the fence- high stile or low stile, are the easiest. Frankly, even the variety of levers and swings on the gates are not terribly mentally taxing, even at the end of a tiring hike. But the variety is the fun, and for most of the Way, they are the only thing that really gets in the way of the hike.

The biggest obstacle, after all, is yourself.

Wow

2007-07-28T00:00:00Z

This photo was from 6/16, descending the cables on Half Dome, Yosemite, CA, an iconic hike for many, and the highlight of my trip.

As you see, there is a line of people waiting to go down, a traffic jam between people going up and down the same path along the cables. Shortly after taking this photo, I decided to go down on the outside of the ropes, really the only way to avoid the traffic jam.

Today, I just realized that about 1 hour after I took this photo, a man fell from almost the same spot.

I cannot imagine how scary that would have been to experience. When he fell, there would have been a huge crowd of people at the summit, on the ropes, and on the bottom waiting to climb, hundreds of witnesses, powerless to help. Many of the same people I saw milling around waiting were probably still there and witnessed the fall. While descending down the trail, still on a high from the climb up, I remember seeing a park ranger hiking quickly up the trail, I distinctly remember feeling sorry for him hiking the steep trail so fast, with a heavy pack, sweating in full park uniform on a hot day. Now I realize I was feeling sorry for the wrong man.

Two couples got engaged on the summit while I was up there. People celebrated birthdays, accomplishments, some just enjoyed the views. But unfortunately, one man had a far different experience, and hundreds carry far different memories of the beautiful day. Horrifying.

Our face to the world

2007-09-03T00:00:00Z

When do we let our guard down? When do we show our true selves to the world? How often do you feel your smile is not genuine? How often are you happy inside without it shining through to the world? Can you hide how you feel?

I have a love / hate relationship with American suburbia. I enjoy the space and the ability to retreat from the outer world, the physical separation into the home that the suburbs makes so easy. Yet I miss the ease of interaction, the tension of street life and the variety, vibrancy and possibility of life that proximity creates. Does it have to be an all-or-nothing choice?

There is no perfect place to live, it does not exist. I can only capture everything I like by having multiple environments, multiple cultures and multiple homes, and the ability to switch between them and other locations. Not change, but variety.

What do you need?

Everyone is a photographer.

2007-09-24T00:00:00Z

Photography is alive, perhaps more alive than ever.

The cheap availability, the sheer ease of use and accessibility of cameras and the acceptance of people in society taking photographs has made photographs ubiquitous in life.

Forget the notion that photography is just art, it is now a form of communication.

So while traditional photographers may be stuck in the debate over whether sites like Flickr et. al. contribute anything meaningful to the art of photography, the point is completely missed – most people don’t care. Photos are just a way to share their lives, they do not do it for the art, the idea doesn’t even enter their mind. It’s just a way to communicate.

Art photography will always be important, meaningful, valuable, once you realize that the notion of photography as an “art form” is a recent change in itself, as photography was initially not accepted as an art form when the first photographs showed up in the world. Artists are the exceptions, the ones inventing ideas and ways to express them, driving us forward in step changes through creative vision outside the realm of thought for most.

The great work is still great, and is still rare – but there is more good work, and even more marginal work, out there than before cameras became widespread.

The lesson of the expansion of tools from other industries (books, newspapers, music, movies) is the same – as the tools reach a larger amount of people, the ability to organize it all is even more important, and the tools and people to do the organizing even more important. Editors, curators, people with the eyes and understanding to organize and scan through the world, are and will be even more important.

Where does this leave the economics of the stock business? Shot, dead, gone. Debate what you want about the economics of microstock, or Getty’s change to $49 images, or the value of RF and RM, or whether Flickr or Zoomr can create stock agencies from user generated content, but long-term, the economics for individual photographers will continue to degrade. While the demand for photographs for traditional media is flat or growing slowly at best, the supply is drastically increased. Say what you want about the quality of the work (marginal, uninspired, even dumbing down the art form), but most buyers do not need the best, they just need what is good enough for the decreasing expectations of the public.

Communication has never been about pure quality, but rather about exchanging information efficiently, and once you accept photography as a form of communication then you completely change your expectations and use of the medium.

What does mean to professional photographers? Learn the lessons from the music business and musicians – the future is less about owning the end product, more about the process and the experience of creating.

My Cities 2007

2008-01-04T00:00:00Z

Continuing from my cities in 2006, my cities in 2007:

(only cities where I spent a night count, and the * means I visited multiple times on non-consecutive days)

Falls Church, VA *
Richmond, VA *
Dolly Sods Wilderness, Mononghela National Forest, WV *
NYC, NY
Santa Cruz, CA
San Francisco, CA *
Glasgow, Scotland *
Drymen, Scotland
Inversnaid, Scotland
Crianlarich, Scotland
Bridge of Orchy, Scotland
Kinlochleven, Scotland
Fort William, Scotland
Inverness, Scotland
Edinburgh, Scotland
Arlington, VA *
Luray, VA *
Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
Zihuatanejo, Mexico
Acapulco, Mexico
Puerto Escondido, Mexico
Oaxaca, Mexico
Pittsburgh, PA *
Charleston, WV
Louisville, KY
Champaign, IL
Avoca, IA
Keystone, SD
Badlands National Park, SD
Boulder, CO
Highlands Ranch, CO (Denver, CO)
Rocky Mountain National Park, CO
Moab, UT
Capital Reef National Park, UT
Kodachrome Basin State Park, UT
Zion National Park, UT
Mammoth Lakes, CA
Yosemite National Park, CA
Folsom, CA
Tahoe City, CA
Citrus Heights, CA (Sacramento, CA)
Arcata, CA
Crater Lake National Park, OR
Tahkenitch State Park, OR
Corvallis, OR
Newberry National Volcanic Monument Park, OR
Bend, OR
Olympic National Park, WA
Seattle, WA
Okanogan National Forest, WA
Vancouver, British Columbia (BC)
Skihist Provincial Park, BC
Okanagan Falls Provincial Park, BC (Okanagan Falls, BC)
Dry Gulch Provincial Park, BC (Radium Hot Springs, BC)
Jasper National Park, Alberta (AB)
Kananaskis Country, AB
Calgary, AB
Larimore, ND
Saginaw, MI
Brooklyn, NY *
Vienna, VA *
Charlottesville, VA
Lottsburg, VA (Northern Neck VA)
George Washington National Forest, Wardensville, WV
Austin, TX
Clarksburg, NJ
Wyndmoor, PA
London, United Kingdom
Delhi, India *
Amritsar, Punjab, India
Pune, Maharashtra, India
Aurangabad, Maharashtra, India
Udaipur, Rajasthan, India
Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India
Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India
Desert outside Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India
Jaipur, Rajasthan, India (kind of…)

—

This year I completed visiting all 49 continental US States, with just Hawaii left to go to finish off the USA. And yes, it’s a long list this year. In no way am I looking to top that next year, unnecessary…

Cultural Tourism

2008-01-17T00:00:00Z

People or places? Which has a bigger impact on our memories? Can we make a distinction between the impact of the two on our experiences? Which is more rewarding?

Over the past month I have been saving up my thoughts on India and just enjoying and embracing the days. I have spent days bouncing between cities, wandering through temples, museums, forts, palaces, memorials, markets, neighborhoods, looking at sights and listening to the streets.

I have also spent days, afternoons and evenings with old friends, new friends, fellow travellers, locals, people I meet while wandering about, some that I approached with questions or requests, some that come up and just want to ask me questions.

What will I remember more? Which will make a larger impact on my memories, thoughts, actions, life?

People.

Yes, I know how odd that sounds. Yes, I am a loner at heart. But I have learned so much more about India, its people, culture, history, past, present and future from my conversations with people that I meet that I could have ever learned from guidebooks or historical explanations. It is nearly impossible to sit alone in India: the natural inquisitiveness (or opportunism) of Indians inevitably leads to me getting into a conversation with groups of people, at varying levels of depth depending on their grasp of English.

Most times I find if difficult to figure out someone’s intentions, and while I have gotten better at picking my places to get into conversations I still tend to be too trusting of people that I meet on the street. As it was explained to me, everybody wants something, ranging from simple info about me and my life to my money. And in fairness, I have initiated many conversations, sometimes for information, sometimes just to talk or learn, but always wanting something myself, however pure my intentions may be.

Trust me, not all random experiences with people have been great. While some have been exhilarating, deep, meaningful, illuminating, many have been tiring, limited, shallow, and a couple have left me angry, depressed, and distrusting of people.

But still I hunger for more interactions, more experiences, more memories.

Thus, despite the abundant history and natural and man-made beauty, it is the people and conversations (travellers and locals alike) that will leave me with my true memories and stories from India. Here’s to two more weeks of embracing India and enjoying more great memories…

Unordered Thoughts from India

2008-01-22T00:00:00Z

Rather than waiting for the unlikely essay that captures all of my thoughts, experiences and observations in one grand, defining swoop, instead I offer a list of unordered, unstructured and hopefully somewhat insightful observations from 52 days in India:

I harbour the idea that Westerners (or at least, Americans) think of India as “India”, a homogeneous collection of people and societal artifacts that constitutes culture. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
As mentioned previously, it’s impossible to be alone in India. Sitting alone is an open invitation for someone to approach and start a conversation. Most often it is just simple and benign interest in a traveler, an outsider, a curiosity.
Closely associated with the above, the willingness to help a stranger, Indian or foreigner, is simply amazing to a westerner.
Everything is incomplete, or at least appears to be. Everything in the process of being constructed has piles of material standing nearby, making you wonder if the materials are going to be used, just leftovers yet to be removed, or rubble that has not been removed. Chances are it is all of the above.
This is often manifested by the inability to determine where construction and destruction begins. Sidewalks end at pile of rubble, to be picked up again and dropped at seemingly random intervals. Roads collect potholes, barriers, boulders, abandoned piles of dirt, bricks and trash, all acting as naturally created speed bumps.
At the same time, everything works, smooth or not. The Indian train system is a massive, archaic institution that somehow transports millions of people despite great inefficiency. But at the same time, you can book tickets online, print out an electronic ticket from home, check your wait list status online, and while at the station check train status, routes, and reservation status and seat assignment at networked kiosks.
An unwillingness to make change is most often disguised as an inability. If you walk away from a merchant because they say they can not make change, somehow those missing notes or coins magically appears.
The Indian head side-to-side nod that accompanies or replaces a verbal yes and no is a big point of confusion and comment from most westerners I meet. My hint is to ignore what the person says, ignore the direction of the head shakes, and pay attention to the eyes.
A corollary to the above: the more confident a person is in their advice, the more likely they are wrong.
Everything you look at or take interest in will undoubtedly be closely followed by five people taking a similar interest, looking over your shoulder, looking to see what you are doing. Just carrying a camera is an invitation for ten people to want to look at what you last took a picture of.
Or more commonly, carrying a camera is an open invitation for someone to request that you take a picture or them, and for them to see themselves on the little digital screen. Did people make the same requests in the days of film? Does everyone just want to give the gift of their likeness to strangers? Or does everyone just want to be recognized, a star, in some way?
There is an abundance of goods sold in small quantities, for small amounts, in small shops, by small kids.
Labour is inexpensive, and it shapes all interactions, expectations, decisions. For example, why mechanize when a person can do it? What is saved? What is replaced?
Thus a corollary: everything is done through middlemen, sometimes a chore, but most often a necessity to get anything done. Efficiency has a very different meaning.
If can be fixed, mended, adapted, or reused, just ask, and someone will figure out how.
Small things I notice by their abundance: gates, security guards, log books, the need for photos for all sorts of applications, hand-painted signs, the extra three to ten waiters at every restaurant.
Small things I notice by their absence: napkins that actually work, vending machines, “health” food, women cooks, waitresses.

More observations, hopefully more meaningful, to come later…

Cutting a desire path through life

2008-03-24T00:00:00Z

Although you may not notice, desire paths pop up throughout our daily life. Next time you walk from one place to another, note the route you choose. Do you stick to the designed paths? Do you stick to the paved path, the gravel road, the marked route? Or do you choose an alternate route, a quicker or better way? Do you walk on the grass? Is this way crisp and laid out, or has it been trod before?

A desire path is this non-designed but worn path, created casually by people finding the shortest distance between two points. It is created by experience, not by explicit design. The concept has existed in architecture for decades. Landscape designers can apply the concept to let people choose their preferred paths, and then formally pave the paths once established. To see many examples of desire paths, check out the pictures in this Flickr group dedicated to observed desire paths.

The concept has recently popped up as a principle to apply to other methods of industrial, product and even software design to allow usage patterns to help inform design choices. Customers use products, making choices as they go, forming behaviors, and hopefully best practices emerge that can be used to guide design and product decisions.

Whether created by a single designer or by the wisdom of the masses, we create norms, standardized choices, and we follow. We see the choices people have made, we see the paths, and we follow them.

And not just in our walking routes, but throughout our lives. Laws, rules, understood norms for behavior, societal expectations: all created by the history of choices of the masses.

Desire paths are how people have chosen the best route to navigate their physical world, whether it is the “intended” path or not.

How can we cut our own desire paths through life?

Create your own success in life by choosing your own process, your own route.

Most conventional ideas about success go wrong because they focus on outcomes and results instead of on the processes of living. Outcomes come around from time to time, but life itself — the process of living, acting, thinking, and being — happens all the time.

Focus on the process, not the results. Spend your time on doing what you enjoy, follow your own process, because if you don’t enjoy the process, it’s unlikely you’ll enjoy the results.

Successful businesses are founded on the idea of creating processes that can be understood, repeated, replicated, broken down step-by-step, because they know that in the business world sometimes the results go a bit astray. Companies use past performance to benchmark and create expectations for the future, and it helps them understand mistakes, failures, opportunities for improvement. They develop history, core competencies, establish cultures, a history of shared experiences that becomes their DNA for success.

Do the same in your life. Take time to figure out what you want, whether it is on the established path or not. Then do it, consistently, with purpose. Make mistakes, and ruthlessly learn from them. Create your desire path in life: maybe others will follow, maybe not, but in the end at least it’s your path.

Centralia, PA

2008-08-24T00:00:00Z

Centralia, Pennsylvania, USA, a nearly-abandoned town due to an underground coal mine fire since 1962, and an abandoned stretch of highway PA 54 / PA 61 created by a still smoldering fire.

Centralia, Pennsylvania used to be an active town of over 1000 residents, busy with coal mining, railroads, schools, churches, hotels, bars, theatres, banks and a number of stores. Today all that remains is a couple houses, a municipal building, empty streets, 11 residents and a surprisingly large cemetery that hints to the town’s former prosperity. Standing only a couple miles from neighboring towns, Centralia today has few signs of what used to exist as recently as 10-20 years ago.

Why go to a nearly-abandoned eventual ghost town? Why not?

Opportunities for exploring without guides, without signs, without obvious indicators of what to look at and how to react are far and few between in the developed world. So why not take these small chances when we can?

I wasn’t alone: in the couple hours I wandered around last Friday and took photographs of the town and the abandoned highway, I ran into about six other groups of people, including a German reporter from Munich visiting the town and interviewing the few residents willing to talk. (Updated 9/11/2008, his article on Philly.com).

I first heard about Centralia about five years ago, and have read a lot about the town on the Internet (background links below). What happened? In brief, an underground coal mine caught on fire 1962 due to an incident that caused a fire at the new landfill and exposed errors in the landfill’s construction. Even though the authorities started monitoring the fire, a slow and ineffective response to the coal mine fire over the years led to citizens choosing in 1983 to take a government buy-out instead of an expensive and uncertain plan to stop the fire’s spread. Additional government purchases of homes over the years have left only a few residents still residing in the town.

In 1994 a section of PA 54 / PA 61 had to be re-routed because the underground fire caused portions of the pavement to buckle. Smoke still seeps out of the cracks in the closed-off highway, and immense weeds have sprouted through the median. The only apparent signs of life is the fresh spray-painted graffiti littered all over the pavement.

That said, the most interesting part of my visit was to compare photographs of the town from the past 10-20 years with my own views of today: less buildings, more graffiti, less people, less signs of what used to exist.

Background links:

Damn Interesting: The Smoldering Ruins of Centralia. Good for history of the fire and its impact on the town.
Offroaders.com: Centralia, Pennslyvania. Also a good source for background.
Wikipedia: Centralia, Pennslyvania. Detailed background and photos.
RoadsideAmerica.com: Centralia Mine Fire
Xydexx’s Exploring and Moderns Ruins: Centralia, PA. Good directions.
PA Highways: Centralia, PA

What Startups can learn from Billy Beane

2008-09-17T00:00:00Z

Billy Beane, the General Manager (GM) of the Oakland Athletics, explaining how to change the team during the regular season, from “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis (page 193-194 if you’re interested):

“No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have money you can’t afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you’re f**cked.”
“The day you say you have to do something, you’re screwed. Because you are going to make a bad deal. You can always recover from the player you didn’t sign. You may never recover from the player you signed at the wrong price.”
“Know exactly what every player in baseball is worth to you. You can put a dollar figure on it.”
“Know exactly who you want and go after him.” (Never mind who they say they want to trade.)
“Every deal you do will be publicly scrutinized by subjective opinion. If I’m [IBM CEO] Lou Gerstner, I’m not worried that every personnel decision I make is going to wind up on the front page of the business section. Not everyone believes that they know everything about the personal computer. But everyone who ever picked up a bat thinks he knows baseball. To do this well, you have to ignore the newspapers.”

Many observers, especially those in baseball, completely misinterpreted Moneyball. Moneyball was about strategy, not tactics: constantly measuring and re-evaluating tactics and alternatives, not about determining and defining the “winning tactic”.

Beane built (and continues to build) the Oakland Athletics by building a team focusing on under-valued players. What is under-valued, however, changes over time. In the mid-1990s, OBP (on-base percentage) and OPS (on-base percentage slugging percentage) were under-valued statistics compared to more traditional stats such as RBIs, batting average and other counting stats. Beane was able to identify measurements of player performance that were under-valued by other teams (by player trade value and salary) compared to the contributions the player would have to the team’s performance (in wins and losses). Beane found, monitored and acquired players that fit his model and built teams that perennially out-performed their total salary expenditures; he created winning teams that were able to regularly compete against teams spending multiples more in salaries on players and teams. ^[1]

However, times changed. As other GMs picked up on the results, they started copying his tactics and bidding for the same players.

And over time, Beane adjusted. The metrics of value in the marketplace changed and Beane re-evaluated his tactics and identified new ways to value players and construct teams. He changed how he valued defense, draft picks, salary flexibility and pre-arbitration players; he changed how he constructed bullpens and timed acquiring and trading away players; and he made many other decisions that demonstrated his ability to measure, estimate and value player and team performance. It may not work every single year since many factors are difficult to model (e.g. freak injuries, personal matters), but over the long run Beane has demonstrated the ability to change tactics within an overarching strategy.

Lessons for all…

Also: more on GigaOm: What Startups Can Learn From Billy “Moneyball” Beane.

Of course, while the A’s out-performed in the regular season, they regularly under-performed in short playoff series post-season baseball. The averages of the long-season simply did not always work out over the small sample sizes of five or seven games. Beane’s infamous retort: “My sh** doesn’t work in the playoffs.” ↩︎

How to Fail - 25 Lessons Learned through Failure

2008-09-23T00:00:00Z

Below are the 25 most important lessons I’ve learned through close observation and first-hand experiences in how entrepreneurs and startups fail. The first sixteen primarily address strategic and operational issues, and the last nine deal more with management and organizational issues. I believe the three most important factors for any company are people, product and market, so I’m not sure that the ratio of ways to fail really fits my overall beliefs, but perhaps you’ll have ideas and lessons you’ve learned that will bring the ratio more in line. Read, and then comment: what would you add as reason #26?

1. Dither, dither, dither; plan, plan, plan. Instead: Fail fast. Fire, aim, repeat.

Time is the most valuable asset a person has, and yet it’s the easiest and most common thing wasted. Speed breeds momentum and passion, motivation and a bias for action. Learning through experience is far more valuable than learning through planning, prototyping or researching as nothing is more direct, meaningful and visceral than seeing how something works (or doesn’t).

What is the second-most important asset? Passion. People only have so much passion, intellect and interest to devote to ideas without seeing results, without seeing the fruit of their labour. Give people the chance to succeed and the opportunity to learn without drowning them in the process. Few things are more demotivating than working on a project for an extensive amount of time just to see it canceled shortly before it would have seen the light of day.

2. Postpone hard decisions until you have to make hard trade-offs. Instead: Make decisions earlier to create options and build flexibility.

Make decisions before you think you need to. You’re probably too late if you come to the point where you realize you have to make a choice between hard trade-offs. By waiting to make a decision you’ve created trade-offs instead of options. Postponing decisions in the attempt to optimise your results is probably a waste of your resources in other ways.

3. Copy tactics. Instead: Create strategies.

Blindly following the tactics and path of other companies is a sure route to failure. The right tactics are indelibly linked to the internal and external environments a company faced at a particular point in time. Companies regularly fail by adopting old business models or basing a business on artificially protecting old business models. Re-applying another company’s tactics neglects to consider the process and path they took to success.

Followers focus on tactics and tools rather than strategies and goals.

4. “Fight the good fight.” Instead: Pick the right battles, at the right time, with the right people.

There is a time and a place for everything. Make prudent decisions based on your present and future situation and capabilities rather than fighting every battle that comes your way. The hardest part for every startup is staying in the game, thus do everything you can do to stay in the game give yourself the opportunity for future success.

Implications:

Leave big, systemic, intractable problems to big companies with the resources to get knocked down and get up again. Instead, solve simple problems (big and small) where you can have a direct impact.
Let large companies create standards. Stay away from basing your success on re-creating the wheel for the industry. If your valuable, innovation solutions for your customers are meant to be industry standards, then they will naturally become the standards, but do not depend on systemic change for your success.
Leave large, cross-industry partnerships between incumbents to large, established companies. Startups will almost always be caught between the old battles and priorities of established companies, better to not depend on having to solve their relationships for your success.

5. Solve your problems. Instead: Solve their problems.

Alternate interpretation: Solve buyers’ problems instead of solving sellers’ problems.

Don’t create solutions that make things easier for you. Create solutions that solve problems for your customers and buyers; they typically don’t care about your own internal problems.

6. Focus on the long-term. Instead: Focus on the short-term.

You exist in the short-term, you don’t know if you will in the long-term. Make decisions that matter now. In fact, your view of the long-term will probably be wrong; instead, make decisions now that build options that allow you to adjust to the inevitable differences between now and the future.

7. Build prototypes, mockups and samples. Instead: Start building in a format and medium as close to the finished product as possible, and iterate, iterate, iterate.

Nothing saps the spirit more than creating mockups and designs without making progress toward a completed product. Most often the product cannot be created exactly as it is designed, and thus it is important to learn through working on the product itself, not the design.

Obviously different products require different levels of designing, blueprints and planning; but the focus should always be on the quality of the finished product and not the model.

8. Let data make decisions. Instead: Use data to guide decisions.

There is always incomplete data whenever you create something new. In a world of incomplete information, data can help you make a decision but it must be treated as a guide to a decision, not the decision. You are more likely to neglect to evaluate an “unknown unknown” than you are to misjudge a “known unknown.” Spend your time wisely on asking the right questions rather than just coming up with the right answers.

9. Give customers everything they want. Instead: Listen to customers, then throw (almost) all of it away.

Closely related to how to use data: one of the best advantages of a small company is that everyone interacts with customers or can directly see how customers are using their product or service (wait: not everyone does?).

Large companies are forced to split tasks, accountabilities and “strategy” up into small pieces by the very nature of being large. The increased interactions and interlocking tasks creates layers of decision-making and abstracts the tasks away from the impacts they have on customers.

If you are in a position where you cannot directly listen to a customer, talk to a customer or directly see what a customer is doing, then you’re too far away.

10. “New, New, New!” Instead: F*** new. What’s different? What’s better?

Unless new adds something to the equation, new is not good enough. New is not enough to get people to switch; and if they are switching to you, it’s pretty likely they’ll switch away from you when you’re no longer new.

11. Leave money on the table. Instead: Raise all the capital you should each time you’re at the trough.

More companies die through lack of capital than any other reason. Capital buys time and creates options; it allows you to stay in the game through the inevitable mistakes, misjudgments and external market shifts out of your control.

The key here is “should.” Raising small amounts of capital to test an idea or to get a quality investor involved or to validate the idea are all good reasons to raise smaller amounts of money; raising smaller amounts of money to optimise the valuation at the next fund-raising round is not a good reason. You’ll spend more money and more time than projected and you’ll be looking at a range of hard trade-offs in your next round of fund-raising.

Cash is king.

12. Optimise for the best-case scenario. Instead: Build redundancy and plan for the worst-case scenario.

Projects take longer than planned. Production is more expensive than projected. Sales come slower than forecasted. Market conditions change, competitors shift gears.

The only guarantee is that things will change. Depending on the past to predict the future is a bad bet because the risk / reward trade-off is inevitably skewed; things are guaranteed to change, yet the rewards are poorly priced into current risk.

Create solutions for things that don’t change. Create a structure that allows you to stay in the game. Instead of depending on a step-by-step sequential plan, create alternate, parallel paths that allow you to adapt your various workstreams to the changing environment and marketplace.

13. Over-promise, over-sell, under-deliver. Instead: Over-promise, over-sell, over-deliver.

The vast majority of startups fail because the problems they aim to solve exist for a reason. Aim high and deliver high, and if you can’t do that, then you probably won’t succeed. Justifying mistakes is merely rationalization.

However, “over-delivering” does not equal “doing more”. If you attempt to over-deliver by adding more and more features, more promises, more capabilities, you’re reducing your likelihood of delivering on any of them. Focus on the getting the minimum done exceptionally well.

When in doubt, do less.

14. Be stubborn in the face of failure. Instead: Be determined in the face of disbelief.

The doubters are inevitable and the odds are stacked against entrepreneurs and startups, thus it is crucial to believe in yourself, your company and your solution. Yet that determination can become our biggest weakness when it manifests itself as stubbornness or inflexibility; we can learn more through failures than successes.

The difference between determination and stubbornness is the difference between ignoring people and ignoring results.

Flexibility is a virtue, not a weakness; error is inevitable, thus accept being wrong and make more mistakes to learn better and faster.

15. “We can build a successful business by capturing just X% of the market.” Instead: Sell to one customer. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

It is impossible for a company or an employee to grasp “the market.” All of your potential customers face slightly different problems and nobody wants to be the “average customer” at the median of the market. Focus your attention and all of your employees on being the best solution for a single customer and grow by winning customer after customer.

By attempting to appeal to everyone, you’ll likely appeal to no one.

Know the difference between the mass market and the niche market and build your entire business on that understanding.

16. Depend on outsiders to make key decisions or develop key components. Instead: Make your own key decisions and build your own core competitive advantages.

Outsourcing parts of your business is a key way to focus your time and attention on what matters; but be sure to keep your core competitive advantage in-house. The key decisions that affect the future of your business should be made by you and your company.

Consultants, partners and investors will simply make different decisions using their frameworks guided by their incentives and payoff structures, despite all good intentions.

Consultants can be valuable for large companies by exposing them to new ideas and processes and shaking up ingrained ways of doing business, but at a startup nothing is ingrained and creating new ideas and solutions should be the key part of your business. If you need a consultant to make a decision or build a solution for you, you’re making the wrong decisions or building the wrong solutions.

17. “I know more than anyone else.” Instead: If you think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re the fool.

If you are indeed the smartest person in the room, then you’ve picked the wrong people to work with. If you’re not the smartest person in the room but think you are, then you’re simply (usually disastrously) wrong.

Hire people smarter than you. Work with people smarter than you. Listen to them. Let them lead you. Take the blame for all failures, give away the credit for all successes.

18. A unanimous decision means we’re all right. Instead: If everybody agrees, you’re probably all wrong.

Startups face big decisions in areas of uncertainty. If everyone takes the same decision using the same information then you’re probably not structuring the choices appropriately.

Expose yourself to a more diverse set of opinions and interpretations to re-structure the choices. Differences of opinion are warning signs for decisions; use these warning signals to identify the areas where you need to structure more options in your investment decisions. Since nobody really knows the exact path to success, build flexibility and don’t depend on everything to go right for success.

19. Hire resumes. Instead: Hire people: curiosity, passion, interpersonal skills and drive.

Who would you rather work with: a resume or a person?

Remember that resumes are naturally biased, created and carefully manipulated by job-seekers as marketing devices.

Hire people you want to work with based on the traits, characteristics and behavior you see. It takes more time to hire people rather than resumes, but the risk and downside of hiring a poorly-suited person is higher than the downside of an empty position.

20. Create rules to outline decisions. Instead: Create incentives to guide decisions.

Incentives align priorities. Rules do not create loyalty or empower employees. Instead of telling people what to do, outline goals and let them lead you to the destination. If you work with people smarter than you (and you probably do), then it’s important to listen and learn from them.

Give up control; you never really had it anyway.

21. Reward activity. Instead: Reward achievements, both failures and successes.

Failure is an inevitable by-product of an innovative company, thus it’s important to reward people’s failures along with their successes. Ending a project can be as valuable as pushing forward, since misguided activity wastes resources, time and people’s passion.

While process is important, remember that it’s results that count. Academic exercises (efforts that will never be executed) are called “academic” for a reason.

22. Meet to discuss. Instead: Meet to decide.

Meetings used to disseminate information are the biggest time-sink at almost all companies. Nobody likes meetings and the interruptions they create.

If you are meeting, structure an agenda that leads to a decision being made right then. Use other methods of communication to disseminate information and updates.

If you need meetings to “get everyone on the same page”, then you have bigger problems the meeting will probably not address.

23. Work under “understandings”. Instead: Create legal agreements as soon as possible.

The process of creating legal agreements is more valuable than the resulting documents themselves. Creating legal agreements forces people to make clear decisions and eliminates the different perceptions and the illusion of agreement that “understandings” invariably create.

24. Everything matters. Instead: Recognize the difference between “penny-wise” and “pound-foolish”.

Focus on what matters. “Penny-wise and pound-foolish” is a phrase that describes the tendency to focus on small, marginal-value things that we can see to the detriment of focusing more important, valuable but perhaps less-obvious options.

While the phrase is more generally used to describe investment decisions (e.g. spending time on evaluating ways to cut small expenses instead of focusing on larger profit opportunities), it applies to any resource investment: time, money, people, passion, intellect, focus, integrity.

And last but not least,

25. Treat these lessons as absolutes. Instead: Know all the rules completely so you can break them perfectly.

I didn’t come up with this one. ^[1] But even if it’s a bit hokey, it’s true: there are very, very few absolutes in the world.

Generally mistakenly attributed to the Dalai Lama ↩︎

Five Lessons: How Photographers can Create New Business Models

2008-09-30T00:00:00Z

The industry has been flooded with news lately; Photoshelter closing their stock agency, Corbis laying off more jobs, Photokina and a raft of new camera announcements, etc., etc. But if the only conversation in the industry is about new cameras and dying business models, then I’m scared we’re missing the point.

I’ve been thinking about the changing nature of the photography business for awhile, and I’ve teased about my thoughts about the future of the business and how photographers need to change their business models to adapt, to survive, to thrive.

Well, here we go. Today we’ll start with the introduction, and we’ll break up the five lessons over the coming days to give you a chance to take it all in a little easier. Let’s go.

We are all aware that the photography business is undergoing some changes that is making it difficult for photographers to maintain their previous levels of income. But it’s not just about that: the entire field of photography is undergoing massive shifts in how photographs are produced, distributed, stored, sold, viewed and critiqued. Additionally, the number of people involved with creating and viewing photographs has increased drastically as the the tools for producing and distributing images are easier to use, cheaper to buy and much more available than before.

More importantly, it’s not just photography, and it’s not just the creative industries; all industries are undergoing their own “democratization of the industry” in different ways.

Can a photographer just focus on “how have things have changed for my business this year”? No: a limited, myopic view will not enable photographers to understand how external pressures are affecting the execution their own business plans. (Wait: you’re a photographer and you don’t have a plan? Drop me a line.)

Instead, by understanding the larger changes throughout the industry photographers can develop a better understanding of how to invest their time, money and passion across the many potential routes.

The basic economics of the photography industry have been absolutely, fundamentally, permanently upended, flattened by the democratization of the tools of the production and distribution and a shift in the technologies, mediums and methods of communication. (link)

Technology has democratized access to the tools of production and distribution, leading to a surge of creators, squeezing the middle class of the industry; the long tail of photographers are getting squeezed. But the stars continue to stand strong: the rich get richer at the expense of the rest. If you look around, this isn’t unique to photography: across industries, countries and within societies, the rich continue to reap the benefits of increasing marginal returns to effort. Instead of railing against this economic order, let’s spend our time figuring out why it is happening in photography and figuring out how we can leverage the opportunities.

We are seeing a massive mismatch of supply and demand; photographers have flooded the market with an oversupply of images created and distributed using mediums and based on economic models no longer in demand. While our ability to consume images and stories has increased, our ability to mentally process, physically consume and filter out quality has decreased.

Framed under these pressures, “good enough” is the mantra of new consumers and creators of photography. The idea of a “good” image has been wrenched from the traditional photography and artistic elite and realigned to the larger mass market of populist photographers. The mass market has stormed the compound and they’re not leaving; better to learn how to leverage and profit from them rather than attempting to ignore or shut them out.

Most of the recent thoughts on how photographers can adapt have focused on either expanding what photographers create or how they market themselves and their images. Photographers have been adding multimedia and dynamic content to their traditional static images to find new ways to communicate and share their stories. We have been exploring how to use the Internet to market themselves and their images to the traditional industry gatekeepers.

But these are tactics, not goals, and as technology changes the tactics will change as well. Photographers need to identify their goals and find ways to introduce learnings from other industries facing similar threats.

Thus technological changes have altered the economic, social and cultural expectations of photography and photographers. Professional photographers need to utilize new technologies and leverage the newer cultural expectations of photography to stay relevant and profitable. Consider the changes in the industry as an opportunity, not a threat. While the existing routes to success have been under increasing pressure, many new avenues have opened up. Photographers have more opportunities, not less, as long as they are willing to explore new technologies and define their exact business models more precisely.

So what can professional photographers do?

Five Lessons for Professional Photographers

Lesson 1: Photographers are your customers, not your competition

2008-10-01T00:00:00Z

For the background behind this post check out the introduction: Five Lessons: How Photographers can Create New Business Models. This is the first lesson in the series…

Where is the money in photography?

“The way to make money in photography is to sell stuff to photographers.”

The usual sources of income in photography are hitting a bit of a rough patch, to say the least.

From a photographer’s perspective, you’d be pretty worried if you tried to use Porter’s Five Forces to understand what’s going on:

Threat of new entrants: Massive shifts in the supply of photographers armed with comparable, easily and relatively inexpensively acquired technology during a massive upheaval in the technology used in the industry. (High)
Threat of industry competition: Tremendous competition between existing players throughout the industry, squeezed by a declining amount of traditional employment opportunities. (High)
Threat of substitutes: Technology has created substitutes for static images, changed the notion of what cameras do, changed the notion of what photographers do. As we’ve discussed, we’ve seen a fundamental shift in the technology used to create, distribute and consume images and stories. Old technology, however, continues to have a use to define niches and specialization. (High).
Bargaining Power of Buyers: Buyers continue to be unorganized in a diversified, fractured market for images and photographers. Buyers lack any real power to dictate prices outside of the ability to find competing photographers easily. Low transaction costs, low costs in changing photographers. (Low)
Bargaining Power of Suppliers: Massive competition between the manufacturers and suppliers of equipment to photographers has resulted in amazing changes in the pace of advancements in the industry at declining marginal investments. (Low)

More photographers, more cameras, more point-and-shoot and more DSLRs, all with faster replacement cycles, producing more images, shared with more people, more often and more immediate. Everyone is a photographer.

What do all these new photographers want to do?

Do they really want to compete with the traditional professional photographer?

We are seeing an interesting mix of competition between and within amateurs and professionals. 2 The flood of images to stock photo sites and the rise of microstock has permanently damaged the stock photography industry and has crippled many professionals surviving on stock sales. Traditional wedding photographers have been hurt by the shift in demand towards the looser “photojournalistic” style accompanied with more “friends with cameras.”

But this competition is primarily at the fringes of each segment of the business: the cores remain firmly in the grasp of the professionals. Many of the “lost sales” to amateurs are not true lost sales: in most cases the buyers would never have paid the price for traditional professionals and would have either bought far less images or none at all.

Sound familiar? Would everyone who downloaded “pirated music” or “pirated software” for free really have paid for them?

What is the difference between an amateur photographer and a professional photographer?

An amateur can take a great picture: a professional will create a great image.

Put simply, given the same conditions (same time, same event, same subject), a professional will consistently out-produce an amateur. While an amateur will get 10/100 usable images, a professional will get 80/100 usable images (note: the ratios aren’t important: what is important is that a pro will have a much higher “hit rate”).

Amateurs will not make the same commitment to photography and the industry as professionals, and it will show. Amateurs have different lives, different priorities, different goals, lower experience levels, less industry knowledge and less contacts, clients and relationships within the industry. Amateurs don’t really want to become professionals; despite what they say, they’re not willing to take the risk, make the commitment, spend the time and effort.

But amateurs still want to take great pictures; every photographer wants to create great work, but the biggest difference between amateurs and professionals is what they aim to do with it.

They are not your competition; they are your customers.

What do amateurs want to do? To start:

Take pictures. The phrasing is important; it’s not “tell stories”, or “make images”, but “take pictures”.
Share pictures and share their lives with friends, family.
Showcase their pictures and lives for their homes, their offices, small shows with friends.
Learn more about how to take better pictures.
Find people that share their interests and connect with other photography enthusiasts
Do more with their pictures: make photobooks, mugs, calendars, t-shirts, etc.
Take pictures for friends, help them capture times in their lives.

In summary, most amateurs are focused on their images, not yours. Most amateurs, at least the ones buying the bulk of the new cameras sold today and without traditional photography training or eduction, are not interested in delving into the history of photography, seriously attending and critiquing photography exhibits or going to industry festivals and building business relationships.

So, if you’re a pro, don’t fight the rise of the amateurs. We all know success in the industry is not just about the images. Embrace amateurs. Help them. Better yet, sell them what they want.

We’ve started to explore the new demand in photography. Next we’ll focus on what to sell, how to price it and touch on examples of how some people and companies are redefining the opportunities.

1 Or everyone thinks they are…
2 I know the line is blurry and far from cut and dry, and that many people have “amateur” and “professional” photography interests. But let’s start with the simplification…

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Introduction: Five Lessons: How Photographers can Create New Business Models

Lesson 1: Photographers are your customers, not your competition.
Lesson 2: Take advantage of the atomization of demand and expand the scope of consumption.
Lesson 3: Take advantage of the oversupply and target your brand, your niche, your fans, your customers.
Lesson 4: Connect with context and content.
Lesson 5: Make great work.

Lesson 2: Take advantage of the atomization of demand and expand the scope of consumption

2008-10-09T00:00:00Z

For the background behind this post check out Introduction: Five Lessons: How Photographers can Create New Business Models and Lesson 1: Photographers are your customers, not your competition. This is Lesson 2…

In the Introduction and Lesson 1 we spent a lot of time discussing what is going on in the photography industry. Now let’s start to think about what to do about it.

Take advantage of the atomization of demand and expand the scope of consumption.

What does that mean?

Atomization of demand:

The demand for images, photographers and stories has splintered into a disaggregated variety of niches, groups and audiences.
Fans and customers have splintered off into their areas of interest, disaggregated and re-formed across traditional dividing lines by the web.
There are more people creating and consuming images than ever before; thus it’s not surprising that we have developed more varied ideas and perspectives of a “good image” or “what photography is about.” ^[1]
Our definitions of amateur, professional, critic, curator and fan have become more blurred.
Our reasons, interest and goals in photography have become less homogenous.
And our use of images has become broader: we have easier and cheaper access to a wider variety of ways to consume, customize, personalize, remix and repurpose images than ever before.

Expand the scope of consumption:

The opportunities to produce at scale are available to more people, easier, quicker and cheaper than ever before.
And it will likely continue to get better as recreating and repurposing images becomes more akin to manipulating data.
But since these opportunities are available to everyone, competing on scale is becoming tougher and tougher for individuals.
The larger opportunity is to develop economies of scope.
It is easier, cheaper and quicker than ever before to create, setup, market, distribute and sell images, ideas, knowledge and information.
Take advantage of the cheaper and easier access to the interaction and distribution platforms to let people consume content (and context) in whatever form they want.
In simple terms: create more products, customized to different niches, used in different ways. There is no single, killer product or strategy: the answer is much more grey and messy.

What are the business opportunities? What can and should we create?

Let’s remember two things:

People spend their money, time and passion to better their lives, not to better yours. Accept it. Remind yourself of this mantra every time you create, market and deliver a product or service, and it will make you focus on exactly why someone should spend their money, time and passion on you.
By and large, most new amateur photographers don’t want to buy your images, they want to do things with their own.

Whether they have thought about it this way or not, innovative companies and professional photographers are taking advantage of the splintering demand and the increased economies of scale and scope to manage their content, repurpose their images, connect with fans and customers, stir up attention and sell themselves and their images. ^[2]

Examples ^[3]:

Help people share, print images and other products: Flickr, SmugMug, Kodak, Snapfish, Shutterfly et. al.
Help people create and display portfolios: A Photo Folio, Zenfolio, liveBooks, et. al.
Help people print (and frame images): Mpix, Imagekind, Pictopia et. al.
Help people create, print and distribute books: Blurb, My Publisher and almost all of the image printshops
Help people create, produce and distribute other products: Etsy, Cafepress and suddenly many of the printers like Mpix.
Help people license and sell images: Photoshelter, Digital Railroad, iStockphoto, Shutterstock, Photrade, etc.
Create communities around shared interests: Flickr, Lightstalkers, Photojojo, etc.
Educate, portfolio reviews, share information, connect: David Allen Harvey, The [b] School, John Harrington and Photo Business Forum, Mike Johnston, Photopreneur, Photojojo, etc.
Create experiences (travel workshops and groups, festivals): David duChemin, Matt Brandon, and many others
Curate and critique: Jörg Colberg, Rob Haggart, Mrs. Deane, Andrew Hetherington, Miguel Garcia-Guzman, Tewfic El-Sawy
Promote and connect with fans and customers: Chase Jarvis, Vincent Laforet, Jeremy Cowart, Josh McCulloch, etc.
Exposure: publish, promote, photo contests, portfolio reviews, festivals: Jen Bekman, Flak Photo, Vewd, Verve Photo, We Can’t Paint, etc.
Infrastructure: web hosting, online storage, image security and management, accounting, business management, etc.

All of these are examples of people and companies that are taking advantage of the opportunities created by the expansion and splintering of demand and the concurrent proliferation of and accessibility to the tools to connect, market, create, distribute and sell themselves and their images.

So, how should we think about pricing our products and ourselves? What business models are possible?

Looking at the list above, I used the word “help” a lot. Sometimes “help” is sometimes provided free, but often the service is also a source of income.

There is a broader debate in the business community about the variety of business models that have been created by the Internet and other technological changes. I won’t belabor the point, but the Internet has created opportunities for vastly different models of economic organization, creation and distribution, resulting in massive upheaval across almost every industry.

The Internet may have impacted the creative industries (e.g. music, film, photography, writing, journalism) first and hardest; yet at the same time these industries might also have been the slowest to realize what happened and take advantage of the opportunities. Most incumbents continue to cling to archaic, dying business models, and most creators and participants in the industry have failed to adapt their own goals, strategies and tactics. Many still see the problems rather than the opportunities; the majority of the value exchange is based on traditional business models shoved into new methods of exchange, new currencies, new channels, platforms, customers and suppliers.

A couple of leading thinkers about the variety of business models created by the Internet include Hal Varian, Chris Anderson and Kevin Kelly. You might have heard a bit of the conversation: a lot of the talk is about “free”. ^[4]

It’s a deceptively a simple concept, but the take-aways and practical applications are not as simple as “give it away for free”.

There’s actually many variations of “free” and thus many ways to deliver and profit from “free” products and services. We’re all familiar with giving things away: we give away advice, help on projects, donate pictures and help connect people (clients, photographers, buyers, fellow creatives) when we can.

But we give away a bit of ourselves and our images trusting, knowing, believing and hoping that we’ll get something back, directly or indirectly.

How?

Let’s start with the four kinds of “free”:

Get one thing free, buy another.

In essence, one product directly cross-subsidizes another.

Most photographers are familiar with this model: we give away views of our images (in fact, we often pay to have people view our images), but we limit use, ownership and physical reproductions of our images, instead requiring people to pay for prints, books, etc.

The music industry has always understood this model, but the model has been hard-hit by changing technology and cultural mores regarding purchasing music. Essentially, more people have changed their ideas on what they should be getting for free and what they should be paying for.

Photographers have seen a curve instead of a shift: we’ve seen a reduction in the perceived value and the prices they are willing to pay instead of a shift in what products should be free. In simpler terms, while many people say recorded music should now be free, nobody is saying stock images should be free, they’re just not willing to pay as much to license them (yet).

The Internet and the shift away from film and towards digital has fundamentally changed the marginal costs of creation and distribution (think how much easier, quicker and cheaper it is to shoot, view and print images). While all photographers have seen the impact of the rapidly decreased marginal costs of creation, few have begun to test the opportunities created by vastly lower marginal costs of distribution.

What’s possible? Perhaps it can make sense to give away prints.

Advertising, sponsors and paid media.

We’re all familiar with this model. Advertising, patronage, grants, sponsors and commissions are all ways to get paid by creating content without having to sell it.

While the model works for many industries and many forms of media, advertising will always be a controversial model for many creatives. Advertising distracts from and potentially alters the messages behind creative content, sponsorships always have be judged by their underlying motives, and all creative content and creators risk losing authenticity or their message by their association with commercialism.

It’s always existed, but the web has brought the idea of advertising-supported business models far deeper than previously possible. Artists have always struggled with the idea, and probably always will.

##“Freemium” - Only some pay for paid version.
This is a standard model for many web services and software. Essentially, the features of the product are broken out and provided as different versions and tiers with different prices, and the customers that pay for the paid versions subsidize the users that do not pay for the free versions (note: “user” does not necessarily equal “customer”, in the same way “fan” does not necessarily equal “customer”).

Many of the companies and people listed earlier use this model. Flickr is an obvious example. But there are more creative ways to think about this: for example, a photographer that offers workshops, books and general advice usually creates differential pricing schemes based on time, access, personal attention and direct feedback and engagement with the photographer. One level, even if it’s nothing more replying to emails or blogging, is usually free.

Unfortunately not all “customers” understand this concept. ^[5] As we continue to create economic models based on the concepts of versioning, differential access and “this you get for free, but this you pay for”, we’re naturally going to run into more confusion, complaints and arguments: it’s far easier to see, use and understand versions of software than versions of people.

And that’s part of the reason this model is vastly untapped by photographers. But it’s also perhaps the largest opportunity.

##“Gift Economy” - Give away for non-monetary rewards.
If it’s not money, what do we get? Attention, reputation, non-cash awards, press, publicity… all of which may or may not indirectly lead to further economic opportunities. But the key is behind the intention.

Most blogs without advertising run according to this concept: we give away our content without asking anyone to pay for it. Given that photography has always been a difficult industry for people to make a lot of money in, professionals have always accepted the non-monetary rewards as a form of compensation.

What’s the opportunity? The benefits of non-monetary rewards were traditionally fairly limited to the people that we could reach and the attention we could draw. But the Internet has created a massive opportunity: think about how many more photographers are out there than before, the massive increase in the use of images across the Internet, the larger access to and interest in the tools of creating and producing images and the increased ease to reach more people more deeply.

OK. So… what should we do?

The options are overwhelming, and instead of providing answers I’ve probably just created more questions. So, what should you do? How should you find fans and customers for your mix of products and services? How should you decide how to focus your time, passion and money?

There’s another layer to consider. The larger problem many photographers face is the other side of the market for content, an oversupply of photographers and images. How can professional photographers shift that problem into an opportunity? We’ll discuss that in the next post in the series, “Lesson 3: Take advantage of the oversupply and target your brand, your niche, your fans, your customers.”

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Introduction: Five Lessons: How Photographers can Create New Business Models]1

Lesson 1: Photographers are your customers, not your competition.
Lesson 2: Take advantage of the atomization of demand and expand the scope of consumption.
Lesson 3: Take advantage of the oversupply and target your brand, your niche, your fans, your customers.
Lesson 4: Connect with context and content.
Lesson 5: Make great work.

As discussed in earlier posts, the massive increase in the number of photographers has led to a more populist definition of a “good” picture; to get an idea of the debate simply look for the debate among professional photographers about Flickr. Better yet, dig into the site and the community itself, peruse some the of the “Award” groups in Flickr or troll through the comments littered throughout the site. I love what Flickr does, and there are some quality photographers throughout the site, but the average Flickr user’s idea of a “good picture” is very different from the average professional photographer’s view. But then again, Flickr was not created for the professional photographer; Flickr’s goals, value and footprint in the industry are far more grand. ↩︎
The phrasing “themselves and their images” should not be glossed over or taken lightly. ↩︎
I recognize these are broad buckets with a lot of overlap, and that there is a wide variation in the quality, market positioning, audience, customer segments and goals of these companies and people. And it’s not comprehensive. But let’s start with this… and my apologies to those I left out. ↩︎
Best primers to read on the underpinnings of the “free” debate: Chris Anderson: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business and Kevin Kelly: Better Than Free. ↩︎
For the record, it’s a person’s choice what to charge and it’s a person’s choice what to buy, simple as that. ↩︎

Lesson 3: Take advantage of the oversupply and target your brand, your niche, your fans, your customers

2008-10-10T00:00:00Z

In Lesson 2 we discussed how demand has splintered and how photographers have an increasingly larger set of options for products, versioning and pricing. In Lesson 3 we’re going to address the other side of the market, the supply of photographers and images. How can a professional compete against the vast oversupply of photographers and images?

The basic economics of the photography industry have been absolutely, fundamentally, permanently upended, flattened by the democratization of the tools of the production [and distribution] and a shift in the technologies, mediums and methods of communication.

Technology has democratized access to the tools of production and distribution, leading to a surge of creators, squeezing the middle class of the industry; the long tail of photographers are getting squeezed.

We are seeing a massive mismatch of supply and demand; photographers have flooded the market with an oversupply of images created and distributed using mediums and based on economic models no longer in demand. (link)

Forget about fighting the market. Stand above the market and create your own.

Most photographers understand this; creative professionals have always innately understood the need to find a personal style, a personal vision and “something to be known for.”

What’s changed is the range of ways now available to define yourself; demand has fractured, product opportunities have expanded, the Internet has created and aggregated a wider range of niches. There are more routes to commercial and artistic success available than ever. And defining your route is even more important in a struggling, confused and down market; in down markets the mediocre get flattened and only the great succeed.

Find your niche.

Why?

Chase Jarvis says it perfectly:

“Try to speak to everyone, and you’ll speak to no one.”

“Try to please everyone, and you’ll please no one.”

Determine your goals, set your strategy, and then choose your tactics.

Copying tactics is not the route to success. Don’t confuse tactics with strategy. Don’t copy someone because it’s been successful for them; you’ll find it pretty hard to be great by simply choosing how someone else became great. The journey we take, not the destinations we reach, creates who we are; take your own journey.

Even though “everyone is a photographer” (or at least everyone thinks they are), not everyone defines what kind of photographer they are.

How should you determine what kind of photographer you are? How can you find your niche?

First, a step back.

Let’s take a slightly tangential step back. Expanding on the four kinds of free and the applicability to photographers covered in Lesson 2, there’s another framework to help us think about how photographers can create value outside of just our images.

Photographers suffer from a bit of the problem musicians face: once we put our content out on the market, it’s fairly easy to copy and redistribute (in at least some form). We lose our control over how our creative output is viewed, used and redistributed once we release it, copyright and rights management notwithstanding. And once content is easy to copy and redistribute without our control, it’s unlikely we’ll get paid for it.

It wasn’t always this way: controlling our negatives used to be a fairly reliable way of controlling the market supply of our prints, even if it was always possible to recreate prints without negatives. But it required some knowledge of the craft and access to somewhat specialized tools (e.g. darkrooms, enlargers). Now, with the advent of digital imaging, personal computers and the Internet, the tools are available to everybody.

The lesson: if you can’t stop content from being copied easily and distributed incredibly cheaply without your knowledge, it will probably happen, especially if you’re popular. Instead of trying to fight it, take advantage of it: use your easily copied content as a platform for creating additional value.

How?

Immediacy. Even if something can be copied, content can be differentiated by how and when it’s delivered. Imagine the difference between images delivered instantly over the web, or later in a hardbound book, or over time as a subscription, etc.
Personalization. Images that are available to everyone need not be the same. How can you personalize an image? Make it important to them; add a story that means something to your customer.
Interpretation. Critical analysis is an important part of art. Photographers have a vast potential to supply context to their work and themselves by providing interpretations to their fans and customers: portfolio reviews, support, critical analysis, etc.
Authenticity. Artists have always used and understood this concept; examples include limited, numbered versions of prints, autographs, signatures, proofs of authenticity.
Accessibility. Even if we can get a copy easily, we may not want to have it with us at all times. It’s a difficult concept to apply to a photographer, but it’s a fundamental part of many businesses serving photographers: security, organization, backups, hosting, file and rights management, etc.
Embodiment. There’s more to the images than just the image: there’s you. Make yourself available to people; give talks, exhibits, workshops, educational sessions, “performances”, autographs, share your time to provide portfolio reviews and critical thought to people’s ideas, whether it is about their images or just photography in general.
Patronage. Make “it” about more than just the image. Following up from the point above, create an intangible connection from your fans and customers. Support artists and their projects, connect, critique, advise, promote industry causes; being a patron of the community makes your content more important and more valuable.
Findability. There are a ton of images out there, but they’re poorly organized, difficult to find and hard to access. Be professional. Find the right way to sell yourself and your images, regardless of whether you have representation. Make you and your images easy to find, make yourself easy to deal with and use platforms that make it easy for people to find, search, view and buy from you without having to deal with you. Josh McCulloch is a perfect example how to do it. I happen to be a perfect example of how not to do it..

The exchange between an artist and a buyer often embodies much more than just an image, a print or a book. You create your “footprint” through everything you do and embody in the past, present and future. Buyers remember your footprint more than just your images. Clients remember the complete experience of a shoot and base future decisions on more than just the images you created. Collectors value what you mean to the industry, your popularity and your potential. Hobbyist enthusiasts buy from you because they know you, or because it’s a funny story how they met you, or because your image represents something meaningful to them. Relationships outside of the images matter. It doesn’t mean you have to be liked; sometimes it is more important to be respected than liked. But choose carefully how you create and manage relationships to fit the requirements of your niche.

So how do I choose a niche?

First, know yourself. In the frameworks covered in Lesson 2 and above, we’ve discussed a wide range of ways to create value. Some of these will appeal to you, your skills and interests, some won’t. Be yourself. Choose a niche that fits your goals in photography and in life.

What does it take to succeed?

Know your passion. Know your eye, your mind, your viewpoint and what you enjoy creating. We all see the world through our own biases; knowing how to use our biases to create our own interpretations is perhaps the key to finding a personal vision and style.
Know your goals. Not everyone wants to be a professional photographer: not everyone wants to put in the time, make the sacrifices to succeed as a professional. Different niches require different sacrifices, risks and ancillary life decisions. Being a conflict photographer requires a vastly different approach than a commercial product photographer, or a child portrait photographer, or an outdoor stock photographer.
Know your customer. Know how you make their lives better. Know how you’re solving their problems. Develop ways to solve problems they haven’t even realized yet.
Know your market and your competition. What are other people doing? What skills are they developing? How is the market changing? What opportunities are expanding or closing?
Target your passion to create the right products for your customer and go get them. Create your niche based on your passion, your goals, your products and your customers. Determine the best way to reach and connect with your fans and customers. Market relentlessly. Do not depend on people finding you, you have to go find them.
Sell. Learn. Adapt. Sell. Be consistent. Target your niche. Learn from your successes and failures and adapt your approach.

If this means you’re best at creating images for general interests (e.g. “postcard” photographers), use the do-it-yourself sites to create a range of products that amateurs and hobbyists like to purchase: postcards, t-shirts, greeting cards, calendars and coffee mugs, for example. Target your business to reach those people, learn about trade shows, retail outlets, product distribution, catalog marketing, etc.

If you have a geographical niche, market yourself heavily in your geography and create a range of products that focus on your area.

If you’re best at creating high-brow, conceptual art, then eschew many of the more commercial, general public routes and learn everything about exhibiting, publishing, grants, museums, etc.

If you’re great at shooting stock, then setup your entire business to focus on creating and promoting stock. Learn everything about the Internet, SEO, stock buyers, stock agencies, license terms, industry news and developments.

If you are best at commercial photography, figure out how people get established in the industry, meet other professionals, assist, intern, use the right equipment, set up a studiio, live in the right cities, network, etc.

If you’re best at teaching, critiquing or helping people, find ways to give people what they want. Go to school, get an MFA and teach. Give workshops and sell books to amateur photographers. Teach people how to use Photoshop, Lightroom, create websites and use cameras. Review and critique camera technology, write articles about industry trends, etc.

If you’re best at creating products or businesses based on photography, then go out and create the next SmugMug, Flickr, TinEye, Photojojo, Zoomr, Photoshelter, liveBooks, etc.

You get the picture. I don’t have the answer. You do.

At the end of the day, you want to be known as a leader in your area of expertise. For example: if someone asked about outdoor adventure photography, I would say check out Jimmy Chin. Or conflict photography: James Nachtwey. Or sports photography: Vincent Laforet. Or fine-art photography critique and analysis: Jorg Colberg. Or Chicago wedding photographey, or commercial product photography, or Nashville music photography, or Indian cultural photography, etc.

In the cases of the above, the fact that I named them doesn’t mean they are the absolute best, but that they’ve created their name, defined their mark, reached an audience and created their niche.

Oddly, the possibilities of running counter to trends are intriguing: instead of making more, make less. Be more exclusive, or mysterious, or harder to understand. Be available in less outlets, or harder to reach, or anonymous. Or show off your flexibility and target multiple niches or create multiple businesses. But in all of those cases, be known and appealing specifically because of your counter-cyclical decisions.

But in whatever you decide to do, make it a conscious decision.

In the Introduction, we talked about the general photography industry, in Lesson 1 we discussed the changing nature of demand, in Lessons 2 and 3 we covered demand and supply and talked about how to determine your product decisions. In Lesson 4 (early next week), we’ll dig into how to market and reach your customers…

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Introduction: Five Lessons: How Photographers can Create New Business Models

Lesson 1: Photographers are your customers, not your competition.
Lesson 2: Take advantage of the atomization of demand and expand the scope of consumption.
Lesson 3: Take advantage of the oversupply and target your brand, your niche, your fans, your customers.
Lesson 4: Connect with context and content.
Lesson 5: Make great work.

Lesson 4: Connect with context and content

2008-10-22T00:00:00Z

We’ve discussed in Lessons 2 and 3 about how to create, price and market great content.

The larger opportunity ahead, however, is to create great context in addition to great content. Context is a complement to content: demand for one component amplifies demand for the other.

How do you create “context”?

Show up: online and offline. Be a person, not just a name. And give to your fans and customers.
Connect: Link people together, connect like souls with shared interests. Create a hub, create a tribe and be a leader.
Educate: Provide knowledge and ideas to the community. Give critiques, workshops and portfolio reviews. Be a leader or an authority in your field.
Organize: Create niches, organize events, create workshops, combine the online and the offline experiences.
Share: Give to the community. Share yourself, your experiences, knowledge and images.

It’s not just about your images, it’s also about you: “what you can’t see matters”. You – your style, personal brand and legacy – plays a huge role in why people choose to pay you money for what you do and create and deliver to them. Relationships matter. People matter.

In all honesty, none of this is new. Many of these methods were possible long before the web. Information, examples, instructions and analysis about how to use the web to connect with people is easy to find, and we’re becoming increasingly familiar with the tools in our personal and professional lives.

It’s not hard, but it’s complex.

Let’s add to the complexities:

Blog

Blogs are tremendously powerful ways to increase your ranking in search engines (for the best primer and analysis of why search engine optimization is important, click here to read John Harrington’s article on search engine optimization for photographers).

But they are also a very powerful way to connect with people, to show what you are doing, to personalize yourself to your fans, to get and hold someone’s attention, and to prime people to turn attention into intention and conversion, either directly or (perhaps more powerfully) indirectly.

Using context to amplify content creates “reverse markets” that will allow you to find all the fans and buyers that should appeal to you, instead of forcing you to find them all yourself.

Why is it important to create content for people to consume without your active engagement? Because we don’t scale.

Use social media

Show who you are. Communicate with people, personalize yourself through the wide range of social media tools and mediums

Don’t know which ones to use? To use a phrase from Gary Vanderchuck, “use them all”. Sign up, learn how to use the mediums, learn about the communities and their expectations, meet people and dig in. Figure out the standards for conversations, transparency, self-promotion and spam. Figure out which communities and tools make sense for you. What do you feel comfortable using? Which ones stretch your capabilities? Which ones do your customers use? Which ones do your fans use? Which communities make sense for you? Who do you want to meet?

Often companies forget about the “social” in “social media”: don’t be afraid to let yourself shine through the mediums. How you use the mediums says a lot about you.

Social media isn’t hard, but it’s complex. Don’t underestimate the time it takes: social media typically takes longer than you think. You probably won’t see an impact until you’re ready to give up trying to reach people, for the simple reason that you’ve probably approaching social media with the wrong mindset: it’s about other people, not you. In the same way we decide to spend time on anything, people use social media to get something: how can you help give them what they want?

Deliver value to your fans and your customers

We’ve talked about “fans and customers” in past lessons. A fan is not necessarily a customer, but you can profit from both. We typically think about how we profit directly from a customer (sales), but fans are also key to create profits. Attention is a valuable asset even if it does not convert to intention and conversion. Fans are key components behind creating “social objects”.

It’s amazing to think how much attention is focused on creating platforms to manage content (images). But where are the platforms to manage context?

What we need is a fan management system, a customer management system, a system to organize fan and customer information and deliver the tools needed to connect with our fans: products, bundled content, stored live performances, email offers and the like. Even more important, we need a way to track all the data our fans and customers create through their interactions with us. It’s possible to hack together solutions using existing social networks, white-label networks such as Ning, Squarespace and Socialgo, blog and Twitter keyword search, feed subscription and readership data, link trackback monitoring, web analytics and sales data: but we lack a single solution that allows us to aggregate all of this data and truly understand what our fans and customers want from us.

We’re seeing steps: Photoshelter 2.0 (the updated Personal Archive) is a step in the right direction, but there’s still a lot of opportunity to create better ways to reach and manage all our existing and potential fans and customers.

Connect passively and actively

We’ve always understood the power of networking and actively connecting with people. Relationships matter.

What’s changed is that we now have much more power and control over how we connect passively.

Passive does not equal online. Many online interactions, including email, are highly active and take direct engagement. And we’ve always “connected passively” offline through the memories stored in the heads of our past clients, agents, customers and employees.

But the infrastructure of the web offers a much more powerful base for passive engagement. Make it easy for people to:

Reach you and see your images.
Share your work or embed your images on their sites.
Buy and license your images and other products.
Know what you do and when you’re available for assignments and engagements.
Learn from you from your website, books, instructional videos: archived for anyone to see, anytime, easily, without having to ask you about it.

We’re well aware of the problems of depending on passive content income streams: add passive context and amplify both by connecting, promoting and producing actively.

Lead

Stealing the concept from Seth Godin,

The next frontier of marketing is in leading groups of people who are working together to get somewhere.

Who understands this and is building their tribes? Flickr, Photojojo, Photoshelter, Lightstalkers. Give to the community, solve their problems and the community will respond.

Yes, this requires you to be active. The economics of the industry is driving down the opportunities to earn passive income.

You don’t think you can lead? You don’t think you can find something to lead, somewhere? You can. We’re all overloaded with content, yet we’re constantly looking for what’s new and better. We create context when we find, organize, analyze and share “new” and “better” with our world. Technology can’t completely replace people: we’re still flawed people making flawed decisions with incomplete information. Use your platform as a leader to help people make decisions, solve their problems, give them the right information, lead better lives… and be better photographers.

Introduction: Five Lessons: How Photographers can Create New Business Models

Lesson 1: Photographers are your customers, not your competition.
Lesson 2: Take advantage of the atomization of demand and expand the scope of consumption.
Lesson 3: Take advantage of the oversupply and target your brand, your niche, your fans, your customers.
Lesson 4: Connect with context and content.
Lesson 5: Make great work.

Updated May 27, 2009: edited for content.

Lesson 5: Make Great Work

2008-10-23T00:00:00Z

The last lesson of the Five Lessons series…

Make great work.

It’s still about the art.

A bit anticlimatic, eh?

It’s still about the quality of the work. But as we’ve discussed, “work” encompasses a much broader scope than just the images.

All the work to connect, promote, share and educate means nothing if you’re not creating great work. If you’re not making “art that reacts”, good luck.

Your passion has to guide your work; you won’t be able to succeed by simply copying someone else’s style, goals, tactics or ideas. If your voice and passion happens to be exactly the same as others, then fine: and good luck.

People still love photography. People still love seeing stories communicated through images. We’re living in a world with a far wider range of mediums in our daily lives that can create, manipulate and display images. We’re not limited by options, we’re limited by our desire and vision.

Find yours.

Introduction: Five Lessons: How Photographers can Create New Business Models

Content is cheap, context is expensive. Is it any surprise which one we lack?

2008-11-18T00:00:00Z

Everyday we encounter a deluge of information: it’s still there even if you’re not listening.

Digging signals out of the noise is hard work.

We’re drowning in information (or at least I am).

We’re inundated with interaction.

Biases, viewpoints and advice abound: who (and what) should we trust?

We’re lost in a cacophony of disaggregated one-sided conversations.

Every day we create a maze of experiences, cross-referenced and tagged with the meta-information of our lives. But tags do not replace theories:

Malcolm Gladwell, Geek Pop Star (New York Magazine):

People are experience rich and theory poor. My role has been to give people ways of organizing experience.

We lack easy access to the underlying theories to understand and filter what we experience and see. We lack context.

The idea that context is important isn’t new (Justin Kistner: It’s the context):

In a 1994 article he wrote for Wired magazine, futurist Paul Saffo addresses the future of digital networks. He writes: “[An] avalanche of content will make context the scarce resource. Consumers will pay serious money for anything that helps them sift and sort and gather the pearls that satisfy their fickle media hungers. The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the banal expanses of cyberspace.”

Yes, context is king.

We understand why we need context: but we’re just starting to see how context can be so powerful. Umair Haque, (via Ethan Bauley):

…when interaction is cheap, the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: information about expected costs and benefits doesn’t have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches.

… instead, consumers can debate and discuss expected costs and benefits in incredibly rich detail.

But what are we going to do with all the discussions, debates and conversations?

Why is context scarce?

Information is cheap to create and distribute. Granted, creating valuable information is still expensive. But at the same time we’ve created quick, easy and free tools and processes to automatically create, distribute and promote information.

How many different sources are available for us to distribute our thoughts or ideas with the click of a button? How much information can we distribute automatically, passively, without marginal effort or time?

Is making information available in as many channels as possible a positive or a negative?

Interaction is cheap to create and distribute but costly to consume. We’re easier to reach than ever, caught in a culture that values constant availability and instant responses. We use a variety of methods and devices to interact, each with their particular benefits and costs.

But almost all of our interaction creates some deadweight loss, either in time, effort or money. Multi-tasking degrades our productivity non-linearly: we take extra time to bounce back from interruptions (anyone wonder why we hate advertising, i.e. interruptive corporate spam?).

Passive interaction imposes less of a cost than active interaction; but we still spend inordinate amount of time and energy processing information and responding to unclear, unimportant requests. (Anyone like meetings?) We aren’t mind readers: we miss clues, fail to explain things, forget to mention key points.

We’ve victims of our quests for access and availability.

Context is expensive: hard to create, hard to learn, hard to distribute. At the intersection of information and interaction, context is a unruly mixture of variables, each with own level of situational impact. Content is expensive to filter: false positives add to the noise as we simultaneously mistakenly discard valuable signals. Strict rules-based systems for managing interaction can be expensive to manage. We have to listen to both sides to balance out the debate, to understand the biases, to pick out what people are actually saying. Education takes time.

Transparency does not create context on its own: it increases the amount of available meta-information, but processing transparency and the intentions behind our biases and actions remains an art, not a science.

Context takes people: it takes our time, energy and attention. The semantic web remains an unfulfilled promise. Finding the right information takes time: search engines aren’t perfect, recommendation sites are a mess and accessing our incomplete networks of outsourced knowledge takes time. Finding the right people through intelligent routing is a start, but it is still expensive to test, understand and evaluate people’s knowledge.

Expensive problems create enticing opportunities.

Who is going to create context that we can trust?
Who is going to tell the truth?
Who is going to “use my intelligence as part of the network to replace” their advertising?
When are going to stop trying to monetize conversations and start creating valuable context?
Who is going to spend the time and money to make participation cheap?
Who is going to realize that “in a low-attention economy, the scarce resource is time, effort, passion and attention”?
Will “industrial media” ever be able to create great context?
What companies will make managing context central to their product and brand?
When will companies learn how to use email for awareness, engagement and marketing?
How will companies be able to justify spending on media besides television?
How are we going to empower people to shine through companies?
Who is going to figure out how to manage our different mental models for our variety of communication tools?
When will be able to stop telling people how we use our communication tools in order to truly leverage them?
When are we going to understand and leverage the social layer behind blog comments?
Will social media ever be much more than just social preening?
Who is going to create the tools or processes to truly leverage the opportunity?

It’s not surprising that we have too much of what’s free but truly lack what’s expensive. We’re culturally obese and overleveraged, built to over-consume and store up things we don’t need in our mind, body and soul.

Don’t get me wrong: I like the mess. I like the free-for-all of the blogging world. I try to do my share to “import and export ideas” efficiently, but I still share the blame for creating a lot of noise.

We still do a lot of talking: we’re starting to listen, but it isn’t enough. We can figure out better ways to organize and understand what we create.

What information will we pay for? What interactions will we pay for? What context will we pay for?

Be Undeniably Good

2008-12-11T00:00:00Z

Comedian Steve Martin on how to make it in any field:

Be undeniably good. When people ask me how do you make it in show business or whatever, what I always tell them and nobody ever takes note of it ‘cuz it’s not the answer they wanted to hear — what they want to hear is here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script, here’s how you do this — but I always say, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If somebody’s thinking, “How can I be really good?”, people are going to come to you. It’s much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.

(via Chase Jarvis, Secret to Success in Photography)

Sean Howard, Wayne knows what many Word of Mouth experts don’t (in comment):

I believe that there is a new trends back towards small, where small is not a size of company but rather a mindset. We have to remember that the world has been lost in this idea of “scale” to the point that the very markets were expected to never correct themselves.

In a world gone mad with supply chain management, commodification, and outsourced value can we be so surprised that those providing services of quality with their own hands are a) valued or b) in short supply?

Great marketing cannot make up for poor product. Marketing can no longer obscure a product’s shortcomings.

Diamond D of Tribe Called Quest explains:

You gotta get a label that’s willin’ and able
To market and promote, and you better hope
(For what?) That the product is dope

The question: can great product make up for poor marketing?

My Cities 2008

2009-01-07T00:00:00Z

My cities in 2008, originally inspired by Kottke, continuing from 2006 and 2007. I hadn’t planned on coming close to 2007′s total, but sometimes things don’t go according to plan. 72 different cities in 2008, compared to 76 in 2007: but who’s counting?

(only cities where I spent a night count, and the * means I visited multiple times on non-consecutive days)

Delhi, India *
Mumbai, Maharastra, India
Goa, India
Trivandrum, Kerala, India
Kollam, Kerala, India
Alappuzha, Kerala, India
Ft. Cochin, Kerala, India
Ooty, Tamil Nadu, India
Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Hampi, Karnataka, India
Pune, Maharashtra, India
McLeodganj, Himachal Pradesh, India
Arlington, VA *
Luray, VA *
Charlottesville, VA *
Richmond, VA *
Quehanna Wild Area, Moshannon State Forest, PA
New York City, NY *
Brooklyn, NY
McLean, VA
Columbus, OH
George Washington National Forest, Virginia
San Francisco, CA *
Monterey, CA
Point Arena, CA
Rockville, MD
Dolly Sods Wilderness (Red Creek), Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia
Cranbury, NJ
London, United Kingdom
Beirut, Lebanon
Shenandoah National Park, Virginia
Durham, NC *
Parsippany, NJ
Harrison, NY
Utica, NY
Lake Placid, NY
Wilmington Notch State Park, Wilmington, NY
Quebec City, Quebec, Canada
Sterling, VA
Elizabeth City, NC
Oregon Inlet Campground, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, NC
Frisco Campground, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, NC
Ocracoke Campground, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, NC
Mt. Rodgers National Recreation Area, Jefferson National Forest, VA
Lottsburg, VA
Chicago, IL
Champaign, IL
Scarsdale, NY
Charlotte, NC
Atlanta, GA
Apalachicola, FL
Mobile, AL
New Orleans, LA
Lake Charles, LA
Houston, TX
Plano, TX
Dallas, TX
Odessa, TX
Las Cruces, NM
Willcox, AZ
Scottsdale, AZ
Palm Springs, CA
Twentynine Palms, CA
Los Angeles, CA
Woodland Hills, CA
Carpinteria State Park, Carpinteria, CA
Refugio Beach State Park, Goleta, CA
Pismo Beach, CA
Los Padres National Forest, CA
Salinas, CA
Reno, NV
Homewood (Lake Tahoe), CA

Financial Models Are Always Wrong: Create One Anyway.

2009-01-13T00:00:00Z

Creating a financial model forces an entrepreneur to outline very specifically how a business “works”: how a company creates their products, how users and customers find and use their products and how those processes create revenues and costs. The result, a set of operational metrics, financial statements and the “equation of the business”, is one view of a potential reality of the business. While any one view is inevitably wrong, by digging deeper and analyzing the key drivers and testing a range of assumptions an entrepreneur can create multiple views to help make crucial product design, marketing, organizational and strategy decisions.

Instead of focusing on the bottom line profit and net income, focus on the assumptions and key drivers of the business. Developing a financial model creates the type of thought and data that helps entrepreneurs figure out what they are betting on and how likely their bets will pay off.

What is needed to start creating a financial model?

The best way to start building a financial model is to start thinking about how the business works:

What is the business? What is the product / service?
How do you target, and acquire customers?
What are the revenue streams? (prices, sales of products or services, advertising, usage fees, etc.)
What costs will the business create? (items and estimates, employees, hosting, SG&A; fixed costs, variable costs, etc.)
What timeline of development and product launch and market / customer adoption are you expecting?
What do you think are the major drivers of revenue and costs?
What do you know about the market? (# of potential customers, $ spent currently, market trends, growth, competitors, etc.)
What lessons, revenue / cost models and performance / operational metrics exist from studying existing competitors and complementary and substitute products?

When I work with entrepreneurs, I typically ask for some preliminary information and data around the above questions, and then after an overview conversation I am able to hack together a first draft of a customized financial model. I typically start with one of two models:

Simple Model: A basic one-sheet model that outlines the customer acquisition process, revenues and costs; customized to help an entrepreneur understand the business they are creating.
Complete Model: A highly customized, detailed model that creates a full set of financial projections that can be used to raise capital and operate the business.

Want to learn more? Learn how to build financial models or download a financial model template for startups.

Modeling Viral Loops

2009-01-23T00:00:00Z

Recently I created a short financial model for a friend to help him understand how his newest startup “works” and estimate the basic operational and financial metrics behind his business.

After we went over the basic information about the product and business (a standard part of my initial data request before creating a startup financial model), I realized the crucial part in creating the financial model was going to be understanding the customer acquisition and engagement cycle. I started digging into viral marketing, viral loops and viral expansion loops to understand how to translate people’s behavior and usage of his product into a series of assumptions and equations.

Even though the estimates will undoubtedly be wrong, breaking down the operations into a series of equations forces one to take a very tactical look at product development choices and business strategies.

Maybe someday I’ll release a version of my viral loop customer acquisition and engagement model. Until then, I figured it might be valuable to share a bit of the research I found most interesting and valuable.

Yes, there are a lot of links to Andrew Chen, and as you read you’ll figure out why…

Andrew Chen, What’s your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption: A viral loop is…

…The steps a user goes through between entering the site to inviting the next set of new users.

… Ultimately, viral loops are like induction proofs in that you are jumping to a steady state situation in which your viral widgets/emails/messages are already out there, and you are optimizing some set of steps that users have to jump through. Then, once you get this right, then you are figuring out how to build “on-ramps” into your viral loop so that you bootstrap the entire process.

Fast Company, Ning’s Infinite Ambition:

“Incorporating virality into the functionality of the product.”
Ning grows because each new user begets more users. Every time someone sets up a social network, he has no choice but to invite friends, family, colleagues, and like-minded strangers to sign on as well. The company calculates that each person signed up for a Ning group is worth, on average, 2 people, compounded daily: On day two, that individual brings in 4 group members and on day three, 8; within a week, she has brought in 128 people. Which is how Ning has been able to grow at a daily average of more than .4% and add 500 new groups a day, doubling roughly every 137 days.

… “double viral loop,” which spreads two ways, because every network creator is a user and any user can become a network creator.

Andrew Chen: Viral marketing is not a marketing strategy:

Viral marketing is not a marketing strategy
Successful viral products don’t have viral marketing bolted on once the product has been developed. It’s not a marketing strategy. Instead, it’s designed into the product from the very beginning as part of the fundamental architecture of the experience.

Viral marketing is not a product feature
No single feature determines the virality of the product – instead, it’s part of a viral loop that connects a disparate set of functions into a cohesive motivation for the user to tell their friends. If the fundamental product doesn’t drive a viral motivation from its users, then it’s very hard to force it.

Viral marketing is a fundamental product design discipline
Instead of:

We have product X, how do we virally spread it?

… we ask:

We have viral loop X, what’s the right product to put into it?

The skillset for effective viral marketing
Because of the above issues, “viral marketing” is not really something that ought to be in the domain of soft-skill folks like PR, advertising, and marketing people. Nor is it in the world of hardcore technical folks that can architect systems but not consumer interactions.

Instead, it’s something that needs to bridge both soft and hard skills. You need an interesting combination of skills, including:

Understanding the motivations behind user behaviors

Understanding and exploiting the technical loopholes to create viral loops

I think that the fundamental compartmentalization of these two skillsets is what ultimately drives huge companies being worse at viral products than startups.

Eric Ries, Engagement loops: beyond viral:
On synthetic notifications:

The most blunt instrument is to simply reach out and contact your customers on a regular basis. …true ROI of a synthetic notification has to balance ROI, customer fatigue, and the engagement effects of the campaign itself.

On organic notifications:

… the mechanics of sending users notifications when new friends of theirs join the site is a great organic re-engagement tactic. From the point of view of the existing customer, it goes beyond reminding them that the site exists; it also provides social validation of their choice to become a member in the first place.

The ultimate form of engagement is when the company doesn’t have to do anything explicit to make it happen

Connecting engagement and viral loops:

The two loops are intimately connected, in a figure-eight pattern. Customers exit the viral loop and become part of the engagement loop. As your engagement improves, it becomes easier and easier to get customers to reenter the viral loop process and bring even more friends in. And as in all dynamic systems, there’s no way to optimize a sub-part without sub-optimizing the whole. If you’re focused on viral loops without measuring the effect of your changes on other parts of your business (of which engagement is just one), you’re at risk of missing the truly big opportunities.

Todd Stephens, Viral Expansion Loop.

Tony Wright, Value or Viral?

It’s easier to build a great business on top of an existing viral engine than it is to build virality into an existing business”
At the time, I found myself nodding. … It turns out that viral loops are HARD.

But, as I think about it, I can name something that’s a LOT harder, and that’s building a product that people really want.

Andrew Chen: Freemium business model case study: AdultFriendFinder ARPU, churn, and conversion rates:

Visitors -> Members: 6-15%
Members -> Subs: 10-22%
Subs -> Renewing Sub: ~80%
Revenue per member: $0.48-$0.95

And most recently, the latest from Andrew Chen on Freemium models, How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included!). Worth a deep look…

How to Live a Nomadic Lifestyle

2009-02-05T00:00:00Z

A couple thoughts from my current trip on how to live a nomadic lifestyle…

“What you own ends up owning you.”

Carry a low “life overhead”: remember that “owning little” is as much of an attitude or an approach to life than a description of how much you carry with you.
The more expenses you have, the more you have to make to cover expenses, the more you have to work.
Give away what you don’t need. And while you’re on a trip, don’t carry what you don’t need: consider donating to goodwill, giving away things to friends, or mailing unneeded items and souvenirs back to your home base.

Leave an impact but leave no trace.

Leave a positive impact on people’s lives. People have enough of their own worries in their lives, don’t burden them with your daily problems.
Be a good houseguest; bring a sleeping bag, pillow and linens, and use them.
Always carry a towel.
Buy meals and bring alcohol.
Consider alternate accommodations near your friends; it could make all of your lives easier.
Be respectful of people’s lives while you are out gallivanting. You’re a tourist and want to explore, see new sights, eat at restaurants and tour the town, but think about what you would normally be doing on a Tuesday night after you’ve gotten back from a day at work, running errands, paying bills and living the daily life.
Ask questions, soak up information. Respect people’s time, thank them, and learn to both accept and give graciously. Remember what you’ve received when it’s your turn to give.

Live for the upside and the downside.

Travel carries its ups and downs: carry both in your memories.
Learn to create your own oasis wherever you are. Use it.
Be flexible; stuff happens, schedules shift and unexpected delights force you to re-think your plans.
Live for the angles in life. Learn where to find the best places to stay in towns. Learn when to visit tourist locations, when to do your shopping, when to explore areas, where to go. Learn how to negotiate. Learn your way around towns fast, where to find markets, daily needs, tourist sights and hidden gems.
Take advantage of the upsides. Explore when you have the opportunity; a return or another chance might never come.
Be prepared for the downsides. Plan on spending to replace things that break, get lost, get stolen. Photocopy important documents and store online and offline. Create backups. Use webmail. Carry important digital documents and files on USB sticks. Use an online backup service like Mozy (a personal thanks to Anil for the reminder).
Whatever happens, by the nature of simple probability it probably won’t be the worst thing that has ever happened to you or will happen to you.
We never know it at the time, but you might be living the defining moment of your life right now. What would you do if it was?

What are your tips?

* * *

More: Less about the attitude, more about the tactics for working and living while traveling…

Living the Technomadic Life
Kareem Mayan, 5 Lessons I Learned After a Year as a Digital Nomad

I expected to like Durango, and I did.

2009-03-03T00:00:00Z

Compared to Reno, which I thought I would hate (but didn’t), I expected to like Durango, Colorado (and I did).

It’s hard to explain how we create images in our minds of places we’ve never visited. Maps; maps of streets we haven’t meandered, topographies we haven’t surveyed, neighborhoods we haven’t visited. Pictures; pictures of people we haven’t met, restaurants we haven’t ordered in, bars we haven’t curled up to, views we haven’t captured in our minds. Stories; tales of days we haven’t seen and nights we don’t remember (and still might not even after experiencing them). Memories; deja-vus that we have yet to experience, memories that exist only in the future.

Knocking, Durango, Colorado, Feb 2009

We eagerly wait to put our feet where our mind has already tread, finding out if our ideas of alternate lives we could lead in unvisited places could be realities or are merely misplaced illusions.

How often do your “castles in the sky” turn out as you envision?

Rarely.

But sometimes they do.

Why was Durango one of the few? Constant reminders of abundant opportunities for escapes and adventures small and large. Good reasons to stay home. A refuge. The hope of a real, varied, manageable life of my own creation.

Opportunity knocking.

A little known fact: I'm actually a baseball geek.

2009-04-19T00:00:00Z

A little known fact: despite my range of geeky interests, my deepest area of knowledge is actually baseball. Always has been, always will be. In another life I would have been a General Manager (GM) of an major league baseball (MLB) team in the United States.

I grew up reading and re-reading box scores, digging into baseball box scores to pick out interesting lines, figuring out the impact of each day’s lines on overall season statistics, looking for signals in the daily randomness. I used to love the USA Today’s expanded box scores (as opposed to the streamlined lines published by other papers in the 80s and 90s); give me a USA Today Sports section during baseball season back then and I could spend an entire day just digging into box scores. I used to pick out individual lines and re-write starting lineups, bullpens, rotations and 25-man rosters using various sets of days’ box scores.

Bill James changed my life.

The first time I read one of Bill James‘ Bill James Baseball Abstracts it opened my eyes to an entirely new way to look at baseball. Bill James was an outsider who meshed his love for baseball, a critical eye towards baseball “truisms’ and statistical genius to create the real study of baseball statistics; Bill James appealed to my naturally contratrian, fact-based mind and I read and re-read every bit of analysis of his I could find.

Bill James is why I played baseball in high school (and given that I played baseball like a statistician, it showed).

Despite their forward thinking Bill James and SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) used to be fairly unrecognized voices, but the Internet changed that; an explosion new voices and content opened baseball fans and analysts to a deeper world and gave hard-core Sabermetrics enthusiasts access to broader sets of data and the ability to publish their own research and engage far broader audiences (early examples: sites like the Baseball Prospectus, the Hardball Times and many other Sabermetrics-inspired websites).

Baseball is a dream for statisticians; each action on the field has a variety of potential results and an innumerable number of concurrent states, creating an enormous mix of situational data to be mined by careful eyes.

Yet few observers were open to new ways to analyze the game; traditional print and TV baseball “analysts” remained stuck in their traditional ways, hidebound to baseball “truths”, dismissive of new metrics and methods to analyze performance.

Structured data changed sports management.

Up until the 1990s teams were run exclusively by consummate insiders, guys who had grown up in and played the game. Sandy Alderson of the Oakland Athletics was one of the few progressive minds; Billy Beane, his successor as GM of the Oakland Athletics, was the first upper-level baseball executive to really blend new analysis tools with traditional scouting methods. Beane’s creative and non-traditional methods for player analysis and team construction were the subject of Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball. Moneyball was divisive and controversial within baseball because it was grossly misunderstood by traditional analysts; as I wrote last year, “Moneyball was about strategy, not tactics: constantly measuring and re-evaluating tactics and alternatives, not about determining and defining the “winning tactic”. But few understood that at the time.

It’s a vastly different world today.

Teams across sports leagues have realized the potential of creating and analyzing structured data to find an edge, to find better ways to structure teams, measure the “marginal revenue product” of players, predict future player performance, analyze trades and decide on salaries, compensation structures and contracts. Baseball teams were the first; along with Beane, Mark Shapiro and their hires of non-traditional Assistant GMs (and future GMs) like Paul DePodesta, J. P. Ricciardi, Dan O’Dowd, Josh Byrnes and Jon Daniels, progressive thinkers have continued to propagate through the baseball executive ranks. For example, following his work at Baseball Prospectus Keith Law worked as Assistant GM for the Toronto Blue Jays for a couple of years (still the only MBA ^[1] that has worked in an upper-level management role in a MLB front-office); Theo Epstein of the Boston Red Sox later hired Bill James as a consultant; former investment banker and private equity analyst Andrew Friedman now runs the Tampa Bay Rays (and was name Baseball Executive of the Year last year as the Rays made it to the World Series).

But NFL and NBA teams have started to catch up; examples include the Houston Rockets’ Daryl Morey (the only MBA running a major-league professional sports franchise in the US), entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban and the magnificent basketball statistics site 82games.

The future is in creating strategies, not copying tactics.

This past baseball off-season was fascinating; the economic recession brought new constraints to teams and forced all participants (teams, players, agents) to adapt to the shifting environment and create new strategies for constructing teams. Free agents faced a limited number of teams willing to sign players, and beyond the marquee free agents signing for well-capitalized teams, players were faced with vastly fewer options, lower salaries and contracts with fewer guaranteed years.

Granted, some teams vastly misjudged the market, but the constraints of the market forced many teams to search for new ways to gain an edge. For example, defense has traditionally been one of the hardest aspects of player and team performance to measure and translate into impact on wins and losses, but in this past off-season defense became one of the focuses for many baseball scouts and executives searching for new ways to construct teams.

But teams have started to copy tactics much faster than since the days when Moneyball was first released; much like the broader web and business arena, creating enduring strategies by structuring data and capitalizing on fundamental trends is becoming even more important. Playing the game by copying the newest tactics is waste of time, a recipe for activity without accomplishments.

There’s a big difference between copying and creating. Which do you want to do?

It’s a fun world we live in…

And not just any MBA, but from my alma mater ↩︎

A Personal API could be a modularized, standardized interface for collaboration.

2009-05-07T00:00:00Z

John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, Defining Common Collaboration Tensions:

Loosely versus Tightly Coupled: One objection you might reasonably raise relative to the collaboration curve is the n-squared problem, in which the expense and effort required for participants to interact in a given environment rises exponentially with the number of participants. In a pull-based creation space, loose coupling provides a way around the n-squared problem by modularizing (and standardizing the interfaces between) resources so they can be flexibly combined and recombined. This sharply contrasts with more hardwired approaches in which the activities people do and the connections between them must be redefined each time the activity or connection changes. Said differently, loosely coupled collaboration scales; tightly coupled collaboration does not.

Sound like a “personal API”?

As I explained the concept of a personal API last month,

…when I talk about “personal APIs” I’m not only talking about accessing or receiving content, I’m also talking about delivering content and context to people; using the term API is a conceptual approach to thinking about how we can “scale” our time, thoughts and value stored inside ourselves to deliver more (quantity) and deeper (quality) interactions to other people; how can we reduce inter-personal transaction costs of interactions to deliver more value?

Right now my websites and my template financial model are the only “personal APIs” I have, but in their current unorganized, unpersonalized, untargeted and “noisy” state they are only a glimmer of a way to “scale me”.

Even worse, my efforts to create signals merely adds to the noise; the web of duplicative content aggregators and republishers hinders our collective ROI on attention and increases our collaboration transaction costs; by trying to help I’m helping make it worse.

Solving this paradox by moving the idea of a “personal API” from conceptual to actual is going to be fun…

Ambient Intimacy: Creating Archetypes from Avatars

2009-05-19T00:00:00Z

Expanding on a couple short notes about ambient intimacy; learning to take the good with the bad.

Intimacy without being Intimate.

Intermittent, one-way, more of a “crush” than love; the feeling of a shared relationship without it being shared, a benevolent form of stalking; ambient intimacy is what happens when we strengthen our loose ties, by keeping in touch with people by following, reading and caring about another person without telling them you care.

Intimacy contains the assumption of risk, of putting a part of yourself “out there”; but it’s not the same as merely sharing ideas, or sharing criticism: remember that intimacy is less about revealing facts and more about revealing feelings, sharing a part of ourselves that we’re not sure we even want to admit to ourselves.

That’s a hard thing to scale; even if the web is increasing the number of ties we can create and sustain, even if we’re no longer tied to Dunbar’s Number, true intimacy doesn’t scale: personality can’t be automated, technology can’t replace our soul or change the human limits of our time, energy and passion. Even big hearts can only pump so large, so wide, for so long.

Observing without Understanding.

Knowledge isn’t wisdom; observing isn’t knowing, watching is only half of interacting; information is useless without knowing what to do with it; observing crowds out the mental and emotional space necessary to create true understanding, yet most of our tools, time and attention are dedicated to observing: aggregating and filtering the noise rather than understanding and leveraging the signals to initiate actions.

Creating stereotypes from limited information is a fundamental way the human mind deals with incomplete information to simplify decision-making; we rely on our minds to fill in the gaps, to create archetypes from avatars.

But stereotypes don’t give us the full picture; even worse, stereotypes help us classify and file people and ideas, but they don’t help us interact, use or truly leverage the value behind the avatar: that takes a level of understanding that ambient intimacy can’t create.

This is why I talk about a “personal API”, about a way for people to understand how to access and tap into my skills, knowledge and “value” in a scalable way that reduces the transaction costs of our interactions, with a structured datastream behind it that allows me to understand, track and reach out to people in their time of need before they even know it themselves.

The Awkwardness of Unknown Conversations.

Remember everything, forget nothing; the static cling of the web captures far more than our slippery minds and our awkward offline exchanges without hyperlinks and search-friendly context. But the problem of unknown conversations reaches across both mediums; hazy rememberances about what you told people, what they happened to glance, or what someone else forwarded them about you; unsure if the bits of yourself you shared ended up grabbing their attention or fading into the noise; we’re ambiently intimate with versions of people through our intermittent intersections, but we’re unaware of the complete versions that we miss, misinterpret or ignore.

And we can choose how to converse: we can ignore, turn away from a conversation with a flip of a finger; archive an email without a response; read, ignore, love or hate a message without caring enough to respond.

The Paradox.

But here’s the paradox: as much as I want to decry our expanding loose networks, fracturing attention and fake friendships sustained through our ambient connections, maximizing the power of loose networks and loose ties is the real opportunity; it’s where I’ve met the most interesting people, learned the most interesting things, connected to new opportunities; it’s where we find growth and create new value, it’s where we find new edges; it’s the source of innovation and insights we would not have seen otherwise. It’s why we care about serendipity and discovery; we’re hooked by the positive variable intermittent reinforcement baked into all successful, widely-adopted tools; an insight, an opportunity, a confirmation, a life-changing connection behind every click.

Adding to the Cacophony.

Pointing you to other aspects of the topic so you don’t have to search for them:

Clive Thompson in New York Times, Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
Leisa Reichelt, Ambient Intimacy
Jeff Jarvis, Ambient intimacy
Adpulp, Ambient Intimacy?
Steffan Postaer, Do social networks provide “ambient intimacy” or faux friendships?

Unbundling the Photography Industry, Redux

2009-06-23T00:00:00Z

Revisiting The stock photography industry needs to be unbundled from October 2008:

We need to unbundle the functions of the traditional stock photography agency. There is no fundamental need for the image delivery and management platform to be delivered by the same company that makes the market and connects buyers and sellers.

Platform
What we need is a quality, powerful open-sourced platform to allow photographers to control their own images in their own ways. We need a platform and a community of developers similar to WordPress or Movable Type. Blogs exploded because people were given the tools to create and publish on their own using the range of hosted and non-hosted options; why can’t the same thing happen with stock photography?

Market-Making
Agencies would still have a powerful role: agencies would still set the rules of exchange, organize buyers and sellers and promote images: but instead of the images residing on their platforms, the images could reside on photographers’ servers.

Obviously this disaggretated model would shift around some the economic value in the stock photography business: but perhaps the industry is failing because we have not developed or scaled platforms that allow the economic value to shift in ways the industry desperately needs.

… In essence:

Decouple the the platform delivery and market-making components of the traditional stock photography agencies.

Develop open platforms that allow photographers to control their own data, on their own servers, using open-sourced software, “promoted” by stock agencies.

Let agencies focus on making markets, reducing transaction costs, making prices and image comparisons more transparent.

Allen’s comment:

I know nothing about the inner workings of the blog companies, however, they do not have the inherent problem that pro photography has — that is, a small addressable market. Millions of people use blogger and word press, by contrast, the # of “pro” photographers is in the low hundreds of thousands by most estimates. So I’m not sure an open platform system would work.

Secondly, storing digital assets and providing an e-commerce layer isn’t as simple as hosting a few bytes of blog data. Not to say that it can’t be done, but we have a ton of scripts that are necessary to control everything from conversion of JPG/RAWs into thumbnails to e-commerce systems that process transactions, email the client, and generate a downloadable file.

I would personally like to see more adoption of standards so that distribution of your images from a hub like PhotoShelter to any number of destination sites (whether it’s Getty or a boutique agency) could be as simple as something like sending an e-mail. Ultimately, however, I don’t think the industry has the economic incentive to develop such a system — and often, what’s good for the photographer isn’t necessarily needed by the buyer, and vice versa.

Continuing to explain my thoughts:

… in my mind the open-sourced platform would be given away for free. Give away the software, create a platform for developers to create plug-ins to manage images, fans, customizations for photographers. Provide (free and paid) services to help photographers host and customize their own stock solutions. Learn from the lessons of companies that have created platforms (and movements,) not just products.

… Not all photographers will want this, of course: many won’t want to manage their own systems, learn about web development or managing their software and hosting solutions. But that’s what Movable Type and WordPress have learned, and it’s a key part of why they offer both the hosted and non-hosted paths.

Re: Storing digital assets and e-commerce layer: you obviously know what goes into this far more than I do. It’s not a trivial problem, but there are many software and web companies that have dealt with similar problems with managing massive flows of unstructured and structured data. Think of it as creating an API between the cloud of hosted software platforms and Photoshelter’s e-commerce market-making website.

What are the biggest barriers for photo buyers? It’s not just about prices … The lack of price transparency between RF / RM and in comparing images is a strategic mistake: the transaction costs (time, effort, energy) are a significant barrier to closing a sale.

Continuing with a related thought from an interview from April 22 with Ellen Boughn on the future of stock photography:

John: I am hearing predictions that Google is the ultimate stock search mechanism, and that someday all the searches will be done on Google image search…even including Agency collections. Can you comment on that?

Ellen: I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that Google has taught us all how to search. We no longer look for anything with just one or two words. The vast amount of information on the web compels us to become more and more specific in our use of search terms and to use more words in a search. This knowledge spills over into how we search for images. I believe that photographers with collections on specific subjects and who have implemented best practices as far as SEO goes may find that they can make more money selling stock direct than with a stock company in the near future.

Today I am excited about the prospect that we may be at a convergence of technology and user behavior that will shortly enable photographers to license their existing images.

As Ellen continues to explain, we are beginning to see web tools break down the industry stack to help photographers distribute images, handle sales, licensing and infringement.

We’re starting to see bits of the chain emerge:

Distribution platforms: In addition to the more traditional stock photography distributors, collections and portals, a number of platforms, including mageSpan, Photoshelter, Fotolia and others, provide a variety of web platforms for photographers to sell and manage licensing from their site;
Distribution platforms with alternate licensing and/or pricing models: Cutcaster, GumGum and Photrade provide distribution platforms with alternate licensing and/or pricing models;
Syndication (distribution management): iSyndica helps photographers upload images to multiple stock photography platforms;
Analytics: LookStat helps photographers track sales across multiple sites, creating the data behind image sales and performance necessary for stock photographers to make informed decisions about their business;
Direct sales and E-commerce: Fotomoto helps photographers promote and sell prints directly from their site with a simple, small code change to their existing website, and almost all of the distribution and promotion sites also handle print and license sales;
Tracking: Digimarc, Idée and PicScout all help track usage and infringement (with different methods, goals and business structures).
Promotion: A number of companies, including A Photo Folio, liveBooks, PhotoBiz, NextProof and Pictage, provide solutions for photographers to create websites and manage clients and sales.

But there are still a dearth of powerful tools and platforms for photographers to manage their own marketing efforts. Photoshelter might have the best range of tools, widgets and other solutions for photographers to promote their work; but it is still a relatively undeveloped space. How can photographers manage, track and understand their own web marketing efforts? How can photographers track their social media engagement / marketing efforts across the variety of tools and communities? How can photographers reach out and manage their fans and customers? Who will create the Topspin, su.pr or awe.sm for photographers? How will we bring humanity to the market for images and photographers?

I’m sure there are many other solutions available, and I might have missed a core part of the industry stack, but at the end of the day the photography industry still struggles with a mess of largely closed, non-interoperable solutions for matching buyers with sellers.

The photography industry may be suffering right now, but general interest in photography is at an all-time high; even though individual photographers will continue to struggle through the transition, big problems create great opportunities. Find your vision, target your niche, create great work, expand your business model, learn to market, and find a way to swim through the industry’s tides; if you figure all of that out, businesses will emerge to help you thrive.

The stock photography industry needs to be unbundled, Oct 2008.
Everyone is a photographer, Sept 2007.
Photographers are your customers, not your competition, Oct 2008.
Expanding on the role of middlemen in stock photography, May 2009.

The data revolution in baseball continues.

2009-07-12T00:00:00Z

Via Rob Neyer, Alan Schwarz, Digital Eyes Will Chart Baseball’s Unseen Skills:

As baseball’s statistical revolution marches on, the last refuge for the baseball aesthete has been the sport’s less quantifiable skills: outfielders’ arm strength, base-running efficiency and other you-won’t-find-that-in-the-box-score esoterica. But debates over the quickest center fielder or the rangiest shortstop are about to graduate from argument to algorithm.

A new camera and software system in its final testing phases will record the exact speed and location of the ball and every player on the field, allowing the most digitized of sports to be overrun anew by hundreds of innovative statistics that will rate players more accurately, almost certainly affect their compensation and perhaps alter how the game itself is played.

… “It can be a big deal,” the Cleveland Indians’ general manager, Mark Shapiro, said. “We’ve gotten so much data for offense, but defensive objective analysis has been the most challenging area to get any meaningful handle on. This is information that’s not available anywhere. When you create that much data you almost have to change the structure of the front office to make sense of it.”

Yet another example of how structured, widely available data changes decision-making; just as better, more available, more transparent and “promotable” data about daily life impacts the decisions people make (i.e. energy consumption, investment strategies and personal financial management just to start), and structured data about hitting and pitching changed baseball management, better data about fielding and baserunning will continue the evolution of data-driven decision-making in baseball. How will better data continue to challenge baseball’s axioms and “traditional wisdom”? How will better data, ranking and comparisons change player compensation and team structure strategies?

Bob Bowman, the subsidiary’s chief executive, said he hoped to have meaningful data flowing by the end of this season from the San Francisco installation, and from all 30 stadiums in 2010. The data could be made available to the public on a subscription basis, Bowman said, although what data is released and in what form could be affected by clubs’ competitive concerns.

Bowman said he preferred the data be more open so that statistically minded fans and academics could brainstorm ways to wring useful information from what would become petabytes of raw data. Software and artificial-intelligence algorithms must still be developed to turn simple time-stamped x-y-z coordinates into batted-ball speeds, throwing distances and comparative tools to make the data come alive.

“It will give fans other things to argue about and discuss, and highlight details of the sport that you hear about a lot but don’t know too much about,” Bowman said. “It has broadcasting applications for graphics, things like that, and also has real-world applications to teams who have to evaluate players.”

I would love to see all the data be open to the public: could a baseball team effectively outsource analysis to hardcore stats geeks?

“I would say it would be threatening to more scouts than not — here come the stat rats,” said the Houston Astros’ Paul Ricciarini, now in his 35th year of scouting. “It’s the same diamond and same distances between the bases, but the way the game changes from generation to generation, you have to adapt with it. I’m confident that I can be accurate in judging players. But history has taught us that that’s not always the case.”

Scouts aren’t fortune-tellers; predicting how players develop over time is notoriously hard and inaccurate. But data doesn’t solve that problem: past performance does not guarantee future results. The scouts that survive and thrive will be the ones that can blend their eye for the game with a mind for statistics.

Just like the most businesspeople :)

Three people living lives too cool to ignore.

2009-07-16T00:00:00Z

As I mentioned the other day in my post about the tools, tactics and strategies I use to filter the noise, I depend heavily on people to help “create my web” and point me toward valuable and relevant information and insights. To extend the focus on people a step further, I wanted to highlight a couple people who are doing cool stuff and play a part in my daily web…

Part of an irregular series, three people doing cool things big and small, a small sample of the many people I follow throughout the web…

Chris Guillebeau (@chrisguillebeau)
I first heard about Chris from Valeria Maltoni, who pointed me to Chris’s Art of Nonconformity (AONC) project, focusing on personal development, life design, international travel, and “the battle against conventional beliefs”.

An example, about going to extremes:

Conventional living is all about being balanced, well-rounded, risk-adverse, and safe. The problem is that well-rounded people rarely do anything interesting. Balanced people don’t usually change the world.

The alternative is to truly live, and come back tired – even if you’re not traveling. Be better than you have been before. Give more than you take. Embrace the extremes. Say yes.

I struggle with the notion that many of us are merely pretending to be lifestyle rockstars, promoting online lives that don’t live up to our offline lives, but Chris walks the talk, helping people create their own unconventional lives by bringing his story, lessons and guidance to the community.

Sloane Berrent (@sloane)
Currently a Kiva Fellow in the Philippines, I first heard about Sloane through my NOLA (New Orleans, LA) friends when she was temporarily living and working in the New Orleans community earlier this year. In the Philippines, Sloane is working as a loan officer for a micro-finance institution, going into the field and helping people that are interested in a Kiva loan, and then writing about their stories and her experiences.

As a long-time (albeit small, and currently lapsed) lender through Kiva, I’m finding it interesting to learn about the people behind the Kiva profiles and the impact that micro-finance has on their lives.

Christopher Natsuume of Boomzap
Fine, I’ll admit I’m incredibly biased: not only is Chris my cousin, but he and his family are also my guides on my current little jaunt in Japan.

That said, he’s still doing cool stuff; Chris is Creative Director and co-founder of Boomzap, a casual game development studio headquartered in Singapore that has become one of the leading independent game developers in Southeast Asia.

But what’s really cool is how Boomzap is doing it, leveraging a distributed, virtual workforce to tap into quality games developers and artists across Southeast Asia, creating a structure that frees their staff to define their work schedules, enabling the company to focus on developing and delivering great games.
The common thread? People creating their lives, their way, on their terms. It’s a thread common to the original thinkers, passionate entrepreneurs, creative professionals and open-minded travelers that help “create my web”.

What three people would you highlight from your web?

One Way to Sleep in Tokyo (Not Recommended)

2009-07-17T00:00:00Z

One way to spend a night in Tokyo, not recommended.

The Plan II, Tokyo, Japan, July 2009

I’ll tell the full story behind a better way soon…

How to Pack for a Nomadic Life (and the 79 things I packed).

2009-07-20T00:00:00Z

First time here? Enjoy this post, subscribe to the blog, and follow me on Twitter @tdavidson.

Patagonia MLC and stuff

People always ask long-term travelers what they pack for trips, with cries of surprise at how little (or how much) they carry with them on their journeys. At the same time, long-term travelers are always curious about the decisions other travelers made when faced with similar decisons, part of the continual game in living a nomadic life. Therefore, to continue the conversation and peek into my own decisions, here are the details behind what I packed on my current jaunt.

How to Pack: “Heavy packs kill light lives.”

As a constant traveler, always packing or unpacking from one trip or another, I’ve been on the search for the perfect bag for a long time.

But I’ve come to recognize that the perfect bag simply doesn’t exist.

Instead, I’ve come to enjoy different packs for different adventures: a Gregory Shasta and Mountainsmith Ghost for backpacking trips into the wilderness (although both bags have been on long-term trips abroad in the past), a Mountainsmith Tour as a camera bag, and my Patagonia Critical Mass as a do-everything briefcase / gym / weekend bag.

But for trips I’ve come to depend on my Patagonia MLC; it’s a pack that doesn’t look like a pack, has a comfortable shoulder strap, works surprisingly effectively as a backpack while traveling, has a low-profile and is sized to carry-on airplanes and squeeze into small spaces. Yes, at 43 L (2610 cubic inches), it has less pack space than most packs people use for long-term trips. But that’s a virtue, not a weakness; “heavy packs kill light lives.”

Seriously, if there is just one bit of advice I would pass on to someone getting ready to take a trip: take less. There are few joys greater while traveling than walking off a plane and heading directly into the world without stopping to pick up baggage, without having to worry if the bags made it to your destination, or by being able to navigate cities, hotels, restaurants and daily life without dragging a huge bag behind you.

Selecting a smaller pack helps make that a reality by forcing you to re-evaluate what you bring because the size of your pack is a very real, tangible constraint. Embrace constraints.

1 Patagonia MLC.

Pack: 1 item.

Clothes: “What you pack, breaks your back.”

I use the adage “take half as many clothes as you think you need and twice as much money”, but still find that I take too many clothes.

My hack? I take or wear a couple bits of clothing that I intend to discard while traveling, lightening my load and building in some space in my pack for poor packing decision-making.

What did I take on my current trip? Excluding what I discarded:

1 pair jeans. Yes, they are heavy, bulky, and take forever to dry when you wash them, but jeans are a go-anywhere uniform for the world.
1 pair black pants. Why do I carry a pair of black pants? For business, for more formal and dressier affairs, and to avoid looking like a backpacker at all times.
1 pair North Face khaki hiking pants. Not zip-off convertible pants, just lightweight, simple, wear-anywhere, quick-drying, decent-looking pants for travel, hiking and relaxing.
1 REI One soft shell. A go-anywhere, lightweight, flexible jacket to wear in all conditions. Not needed everywhere at all times, but it’s a security blanket more than anything else.
1 dark pinstriped blazer. A reminder of my “what would James Bond do” mantra; unnecessary, but one of my travel comfort items.
1 tie. Mostly to wear while flying, to help stand out from the usual sweatpants-wearing American flyer.
3 long-sleeve button-down shirts. White, black, and a blue North Face travel button-down. I am almost incapable of wearing a long-sleeve shirt without rolling up the sleeves, so these basically function as short-sleeve shirts.
1 pair Columbia khaki shorts.
1 pair Nike running shorts / bathing suit.
1 Nike Dri-Fit Pullover. If you know me, you’ve seen me wear this shirt a couple times over the past five years. Still going strong.
2 short-sleeve polo shirts. White and Black.
2 pair Patagonia Silkweight t-shirts. Indestructible, functional, perfect to wear anywhere, anytime.
1 pair Saucony Jazz black vegan trainers. A new beloved, wear-anywhere pair of shoes, suitable for any situation given the right attitude.
1 pair black shoes. Soon to be ditched.
3 pair Smartwool long socks, all dark colors.
1 pair Smartwool short socks, white.
1 Mountain Hardwear light fleece tuque. Again, not needed everywhere, but very small, lightweight, and can be used to pack and pad electronics.
1 pair Manzilla light gloves. Ever since I got frostbite back in 2003, I always carry a pair of gloves when I travel.
1 scarf. Unnecessary, I know. I’ll probably never wear it. I just like scarfs.
1 pack towel. I always carry a towel.
3 pairs underwear. Cotton and Patagonia silkweight.
1 belt.

Granted, this list includes some of the 18 things you don’t need, but it works for me and how I want to live.

When I pack clothes I pack for multiple uses; I hesitate to bring anything that only works in one combination, or for one specific use. Basic clothes can be mix-and-matched with anything; building flexibility into your wardrobe is the key for minimizing the amount of clothes you need to bring.

And remember one thing: clothes are sold all over the world. If you forgot it, or didn’t bring it, you can buy it.

Clothes: 30 items. Total so far: 31 items.

The Tools to Live: “Bring, Buy and Discard”

I’m always surprised how the rest of the stuff adds up; we think carefully about the clothes we pack and how we’ll use them, but the rest of the “stuff” adds up quickly and is typically disposable and replaceable.

1 Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. No dSLR on this trip. Attempting to embrace creative constraints, but kinda regretting my decision, the first time I have traveled extensively without a dSLR since 2005. But still, loving this little camera. ( 1 charger and 1 USB cable)
1 Lowepro Rezo 50. Case for the camera above.
1 8GB Sandisk Ultra SD card, 1 4GB Sandisk Ultra SD card, 2 2GB Sandisk Ultra SD cards. Kinda unnecessary, but worth it.
1 Apple MacBook Pro 15″. The best and worst thing I carry, for many, many reasons, my tool for creating and connecting, my tie to another world. ( 1 power cable and 1 2GB USB thumb drive)
1 unlocked Nokia GSM phone. Necessary for traveling abroad; but make sure you bring the right kind, and despite the fact I used to work in the wireless industry in the US and Europe and should know better, I still brought a GSM phone that wouldn’t work in Europe. C’est la vie. ( 1 locked Nokia GSM phone, acquired in London, 1 charger for each phone)
3 plug adapters for various countries.
1 Sea to Summit dry sack. In case of rain, to keep electronics completely dry, just in case.
1 cloth shoulder sack. It’s a shoulder sack I bought in Chiang Mai, Thailand back in 2005, and it’s continued to stay in my pack ever since, because it’s lightweight, it rolls up, it doesn’t stand out, and I have yet to find a replacement.
1 Masterlock combination lock. One of things that can be a pain to get when you need one; my nearly 20 year-old Masterlock combination lock failed in Austin this past March, forcing me to get a new one, sadly.
1 Petzl headlamp. For looking like a geek at hostels at night.
1 Timex watch. For running, wandering, and tracking the time when your phone is otherwise useless.
1 REI ditty sack (to store stuff inside the pack), 1 laptop case (to protect the laptop inside the pack), 2 Ziplock bags.
Toiletries. A small, limited selection, just the necessities, in a carry-on ready plastic bag. (counted as one item).
1 Offbeat Guide to Tokyo (since discarded), 1 city map for London, and 1 French phrasebook (unnecessary).
1 Passport, 1 copy of passport, printouts of air tickets, printed maps of where I’m staying (counted as 4 items).
1 notebook, 2 pens, keys from home, 1 carabiner, 2 knee braces (for running), 1 sunglasses, 1 eyeglasses, 1 checkbook, hotel and airline loyalty cards and random foreign cash from past trips (counted as 12 items).
I also “travel” with Mozy’s online backup system, backing up my laptop automatically online every time I get access to Internet, giving me some peace of mind from the inevitable hard drive failure (not counted).
Stuff: 47 items. Total so far: 78 items.

Although pretty different in composition, the total number of items I am carrying is close to the 77 items that Carl Nelson has packed, and a fairly successful attempt at my version of the 100 Things Challenge.

What would I have changed?
I would have brought an dSLR. So it goes. And given the hot European and Japanese weather I have seen so far, the jacket, toque, gloves and scarf have been completely unnecessary. We’ll see if I end up wearing them.

The most important item I brought: Me.
More important than anything else, we shape our experiences with our attitudes, viewpoints, energy and openness to explore far more than any physical item we can bring. In another life, I could imagine traveling in medieval times with nothing but a walking stick and the clothes on my back; yet different times call for different measures.

Me: 1 item. Total: 79 items.

When I pack for a trip I like to reflect on my travel goals: to explore, to experience, to learn from the world, to create memories, and to give back to the world, sharing ideas and experiences with people throughout the world. If the stuff I pack doesn’t help me do that, then there’s really no need for me to bring it.

* * *

This post lingered in my mind for a long time, finally written during a train ride from Kyoto to Tokyo, staring at Mt. Fuji in the distance, then polished and posted from London, listening to the sounds of the city waft through the morning air.

* * *

Posts from other travelers past and present about how to pack for long-term travel:

Derek Johanson, My Gear List – Travel through Life Light
Matt Kepnes (Nomadic Matt), What to Pack on Your Trip
Tim Ferriss, How to Travel the World with 10 Pounds or Less (Plus: How to Negotiate Convertibles and Luxury Treehouses)
Todd and Tynan of Life Nomadic, The Gear of Life Nomadic
Christine Gilbert, A Year of Gear: Road Tested Results Part One
Gillian and Jason, Our Whole World On Our Backs
David duChemin, Travelling Stuff (for photographers, but still valuable)
Kareem Mayan, Gear List for a Digital Nomad (and thanks to Kareem’s post for pointing me to more pack lists below…)
Megan, The Details: Packing
Andy Volk, The packing list
Sarah Lane, World Travel FAQ
Nate Kurtz, Packing List
Theresa and Jeff Blackinton, Packing List
Ian, Packing List
Malena, My Packing List
Kelly Westhoff, Packing for a Long Journey

One Night at an Internet Cafe in Tokyo (a recommended experience)

2009-07-21T00:00:00Z

A couple days ago I pointed out one way to sleep in Tokyo that I wouldn’t recommend that highly, largely because far better options exist for finding a last-minute place to sleep for the night. A short post about going with the flow and embracing cultural experiences.

* * *

Approximately 11 million people commute throughout Tokyo every day, using a ridiculously efficient public transportation system to venture into the epicenter of Japan from their homes near and far. Roughly a million people pass through Shinjuku station every single day, yet it is only one of multiple major gateways to the city. Tales of commuting from bedroom communities up to 2 hours from Tokyo are far from uncommon, the effect of the economic magnetism of Tokyo, drawing 35 million people to the greater Tokyo region, driving up the costs of living in Tokyo and scattering people far from their jobs.

The public transport system is notoriously effective, timely, dependable and efficient, despite the fact that the trains, subways and buses are actually operated by many competing private companies, creating a maze of intersecting, overlapping and competing routes through the dense network of stations crammed into the area. Of course, the system has to work: how else would the masses driving Japan’s economy plunge into Tokyo every day?

But it’s not perfect. For many far-flung destinations, the last trains home can be as early as 10 PM, a problem for workaholic Japan and the salarymen (and women) that work and play in the city.

How does a functioning city adapt? For those who choose to skip a commute or two (or miss their last train home), a range of options are available:

Hotels. Thousands of hotels are distributed throughout the city; at one point about 70% of Tokyo hotel stays were by residents of the greater Tokyo region. Western hotels are supplemented by ryokans and capsule hotels, hotels that offer “rooms” that are basically just boxes to sleep in, great inexpensive accommodation for planned and unplanned nights away from home (and perhaps pointing to a broader need, capsule hotels are beginning to pop up in Europe).
Love hotels. Not exactly meant for sleeping, but it’s an option; while love hotels conjure up a variety of conceptions, they are actually a practical response to a variety of cultural and economic realities.
24-hour comic book library / internet cafes. In addition to internet access, and facilities for reading comic books and watching TV and DVDs, many Internet cafes in Japan have a range of options with private rooms, reclining chairs (single and double), and even flat beds, and many also have shower rooms and amenities for the overnight visitor.
Karaoke boxes: late at night, karaoke boxes often offer discounted prices for the entire night, an easy option for extending a night out at karaoke into a place to sleep for the night.
Street. Not recommended, but sleeping on the street isn’t as dangerous in Tokyo as most cities around the world, and with the range of public baths and facilities it is still possible to clean up in the morning.

Luckily for me, I had the opportunity to explore one of the options the other night, the result of going with the flow of a fun night and a fondness for cultural experiences.

* * *

Bunker, Tokyo, Japan, July 2009

Compared to the Internet cafes that I have visited in North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Asia, Japanese Internet cafes hardly recognizable, a different beast. Although I have yet to see them myself, I have heard that Internet cafes in Korea and China are often centers for gaming, social life and businesses, far more popular and advanced than most places offering Internet access to the public throughout the rest of the world.

Japanese Internet cafes have developed into centers for entertainment, places for relaxation and private lives. Many offer private rooms with comfortable, reclining chairs, places for people to escape from the bustling city and crowded homes and relax, complete with computers with high-speed Internet access, libraries of comic books and DVDs, TVs, shower facilities, food, drink and other amenities. Since many are open 24 hours a day, they have evolved to become easy, cheap places for people to nap and spend the night, offering rooms with reclining chairs and flat beds and a range of rates to accommodate a variety of needs.

Some of this I knew before last Thursday night.

Some of this I only found out after I ventured into one to find a place to stay in Tokyo at 1:30 AM, the result of extending a night out with friends far past my last train home.

* * *

Check in was easy and quick. The rates were posted in Japanese and English and easy to understand, and after paying I was handed a small clipboard, instructions on how to find my cube, and released into a darkened cave of rows of cubes, flickering lights escaping over the tall walls. The hushed masses late at night: the sounds of light jazz, innumerable soft sleepers, a couple late workers, numerous late-night movie viewers, and one loud snorer, all softly wafting through the air.

Slumber, Tokyo, Japan, July 2009

But also perfectly comfortable, at least for a tired, buzzed, notoriously heavy sleeper quite accustomed to sleeping in different places, and much more comfortable than sleeping in an airport.

How expensive was it, you might ask? 1,450 yen (about $15), about the same that my train ticket home would have cost: more expensive than sleeping on the street, but cheaper than the other widely-available options.

And of course, I woke the next morning in the heart of Tokyo, ready to explore the city, replacing the hours spent on the train with wandering through temples, shrines and the streets of the city.

Although I would probably look for a capsule hotel next time (in the quest for new experiences), I wouldn’t hesitate to spend another night at an Internet cafe in Japan. Especially after a good night out…

Zombie travel is travel without conscious thought.

2009-07-24T00:00:00Z

A nice, but misguided, attempt to connect the principles behind Umair Haque’s Zombieconomy to our choices of how to travel, followed by a bit of a rant.

Lonely Planet, Zombie Travel:

For what shall it profit travellers, if they visit the whole world without experiencing it fully?

The Lonely Planet community has always been about Independent Travel. Our success is being able to empower curious people to get to the heart of a place, whether by getting around on public transport, getting beyond the tourist traps, supporting local businesses, or relating to the wonderful and the everyday in every destination. But a lot of travellers are unaware of the benefits of Independent Travel, and instead support Zombie Travel.

What is Zombie Travel?

It’s a part of the larger Zombieconomy. Harvard Business Review [actually, Umair Haque) describes the Zombieconomy as being ‘built on McMansions, Hummers, and $5 lattes’. In other words, it is the products and lifestyles that don’t add value to our lives. In fact, they take away value. They destroy our standard of living, the environment, and minority cultures, and distract us from adding real value to our lives.

Yes, but I have a quibble coming…

So Zombie Travel is the vacation spent all day, every day on the beach getting skin cancer, instead of learning even a little about the local culture and history; it is drinking at Irish pubs in France instead of finding a family run brasserie or cafe; it is staying only at cloned five-star international hotel chains, instead of trying a locally owned guesthouse; it is going on an air-conditioned coach tour of a city, rather than creating your own walking tour.

In short, Zombie Travel is typically luxury without value.

Yes, but no.

Zombie travel is travel without conscious thought.

The mistake: a misguided interpretation of Haque’s thoughts. The Zombieconomy is not created by the products themselves but the resource allocation processes that leads to short-sighted, misplaced production and consumption decisions based on perceived, “thin”, short-term value, neglecting real, “thick”, long-term value.

If someone truly values getting a suntan all day, or lounging in a Starbucks in Beijing, or eating at 7-11 in Japan, and makes those choices consciously, because they truly enjoy those experiences, than who are we to judge?

People are entitled to the right to experience a place and a destination in their own way, for their own reasons, safe from judgment. All travelers are created equal.

“McMansions, Hummers, and $5 lattes” are example of poor decisions, but they are not the root cause of the problem; the problem is how business and society accounts for and values the costs and benefits of our actions. Systems that take a limited, non-holistic view of costs and benefits create economic incentives that misallocate resources, attention, and actions, creating unending patterns of destructive behavior.

In short, “luxuries without value” aren’t an issue if people make conscious decisions based on a holistic accounting of their true value.

Focusing on “McMansions, Hummers, and $5 lattes” might be an easier way to communicate the idea, but it is still misleading; neglecting to focus on the root processes and causes of our mistakes dooms us to repeat our mistakes in new ways.

I tend to avoid Irish pubs in France, five-star hotels and air-conditioned coach tours, but for my own, personal, conscious reasons. In the end, the fruits of your life are the only validation you need.

—

Updated 7.24.2009
A friend justifiably asked me today to explain myself better on one point:

“McMansions, Hummers, and $5 lattes” are example of poor decisions, but they are not the root cause of the problem; the problem is how business and society accounts for and values the costs and benefits of our actions.

Many of our decisions behind what we produce (companies) and consume (people) impact people not directly involved in the transaction, creating positive and negative externalities.

Systems that take a limited, non-holistic view of costs and benefits create economic incentives that misallocate resources, attention, and actions, creating unending patterns of destructive behavior.

Since prices do not reflect the full costs or benefits in production or consumption, either too little or too much of a good is produced and consumed in relation to the full benefit and cost to society. In essence, society bears some of the costs (or accrues some of the benefits) to individuals’ decisions. More holistic methods of accounting gives more complete information for people to evaluate what they consume, pay attention to (e.g. choice of media), and what they spend their time producing (e.g. jobs, careers).

How does behavior change? What will help or make us change our decisions?

Account for the full costs and benefits of our actions,
Structure that information for individuals, groups and society,
Create systems that enable us to (and force us to) use that information as we weigh our decisions.

Systems shape our behavior by creating economic inventives for particular actions: for example, tax policy in the USA is a primary example of how the government subsidizes and taxes certain behaviors in an attempt to influence the decisions we make.

While our decisions about what we buy and produce change constantly, the incentives that frame those decisions are far less malleable; the fact that our decisions change does not guarantee that we’re actually any better. Without understanding the incentives shaping our behavior we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past.

Modern Flaneurs

2009-08-15T00:00:00Z

My friend Joost recently introduced me to the term “flâneur”:

The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, “loafer”—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means “to stroll”. Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”. Because of the term’s usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity.

Stealing Time, London, England

Unsurprisingly, the term has found its way into photography:

The flâneur’s tendency toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation has brought the term into the literature of photography, particularly street photography.

… The most notable application of flâneur to street photography probably comes from Susan Sontag in her 1977 essay, On Photography. She describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur:

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.’ (pg. 55)

Startled, Covent Garden, London, England

Fine and well. But is it enough? Can the flaneur’s insightful yet ultimately disengaged observation be put to greater use?

Grant McCracken, Morgan Friedman, turning flaneurs into planners:

In some circles, the “flaneur” is a key idea. The flaneur is a person walking, watching, stopping to pay attention and otherwise engaging with the city as it presents itself to someone in motion and on foot.

It’s an idea discussed by some of the most gifted observers of contemporary life: Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin, and Sontag. Indeed, it has become so fashionable that it has become a kind of pose. (Baudelaire’s great fear realized.)

The cost of the pose is high. Some of the hard and most urgent work of noticing in the city goes undone. Some flaneurs are so busy posturing and so very scrupulous about what they notice (the post modern list is a short one), they can’t actually see the city very clearly. Thus does our self-impoverishment perpetuate itself. Some of the people blessed with the time and education to notice the city particularly well have been removed from usefulness.

Sharing, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, England

While the term flanuer is largely hidden from popular use, tucked away in corners of the web, surviving in forms on Facebook and Twitter, the action itself is thriving; in the web we have one the greatest avenues for sharing our observations from our analog and digital worlds.

But are we putting these observations to their best use? How we can remove the pose, engage the disengaged, structure and apply these observations and convert insights into knowledge?

Continuing with Grant:

… While the flaneur is busy swanning the city scape engaged in acts of self exaltation, the [Morgan] Friedman-esque observer is running the city down, seizing every opportunity it gives for further investigation. … Morgan suggests we take advantage of the people with time, the knowledge, and the incentive to act as our guides.

Who are our modern guides?

Grant points out Morgan Friedman, Eric Nehrlich, Jan Chipchase, and Russell Davies as a start; to that I would add Jason Kottke, Cory Doctorow, Ze Frank (ah, the forgotten brilliance of The Show) and Andy Baio, all known for noticing and linking together facts from our digital and analog worlds into more meaningful insights.

But it doesn’t end there: trendspotters like Core77, PSFK and Josh Spear; ethnographers like Chipchase and McCracken himself; collectors of ephemerality like Frank Warren of Postsecret, Friedman of Overheard in NY; the creators and collectors of insights that frequent events like Interesting NY (details from 2008), PopTech and TED; the contributors to FFFFOUND and Digg; everyone that posts an “OH” note on Twitter, all flaneurs in their own ways. ^[1]

But what happens when everyone can be a guide?

How do you choose who to listen to? How do you filter the noise to find true signals? And how do you absorb and apply the knowledge that swims around us every day?

The term flaneur may date to another era, but it’s an idea and an action more relevant today than ever.

I readily acknowledge I am applying the idea of a flaneur quite loosely, far outside its root in detached observation, but there’s more to learn from the concept by being inclusive than exclusive. ↩︎

Street Art from Istanbul, Turkey

2009-08-18T00:00:00Z

The first three pictures are of a display in the Besiktas district of street art from around Istanbul; the rest are a sample of the abundant street art around Istiklal Avenue, located in the historic Beyoglu district near Taksim Square in Istanbul.

Beautiful, intriguing, fascinating, but with a maze of cultural references and meanings unknown to a mere traveler. I would love to understand the meanings behind everything better: please comment and fill me on what everything means. And please tell me if anything is offensive, I mean no harm…

Meta I, Istanbul, Turkey

Meta II, Istanbul, Turkey

Meta III, Istanbul, Turkey

Art and Art, Istanbul, Turkey

Fists, Istanbul, Turkey

Divided, Istanbul, Turkey

######Window, Istanbul, Turkey

######Worried, Istanbul, Turkey

Aside, Istanbul, Turkey

Above, Istanbul, Turkey

The Eyes, Istanbul, Turkey

Friends, Istanbul, Turkey

Fitting in, Istanbul, Turkey

In Action, Istanbul, Turkey

One night on a train from Istanbul to Sofia

2009-08-20T00:00:00Z

The relief of being on the train segueing into the nervousness of the journey, waiting for the Bosphorus Express to depart Istanbul’s Sirkeci Station, deep in the Golden Horn of Istanbul.

Expectant, Istanbul, Turkey

Sirkeci Station was originally the eastern terminus for the famed Orient Express linking Paris to Istanbul. But those days are over; in 1977 the service was scaled back to a much smaller Vienna to Strasbourg route. The Bosphorus Express, named for the Bosphorus Straits that divides Istanbul’s Europe and Asian sides, offers daily service between Istanbul and Bucharest, Romania, with connections through and to Sofia, Belgrade, Budapest and Chi?in?u, Moldova.

Quarters, Istanbul, Turkey

One fear, reduced: a well-appointed berth, one of the nicer trains I’ve slept on in the past couple years (and trust me, I’m used to sleeping in many different places

Running, Istanbul, Turkey

A journey started, bouncing into the late night darkness of Istanbul, unaware of the jostling cacophony that the night will bring.

What will I remember from the night? The incredible bouncing, causing me to doubt my incredible ability to sleep anywhere, anytime (a misplaced fear, as it turned out); the incessant staccato of metal on metal, ten muddled minutes spent searching for its source, solved with a simple jam of my shoe into a tight spot; forty-five minutes standing in line in the wee hours of the new day waiting for an exit stamp from Turkey (more on that in a bit); followed shortly by the knocks of “passport control” on the train’s sleeping compartment doors, re-awakening the half-asleep inhabitants; the last interruption, the unexpected cries of the “customs control” officer sweeping through the train, a man that looked at me and my compartment mate Oliver and merely asked “English” to each of us, two tired shakes of our heads answering his question in turn, sending him scurrying away without a further word.

Exiting, Kapikule, Turkey

Powerless, Kapikule, Turkey

A singular highlight? A tired, bored Turkish immigration officer, stamping passports at 3 AM in the border town of Kapikule, Turkey; his questions of where I’m going (“Sofia”), where I’m going after that (a pause, “Bucharest”, followed by him repeating it back with the correct pronunciation); he answers his next questions himself with tired rolls of his hands and the names of cities on the rails beyond (“Vienna?” Da. “Berlin?” Da. “And then, Washington, DC?” Da.), both of us acknowledging the beaten path; even if my slightly more ambitions plans stray from his expectations, correcting him at 3 AM serves none of us any good, and off I slunk back to the train and my bunk.

Leaving, Istanbul, Turkey

And in the morning? Awakening to a peaceful trance, content with the hot, brown countryside as my companion, skipping away outside my window, time standing still in my oasis; my unreasonable wish to spend the rest of the day on the train, unfulfilled, as the drop into an unknown foreign city gets closer and closer.

Creating the means to match the spirit (How to Plan for Travel)

2009-08-28T00:00:00Z

A question via email in response to How to Pack for a Nomadic Life…

… How does it all work? So many of these [posts about what to pack] just seem to assume we have our [stuff] together enough that the only question is packing shoes or sandals. Well, many of us have the spirit … though the means elude us.

How does it work? In short:

The spirit creates the means; if you truly want to travel, you’ll find a way.

Travel isn’t easy. Dealing with the practicalities of worlds home and abroad, planning, deciding, preparing, booking and then actually traveling… the grind of the journey gets to us all some days. It’s not for everyone, and it isn’t the cure-all some people believe it be; but for those of us who make conscious decisions and approach travel with an eye and a mind towards its limitations, we can create realities that live up to our dreams.

How do we handle the logistics?

Plan less and plan now.

Plan less.

Embrace the unknown. Traveling without a plan can often be the best way to travel; half of the fun of travel are the experiences, moments and encounters you couldn’t schedule if you wanted to.

Open yourself up to serendipity by creating the situations for good things to happen. Then show up, mind, body and soul, and make the universe bend in your favour.

But of course, some planning is necessary; luckily there is a wealth of information available. Standbys like the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide guidebooks; newer possibilities like Offbeat Guides or iPhone applications; the wealth of information available through forums on travel websites like BootsnAll and World Hum and the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree travel forum; the wealth of travel bloggers with a range of travel and lifestyle design tips (resources and links detailed below); and of course, the all-knowing Google.

Planning for travel (arrangements, logistics, buses, places to stay, etc.) is actually a bit easier if you’re winging it rather than planning everything out ahead of time. Start with the basics for booking travel: Kayak.com, Vayama.com, Eurorail, Hostelworld.com, Hostels.com, TripAdvisor; it’s not really that hard if you’re open to figuring it out along the way.

Planning everything out ahead of time? Not only is it a guarantee for a headache, but you’ll also miss out on one of the best resources for information: people. Ask people along the way: tourist information centres, fellow travelers and locals. Travelers love to talk about destinations and routes; stay at a hostel and you’ll learn the ropes pretty quickly. Just figure out who to ask what and how to decipher their biases and use everyone’s information to make your own judgments. Do it, and you’ll learn.

Plan now.

Pay attention to the long-term impacts of seemingly short-term decisions. What you own ends up owning you; contracts, leases, loans, expenses small and large: all have implications beyond the initial purchase decision. Even “freebies” can have the hidden cost of commitments and paths you may not originally intend to pursue. By no means do I advocate running from commitments: just know what you’re really committing to.

Mortgages? 9-5 jobs? Student loans, car loans? All choices, not necessities or requirements for life.

Making and valuing trade-offs is part of “having the spirit”; if you can’t make sacrifices, then you don’t really have the spirit.

Don’t know how to jump off on a year of gallivanting around the world with nothing but a backpack and a round-the-world airline ticket?

Then don’t.

Start small: take an unplanned day-trip, an unscheduled weekend jaunt, a week-long trip with little planning and less gear. Test the kinds of experiences you think you want to create through travel. You might be surprised.

Starting small also helps you figure out how to handle some of the necessities. Passports? Get one. Visas? Depends on where you’re from and where you’re going.

Daily necessities? Bring some stuff you absolutely have to have, and figure out the rest along the way. People do laundry, buy medicine, exchange currency, get haircuts, take baths, etc. all around the world. The most important thing to bring is an inquisitive mind and an openness to try doing things the way locals do.

Just remember: wherever we go, we always bring ourselves.

An introvert, in the wild.

2009-08-29T00:00:00Z

Peeking, Istanbul, Turkey

Sophia Dembling, Confessions of an Introverted Traveler:

Introversion and extroversion are inborn traits, and the difference between them is not that one is gregarious and at ease in the world and the other shy and awkward. Rather, extroverts are outwardly motivated and gain energy from interaction with the outside world while introverts are more inwardly directed and drained by interaction with others. Introverts’ thinking tends to be deep and slow, we require copious time alone, we prefer probing conversation to shallow chitchat, and our social lives are geared more towards intimate one-on-one interactions than “more the merrier” free-for-alls.

To add, Jonathan Rauch, Caring for Your Introvert:

… introverts are people who find other people tiring.

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. … In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. … This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: “I’m okay, you’re okay—in small doses.”

A traveling life, especially one spent in the halls of hostels around the world, is easier for extroverts. But the joy of traveling is still accessible to introverts; Sophia Dembling, in an article worth reading in full, Six Tips for Introverted Travelers:

Be open to conversation when it’s offered.

… In her book Introvert Power, psychologist Laurie Helgoe points out that introverts generally prefer deep conversation to superficial chitchat. I’m never afraid to turn conversations to to the subject of worldview, personal goals, politics and other Deep Thoughts.

Regular, daily, social chit-chat doesn’t come easy to introverts. I don’t think extroverts truly understand this.

Introverts (well, at least me) get bored by the typical conversations about past exploits and future destinations; but we’re ready for the deeper explorations of cultural and economic differences that travel helps create. Just not all the time…

Trails, Istanbul, Turkey

Continuing…

Don’t be shy about ending an encounter when you’re ready.

A lot of times, random conversations lead to invitations to parties, to travel companionship, to meet others. … Don’t be ashamed or embarrassed to say “no” if you’re not feeling it. Then again, say “yes” sometimes, too. You never know.

“Saying yes” is one of the keys to creating serendipity; figuring out when to say “yes” and “no” to optimize for serendipity is particularly important for introverts, part of the constant battle to balance one’s time between expending and recharging social energy.

(And to be clear, I like raucous good times. Just not every night.)

Carry a book.

… I always carry a book when I travel for when I need to create a quiet place for myself. Travel is wonderful and exhausting and over-stimulating. Sometimes I need to escape into the tranquility of reading.

A book, a camera, a pad of paper and a pen, the tools for a happy day.

Give me a computer with an Internet connection, and that’s bliss for a couple days.

Targets, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey

Continuing…

Develop the art of sitting and watching.

In her book, Helgoe talks about the French term “flâneur” (feminine, “flâneuse”). It translates literally to “idler or loafer,” but the poet Charles Baudelaire defined it as a passionate observer. Yes, yes! I am a flâneuse. I love just sitting and watching people doing what they do, and even more so when I travel.

If there were truly any doubts, yes, I am a flâneur, of a sort. Done and done.

Take a walking tour or, even better, hire a guide yourself.

I have found this controlled interaction is a great way to get some conversation in with a local. …

Honestly I’ve never had the desire to hire a guide. Give me a map, point me in the right direction and I’m much happier to amuse myself with whatever I see and find.

Private Wishes in Public, Sofia, Bulgaria

Continuing…

Take the downtime you need.

I’m not opposed to traveling with others—a good travel companion is a joy and an extroverted companion can make connections for you on the road. But I’m also not shy about eking out time to myself as necessary.

The short intersections of time and place shared by travelers simply aren’t conducive for softly educating people about what introverts need; frankly both introverts and extroverts suffer from an inability to communicate about their preferred ways to travel and live.

But hopefully this will help…

—

i. Links via Jason Kottke
ii . Related reading: Party of One: the Loner’s Manifesto

Looking out, looking in.

2009-08-31T00:00:00Z

A hot, languid day train from Bulgaria to Romania, (Veliko Tarnovo to Bucharest via Ruse); as uneventful, in a good way, as a night train from Turkey to Bulgaria.

Looking out, looking in, Ruse, Bulgaria

Create enough friction and people will find a way around; business models, undermined.

(Hopefully the analogies to file-sharing, the music industry and the misguided implementations and business models behind DRM are obvious enough to escape the need to mention…)

Down the rails, Bulgaria

Create enough mess, and people will want to clean it up (whether it’s worth it or not); business models and the links between actions and results, misunderstood.

Peace in stillness, Ruse, Bulgaria

For every cultural movement, an early warning. Models for life, tested.

Outward, Bulgaria

Surfacing data, surfacing decisions; models for life, created.

Three days hiking in the Rila Mountains, Bulgaria (a story untold)

2009-09-05T00:00:00Z

Visiting the Rila Monastery outside Sofia, Bulgaria wasn’t in the original plan; sitting in my hostel in Sofia, I didn’t even know it existed a mere couple hours away.

Three days hiking hut-to-hut in the mountains of Bulgaria wasn’t in the plan; in fact, I wasn’t even aware it was an option.

Blame poor research, poor preparation, not asking enough questions, all true.

But thanks to an open mind and a joy for embracing a bit of idiocy, the unknown became known, a story I’m looking forward to milking for a little while. However, for now, I’ll let the pictures tell thousands of words, priming the stories that I’ll share over dinners, drinks and late nights for years to come.

Stepping back, Rila Monastery, Bulgaria

Planning by candlelight, Rila, Bulgaria

Directions, Rila Mountains, Bulgaria

Relaxing, Ivan Vazov Hut, Rila Mountains, Bulgaria

Home, Ivan Vazov Hut, Bulgaria

Chasm, Rila Mountains, Bulgaria

Exposed, Rila Mountains, Bulgaria

3 of 7, Seven Lakes Region, Rila Mountains, Bulgaria

Tourists, Seven Lakes Region, Rila Mountains, Bulgaria

2 of 7, Seven Lakes Region, Rila Mountains, Bulgaria

Rest, Rila Lakes Chalet, Rila Mountains, Bulgaria

Exit, Rila Mountains, Bulgaria

DSLRs are SUVs

2009-09-21T00:00:00Z

It has been a busy Fauxtokina ^[1] this year with a raft of camera manufacturers announcing their new digital cameras. Given the strong sales of DSLRs over the past couple years, it’s not surprising that most of the attention from manufacturers, retailers and people have been on the high-end of the market. Canon’s 7D, Nikon’s D-whatever and Sony’s A850 are sure to draw a lot of attention (along with Leica’s M9), but a couple cameras based on the micro 4/3 format are drawing a lot of attention: Olympus’s E-PEN 1 and Panasonic’s DMC-GF1.

It’s not just about micro 4/3.

The announcement of these cameras has created a bit of debate about the impact the micro 4/3 standard will have on the industry, but it’s obscured recent innovation in the “pro-sumer point-and-shoot” segment. Ricoh and Sigma have attempted to create point-and-shoot cameras with powerful full-frame sensors and fast lenses with their Caplio GX-100/200 and DP1/DP2 cameras, respectively, but in both cases the manufacturers have been unable to create cameras with the results to match the expectations from the specs.

At the same time, Panasonic has been unable to meet market demand for its DMC-LX3, a point-and-shoot camera that rebelled against the megapixel race and embraced some limitations in its design, allowing it to truly excel at a smaller range of use. Unsurprisingly, Canon recently announced two new cameras (the S90 and the G11) which both appear to embrace some of the lessons from the LX3, breathing some life back into the dream of a “DMD” camera.

##What do people really want?
But missing in the conversations is the more meaningful debate: what do people really want?

Does everyone want an SUV?

Does everyone want a DSLR?

DSLR sales have taken off in recent years ^[2] and while professionals will continue to use DSLRs and more powerful medium-format and still/video camera combinations such as the RED One, more general photographers face a different issue. Most people will trade-off image quality for easier-to-use, more portable cameras that fit better into their lives. Part of the question in their minds is less about getting a camera that is “good enough” or fits their needs, but deeper down it’s really about paying the right amount for what they really want for their lives.

Therefore, for most people, “what they really want for their lives” is not a DSLR.

Will Canon and Nikon change their DSLR strategy?
Panasonic and Olympus understand that micro 4/3 is not intended to compete against DSLRs, and they understand that micro 4/3 is unlikely to be anything more than a second camera for a professional, even if it does offer interchangeable lenses.

It’s understandable why Canon and Nikon have yet to introduce a 4/3 model; “in the digital age, your first and biggest investment should be your lenses”. And as Robert Noble pointed out in his comment, Panasonic, Olympus et. al. had little to lose by adopting the 4/3 standard since they knew that playing Canon’s game was not their best strategy.

Canon and Nikon (and to a different degree, Sony) have used a simple strategy the last couple years: convince people that bigger cameras, more megapixels, more options and more features make us all better photographers, and use DSLR sales to drive sales of lenses and accessories.

But at the same time their DSLR product lines became more complicated. They created smaller target customer segments by cintroducing new camera models based on incremental innovations, but made it harder for people to tease out the differences between their cameras. Confusing naming systems and lists of feature comparisons do not help people understand why they should buy a particular product, but that’s how Canon and Nikon have continued to market and promote their DSLR cameras.

And at the same time, price competition and the increasing pace of new technology has made it more difficult for people to judge when to buy a camera, because it’s becoming increasingly likely that a better, cheaper camera will be released in six months.

Professional photographers and camera geeks are ok with this; they understand the debates, the technology, and can make nuanced trade-offs and decisions about value and price. But the majority of camera buyers are faced with an increasing set of deeply confusing decisions.

In short, not the best business strategy in an age where “delighting people” through “awesomeness” is easier, cheaper and simply better than ever before.

Is 4/3 or micro 4/3 the future? Who knows. But it really doesn’t matter. In a broader sense, at the moment economic returns flow to openness, and by embracing a more open standard, manufacturers using the 4/3 standard are giving themselves the best chance to succeed.

How will people respond? Dreams of careers in photography crushed by the long tail, tired by the physical and digital weight of DSLRs, angered by the pace of DSLR “innovation” and confusing, incremental enhancements and entranced by the small size of micro 4/3 and powerful point-and-shoot cameras, the interest in smaller non-DSLR cameras will return.

Will Canon and Nikon change their DSLR strategy? Unlikely. But we’re already seeing them change their point-and-shoot strategy. The real question is how they will balance their internal organizations and resource allocation to target the different markets. I would love to be a fly on the wall in those discussions.

Relevant thoughts:

Chase Jarvis, Olympus Pen Digital And Maybe A New Way Of Thinking
Mike Johnston, Why I Love Micro Four-Thirds
Robert Noble, in a comment to Why I Love Micro Four-Thirds
British Journal of Photography, Olympus: there’s more to come
Robert Capps in Wired, The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine
Mike Masnick, It’s Not The ‘Good Enough’ Revolution; It’s Recognizing What The Consumer Really Wants
John Hagel, Defining the Big Shift
Me, “The best camera is the one that’s with you”
Roger Suppona, The Sigma DP2, a second opinion
Mike Johnston, ‘DMD’: The Digital Camera I’d Like to Own
Sam Bloomberg-Rissman, Conversations around the globe

“Fauxtokina”, a period of time full of product announcements from camera manufacturers, filling the gap in-between Photokina‘s every-other-year schedule. ↩︎
No, I could not find a reasonable data point to support this, and would love for a bit of help in finding some data about sales by manufacturer and format. But as a proxy, check out the popular cameras on Flickr, or just note how many more people you’ve seen with DSLRs around their necks and in their hands. ↩︎

The Tuttle Club

2009-09-22T00:00:00Z

I was introduced to The Tuttle Club by Alan Patrick at SXSW. Noting my love for meeting interesting people in my travels, Alan invited me to drop by next time I was in London.

So when I started my little jaunt, checking out Tuttle was one of the first items on my agenda in London.

The first person I met at my first Tuttle when I walked up to the outdoor patio at Inn at the Park was Lloyd Davis (@lloyddavis). Only now do I realize how lucky I was.

##What is Tuttle?
To quote Lloyd from the Tuttle Club Annual Report 2009:

** What is it? **
The Tuttle Club is a loose association of people finding a way of working better together both online and off-

** Who goes? **
Most people have an interest in social media or online social networking – beyond that it’s hard to categorise them.

** What happens? **
People come along, meet new people, drink coffee, talk, scheme, build new businesses, find clients, suppliers and collaborators. In short, they work hard at getting things done while having fun.

** Why? **
Is a very interesting question. There are (at least) as many reasons as there are Tuttlers. Mostly it boils down to a recognition that building rich relationships with real live people is a tremendously valuable activity.

** How can I help? **
Come along. See what we’re doing. Share your knowledge and your dreams. Come again and bring some friends.

** Can I come? **
Yes.

Tuttle: “still a prototype for something else”

Last week at TEDxTuttle Lloyd shared some of his experiences from Tuttle over the last years. As Alan recapped:

Lloyd looked at his experience of curating the Tuttle club over the last 3 years. Its main claim to fame is it is still growing in size and capability after this time and has yet to be perverted from its (lack of) specific purpose. As he points out, its major claim to fame is that it is an open club (it’s fervently open to anybody, but it’s not for everybody). Some key points were:

It’s like running a Kid’s Birthday party – “nudge” aberrant behaviours early rather than be draconian later.

Someone has to shoulder the risk – I’m here, I’m doing this – and give others the confidence its happening.

Tuttle spends nothing on promotion, etc – the best way to do this is to do cool stuff and then talk about it.

Tuttle uses Twitter heavily, it’s ideally architected for the Tuttle dynamic – but its mainly a way for people to talk face to face. However, the online/offline conversation means that you interact with the real person.

“I know more about people, but not in a creepy way, because I see them every week.” That leads to more opportunity for serendipitous meeting and connection, as we get to know and trust people.

I’ll add a couple more points from Lloyd and Alan that I wanted to highlight:

Diversity and inclusion. Everybody is welcome, and the people that come to Tuttle is a mighty diverse group of people; at the same time note that Tuttle isn’t an attempt to create something that is for everybody, but something that is instead open to anybody.

Distributing power. People come up with various ideas for Tuttle: “we could do something else” with Tuttle, to which the answer is invariably “so go and do it”. Meaning, give away power, and it comes back (often in “bizarre, strange ways”).

Rich connections. The simple way Tuttle people get together means that people are getting to know each other in a way not usual for a business network. The richness of the connections that comes through the culture of Tuttle is the strongest and most appealing part of the group to me.

Complementing online social networking. Tuttle fills the hole in online social networking, by actually getting people to talk to people face-to-face. People often say online social media takes you away from real interactions: thus, “that’s why we do Tuttle.” (I’ll simply say I’ve started (and continued later) some of the most fascinating conversations with people at Tuttle; thank you to many, many people for listening, sharing and rebutting.)

Tuttle is “still a prototype for something else”. Tuttle is simple: talk, do stuff, learn, teach each other, work together. The regular, “same time, same place” ritual of Friday mornings was created as a prototype, not an end in itself, and it will continue until … well, until it ends. Tuttle has created some positive accomplishments (detailed in the annual report and on the Tuttle blog), and over time Tuttle will create more opportunities for interesting, useful and awesome things (a Brit wouldn’t say “awesome”, but I’m American, so I will).

Tuttle is a social space for creating, a space for doing and for learning from each other through doing. Is Tuttle creating the right balance between serendipity and efficiency? Who knows: but since people continue to come back, and the numbers continue to grow, something must be right.

What will it be in the future? Lloyd doesn’t know, Tuttle doesn’t know, but that’s not important. But when the time comes, it will happen.

A bit of play, a bit of snark, a bit of improvisation; a self-assured, authentic, “fragile and beautiful” collection of people and experiences that may be far, far stronger than we think, due to the simple power of Tuttle’s lack of a plan, ego or intent.

Of maybe not. But as far as Tuttle is concerned, it doesn’t matter. Tuttle is what it is, until it isn’t, and then it will be that. Simply “be here now”, every Friday, 10 AM at the ICA in London.

I’ll miss it when I leave this Sunday.

(Or maybe, just maybe, I can take a bit of Tuttle with me on my travels. We’ll see.)

The smooth subversion of air travel

2009-09-30T00:00:00Z

Alain de Botton, in A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary, after discussing the brutality of airport car parks and their unforgiving fluorescent lights,

We may ask of our destinations, ‘Help me to feel more generous, less afraid, always curious. Put a gap between me and my confusion; the whole of the Atlantic between me and my shame.’ Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

Also, on the impact of air travel on the meaning of journeys:

Whatever the benefits of prolific and convenient air travel, we may curse it for its smooth subversion of our attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives.

The Passing of the Polymath

2009-10-05T00:00:00Z

Edward Carr in Intelligent Life Magazine, The Last Days of the Polymath:

Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into two types. Foxes, he wrote, know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used to roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule.

Foxes, otherwise known as polymaths, individuals “whose expertise fills a significant number of subject areas”, were once admired and beloved for their breadth of knowledge and ability to contribute across disparate fields. The terms Renaissance Man, Universal Genius and generalist all spring from the same idea, with slight differences in meaning deriving from their relative breadth, depth and level of impact across fields.

But today, the term polymath carries a more ironic meaning as a dabbler or a “jack of all trades, master of none”.

What happened?

As society’s overall level of intellectual knowledge has risen and become more dispersed, dominating multiple fields has become more difficult for the individual, re-affirming the value of specialization and forcing potential polymaths to focus their efforts on single areas. The market economy provides the feedback loop (money and more money) that incents us to specialize.

As Carr points out in his essay, even if it’s easier today to learn about and educate oneself about a wider variety of subjects, it’s harder to do something with that knowledge; dabbling across fields is easier, but achieving in multiple areas is far, far harder.

The danger? Carr’s finest point:

Polymaths were the product of a particular time, when great learning was a mark of distinction and few people had money and leisure. Their moment has passed, like great houses or the horse-drawn carriage. The world may well be a better place for the specialisation that has come along instead. The pity is that progress has to come at a price. Civilisation has put up fences that people can no longer leap across; a certain type of mind is worth less. The choices modern life imposes are duller, more cramped.

The question is whether their loss has affected the course of human thought.

Yesterday’s polymaths have been supplanted by the crowd.

But even as I sentimentally decry the loss of the polymath, I’ll admit that overall it’s a good thing for society.

No longer must we rely on the knowledge from a single polymath to bridge fields and disciplines: it’s now easier, cheaper, faster and simply better strategy to tap into experts from different fields.

We all know crowds aren’t always wise; groupthink and death by committee are all-too-familiar examples of crowds gone wrong. But instead of disproving the power of the crowd, to me it merely indicates how much there is to learn about how to tap into the right people, nurture the right communities and create the right incentives, markets and networks for collaboration and co-creation.

Perhaps we need a polymath to nudge us down the right path :)

—

Note: Prior thought not cited but relevant: Haque, Hagel, edges and cores, Coase, theory of the firm and transaction costs.

Related: Previously posted on tumblr, contained in a post by Andrew Chen about building a team for seed stage startups, Andrew makes a note about doers and philosophers (monomaths and polymaths, perhaps), with the solid advice: get doers.

Making Myself Uncomfortable (A Zombie's Journey)

2009-11-03T00:00:00Z

At TribeCon 2009 in New Orleans last week I got to participate in a panel discussion about how to embrace making yourself uncomfortable for personal and professional growth.

Little did I know I would get to put the idea to use just a couple days later.

—

When I originally planned out my travel schedule for this fall, I booked my flight from New Orleans to San Francisco on the only reasonably-priced flight I could find, a 7 AM departure on the Sunday morning after Halloween. As I booked the ticket, I knew very well that I was also planning on either spending the night at the airport or going straight to the airport from a rollicking good time.

What I hadn’t planned on:

Having the best Halloween of my life,
Having a great time at Voodoo Music Experience with great guides and partners-in-adventure,
Getting my face painted as a Zombie at the music festival,
Taking a 5 AM challenge to keep the face paint on during my flight from New Orleans to Houston to San Francisco that morning.

But that’s why it was so fun, freeing and powerful.

First off, an important point: I’m an unquestioned introvert, and I’m not an exhibitionist. I’ve never liked Halloween; I’ve always loved to see the creativity and costumes, but I’ve never wanted to participate. I’ve skipped many Halloween parties, and taken a general pass on the holiday throughout my life. I can’t remember a single good costume I’ve worn over the years. I was a face-paint virgin.

But, when friends Sloane and Kyle jumped right in to get their faces painted as zombies at the festival, despite a bit of reluctance, it seemed like a good opportunity to try something new.

Without feeling physically different, I initially felt emotionally different, a little self-conscious, even if everyone else was doing it. I showed pictures from my camera of what I looked like without the face paint. But the feeling faded, and as the night continued at the festival and deeper into the New Orleans nightlife, I forgot about it.

And thus, helped by a little liquid courage, when Kyle and Sloane offered to drive me to the airport at 5 AM to catch my flight, on the condition that I kept the zombie face paint on for my flights to Houston and San Francisco that morning, it wasn’t even a decision. Of course I would.

Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, New Orleans, LA

Would you let a friend board a plane looking like this?

Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, New Orleans, LA

Waiting to go through security, worried a little bit about whether security will let me through without taking off the face paint, an unfounded concern as it turned out.