I’m absorbing a panel at the excellent Defrag conference in Denver, and thanks to the best wifi I’ve ever actually had at a conference, combined with an audience of some of most socially wired people around, finding myself exercising a learning paradigm that I’ve often experienced but rarely been able to enjoy to this degree.

In the last two sessions, I’ve looked up the company websites and blogs of several speakers, subscribed to multiple RSS feeds from people I’ve met here, added several people to my social networks, posted a question to the room via twitter, joined a Facebook group (no you can’t join) on a thread of interest created at the conference, posted a clever comment on the wall there, and discovered and followed a twitter account set up to comment the conference. After posting this, I might even link to it there.

What’s interesting to me about this is that I don’t usually do orthogonal multi-tasking well — and I don’t usually take kindly to people opening up laptops in my meetings either. But this has had the opposite effect, enhancing my experience of listening and thinking about things that are being said, rather than distracting from it. I’ve stayed completely off of email and IM and outside distractions (despite having facebook and twitter tabs open).

So it’s sort of like an IRC backchannel - only I get to decide who’s in it and how I want to flavor the experience in terms of tools. Come to think of it, I haven’t used any of the three quasi-official collaboration tools offered through the conference organizers, which validates (for me) two key themes of this show so far — that open standards and identities are going to continue to enable users to drive increasingly customized and personal experiences around idea sharing and group collaboration, and that there’s plenty more to do in the group / enterprise collaboration space.

There’s probably something interesting that could be done to enable the exchange of identities - something like what Chris Pirillo does for Gnomedex with OPML, only less “all or none”.

Defrag, and the people attending it, are changing the way I listen. How do you listen?

There’s nothing like travel to take your head out of everyday life and get you thinking about things. Amy and I headed east last weekend for some much-needed R&R in Vermont, and through some coincidence of the normal seasons and global warming, we were treated to a perfect combination of fall leaves and late-summer weather.

More ridiculously idyllic pix will eventually get posted to Flickr, but a few highlights include:

• walking and driving the back roads around Brattleboro and towns around it like Newfane, Grafton, and Jamaica, watching leaves drift off the trees and flutter
• visiting a graveyard with a stone turnstyle
• stopping at an apple farm that grows ~70 varieties of heirloom apples on the premises — some of the best damned apples you’ve ever tasted
• local cheddar cheese and beer — ditto, and ditto

Best of all, we spent much of the time hanging out with friends Tom and Cathy and their two children, who live on 18 acres with a beaver pond, can’t hear traffic from their yard, and have a box of African percussion instruments and a tree-house with a pirate flag instead of a TV.

Tom (a journalist) and I were also trading book recommendations, and I walked away with his copy of Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben — which I devoured on the plane ride home and can’t recommend highly enough. It’s about the notion that our dependence on energy subsidizes a more hidden dependency on cheap shipping and mass production, and what that does to our food chain and our communities. Because it’s cheaper to produce lettuce AND ship it a thousand miles than it is to produce it on a local farm (at least until the price of oil doubles), the price at the cash register tips the balance in favor of WalMart and WalMart-like superindustries in our food chain. And much is lost in the process — including, in many places, any semblance of an ability to be self-sustaining.

Seriously, if you care about community, local economies, or what you eat, read this book. I’m not saying I agree with everything in it (and particularly I don’t think he’s found the right proscriptive angles yet), but it certainly makes a provocative book-end next to, say, Thomas Friedman.

As I was processing all this, replaying the tape of seeing Dr. Yunus’s talk last week, and after I came home to read about having passed “peak water” in the west, I came to a decision that some things must change for me. Among other things, I’m going to be thinking a lot more about how to get serious about harnessing the web (and Yahoo!) for social purposes.

Yesterday, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient and founder of Grameen Bank, spoke at Yahoo!. I was lucky enough to stake out a good seat, and was very glad I did.

There’s nothing quite like hearing from a guy who has taken hundreds of thousands of beggars out of poverty and millions of humans out of abusive, village-scale loan-sharking situations to remind you what “scalable social solutions” could really accomplish if we put some effort into it. Starting with a $27 loan to 42 women in one village, his bank has to date issued over $6.3B in loans to over 7.4 million borrowers — a veritable tidal wave of tiny payments that has changed government policies and built new infrastructure (e.g., the largest mobile phone company in the country).

In web2.0, we talk about agile development, iteration, delighting users, getting things done, and what functionality to take away to make an API more elegant. In Bangladesh, a family is considered to be moved out of poverty only if it meets 10 criteria along the lines of “all family members sleep on a bed”, and “family uses sanitary latrine”.

Anyone else wanna get stuff done and delight some users? Via Kiva.org, I just lent $25 to Margaret Namyalo, a restaurant owner in Uganda who takes care of 3 orphaned children on top of her own 3. (As of this posting, she still needs some more funds.) I also just added a payroll deduction to the Yahoo! Employee Foundation, which will be matched by our founders and distributed via employee-initiated grants to worthy organizations.

But that’s just doing my bit as an individual contributor in other people’s systems. What I’m really thinking about is how to build more systems that change The System. And how we might be able to leverage and/or hack Yahoo!’s global platform to do that.
I also feel very good about my choice to skip the latest overpriced confab. There are more important things to do. Like rethinking what innovation, incubation, and platforms – three words I rarely fail to use in a day — can really mean.

Thanks to Volkswagen of America, the VW sitting in front of my house — my fourth — is sure to be my last. Not only that, I’m blogging and posting on Satisfaction about my negative experience. (You can read the full details there if you want, but the nutshell is my transmission blew up just barely out of warranty, VWoA accepted my request for help with the matter, and promptly declined it without explanation.)

The point isn’t that my transmission blew up; transmissions blow up. The point is not even that they have a proprietary part that seems to be known by mechanics to be extremely sensitive, want more than half the trade-in value of the car to replace it, and abjectly refuse to stand behind their product.

A little history: the first car I can remember my family owning when I was a child was a rust orange ‘71 squareback that my dad used to commute 80 miles in daily. I’ve owned two Jettas, and currently own two vw’s — the dead Jetta in question and a ‘71 karmann ghia convertible that I love driving (when it’s not raining or too hot or too cold) and proudly tune and troubleshoot myself. I have aftermarket vw parts and replicas catalogs coming to my house, occasionally go to vw-centric swap meets and online classifieds, have been invited to join VW clubs and rallies, and once even entered an air-cooled vw car show (2nd row, middle).

As I’ve said before, the Bug was a true platform. And trust me, I’m far from a true enthusiast compared to many of these folks - these things have just sort of happened as a by-product of owning a vintage car.

So what happens when I call VWoA with this problem? After I make a point of sharing my history and noting that a transmission failure inside of 75,000 miles is unacceptable to the point that I wouldn’t buy another VW if they didn’t help me, they decline to help me.

What amazes me most, though, is that they do so without offering me anything - not even a favorable trade-in or modest incentive on an upsell to a new car (which I would have been very likely to go for under the circumstances).

When I tell my mechanic about my experience with VWoA, he just laughs. Then he shows me the cease-and-desist letter VWoA sent him, because he had the letters “VW” in the name of his business (as in, “____’s VW Repair”). He tells me how he had to buy all new letterhead, new signage, etc., under threat of lawsuit, and that they even tried to collect a settlement from him for the business he had done in alleged violation of their trademark. He tells me everybody knows how poorly they treat their community of fans and customers, and how all the independent mechanics he knows consider them the enemy.

Thinking back on my experiences and visits to the swap meets, I notice I can’t recall any official VW presence there. A quick search shows plenty of examples of C&D’s chilling the community. Unbelievably, they sent one to a rec.autos.makers.vw.aircooled moderator. There’s even an official statement about it, noting that they’ve successfully pursued actions purusant to, among other things, domain names with the letters “vw” in them, such as “anyvwpart.com”.

I do understand trademark protection (setting aside the dubiousness of some of these claims). I also appreciate that random extensions of warranties cost real operating dollars. But what VW just doesn’t seem to get is the opportunity they’re missing to embrace, rather than alienate, their enthusiast community. There’s so much more they could be doing to put their fans to work for them.

Where are the community moderators? Where are the mechanic’s reps? Insiders blogs and message boards, official leaks to influencers, loyalty discounts? How long will it take for vw to discover and claim their brand on Satisfaction? By contrast, another german car manufacturer seems to know how to nurture its life-long fans - and actually use the internet.

In the meantime, I’ll be shopping for a car from another manufacturer. If anyone can recommend a modern car that behaves just a bit more like a supported platform and ecosystem, I’m all ears.

This was written mostly on the plane back from Mexico City, during which I was reading The World is Flat and using it as a lens to reflect on all I had just experienced, but I wanted to wait until I got at least some of my Flickr pix up before posting.

On the one hand, this city has neighborhoods like Condesa, which is as close to Paris as I’ve experienced in norteamerica, with an urban fabric and economic texture that keeps neighborhoods teeming with the kinds of activities that would have made Jane Jacobs proud – cafes of all national flavors, streetcorner taco stands, shoeshine men, political grafitti, hole-in-the-wall farmacias¸ cab drivers who remember where your house is . . . and more recent additions like tapas bars, hipster hotels, and slick yoga joints. While wandering around, it was hard not to joke that it was the Silverlake of the DF – and even to make specific correlations between establishments in both bohemian outposts. But after consideration I think it compares pretty favorably. Beyond that particular colonia (district), Mexico City is enriched with grand colonial cathedrals and civic architecture, great public parks, dozens of museums featuring international class art, architecture, and archeology, a rich, poly-colonial history, fantastic street life, Aztec architecture, and phenomenal food.

On the other hand, the same shoeshine men have chairs sponsored by Fortune 1000 multinational companies, people buy their sushi at the Superama, and the whole neighborhood is ringed by more nakedly commercial streets with big-box retailers where actual middle-class residents of the city presumably buy their unmentionables. While we didn’t look closely at home prices and rents, it is clear they are going up (a subsequent peek at Craigslist Mexico City confirms this), and the inevitable gentrification is not just making life pleasant for the flaneur, but also showing the back of its hand to longtime residents and via omnipresent rehab sites, swarming laborers, and new construction signs featuring words like “LOFT” – just as it has in Silverlake, Park Slope, Williamsburg, Capital Hill DC, and so many other neighborhoods around the U.S.

It’s the “swarming laborer” part that is one of the most intriguing – and concerning – aspects of the city. Everywhere we went there were domestic workers, and based on the hourly wages implied by the cost of street services from taxis and tacos, there is clearly no shortage of available employees for any given would-be jefe. This makes life great for the tourist – even those who pay the substantial markups these services go for when procured by the international hotels (something we mostly managed to avoid). As when I went to Africa, there seems to be significant human capital here, in a well-enough organized economy, with plenty of opportunity to add to local services or bring new ideas into play. The entrepreneur in me thinks this would be a great place to start a business. . . . many businesses.

But I can’t help thinking Mexico City is an also unwittingly soft target for modern business practices and international ideas. Primitive mural advertising will inevitably give way to conglomerate controlled outdoor media, and the local authorities will fall into line to police this. At some point, it will become intolerable to find prescription medications in suspicious packaging for half off at the corner store. As international entrepreneurs arrive, the shoeshine men will soon follow this Giuliani effect. The big boxes will be the only place “real” people can afford to shop. Eventually, only the rich will be able to afford the good neighborhoods, and – just as in Paris – the middle-class will follow the working-class and the shiftless to the perimeters. Also as for Paris, this will work wonders to attract tourism, given a sub-four-hour flight from LA and a Euro that’s crushing the dollar. (The reason for my trip was a wedding between a New York-based part hindu, part west Indian, Spanish-speaking investment banker and his native wife, and was attended by a veritable united nations of international guests.)

If the bureaucrats typical of state tourism industries realize their dreams, this will become a self-perpetuating cycle. Bringing the cost of real estate up to the point that only the Starbucks’ and McDonalds’ of the world (who are already arriving) can buy their way in.

OK, so this prognostication is undoubtedly an oversimplification. This is, after all, a city whose municipal plumbing leaks 37% of the water that passes through it even as it depletes the aquifer that supports it. It’s hard to imagine any single, monolithic effects from progress (other than the city exceeding its own ability to supply its citizens with essential resources and process its pollution and trash, much as its ancient forbears did). A venture outside the elite neighborhoods brings the unavoidable sight of windowless cinder-block shanties topped by standard-issue PVC water tanks and unfinished rebar sprawling toward the horizons.

(I have to interrupt this parenthetically to note that, as I wrote this, the post-roll from the in-flight screening of Shrek II is currently alternating between images of the ruins & pyramids of Techuatenoc, India’s Taj Mahal, and a man so jowly and well-groomed, I could only assume he was a minister of tourism – a thought seconds later confirmed by a graphic.)

My point, to wrap it up, is that the human capital in Mexico City, fertile though it may be, is no match for China or India, who are turning out hundreds of thousands of engineers a year and steadily building on their various technology platforms, as well as the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to support them. Forget about orchestrated modern education; this beautiful city can barely keep its lights on. And in this, it strikes me as similar to many countries around the world that will either have to learn to compete with modern economies, become tourism meccas, continue to mine their natural resources until they are depleted, or find some other means to thrive (art?). I suspect Mexico will fall back mainly to tourism — ironically enough banking on the U.S.’s failure to preserve its own wildlands and urban fabric.

I have high hopes for Mexico City and hope that many great chefs and service entrepreneurs will cut their teeth here and make things great for residents, visitors, and expats alike. I know Amy and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, if unexpectedly, and certainly plan to return. It is hard to imagine, though, in the long run, that these things will outweigh the forces of globalization enough to last very long.

At the close of my sixth week of an empty inbox (barring a few spikes following a hard-drive crash), I don’t feel too irresponsible responding to Brad’s request to share my GTD setup with the world. I’d say at this point it’s working tolerably well but not at weapons grade, so I’d welcome any suggested tweaks.

Let me start off by noting that the primary constraints around which I have to work are an office email system that’s on Exchange, with Outlook on pc as the supported platform and mail client. Exchange has the benefit of pushing to the supported blackberries too, but that particular combination comes with some unique issues, particularly if you have a limit on server space and have to push archives offline (as I do).

So, in outlook, I’m using the GTD Outlook plugin from Netcentrics. It’s $70, but well worth it imho, and they’ve let me upgrade and had decent support on a couple of re-installs, so I’m happy. (There’s a free trial offer if you want to see for yourself.) Sorry, Mac people, it’s PC only - but I don’t think you really need it anyway.

In GTD, every action has a “context” = where/when you might do it. Every action can also be part of a project. The idea is, at any given time, you can look at a project and see what needs to be done, or look at a context (e.g., “@ office”) and see what your top to-do’s are that you can actually do when in that location. The outlook plug-in uses Outlook’s native task categories to denote context, and its primary benefit is handling: it does things like let you send an email and delegate it to an @Waiting For category at the same time. It also lets you easily add both context and project to a single item (something not easily accomplished in native outlook, and my primary issue with it). Finally, it lets you associate an action with an email and then store them in separate places, which is very helpful except when you lose them.

For me, simplicity is the key to the actions / contexts setup. You need your to-do list to be a dashboard you can really take in at a glance during your day, without sorting through 15 categories of things you should be considering doing. The first time I implemented this (over a year and a half ago), I had way too many contexts, and I spent just as much time looking over all my contexts for the relevant ones as I saved by having them be so precise. Now, my key action contexts are @Yahoo office, @Yahoo calls, @Calls on the Go, @Home, @Waiting For, @Agendas, @Errands, @Lists, and @Someday. That’s it.

I try really hard to park any to-do in one of those areas - and I also try really hard not to let any given category stack up with more than a dozen or two items at the outside. You can’t really have that many priority items anyway, so everything else is something you should try to do, delete, or dump into low priority bins. For a handful of absolutely-must-do-TODAY items, I use the high-priority flag. Once in a while, I add a new context, but only if I’ve thought it through.

If you’re new to GTD, the power of the @Waiting For category is not to be underestimated, and it works really well in this setup. If you’re working out of your inbox as your todo list, there are probably dozens of emails you can’t really do anything about that are just sitting there until you can. Maybe an invitation to a conference you don’t know if you’ll be able to go to yet - simple, park it in @Waiting For and title the action something appropriate (”conference budget approval”). Or park it in your calendar as something you’ll decide after a fixed time. Either way, it’s gone from the inbox and the list of things you scan all day long when you’re looking for actionable items. I have a lot of stuff in that list, and it’s much easier to review it a couple of times a week than to look at constantly.

The other power of @Waiting For is you remember to follow up on stuff. I can’t tell you how many times a week I shoot an email off to someone at Yahoo! and wait to hear a response. This is particularly true when it’s one of those situations where you’re helping someone from outside the company get intro’d internally. It’s very easy to trust karma, delete the original email, and forget all about it - but if you park it in @Waiting For and, on review, notice it’s still there, you can follow up. People are amazed sometimes when I chase down little items like that repeatedly, and you win a lot of credibility taking care of things you’ve been entrusted to in this really simple way.

So those contexts form the basis of my todo list, and since tasks sync to blackberry and you can filter task display on the handheld by category, i can pull up a list of “Calls on the Go” when I’m in my car or “Errands” when I’m at the grocery store. On the input side, I can easily add a new task I think of when I’m on the move or in a meeting - i usually just leave it uncategorized and file whatever’s new the next time I check in from the PC. I also sometimes use downtime to scan @Waiting For to delete items that are no longer open. (If I’m not surfing m.twitter.com.)

The @Agendas category is also powerful. You create an item for each standing meeting you have or each key person on your team, and in the notes field for that item list keep a running list of things you need to remember to talk to someone about but for which you don’t need or want to send a one-off email.  And, of course, it’s all right there in your handheld when you’re having a meeting.
I do take the time to group some tasks into projects, but only certain kinds. For example, Hiring. By doing this, I can pull up the project Hiring and see all the open (and closed) items having to do with candidates in one view. I don’t currently bother categorizing calendar meetings this way, but I think you could.

Filing reference emails is also key - I have a handful of folders that I keep in an outlook .pst file that’s local (not live on the server), and I drop most stuff post-handling into those. They mostly correspond with particular areas of my work responsibility and the major projects within them. Again, the fewer the better, because I frequently have to dig into them to find stuff. I have on general one for “chron”, where I put one-off stuff I want to keep, two general ones for admin (one for sysadmin stuff like password emails) and one for G&A/HR-type office stuff. I also keep a folder called @shortref in my server-synced files so that I can drop, say, the itinerary of my upcoming trip into there and view it from desktop or palmtop. One downside of this is that I can’t access the archives from palmtop or from another computer, and I have to make sure they’re frequently backed up. But since .pst files were not meant to be accessed over LAN/WAN and have a tendency to hang or corrupt when you try, it’s the best I’ve come up with in the absence of an admin assistant.

One problematic element of being in a high-email-volume environment is threaded conversations and ilists. Again, I try to delete or file these quickly once I’ve extracted any actionable elements from them. If i get a long email I’d like to read, I drop it into an @Computer task and mark it low priority.

Finally, I use the Plaxo outlook plugin, which syncs all of my contacts (thus far seamlessly) between my home and work pc’s. You can configure which things you want to sync, and I also sync my tasks and calendar to the web. I’m going to experiment with installing a 2nd copy of the GTD plug-in on my home pc Outlook client (buying the license gives you up to 2 pc’s) and see if that will work too. But web has been fine so far.

Oh, one more thing. I actually lied about having an empty inbox. There’s one email that’s been in there for a month now. It’s red-flagged and marked urgent, and it’s from me to me. The subject line is “GET OUT OF YOUR INBOX”. It’s the only one that I don’t mind seeing repeatedly when I’m in there.

I had an interesting experience yesterday when my company laptop bricked up on the way into the office. I went immediately to blackberry not just to scan my email (which I usually do when I’m not at a desk), but also for everything else. And by “everything else” I mean scheduling meetings, viewing and commenting on powerpoints, looking things up on the web,and (now) even writing this blog post.

while I missed the pc for a few things that are more efficient with that form factor (multiwindow activities, typing fast, mousing) and I have a few mail server folders to optimize for getting stuff out of my inbox once processed a la GTD, overall I’m pretty pleased by how well synced up the RIM curve let’s me be.

I found myself caught with nothing to read and no laptop juice yesterday afternoon during an airport delay.  After getting bored with Twittering and Facebooking from my Curve, I went in search of a book.

It never ceases to amaze me how much vapidity is for sale in airport newsstands, but (insider tip) SJC has something that passes for a bookstore way down at the end near A10, and, choosing among slim pickings, I came up with a copy of The World is Flat, which I’ve heard much of, had never read, and seems to be in release 3.0.

So far, the thesis is interestingly woven if unsurprising. But it’s the little details that scare me — Indian citizens referring to getting good jobs “at a multinational”, and then attending “accent neutralization class” to learn how to articulate their t’s poorly in order to sound less alien to americans.

Here’s another choice passage:

When you look around at 24/7’s call center, you see that all the computers are running Microsoft Windows. The chips are designed by Intel. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke.

It’s probably just a coincidence, but I finished reading Oryx & Crake a few nights ago, and every news item I’ve since seems eerily in line. It’s a provocative book, worth reading — and just for laughs I’ve posted my review over on GoodReads.com.

Details on Bug Labs are starting to emerge (see posts by investors Brad Feld and Fred Wilson).

I’m excited about this and think tremendous potential will be unlocked as data and content are increasingly mixable with device functionality. I’ve alluded to this before in terms of user utility, but I’m not just thinking about fun gadgets and 30-boxes-enabled dog bowls. Think devices that will change the world for the handicapped, for example.

Wireless rabbits and squeezy widget viewers are only the beginning; the internet of things is coming. True open-platform potential ups the ante in a very interesting way. Good luck guys!