I am Jon Morgan | December 2011

8/3/2019 I am Jon Morgan | December 2011

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I am Jon MorganDecember 2011

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Technology

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Don't Be Like Marney

I came across a letter on Awkward Photos that made the rounds a few years ago as an emailforward. Its written by someone who is hosting a holiday dinner (I think its Thanksgiving) andcommunicating with the attendees about what they need to bring.

The letter kind of goes off the tracks when Marney begins to assign dishes to specificmembers of the family and describes exactly how the food should be prepared, down to theingredients and even the way that they are served. You can read the scanned version of theletter here.

After reading the letter, I started to think a little more about what was going on behind thescenes, inside Marneys head, and inside the heads of the other family members who wouldhave recieved this (supposedly real) letter.

Marney, apparently, has a vision for how she wants her dinner to go and how the food shouldtaste. She knows that even though she is able to make every dish shed like to serve duringdinner, its just not practical for her to do so. Maybe shes limited on time, or it would be too

expensive.

So, she is enlisting the help of her relatives. But, this is where she has gotten things a littlewrong. She is letting go of the process of preparing food, but she has not given up ownership ofthe food. She is adhering too closely to her original vision for what she wants the dinner to be.Its her show.

If she understood human behavior, or at least the personalities of her relatives, she wouldunderstand that dinner needs to be a collaborative process. Sure, Marney should be the oneto decide how many pies they will need or maybe even who should make the stuffing, but therest should be left up to the person doing the cooking. There is some risk in doing this becauseyou are actually blending different cooking styles and skills together, and you might end up

with some suprising results. But, everyone benefits because they are contributing equally, andMarney is able to focus on her other duties as a host.

What Marney needs to do is to recognize that as the host she will have control over the keyaspects of her party, but not over everything. If instead of telling someone This is what youneed to bring, and how you need to prepare it, she said, You make the best pies. Would youmind baking two? things would go a lot more smoothly.

Companies are sometimes lead by managers who carry around such a locked vision in theirhead that they are not willing to allow others to fully contribute. They micro manage the detailsso precisely that they start to sound like Marney in the letter about dinner. This is what willhappen, and here is how it should look or act. Then, much like Marney, they might wonder whythey didnt get the results that they were hoping for.

Websites are the trickiest to micro manage because, much like a Thanksgiving feast, webprojects are dependent on so many different disciplines and types of expertise. It is alsointerpretive and subject to change based on what works, what doesnt, or what users need.

The best thing for a Marney-like manager to do is to sit back and ask themselves, What is myobjective? If their objective is to produce a website exactly the way that they envisioned it,then their next step should be to careful defined exactly what they want, how they are goingto do user or market testing, and what roles other project members will play in the proces of

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development. But, they might find that it will be a struggle to maintain their vision with so othercompeting factors such as usability, limitations, etc.

A better approach would be to define what you want the website to accomplish. Typically thismight be to change lives, make a task more convenient, etc. When you focus on an objectivelike this, you will find that the project will be easier to manage. When team members are allowed

to contribute equally, the results are much sweeter.

Marney seemed to forget, for example, that the purpose of bringing everybody together forThanksgiving was to be able to see family. Once everyone is talking and enjoying each othercompany, they wont really care about how the food was presented. When relatives preparedfood for Marney, they were doing it for three reasons: to help her out, out of a love for cooking,or because they looked forward to spending time with family.

Things were guaranteed to go badly when she made the meal all about her.

I experienced my own, Marney-like feelings when I worked on a student-run comedy skit showin college called Aardvark. Although I ended up operating cameras and acting, my originalgoal was to write scripts for the skits. Wrote the scripts with pride, carefully describing what I

wanted the actors to do or say.

I would bring copies of my scripts to a taping, distribute them to the cast, and then watchedwith dissappointment as they adlibbed lines or didnt follow the directions I had included on thepages.

I felt very protective of my work at first. I could have stepped in and pointed out their mistakes.But, as I thought about it I realized that my skits were actually getting better when the actorswere able to add in their own interpretations. The shows were very much a collaborative effort,and while my ideas and scripts were an important part they were best used as a starting point.

Looking back at my situation with my non-Marney point of view, I see that it really helped me toremember that everybody had come together to produce a comedy skit show, not to read Jonsscripts verbatium and do everything that he said.

If you want to see the consequences of not allowing collaboration in your project, just look at thecomments which follow the letter from Marney. These arent relatives, but they sympathize withanybody who would have recieved the letter. Some say that they have relatives who actuallybehave or sound like Marney. When it comes to dinner or projects, nobody likes to be micro-managed.

And, Im arguing that there is a middle ground where managers can allow their visions toevolve without giving them up completely. During the production of Aardvark, everybodysacting stayed true to the spirit of my scripts even if they didnt follow every letter. Given enoughdirection and space, a project team can take their assignment and run with it.

So, my message today is Dont be like Marney. Define what you need from your web projectahead of time, and then approach your web team with questions. Leave room in your visionfor the teams ideas. Be your customers advocate, not purely your own. Stay focussed on theobjectives.

Think of your companys business objectives as the main course, and collaboration with yourteam as the dessert. And, during any meal its important to leave room for dessert.

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On the Web, what goes up must come down (Eventually)

In the world of web design, were always putting stuff up. We ask, Is that article up? or Didyou upload that photo? or Did you post up that blog?

We are so focussed on getting everything up, up, up onto the web, that I think its too easy tosometimes remember that the stuff we share via a website needs to eventually come backdown.

This doesnt mean we need to remove the stuff, but maybe it should go away or get replacedafter a while. This would help keep content looking fresh on a website.

There are some kinds of content that just cries to be taken down. Like, when we put a holidaygreeting and suddenly its January. We take it down. But other types of information arent quiteso obvious. Like, a description about a service or a letter to readers. Sometimes we think that itsmore efficient to leave a letter to readers or description of a service up online than to be alwayschanging it. There are, after all, a steady stream of people who havent read seen them before.

When we launch astronauts into space, either as the crew of a space shuttle or the InternationalSpace Station, Im pretty sure that we always have a plan for bringing them back down to Earth.Ill also guess that it is (or was) common practice for NASA to stay in constant contact with thecrew during a mission.

We should treat our content in the same way. When it goes up, we should have a plan for takingit back down, or changing it at the very least. While its up, we should check in on it to see howits doing. This might mean sprucing up parts that might be growing stale, or looking at stats.Sudden irrelevance might cause us to scrub the mission, and bring the content down again.Hight traffic could mean leaving it up longer. Maybe even irrelevance is irrelevant, as long asvisitors are finding value in the content.

So, when youre launching a new page for your website, or writing a post for your blog, askyourself how you will manage the content, and when/how you are gonig to take it down.


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Do you know where your content is?

A year ago, I began working with my sister-in-law Susan who had started a page on Facebook

for her flower shop, and needed to move her business website to a different hosting platform. Ihad recommended starting a blog using WordPress free service.

As I worked with her, I discovered that the hardest part to getting her up to speed in socialmedia was helping her to manage all of her online assets. This included catalog entries, postedupdates, and business transactions.

At first, I tried using Fogbugz but it really didnt handle things the way we needed for socialmedia, plus it was too technical for Susan to work in.

At the same time, I was struggling with the same kinds of questions else where. At work, whereEduGuide was slowly ramping up a social media presence, and also at home where I wasworking out ways to distribute content across the Internet.

Things used to be easier back before the Internet because content could only come in oneof two different forms: draft or published. If it was a draft, it was still in-house, and then ofcourse when it was published, it had been published inside a newspaper or some other type ofpublication.

The review process for content has change drastically since the Internets growth in popularity,as well as the rise of the social media networks. It has become apparent to me that it isimportant these days to publish as quickly as you can. The review process is now handledpublicly via crowdsourcing. Changes are made on the fly, either to the original content, or ascomments, updates, etc.

The challenge of this new methodology is that it is much harder to track your content when it

has been shared or published in ten or twenty different places at the same time. Back beforenewspapers were digital, for example, editors probably werent always aware when Aunt Matildaclipped out one of their publications articles and mailed it to her son. But, today when this isdone the article is usually sent as a link. Not only is this trackable, but in the age of social mediait very much matters to editors how their content gets shared.

Ive discovered that content is easier to track if you begin tracking it from the very beginning:at some point during the editorial process. You write an article andboom, a record is startedwhere you can track the article throughout its lifespan. If you start a discussionboom, record itin the same database. Posted a photo? Same thing.

Correct me if Im wrong, but there doesnt seem to be a system which allows you to do this.

Sure, there are social media management services, or you could record this activity in adatabase or spreadsheet, but even these tools wouldnt be able to cover all of the angles whichcome with social media.

So, I built one.

My target publication is my blog at http://iamjonmorgan.wordpress.com . My assets are theblog posts I publish there. Most of my writing is done in Posterous and simul-casted to http://iamjonmorgan.posterous.com and http://iamjonmorgan.tumblr.com , but Ill explain why during a

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later blog post. And, for the purposes of this description I will focus on my WordPress blog.

When I write a blog post like the one that youre reading, Ill want to track comments andpage views. But, the same blog post will also be shared via Facebook and Twitter (thanks toPosterous autopost feature) and could potentially be shared via other networks like LinkedIn orGoogle+.

I originally planned to track my online assets inside FogBugz, but I found that it was a bitcumbersome and that when I flowed in every email I recieved from every profile it wasoverwhelming. I recently started to use a service called Tender to collect these same kinds ofemail messages. I can review items, delete them, add notes, or send them on to the next levelof review.

Lighthouse is a tool which acts and looks a lot like Basecamp but allows you to manage ticketsin a way thats similar to FogBugz. It is also made by the same company which developedTender, so the two tools integrate really well. My plan is to delete the items in Tender thatarent useable and attach the items to a Lighthouse ticket when I think that they can be usedin my blog or social network. I can associate more than one submission in Tender to a ticket inLighthouse, so if I see a lot of posts which are related to the same topic of, say, Thanksgiving,I can associate them all to the same ticket.

Right now Im the only one managing tickets in Lighthouse, but I plan to eventually include morepeople. Tickets can be responded to via comments, modified, tagged, and re-assigned to othermembers of the project. I plan on referring items to editors for review, authors for revisions, andproject members in other roles when the need arises.

A key advantage of this system that an item doesnt have to go all of the way through thisprocess before its pushed out to the web. If there is an upcoming event, for example, thenanybody who wants to post it on their Facebook profile or on one of the Facebook fan pages iswelcomed to do so. We would just want to make a note of it in Lighthouse so the post can betracked. But, for the most part an item would have been published on the Internet before being

recorded in Lighthouse.

Once an item is approved, it would be assigned to my Project Hover FogBugz account.This would allow us to close the item in Lighthouse, but use FogBugz to continue tracking itsprogress. Updates in Lighthouse would be notedeven if not postedin FogBugz.

If an item leaves Lighthouse it has been published on the web and revised. Im keeping it insidea flow because now I want it to be a part of some kind of compilation. This serves my ownpruposes, but perhaps this could be used to follow up on a news story, respond to readerscomments, or perhaps turn readers comments into a brand-new story of some kind.

FogBugz still isnt suited for tracking content, but it is still a good tool for recording activity orother types of information. It can also be integrated with a project management tool which I

discovered recently called Pivotal Tracker.

Pivotal Tracker displayes your list of projects in two to three columns. Youhave Current, Backlog, and Icebox. When you integrate it with FogBugz, you will also beable to open up a column where you can import FogBugz tickets. Once imported, your notes inPivotal Tracker are saved in FogBugz, and when you update a ticket in FogBugz, its associatedentry (or story) in Pivotal Tracker is updated.

My plan is to use Pivotal Tracker to track the remaining lifespan of a piece of content. Items can

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What is Storybag?

While I worked for Dow Chemicals Video Conference Help desk, I had a co-worker who Iwould sometimes talk to named Steve. One day, we got onto the subject of social media siteslike Facebook or MySpace. Steve said that these sites were a waste of time because there

wasnt any value to the information being posted. It was all information for the sake of sharinginformation without a defined purpose.

Ive thought a lot about that conversation over the year. Ive seen a lot of great things sharedover Facebook and Twitter, but I often wondered if there was some way to add a little morepurpose or meaning to social media.

The Experience Project comes the closet to being social media with a purpose. The whole siteis geared towards collecting members recollections of their life experiences. And, Ill admit thatthere are a lot of blogs that are written to serve a clearly defined purpose.

My search brought me down a path with key objectives. Define a purpose, recruit people, collectcontent through crowdsourcing, and then publish the results across different media. So, it

would be a project that was as clearly defined as the Experience Project, but broadly focussedlike Posterous. It would also need to be a community without borders, because I would wantto accept submissions from any of the popular networks. And, since there were no borders, Iwould need to be careful about the way in which the content is collected, and then store it in acentral location before publication.

As I thought about this side project, I looked at the tools that were out there. When I cameacross the website http://www.storytree.me/ , I was especially floored by the idea of being ableto share stories with friends and family. When you have a memory to share as a story, you canpost it with a photo and then invite other friends or family members to add to the story. Theposts are presented as squares which are arranged vertically along a tree.

As good as a tool as Story Tree was, it still seemed confining. For one, when you post insideStory Tree you are limiting yourself to their network and capabilities, where I wanted my projectto be open. And, their sharing capabilities werent very flexible. So, I could send out invitationsto friends via Facebook, but I couldnt import my posts into a blog.

So, Im going to start a project which is similar to Experience Project without being locked downto just one social network, will invite almost anybody to share a story about their life or memorysimilar to Story Tree, and which produces content that can be viewed either online or as acompiled publication.

Im going to call it Storybag, although if anybody has an idea for a better name Im open tosuggestions.

The goal of Storybag will simply be to compile stories into a format that is easy to share withan audience. Stories should mostly be nonfiction with a focus on writing about whats going onin your life now, or maybe a past experience that youd like to share. You can also write aboutsomething thats happening in your community or maybe in the news.

If you blog, you can submit your story to Storybag by simply sending me the URL for the blogpost and Ill make arrangements to grab a copy of your submission. If you are on Twitter orFacebook, we can talk about ways in which we could expand a post or series of posts into alonger submission, or maybe we would try publishing the threads as-is.

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If you are on the Internet but dont have a way to submit your story, you can write it as an emailand send it to me. There will also soon be a blog where you can submit your story as a blogpost.

Submissions will be reviewed, edited, and fine-tuned before they go live on the Storybagblog and other, related social media sites. Then, they will be shared as a part of a monthly

publication.

So, thats my general plan. Basically, it allows everyone to do what they normally do onFacebookshare news about their lives, exchange links to news stories, etc.but it offersthe opportunity to summarize what weve shared there and attach meaning. And when thathappens, Ill be able to prove that Steve was wrong.


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What is Project Hover?

During the last four years, Ive lived a double life. During the day, I was a mild-mannered WebServices Coordinator for a non-profit in Lansing called EduGuide. At night, in between my duties

as a father and human dish washer, I have been quietly working on a plan to make it easier toproduce, share, and curate content on the Internet. Which I guess means that I remained mild-mannered.

At first, my investigation into the flow of content was focussed around ways to easily convertcontent from one format to another. Back in the mid- to late 90s when I began working as aprofessional web designer, a lot of my time was devoted to putting things up onto the Internet.For example, real estate listings, newspaper articles, membership directories, and ads.Nowadays, these are all things that you would just expect to be accessible online, but back thenthe Internet was new, and it wasnt as easy to publish these kinds of materials on the Web.

So I thought a lot about how easy it was now to publish resources on the web, but thenwondered how that information might be converted and then published in an easily readable,printed format. Take, for example, real estate listings or articles from a newspaper. You caneasily print these off, one by one, but then they arent associated together and the resultingpages arent very presentable.

It seemed like there needed to be a way to design a publication so that it looked good onthe web (or the screen) and on paper at the same time. I knew that the design needed to beminimal so that it was printer-friendly, but probably avoid columns so that the content was easyto read on the computer.

I was inspired by Changethis, an organization which publishes manifestos as PDFs. Thesemanifestos always consisted of a cover, and pages of content which were laid out in a way thatmade them easy to read either on the computer, or on paper. I began producing newsletters

which followed some of the same rules as the manifestos.

Then, over the last few years there have been different services which have launched whichallow you to curate content using RSS. Some of my favorites have been Paper.li, and Zinepal.And, of course the rules have changed a lot thanks to social media networks such as Twitter,Facebook, MySpace, and Google+.

I began to realize that my question shouldnt be just about content readability and formats.Instead, I began to see that the publication is no longer importantthats only a container. Whatmatters is the content which goes into the container. Content should be designed so that it canbe shared across several publications or social networks and shared on its own.

The best explanation is that content should be considered to be fluid.

The CD album is the best example of what I hope to accomplish. A band or a musician will gettogether to record twelve of their favorite songs, and then the songs are released to the publicon an Album. Later on, the most popular songs from the twelve are re-released on a Best ofCD. Maybe one of the songs has to do with Christmas, so that goes on a holiday compilationCD. Two of their songs appear in a movie, so they are included in the movies Soundtrack CD.

At the same time, iTunes allows fans to pick-and-choose the songs they want to download. Thesongs are listened to individually or as a part of a customized playlist of favorite songs.

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So, in the case of music CDs, it is the contentor the songs that are important. They canappear in any album. My plan is to take a similar approach with written content. Start out withan article or an essay, and then distribute it or package it in as many ways as is feasible. I thinkthat this is how someone will be able to reach the widest audience possible.

I wasnt sure what to call this initiative to think differently about the flow of content, so I decided

on the broad name of Project Hover. Other than this blog, I manage three location-centeredfan pages on Facebook: Shepherd Today, Marlette Today, and Hartland Today. Ive used thispages to experiment with different ways to flow out content. I also maintain a personal Twitteraccount at @jnmrgn, and have started profiles on other social media sites. I recently launched apage for Project Hover on Google+.

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Lifestyle

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18/20

A Memorable Weekend

Whatever happens after today, this will always be remembered as the weekend wheneverything changed.

Today we traded in our Windstar for a 2007 Cobalt. The vehicle is smaller than were used to,but it runs a lot better than our van did and actually has some additional amenities like a port foran MP3 player and remote start. We havent had car payments since back when we paid off theWindstar a few years ago, but it was a necessary evil if we wanted a dependable vehicle. As itwas, my friend and co-worker Jenny had been doing twice her share of driving because we justcouldnt trust the van to get us from here to Lansing and back without giving us trouble.

We also changed our travel plans. I was planning on driving the kids and myself to my parentshouse for Thanksgiving, but decided against it. Visits with our family for Christmas werentlooking very possible either unless we either fixed or replaced the van.

Fixing the van was always considered to be an option, but we had reached a point where it

seemed like we were always throwing money to make a problem go away, only to discoverthere was a new problem. The time felt right to trade it in.

So, on Thursday before we ate Thanksgiving dinner Theresa, the kids, and I stopped at a fewnearby delaership to check out their stock of cars. The Cobalt was one of the cars that caughtTheresas eye. After we returned home, I visited that delearships website and requested quotesfor a few cars, including the Cobalt.

On Friday we visited the dealership after Theresa got out of work and test drove the Cobaltwith the kids in the backseat. By the time we returned with the car, we were ready to talk to thesalesman about buying it.

We ended up driving home in the car that night, and then returned today (Saturday) to finish thedeal and sign the paper work.

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19/20

Enjoying the Great Weather on Friday

I knew that the weather was going to be beautiful on Friday, but I didnt know that the weatherwould be so perfect for a walk around the Shepherd Trail. I was grateful to be experiencing

jacket weather on the day after Thanksgiving.

As soon as I could, I fed the kids lunch and then got all of us outside as quickly as possible. Wewalked to the post office to get the mail, looked at cars in town, and then returned home. Next, Irecruited the kids to help me re-organize our side of the garage so that there would be room forTheresa to park her car after the weather turned bad. I drained the garden hose, moved someof the bigger items to the side of the garage. Kayla cleared off the table she had been using forher wreath business.

Kaylas friend, Hannah, came over about an hour later. They played around outside, sometimeschasing Kaylas younger brother, Josh, and sometimes tying him up for no apparent reason. Itwasnt long before Hannahs sister, Hailey, showed up and then the three girls were tormenting

(or chasing) poor Josh. I figured it was good for them to be outside when it was so good. And,Josh was getting tons of exercise.

It seemed like the best thing we could do on a day like that was to walk around the ShepherdTrail. Since the start of November, it seemed like our warm days were numbered and the cold,snowy weather would be starting soon. So, I like taking every opportunity we could get to walkthe trail.

Ive noticed that a lot of other people in town have been taking advantage of the warm weatherby setting up their outdoors Christmas decorations. This seemed really smart.

I also grabbed my camera and took some pictures during our walk. It seemed appropriate tocatch the kids walking around the trail on what might be the last warm day of the year.

Some highlights of our walk include Hannah teasing Josh about a girl he likes, and then Haileyteasing both Josh and Hannah at the same time (bold, but it was sure to stir up trouble). Also,for some reason Hailey kept telling Josh to hug every tree that we walked by, and for someother strange reason he would do it. When we passed a patch of cattails, the girls had to picksome so that they could throw cattail bombs. This was a trick that Hannahs oldest sister,Adrienne, had shown us during a walk a couple of weeks ago. Break up the cattail in a coupleof places to loosen the seeds, and then when you throw them they appear to explode. Josh andHailey had run ahead, but came back to see what was going on and then they wanted to throwcattail bombs too.

We stopped by the baseball diamonds where I took a shot of the kids togethersomething that

looked easy, but it took several tries before I could get them while they were all looking at thecamera. Both Hannah and Hailey wanted to try taking pictures, so I let them try with my cameraas long as they were careful. My favorite pictures include the couple that Hannah took of me,and then the extreme close up shot that Hailey took of Hannah.

When we resumed our walk, I tried to pick up the pace so everybody could get home at adecent time, and the kids and I could meet Theresa at the dealership.

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I am Jon Morgan | December 2011