Overcoming Bias has a little post that, for the most part, quotes the findings of a study on how "interesting details" affect learning.

The researchers found that "interesting details" decreased the student's understanding (transfer), while not affecting the student's memory (retention) of what they read/watched.

Case 1 was video trying to teach about how a cold virus infects the body.

Case 2 was a slide deck on digestion (the students read the presentation, there was no presenter).

Their Conclusion

The money quote (from the study):

Results are consistent with a cognitive theory of multimedia learning, in which highly interesting details sap processing capacity away from deeper cognitive processing of the core material during learning.

Huh. Interesting, right?

And now, some interesting details I've chosen for you:

• the "interesting details" for Case 1 were not directly related to the matter at hand; they were about virii's "role in sex and death," not spiffy facts about the main topic, how a virus infects the body
• the "interesting details" for Case 2 go unrecorded

This paper isn't showing up in any of the research libraries I have subscriptions to, or I'd dig deeper.

Probable Flaws

But based on this snippety snip, I'd wager that the following problems exist with the study's conclusion:

• interesting details lower comprehension when they distract from the very specific topic at hand
• "interesting" is in the eyes of the beholder (just because something's about sex or death doesn't make it interesting, natch—it could make the student feel uncomfortable, guilty, or disgusted, too, rather than interested)
• intriguingly, the "interesting details" group did not remember (retain) any less, they just understood less, but they were tested on the main point, not the interesting details
• the real key to aiding comprehension & retention is to focus, focus, focus on your point; if you can keep the focus on with interesting details, surely that will add to understanding rather than detract

Useful takeaways for every day life

Nevertheless, it serves as a good reminder that we all need from time to time: Stay on point. Which I will always imagine as a leaping dolphin with a ball on his nose, a cardboard cutout prop used in a 2nd grade writing lesson. Which kinda proves the, well, point.

Ever since my first couple talks, my presentation theory has boiled down to: A) people will only remember 1 entire thing from your 45-minute talk, so make it count, and B) making people laugh gets them more engaged, and more engaged people learn and remember more.

People balk when I tell them A, but my experience has upheld this idea. Once you choose your main point for A, that you want them to remember in full, you can only try to expose them to other ideas in the hope that they will remember them vaguely later, when they need them: Didn't I hear about a tool for this? Maybe I should Google instead of writing my own...

Now I will be sure to reduce even further any extraneous "interesting tidbits" that are not on focus.

Looks like it's that time again! I've found another article that's annoyingly devoid of green, leafy facts but full of sweet, specious seasoning. Reasoning. I mean reasoning.

How's this one start off?

[Charles Petzold:] People are probably reading and writing more than ever, but a lot of this reading and writing is online. Consequently, book reading has suffered.

Ohhh, boy.

Oh no! Nobody buys books!

So, the first premise is that writing tech books is a losing proposition because nobody reads. But what does "nobody reads" mean in this case, as a supportive argument? It means that nobody buys. Reading doesn't put money in the pockets of authors, but sales do.

So, book sales are down. The internet is killing publishing, just like it's killing music and moviemaking. But wait, what's that you say? Music and movies are selling well? Well... what about books?

Oops. The Association of American Publishers reports compound growth rate of 2.5% since 2002? And the economy's been in the shitter practically that whole time, right? We had the crash in 2000 and, of course, the "it's not a depression" slow-down that's been brewing for the past 2 - 2.5 years.

US census data even shows year over year improvements in specific months, even in 2008 (up til June - no further data, but I suspect it's gone down some since then for very obvious reasons).

Content wants to be free! I want to get paid!

[Petzold:] It doesn't take a genius to make a lot of [money] — oh, actually that's the problem. The writer needs to eat but the content must be free.

But, but... content wants to be free. Pathetic fallacy aside—everybody knows that, right? Micro-payments have never worked. Blogging for dollars is a losing proposition. And why would anybody buy a book when they can spend hours searching a bunch of shitty blogs to try and put together the same information?

Let's turn to Canadians for their insight here, because they're so nice as to actually discuss it:

While factors such as the availability of free information on the Internet may have affected Canadians' willingness to pay for content, evidence from the Survey of Household Spending suggests book publishers may be faring better than other corners of the publishing industry.

In contrast to steady declines in household spending on newspapers, magazines and periodicals, average household spending on books rose from $86 in 1998 to $111 in 2005. In 2006, it had eased to $108.

Could that possibly be because many books provide a lot more value than any web site could? I wonder.

What formats don't provide more value, though?

[Petzold:] At a library fundraiser in Sullivan County over the weekend I saw a complete immaculate recent edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica marked down from $45 to $40 to $30 as the day went on.

Well, yes. There is that. You can't search a real book and how recent was it, anyway?

OK, what else?

[Petzold:] Programming books — particularly tutorials (such as I write) and "tips" books (such as Jeff's first book) — have also been hard hit. So much information is available online that books seem superfluous.

It's true, a lot of them *do* seem superfluous. I wonder if that's because they're not good enough that they actually provide a measurable benefit over reading online?

I don't know about you, dear reader, but since Mr Petzold is being all colloquial, I think I will be, too. I've read a lot of programming books. I've tried to learn programming of various types from several, back before I could program very well in anything at all. I found every last one to be too boring, dry, ridiculously narrow-sighted, and not providing the grand overview and synthesis that a book can provide but a free web tutorial does not. They typically feature numerous holes, conceptual leaps without warning, mistakes, bugs, and omissions that make the Internet, and the helpful people on it, a necessary companion to start with... and if the companion is free, why not just bypass the thing causing you the pain to begin with?

The only tech books that I've personally perused that defy this distinction are the Head First books and a couple of CSS books (specifically the one with the beach scene, whose name I can never recall, even though I own it. Beach beach beach!). The Missing Manual books, while not programming books at all, are also very good.

People don't read any more!

But that doesn't matter, because people don't remember how to read.

[Petzold:] Many people are out of practice in reading books.

I love doom and gloom as much as the next guy, but it's just simply not true:

An Associated Press/Ipsos poll, released on Tuesday, revealed that 27 percent of the approximately 1,000 U.S. adults polled had not read a book in the past year.

I admit that 27% of people not reading a book seems pretty bad at first, but if you consider meeting 1,000 people on the street in random towns and villages across the US and figuring how many are "the reading sort," it doesn't seem that bad to me. The US's alleged literacy rate is 99%, but don't believe that without some big qualifiers. The US Dept of Education claims that 43% of the population is low literacy, with an additional 44% having only "intermediate" reading skills. Compared to these statistics, that book-reading rate doesn't seem so bad at all.

Especially since the "book lovers" sure do love books:

However, the study showed that more than half of those who did read a book in the past year had read more than six books, and over a quarter had read more than 15.

It changes based on age, too. The real slackerly readers were over 50; 79% of adults 40 to 49 and 74% of adults 18 to 29 read a book.

People can't read any more!

[Petzold:] Reading requires Patience and Fortitude, not coincidently the names of the two lions who sit outside the New York Public Library. Many people are out of practice in reading books...

Is that really so?

I couldn't find a single research paper that suggests that reading attention span for paper books is diminished by Internet usage or on-screen reading, and believe me, I tried. I have subscriptions to the Association for Computing Machinery's online research paper archive, which dates back to the 70s and in some cases beyond, and Highbeam, both typically very reliable for any topic that even thinks about being Internet- or computer-related.

There are lots of editorials and several pop psych books that bemoan our loss of attention span, but none of them have supportive research specifically pointing at Internet vs paper books, and the Internet is listed as a general scapegoat along with TV, video games, and other media.

[Petzold:] Declining books sales have led some publishers into thinking that the way to revive books is to make them more like an online experience.

I couldn't find any evidence to support this claim, or to do deny it. I suspect that it's not actually happening, because if it's not enough of a phenomenon to be studied it must not be much of a phenomenon. Research scientists are hungry and not very demanding people.

On the other hand, the industry of publishing new books in English in general is growing.

Thoughtful tech writing is DOOMED!

[Petzold:] Programming books — particularly tutorials (such as I write) and "tips" books (such as Jeff's first book) — have also been hard hit. So much information is available online that books seem superfluous. To many developers these days, if it doesn't show up in a Google search, it doesn't exist.

So there's all that positive growth in just about every other book sector. And then there's the tech sector, which, it's true, shows lagging sales.

Maybe the bad sales have got something to do with the shape of the technology book sector overall, not just sinful Internet people not reading books, as Petzold seems to imply.

It's book-length, but you don't call it a book?

On the other hand, it could also be related to book positioning, existing user base / platform, interest in a topic, quality, and so on...

When Agile Web Development with Rails was released it sold 6 thousand books in its first run. Six months later, its sales are over 25 thousand. Rails publishing is busy, with even more titles upcoming, such as the Rails Recipes cookbook, which is scheduled to be available in beta sometime this February.

PS - that doesn't include PDFs. That's the paper edition only. I have it on good authority that the PDF version far outsold the paper version. We're talking in the 6 figures sales numbers (and I mean copies, not dollars!), all told. And no surprise: the topic was white hot, the book was trail-blazing, and you could go to a big box store and only find one or two paper copies in stock, but the PDF version was cheaper, immediate, searchable, and not crippled by DRM. It was also a huge seller on Amazon.

That's not an entirely isolated success story, either. Looks like lots and lots of people are digging ebooks, not just PDFs and PDF-like special formats, but also ebooks as distributed for Sony and Kindle ebook readers.

On a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles…. At a technology trade conference in May, CEO Jeff Bezos said that Kindle sales accounted for 6% of book titles sold for the Kindle and in print. So Amazon appears to be selling more e-books.

On top of all that enthusiasm, there's more. If you've ever hung out on internet marketing forums, you'll find a lot of people making tidy monthly incomes selling their own specialty topic PDF- or HTML-based ebooks all by their lonesome—sales that will never, ever be counted by these industry figures.

The unmentionable Q word

But despite stealth ebooks, lack of positioning, badly chosen topics, and all that jazz, I think the number one reason tech books sell can be shelved under: Quality, lack thereof.

I've tech edited 10 industry books and struggled to write my own book, three times. (No, I do not learn.)

It's true that the rewards don't equal the effort. Why? Because the books don't sell, goes the industry line. But if you pay crap for something, you get what you pay for. In all cases, I had a (some would say foolish) dedication to quality that led to my downfall, because I am sick and tired of awful tech books. This was manageable when I was merely editing, even though I seriously reduced my hourly rate in pursuit.

But for writing, it's just unmanageable, because publishers want books fast, dirty and cheap. In two of the aforementioned cases, the publisher actually aggravated the situation by not paying me, hiring useless tech editors (again: crap pay), and threatening that the book could neither slip nor be canceled over 400 pages in (while still not paying the promised advance). In that latter case, I would have continued the death trudge for the next 150 pages, if they'd only given me another month. And the book would have been great. (In the former, the book was canceled at 85% completion because the publisher was acquired. The third failure was just my own damn fault, what can I say?)

In light of all this, it's not surprising that the pay for Head First books is higher—and they sell more than others series'—and you get trained how to write them during a 2-week course. These things all go together.

Quality sells. It's that simple. But the tech industry insists on, all in all, putting out warmed-over crap. No matter how well-intentioned an author might be at the beginning, by the end of the process he will be a beaten-down wreck who has produced a second-rate product just in order to stay sane. Writing a book does shatter one's illusions, it's true.

His Personal Experience

[Petzold:] For the first time in 22 years I've been doing some consulting to supplement my ever-dwindling royalty income.

Of course this is an unfortunate thing for Mr Petzold, but not a good reason to indict the Internet, his readers, and humanity n general for its feckless lack of attention.

Since he's been able to live off royalties in the past, what we're talking about here is change. But the documented, cited changes in book buying habits just don't support a personal difference as large as being able to live off royalties vs not.

I personally suspected that this change might have more to do with the kinds of books Petzold writes, and how old they are, and I think my suspicion has a good basis. In reverse chronological order, these are books written by Charles Petzold as found on Amazon (not all of which are available to purchase):

• The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine (2008)
• 3D Programming for Windows (2007)
• Applications = Code + Markup (2006)
• Programming Microsoft Windows Forms (2005)
• Programming Microsoft Windows (2003)
• Programming in the Key of C# (2003)
• Programming Microsoft Windows with Visual Basic .NET (reference) (2002)
• Code: The Hidden Language of Software (2000) — which I owned; it's far too dense and scattershot to enjoy

These books not even proximate to the neighborhood of the growth categories that O'Reilly has pegged over time.

Look at O'Reilly's current top sellers, for example: The majority are consumer apps, with a few programming tomes aimed at beginners thrown in. A full 3 of the top 5 are OS X / Apple-specific, with the remaining two being a Photoshop book and a book on making great presentations. There's not a single programming book until slot #9. If it were a top 10 list, that'd be it! But since the list goes on, there are 6 more programming books out (total: 7) of 25 top slots -- and 3 of them are Head First titles. (If you count HTML/CSS, then the programming titles start at #8, there are 7 more beyond that (total: 8), and 4 are Head First titles.)

Left brain books - and books for experienced programmers - are out. Them's the facts.

Is it the industry—and the reading public—that's failing Charles Petzold, or is it his choice of topic, format, sales model and delivery method?

Phew.

I think I've neatly eviscerated this aggravatingly fact-free essay. So, in conclusion, what Charles Petzold has claimed about book selling and reading habits: simply not true. The thrust of his argument doesn't hold water. If he is concerned with the sales of an individual book, either his or someone else's, he should try to focus on ensuring it is marketable before bemoaning the state of humanity in general and the industry in specific.

My advice to Mr Petzold would be: If you want to keep living off your writing, more power to you. Perhaps you should look at a different venue than monolithic print books, something that will be a win-win situation for your reader and you.

Hey kids, it's poetry explication time! Give me five double-spaced pages on Robert Frost's "Nature's First Green is Gold" by Friday or your grade is toast and your parents will disown you, you'll never hold a good job, and you'll die destitute and alone.

Just kidding.

I hated dissecting poetry in school, but loved the promise poetry held for me. So while rebelliously faking the teacher out in my assigned schoolwork by day, I put myself through my own Poetry Education Camp by night: no cabins, no counselors, no team-building exercises (horror!)—just Amy, the books, and the Internet.

As a consequence, I can write pretty decent poetry. Yay for me! More importantly, I learned to be a competent critic of poetry and to understand what makes a good poem.

I can see you nodding off there, but give me a moment to make my case. Poetry criticism is much more valuable than it may sound, because the skills of critique are general skills.

On Criticism and Greatness and Love Songs

To be a good critic of design, programming, or anything, you must first be able to think critically and abstractly. You have to able to analyze existing pieces to determine why they work, and move from the specific to the general and back again; make hypotheses or conjectures and test them, directly or indirectly.

You want excellent critical skills, of course, because the path to doing great work lies with understanding what makes work great. You can practice all you like but if you can't analyze and evolve, you'll never get there. You won't achieve greatness.

And it's greatness that I want to discuss with you today.

Just like greatness in anything else, a great poem operates on multiple levels at once. To understand and use those multiple levels, you'll need those habits and skills I described above—habits and skills that studying poetry will teach you.

I like to talk about poetry. But poetry is such a personal thing, I sadly fear that you'd be snoring before we got to

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

So let's talk about love songs instead, breakup songs in particular.

After all, song is poetry set to music. Just like "real" poetry there's a refreshing variety available. Love songs, in particular, are more immediate to our personal experience than the average poem. Love songs have to sell.

Level 1: Neil Sedaka

Consider this famous pop song, "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" by Neil Sedaka:

Don't take your love away from me
Don't you leave my heart in misery
If you go then I'll be blue
'Cause breaking up hs hard to do

Remember when you held me tight
And you kissed me all through the night
Think of all that we've been through
Breaking up is hard to do

... bridge ...

I beg of you, don't say goodbye
Can't we give our love another try
Come on baby, let's start anew
'Cause breaking up is hard to do 

This little ditty is almost entirely straightforward. It says what it means, and means what it says (except for the "comma comma down dooby doo down down"!). There are no ideas or even phrases in the song that hadn't been heard, in some variation, before—even the concept of "taking" love away. The rhymes are the good old standards, except for "misery." The format is predictable.

The song is generic, so it resonates easily with anyone who's been dumped after having been held all night (at least once); at the same time, it's explicit, and thus impossible to misinterpret.

It's peppy, it's catchy, it's enjoyable—I, for one, love Neil Sedaka—but there's really no there there. There's no substance. It's the same great taste but less filling. It leaves one unsatisfied.

Level 2: The Everly Bros

Our second song, "Bye, Bye Love," steps it up a notch:

Bye bye, love.
Bye bye, happiness.
Hello, loneliness.
I think I'm a-gonna cry-y.

Bye bye, love.
Bye bye, sweet caress.
Hello, emptiness.
I feel like I could di-ie.
Bye bye, my love, goodby-ye.

There goes my baby
With-a someone new.
She sure looks happy.
I sure am blue.
She was my baby
'Til he stepped in.
Goodbye to romance
That might have been...

This classic by The Everly Bros is, narratively, as simple as "Breaking Up is Hard to Do." The phrase "Bye-bye love" is not as direct as "Don't take your love away from me," though it's clear from these very first words what the song is about. It explains the same exact situation through a slightly different lens.

Where "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" sounds almost like a straight transcription of a one-sided conversation (what, you don't rhyme when you talk?), "Bye Bye Love" is more oblique, more like actual poetry. It approaches the topic at an angle. It doesn't declare that "breaking up is hard to do"—a fact, and a boring fact, duh. Instead, the Bros sing "Bye, bye happiness / Hello, loneliness," which is metaphorical and a little bit clever, leaving you room to fill out the story yourself, which makes it more interesting.

Level 3: Sarah McLachlan

Now compare the preceding two to this song by Sarah McLachlan:

I remember the nights I watched as you lay sleeping 
Your body gripped by some far away dream 
Well I was so scared and so in love then 
And so lost in all of you that I had seen 
But no one ever talked in the darkness 
No voice ever added fuel to the fire 
No light ever shone in the doorway 
Deep in the hollow of earthly desires 
But if in some dream there was brightness 
If in some memory some sort of sign 
And flesh be revived in the shadows 
Blessed our bodies should lay so entwined 

...

I remember when you left in the morning at daybreak 
So silent you stole from my bed 
To go back to the one who possesses your soul 
And I back to the life that I dread. 
So I ran like the wind to the water 
Please don't leave me again I cried 
And I threw bitter tears at the ocean 
But all that came back was the tide... 

"I Will Not Forget You" is more wordy, more dreamy, more metaphorical—but still clearly a sad love song about some kind of affair.

You can tell it's a love song because it's got the word "love" in it, right up front. And the qualifier 'then' in that same line ("I was so scared and so in love then"), coupled with the first words "I remember," implies that the narrator is not so in love and/or not so scared any more and suggests that it's a song about lost love of one kind or another. Although the rest of that stanza implies that the narrator knew there was no hope for her love, you don't know until the second stanza that she has been left.

At heart, "I Will Not Forget You" has the same story as "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" and "Bye Bye Love": the narrator's in love, the narrator is left, the narrator pleads, the narrator is really sad and desperate. The story is just embroided with metaphor and pretty words.

But that embroidery is stunning. The lyrics approach a biblical kind of beauty:

And flesh be revived in the shadows
Blessed our bodies should lay so entwined

The individual choices of words and phrases work hard to build the mood: gripped, far away, dream, lost, darkness, fire, doorway, deep, hollow, shadows, entwined (and so on). Neither of the previous songs really offer a mood as such, relying instead on explanation.

Additionally, unlike the other songs, this song builds narrative tension by carefully placing its words. The first stanza has only one passive verb for the narrator ("was") and everything else is built by adjectives: was in love, was scared, (was) lost. The small handful of action verbs for the narrator appears only in the second stanza: remember, ran, cried, threw. In the beginning, the narrator is totally passive, leading to a vague feeling of powerlessness—which is used to serve the song's purpose, of course.

The song also features a generous use of rhetorical devices such as alliteration, anaphora (yes I had to look that up), and parallelism. On top of all that, the rhymes are natural and pleasing, unlike the usual love song standards (arms! charms! love! dove! duke! puke!), and the line structure is more sophisticated than either of the two oldies.

Now we're really getting somewhere.

Level 4: The Postal Service

But what about a love song that never mentions love, a breakup song that never mentions a breakup?

If you ever find yourself in the midst of a self-administered course on poetry, you will be come across many exercises that demand you to write a poem about an emotion or act without ever mentioning it, relying solely on other tools: mood, meter, word choice, structure. It's difficult but illuminating, and the results can be breathtaking.

Just like "The District Sleeps Tonight," by The Postal Service:

Smeared black ink
Your palms are sweaty
And I'm barely listening to last demands
I'm staring at the asphalt wondering what's buried underneath 

I'll wear my badge 
A vinyl sticker with big block letters adherent to my chest
That tells your new friends 
I am a visitor here
I am not permanent
And the only thing 
Keeping me dry is 
(Where I am [3x])

You seem so out of context 
In this gaudy apartment complex
A stranger with your door key 
Explaining that I am just visiting
And I am finally seeing 
Why I was the one worth leaving [2x]

D.C. sleeps alone tonight

You seem so out of context 
in this gaudy apartment complex
A stranger with your door key 
explaining that I am just visiting
And I am finally seeing 
Why I was the one worth leaving [2x]

The district sleeps alone tonight 
After the bars turn out their lights
And send the autos swerving into the loneliest evening
And I am finally seeing 
Why I was the one worth leaving [4x]

This is a song that never mentions love, romance, relationships, or breaking up. In fact, are no "emotion words" at all until the second to last non-choral line: the "loneliest," which is describing the evening and not a person. The impression of feeling is built through details. The one nod to direct emotion is left for the very end, the second to last word, where it packs a considerable punch.

So how do we know it's a breakup song?

The "loneliest evening," resonating as it does at the end, is a strong hint. But the only concrete reason we have to believe this is a breakup song is the line "I am finally seeing / Why I was the one worth leaving." Although even that is ambiguous, offering at least two interpretations.

Despite its lack of emotion words and room for interpretation, this song is not abstract. It manages to be both less explicit than all the other songs, while at the same time having the most vivid images ("the vinyl sticker with big block letters") compared to the others ("so silent you stole from my bed"—lyrical and poetic, but not specific).

It gives the feeling of being jilted, jittery, out of place, and uncomfortable through the sound of the words in addition to what the words actually say. Harsh sounds predominate and they tend to come in groups (ink, sweaty, stranger, door, key, vinyl, sticker, block, letters, explaining, visiting, context, gaudy, apartment, complex, swerving). There's none of the love song "soft touch" you might expect after listening to a Sarah McLachlan album.

Like "I Will Remember You," it tells a story on a meta-level with the progression of each stanza's main subject: mixed (ink on your hands; you and I), I, you, you, the city.

You have to interpret that story, and decide who is feeling what (who is doing the narrating?), and why. It doesn't come outright and tell you what it's about in the overall shape of things.

The song is a breakup song, but it might not be about a lover. It could be about a friend, sibling, or family member. With just the tiniest stretch, it could be about losing or leaving a job, the city, or the feeling of belonging in the narrator's own country. Is the smeared ink the ink of a fingerprinting dye, or the ink of a Dear John letter, or something else? It's specific, but ambiguous. And therein lies its power.

And yet, at the same time, it operates on other levels. It has a good tune. The vocalists are skilled and emotive. It's well-paced. The music is beautiful. It's technically sweet. The progression of the female vocalist from support/background to half of a duet is not hackneyed, unusually.

In contrast with Sarah McLachlan's songs, this song does more with less. There are very few words compared to "I Will Not Forget You," but it builds an equally strong (although totally different) mood. It doesn't leaven on the adjectives and mood words; instead, it contains mostly strong nouns, few adjectives, and no bald statements about feelings.

It doesn't tell you what to think. It sneaks up on you, you sense it rather than hear it or think it—almost like it's your own idea.

To me, this is what great work aspires to.

You may not enjoy this song—or you may like the words but not the tune, or vice versa. But you can't deny the skill which created it.

So, what's your work look like?

I spent all this breath on the topic because I think there's a parallel here, between these levels of songs I've described and analyzed for you, and the levels of work and expertise in any field. Granted, I hand-picked these songs to make my point. Of course I did, I'm the writer! I know all these songs and love them.

I will concede that there may be more levels. I think there's one more at least beyond Level 4, here, that doesn't necessarily involve further mastery of the craft itself but meta-knowledge and self-awareness. I could go on about that now but you're already exhausted, I'm sure. I know I am.

There's also a level of skill below that of Level 1 as described here, because for all its innocent childishness, "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" is an excellent example of its genre—it's a "bad" song written by expert song writers who knew exactly what they were doing. And they did it on purpose. This is a totally different thing than somebody who lacks skill and so creates an innocent and childish work and is currently incapable of doing more.

I know this essay itself is not perfect and if analyzed the way I analyzed those songs, this would quickly be revealed. But if I waited for it to be perfect, you'd never see it.

But the idea inspired me to take a closer look at my own work yet again, and the writing of it made me feel more aware of what the bits and pieces are doing. I hope it inspires you similarly!

Please. Will the talking heads just shut up?

That dude who wrote that book slamming "amateurs," which I will not name because like hell I'm gonna give him free press, has written something else equally stupid. This time it's short, at least, and free, and therefore not nearly as offensive as the whole goddamn book.

So full of crap

But he is making the asinine and no doubt intentionally inflammatory argument that the economic downturn will make people stop contributing to insert media darling web 2.0 community here in favor of payola, Web 2.0 style.

When we think of the Great Depression, we imagine long lines of gaunt men, caps in hand, waiting for soup handouts. The equivalent photos of today's economic hard times -- displayed for free, of course, on Flickr -- may be represented by images of unemployed people in front of their computers cheerfully donating their labor to Wikipedia.

Oh, pleeeeeeeeeeeease.

In his best-selling book, Predictably Irrational, MIT behavorial economist Dan Ariely suggests that most of us are irrational when it comes to determining the value of our labor. I’m not sure.

Well, you know, that's just one uneducated man's opinion. Oh wait. Dan Ariely is an MIT behavioral economist. Who does genuine scientific research. And cites other people's genuine scientific research. There's, like, at least 3 decades of research on these topics.

And this guy is... a history major![1] (Would I like fries with this rant? Why... yes!)

So, about that point...

So how will today's brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 "free" economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc. , Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism... The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue. "Free" doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

Oh NO! Better start shorting stock in Jimmy Wales!

But in reality, there's this thing called science

Most people don't do it for the "back end" revenue (which is a term I think he made up just then). They do it because they like to, because it gives them fuzzy feelings, because they like helping people, because that supports their self-image of being a helpful person, because it gets their name out there, and because they like basking in the warm glow of geek cred.

Everybody knows—or should know, in this age of cheap and accessible neuroscience/sociology popularization—that when you pay somebody for something (or even mention money), their reasoning flips a switch, from pleasure / social justifications (e.g. I'm posting on digg because it's fun! or I'm writing this Linux tutorial because it makes me feel good to help people, plus I get geek cred! or I'm helping you move your heavyass sofa because you're my friend and that's what friends do!) to economic justification (Like, dude! $1 for a digg post is so not worth me actually hunting down something NEW, here comes recycled blog spam. Or What the hell? You think $40 was enough to help you carry that damn couch? It was made out of fucking lead! Fuck you too!).

Once you've got somebody sitting there, economizing in their head about their effort vs your money, you're pretty much screwed. There's no way you can pay people what their actual effort is worth, with your Web 2.0 "business" (or friend-powered moving endeavor). Once they start thinking economically they'll see it's a waste of their time... and since you've sucked the joy out of it by making it work, they're gonna disappear. Poof!

Even when their coffers are already pretty empty. People have such an overpowering sense of fairness that they'd rather get nothing than receive an unfair cut.

But if you don't believe me, just look for the shining examples of paid-for content on the interwebs. Look at Squidoo. Look at Netscape's digg killer (quick! can you name it? I couldn't, I had to google it). Yahoo! Answers. Et cetera, ad nauseum.

Timely business book cliché

This is also illustrated in the har-har-aren't-we-businessmen-clever-nudge-nudge apocryphal story about the old man who couldn't get these noisy kids to stop playing in his yard, and believe you me, he tried everything right up to and including shaking his cane and calling them whippersnappers. Nothing worked. Until one fine day when he hit on the idea of paying them.

"Your young voices, so full of cheer, do me a world of good. I love to have you playing in my yard. It brightens up my day," he told them, "I'll give you each 50 cents each day to come play." At first the kids thought, "Score! Free money!" And yet, money was less powerful motivator than the joy of being annoying little bastards and so they slowly trailed off in their enthusiasm for playing—because now it had become work—until one day the old man told them he forgot his quarters in his other pants, and they never came back again.

Which just goes to show, you shouldn't piss off old dudes with lots of time and access to pop psychology books.

And if you're going to rope your friends into helping you move, do everyone a favor and pay them in beer, pizza and affection, not money.

And if you think you're going to write world-changing social software—or worse yet be a social software critic—do the world a favor and read a book on psychology first.

A special note for the one-uppers

PS — Don't bring up Mechanical Turk. It's a different case, and you know it.

[1] OK, the annoying dude also has a master's degree in polysci, but I remain unimpressed.

A good in-depth article on information hoarding:

Linder argues that as we become squeezed for consumption time, we’ll consume more expensive things over cheaper things when possible to make use of more goods on a total-cost basis. But when the cost of goods is zero, what happens then? As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of “free” stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we’ll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we’ve managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we’ve set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged.

Linder being the author of The Harried Leisure Class, apparently. A book I haven't read and probably won't.

There's also this rather insightful essay by Nicholas Carr. Which I did read through to the end, finding myself agreeing with him, at least on the effects of too much information on my own person. (Whether Google's 20% time is engineered purposefully for evil is another question. I hear from many "Googlers" that it's 20% after your requisite 80-hour week, and David Hansson recently pointed out that it's supposed to be 20% more time doing the exact same things only with a different name, and that getting away from the computer sometimes might be a good idea.)

There is this counterpoint, if you can call it that, by John Batelle but I found it a little too "rah rah INFORMATION AGE!" for my liking.

A couple weeks ago, at RailsConf, I tweeted that I was skipping Joel Spolsky's keynote and why.

Judging by the few responses I got, most people took this to be a joke. It's not.

I try very hard to watch what I put into my head. To a greater or lesser degree of success. All kinds of research is out there that begins to explain what affect information has on our not-21st-century brains and there are many reasons to believe in a mental architecture that functions on the principle of shit-in/shit-out (SISO). (I say "shit" instead of "garbage," because garbage often times has some redeeming value (depending on the type).)

And, secondly, research has shown that the majority of what Joel Spolsky writes is pretty embarrassing, and so is the software he produces. Based on what I know of the man, I didn't have high hopes for his talk, and it sounds like I wasn't far off the mark.

But it's not just about some personal vendetta against Spolsky. Put simply, I already take in too much.

Case in point: I want to reference an author's assertion about failure that I read recently.

It was probably in a book. That is, one of the five or so books I've read this past week.

Or, shit. Was it on a blog?

You can see my predicament. I know I read the thing. I remember what it said.[1] I said "Aha!" and "that's interesting" and "I'm not entirely sure I agree," and I probably dog-eared it or used one of my marker stickers which I keep everywhere, but that doesn't mean much.

My "tagging" behavior has the side effect of leaving the best of the books I read looking like technicolor porcupines from Flatland. It will just as likely take me 20 minutes to find that quote, if I ever do.

I put too much information into my head. I devour it like it's... I can't even think of an adequate food metaphor because I just don't like eating that much. My tummy is a wild beast that only accepts my yoke when I treat it with the gentle respect it deserves. Never in my wildest dreams could I spend an entire 8-hour day eating without wishing like hell I could stop, or at least barf.

With information, however, I start to read just one blog or just for 15 minutes and come to, hours later, with a stiff neck and cotton mouth, wondering dazedly where the time went. And what's worse, I know full well this is what will usually happen, but I do it again anyway.

Fact: I'm never happier than when I strictly limit my intake of information, especially from pointless, shallow, or actively horrible sources. But, like all diets, I forget about actually feeling better, and sometimes I waste an entire day reading utterly useless shit. But tomorrow's a new day, right? I'll start fresh tomorrow. Or maybe right now.

In the mean time, I am more irritable, more distractable, more physically uncomfortable (info binging for me is a physically static thing) and thus more mentally sluggish, and, to top it all off, vastly less productive.

Which brings me to my point.

Informational...

• bingeing
• purging
• hoarding
• hygiene
• pollution
• gentrification

Information doesn't want to be free—that's the pathetic fallacy in action. But it does seem to have a life of its own, reflected in the above words, because of our seeming obsession with it.

Discuss.

Further reading:

• Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?
• Never Hate. Only Destroy.
• Life Interrupted
• Is Google making us stupid?
• Google: Making Nick Carr Stupid, But It's Made This Guy Smarter
• Intermittent variable reward
• Information overload
• Continuous partial attention
• Supernova 2005: Attention

[1] The author was arguing against the idea that we learn from our failures and others' successes, and saying it was a totally backwards idea—claiming that, in fact, we learn from our successes and others' failures. I am, as I said, skeptical, but it was thought-provoking.

I'm still on the quest to make this blog more like a blog—I think the articles are eventually going to be treated differently.

I am a huge believer in the power of books. Books are the one thing I own "in excess;" my favorite charity is book-related and bookstores tend to create in me that "kid-in-a-candy-store" that electronics or clothes stores do for other people. Since I rarely talk about books, I assume that it may be a bit mysterious where some of my rants or ideas come from, but they're like as not coming from books and/or observations of the Real World. Books have made me the person I am.

Lately I've gone on a real book-buying spree (more so even than usual). Shipping Twistori helped me shake burnout, so I can only assume that's why I'm ripping through them like a sugared-up 6-year-old through a department store.

So, here's a list of the books that are currently stimulating my grey matter:

#1: The Architecture of Happiness

A book on the way architecture (and art, and really, design) can claim to affect the human condition, and how it does so. By Alain de Botton.

I've loved Alain de Botton since I stumbled across his novel "On Love" while volunteering in The Book Thing. It was well-printed, bright pink and had nice typography—that's why it caught my eye. (I'm a designer, what can I say?) It was also brilliant. And I later found out that he wrote books on philosophy. I own all of them and have devoured every one.

This one, his latest, is his hardest to read. It's not that it's not well-written—no, it's incredibly good. But it's so densely packed. It seems like I've dogeared or marked almost every third page for something deeply insightful or interesting, some thought that made me go "Aha!", to which I wish to return.

This makes it not an ideal bedtime book. It has to be savored, read while fully awake, and in small doses so it can sink in and steep.

#2: Death March

By Edward Yourdon.

It's about projects. The kinds of projects you'd assume it would be, with a name like Death March. Remarkably compelling—I was hooked from the snarky, real, and tell-it-like-it-is front page. He doesn't bow to the common convention of turning tail and licking the boots of management, hoping to impress it.

So far, he advocates all-out war-like tactics to get projects done, if you find you really must—but his first advice is to quit the job because death march projects are a symptom of a very deep, very insidious, very unshakeable disease infecting the corporation.

I've really just started this one but so far I am very impressed.

#3: Cryptonomicon

An unbelievable novel of cryptology, technology, startups, war, and of course, humanity. Neal Stephenson is one of my most favorite fiction authors and Crypto holds up very well to repeat readings. (My absolute favorite of his has to be The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, however.)

Like all very good fiction, there are universal truths, insights and lessons to be learned from this one. Stephenson is an expert on humanity and he gets the facts on the other topics spot-on, too. (I originally read it, by sheer coincidence, along side The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography and it was a total braingasm to read about the real history/science in the latter and then see it talked about in the novel.)

Crypto is thus also not a very good bedtime book because it really gets my mental gears turning.

#4 Guards! Guards!

By Terry Pratchett.

It's like the book version of a funny TV show. This is older Pratchett, back when he still had a sharp edge, but not as insightful as some of his other novels (e.g. Small Gods). I've never really found Pratchett to be laugh-out-loud funny, but it's a nice break because with all of the other items on my list my brain is exploding. And I'm really, really running out of sticky notes.