Lone Gunman

Three nec­es­sary ele­ments must be present for a behav­iour to occur: Moti­va­tion, Abil­ity, Trig­ger — and under­stand­ing this is fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing how to change behav­iour. That’s accord­ing to B.J. Fogg and his team at the Stan­ford Per­sua­sive Tech Lab, as described by their Behav­iour Model.

To make behav­iour change eas­ier the team iden­ti­fied the fif­teen ways that behav­iour can be changed, described each with pre­ci­sion, and related them to a spe­cific “psy­chol­ogy”. Together this infor­ma­tion became the Behav­iour Grid:

To use the behav­iour grid and to see the detailed infor­ma­tion and advice for each behav­iour type, fol­low the nec­es­sary steps in the use­ful Behav­iour Wiz­ard tool or view the grid directly.

I’ve only scratched the sur­face of things that you may or may not want to do on the inter­net. I know that, I accept that, and I hope you don’t mind.

Two things I might have liked to address but didn’t: pod­casts and Twit­ter. These were both kicked in pref­er­ence to what I did address because they’re rather eas­ier and bet­ter known than the top­ics I did write about. For 90% of pod­cast lis­ten­ers iTunes does “pod­catch­ing” so effort­lessly they didn’t know that was a word. Twit­ter is world-famous and pretty well under­stood, so my advice would mostly be superfluous.

But what I want to take a sec­ond to say is this: don’t wait for per­fect under­stand­ing of some­thing to give it a try. As Mer­lin Mann makes clear, the first time, per­haps times, you do some­thing you’ll really be ter­ri­ble at it. As Ze Frank said, sav­ing up ideas with noth­ing but the notion that you’ll one day exe­cute them per­fectly and be greeted with immense vol­umes of praise and money is a sure recipe for stagnation.

The internet’s the native home for ama­teurs. It’s a place where 90% of the stuff is made by peo­ple who could never have con­vinced some­one to pay them for what they built but felt a strong enough desire to that they put it out here on the web for us. The pur­pose of learn­ing How to Inter­net is so that you can bet­ter deal with the wealth of that diver­sity of stuff that exists on the inter­net and use it to enter­tain, inform, and improve yourself.

The inter­net is a freer place than any other because of the twin engines of anonymity and low costs of entry. Surely anonymity has prob­lems, which /b/ shows well, but it also cre­ates scary bril­liance. Imag­ine how unlikely some­one would have been to pub­lish LOL­cats if they were risk­ing their rep­u­ta­tion on it.

A low bar­rier to entry makes it pos­si­ble in a way it never was to be only con­strained by your effort. This is incred­i­bly empow­er­ing and a lit­tle scary. Never before have you been so able to rise through a rather pure mer­i­toc­racy, never before have you been so unable to blame some gate­keeper for your lack of success.

Great things are afoot on the inter­net. Mind-bendingly great things are pro­duced every sin­gle sec­ond of the day and put on the inter­net. What I hope I man­aged to give you this week was a com­pe­tent sam­pling of the tools you can use to find, fol­low, and share those great inter­net things you love.

Thanks for your time and attention.

As you get bet­ter at the inter­net, you’ll likely start to feel a desire to share some­thing with the world. Thank­fully, the inter­net is awash with tech­nolo­gies that make that easy and painless.

Out­side of Face­book, the can-be-used-for pub­lish­ing plat­form that most civil­ians are likely to have heard about is Twit­ter, which hardly qual­i­fies as a pub­lish­ing plat­form. If you’re ever look­ing for an old tweet, you’ll quickly real­ize that the medium is built to be short-lived. That’s not an inher­ently bad thing, but any­one who has the com­pul­sion to record their thoughts in a pub­lic way prob­a­bly doesn’t want to do so on such an ephemeral plat­form. Add to that the char­ac­ter limit and I would con­tend that any­one try­ing to use Twit­ter for much more than fool­ing around is act­ing fool­ishly. So, one won­ders, how do I pub­lish things in a pub­lic way so they can be found later?

My answer, at least for any word pub­lish­ing (I’ve never tried to pub­lish lots of pho­tos, video, or audio, so I can offer no exper­tise) is to use either Tum­blr or Word­Press (either flavor).

Lloyd has a Tum­blr, which I like, and it illus­trates one of the cen­tral strengths of Tum­blr. For pulling together dis­parate media types and pub­lish­ing them quickly, I don’t think a bet­ter tool exists. And even though it was really built for that, there are other ways to use Tum­blr. More than a few hip designer-types use it for blogs very much like this one.

But com­pared to Word­Press, Tumblr’s fea­tures for a com­plete per­sonal blog are some­what lack­ing. It’s cer­tainly not ter­ri­ble, it’s just not as awe­some and adapt­able as a self-hosted instal­la­tion of Word­Press. Lone Gun­man is online because of a self-hosted Word­Press instal­la­tion, as are my sites. Self-hosted Word­Press offers a wealth of fea­tures Tum­blr doesn’t have, like auto­matic post revi­sions, full cat­e­gory and tag sup­port, and the abil­ity to access your posts in thou­sands of dif­fer­ent way with just a lit­tle PHP know-how.

But if you’re just get­ting started, self-hosted does have the seri­ous down­side of requir­ing you to have and main­tain your own server space. That’s where WordPress.com comes in, it’s more directly com­pa­ra­ble to Tumblr—only requir­ing you to cre­ate a log in for it to work—but it also offers fea­tures like post revi­sions, as well as a great full-screen writ­ing view, and a bevy of things not men­tioned. (If you’re inter­ested, I recently made a longer write-up of the Tum­blr vs WordPress.com ques­tion.)

Lest we for­get, there are also a num­ber of tools other than those two, both free and paid. Notable free ones include: Google’s Blog­ger (which, after what feels like a decade of neglect, finally has an interesting-looking future), Pos­ter­ous, Joomla, Live­Jour­nal, and Dru­pal. Some paid ones are Type­pad and Move­able Type (tech­ni­cally free or paid), Square­space, and Expres­sio­nEngine. In both cat­e­gories there are cer­tainly even more I can’t think of. I don’t have enough expe­ri­ence with any of those to have much guid­ance about them, but if you don’t like Tum­blr or Word­Press, they’re all cer­tainly viable options.

Really, though, the impor­tance of the tool you use to pub­lish pales in com­par­i­son to the way in which you use it. An active Tum­blr may be mar­gin­ally worse for long-form writ­ing than Word­Press, but it’s vastly bet­ter than a dis­used Word­Press site. And that’s hard work that I don’t nearly have the abil­ity to cover this week. If you’re look­ing to actu­ally get some help with that, please allow me to rec­om­mend Mer­lin Mann’s ouvre, and par­tic­u­larly this lit­tle riff about mak­ing the clack­ity noise.

What you should write about, when, with what fre­quency, those are all non-trivial ques­tions, but I’d again empha­size that they pale in com­par­i­son to the impor­tance of doing work rather than think­ing about it.

And a final point: writ­ing, espe­cially on the inter­net, is hardly the quick­est path to fame and for­tune. If you’re only inter­ested in pub­lish­ing stuff on the inter­net for that rea­son, get out now. The prob­a­bil­ity you’ll find more than heart­break and frus­tra­tion down that road to fame is lottery-winning small.

I don’t mean to end on a crush­ing note. There’s huge value in inter­net pub­lish­ing beyond its minute poten­tial for sav­ing you from ever need­ing “a real job.” But for a while I thought it would have that poten­tial for me and it didn’t. Instead, what I got was an unex­pected com­mu­nity of peo­ple to learn from, and a chance to work with peo­ple like Lloyd. Peo­ple inter­ested in mak­ing good stuff on the inter­net, even if it never gets us any­thing. That’s the rea­son to try your hand at web-publishing: it’s a beach-head onto the wider world of sub­stan­tive accom­plish­ment and rela­tion­ships in a way that no Twit­ter account or Face­book page is. But it hardly guar­an­tees you of any­thing but a mod­est square of sand.

One of the first prob­lems you’re likely to run across as some­one who’s now find­ing lots of inter­est­ing things on the inter­net is that you’re amass­ing more stuff you want to read than you’ve ever had before and it’s get­ting hard to track. If you’re like I was for about five years, this will likely take the form of hav­ing 80 tabs open per­sis­tently caus­ing your browser to be slow and your poten­tial for cat­a­strophic data loss to be high.

There are three big obsta­cles to get­ting read­ing done on the inter­net. The first, and hard­est to fix tech­ni­cally, is your con­text. That is: if you’re used to just get­ting on the inter­net to offer con­stant par­tial atten­tion to your brows­ing while instant mes­sag­ing, lis­ten­ing to music, and watch­ing video clips, set­tling in to a multi-page essay will feel very dif­fi­cult. So too, if you fre­quently focus only on the inter­net, but click like mad and just skim every­thing, read­ing will feel bro­ken to you.

There are two solu­tions to this prob­lem: change you sit­u­a­tion and change your mind. Fre­quently peo­ple who find them­selves unable to focus at the com­puter will find them­selves much more able to do so on a tablet, e-reader, or even phone because they have dif­fer­ent habits there. This is a sub­tle and auto­matic way to change what you’re expect­ing on the inter­net with­out expend­ing the men­tal effort to actu­ally exe­cute with the other option, which is just to put some effort into calm­ing your mind and allow­ing your­self to focus. (Like most things I’ve writ­ten about this weeks, whole books could be writ­ten about this paragraph.)

The sec­ond obsta­cle is in some sense the most mun­dane, but if one is to judge by the amount it gets talked about, also the most frus­trat­ing. If you spend much time at all try­ing to read on the inter­net you’ll soon notice the fre­quency with which pub­lish­ers (espe­cially those com­ing from other media) divide their con­tent to max­i­mize page views. A 1000 word arti­cle split over ten pages is a good way to drive page views but ter­ri­ble for reader sat­is­fac­tion. There a num­ber of ways to un-paginate an article—browser exten­sions, web ser­vices, and local soft­ware all exist to do this pars­ing for you—but the most used is sim­ply the printer-friendly view that most such sites provide.

But that solu­tion gets us to the final notable prob­lem, which is that many pages on the inter­net that house arti­cles you want to read weren’t really built for read­ing. Prob­a­bly the most impor­tant way in which they aren’t is that they have (visu­ally) loud ads and other con­tent sur­round­ing them that pulls your eye and atten­tion away from read­ing. Another prob­lem is type set poorly, things like: type set too small or too large, type set in very wide columns so you con­stantly lose your place (espe­cially com­mon on printer-friendly pages), and poor con­trast between the type and the back­ground. I believe that these prob­lem are today best solved with Read­able. What Read­able offers is a book­marklet (a bit of Javascript dis­guised as a book­mark) that auto­mat­i­cally changes any page on the inter­net to exactly the for­mat­ting you’ve told it you want pages to have for read­ing. This con­cept first came from Read­abil­ity, but that has sub­se­quently become a far more feature-full and com­plex tool.

Finally, we need to tackle that tab over­load issue, because even as browsers get bet­ter at not los­ing such data they still do. And, as peo­ple get more and more pow­er­ful and mobile phones and tablets, keep­ing every­thing on your desk­top is ever less fea­si­ble. The best solu­tion I know of is to effec­tively out­source your tabs. Send all of them off to a book­mark­ing tool, be it deli­cious, Pin­board, nor­mal book­marks (with or with­out sync­ing), or a tool that’s purpose-built to han­dle all those arti­cles you want to read.

Instapa­per is what I use, but it’s opti­mized for an Apple-centric tech­ni­cal envi­ron­ment. It’s great if you want read arti­cles offline on an iPad or iPhone, but doesn’t have native clients for any other plat­form. Read­abil­ity, which was men­tioned ear­lier, is a more platform-agnostic alter­na­tive (by virtue of a web app) which offers the nice perk that you auto­mat­i­cally pass on a por­tion of your mem­ber­ship cost to the pub­lish­ers you most fre­quently use the ser­vice to read. (Though the fact the you’re pay­ing for mem­ber­ship is a non-trivial down­side.) Beyond those there are num­ber of other ser­vices built for this pur­pose, the most promi­nent of which is Read it Later. I have no expe­ri­ence or exper­tise at all with any of this last class.

I hope you now under­stand the impor­tance of the triple threat of the printer-friendly view, in-situ refor­mat­ter, and the reading-centric book­mark­ing ser­vice. Far more impor­tantly, I hope you’ve found a solu­tion to your most frus­trat­ing strug­gle in actu­ally read­ing all that great web-content you’re now finding.

For the unini­ti­ated, phrases like “Sub­scribe to this Blog”, “RSS feed”, and “Feed Reader” are just so much noise. So here’s a very short expla­na­tion: you use a “feed reader” to “sub­scribe” to a blog using its “RSS feed”. Make sense?

To use a slightly more ana­log story, you can think of this whole thing as a way to build a news­pa­per of your choos­ing. (That’s the feed reader.) You build this news­pa­per by choos­ing indi­vid­ual reporters who your like (RSS feeds), and then their con­tent is auto­mat­i­cally added to your news­pa­per every time they pro­duce it. This can be, as you might guess, a much bet­ter way to know what hap­pen­ing at the sites you care about than man­u­ally try­ing to check them at an inter­val you care about.

It’s prob­a­bly true, though I have no data on this, that RSS feeds are known to about 20% of inter­net users. And that among those 20%, about 80% use and enjoy them. That other 20% doesn’t like them for a vari­ety of rea­sons and so uses some­thing else.

In most cases, “some­thing else” means some type of book­marks sys­tem. The most com­mon form of this is a flat set of book­marks that you pick through and visit as it strikes your fancy. A slightly improved ver­sion of this is a sim­ple folder set where you reg­u­larly open the con­tents of your fold­ers into tabs. This can be fur­ther enhanced by break­ing down said fold­ers into the approx­i­mate fre­quency you want to visit the site, and then open­ing them on roughly this schedule.

The whole book­marks option is not use­less or totally fool­ish, but given the choice I don’t under­stand why any­one would choose it. RSS feeds are a clearly bet­ter solu­tion as they make it pos­si­ble for you to never miss any­thing, make it easy to save things to revisit at a bet­ter time, and can be made mas­sively flex­i­ble and mobile in a way that web­sites rarely are.

There were once other notable RSS read­ers, but today if you’re doing it you’re almost cer­tainly uti­liz­ing Google Reader in some way. If you refuse, there are other solu­tions that exist: many email client have RSS read­ers built-in, most browsers let you set up RSS fold­ers, and some stand­alone non-Google using clients exist. But because they’re so obscure and rarely used, I’m not going to explain them to you.

Google Reader is the best option for in-browser RSS brows­ing, and it’s an even bet­ter option if you like out-of-browser RSS brows­ing (because so many clients for smart­phones, tablets, and the desk­top use it for syn­chro­niza­tion). Beyond the fact that you’ll want a Google Reader account, there’s not much advice about tech­nol­ogy to give. If you find the browser ver­sion inad­e­quate you can find one of many clients for your desk­top, iPad, or Android phone. Any spe­cific rec­om­men­da­tions I may have about soft­ware are too plat­form spe­cific for me to feel they’ll be valu­able to share.

But as some­one who’s been using RSS feeds for about seven years, I have a rec­om­men­da­tion about man­ag­ing all that stuff that you’ll now find so easy to col­lect. All feeds can be under­stood as belong­ing to one of two cat­e­gories: Noise—content that you like brows­ing but rarely care to pay care­ful atten­tion to; for me this is things like The Awl, Giz­modo, and Boing Boing—and Signal—stuff you’ll be quite sad to miss items from; for me, things like I rec­om­mended yes­ter­day. This is the basic type of folder sys­tem I rec­om­mend set­ting up in Google Reader.

A lot of peo­ple choose to only have Sig­nal in their feed reader, and I do think that’s a valid way to deal with the very real dan­ger for gath­er­ing an over­whelm­ing vol­ume of stuff that feeds cre­ate. But over the last cou­ple years I’ve built a sys­tem that I think I pre­serves much of the serendip­ity that makes the inter­net such a mag­i­cal place but removes much of the too-much-stuff feel­ing that fre­quently goes along with it. My Sig­nal & Noise sys­tem also works great for read­ing on the go.

Regard­less of your feed vol­ume, I think you want to stick to less than 100 new items com­ing in as “Sig­nal” each day. This is the stuff that you most want to read, so keep it to a vol­ume that you can really give care­ful atten­tion. Sig­nal is also the stuff you’ll cut last when you’re low on time to check these things, and you don’t really want it at so high a vol­ume you have to cut it too.

Noise is your fail safe. When it all gets to feel like too much vol­ume, you can mark all that Noise as read and feel lit­tle con­cern because you know you rarely find light­ning in there. But to my mind, you can eas­ily go through more than 1000 “Noise” items a day and you won’t feel much pain. (Though if you do have that much vol­ume, I rec­om­mend you actu­ally have mul­ti­ple “Noise” fold­ers, divided by topic area.) The time you spend on your Noise should come out about equal to what you spend on Signal.

That’s because you can eas­ily “read” your Noise by rel­a­tively quickly glanc­ing past the head­lines and click­ing just the 20 or so that strike your inter­est. Sort­ing your Sig­nal should inher­ently be harder, as it’s got a rather large pro­por­tion of things that you like, want to read care­fully, and maybe even spend a week think­ing about.

A final note on this sys­tem: because of the amount of stuff I churn daily and the per­cent­age of time that I do it with­out an inter­net con­nec­tion (another advan­tage RSS has over web­sites) I per­son­ally find it use­ful to have an inter­me­di­ate folder. A “Noisy Sig­nal” folder of feeds that have between 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 items that I really care to see closely. That allows me to more eas­ily keep the inter­est­ing stuff I don’t have time to closely exam­ine while on the go together, for future exam­i­na­tion beside my Sig­nal folder. Whether or not that’s a valu­able idea for you I’ll not speculate.

To wrap up, RSS feeds are your friend if you have an inter­est in fol­low­ing more web­sites than you can check man­u­ally at sane inter­vals. They can over­whelm if you jump in too deep, or with­out enough prepa­ra­tion. But using the Sig­nal & Noise sys­tem, I see more than most peo­ple could even fathom on a daily basis, but it takes just a frac­tion of my time and energy. And any such advan­tage you can get, I rec­om­mend using.