I’ve been very interested in thinking of clever ways to help myself and other people avoid digital sharecropping. Especially with the recent hoopla around SOPA.

The problem I have with the term Digital Sharecropper is that it represents the negative behavior. We talk about how Facebook and Twitter is turning us into digital sharecroppers but what is the alternative?

Obviously the desired behavior is for people to own their own content and their method for distribution, but what do we call it?

I nominate the term “Digital Decentralism” to be the antonym of “Digital Sharecropping” and therefore “Digital Decentralist” will be the antonym of “Digital Sharecropper”.

It has a nice alliteration going for it, it contains digital to show it’s relationship to digital sharecropping. Not to mention decentralization is a key part of the solution to SOPA style policies.

What do you think? Does digital decentralism capture the essence of what we’re trying to accomplish? Is it sexy enough? Can you think of something better? I think this is going to be a big issue in 2012. We need to get a term to rally behind.

At Brazen Careerist where I work we’re having a series of posts by Brazen employees with tips about how they got ahead in their careers.  My post about starting a group was just posted today.  Check it out.

Rock-It at Work: Start a Group

Today I came across a wikipedia page about the Seven Blunders of the World which was a list created by Gandhi.  As I went through them one particularly stuck with me.  That was “Knowledge without Character” particularly because knowledge is something I strive for.  The problem was although I had a sense in my gut about what character was, I wasn’t sure specifically.  Furthermore I wasn’t sure if I have character.

Of course that question led me to the page on Moral Character which describe character as:

Moral character or character is an evaluation of a particular individual’s durable moral qualities.

It is a test of proper behavior and determining what is right and wrong.

So now the questions is what does it mean to be moral?  I’ve always considered myself a consequentialist which has led some people with differing beliefs to think of me as having questionable morals.  The interesting thing is that through my research I came up with two other approaches to morality.

Deontological Ethics are rule based morality.  Something is right or wrong.  Growing up Catholic I have a lot of experience with this one.  This one doesn’t jive with me because it leaves open the question of “who writes the rules?” Of course religious people would have an answer to that question, but that leaves me something to be desired.

Virtue Ethics gets a little more tricky because that article leads with the definition:

Virtue ethics describes the character of a moral agent as a driving force for ethical behaviour, rather than rules (deontology) or consequentialism, which derives rightness or wrongness from the outcome of the act itself rather than character.

Which leads to the meta answer of “Having character means being moral and being moral means having character” although a later example seems to slightly clarify:

As such, lying would be made in a case-by-case basis that would be based on factors such as personal benefit, group benefit, and intentions (as to whether they are benevolent or malevolent).

So now I’m not really sure where to go from here.  What are your thoughts on character and morality?

Recently I’ve been reading the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck and it’s really making me think.  According to the official website:

In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong.

In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities.

Of course when I read those descriptions I think “Well I’m clearly operating with a growth mindset” since I know that any skill can be developed and if you work hard at something you can do amazing things.  However as I go through the book and she goes over examples of people in similar situations where one is operating with a fixed mindset and the other with a growth mindset I’m starting to wonder if I may be subconsciously operating within the fixed mindset.

One part that really resonated with me when when they mentioned that someone with the fixed mindset “depended too much on his talent instead of hard work” and I realized that’s like me.  I haven’t had to challenge myself for a long time and when faced with something difficult, I frequently procrastinate, preferring to work on projects that come easily to me.  Heck, even when I play video games I don’t last very long before I go looking for the walk-through.

Thankfully I don’t show all the negative traits of the fixed-minded people in the book.  Many of them are very defensive and arrogant, where I’m typically self-deprecating.  But even my self-deprecating attitude can be linked to the fixed mindset.  If I’m self deprecating and people don’t expect much from me then when I do something well they are impressed.

So one of my goals moving forward will be to see what I can do to transition to a more growth oriented mindset.  I should not shy away from things that are challenging and I shouldn’t be afraid to put myself out there. It was a good thing for me when I shipped my TwitOPML app, everybody seemed really happy with it.  Now I should try to one-up myself and ship something more challenging.

The first step in solving a problem is to identify the problem.  I’ve done that, now I have to do something about it.

I’ve been working as part of the blork community lately.  What is a blork?  It’s basically a decentralized Twitter like app that runs on RSS.  You post status updates that get posted to your RSS Feed, then you follow other RSS feeds.  The problem? RSS is not particularly user friendly.  You have to find the RSS feed, copy the URL and paste it into your RSS aggregator. Some sites make it easier, like with Dave’s blork software you just copy a little bookmarklet into your toolbar and when you find a site you want to follow you just click the bookmarklet and it takes you to your blork with the url filled in.

One reason Twitter and Facebook have become so popular is that it’s so easy to follow people.  You just click the follow button and you’re done.  How could we make it that easy for blorks while still keeping it decentralized?  This is where OPML comes in.

OPML is in it’s generic sense a format for outlines, however it’s also used for RSS subscription lists.  Unfortunately there aren’t too many RSS aggrigators that let you subscribe to a live OPML list.  Instead you typically import a list which defeats much of the power of this technology.  Fortunately Dave’s blork software supports subscribing to a live OPML list.

What if we had a service that worked like this:

1. You sign up and get an OPML subscription list and instructions on how to put this URL into your blork.
2. Websites could put a “follow” button on their site that works as easily as a Like or Tweet This button.
3. When you click that button you’re communicating with the site you signed up with and it adds the feed to your OPML subscription list.
4. Since  your blork is subscribed to your OPML list, you’re not automatically subscribed to the site you’re following.

There is no reason why we couldn’t have more then one of these services.  Maybe there could even be a way they could play nice with each other.  They would also have to have a bookmarklet like on Dave’s blork so you could somewhat easily follow blogs that don’t have the follow button.  There could also be browser plugins that make this even easier for people.

I still think this process will be too complicated for the average user but this is an interesting place to start thinking of a solution.

Today I shipped a little app of mine called TwitOPML.  I’m now freaked out.  What if a ton of people start using it?  What if nobody uses it?  I shot an e-mail about it to the EC2 for Poets mailing list, so most likely somebody will try it out.  In fact I pretty much developed the app for the members of that list.

The list is for people trying out Dave Winer’s new “Blork” software.  It’s an app that does microblogging and RSS aggregation.  It’s sort of a Twitter replacement.  You subscribe to peoples RSS feeds, you post status updates to your own RSS feed, it’s cool.  One thing you can do is subscribe to an OPML subscription list which is just a list of RSS feeds.  This way feeds can be added and removed from the list without you having to manage it on your end.

What my app does is you sign in with Twitter and from there you can generate OPML subscription lists for your friends, followers and any twitter lists you’ve created or subscribed to.  It’s a neat little app.  Now I wait for praise or criticism.

I previously railed against the trend of digital sharecropping in my post Giving Up On Web Ownership. The task of taking ownership of your digital identity can be very difficult when you try to replicate the functionality of all the different sites you might use.

Trying to create owned versions of Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Delicious, Flickr and all of the other places where you have a presence could easily be a full time job. Who has the time?

This is where the concept of Data Minimalism comes into play. First try to figure out which of these sites actually add value to your life. If you really think about it, most of them are just noise. Now you have a shorter list. How can you replicate this yourself? I bet you can migrate most of these use cases into one or two sites that you manage.

If you already have a blog, how about you set up special categories for Twitter and Facebook? I’m sure there is a way to automatically tweet everything in a category. WordPress can do pretty nice photo galleries too, that should be able to replace Flickr. Maybe there is even a way to publish your WordPress galleries to Flickr?

I’m going to take a look and see what I can do to make this easier. I have a couple ideas in the pipeline. If you want to find out when I get these things published just sign up for my free newsletter in the sidebar and I’ll shoot you an email as things progress.

Today’s episode of Rebooting The News Jay was out of town so Dave had on Adam Curry and yours truly!  I wish I could say I was invited to be a guest, but Dave was just taking calls and picked me.  On the show I talk about my work trying to use WordPress as a microblog platform.  It’s an interesting show, but if you want to skip directly to my part jump to 31:45.

Here’s the MP3.

On Friday I discovered that my ’96 Buick LeSabre was dripping gasoline. I take it into the shop and find out they need to replace the fuel line. The gas tank may have to be replaced as well, but they won’t know until they take it out. There are also problems with my breaks and a couple of leaking seals. Needless to say, it’s going to cost me thousands of dollars to fix. Not worth it, the car only cost me about $9,000 to begin with.

I’m about to embark on an adventure. I’m going to try going without a car for a while. This isn’t the first time I’ve gone without a car. The last time I was when I was living in CA. I had picked my apartment specifically with the knowledge that I wouldn’t have a car. I was within a few blocks of a mall and the Caltrain. I only lived 2 miles from my job, so I walked every day. This will be different.

When I bought my condo I had a car. My condos Walk Score is 23 compared to my CA apartment score of 80.  The only store I can easily walk to is the Super Walmart 1.8 miles down the street.  I have a bike, so that improves my range, but I don’t really like biking.  That leaves the bus.

I have never ridden a bus in Madison.  I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out, but it’s an unknown.  There is a bus stop down the street from my house, but if I want to go downtown I’ll have to transfer at some point.  I’m not sure where that happens.  Regardless I’m going to have to start factoring a lot more travel time into my schedule.

Right now three days a week I go to my gym downtown.  I work from home until about 20 minutes before my session, drive there, workout, drive back.  Now my commute will be closer to an hour.  I can’t just take off 3 hours from work in order to take a bus to the gym, workout and bus back.  I’ll either have to schedule my sessions at a different time, like in the evenings. Or I’ll have to bus downtown before work, work from a coffee shop, go to the gym then back to the coffee shop after the workout.  I’m waiting to hear more details about some coworking spaces popping up in Madison that might be an option.

Either way, this will be interesting.  I really don’t like owning a car so I’m hoping that I can figure out a way to make this work. Stay tuned!

After my post on Friday about Giving Up on Web Ownership a couple people pinged me asking how they would go about publishing to Twitter, without publishing in Twitter.  Dave Winer is working on the problem with his minimal blogging tool but I was thinking… why can’t we do this with WordPress?  So today I’m going to walk you through the steps necessary to create your own WordPress based microblog that publishes to Twitter.

This is going to be a higher level tutorial.  I’m not going to walk you through installing WordPress or how to install a themes and plugins as there are plenty of places that describe this process.  Many hosting companies like DreamHost have a one click install that make the process super simple.  Ping me if you’re having trouble.

Step 1: Install P2 Theme

The first thing to do is make the site look and behave like a microblog.  Do this by installing the P2 theme which is provided by Automattic, the same company that is behind WordPress.  It’s also available on WordPress.com if you’re not interested in hosting your own blog.

Step 2a: Install a Twitter Plugin

There are many plugins that will allow you to publish your posts to twitter.  I tested a bunch of them but only found two that worked.  The one I’d recommend right now is Twitter Blog which was pretty easy to set up.

To get Twitter Blog configured, you need to connect to your Twitter account using OAuth.  This is as easy as clicking the “Sign In With Twitter” button in the settings page.  It also seems to require a bit.ly account and API key.  I already had an account, and getting the key was as straight forward as going into the bit.ly settings page and copying and pasting it into the Twitter Blog settings page.

The only problem I’ve found with using a twitter plugin is that they all seem to tweet the title and url.  Since we’re posting a status update without a title, WordPress automatically creates one that is the body truncated to 40 characters.  Therefore your tweets are just the first 40 characters and a link back to your status update.  Not ideal, but not the end of the world.

Step 2b: Use TwitterFeed

If you don’t want to use a Twitter plugin or can’t (like on WordPress.com) head over to TwitterFeed and register the RSS feed from your site.  It can check your feed every 30 minutes and post for you a max of 5 tweets at a time.  Obviously if you are going to post more then 5 tweets every 30 minutes, you’re going to have to go with a plugin.  If you go this route, be sure to select “Description Only” for Post Content under Advanced Settings so you can get around the truncated post title issue.

Summary

At the end of the day, while this is certainly better then nothing, there is work to be done.  I’ll do some more research and maybe write a plugin or two that makes this a seamless experience.  It seems like we’re really close to a solution.

Update: Check out my WordPress microblog at http://status.andrewshell.org/