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The Pleasures of Uninterrupted Communication

Thinkernet

My column on Interruptive Media versus Multitasking

My latest Thinkernet column is live: "The Pleasures of Uninterrupted Communication," about the difference between technologies that let us do a lot of things at once and those that interrupt us over and over again:

The mature information worker is someone who can manage his queues effectively, prioritizing and re-prioritizing as new items crop up, doing the fast-context-switching necessary to respond to an email while waiting for a file to download or a backup to complete. It's a little like spinning plates, and when you get the rhythm of it, it can be glorious. There's a zone you slip into, a zone where everything gets done, one thing after another clicking into place.

But once you add an interruptive medium like IM, unscheduled calls, or pop-up notifiers of mail, flow turns into chop. The buzz, blip, and snap of a thousand alerts turn plate-spinning into hell, as random firecrackers detonate over and over again, on every side of you, always there in your peripheral vision, blowing your capacity to manage your own queue as they rudely insert themselves into your attention.

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True Names, Part 03

Here's part three of the podcast reading of "True Names," the novella I co-wrote with Ben Rosenbaum. This week, it's me reading!

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I’m guest of honor at 3PiCon in West Springfield MA, Aug 22-24

I'm one of the guests of honor at this summer's Pi Con, the annual science fiction convention held Aug 22-24 in West Springfield, MA, appearing alongside of Randall Munroe, the creator of the brilliant geek webcomic XKCD. I'm really looking forward to this -- I've never met Randall and I'm an ardent admirer of his work. Discount registration is open until May 31.

This year Pi-Con, the convention located in the belly button of the universe (or more specifically, The Pioneer Valley) is lucky enough to have both Cory Doctorow and Randall Munroe as guests of honor.

Pi-Con has a lot to offer. We have a gaming (both table top and electronic), panels of all types (including virtual and pool panels) and flavors (from hard science to gaming, web comics to polyamory, and quite possibly everything in between), and vendors to fit all your geeky needs.

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True Names, Part 02

Here's part two of the podcast reading of "True Names," the novella I co-wrote with Ben Rosenbaum. This week, it's Ben reading!

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All my books on DailyLit in bite-sized chunks

DailyLit, the excellent free ebook-by-email service, has been putting a ton of my Creative Commons-licensed works online. DailyLit lets you subscribe to receive books in small, quickly-readable chunks every day. They started with my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and now they've got all my novels and short story collections and a couple of my uncollected stories, too!

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“Intellectual property” is a silly euphemism in Japanese

Yutaka has translated my Guardian column, "Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism into Japanese, under a Creative Commons license!

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True Names, Part 01

Here's the first installment of a podcast reading of a new novella that I co-wrote with Hugo- and Nebula-nominee Benjamin Rosenbaum. The story's a big, 32,000-word piece called "True Names" (in homage to Vernor Vinge's famous story of the same name), and it involves the galactic wars between vast, post-Singularity intelligences that are competing to corner the universe's supply of computation before the heat-death of the universe.

Ben and I will be reading the story in weekly installments, taking turns as our schedules allow. The reading is Creative Commons licensed -- Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial -- and the story itself will be published this fall in Fast Forward 2, Lou Anders' followup to his knockout 2007 anthology, Fast Forward (regular Boing Boing readers will remember Paul Di Filippo's Wikiworld story from that volume). Lou's given us permission to post the story's text simultaneous with the book's publication, under the same Creative Commons license.

I had a nearly illegal amount of fun working on this story with Ben, who is a gonzo comp-sci geek with a real flair for phrasing, and I hope you'll enjoy hearing it as much as we enjoyed writing it!

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17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You

Information Week

HOWTO Be blogged

Here's my latest InformationWeek column: "17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You." It's a checklist of the stuff that keeps me -- and many other bloggers -- from posting about sites. There are companies and causes out there spending their time and money trying to get people to talk about them online, while shooting themselves in the foot by not having permalinks (duh), by resizing your browser window (duh), or by having "linking policies" that seek to set out the circumstances under which you can link to them.

Have a link. Seriously: if you want bloggers to link to you, you need to have something linkable. Your upcoming TV show, protest march, product or soccer tournament is literally unbloggable unless you put it on the Web somewhere first.

Have a permanent link. Don't just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future, and not point to the upcoming address by Paris Hilton when you change it next week. Put up a separate, permanently linkable page for everything you want to get blogged.

Have a link for everything. Don't have a single page with ten items on it. Blogging a link to the top of your fifty-screen-long page with a blurb about something halfway down generates 200 e-mails from readers who can't find the referenced item.

Use real links. Don't have links with expiring session-keys that are no good if someone revisits the URL later. If a blogger can't send the URL to a friend or put it on the Web, then that blogger can't send people to go look at your stuff. Likewise, avoid the giant, 800-character gobbledegook URLs filled with junky alphabet-soup GUIDs -- if it can't be pasted into IRC without linebreaking, there's some group of compulsive communicators who'll be unable to get to it.

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