Ori has generously given me two copies to give away to y'all. So if you'd like a free copy of this great book, just drop a comment with an idea on how to market Sway online by Thursday July 24 at noon PT. I'll pick two and send you both copies of Sway! Easy peasy :)

It's thus difficult to reminisce because a) you probably have thousands of photos, and b) they're out of sight on a hard drive or in the cloud somewhere, and thus out of mind.

Today, I just found out that my friend Amit, who runs the excellent photo newsletter Photojojo, just launched a brilliant product called Time Capsule.

Time Capsule remedies both the too-many-photos and out-of-mind problems by hooking into Flickr and emailing you some of the most interesting pictures you uploaded to Flickr a year ago.

TC also lets you leave a message for yourself that it will send to you in a year.

Time Capsule makes you feel really good because you're reminded of old memories when you see your year-old photographs. It's an intensely intimate and useful service that is too rare these days. Any time you can help your customers feel good when they use your service, you're sure to have a winner. In the first TC email I got, I was reminded of a fantastic trip I took to Napa last year and it brought up warm memories of drinking great wine, eating great food, and playing cards with great friends.

If you have a Flickr account, sign up for Time Capsule here -- I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Happy New Year!

Santa Monica, CA*
San Francisco, CA*
Napa, CA
Bangkok, Thailand*
Maenam, Koh Samui, Thailand*
Thong Nai Pan Yai, Koh Phangan, Thailand*
Dallas, TX
Austin, TX
Cambridge, MA
Lexington, MA*
Vancouver, BC
New York, NY*
Southington, CT
West Hartford, CT
Greenwich, CT
Toronto, ON*
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Oguinquit, ME
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And isn't being Happy what it's all about?

People are starting to optimize for time, not happiness because more money does not mean more happiness:

Since World War II the gross domestic product per capita has tripled in the United States. But people's sense of well-being, as measured by surveys asking some variation of "Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?," has barely budged. Japan has had an even more meteoric rise in GDP per capita since its postwar misery, but measures of national happiness have been flat, as they have also been in Western Europe during its long postwar boom, according to social psychologist Ruut Veenhoven of Erasmus University in Rotterdam. A 2004 analysis of more than 150 studies on wealth and happiness concluded that "economic indicators have glaring shortcomings" as approximations of well-being across nations, wrote Ed Diener of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Martin E. P. Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania. "Although economic output has risen steeply over the past decades, there has been no rise in life satisfaction … and there has been a substantial increase in depression and distrust."

So what's the secret to living a happy life? Close relationships, a sense of meaning, and belonging:

once your basic needs are met "differences in well-being are less frequently due to income, and are more frequently due to factors such as social relationships and enjoyment at work." Other researchers add fulfillment, a sense that life has meaning, belonging to civic and other groups, and living in a democracy that respects individual rights and the rule of law. If a nation wants to increase its population's sense of well-being, says Veenhoven, it should make "less investment in economic growth and more in policies that promote good governance, liberties, democracy, trust and public safety."

These are true things, and there's a growing demand for helping people find Happiness, even if it means having less money. Consider:

• I know people who've left high-paying jobs to pursue passions and make a LOT less money. Being one of them, it's ludicrous to even think about going back
• The explosive success of books like The Four-Hour Work Week, which show you how to follow your passions now
• The rise of positive psychology. Researchers study factors that make people happy. Contrast this with traditional psychology research, which is obsessed with pathology. Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness, and Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, are two respected positive psychologists that you should know about
• Sites like The Experience Project and 43 Things are amazing places to find people who can help you follow your passions, and people like Steve Pavlina help you find happiness by "achieving your highest potential"

If you're reading this post, time is the most scarce and thus most valuable currency you have. You can always earn money. I'm constantly reminded of this by my business partner Jon, who is willing to pay $10 / hour for Craigslisters to do pretty much any task he doesn't want to do, so he can focus on things he considers fun and high-value.

So instead of wasting time making money that won't make you happy (if it *does* make you Happy, by all means, ignore this), pay attention the Dan Gilbert's findings. Gilbert says that humans are actually quite bad at predicting what makes them happy. For example, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy a year after their life-changing incidents. So, instead of assuming that more money, or a nicer car, or a fancier office will make you happy, think about the close relationships you have, how you derive meaning from work and play, and what groups or communities you belong to. And then immerse yourself in them.

Actually, immerse yourself *after* you watch this TED Talk by Gilbert...

First, if you've ever wanted to punch your computer after using unfriendly enterprise expense reporting applications like SAP, check out Parand's new app, XPenser. You can record your expenses by SMS, voice, or email, and it's nice and easy to use. It's part of a new wave of customer-friendly money-management apps like Wesabe and Mint.

Second, Charlie O'Donnell is taking readers inside his new startup, Path101 (seriously: here's a presentation about their business). He wants to reach folks at LinkedIn about their upcoming API, and offers thoughts on how Path101 would use the LinkedIn API here. What they're doing is smart: using their blog and networks to have a discussion on what would be useful to them as LinkedIn developers. Head on over and join the discussion if the topic interests you!

It's called PickyDomains.com.

It's awesome because for $50 it helps you find an unregistered domain name that fits your criteria. So if you want to find a domain that's max 10 characters long, letters only (no numbers, dashes, or other punctuation), and describes a social network for goldfish, they'll be able to help you. Here's how it works.

1. Create an account, pay $50, and provide description of the domain name you're looking for.

2. This is sent to the PickyDomains contributors.

3. Let the domain names roll in.

4. Pick one.

That's it! When you register one, $25 goes to the domain namer, and $25 goes to Picky Domains.

And the best part--if you don't register one, you get your money back! Freaking risk-free!

I'm taking advantage of their "plug us on your blog, get a free name once" service, but the real reason I'm plugging Picky Domains is because it's a really smart, well-executed, and valuable service. Heartily recommended!

So I figured I'd put together an event that would let me do so.

Thanks to Amit, I connected with the rad folks who do Facebook Platform Evangelism, who are going to come down to LA to present on the platform, answer technical questions, talk about best practices, viral distribution, hang out, etc.

Basically it's going to be a bunch of geeks getting together to hack on the Facebook Platform. Build an app, share ideas, collaborate, check out app demos, get dev support from Facebook Developers, etc. It'll be a full twelve hours of hacky Facebook goodness.

This will have a Barcampy-vibe, so come ready to share, participate, and absorb new ideas along with other Facebook app developers.

Attendance will be capped, so please only RSVP if you're serious about attending and building on the platform!

(And if you'd like to help out with organizing, please drop me a line!)

Here's the summary:

What: Hack on / learn about the Facebook Platform
Why: Why not?
When: Saturday July 28, noon to midnight
Where: TBD
Register here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2405728519

The last conference was about Community, and this one is about marketing through viral means. I used to think that "viral" was an over-used term until my buddy Otis sat me down and explained to me how he tested viral features and measured virality. So this is a conference that's focusing on stuff any entrepreneur should be thinking about. I'm pretty excited for it, hope to see you there!

Here are the details:

CommunityNext - Viral

When: Saturday, July 14, 2007, 9a PT - 4:45p PT

Where:
Plug and Play Tech Center
440 N. Wolfe Road
Sunnyvale, CA 94085

• Schedule is here
• Register here

Here's a video of a panel with guys from Fark, PlentyOfFish, HotOrNot, Slide, Suicide Girls, and a couple others from the last conference that may whet your appetite for Viral. (I really like how Noah went outside of the stupid valley echo chamber to get really interesting entrepreneurs to speak.)

Founder's Panel (MP3 here)

Lex just had a not-awesome customer experience at a Best Western here in Santa Monica, which you should read if you're interested in how not to provide a good customer experience (hint: it involves bedbugs). Lex's experience illustrates how it's often a terrible response to a bad customer service incident that can make the situation 100x worse.

Speaking of poor experiences, I've had it with Movable Type. I'll be switching this blog over to Wordpress in the next little while, and will write about the experience if it's more challenging than I expect.

So, I need someone to crawl the set of Reemer.com individual archive files I have on my HD, and assemble one giant text file comprising all the link blog entries on the site. Should be relatively easy to do, but I don't have the time to figure it out right now.

I'm happy to pay / give you a shout out. Anybody out there able to help a brother out (blog at reemer dot com)?

Oh, and once I'm done here, I've had enough of MT and am switching to Wordpress. It's been five lovely years, MT... but welcome to dumpsville. Population: you.

I know you'll understand, because I'm really passionate about it.

It's called HiddenMojo, and it's about how to unleash the passion and energy that your company is probably unwittingly suppressing in your employees.

I can't tell you how many people I've talked with who have said something like "if only the company would get out of its way, my team could make it X more dollars!" HiddenMojo is about improving the employee experience to improve business metrics.

We've been writing it somewhat under the radar, but now HiddenMojo has been picked up by Fast Company (page 37 of the Zuckerberg issue):

The funny (sad?) part is that neither Eric nor I work for the companies mentioned in the article any longer. Fast Company, indeed.

So if you're not interested in paying lip service to talent being your company's #1 resource, but are more interested in actually doing stuff to keep your talented people and help them kick ass, head on over to HiddenMojo.

I started and finished this book in the two hours I spent on the runway at JFK while waiting for the United co-pilot to arrive (he was, in the words of the captain "stuck in traffic." Talk about the opposite of a Good Experience, United!)

Anyways, Hurst has thought deeply about managing bits. In an era when we're all overwhelmed with massive amounts of data from many different sources (TiVo, email, RSS, voice mail, newspapers, magazines, photos, videos... exhausted yet?) Hurst points out that it's only going to get worse. In a few years, he says, mobile-phone video cameras will have the capacity to record your every waking moment. Being the "busy man" who's always on his Blackberry managing his bits barely scales now, and it won't scale when your Nokia is gathering data on every second of your life.

So what's the solution?

Bit Literacy is a set of principles Hurst has developed to manage incoming data. It's not more complicated technology, but a strategy for dealing with data.

In the book, Hurst talks about managing to-dos, email, and photos, naming files, using appropriate file types, how to store files, how to structure an email, current bit-literate tools, and the future of bit literacy.

Let me preface this by saying that I've played with, but never gotten into Getting Things Done. David Allen's system never seemed to mesh with how I work, perhaps because it seemed more complicated than it needed to be with its contexts, projects, and other task metadata. That, and there never seemed to be an easy way to get a task into my GTD system from email, which is the nerve center of most peoples' work life.

The core of Hurst's current task management system is his web tool, GooTodo. I beta tested GooTodo back in the day, but it was never clear how the system would make my life easier. I had the benefit of attending his ETech talk last year, though, and it made a lot more sense afterwards. The core of Hurst's philosophy is to let the bits go. What he means by this is to keep your inbox clean, and to defer tasks until they're due, using a simple and effective tool. He designed GooTodo to be that tool.

The Bit Literacy system breaks a task into four phases:

1. Creation occurs when a user creates a task (duh)
2. Inactivity is the period between when a task is created and when it needs to be acted on (example: email Sarah next week about increasing whoopee cushion order)
3. Activation occurs when the todo is available to be completed, and
4. Completion is when the todo has been completed and checked off as such

Most todo lists miss the Inactivity stage--they'll show all todos on one list, regardless of when they're due, and thus prevent you from letting the bits go. A bit literate tool like GooTodo, on the other hand, allows you to focus on what's important by showing you today's tasks only, and hiding tasks with future due dates. The psychological benefit of knowing that you can focus on what's due today, and let tomorrow's deferred tasks pop up tomorrow, is huge. Out of sight means out of mind. The value of a tool that organizes itself around this principle shoudn't be underestimated when you're dealing with hundreds of todos (as most of us are).

I really love that getting emails out of my inbox and into GooTodo is super simple. You just forward the email to a gootodo email address depending on when you want the task to appear. Any of saturday@gootodo.com, may13@gootodo.com, and t90 (90 days from now) work, along with the variations that you'd expect (monday@gootodo..., tuesday, mar24, oct31, t4, t283, etc).

After a determined effort to answer the 100+ Important emails waiting for me when I got back from NYC, I can truly say that using GooTodo has made me more productive, and more importantly, happier. I am able to focus on the Important instead of the Urgent, can comfortably close GMail for a couple of hours to focus on getting stuff done, and have had a zero inbox at least once a day since I cleared out my emails on Monday. The painful part is going through the emails sitting in your inbox, but once you're through that, using GooTodo has made me much happier managing incoming email than anything else I've tried.

And while I've briefly romped in the hay with GooTodo before, I'm more confident this flirtation will turn into a full-blown relationship. There's nothing like entrepreneurship to instill a little more discipline.

Without reading the book or seeing Hurst talk, it's difficult to grasp how to use GooTodo to be more productive. GooTodo.com could benefit from a "how-to" screencast and a more informative marketing page if they want to reach the consumer market. The GooTodo interface could use a little ajaxification to make the system more snappy (particularly when re-ordering and re-dating tasks), but the principles and execution are sound. And I can already picture how a bit literate email client or contact management system could work (anybody who's developing productivity software, read this book!)

Task management aside, Bit Literacy provides some good ideas on managing other bitstreams. If you're a geek, some of the book is skimmable, but there are some real gems. I found the chapter on organizing the filesystem to be particularly useful.

I highly recommend Bit Literacy. It's a quick, insightful read on a topic that has the potential to make you significantly happier the day you finish reading it. How many books have you read recently can deliver on that promise?

You can buy Bit Literacy from Amazon here.

BarcampLA v3.0 is happening this weekend, back for the third time at the rad Little Radio Warehouse. [map]

I'm not involved in putting it together, but it's amazing to see that rad people like Heather, Crystal, Jason, and Jennifer have been infected with the Barcampy spirit and have decided to make it happen. It's a sign of a truly healthy geek community here in LA that none of the original organizers are involved and the event is still going strong with new organizers, new sponsors, and a whole bunch of new names on the attendee list.

If you don't know, Barcamp is

...an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

All attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one. All presentions are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

It's a great atmosphere to meet really interesting people in LA, and the conversations are almost always intense and thought-provoking.

So check it out if you're a geek in LA, on or your way down to ETech in San Diego next week.

What
BarcampLA 3.0

When
Saturday, March 24, 2007 - starts at 10am
Sunday, March 25, 2007 - ends at 7pm

Where
Little Radio Warehouse
1218 Long Beach Ave
Los Angeles, California 9002
Map

'Tis true. It's a day to celebrate companies that are run democratically and are built around principles like transparency, decentralization, accountability, and choice.

And in the spirit of the day, my friend Traci over at WorldBlu announced the results of their search for the List of Most Democratic Workplaces (full disclosure: I am on WorldBlu's advisory board.)

34 companies from the US, Canada, Russia, and Holland made the list, including Great Harvest Bread Company, GE Aviation’s Durham Engine Facility, Honest Tea, 1-800-GOT-JUNK, Linden Labs, the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Threadless, and Zaadz.

Some of the practices from companies on the list are awesome (paraphrasing the press release):

• At Linden Labs, key financial data is openly shared in real-time on giant flat-screen TVs, employees are encouraged to chose their own work rather than be told by someone else what to do, and they show their appreciation for one another by “sending love” through their “Love Machine” software (more on their democratic culture on their blog)
• The Grammy-award winning Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in NYC is completely conductorless, rotating leadership amongst orchestra members.
• At Equal Exchange, the employee-owners elect their Board of Directors and hold six of the nine seats.
• GE Aviation’s Durham Engine Facility is flat, with just one Plant Manager for 260 employees.

I haven't written much about democracy in the workplace here yet, but I believe that we are about to see some significant change in the way businesses are organized and run. Counterproductive hierarchy and fascism in business are remnants of the industrial age. It's companies like those on the list that are riding technological advances and cultural change to build agile, fun, and profitable businesses that will thrive in the democratic age.

If you're interested in learning more about democratic workplaces, head over to Worldblu and check the list of Democratic Workplaces!