Originally written January 4, 2004 @ 8:30 p.m.

The other night I was standing in my living room eating Swedish fish and pondering life in a post-Buffy universe when it struck me that I am, for once in my life, very alone in the world.

Being alone doesn’t bother me as much as it might bother some people: I am an introvert. I often thrive on being alone. I don’t mind spending long stretches just reading a book or noodling around on some project around the house. That’s not to say I’m antisocial. I like to talk to people and hear about their lives, to go out and participate in the clockwork business of the world, and so on. But I don’t crave constant sociality like some people; I need extended time away in the private, quiet sphere to process and recuperate. I would last longer than most on a desert isle.

Nevertheless, I felt a certain despair at my realization of loneliness. It’s not that I don’t have friends, and it’s not that there aren’t people looking out for me. I actually have a great relationship with my parents, for example, something of an anomaly among people my age. But they and my closest friends are all at distances measured by states, not towns. It’s different, too, from when I lived in Europe, because even though the distances then were continents, I knew it was temporary. Now I’m moving on with the living of life — and so is everyone else — and there’s really no telling when I’ll be close to the people who really matter most, except at the kinds of holidays when one eats turkey. Of course we keep in touch; it’s so effortless in a modern world of cell phones and email.

It’s not loneliness, precisely. It’s being alone in a sort of grand, macroscopic sense. What I really am lacking is the kind of relationship where I’m attached at the hip with another person. I have no best friend. Or rather, I have a best friend (or two or three), but not one who is here, to whom I can turn at the end of every day for comfortable conversation, with whom I can spend the banal moments of life. There’s no one I automatically expect to hang out with when Friday night rolls around.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled. Maybe not very many people are so lucky as to have such a person, such a relationship, whereas I have had several, and am only now sent forth into this desert world where the shifting sands leave nothing certain, not even Friday night plans.

It’s hard to believe it’s been six years since I moved to Pittsburgh. I am grateful and humbled to have found some life friends here, and a city I love.

I originally wrote this to pitch as a magazine article last year, then never really did anything with it. Seems apropos for this time of year on the blog.

There are relatively few occasions any more that call for putting a card in an envelope, stamping it, and writing out an address. With the ubiquity of email, instant messaging, and other communications technology, it seems like the only things that come in the snail mail are bills and junk — that is, except for fancy invitations and holiday cards. These celebrations call for something a little old-fashioned and formal, and a card in the mail is just the thing.

But while you’ll probably send out to the pros — a print shop or a calligrapher — for your commitment ceremony invites and the like, most of us will be sending our own cards this Christmas, Hanukah, Festivus, or whatever holidays you’re choosing to celebrate. You’ll have fun going to the store to pick out cute little cards with snowmen, or something with a dirty picture on the front, or some sassy stationery. You’ll scrawl a little note, or send a newsletter that extensively details your life over the last year, or just write “Happy Holidays,” whatever is your personal style. You’ll put it in an envelope to send to friends and family, and then — well, what goes on the envelope is where the problems start.

Do you know how to write out an address properly? You might consult a style guide for a little direction, but consider this your warning: Miss Manners may not be entirely up to speed on modern gay life. Problem is, these style guides were written with 1952 in mind. Nice young ladies and gentlemen lived at home with their parents until they married someone of the opposite sex and moved out on their own.

“Mr. and Mrs. John Doe,” is all well and good for your married, straight friends, but it doesn’t begin to cover all the possibilities. Sure, there’s some advice for handling wives who didn’t take their husbands’ last names, and even for the cohabiting, unmarried straights. But what do you do with your married gay friends in Massachusetts? The husband’s name comes first, but when there are two husbands — well, what then?

What about domestic partners or the “civilly unioned”? It seems unfair to treat them as mere cohabiters simply because they can’t technically be married. And no doubt somewhere on your address list there’s the real problem family — the four-way lesbian commune, the master and his slave, or the transgendered F2M and her/his ex-husband who are now back together as life partners.

Pondering all this might be enough to make you inclined put the cards back on the shelf and skip the exercise entirely. But don’t give up hope. Remember that the point of the holiday spirit is to connect with friends and family, so don’t sweat the etiquette — just do what seems right. Getting that card in the mail from you is sure to brighten someone’s season.

From us to your family, however you address yourselves — Happy Holidays.

My two new(ish) favorite online tools:

• Amazon’s Universal Wishlist — lets you add listings from any store to your Amazon wishlist. It’s just a bookmarklet you can add to your browser, and it does a pretty good job at grabbing the price and product picture from the page (and you can manually adjust if necessary). I’ve always loved the Amazon wishlists, but now that you can save things from any web store, they’re even better.

• TripIt — forward your confirmation emails for flights, hotels, etc. and it builds an agenda for you. It includes all your trip details like times and dates and confirmation numbers, plus maps, weather, links to check in to your flights, check flight status, seating charts for the planes… Best of all, it has a great iPhone-optimized mobile site. This is super handy, because now I don’t have to look through my email to find my confirmation numbers and things like that, and with all the travel I’ve been doing lately, I’ve found it really useful.

My dad is a carpenter. He’s been doing it for a long time.

Most of the things I know about building stuff come from him, and my grandfather. And, I’ve read a fair number of books and magazine articles and watched plenty of episodes of This Old House and whatnot.

I’m a pretty handy guy, and a pretty intelligent one, too. But inevitably, when it comes to building something, it takes me at least twice as long as it would for my dad. Most of that time goes into planning — I have to plan everything out, really carefully, before I go ahead and do it. (”Measure twice, cut once” and all that.)

Of course, this is no big surprise; he’s been at it for far longer than I have. But exactly why this is, what it is that he does or knows that I don’t, took me a long time to figure out. It’s not that he doesn’t plan ahead — of course he does; he has to. I get that from him. It’s that, unlike me, he has enough experience to know how to proceed in a way that he can make adjustments on the fly. He doesn’t have to plan everything out completely. He has to plan just enough, in just the right way so the next bit can adjust for what wasn’t quite right in this one.

This applies to making all kinds of things. With my mom, when she helped me re-cover my couch. She’ll freely admit she’s no master reupholsterer, but she’s done it far more often than I have. I would have had to plan for hours to get it all right. She just made a few measurements, started cutting up fabric, and forged ahead. She said, “Don’t backstitch at the ends of the seams in case we decide to rip them out and do it differently.”

I find this when I’m helping people cook. I’m a fair cook and so are some of my friends, but there are others who are afraid to chop vegetables or boil water. They’re paranoid about recipes and following things to the exact letter, and stress out when something isn’t explained to death. After you’ve cooked for a while like I have, though, you learn to adapt. Don’t have some particular ingredient? No biggie, we’ll subsitute something. Or maybe it’s not really vital to the dish at all. But without experience, these things are really hard to know.

It’s really humbling to work alongside someone who really knows what they’re doing. Their experience is crucial. Reading about how to do something, imagining how to do it, planning out how it will be done — these are all helpful to the novice, but they are no substitute, in any quantity, for the experience. There is a qualitative distinction between the two.

I haven’t written in a loooong time. Mostly because I don’t really know what to write about here any more.

This blog used to be a lot about libraries and other information-y topics. But I’m no longer in library school, I don’t work in a library, and I blog about the things I do professionally (web analytics) at my company blog.

So I’ve sort of been stuck, unsure what to do with this space. A redesign is tempting, but that’s really just a way to play with PHP templates instead of actually producing something. Lots of changes have also happened for me over the last few months, which is something in the way of an excuse for not writing. I’ve been in the same kind of place Merlin Mann describes about his blog. And, in his terminology, I need to give myself permission to “drive around the buffalo” — that is, just forget about what it’s all “supposed” to be and start writing stuff.

So that’s what I’m going to do. What will I post here? I’m not sure. Essays, fiction, I’ve got some stuff that could go here, just hasn’t because it didn’t seem to fit right. But, to hell with “fit.” I’m just going to do it and see what happens.

More soon.

Before I left my last job, a colleague asked me to impart whatever wisdom I had. Here’s what I said.

Being a Consultant

Everything I know about consulting can be summed up in the following:

1. Listen to your customers.
2. Understand your customers.
3. Be their trusted advisor.

Listen to your customers. A consultant’s #1 skill is listening. If you can’t listen to your customers explain their problems and needs, you won’t get anywhere. I’ve worked with others who, because they’re consultants, think they already know what the customer needs before the customer has a chance to describe it. It is, after all, the consultant’s job to know what to do; that’s why people hire us in the first place. But this approach is wrong-headed for a couple of reasons. First, “what to do” is highly dependent on what the problem is. Without listening to what makes this customer special, it’s hard to say off the bat what’s right for their situation. Second, listening to the customer gives them confidence in you. They see that you take them and their problems seriously. And finally, often people just really like to get their problems off their chest. When you give them a friendly ear, they unload, and they feel relieved already just because somebody is listening to them, even if you haven’t done anything yet.

Understand your customers. So you have to be a great listener. But the next step is taking what you hear and figuring out what to do about it. This is where the “consultant” part comes into play — your special expertise, the reason people hire you instead of doing it themselves. You need to understand their problems as if they were your own and apply your expertise to give them workable solutions. And by “solution”, I mean the whole deal — not just a tool that fixes their problem or a process sketched out on a piece of paper. You have to consider the whole kit and kaboodle, including the hurdles your customer may need to overcome with their bosses or colleages to actually do something with the tools and processes you’re suggestion. The “solution” should be a way to actually solve their problem, taking into account everything you’ve learned about their situation.

Then, when you have solutions, you have to deliver them in a way that your customer understands. You need to be patient, because they do not have your expertise (remember, that’s why they hired you). You need to be diplomatic, because often your solution will involve telling them they weren’t doing something in the best possible way before, and they could do better. Of course they do want to do better, but they don’t want to be embarassed or feel scolded in the process. This is what we used to refer to as the “your baby is ugly” problem. If someone’s put a lot of time and work into a project — their “baby” — and then the consultant comes along and tells them how awful it is, they’re really put off. You have to be gentle and work with them, and focus on the improvements they can make rather than the mistakes they already did.

Be their trusted advisor. Through this process, your customer comes to trust you. They rely on you. They call you up or have you sit in meetings to get your opinion about this thing and that thing, and they bring you in because they’re starting Phase II and they want your input. This is the kind of relationship you have to strive for — being your customer’s trusted advisor. (I’ve never read The Trusted Advisor, but it’s come to me with high recommendations. I’m adding it to my reading list.) This kind of relationship smoothes over the sales process, because you don’t have to prove yourself to the customer. They know you and they like working with you, and they trust your abilities in guiding them to do the right things. Moreover, they trust you to treat them with regard, to handle their problems delicately, and to not embarrass them with their boss.

That’s it; that’s all there is. Consulting is all about relationships, and if you have good ones, you almost can’t fail. You can be a top expert in your field, but if you can’t do these three things, clients won’t like working with you because even though you’re smart, you don’t feel very helpful. I’ve seen consultants who were really good at listening to customers, understanding them, and being trusted advisors — and even though not all of them necessarily had top-notch expertise on tools or technologies or whatever the client actually needed help with — those people get repeat business, because clients actually feel that they are getting helped.

Of course, to be the best consultant, you really do have to have the knowledge that the client needs. That’s the second part of what I said.

JW’s Philosophy of Learning

Some people are constantly amazed at what I know about various subjects, especially technology and how various pieces of software work. I am going to let you in on a little secret: there is no secret to amassing this knowledge.

(With credit to Dorothea for the phrasing): The way to learn is to beat on things with rocks.

That’s it. Just keep trying until it does what you want it to do. When you get there (or even if you don’t), I guarantee you will have learned something.

OK, I can recognize that this is a statement of philosophy, but as an actual game plan, it may not be all that helpful. So here are five tips on how to be a more effective rock-beater:

1. Define the problem well
2. RTFM
3. Change one thing at a time
4. Someone else already knows
5. Don’t believe it until you see it

Define the problem well. This may seem like a no-brainer, but if you don’t know what it is you’re trying to do, it’s hard to come up with something effective to do about it. Before you start hammering away willy-nilly, take a step back and say, “What do I need to accomplish here? What’s vital in what I’m trying to do, and what’s just nice-to-have? Is this really a problem, or is it caused by something upstream that’s really what I need to be working on?”

RTFM. Read the *#$%^@ manual. (This is especially dear to me because I used to be a technical writer.) Now, I know, not everything has a lovely manual like the kind I used to write. But by gosh and by golly, you won’t know until you take a look, will you? I can’t count the number of times someone has asked me a question that’s perfectly good, but also perfectly easy to answer if they’d spend 5 minutes taking a look at the documentation.

Change one thing at a time. If you’re trying to suss out how something works, you must think of yourself as a scientist performing a little experiment. You must change just one thing at a time to see what happens. If you change two or three or twenty-seven things at a time, how will you know which one is the one that actually worked?

Somebody else already knows. The chances are high that there is someone out there who can answer your questions. Maybe it’s your colleague in the cubicle next door, or maybe it’s somebody with a blog or a book or on a forum or mailing list. (Part of the trick is knowing where to look; do some research. The Internet is your friend, and so is your library.)

If you ask, these people are often eager to teach you what they know. However, a word of warning — there’s a reason this is the fourth tip and not the first one. “Define your problem” and “RTFM” first, or people are likely to be a little peeved at you for dumping your ill-defined problem on them, or asking things you could easily have found out yourself. Get as far as you can on your own, then ask for help.

Don’t believe it until you see it. This is the flipside of “RTFM” and “Somebody already knows”. Some document or person can describe how something is supposed to work, but you should still try it out. (This is especially true when the document happens to be a piece of marketing literature for software.) By trying it yourself, you make it yours. You really understand how and why (or even if) it works.

Good luck

So that’s all I know, and it works for me. I can’t promise any more than that, but I do hope it helped my former coworker, and I hope it helps somebody out there in the blogosphere, too.

While I’m getting back on the blogging horse…

I realize this is old news now, but LibraryThing announced an API for work data. This is great. But what’s really awesome? This little tidbit from the post:

Scope. This is an API to work information. Once I’ve worked through the kinks here, I plan to release a member API, allowing members to do clever things with their data. For example, members will be able to make their own widgets, not just rely on ours.

I will squeal with glee the day there is a member API. I’ve been harping on the issue for ages, because I really want a way to make a “to-read” list that mashes up LibraryThing with my local library data. I can’t wait.

It’s been a looooong time since I’ve blogged, and I’m finally dusting this thing off and getting back to it.

Lots of changes have happened. Most notably, I’ve changed jobs. Formerly doing information architecture and content management consulting, I’ve sidestepped fields slightly into web analytics at another consulting firm, LunaMetrics, also here in Pittsburgh.

Web analytics is all about measuring what people are actually doing on websites. You can’t create a good site without relying on information architecture best practices (my old role), but you also don’t really know a site is working as well as it could or should without measurement and experimentation (my new one). My role is again a mix of technical and business knowledge. I have to be able to tweak JavaScript tracking code, but I also need to be able to elicit the goals of a website and interpret the analytics to understand what that means to the business behind it. And, I get to play with numbers, which is fun (I was a math major, after all).

So far, I’m very excited. I like learning new stuff, so I’ve been immersed in web analytics blogs and books, and learning Google Analytics (GA), since we’re a GA Authorized Consultant. Last week we did a one-day training in NYC for about 70 people, where I got to speak about creating a data-driven culture at your company. (The challenges of changing company cultures I am all too familiar with from my previous work.)

So I’m sure you’ll hear more on this blog about web analytics. I also am far, far behind on a post I started writing ages ago about mashups, which I’ll be finishing soon, and I have a handful of other things I’m itching to write about too. It’s been a long dry spell of blogging, but I’m back. Hmm… this place could probably use a redesign, too…

I spent Monday–Wednesday of last week in Las Vegas at the Gartner Summit on Portals, Content, and Collaboration. The highlight for me was a talk by Jakob Nielsen on usability in intranets. I even got to ask him a question pertaining to his eye-tracking research (users don’t look at ads) and about design pitfalls to avoid even on ad-free sites like intranets.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to stay for the Web 2.0 and Open Source Summits, which were taking place Wednesday–Friday. I’m especially bummed because David Weinberger was speaking, and I’m a total DW fanboy. (I squealed with joy when I won his book in the LibraryThing contest giving them away.)

Much of the conference dealt with employing Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise and dealing with the fact that the work/life line is blurry and users’ expectations for corporate portals, intranets, etc. are set by their dealings with the Web at large (an idea known as “consumerism”). I can certainly relate — I know I expect (sometimes impatiently) that applications at work, from email right on up the chain, work as well as those I’m used to at home.

I found much of the conference confirmatory of trends I already recognize, but there was one thing in particular that got me thinking. Gartner analyst David Gootzit gave a presentation about the future of the portal market. He argued that consumerization will lead to the development of a “portal fabric” for the aggregation of experiences across the portals people use (e.g., iGoogle, your bank portal, your work portal, etc.) — the “Follow Me Portal” or “MyPortal”. The emergence of this portal fabric requires standardization of a number of different functions, such as identity management, personalization and preferences, portlets, and metadata. (Gootzit also argues that this trend is likely to result in enterprise portals being decomposed into component services, something that we’re already beginning to see to some degree with, e.g. search.)

It certainly would be cool if someday My Yahoo! or iGoogle or something else could be your real, honest-to-goodness personal homepage that aggregated all the things you were interested in. Not just your horoscope and the weather and some RSS feeds, but also your bank balance, what’s going on at work, your home automation portal, and so on. (Now, I certainly know there are privacy/trust issues with, e.g. letting Yahoo! or Google access your bank balance, but let’s assume the portal provider is an entity you trust.)

I want to skip over, for the time being, the question of what sort of software the “Follow Me Portal” actually is — whether it’s from a major web provider like Yahoo or Google, or whether it’s built on enterprise portal frameworks within businesses, or by Web 2.0 startups, or even as plugins or customizations to desktop software such as browser extensions or something like Flock. Instead, I want to look at the idea of the “portal fabric” that would be needed to support it. What standards currently exist for federating the functions of portals and where are there gaps? Here’s my still-processing-the-thoughts list…

Identity management

For authentication, we have OpenID. Although it’s not entirely clear yet if OpenID is the winner here, it’s looking better all the time. Big services like AOL and Livejournal are both OpenID providers (and a third party provides OpenIDs for Yahoo! accounts using Yahoo!’s API) — meaning about there are about 120 million OpenIDs out there already, whether they’re being used yet or not. Fewer sites accept OpenID for authentication, but the number appears to be steadily growing — I’m using OpenID to sign into 37signals applications, 43folders just announced they’ll be supporting it, and the other day when I got a trial account to myExperiment.org it asked me to sign up with an OpenID. (You can find more site accepting OpenIDs at myopenid.net.)

For other information about identity, there’s XFN and FOAF. This is especially timely given Six Apart’s David Recordon’s announcement of tools for “opening the social graph”, which is not only about managing your own identity, but also your relationships to others.

There’s also vCard/hCard for directory-listing type info about people. (UPDATE: And duh, I forgot about LDAP.)

Portlets (or widgets, or gadgets, or what have you)

Well, there’s JSR168 and WSRP (and forthcoming updates in JSR286, and WSRPv2) but those are really only adopted by commercial enterprise portal frameworks. Google, Yahoo, etc., aren’t supporting them. Maybe they should, or maybe there’s something else. Certainly RSS and Atom represent really lightweight ways of passing data to a portlet/widget/gadget, but they’re not nearly as broadly encompassing as JSR168 or WSRP are, and can’t fully encapsulate the definition of a portlet to make it portable across these portals. How great would it be if your Yahoo widgets, Google gadgets, Apple Dashboard widgets, etc. were all interoperable and you didn’t have to worry about which platform any particular widget was made for?

I don’t really know a ton about the details of JSR168 or WSRP. I’m not sure whether they represent a viable way(s) forward, or a new, more flexible standard is needed in this category.

Personalization and Preferences

This category is possibly the most tricky to deal with, which is probably why there are few existing standards in this realm. I think there’s also a great deal of value to be gained here, however.

One standard that does come to mind is P3P for privacy preferences. It’s been around for some time but hasn’t really gotten a great deal of traction, although there are some browser plugins and so forth.

Search

Of course, there’s Z39.50, but I don’t know of anyone in their right mind who’s not running a library catalog with a Z39.50 interface. (UPDATE: I forgot to mention SRU and CQL, which are based on Z39.50 but updated for the Web. I think I used to know more about these, but now remember approximately nil. I have to read up again…)

OpenSearch is a more modern, digestible alternative. It hasn’t been around very long, but it’s gaining support both by search engines, wikis, blogs, and other tools (as providers) and browsers (as consumers). And there are extensions to handle more complex searches, geographic searches, and other more complicated things.

Also related: metadata standards. There are lots of these for specialized purposes, but the simplest are the likeliest to be useful for syndication and aggregation purposes. Specifically I’m thinking of Dublin Core here. Certainly DC isn’t complex enough to handle most metadata needs for even mildly complex cases, but what would be interesting is if metadata schemes had a defined reduction algorithm to simple Dublin Core, so that a standard set of metadata could be used by, e.g. OpenSearch. (Search APIs could still support native metadata schemas as well, but I think there’s value in a standard interface for straightforward parameterized searches based on things like dates and authors.)

Publishing

For pushing content elsewhere, there’s the in-development Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), which is mostly thought of as an API for posting to blogs. But wouldn’t it be cool if you could also use it to comment on someone else’s blog, or participate in a discussion forum, or change a wiki article — or even, say, post a link to a bookmarking service?

OK, maybe that last one can stick with specialized APIs. I’m not sure there’s a strong case for, e.g. del.icio.us, to support APP. But for blog posts, comments, discussions, wikis — which are all essentially similar things, just updating some content — it would be killer to use the same interface for them all, right?

Closing thoughts

These thoughts aren’t fully formed at this point, and this is something I’m going to continue thinking about. If you think there are existing standards that I’m overlooking in any of these areas, or if you think there are any areas to be standardized that I missed completely, I’d be interested in hearing about them.

Is anyone out there using Yahoo Pipes, Google Mashups, or something like Dapper or Coghead on a library website or for library services? If so, I want to talk to you! I’m writing an article. Email me at jonathanweber@mac.com.