Preventing IT burnout

I have a lot of friends who work in IT, and I've noticed that more and more of them are wanting to pull the plug and get away from working with computers. I can't blame them. It's a bit of a drab existence staring at the screen all day in a cell, I mean cubicle, and if I had to do that in a traditional eight-hour shift, I'd go nuts myself -- and I love computers! The good news is that those suffering from tech burnout have an out, without shunning the grid. Make tech work for you!

Strategy One: Become a moofer. Mobile technology has dramatically matured to where you really don't need an office anymore. Laptops working off Wi-Fi and 3GG Smartphones allow the would-be tech burnout to go out and get some *shudder to think* sunlight! And I mean real out-door computing, not some office-surrogate like Starbucks. When the weather gets warmer, I'll probably spend just as much time in the courtyard across the street as I do in my actual office. Wired Magazine this month published a map of free municipal wi-fi, not just in large cities, but in small towns across America you've probably never heard of. Check out the interactive online version, pick a city, move there, and moof! The sun burn will eventually go away as you adapt to your new environment.

Strategy Two: Launch a startup. Sure, it's sooo Y2K to launch an tech startup, but today's startups are made smarter because the technology is finally in place to, you know, actually make some money. Maybe you won't become the next dot com billionaire, but that's not really your goal, is it? You're just looking for supplemental income so you can maybe see some sunlight (see Strategy One). If that's your goal all you need is a couple of thousand dedicated users, and the passive income earned through syndicated ads will likely earn you a living. But how do you get those thousands of users you need and still not, like, work and stuff?

Here's my formula:

1) Imitate - Find something that works well on a macro-scale and adapt it to a micro-scale. If you find yourself drooling over the ungodly amount eBay takes in, brainstorm how you can duplicate that on a smaller scale. eBay is a worldwide marketplace for everything you can think of, but there's likely a market in your own little corner of the world for items too large to ship easily. A local site that auctions large items like antique beds and dressers, items best delivered locally, if marketed well locally, may just allow you to escape that 9-5 unhealthy relationship you have with your computer.

2) Innovate - Don't just rip off something someone else did. Find ways of adding your own contribution. Make it your own. If you're adapting a macro-scale model to a micro-scale model, like in the example above, there's likely to be hundreds of features the big guys left out because they just don't work on a macro-scale. eBay couldn't incorporate a local delivery service that picks up items at one location and delivers them to another location -- that's just not going to happen. It could happen for you if you partner with a local delivery company, and take a little off the top. Adding your own novel ideas to the mix will make your micro-site more attractive to users who need features that the macro-models simply can't provide.

3) Automate - One of my favorite lines from Fox's King of the Hill is in the episode where Kahn shows up at Strickland Propane and asks Hank, "Haven't they replaced you with a coin operated machine yet?" To prevent tech burnout, especially if you're running a tech biz, you want to be replaced by a machine. Put tech to work for you by automating everything you possibly can. That's what software is supposed to do. When the machine just won't do the job because it requires human intervention, still automate. Crowd-source it.

In short: The smarter you use tech, the less time you'll actually have to spend hands-on with tech.

Is this blog hot or not?

Subtitle: A Limitation in Value Judgments

A computer system can only evaluate objective facts. They are currently unable to form a subjective opinion. However, a human/computer value ranking system is also limited in the types of value judgments it can make, despite the values of the human being involved.

All open value ranking systems on the web, whether they are purely algorithm controlled ranking systems, like Google's page ranking system, or human based ranking systems like Digg.com, etc. end up only ranking the popularity value. Other subjective human value judgments are lost in the shuffle. The reason is because informed opinion is overshadowed by uninformed opinion in an open system. Experts, by definition, are always the minority.

Take, for example, a system that ranks art. Typically what you may find in an online art ranking system is a thumbs up or thumbs down button. Like it, or don't like it? Unfortunately this only reflects the aesthetic appeal, and not the majority of values incorporated into art theory. Composition, context, meaning, all those values are overshadowed by the popularity value. If a lot of people really like the way a crappy piece of art looks, it has more value, despite this being a shallow judgment.

When you rank videos the stupid dog tricks videos will alway be more popular than a video with a social message.

What do we do ten years down the road when all knowledge is defined in terms of popularity? News is going that way, with even major networks latching on to the Digg.com model. Wikipedia, the encyclopedia of the Internet, is solely a popular treatment of a topic. Search engines rank by popularity. It feels a lot like high school : )

It's hard to say which model is better. In politics, this is the debate over representative democracy versus direct democracy. I don't personally trust the "wisdom of the crowds" because the crowd is an uninformed majority (not to say it's all bad). Philosophically I mistrust authority as well, but I think it's safe to say that something is lost in turning value ranking over to the crowds. The only real value that can be ranked that way is popularity. How bad that loss is, or the ramifications, won't be known for a few decades.

The good and bad of crowd-sourcing

When Google unveiled their latest project, Street View, recently, I doubt anyone over there expected such a collective back lash from privacy advocates. I mean, the service is really cool. Available in select cities, Google now allows you to zoom in on their maps and see what things look like at street level. This isn't CG. I once rented Spiderman 2 for the Xbox just so I could take a virtual tour of New York and climb to the top of the Empire State Building like King Kong. I was a bit disappointed because it didn't feel "real" enough. Google's Street View doesn't disappoint. It's actual photos spliced together and is very immersive.

Perhaps that's the problem. It's a little too real. They are actual photos taken by Google crew driving around in this van, which was caught in a reflection as it was driving by a window. That's not the only thing caught on camera. I can imagine the guys in the van thinking it was funny when they also snapped photos of girls sunbathing, some dude going into an adult bookstore, some dude coming out of a strip club, and a guy breaking into a house (among others). Some photos have since been removed like the infamous guy peeing on the side of the road and the poor girl whose thong was showing as she was getting out of a truck. The privacy advocates raised the red flag when it was revealed that in some of the photos you could see into people's houses. I'm sure Google's photo-taking policies are in the process of being revised.

So how did all these photos in a haystack surface? That's the power of crowds. Google serves millions of users per day. Whole groups of users, right now as you are reading this, are scrutinizing every inch of Street View looking for interesting photos. In this particular case, that's come back to bite Google in the arse. Millions of judging eyeballs is the downside of having a huge user base. But when it works to their advantage, it's called crowd-sourcing. Huge tasks, like maintaining articles at Wikipedia and protecting them from vandals is turned over to the crowd itself. This greatly reduces the amount of time and money spent on paid moderators by replacing them with volunteers. Yahoo bought Flickr as a replacement for its photo service exactly because Flickr has self-maintaining crowd-sourcing features built-in. Though the deal cost them millions, they need less of a work force to work it, and end up saving much more in the short long-run.

It sounds like a lazy way of getting something for nothing, and it sort of is. Still, crowd-sourcing shows promise in solving real problems. Computers are great because they can automate tasks. Unfortunately computers aren't human, and there are some things only humans (currently) can do. For example, "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) can be used to scan books and turn them into digitized text that can be searched. It works great on clearly printed books, but when dealing with old worn manuscripts and handwritten journals, OCR starts encountering problems. Is that a lower-case "a" or an "o"? Only humans can currently tell the difference. This very same idea is used in CAPTCHA, or "word verification" spam deterrent systems. Spam bots can't tell if that's an "a" or an "o" either. It just so happens that about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. This few seconds of individual human deciphering translates to more than 150,000 hours of work each day. Imagine if that could be put to use somehow, like maybe translating characters OCR can't recognize. Well guess what, it is. Check out reCAPTCHA, a service doing exactly that.

Who knows what future problems crowd-sourcing will solve? Reading books while fighting spam is new way of harnessing its power, but crowd sourcing isn't exactly new. SETI years ago started using volunteer's excess computer processing power to scan the skies for extraterrestrials. Similar projects likewise borrow processing speed to crunch data on AIDS research. The "some dudes" of the world are probably planning really complex uses we can't even imagine yet. At the very least crowd-sourcing keeps us honest, as in pointing out Google's unintentional transition to Big Brother. I'm still trying to figure out how to crowd-source my finances. If only one million people would send me a buck...