Richard K Miller

A few notes from Paul Allen’s keynote lecture at the BYU Marriott School’s e-business day:

Brent Barlow’s talk on marriage [mp3] includes a quote by poet Robert Browning that says the “best is yet to be.” That should be our attitude in life; it’s an attitude that helps us be happy. We can’t be happy by thinking the best has already passed. (Paul Allen said Brent Barlow’s talk is also the best talk he’s heard on strengthening one’s marriage.)

Several inventions have come from or been made popular in Utah. Paul Ahlstrom, who started vSpring Capital, talks about technology in Utah in a recent podcast.

Advances in technology mean we can “approach omniscience” — we can learn almost anything we want (e.g. Wikipedia), and we can connect to and communicate with almost anyone in the world (e.g. Skype, Linkedin).

Ten things you can do to learn more and connect more:

1. Take notes always
2. Store everything you learn in a personal knowledge base (e.g. Folio, Gobinder)
3. Start a blog
4. Google Alerts
5. Linkedin
6. Read Love is the Killer App — “the book that changed my life the most in business”
7. Use time wisely: audible.com, ldsaudio.com
8. Volunteer with the More Good Foundation
9. Become an “e-mail missionary” — email people you love more often
10. Be a spokesman for BYU and the Church (Carrie Jenkins) — how many people have heard you speak about or read something you wrote about BYU or the Church?

The longer I go without blogging, the more pressure I feel to say something profound when I come back. And it’s been almost a month. While I won’t pretend to have anything grandiose to say, I just wanted to pass along a quote from Tim O’Reilly that I heard today. Tim O’Reilly is the publisher of O’Reilly books, which produces fine computer books. I listened to the podcast version of his interview on NerdTV while jogging. (I jog as often as I blog.)

Tim said companies should seek to “create more value than they capture.” That’s something I’d like to live by, personally and professionally. There are plenty of opportunities and riches out there to give away a lot.

Jeff Barr of Amazon.com was in town last week and spoke at the Thursday evening UPHPU meeting. His position at Amazon.com is “Web Services Evangelist” — he spends a lot of time traveling to talk about Amazon.com’s web services.

Web services are “backdoors” to websites. For example, a popular app called Fetch Art lets Mac users download all the album art for their iTunes songs. It uses web services to connect to Amazon.com and look up all the albums. Other popular sites with web services are Google, Yahoo, HotOrNot, and Flickr. A fairly complete list can be found at ProgrammableWeb.com. The point of web services is that web sites and apps can be connected together (sometimes called “remixing”) to provide more interesting and powerful applications.

Amazon.com’s web services allow people to make money using Amazon.com. Almost 1 million people sell their products on Amazon.com and over 100,000 people earn money by selling Amazon’s products as associates. Jeff pointed out several cool websites that use Amazon.com web services to change or improve or niche the buying experience:

• TV Mojo — a website by a guy in Logan, UT, that only sells TVs. It uses Amazon.com product information but has a very clean, uncluttered look.
• ScoutPal — lets you book check prices from your cell phone. For example, if you see a cheap book at D.I. (they’re all cheap) you can find out whether you should buy the book to sell for a profit on Amazon.com.
• liveplasma — shows music recommendations with floating bubbles connected by curvy lines — cool
• HoneyComb — shows products graphically with different colors and sizes — cool

Jeff also pointed out that microformats are essentially half way between websites [scraping] and full-blown web services. Microformats allow for structured data to be embedded in a web page so it looks the same to a person but can also be interpreted by a computer. For example, you might list your mailing address on your website, and while it would look normal, it could be directly downloaded into someone’s address book program.

Take-away for the layperson: the “new” web — they’re calling it “web 2.0” — combines previously separate services (HotOrNot on a Google Map, or Amazon.com album covers in iTunes) and anyone can do it.

When I learned that David McCullough was going to speak at last week’s BYU forum, I marked it on my calendar. He’s the author of 1776, John Adams, and other best-selling history books. (He has even appeared in several movies.) Roommate Cody and I ended up going to the lecture and we both loved it. Mr. McCullough gave an awesome lecture on the founding of the United States and what it means for us today. Phil Windley took notes:

David McCullough at BYU

And it should be here eventually:

BYU Devotional archive

Last Monday I went to a lecture on blogging and wikis by Phil Windley. Here are my notes:

• the internet is like a river and we are like fly fishermen — our experience depends on where we’re standing and what flows by
• My Yahoo and Personal Google let you customize what information you want to be in front of
• reading blogs lets you customize your experience
• bloggers practice the virtuous cycle — they write about what they read, then others write about what they have written — everyone learns — the body of knowledge grows
• blogs are conversations — you can respond to things you read and then other response to you; comments and trackbacks help with this
• if you find a blog you’re interested in, that person becomes a human router for you — he or she finds and filters information that’s interesting to you
• by regularly reading blogs you like, you create your own panel of experts (or “cabinet” or “brain trust”) — you can learn about any topic you want from an expert
• you can be someone else’s expert
• if you don’t write about something, you’re probably writing about nothing (not all bad if readers are just your friends)
• [non-friend] readers want to know what to expect, they want a topic
• be sure to practice the virtuous cycle — link to others, comment on others’ blogs — they’ll see it
• centuries ago, journals and letters were for sharing scientific information and other learning — today blogs and wikis allow everyone to share in the learning
• the old model was to peer review, then publish — the new model is to publish, then peer review
• everyone can publish (start your own blog!) — and the best stuff floats to the top through services like del.icio.us and digg
• wikis are collaborative websites, like multi-person blogs
• Wikipedia, an encyclopedia built on wiki software, is the “best encyclopedia ever” including World Book and Britannica
• blogs to help hurricane Katrina victims popped up quickly — blogs are great for non-tech uses as well — anytime information needs to be published

On the way out of the lecture, I heard Paul Allen say that he wished even more people had been at the lecture because it represented a “massive shift” in the way we get information. Incidentally, one of Phil Windley’s lectures a couple years ago was what got me started blogging.

Update: Errors in the Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia, why it works, and why it sometimes doesn’t work.