Lost in Translation

1. Coffee.

We have several ways of making coffee in our house. The one that gets the most use is a Gevalia coffee maker (we had a Cuisinart, but I forgot to take some old grounds out when we went out of town for a week and Bad Things Happened). It’s pretty basic: you put the water and grounds in, press a button, and ten minutes later you have a pot of coffee. If I’m really inclined, I can pre-load the grounds and the water, and program it to turn on at a certain time. (The clock is currently blinking 12:00, largely because I don’t use the programming system.)

The other major way to make coffee is an espresso machine. Where the Gevalia is set-and-forget, the espresso machine requires pretty much constant attention. To make a latte (the variety of espresso coffee that we drink), you need to

1. Make sure the water reservoir is full.
2. Pre-heat the steam chamber.
3. Load espresso grounds into the filter. Pack the grounds gently.
4. When the steam chamber is ready (a light goes from blue to green), fill the measuring cup with milk, place it under the steam nozzle, and turn the steam dial to full.
5. Carefully monitor the steaming milk to make sure that it’s not scalding. Foam it by tilting and moving the cup.
6. When the milk is heated and foamed, place two shot glasses under the filter, turn off the steamer, and turn on the espresso maker proper.
7. One shot glass will fill faster than the other. When the first is full all the way, move the second glass so that it’s being filled by both streams.
8. When the second glass is full, turn off the espresso maker.
9. Pour the espresso in the shot glasses into the desired mug. Follow with the (hopefully not too de-foamed) milk.
10. While the milk and the coffee mix, clean off the steam nozzle with a damp cloth, and dump out and rinse the grounds filter.

On the one hand, there’s a lot to be said for being able to dump some grounds and water in, press a button, and then have coffee available whenever I want it (at least until I drain the pot).

On the other hand, I really like lattes, and they get me going in the morning far better than standard coffee does.

(On the gripping hand, milk is cheaper than coffee grounds, and lattes use more milk and less coffee than the Gevalia does.)

Plus, if I make a latte, I get to be part of the process. Instead of just walking away and coming back when the coffee robot is done its job, I’m actually the one making the coffee. If it’s a great latte, it’s because I made it that way. It’s very satisfying to drink that latte, and that’s probably why it does such a good job of perking me up.

2. Twitter.

I just ran a quick straw poll on Twitter:

Do you prefer to see “classic” or “new” retweets in your timeline? Which do you prefer to use? On both questions, why?

“New” retweets are the inline ones – if you use the new retweet, you can’t edit the tweet, and it shows up in your timeline as from the original user. “Classic” retweets are the kind where you actually say “RT @etherjammer: Do you prefer to see…”; you can edit the tweet, and it shows up in your timeline as from you.

The drawback to new RTs is that you don’t get to add your thoughts, and they don’t show up in the original user’s “Mentions” – in fact, the API doesn’t seem to provide an interface for gathering them at all. The drawback to the old RTs is that if you’re trying to retweet a long tweet, you’re going to have to truncate it to get it all in. (I know a lot of people who actually advocate keeping your tweets to 140 – (5 + the length of your username) characters, to make it easier for people to retweet you.)

There’s something to be said for set-and-forget RTs. You don’t have to worry about whether you should add your thoughts or whether you need to truncate the tweet – you can’t, and you know that the original tweet fit the guidelines so it’ll fit in your timeline without editing. Plus, it’s a single button-click – push the button, and the system does the work. But the original RT system gives you the opportunity to interact and be part of the process, and that shows on the far side.

By the way, the results of my straw poll? 100% in favor of “classic” retweets (except for one friend who doesn’t like retweets at all). Nobody who replied likes the new style (which, incidentally, is the style that I’ve been using for the last few months).

• “It’s easier to tell who retweeted.”
• “I can add a comment if I want.”
• “I get confused by unfamiliar userpics popping up in my feed.”
• “I want to see the retweeter as the source.”
• “If it’s too long to RT, only then will I use the new.”

3. Process and agency.

My latte tastes better than my drip coffee in part because I’m the one who made it. I’m involved in the process and so I’m engaged. Even when it’s just a cup of coffee, it makes a difference.

My classic RTs are better received by my audience because they know I’m involved in the process. My engagement engages them. That makes a difference too.

If something as simple as a cup of coffee or a retweet can be affected directly by your engagement, what else could you improve by being part of the process instead of just letting the machine do the work?

It occurred to me today that I’d never satisfactorily answered this question to anybody, even though I’ve been asked many times. Unfortunately, that’s because it’s a two-part answer and requires a logical leap.

The first part is Ether.

To understand this you need to go back a little over a hundred years. Physicists of the 19th century were struggling to understand how light got from the sun to the Earth, and why it behaved the way it did; the belief that light was a particle explained many of its behaviors (like reflection) but not others (like refraction). To explain this, scientists proposed a medium through which light traveled, the luminiferous aether. Invisible and omnipresent, it allowed light to travel through what was otherwise assumed to be a vacuum, and faster-than-light propagation of waves caused by the light explained the odd non-particle behaviors.

Naturally, Einstein showed up in the early 20th century and screwed the whole thing up with Special Relativity, but that’s neither here nor there.

In the mid-70s, engineers at Xerox developed a computer-networking protocol that was superior both in speed and in usability to the then-prevalent but highly-proprietary Token Ring and Token Bus systems. Unlike the Token systems, each system on Xerox’s network could see each other system, regardless of whether the systems were linked serially (that is, each computer hooked to the next in sequence, like elephants in a row, trunk-to-tail), hubwise (a central core into which each computer hooked, like an octopus), or otherwise. The new networking protocol, in effect, allowed the computers to pretend that there was an invisible, pervasive medium surrounding them, through which they could propagate messages to other systems, much like the sun propagated light to the planets.

In a fit of pique, the Xerox engineers (who were now working with Digital and Intel to finalize the standard) named their protocol after the luminiferous aether, and thus Ethernet – the networking protocol by which the vast majority of local internet nodes communicate – was born.

The second part is jammer, and although it’s a lot simpler to explain, I’ll wager that fewer of the people who read this will have run across the origin of this part before.

To understand this part, we need to go back to the late Age of Sail, just before the advent of steamships. There were two major classes of shipping vessels then: the clippers, which held a smaller cargo and were less maneuverable but were much faster, and the windjammers, which were larger and slower, but carried more cargo, were more maneuverable, and – speed aside – were generally more capable ships than the clippers. (Both of these, sadly, were displaced by steamships, which – unlike clippers and windjammers, which were both sailing ships – were not reliant on the wind to get from point A to point B.)

Combining the two gives us Etherjammer: a large, flexible, maneuverable ship that plies the open Ethernet; not the fastest ship in the fleet, but adaptable and able to deal with a wide array of tasks.

(Yes, it’s a metaphor.)

I didn’t mean my last post to impugn Pam or Charlie. I think they’re great people and I went to great lengths to make sure my readers (all two of them) knew that. Like I said in the last post, I believe very strongly that Pam and Charlie are trustworthy and respectable people who won’t abuse the list of addresses they’ve collected. It’s just that their sign-up form was what brought the topic to hand. I apologize if I led anyone to believe that Pam and Charlie are less than trustworthy or that I have less than complete respect for them.

1. Today I signed up for Pam Slim and Charlie Gilkey‘s free teleclass, “Thinking Big, Acting Small”. It’s a promo for their Lift-Off Retreat for small business owners, and since I know (at least, know of) and respect both Pam and Charlie, I signed up.

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2. Lots of people, including Holly, use a company called AWeber to manage their email mailing lists. It’s fast, full-featured, and reliable, and I see no reason not to use it, assuming that you can afford the monthly fee. (Right at the moment they’re running a promotion that gives you the first month for $1, cancel anytime – and I’m not getting anything for telling you that, by the way.) It automates most of the work for you. All you have to do is set up the list with their system and then send out emails, and they deal with the rest. They’ll even give you a form that you can put on your website; when people fill the form out, they get added to your mailing list. Easy, no work, as my friend Mickey is wont to say.

AWeber also does a good job of keeping track of who’s signed up for your mailing lists and when they signed up – and you can make as many lists as you want, and put the subscribers from one list into another list, such that you can have superlists and sublists and huge varieties of functionality regarding how readers get their information from you.

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3. Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this.

Since AWeber does a good job of handling subscriber lists, it makes a certain degree of sense to use their services in other areas where you want to keep track of who’s signed up for something you’re offering. In this case, Pam and Charlie decided that an AWeber list would be a good way to keep track of the people who have signed up for their free class. When you fill out the sign-up form on their website, you’re taken through to AWeber, which puts you on the compassion09 subscription list and sends you a confirmation email, and then, once you’ve confirmed, another email with details for the class.

This is all well and good.

Except that nowhere on their page about the class, or in either the confirmation email or the details email, do Pam and Charlie tell you that what you’re really doing is signing up for a mailing list. It’s all about signing up for the teleclass. To most people, that means “give me the details, let me attend, then disappear”. If Pam and Charlie start sending follow-up emails, they’re going to come as a surprise. The only reason I knew about it was because I have experience with AWeber and because I’ve been burned by signing up for teleclasses when they were just an excuse to get me on an email marketing list.

I did a quick poll on Twitter: “Show of hands: if someone gives you their email address, is it cool to sign them up for an email list w/o saying that’s what you’re doing?” The universal response was “absolutely not”. I tend to agree. It’s neither honest nor ethical to place someone on a mailing list without their knowledge or consent. That’s what spammers do.

I don’t know what Pam and Charlie are going to do with the email addresses they’ve collected. I really want it to be true that their intent really, truly is to just use them to send out information about the call and then destroy the list when they’re finished, because I trust them. But I’ve been burned before by people I thought I trusted, and since they’re using a mailing list to collect the information, and given that AWeber had a security leak a few weeks ago, it really behooves them – and anyone else using a mailing list as a back-end for teleclass/ebook/etc. sign-up – to put a disclaimer on their page: “By filling this out, you’re signing up for a mailing list. Don’t worry, it’s just how we’re keeping track of who’s signed up for the class. As soon as the class is over, the mailing list goes away.” If you think people aren’t going to sign up if they see it’s a mailing list, find another way to do the sign-ups. Honesty is the only way here, guys, and omission is just as big a lie as commission in this case.

Pam Slim, the author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, has a new article up on Open Forum: How to Choose a Business to Start. It’s well-written and speaks to my condition. I highly recommend it!