moved to tumblr!

This my 100th blog post.

(I feel like that statement should have some fanfare associated with it. Some streamers, a marching band, something. 100 posts is a lot of words, even for me.)

Today is also my birthday (true story, and no, I didn't plan it out this way). So, as a birthday present to me (can I even ask for a birthday present?), do me a favor and redirect your feeds, bookmarks, and the like over to:

http://thegapbetween.tumblr.com

I won't bore you with an analysis of why I decided to switch from Blogger to Tumblr (user interface, mobile capabilities, easy static page creation, a superawesome community, along with a personal desire to shake up my content a little bit and include shorter snippets as well as long posts), but I hope you'll take a look around the new site and tell me what you think.

I won't be using this domain any more for new posts, so mosey on over to Tumblr.

See y'all on the flip side!

health is measured by the ability to recover

To Heal A Fractured World | Jonathan Sacks


It's Peachtree time.

Race number, sneakers, iPod armband. Ready.

I am not a morning person. And I've never thought of myself as a runner. Yet I still drag myself out of bed most mornings to lace up the sneakers and hit the pavement.

When I was young, I did mostly anaerobic sports. Other than swim team, I was a competitive gymnast and cheerleader, and never got in the habit of sustained aerobic exercise. I started running a little less than two years ago. I'm not even sure why. It didn't require much to get started, it gave me something to do, and it was a way to spend time outside after being in a lab all afternoon mixing glue (my adhesive project, not drugs, geez).

That first 5K in March of 2010.

Last March, I ran my first race - a 5k. Last Fourth of July, I ran my first Peachtree.

In between the Georgia heat on the Fourth of July, weaving through 60,000 runners, listening to bands play and supporters cheer and festive chants to celebrate America's birthday, it's the most fun race I've ever run. This year, I have shin splints from running in four cities over the past three weeks, but the atmosphere and energy of running through the heart of the city far outshines the negatives of running with sore shins.

On the best mornings, when I stumble out of bed in the dark and lace up my sneakers, I catch a glimpse of stars in the pink glow of the dawn. There are deep breaths of honeysuckle and Georgia grass as I stretch, and there are the familiar faces of other morning runners on the trails through my hometown. On those mornings, it's easy to be thankful for the ability to put one foot in front of the other. It's easy to remember a time when I couldn't run three miles, much less six. It's easy then, to marvel at what our bodies can accomplish, one day at a time, and over the course of an entire lifetime. The abuse that we take - the easy stresses of daily life - and our bodies' abilities' to take them in stride.

Enjoy your body; use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it, or what other people think of it - it is the greatest instrument you will ever own.

Ah, the Peachtree. Past the Buckhead Strip and Cardiac Hill and the Midtown Mile. See you on the other side of these glorious six miles.

less designing products and more designing outcomes

Thanks to Shalini, I started playing with Google+ this weekend. It's definitely interesting. I set up my Circles, checked out some Streams, tried to put in some Sparks (still haven't tried Hangouts - if you're on Plus and want to check it out with me, let me know!). My first thought mirrored the xkcd cartoon, "It's not facebook... but it's just like facebook!"

Rocky Agrawal wrote a great post about Circles yesterday. In particular:

The biggest unsolved problem in social networking remains unsolved with Google+: separating signal from noise. Twitter, it seems, doesn’t even want to try. The timeline is as dumb as it has been since the beginning, a reverse chron firehose of information. Facebook’s feed has improved over the years, but a friend in New Jersey trying to get rid of a bookshelf is just not relevant. 

The lack of quality tools for generating signal out of these feeds is inhibiting the creation of content. People are multidimensional and manual segmentation at the person level isn’t enough. I create content about a lot of things, including social networking, mobile, daily deals, my travel, my reading and more. But as I was reading Onward, I shared less than I would have because I didn’t want to flood people’s streams. If I annoy people, they have a blunt tool to fix it: unsubscribe entirely. So I mitigate my posting.

I'm a very selective content consumer, and an even more selective content creator. I blog, but I won't tweet. I'll post location on Instagram, but not on Facebook. When it comes to organizing my Reader feed or picking people to follow on Buzz or Tumblr, I'm merciless. And as a creator, my biggest concern is not about privacy (although I make it seem like it is). It's about irrelevance.

At the end of the day we don't need more creation and consumption tools. Everyone has their favorites - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, Wordpress, Digg, Disqus, Tumblr, Buzz, Flickr, and a thousand others that pop up every day. Right now, all it's doing is giving us more sites to check to get the content that's relevant to us. What's important is how we create value out of these things to generate a stream of content that's meaningful to us. And I'm hoping that as Google+ grows, it addresses the "signal-to-noise" problem that's overwhelming our lives.

The future for content sharing is bright, but the path to get there is still nebulous. Kind of like DTW.

A few months ago I had a great conversation with one of our national sales directors about creating products in healthcare. Healthcare is a great example of a market in which companies have focused on creating and selling products to solve problems. But what's valuable in healthcare is not products - it's outcomes. A subtle nuance, but important. Technology on its own is useless, unless it can drive the outcome - better health, less disease, higher quality of life - that we desire. The tool has to reflect the task.

Google has created a tool to drive its market share in social. It's created a product. But what social needs right now is not products. It's outcomes.

Consumption and creation are huge topics of interest for me. In fact, it was a conversation over seafood in Midtown about how we create and consume that led to this blog. At that time, it was Google Buzz that was new and exciting in social. Now, as I near my 100th post (we're up to 98, for those keeping score) more than a year later, I'm excited to see what Google+ does to the creation and consumption landscape.