About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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I’ve noticed a fundamental distortion in how I view the world:
This is a distortion because this worldview devalues my accumulated experience and knowledge. It’s funny because I know how long it took me to learn what I’ve learned, and yet because it seems easy to me now, I assume it’s easy for everybody. A trivial example: I consider myself a low-intermediate ultimate frisbee player, and yet when my coworker asked me a question last week about various terms, I was diagramming plays on the whiteboard, explaining different defensive strategies, etc. – things which took me a couple years of playing regularly to learn.
I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers recently, and one of his points in the book is that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become a master of a discipline. I’ve commented before that this is because it takes that sort of repetition to move the skill to the unconscious so that the conscious brain can concentrate on higher level thoughts. In some sense, it’s become “easy” to my conscious brain because the unconscious brain is doing all the heavy lifting.
That’s part of the power of making things easy. Designs which make things easy provide a shortcut to a sort of “mastery”, at least with regard to accomplishing a certain task. The downside is that such shortcuts do not provide the full context necessary for true understanding, and so poor decisions will be made when parameters stray outside the boundaries for which the application was designed.
The mortgage meltdown is a good example of the perils of these shortcuts, as the ability to securitize anything and pass it on was amplified to the point where it brought down the global economy. It shows the importance of being a good information carnivore, somebody who understands their information food chain and the assumptions implicit in that chain. It also suggests that there are times when things should be difficult – because securitization worked so easily and so well, it became the default solution (creating CDOs etc.) without anybody questioning whether it was an appropriate use.
An ideal design would make it easy for users to do what the application was supposed to do, and difficult to do what it’s not. I don’t necessarily think that an application should make it impossible to do “off-label” things, as there are times when people will need to do that, but it should make it very clear that the user is likely to shoot themselves in the foot if they proceed. In other words, “making things easy” isn’t the only goal of design – it’s making the right things easy, and the wrong things hard.
P.S. I await Seppo’s comment explaining how this relates to game design 
Why was the iPod successful?
The design and user experience, the sleekness and trendiness, certainly played a part.
But the most important thing, to me, is that the iPod made things easy. Here’s how to buy and listen to a new song on an iPod:
Easy. No trying to remember where you downloaded a certain file, or making sure it’s in the right directory to get transferred to your MP3 player, or trying to find a legal copy to buy – Apple has taken all of the effort out of this fundamental transaction.
And I think this is something to remember – a good business plan can be built around taking the things that should be easy, and making them easy. Why is Google successful? It makes it easy for advertisers to find users who are searching for relevant information, and easy for users to find relevant advertisers to their interests. Google makes it easy for these two populations to find each other, and has made absurd amounts of money.
It reminds me of Seppo’s description of game design – find the fundamental unit action of a game, and make it fun. The equivalent for business model design is find a fundamental action of a user, and make it easy. There is value in making things easy, and users will pay for that value.
Even the rise of blogging can be seen as a testament to this idea. From the earliest days of the Web, it was possible to post updates and thoughts on a web page – it was crude by modern standards, posting individual HTML pages, but possible, as evidenced by my ramblings page which was started in 1994. But the advantage of blogging software is that it makes it much easier to post an update. And although I don’t pay for Wordpress, I do pay a subscription to LiveJournal and MyBlogLog to make my blogging easier.
Twitter takes the next step to making it so easy to keep one’s friends informed that we can do it from anywhere we have cellular access. I think that Twitter may be the perfect mobile application in that it is easy to dip into the Twitter stream whenever I have a few minutes to kill, and I can do it from anywhere. I do worry that it is destroying my attention span, though.
One last example: Google has changed how I do things because it makes certain things so easy. I have now given blood twice and plan to continue doing so. It was always something I meant to do, but never got around to. But when Google brings the blood drive on campus, so all I have to do is go downstairs, it’s so easy that all of my objections go away, and I just do it. Similarly, having the Mountain View Public Library come to campus once a week, and making it possible for me to request books via email, means that the library is now more convenient than Amazon (which in itself is an example of a business model built around making a common action easy).
It makes me think that there are plenty of business opportunities left in the world. I feel like any time I encounter something that is difficult that I can imagine could be made easy, I should now react to it by thinking of it as an opportunity rather than a frustration. Admittedly, it’s only a business opportunity if it’s enough of an annoyance that a significant number of people will pay for a solution. By making it easy to do things that were difficult or impossible before (like buying music online or finding people interested in your advertising), an entrepreneur can create new value in the world. And it seems like there’s an endless supply of things in the world that should be easier.
Charlie asked the question last week: “Why aren’t you striving to be a leader in your field?” which has gotten me thinking about leadership, and what it means to be a leader. It also sparked an email exchange with a friend on the topic, which led to some interesting thoughts.
What does it mean to be a leader?
We can probably think of people in all of these categories who we think of as leaders. So it’s clear that “leadership” is not an easily definable characteristic. Yet it’s like obscenity – we know it when we see it.
Perhaps leadership is about helping people achieve their goals. In other words, if I want to be a leader, I must gain followers, and therefore I must do something that would get people to follow me. I can do that in a number of different ways:
One way to measure leadership might be to see who everybody in the room looks to when a decision needs to be made. Just because somebody is the manager on the org chart doesn’t necessarily make them that sort of leader (as Rands’s great story about “The Culture Chart” illustrates). One can be “The Guy” to whom others look using any of the methods described above.
So what can one do to become a leader? Part of being a leader is understanding one’s own strengths and weaknesses and choosing a leadership style that matches one’s tendencies. Gerald Weinberg’s book Becoming a Technical Leader offers advice about finding one’s own path towards leadership. And, on the flip side, it’s hard to take somebody seriously as a leader when they are acting in a way that is contrary to their nature – the engineer trying to schmooze his way to the top, or the MBA spouting half-understood technical jargon.
Mostly I’m fascinated by this idea of leadership that initially seems so prosaically obvious – we all know what leadership is – and yet so difficult to define.
What do you think defines a leader?
P.S. There were a couple crazy months there, both at work and in life. Things have calmed down a bit, and I enjoyed a slothful few weeks to recover from the craziness, but it may be time to pick up the posting habit again.
Anybody that’s been following my Twitter feed knows I’ve been working long hours recently. I’m actually working harder now than I was last year when I was working full time while finishing my master’s degree at Columbia. This would come as a surprise to, well, pretty much anybody that’s ever worked with me, given my tendency to do just enough to get by and no more. So what’s different about working at Google for me? My current answer to that question requires a detour through some other things I’ve been thinking about.
I really liked Po Bronson’s book What Should I Do With My Life? when I first read it (his original Fast Company article is a nice introduction). Trying to find a place for myself in the professional world has been an ongoing struggle, as while I have the capability to do anything, I have often found myself in situations where I was stuck doing the “wrong things”. Bronson recently published an update article with his perspective since publishing the book, and a couple quotes from that resonated with me:
“All jobs have things you hate about them. But real people feel fulfilled by the overall purpose of their organization that the shitty parts are worth putting up with. It’s not what you do, it’s what you’re working towards. …you know the feeling you desire — fulfillment, connection, responsibility, and some excitement.”
I think these last four characteristics he describes are absolutely key for me. I don’t define myself by the specific work tasks that I have to do, as I have the flexibility to do any number of tasks. I aspire to define myself with the meta-work of being a generalist. I want to feel that I am getting to use my unique potential and abilities in the course of doing my job. I need to find some sort of meaning in what I’m doing, or at least be working towards both personal and company goals.
As Bronson observes, there are annoying parts of every job – the question is whether the goal towards which one is working is worth the annoying parts. To put in a larger sense, it is important to know the answer to the question of “Why am I doing this?” In a similar vein, when I have friends considering grad school, I argue strenuously against it and try to dissuade them from going. This is not because I don’t value education – it’s because grad school is really hard, and the only way to get through it is to know exactly why you are going. My arguing against grad school is a way for me to get them to articulate their core reason for going to grad school.
To get back to my original question of what makes my job at Google different than other jobs I’ve had in the past is that I can see how I am contributing to making the company work better. I do genuinely believe that Google is making the world a better place, all things considered, as it provides us all with tools that are astonishing in their ability to put information at our fingertips. I can see a future for myself where I get to use all of my skills and talents in that goal. The only obstacle between me and that future is myself – I have the opportunity, the skills, the support to get there.
So while the long hours are irksome, they are not morale-destroying – we were joking this week about who in our group would be the first to snap, and I was surprised to realize that I wasn’t anywhere near snapping. I have hit my limits before and know what that feels like. But in this case, while I am tired and occasionally cranky, I feel like the work I am doing is recognized as meaningful, both to the company and to my future, and that’s far more sustainable for me than working even half the hours on dead-end tasks like technical support.
This has tremendous implications for managers. In a free agent world, getting the top people is no longer about paying them the most (beyond a certain point, I don’t think it makes a difference) or showering them with perks – it’s about giving them challenging, meaningful, interesting work. Managers need to find ways to engage their employees by framing the work that needs to be done in a narrative that propels the employee forward into a desired future. Getting back to Bronson, managers need to work with their employees to answer the question of “Why am I doing this?” And the answer doesn’t have to be existential – it can be as simple as earning the money to support one’s family. But there needs to be an answer, because without that answer in place, the annoying parts of the job will wear anybody down.
Anyway. We’ll see how I feel in another month if things don’t slow down, but for now, it was interesting to think about how this job has given me the belief that I can finally stretch myself in the directions I want to go with my career and life, in terms of building on my interests in interdisciplinary collaboration. It’s not a Great Cause ™, but the belief that I have found a good fit for my skills and talents is exciting enough to me to keep me going through the long hours. That being said, it sure is nice to take a weekend off and actually have time to write down some of my thoughts
I’ve mentioned this idea in several conversations recently, so I figured it was time to blog about it. In particular, I’ve been telling people about my career and how it’s much easier to be right than it is to make the right thing happen. So, like any good wanna-be management consultant, I came up with a two-by-two matrix to illustrate the possibilities.
In case it’s difficult to read, the horizontal axis goes from Wrong to Right, and the vertical axis goes from Ineffective to Effective. I’ve labelled each of the quadrants with an appropriate name.
Most engineers end up in the Martyr quadrant, as they have the powers of analysis to figure out the way things should work. But they don’t necessarily have the people skills and observational skills to understand how decisions get made within the organization. So they complain vociferously when decisions get made that they don’t understand, but are singularly ineffective at changing the decisions. I spent several years as a Martyr at a couple different organizations, so I’m very familiar with the feeling.
The engineers are living along one dimension in this space – they see Right and Wrong, and see that they are more Right than the Player, so they can’t understand why the wrong decisions keep on getting made. That’s why I think it’s helpful to introduce this second axis of Effective and Ineffective, to illustrate the axis on which they are failing. I’m still learning to be more effective within an organization (it’s a slow process), but just being aware of my failings is a good first step.
Of course, “Right” can also be optimized along multiple dimensions, and which dimension you choose to optimize on changes the decision as well. Engineers prefer to optimize for the correct technical solution (scalable, clean design, etc.) while marketers might choose to optimize for what the customer wants, sales people commissions, and executives revenue or profit. But that makes my two-by-two matrix too complicated.
Anyway, I have found this distinction of Right/Wrong from Effective/Ineffective to be a useful conversational prop recently, so I figured I would share it in case it’s helpful to others.
Yikes, it has been a long time since I blogged. I’ve been buried at work, although things seem to be slowing down a bit (knock on wood). For those of you that want more regular updates, I recommend Twitter and/or del.icio.us as those get updated more regularly.
This past weekend, though, I made time to watch the Super Bowl, because, well, it’s the Super Bowl. I was alas unable to make it to a Super Bowl party, or even host one myself, because I ended up working both before and after the game. But I enjoyed the Super Bowl experience, both the game and one ad in particular, so I’m going to write about both, because hey, it’s my blog, and I don’t currently have the brainpower to write a “Deep Thoughts What I Have Thunk” post (tm Jofish).
The game itself had some amazing plays. The James Harrison interception was just ridiculous, and may have decided the game, as it was a 14-point swing that killed the Cardinals’ momentum.
But the Cardinals came back, and Larry Fitzgerald’s touchdown was a thing of beauty. You can’t see it from the angles they show in that video, but the play design was just brilliant. Given that Larry Fitzgerald had dominated the postseason and ended up with more yards, receptions and touchdowns of any playoff run ever, it’s almost inconceivable that a defense could possibly let him get wide open and score a lead-changing touchdown. Here’s what happened: The Steelers were in a deep Cover 2 defense, with the safeties 25 yards off the line of scrimmage to take away any chance at a big play. The Cardinals saw that, and lined up three receivers. Two receivers ran straight down the sidelines. The safeties both did what they were supposed to do, and scooted over a few steps to the outside to help the cornerbacks and make sure those outside receivers didn’t get past them. But taking those steps emptied out the middle of the field. Meanwhile, Larry Fitzgerald took an underneath route across the middle, caught the ball, broke one tackle, and then it was just a race to the end zone, which he won. So in the clip when you see three guys chasing him, it’s the two safeties who were lured out of position by the decoy receivers, and a linebacker who was trying to catch up. Just an awesome play call, illustrating the chess game that happens at the highest levels of the NFL.
Meanwhile, my favorite Super Bowl ad, by far, was the Audi: Chase commercial because of the way it layers in meaning after meaning, taking advantage of our cultural knowledge.
What was incredible about this to me is that they set up these scenes within 10 seconds each by leveraging our cultural knowledge. Using every element available to them, they anchored each scene firmly in a different decade, and were thus able to convey the underlying theme of the commercial which is that the Audi was the apotheosis of car design, the evolutionary endpoint.
I also loved that you can enjoy the commercial without catching any of these references, as it is still satisfying on a basic level, because, hey, three car chases in 60 seconds. But if you catch the references going by, it adds depth and meaning while still staying coherent. I love it when narratives work on multiple levels, so this ad really pleased me.
By the way, I should mention that the second part of this post is an homage to Grant McCracken, whose brilliant post deconstructing the meaning making in a Volvo commercial continues to inspire me to analyze the meanings designed into the world around me. And the Audi commercial was one that just begged for this sort of deconstruction.
I’ll get back to more regular posting soon, with a backlog of book reviews to do, and other topics on my mind. Soon. Really.
Google has a program called Self-Powered Commuting, where they let employees track the days on which they get to work via self-powered methods (primarily biking or walking). At the end of the year, they tote up the number of days, and donate a proportionate amount to charity.
What’s amazing to me is how effective this program is at making me feel guilty when I don’t bike to work. I have the tracking page set up to open as one of my initial tabs, and every morning I don’t bike to work, I feel a slight twinge when I have to close the tab without clicking the button. And when I look back at the month, I can see which days I missed and wonder what my excuse was for not biking. The simple act of checking in once a day and tracking how I did is remarkably effective at reinforcing the habit of biking that I want to inculcate in myself.
In a similar vein, I recently found Joe’s Goals, which is a website based on the same concept. It allows you to set goals for yourself, assign them different point values, and track them on a daily basis. For instance, I give myself 1 point for flossing and eating 4 fruits a day, but 3 points for going to the gym or posting here. And now I can see tangible progress towards acquiring these habits – I’ve flossed every day for a week!
It’s silly that such a small thing as checking a box once a day can reinforce habits that I have been saying I should acquire for years. But it does. By reducing my goals down to a daily yes-or-no question, there’s no fudging, there’s no “I’ll get to it tomorrow” – there is only whether the box gets checked or not. I read recently that new behaviors take a month to set into place as habits (Google Answers has a couple references), so if I can keep up these habits for a month, then I can perhaps add a couple more next month. We’ll see.
But I think tracking has applicability beyond personal improvement, specifically in management. One of my favorite management anecdotes is the story of how Andrew Carnegie (I think?) was asked to figure out how to make an underperforming factory more productive. He said all he needed was a piece of chalk. He arrived at the shift change between the night crew and the day crew, asked the outgoing crew how many widgets they had produced, wrote that number on the wall with the chalk, and waited. The incoming crew asked what that number was. He told them. At the end of their shift, the number was erased and replaced with a higher number. The night crew put up a higher number, and soon the factory was outperforming other factories. The story may be apocryphal, but I find it indicative of the power of tracking (and also competition in this case).
Many management texts recommend SMART goals – that’s Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. And those are good, although the method biases action towards easily measurable goals, which may not be aligned with overall organization goals. But the Self-Powered Commuting and Joe’s Goals pages show me that having regular checkpoints is really important as well, so that one can’t be procrastinating on those goals. I suspect that some of the benefit of Agile methods is having a daily stand-up meeting, so everybody knows they have to make progress each day. My best manager checked in with me once a week, to find out what I’d done the previous week, and what I planned to do the next week.
What are the behaviors you want to inculcate in yourself and others? Would tracking those behaviors, either privately or publicly, help? It’s a theory, and we’ll see how the Skinner-ian self-management experiment goes for me. If I’m still sticking with it in a week, I’ll move the Joe’s Goals tracker to my sidebar .
Finding the story has been a recurring theme for me recently. It’s come up in a variety of settings, so I thought I’d explore the topic some more. Let’s start with the anecdotes.
A friend was looking for advice on sprucing up her resume. I started with the normal advice of stating accomplishments rather than responsibilities and looking for ways to quantify those accomplishments. But then I observed that it seemed to me that her current draft was more about telling her career history rather than convincing potential employers to give her an interview. A resume is a sales document, and everything on that document should contribute towards persuading the person that reads it to call you. So we went over the positions she was applying for, and looked for ways to tune the resume to match the positions, telling the story of why she would be a good fit for those positions.
At work, I was helping a coworker out with a major presentation by doing some data analysis and pulling some numbers for him. While discussing what analysis he needed, I also was interested in understanding the presentation itself. After asking a few questions, I threw out an idea for the “story” that my coworker was trying to tell with the presentation. He liked it, and went with it, and we constructed the presentation around that story. This turned out to be very useful at the presentation itself, as the meeting with the executives was running late so instead of 20 minutes to present, he only had three. Because we’d already agreed on the major story we were trying to tell, we were able to cut back to those key points and he delivered a compelling two minute summary of his work, leaving a minute for questions.
Another friend is teaching a seminar this term for the first time. I asked him what the class was about, and he started listing off some of the topics he plans to cover. It seemed scattershot to me, so I asked him what the underlying theme was, the one thing he hoped his students would take away from the class even if they didn’t remember anything else. He described in one sentence the awareness he hoped to create in his students, and I hope answering that question will help in designing his curriculum.
In each case, I felt like I contributed something by asking the question “What is the story here?” When we are communicating with others in any form, we need to think about what message we are trying to convey. For our communications to be effective, we need to stick to that message and not introduce potentially confusing or distracting elements. This is a core principle of marketing, but it has applications throughout life.
Whenever we interact with other people, we are marketing something. That may sound crass, but when we interact with another person, we are generally trying to convince them of an idea or convey an image of ourselves. This is why we care so much about what we wear (and even choosing to opt out of caring is still an image choice) – it sends a message. So it’s interesting to me to apply marketing principles to these sorts of interactions – pick a position that is consistent with your “product”, and unify your communications around that message. If you try to be all things to all people, you are sending out contradictory signals that remove any persuasive power of your communication.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t refine your message for a given audience. This is one place I believe my skills as a generalist are valuable. I can generally figure out how to present a set of given information to others in a way that makes sense to them and fits in with their goals. I can talk to specialists for an hour, learning about their issues and results, and create a useful minute-long summary without the specialists feeling like I’m misrepresenting them. It helps to do ongoing summaries throughout the conversation (”So what I think you’re saying is X”) so that you can get feedback (”Actually, I didn’t mean X, I meant Y”). I really enjoy this skill and find it valuable – now I just have to figure out the career path it enables. In some sense, I aspire to be an intra-organization marketer, figuring out how to most effectively present different parts of the organization to each other.
It’s ironic that this post about finding the core story and sticking to it is a bit disjointed. I’ve tried writing this post a few times over the past week, and it’s still not quite coming together. But I’m going to post it anyway, because it’s ludicrous that I haven’t posted anything in weeks. Hopefully, this first pass will spark discussion that gets me pointed towards the story I am really trying to tell.
I really liked Tim O’Reilly’s post today about how companies like Google and WalMart are incorporating IT into their organizational DNA. O’Reilly’s post describes how those example companies are mapping out a new way of organizing people built around integrating IT into how the organization functions:
Sensing, processing, and responding (based on pre-built models of what matters, “the database of expectations,” so to speak) is arguably the hallmark of living things. We’re now starting to build computers that work the same way. And we’re building enterprises around this new kind of sense-and-respond computing infrastructure. …It’s essential to recognize that each of these systems is a hybrid human-machine system, in which human actions are part of the computational loop.
I particularly like O’Reilly’s description of the organization as a group mind that incorporates both people and machines, as it fits in with my thoughts on organizational cognition. The organization also incorporates culture, processes and many other feedback loops that structure how the organization accomplishes its tasks.
Let’s start by taking a quick look at two existing organizational models:
There have been various hybrid organizational models where there are hierarchies of teams and other configurations, but teams and hierarchies have been the basic building blocks for most organizations.
We are in a fascinating time where the number of possible organizational solutions has gotten much larger, as technology has removed the communication limitations that previously eliminated many potential configurations. We are just now figuring out what the new possibilities are, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, so that we can find the appropriate option for a given venture. To put it in geekier terms, we are starting to map out the vastly expanded search space for organizational structures.
I think O’Reilly’s post identifies one direction, where organizations integrate computers so that certain decisions (like Google ranking web pages) don’t need to be handled by people and instead information deluges are handled by software. One of my interests is in trying to map out other possibilities, what they would look like and how they would fit various organizational purposes. My previous post about the future of organizations discussed how the new limitations may be social rather than technical, which implies that we need to start designing new social structures that can take advantage of the newly available technology.
One possibility that I’m playing with is that of overlapping teams with clearly defined roles. The good teams I’ve been on involved people who trusted and respected each others’ contributions to the team’s overall goals. I’d like to think that a fractal organization could be built off of such teams which each have a team goal, and then each team trusts the other teams to accomplish their goals in order to satisfy the organization goals. There would be a ton of communication necessary to distribute information within the organization to where it needs to go, but I think that is becoming more realistic by the day.
Another possibility is the free agent world, where there are no continuing organizations. Instead, coalitions of individuals are formed for specific projects, accomplish those project by bringing in other people as needed, and then disband to pursue other projects with different people. This would be the endpoint of the world where everybody becomes a consultant in their specialty.
I’m sure there are lots of other possibilities that I haven’t considered. For instance, I’m definitely interested in what we can learn from how World of Warcraft guilds are organized to accomplish their goals when every player is free to leave guilds that don’t work for them. Or how organizations mobilize volunteers to work for them – I’m sure there’s much to learn from Obama’s campaign this year. I’d love to hear of other ideas that people have on how to organize people.
P.S. I finally created the Google group/email list to discuss organizations that I mentioned in that future of organizations post, so go ahead and join up if you’re interested.
I flew up to my parents’ house yesterday, and our plane came in late due to storms. Over the intercom, the flight attendant said that there was “a newlywed couple in row 14 trying to make a tight connection to their flight to Amsterdam, so if rows 1-13 can please let them through before getting up, they’d really appreciate it.” I leaned over to my sister, and said that such an appeal would never work, as I’d seen it fail on a couple other flights. My sister said she’d seen it work several times, and, in fact, the first 13 rows did stay seated until the couple got to the front of the plane.
I was trying to figure out what was different about this time versus the other times I’d seen it fail, and realized that it was the specificity of the appeal. On the other flights I remember, the flight attendant said “We have several people trying to make close connections, please let them through”, and that appeal had no effect, as everybody considered themselves to have close connections, so everybody got up. What was effective this time was that the flight attendant had framed it as a story – the one-line story of the couple trying to get to Amsterdam reified them in our brains as “real” people. The story also invoked our social sense, and made us defer to them as we would for any member of our community.
To give more background on my thinking, my post on the ultimatum game explores how our brains react differently when we have a one-off transaction with somebody (where we try to get all that we can from that transaction) versus how we react when we are part of a community (where fairness becomes a factor as we’ll have to interact with them again in the future). I also argue in the following post that we can use stories to expand our “monkeysphere”, the number of people that we consider to be “real” people as opposed to strangers who we distrust and/or take advantage of.
Making people persons by associating stories with them comes up in many different situations that I can think of:
It takes practice to remember to treat others as people, and not as puppet players on whom you are projecting your own fears and hopes. I still fall into the trap of ascribing my own stories to other people and assuming the worst or best, and being surprised either way. Learning to treat others as real people in their own right remains a goal towards which I strive, and I think it’s an essential skill to learn in a massively networked world where we are always interacting with people outside of our own core community.
What do you think?
P.S. A friend’s new blog, Made of Happy, has a neat star rating Wordpress plugin, and when I inquired about it, she said it was GD Star Rating, so I just installed it. Now you can provide feedback on my posts without the trouble of having to come up with a comment!
