GTD Seminar on WebEx, and OmniFocus

I had an opportunity last week to attend a free Webinar featuring David Allen, entitled “Best Kept Secrets for Personal and Team Productivity.”

It focused on a mind-mapping software called Mind Manager, and was sponsored by Mindjet. I haven’t used this type of software, but after the seminar I’m considering it.

You can see the archive of the seminar here.

I’ve been using the Kinkless GTD system for Macintosh, which is a series of Applescripts added on to OmniOutliner Pro that enable me to plan projects step-by-step, but then view action lists by context, so all my calls are together, for instance. Ethan Schoonover (the developer of kGTD) and the Omni Group recently announced development of a new program called OmniFocus which will take what Ethan has hacked together and make elegant, like the other Omni apps.

I’m sure I haven’t begun to use all the great features in OOP. Maybe there is some mind-mapping capability built in to it already, but if not, I hope OmniFocus will have it.

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Flickr: “The New LIFE Magazine”

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for pointing out this post from a blog called What’s Next: Innovations in Newspapers:

Juan Antonio Giner asks where you can find the most photos of the Manhattan plane crash and here’s the answer. Flickr, he says, is the new Life magazine. If I were the photo editor or a producer at a news site, I’d perform the valuable service of digging through the many pictures there to find the best.

I’m not sure whether the various photo sizes available on Flickr are sufficient for quality newspaper publication (although I now see that the original size uploaded is an option for download.) But that’s more a problem for newspaper than anything wrong with the photos. Newspapers would just need to pick what fits their medium.

For a newspaper web site, or a blog, it’s really easy to pick a photo, download, and post…or even more immediately, just link to the photo on Flickr and include in the site, like this:

Plane Crash in NYC

Professional photographers take scores or hundreds of pictures to find one suitable for publication. On Flickr, hundreds of pictures of a big event will likely be posted…so maybe more sifting of the “amateur” photos will be required, but Flickr makes it possible to have photos of some events that otherwise would be missed.

Advice to news organizations: If an event is predictable (Presidential speech, press conference, sporting event, or anything that cann make the AP daybook), send your best professional photographer. But for breaking news, take advantage of the fact that millions of people have digital cameras and camera phones, and can capture events you can’t reach.

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Technorati Tips

Steve Rubel of Edelman has a very useful blog, Micro Persuasion, aimed at exploring “how social media is transforming marketing, media and public relations.” Today he has a helpful post on Technorati and how to use it to track discussion of topics that are most interesting to you.

I subscribe to Steve’s RSS feed, and would recommend it for anyone interested in social media.

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PR Growing Faster than Advertising

Thanks to Shel Holtz for pointing out this article in the Charlotte Observer about the growth of PR firms, and how companies are moving their spending from advertising to PR because it’s becoming harder, with fragmented audiences, TiVo and the like, to use traditional advertising to get messages across.

Shel made the good point in his For Immediate Release podcast that the growth of traditional PR vs. advertising may be one reason why PR firms have been slow to adopt social media…just as they were slow to implement the internet. When times are relatively good for your basic service, it probably makes sense to focus on the “bread and butter.”

Still, it’s important to learn some of these newer methods, because times change and the media landscape is changing rapidly. I heard an interesting tidbit at a recent meeting, that in 1965 it was possible to buy 3 ads on network TV and reach 85 percent of households. Today that max (except on Super Bowl Sunday) is something like 15 percent. And I believe Pew found that network newscasts are down 50 percent in audience since the launch of CNN.

With radically democratized content production and distribution with virtually no barriers to entry, the audiences will continue to break into smaller segments.

That’s where social media come in, as a way of aggregating niches of people who share interests. They (we) will point each other to things we find useful. And it means audiences are no longer passive consumers, but also a content contributors.

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A GTD Podcast

Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders blog is part of my blogroll because it was part of the chain of blogs that led me to read Getting Things Done, by David Allen.

Merlin is also a great source for Mac-based geeky implementation tips for GTD, and helped me find Ethan Schoonover’s Kinkless system.

Merlin was recently at David’s home in Ojai, and recorded an interview with David (although I’m not sure who interviewed whom) and will be distributing the conversation over the next several weeks as a podcast.

The first segment, on Procrastination, is available now.

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