web etiquette

ten rules while in the matrix

i wrote these mostly for myself but decided to publish them in case someone else might benefit from them as well.

1. publish - push less, be pulled

minimize emailing, it is a clear push. if you are in marketing, forget about email campaigns. instead, read Steve Jurvetson’s and Tim Draper's story on Hotmail and viral marketing. also, remember that Google Page Rank is based on how many people talk about you, not the other way around.

in the real world, emailing many times a day to your friends would be considered posting them hundreds of paper envelopes via postal office each day. if you do not do that in the real world, do not do it in the Matrix either.

2. publish selectively and enhance

if you put the word cell in Google, you will notice that there are over 400 million references to this word while it was only a couple when i studied cell biology in college not too long ago. Perhaps less than hundred links or so can be interesting to even cellular biologists - the other 400 million must be just echoes. imitation is okay – the very fact of learning is imitation – as long as it is followed by novelty.

3. chat less

do not go overboard with chatting on an instant messenger unless (1) you absolutely cannot speak (that would be at work for most people), (2) you are sending a link to web resource which would be hard to do over the phone, (3) you are a building instant messenger software, and are evaluating competitors various power features.

chatting is one-to-one communication, publishing is one-to-many if at least two people read your writing

in real world, excessive chatting amounts to spending three to four hours doing just that - chatting let's say at a cafe as though you were caught in a infinite proussian moment of time, or had the schedule of mediaval nobility – while various people come by, interrupt your work, or your eating lunch.

4. send fewer files via email

publish them and send references, unless they are very private. that is the whole idea of hypertext to begin with as far as i understand it. if you think your files are too private for publishing, then do not send them via email either because if you think email is private, you are kidding yourself. seriously.

5. use other entry points to web

using Google to enter the web each time is equivalent always getting on the same highway regardless of where you are heading. be different, variety is a spice of life. You might learn something by walking through an old part of the town, taking some back roads once in a while, or visiting the internet in other countries. you will be surprised at what you find. i certainly was.

6. learn to type with ten fingers

it still hurts me to see that many people using computers are typing with two fingers which is equivalent to walking fifty miles a day everywhere instead of driving, or showing up to the Gold Rush with no shovel.

if you feel guilty of the crime, i recommend reading the tutorial on typing with all ten fingers

7. dress down

most popular sites on web - or houses in the matrix if you will - are very simple. if you could see real world analogies of Google and Yahoo, they would probably wear jeans and T-Shirt. flash and other flashy technologies are equivalent to dressing your house in haute couture. there is a reason there is one text box and only a few links on Google's home page (apart from the fact that including links on your web page dilutes your page rank).

8. study programming like a house on fire

this is a modified quote from Darwin’s words to young Galton who advised the latter to study mathematics like a house on fire. a shorter version would be "Learn More Java, and Less French". I love French, but things are a bit out of balance now by looking at the number of students going into computer science. the number of computer science major keeps going down while the web and information technology is becoming increasingly more prominent, interesting isn't it? each new generation entering college thinks it's the right thing to do but it is just too hard. and it is. studying computer science at stanford - which as you know produced many hard-core software firms including yahoo and google - is the closest thing you can get to being violated by a division one football team for four years in a row, my brother used to say

french on the other hand, o-la-la, what an exploration of culture, what a delight of poetry. baudelaire, derrida, baudrillard, cannes, christian dior, c'est adorable! who wants to think about compilers when you can kill time and entertain self-referential thoughts in a black purple net somewhere in monmartre with some other friends who have lost touch with reality.

in the real world, a web designer would be an interior decorator, but it takes a little more than that to build cities. The most efficient and most expressive programming language is Java. You can pick your own just us many people learn French and Chinese, too. there is value in knowing other languages, just ask what it is you are trying to accomplish.

9. take a peek at real world

Internet is a mental state, a form of communication and archiving. the real world consists of individuals, other species and the inanimate world.

10. using lowercase is okay

you have probably noticed that i do not use capitalization in my writing. apart from the fact that i admit to the crime of laziness, i think that no capitalization is okay since we use periods, exlamation and question marks to denote the end of sentences so capitalization is a frozen accident like many things in our language and will be soon a thing of the past in my humble opinion. i could be wrong though so do it at your own risk. and i do use capitalization for emphasis in other parts of the writing (where it could not be derived from the context).

why i wrote this:

we all learn the real world rules at very early age when pumping into objects and hurting ourselves. and that is okay, since as Einstein said, people who claim they have never made mistakes, have not tried anything new. since no one gave us advice on how to move around in this new medium, i decided to come up with an initial set of rules to avoid another dot com crash type of events (think children stepping out of the window thinking they could fly).