From a birthday greeting I received:

"Happiness is the result of inner maturity. It depends on us alone, and requires patient work, carried out from day to day. Happiness must be built, and this requires time and effort. In the long term, happiness and unhappiness are therefore a way of being, or a life skill."

Thanks, Bonnie. :)

This just in (in case you care): Writely has been acquired by Google. See here: http://writely.blogspot.com/2006/03/google-yep-google.html.

Recalling my mission to make valuable new web tools understandable to the less-webby masses, allow me to explain why *I* care. Writely is an online word processor - kind of like Word for the web. I've been using it for a couple of months, and I've grown rather fond of it. To me, it epitomizes many of the reasons why I get excited about web technology, at its best. Why? Because Writely has great potential for fostering collaboration.

The main thing that makes it different from Word is that multiple people can work on a document simultaneously (just not on the same sentence at the same time. Anything else goes.) Writely tracks all revisions as previous versions that you can refer back to, and eliminates forever the horrible experience of passing around multiple versions of the same document, clogged up with endless "tracked" changes.

So, for example, earlier this week I was asked to help some friends write copy for a software product that they're launching soon. I plugged the bare-bones I was given into Writely, and did my best to come up with clear, engaging text. Then I added the project lead to the document as a "collaborator", and together we worked, talking out loud sometimes and working independently at others. Once we were feeling pretty good about what we'd come up with, we added in another project member to look it over. He made a bunch of changes that I thought were terrific, and preserved the good in what had already been done.

Together the three of us fine-tuned our document, live on the internet, until we were satisfied. What emerged felt like a truly collaborative effort. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy, and it was very clear to me that what we had created using Writely was better than what any of us would have come up with alone. I'm also quite certain that it was better than what would have resulted had we passed around a Word document and all added our two cents at different times.

I think there's something about giving over to the flow, trusting the process, watching your words be changed by another... and letting the wisdom of the group emerge. That's what social software can facilitate, at its best. That's why I get excited about this stuff! Maybe if we build the right technology, it really will contribute to the emergence of new capacities in human consciousness. Then our challenge will be to learn wise use of our tools, and discernment about when the tech is helpful, and when it is actually distancing us from the presence and awareness required to move towards the evolution of our consciousness.

(Big words for a blogger, eh? Oh, and if I've sold you on Writely, get yourself on the new waitlist quick.)

All right.

I am here to shamelessly promote the Litebook. If you are one of the many people who suffers in the wintertime from low energy, depression, or a whole host of other symptoms that can accompany the season of low light, then you should seriously consider investing in one of these.

I've been using mine for just over a week now, and I don't think it's an overstatement to say that the improvement was dramatic and pretty immediate. My days of sleeping nine+ hours and then wanting to crawl into bed for a nap all day seem to be over. Since i started using my Litebook, I sleep like a normal person again (between 7 and 8.5 hours, ish) and I don't feel tired all day. I feel... normal, I guess, again. I feel how I am accustomed to feeling, when I'm not in the midst of SAD season. My mood is also quite a bit better - and I'm not the only person to notice the improvement in me.

It's been quite the relief. I mean, obviously thirty minutes of light in the morning can't change the circumstances of your life, but it certainly seems to do something to improve my day-to-day perception of those circumstances. Kind of like anti-depressants for some people, I suppose. And I would personally rather sit in front of a funny little box of LED lights than start adding chemicals to the mix.

They don't come cheap - mine was $300, and I got a super-good deal. But I really can't say enough about mine so far. My only regret is that I didn't get one a long time ago.

Wired Up, Plugged In, Zoned Out

As mentioned in my previous post, I haven't been spending a lot of time with the newspaper lately. But I was looking through this past weekend's Globe and Mail, and found the article above (linked from a site that didn't insist on breaking it up into five annoying pages, take note G&M) which I found very interesting.

The article expresses concern about the growing prevalence of "egocasting". This term refers to the way that new technologies allow us to increasingly filter out all views, sources, and voices that don't align with what we've already decided we believe about the world. So lefties tend to subscribe to RSS feeds from lefty news sites, and conservatives do the same. TiVo allows us to select our preferences and never have to flip through anything we aren't interested in. The ads we see online are increasingly tailored. We seek out reflections of ourselves.

In some ways, this is a great thing. We have incredible access to like-minded people, and to information about the things that interest us. Our time is valuable and so tools that help us to filter through the noise are hepful.

But the concern is that we are losing any sense of a common culture, as well as our collective appreciation for the role of differing viewpoints, and constructive debate. Christine Rosen suggests that this  trend of egocasting increases polarization in the political spectrum, because people aren't challenged to consider the voices on the other end. And the blogosphere allows us all to reinforce our beliefs, and hang out in our respective "echo chambers".

I think this article is worth a read (and a second link). My sense is that there is a degree of reaction by a traditional journalist to what must seem a threatening wave of change, but there's also a lot to think about.

I want to believe that new technology in communications is going to help us evolve and find new and better means of collaboration and have access to more and broader ideas than ever before. But, as I admitted yesterday, I have been rather dis-engaged this election, and I think it is in part because I am able to fill up all my "news" time with stuff that is interesting to me, and that has nothing to do with the election. If I relied on a traditional newspaper for my news, I would not be able to avoid the coverage and the debate.

Any reactions out there? Fear mongering, or insightful commentary on Consciousness 2.0? I'd love to hear what you think.