Every Thursday at 8 PM EST, David Spinks and Lauren Fernandez host a Twitter chat called #u30pro.  Its focus is to create a network of young (aka “under-30″) professionals, but participants of all ages are invited to join the discussion and share their relevant wisdom.

Last week, the topic involved offices — namely, do we still need them?

With such a web-enabled modern workforce, is there still actual value in requiring people to work in one place for 40+ hours every week?

Making the Case for Tunnel Vision

As many #u30pro participants admitted, working from home exposes a person to daylong distractions (e.g., kids, pets, video games, running errands, taking a nap).  Wouldn’t being stuck at the office be more productive by default?

And yet, in an office, you’re still assaulted with distractions of a different stripe: questions, emergencies, small talk, meetings, upgrades, lunch breaks, coffee breaks, memos…

Is there really any difference?

Yes, But It’s All in Your Head

As I tweeted during #u30pro, an “office” is less important than “a place where you can focus and accomplish your goals.”

And, whether you work at home or in an office, that focus is ultimately up to you.

To help reduce the white noise that can distract you from your goals, consider these tips:

1. Shorter Emails, Less Often

Very few emails require immediate replies, and even fewer emails require long replies.  Check your email when you start work, after lunch, and before you end your day.  Send your replies immediately, but don’t check back in the interim (unless it’s an emergency).

Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week, suggests doing even less.

2. “Got It.”

Two little words that can put an end to an otherwise endless chain of emails.  It lets the sender know a document or message was received without sparking an elaborate and pointless conversation.  (e.g., “I got your message — thanks for such a prompt reply!” ~ “No problem! Glad to know everything worked out.” ~ “Sure did!  If anything else comes up, I’ll let you know.” ~ “Please do!  Although I’ll be out of the office most of next week.” ~ “In that case, have a great vacation!” etc. etc. etc.)

Stop wasting everybody’s time.

“Got it.”

Onward.

3. Block out your time.

Accomplishing the first 3 items on your to-do list by 10 AM is nice, but if those last 2 items linger because you felt like you had time to kill, you’ll still end up working late.

Instead, try this: list every hour of your workday and assign 2 or 3 to-dos to get done in each hour (or , if a project is large or ongoing, in each block of time).

If you get that hour’s work done in less than an hour, congratulations: you’ve earned a break.  (Until next hour.)

Otherwise, even the shortest to-do list can remain undone if you confuse small tasks with the big picture.

4. Schedule “Me” Time, and Defend It Viciously.

If you need a coffee break at 10 and 2, take it.

If you need to surf Twitter between tasks because it helps your mind realign, do it.

And yes, naps are good.

Your work gets done because you’re good at what you do, not because you’re a machine.

5. Close Your Door.

If you have an office, you have the right to close the door.  If your coworkers keep interrupting you anyway, you have the right to lock it.  And if they keep knocking, you have the right to crawl out the window and work from the cafe down the street.

If you work in a cube, the same rules apply, but you may have to be more visually demonstrative.  If you’re not to be disturbed, hang up a sign that says so.  Or run police tape across your cube entrance.

And if all else fails, work with your brow furrowed or your tongue sticking out.  If you look like you’re working hard, other people are less likely to interrupt you.

6. Ignore Your Phone.

If it’s important, they’ll leave a message that you can check when you have time.

If it’s really important, they’ll call back.  (And yes, if the same person is frantically dialing you over and over, that’s a sure sign that something else is about to become more important than whatever you’re currently working on.)

7. Make It Hard to Navigate to Websites Where You Routinely Waste Time.

If you can’t watch one YouTube video without viewing three more, leave your speakers off.

If you can’t tear yourself away from Farmville, don’t bookmark Facebook.

The act of having to turn on your speakers, or to physically type in the address of a website you know you shouldn’t be going to, is a subconscious reminder that you have more important things to do.

8. I’m cutting this list short because you have more important things to do.

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When you’re surrounded by strangers, it can be hard to strike up a conversation.  Presumably, things would be easier if you already knew something about some of those people.

But what if that knowledge actually made you more reluctant to start a conversation?

That’s what I’m wondering about Meet Gatsby, a Foursquare-related program that connects you with fellow users in your proximity who share the same interests you’ve divulged to the program.  It’s basically an icebreaker service for complete strangers sitting in the same room who happen to share a common interest.

For example, if you tell Gatsby that you like comic books, and someone else who also likes comic books checks into your location on Foursquare, Gatsby will introduce you.  You’re under no obligation to speak to each other, but you now have that opportunity.

In theory, this should help us all leapfrog over our fears of meeting strangers.

In reality, I can already think of several potentially awkward scenarios — including:

• What if one person is an expert in a field, but the other’s just casually interested?
• What if someone’s trying to work, but they’re accosted by a bad conversation?
• What if someone’s already in a conversation with someone else?

But while those examples might be disappointing, annoying or uncomfortable, they’re also beside the point.

The real power of Gatsby is in the way it makes you re-evaluate a central question:

What kinds of people do you really want to meet?

Hi, My Name Is ________.

In order to meet a wide array of people, your instincts might lead you to supply Gatsby with lists of incredibly obvious interests.  “Music.” “Movies.” “Sports.” “Blogs.”

But this presumes you’d be happy to meet anybody.  If that were the case, you wouldn’t need Gatsby; you’d just ask the nearest stranger if they’ve seen any good movies lately.  Supplying Gatsby with ultra-common criteria is like supplying it with no criteria at all.

You could also program Gatsby with all sorts of hyper-specific interests that are extremely personal to you… except they’re immediately obvious to anyone looking at you.  Trust me, if your interests are Skinny Puppy, Joy Division, The Cure, and The Crow, I can probably figure that out without consulting Gatsby.

So what does that leave us with?

The future.

I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On… Mentally

To me, the real hook for using Gatsby is the opportunity to meet people I’d want to talk to because:

• they know a lot about something I want to learn more about
• they’re experts in something I know nothing about
• our shared interests are likely to yield new discoveries for each of us

For example, if I said I liked “movies,” that would be nearly useless.

But if I said I was a fan of Whit Stillman or Atom Egoyan, two lesser-known indie directors with very unique storytelling styles, I’d be less likely to find people who matched that interest but more likely to have fruitful conversations with anyone who did.  Because if we both like Egoyan, we can probably each suggest half a dozen amazing films that the other’s never seen.

To accomplish this, we need to rethink the words we use to identify our interests, like…

• Would the people we meet differ if we were fans of “movies” versus “films”?
• Are your interests “politics,” or are they “liberal politics,” or “Libertarian”?
• Do you like “blogs,” or do you like “blogging”?

This isn’t just semantics; this is SEO for your personality.  The more specific you (and others) are, you the more likely you are to find conversationalists who matter.

But this still leaves one loose end: how do we bridge the gap between “students” and “teachers”?

Single White Male, in Search of Enlightenment

Meet Gatsby is still in its earliest stages of development.  (As I type this, their Twitter account only has 61 followers.)

And since they’re currently accepting suggestions from users, I have two:

• Subdivide interests into Things We Know About and Things We’d Like to Learn About
• Allow users to rate their own expertise, and the expertise of others

Why would this matter?  Context.

Let’s say two people with interests in social media happen to meet up through Gatsby.

If Person A knows enough about social media to rate himself a 7 out of 10, he can probably offer advice to someone who’s only rated her own expertise a 4.  But if she disagrees with his suggestions (or thinks he’s making it all up), she should have the same opportunity to affect his credibility rating as buyers and sellers do on eBay.

Ultimately, Gatsby is positioning itself as a marketplace for human interaction.  And people will always want to interact with others who offer them the most value for their time.

The more ways we have to find the people who matter to us, the more valuable every Foursquare check-in will be — and the more relevant our own accumulated knowledge becomes.

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Last night, while I was conducting a Social Media 101 workshop at Baltimore’s Creative Alliance, my Twitter account was hijacked… by my girlfriend.

I’d logged in on her laptop before the workshop began, and then I forgot to logout.  Since she’d accompanied me to the workshop, she suddenly found herself with two free hours to masquerade as me, and I’d be none the wiser.

Fortunately, Ann has no reason to dent my reputation by making offensive or controversial statements in my name.  Instead, she has a wicked sense of humor, and she started offering play-by-play commentary on my presentation style.

After awhile, she switched gears and started offering “fun facts about Justin,” which then morphed into a #funfactsaboutjustin hashtag.

And while anyone who didn’t see Ann’s original tweet probably thought it was bizarre that “I” would be tweeting about myself in the third person, my friends and my familiar Twitter conversationalists got a huge kick out of it because they were suddenly privy to a side of me that they wouldn’t otherwise see: me, as explained by someone who knows me a little too well.

Then, in order to illustrate a point, I pulled up my Twitter account during the presentation.  Ann’s cover was blown.  And the audience (and I) got a handy reminder that you should always log out of your personal accounts when you’ve accessed them from a public computer.

Afterward, I finally had time to read back through what “I’d” said, and see what others said in response.  It was entertaining.  And (mostly) true.  And surprising, because I never would have expected so many people to be so interested in the arbitrary details or commentary about my life…

… and yet, that’s what I already share with the world on a daily basis.

It took me awhile to realize that what Ann had been saying in my name isn’t all that different from what I already say myself.  But she was able to offer a slightly different viewpoint that I wouldn’t (or couldn’t) have provided because… I’m me.  And because she channeled her commentary as me, the people who follow me got to be in on the joke in a way that wouldn’t have happened if Ann had tweeted from her own account (which she doesn’t have).

I’m happy to have my own account back, but I’m also thankful for my out-of-twitterbody-experience.  Not many people get to attend their own funeral, but hearing what they have to say about you (or as you) is priceless.

Now all we need to do is convince Ann to rejoin Twitter (which she quit years ago), and then I can patiently await the day when she leaves her account logged in on my laptop…

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For the past decade, we’ve all felt increasing pressure to “join the conversation.”  Companies and communicators alike have been advised to bring their messaging to the people and service them “where they are,” rather than the now-passé tradition of expecting the people to come to you.

This approach has resulted in a cacophony of competing messages, as everyone strives valiantly to be heard above the din.  Instead of “joining the conversation,” it now feels like everyone’s joined the fray, and only the most relevant or rewarding messages manage to break through the squall of white noise.

This development has also altered our valuation of people’s time.  Instead of presuming a person’s shop or services are so remarkable as to be worth someone else’s time and effort to come find them, the provider’s time and effort is now worth less than that of her audience or her customers.  It’s now her responsibility to make time for them.

But with everyone competing for the same 24 hours of attention, is it any wonder that some people are starting to question the merit of this new technique and instead casting a wistful eye toward the more easily-managed construct of walled gardens?

Grant Me a Brief Respite in Your Branded Eco-Lounge

Information overload helps no one.  If we want to process information, we need a break from absorbing more information.

Enter (literally): the walled garden.

In info-speak, a walled garden is a self-contained info-system.  People come in, they see what you want them to see, they have conversations and ask questions about a narrow range of relevant topics, and they’re presented with action items and takeaways designed to keep your message and branding top of mind as they head back out into the unpredictable static of the info-storm.

Previously, companies were derided for expecting web surfers to linger in their walled gardens.  With so much information “out there,” how could companies be presumptuous enough to require that people spend their precious time in the company’s space?  But once the sum total of information available “out there” surpassed our ability to process it meaningfully, those structured storehouses of information started to seem less like oppression and more like relief.

Even sources who “should know better” are calling for a return to prior simplicity.  A stellar post from BBH Labs about stimuli and mental computation floats the following justification:

“For now at least, there’s room for brands to be marketed as tools to help Neo-Luddites swim against the tech tide.  Guinness, Magners, KitKat – ought to be creating virtual & real walled gardens for when you want to kick back and relax, away from the torrent of data.”

Suddenly, what once seemed like a sure sign that a company “didn’t get it” is now being touted as a wise move for companies who want to position themselves as “counter-culture.”  Evidently, what we now consider “culture” involves a massive continual onslaught of stimuli and low expectations for long-term retention.

Who knew outdated communication techniques would so swiftly experience a romantic resurgence?

The Upside to Enclosure

These days, the breadth of available information is obvious.  But those seeking depth or context require more than an endless barrage of stimuli; they require some mental (or digital, or physical) space to sort it out.  A chance to dig a little deeper.  Some time to consider the bigger picture.

Walled gardens provide the structural, thematic and operational constraints that let us evaluate smaller bits of information over a longer (or at least less disruptive) stretch of time.  When you’re in Facebook, you may see a torrent of data, but it’s all contextualized according to whom you’ve opted to follow (and how).  When you’re on the Dos Equis website, you’re free to learn more about their beer at your own speed, rather than relying on a chance encounter with a serendipitously-timed tweet or a randomly-generated ad.

Granted, there are impractical ways to do this.  And in an age of respect for “open” communications, limiting your customer’s options isn’t always a blueprint for success or goodwill.  But the companies that strike the best balance between constriction and collaboration under the guise of providing users with improved functionality will likely see the greatest end results.

It could even be possible that companies and sites who restrict information flow will be rewarded for their stewardship, as long as the ultimate control of that flow is in the hands of the user.  And the better attuned a site is to the cognitive needs of its users, the more value those users will ascribe to the information provided, even if it’s the same information they could find elsewhere by chance.

The worldwide flow of information won’t be slowed; that genie has left the bottle.  But there’s certainly an opportunity for companies and curators who can provide rest stops along our ever-widening Information Superhighway.  (And if those rest stops do come with Kit Kats, so much the better.)

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Yesterday, I said you need to be interesting if you want to get paid to be yourself.  But producing content that others willingly pay for is only one way to make a living online.

What people fail to realize is that everything you do online is part of a living resume.

As Doug Derda, the co-founder of the long-running Should I Drink That? podcast, pointed out in a comment yesterday:

you wanna know how I made money? I took what i learned at Podcamps, [and] worked on it for my podcast which eventually got me a full-time job as a social media coordinator. That’s how you make money.

So is Doug getting paid to drink beer?  No.  Is he making a living from the advertising revenue on his podcast?  No.  Instead, his expertise in creating and promoting his podcast is what opened the door for him to land a full-time job managing someone else’s media.  And that’s the job that allows him to keep funding his show.

Doug’s not alone.  Many other media producers — including yours truly — have parlayed their passions into occupations.  Just not in the romanticized way that get-rich-quick schemers might expect.

How I Got from There to Here

In 2007, social media veteran John C. Havens earned a contract to produce a series of web videos for a client.  The problem: he’s not a videographer.  But I am.

John knew of my work as the creator of Something to Be Desired, which came up during a 2006 interview he conducted with me for About.com after I organized the first PodCamp Pittsburgh.  Based on what he knew of my video experience, he brought me aboard for this particular job.  And that opportunity eventually led to me becoming the Director of Social Media for Creative Concepts LLC, who had been John’s original client.

Am I getting paid to produce STBD?  No.  Am I getting paid to organize PodCamps?  No.  But had I not produced STBD in the first place, I never would have had a reason to attend the first PodCamp in Boston, or to replicate the event in Pittsburgh, which put me on John’s radar, which led to the offer that became a long-term job.

So why aren’t more people treating their online persona as a full-time recruiter?

Monetize This

In November, a friend sent me a link to a job posting.  It was for a Director of Social Media position within a sub-office of the federal government, and its salary ($40-$50K) was the kind of number that most of the people who ask “how do I monetize my blog?” can only dream of.

Of course, the requirements for that job were also beyond the reach of most blog jockeys, who spend their days burrowing so far into their favorite niche that they can’t see the light of opportunity all around them.  Social media is a booming field, and as the examples above illustrate, legitimate employers are willing to offer legitimate money to people who understand how these tools work.

So why, in an economy where any job has to be considered rationally, is everyone still trying to become “internet famous” overnight?

One problem is that we’re still getting used to the idea of content-as-resume.  We’re still laboring under the pretense that people are either creators or they’re facilitators, artists or accountants.  Either you do, or you make.  Despite social media’s inherent ability to dissolve psychological boundaries, we’re still not comfortable allowing our preconceived labels to overlap.

Once you realize that a potential employer is as likely to contact you through your Flickr stream as they are through your LinkedIn profile, you begin to realize that everything you do online is both a statement and an opportunity.

So make no mistake: every pixel you produce is a brick in the wall of your future.

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Last week, I wrote about Spokeo, a service that lets people who barely know you find out more about you than either of you might realize.  But the problem isn’t the service itself — it’s our expectations of privacy, and our intentions for wanting privacy in the first place.

As Ian M. Rountree writes in his sharp-eyed post about the fallacy of privacy:

“Because anonymity is futile, we need to guard our manners.”

Services like Spokeo — or even just Facebook — dilute privacy to the point of meaninglessness.  Anything you’ve ever done online is increasingly searchable and findable by the people who want to do so, which makes obsessing over the things we want to keep hidden from them futile indeed.

On the other hand, secrets are now easier than ever to find — and, therefore, worth ever less to those seeking to destroy you.  (“Destroy you?” Someone has a high opinion of himself…)  Which means secrets are cheap, and muckraking is cheap, and tearing apart someone’s reputation by divulging their own worst actions means less and less as those worst actions are, by nature, becoming more and more public.

What Happens When the Skeletons in Your Closet Don’t Matter?

We impeached a president over a blow job.  We indicted a quarterback for murdering dogs.  We’re currently fascinated by whether or not a golf hero will survive the exposure of his seemingly endless adultery — not professionally, because such transgressions obviously never impacted his game, but publicly, “in the eyes of the people,” which is (we tell ourselves) all that really matters.

Except it isn’t.

What other people think of you matters infinitely less than what you do.  We’re taught this in gradeschool, and then we promptly forget it, because the rest of life is predicated on presumption, opinion and appearance.  Facades are a goldmine, while accomplishments (or a lack thereof) are quickly dismissed and easily forgotten.  And if that’s the case, why should failures be such taboo?

Everyone has secrets.  Everyone does things they’d prefer to keep quiet, or which seem to be in direct opposition with their public persona.  That’s life, and it’s the duality of human nature — we’re forever torn between who we wish we were and who we are right now.  Yet, paradoxically, whenever someone’s private secrets have been divulged and their public persona has been tarnished as a result, we become fascinated with the spectacle — despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the exact same thing (minus the fame) could happen to us.

People who never cared about golf a month ago are now riveted by the saga of Tiger Woods and his seemingly endless harem, and the only question asked more than “How did he get away with being such a duplicitous adulterer for so long and still play golf better than anyone else on the planet?” is “How will he handle this?”  Because as much as the public loves to see a good implosion, it’s also watching for instructions on how to handle this same kind of PR nightmare, should such an expose ever happen to them — or us — or you.

Because “public relations” isn’t actually about relating to the public; it’s about convincing the public that your own version of a story is the most relevant.  Nobody cares what actually happened; we only care about what the stories we tell each other mean, and who’s believing them.

Which is ironic, because who we are is always more interesting than who we pretend to be.

Somehow, even though it’s been around for years, I managed to remain unaware of Spokeo until yesterday.  But lord knows they’ve been aware of me — and you.

If you’re also unfamiliar with the service, it’s basically an aggregator of anything you’ve ever done online.  You join, and then Spokeo scrapes your email contact list and shows you what everyone on your list is doing across every one of their web profiles.  It’s like stalking by accident — as evidenced by the color-coded gossip mongers on their homepage.

Spokeo currently boasts input from 40 different websites, giving anyone who’s ever emailed you before a pretty detailed picture of who you are and what you do — and have done.  Ever.

Check out these pull-quote testimonials about the power of the service, also pulled from their homepage:

Got that?

If it’s hard to read in these screen caps, PC World, ABC News and TechCrunch each laud Spokeo’s ability to “dig up information on friends, foes, ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends and everyone in-between — and the best part is they don’t have to know you’re keeping track of them.”

Yay!  Now it’s stalking on purpose!

And while it’s obviously appealing to people who just can’t stop cyberstalking everyone they know, that’s just the gateway to it’s actual usefulness: business and law enforcement (as noted in the nav bar in the first image).  By luring in the nosy next-door neighbors of the world, Spokeo automatically populates its database with information about everyone its users know — which then becomes legitimately useful to the people who can make actual use of that information by marketing to or, potentially, litigating against you.

Reel in the Suckers, and They’ll Drag the Whole World Behind Them

How did I hear about Spokeo?  Oddly, not from any of the blog articles written about it over the years, which (correctly) point out the system’s uncanny resemblance to an uninvited Big Brother whose tentacles reach farther than its users initially realize.  I heard about it when someone who’s emailed me once before evidently signed up for the service.

I know Cristina in passing, but we’re not on a “hey, let’s grab a beer” level of acquaintanceship.  But because I’m in her address book, she now knows everything about me that Spokeo can tell her.

Notice the creative wording in this email, which makes it sound like people are using Spokeo to voluntarily follow me out of convenience, rather than as an automatically triggered response to a pre-set instruction from the service.  That’s a much cuddlier approach than the “Warning: Your privacy is being breached” type of emails they used to send out a few years ago.

Also, notice the other twist in this “opt-in” puzzle: in the fine print of Cristina’s email, it says: “If you wish to opt out of all future emails, click here.”  As though, because Cristina signed up for the service, everyone in her address book must now choose to opt out of also being part of the service by association.  How cosy.

Of course, as most observers have pointed out, there’s nothing Spokeo can find that isn’t already “out there” anyway.  In fact, they’re even doing you a service by showing you all the unused accounts (or incriminating information) you’ve left littered behind you on the information superhighway — and you might want to clean those up.  But the purists will argue that just because I’ve responded to an email from a client or a Craigslist seller, that doesn’t mean those people deserve to know everything they can discover about me with one click.

Too late: the Internet is here.  And it knows you.

Lately, I’ve been discontent with the state and quality of social media.  I’ve lamented the lack of trailblazers, questioned the purpose of an audience and even called for an outright rebellion.  And now, amid all this white noise that passes for communication, we have yet another sign that independence in America is more discouraged than ever:

PittGirl just got fired.

If you’re not from Pittsburgh, you may not be familiar with PittGirl, the blogger who (until this week) posted anonymously hysterical rants and bittersweet observations about Pittsburgh for three years on her old site, The Burgh Blog.  Due to the increasing difficulty of maintaining her anonymity, PittGirl finally outed herself this week.  It turns out her name is actually Virginia Montanez, she’s 35, happily married and a mother of two.  She’d blogged anonymously because she was concerned that her comedic evisceration of local targets like mayor Luke Ravenstahl, UPMC, and Steelers Ben “Duke of Fug” Roethlisberger and Jeff “Skippy Skeeve” Reed might get her in trouble at work.

Turns out she was right.  One day after going public, Montanez was fired from her job as the Director of Marketing and Communications for NEED, a Pittsburgh-based scholarship program for minority students, where she’d served for the past 6 years.  (Amusingly, Montanez is still listed on NEED’s employee page at the time of this post.)

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Montanez’s story so closely resembles that of Heather Armstrong (aka Dooce), who was also fired after posting sarcastic and unflattering anecdotes about her day job.*  (In fact, Montanez was technically “dooced,” according to popular web parlance.)  In the aftermath of her dismissal, Armstrong parlayed her considerable writing skills into a full-time career. PittGirl’s fans undoubtedly expect her to do the same; it’s not Montanez’s career options that worry me.

It’s that the paranoiacs were right.

Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that Armstrong and Montanez are each strong-willed, sharp-tongued women who were fired for daring to detail the idiosyncracies and idiocies of their daily lives.  Let’s also kid ourselves into believing that a man who’d done the exact same thing would have also been fired by his face-saving male superiors.  (Sexism would only muddy these waters, so let’s keep our paranoia clean.)

For me, the bigger issue is this: since when did America become a nation where holding a contrarian opinion is a fireable offense?

I understand the politics of always needing to appear positive, and I find them wearying and fraudulent.  That’s one of the many reasons I’m a freelancer; this way, I only have to kiss my own ass.  And yet, even my own sarcastic opinions and unpulled punches have allegedly cost me work, so I can only imagine how many people are lining up to not hire someone like Montanez for fear that she might eventually point out their flaws, or otherwise challenge their obsessively bubble-wrapped self-image.

When Montanez temporarily pulled the plug on PittGirl last year for fear that someone else might out her, I lamented the need for her anonymity in the first place.  When she decided to go public this week, I gave her credit for being resilient enough to withstand the impending slings and arrows she’d been fearing these three long years.  But now, realizing just how right she was to be paranoid, my respect for her has doubled, even as my respect for society in general continues to plummet ever downward.

* Correction: I originally wrote that Heather Armstrong blogged anonymously at Dooce.  I was wrong; she blogged in her own name.