In a recent post on Blog Maverick, Mark Cuban gives P-E Obama a low mark for failing to include any entrepreneurs in his economic recovery team. Leaving aside the question of whether or not the current economic situation could be helped by entrepreneurship or if there are low-level economic issues that need to be resolved first, it got me thinking about public policy as it relates to entrepreneurship. If the government decided to pick establishing new ventures as one of its key policy goals, what would that legislation look like?

I have owned and operated Distance Software for over a year now. Before that I worked at a small research company for seven years funded mostly by government contracts, and before that, I worked for a B2B startup that collapsed in the dotcom boom. I have never worked for a company that more than 50 people. I have never worked in an office that had more than the office I work in right now (8, when both companies in the space have all their staff in). With these experiences, I feel fairly qualified to talk about what might encourage and support entrepreneurship from a public policy standpoint. Here are my top five initiatives:

1. Fix the #%@$&ing heath care system - The debate over health policy is hopelessly framed as a choice between a "socialist" single-payer system and the current employer-paid system. The Obama campaign ran ads here in Wisconsin in which it described his health policy as somewhere in the middle of the extremes of an "expensive single-payer system", and the current system, described as "Insurance companies in control, denying coverage", or something to that effect. With this kind of view, I have to agree with Cuban that they are blindly failing to include the entrepreneur's perspective on what would make good policy.

   Personally, the number one thing that prevented me from starting my own business years ago was the knowledge that I didn't know where or how I would get health coverage. I can't be the only business owner who has felt this way. Now that I'm in business, with every hire I make I have to consider how I will offer them some health benefit if I hope to be competitive. Because of the employer-paid system, every single business in America is also in the business of navigating the health insurance industry, and has to spend some amount of tie and energy picking a plan, administering that plan, and accounting for the plan costs in their books. Sounds pretty inefficient doesn't it?

   The current health care system is rabidly anti-entrepreneur. I don't claim that a single-payer system will solve all the problems, but pretty much anything would be better than what we've got. I can guarantee you that if Americans had universal coverage that would cover them regardless of their employment situation, you'd see the market flooded with 30-something entrepreneurs who suddenly have no reason not to take the plunge.

2. Create Something like SCORE, but More Useful - Once I had gotten a lot of the basic elements of my business in place that were easy to figure out with a little research, like contracts, invoicing, employment issues, payroll, and an accounting system, I had a lot of questions that were more esoteric and, in my mind, required the input of a business veteran.  I had questions like:

   "I'm starting to hire, but a lot of my clients imagined that they would be getting me and only me on their projects.  How do you transition from one to many as a consultant without making clients feel like they've gotten a bait-and-switch?"

   "How soon should I hire an administrative person? Can it be done too soon?"

   "Are there any short or long term drawbacks to incorporating as an LLC versus a standard corporation given my corporate goals?"

   A few of the resources I had used recommended contacting the Service Corp of Retired Executives (SCORE), as a way to speak with a real live veteran of the business. I contacted my local branch and arranged to meet with someone there. The guy I met with meant perfectly well, and did answer a few of my questions, but he was just a volunteer trained by the organization and had kind of a stock routine he followed. I listened to his info and took their pamphlets, but I kept waiting for him to say, "and then we'll set you up with one of our Executive members", which never happened. Perhaps it's different in other parts of the country, but overall I felt like it was a huge missed opportunity to match up old with new and answer some of those esoteric questions. I believe that an organization, maybe even SCORE with some tweaking, could be federally created and funded and to fill that role.

3. Qualified Tax Holiday - This is a general policy idea that makes sense for entrepreneurs. It's a simple concept: anyone can request that their payroll taxes be waived for one year. There are some strict rules that try to disincentivize gaming the system:

   - Note that it only applies to payroll taxes, so people can't go selling off stock and homes during that year and avoid capital gains.
   - You can only do it once (obviously).
   - It only applies to the first $100K of income, so there is also not much point in trying to do much other than work real hard that year.
   - It can only be used for personal taxes, so corporations cannot use it to avoid their tax liability.
   - It must be declared in advance, not retroactively.  You file a form with the IRS saying I'm not going to pay taxes next year, and then you are exempt.  That makes sense for entrepreneurs, and others who expect they might have a dicey financial year.

   In general, I despise the notion that taxes are what make it hard to keep a business open, or what keep people from starting businesses. Mark Cuban had a post on this same point a few weeks back: entrepreneurs simply don't care about what the marginal tax rate is, they are are worried about their big idea. On the other hand, during the first year of a business, you will probably have a cash flow problem one or (many) more times. You need to budget for and regularly pay your own estimated taxes, and you probably are cash poor since you may have money tied up in inventory or waiting on payment from clients. If that burden can be eased on entrepreneurs, they can use that money to establish a nest egg to get through tough times, invest in a piece of equipment, or make a payroll that wouldn't have been made, all keys to keeping a business running. The goal is simply to increase the success rate during that critical first year. If non-entrepreneurs choose to utilize it for a little extra pocket cash, so be it.

4. SBA Payment Gap Fund - This is a fairly simple idea that might make a huge difference to a lot of small businesses. A core problem with a new business is that while you both bill clients and pay staff for work completed, your staff has to be paid immediately and your clients generally have some delay in their payment, usually 20 or 30 days. Once you have been in business for a while, you create a cushion that allows you to pay staff without issue and then backfill when invoices are paid. Up until that point though, you generally have to either delay paying staff, borrow to cover your costs, or avoid paying other bills to create the cushion, none of which are good options.

   To address this problem, the SBA could create a "Small Business Payment Gap Fund" that works as follows:

   - Small businesses wishing to use the fund would submit their outgoing invoice and along with a letter of agreement from the payee indicating that the amount would be paid within a certain number of days.
   - The Payment Gap Fund would issue an immediate payment (minus 1% for using the service or something along those lines) for the amount due, and send a bill to the original payee.
   - The original payee would then pay the Fund instead of paying the entrepreneur.
   - As long as the clients are paying back the Fund, the entrepreneur can continue to use the service. Once the overdue amounts exceed some level, the service is frozen and cannot be used by that business until the balance is paid.
   - If the client does not pay, the entrepreneur eventually becomes liable for the money.

   The idea is that good businesses with paying customers who simply need better cash flow can benefit, but it avoids the hassle and risk of a debt system since the loans end up being very short term.

5. Require Inclusion of Small Businesses in Contract Bidding - This one is specific to the tech industry. State and Federal Governments frequently contract with private industry to design and develop custom computer applications. Generally, they get bids from the same set of clients over and over again, large consulting firms who specialize in this kind of work. Since almost without exception, the work goes to the lowest bidder, they hire a lot of entry-level staff and pile on a few layers of management to get things built. This makes it appear as though they have a large team ready to go that can still work on the cheap. Of course, this flies in the face of the consensus opinion of how good systems get built: small high-quality teams, little or nothing separating the users from the developers, frequent releases with immediate feedback from the users, and so on. The end result is highly predictable: big, unwieldy systems that don't meet user needs, take far longer than agreed upon to finish, overrun on cost, and generally fail to meet the stated objective of the contract.

   I remember a recent example: the Milwaukee Public Schools contracted to have a system built to help school administrators manage their students' standardized test results so that they can better do their work of reporting current performance levels and creating plans to address shortcomings. The system was built by some big software consulting shop and delivered to the vast majority of users in a single release. On the day that it was most needed, when many of the administrators began running their reports to get key data, the system ground to a halt, making it basically unusable and creating a major crisis. Many users resorted to staying up until the wee hours so that they could log on with then load was lower and get access to their data.

   I was so frustrated when I heard about this because I knew that a small team doing frequent releases and good unit and load testing practices could have easily delivered this system with none of the issues. However, if a small company like Distance Software had submitted a bid, they would have looked at the size of the staff and tossed it. The people doing the buying don't understand that building software is not like building a house. If you want to build a big house, you need more people because there is more work to do. If you want to build a big piece of software, you want to stick with a small team because communication overhead is what kills you.

   So what to do? Force government agencies to consider small business proposals on their merit and cost and require them to ignore the size of the company. Require a certain percentage of final bidders to be small businesses (and don't use the Federal Government definition of 500 people; that's insane). Once a few agencies get really good, really cheap, on-time software built by a couple of developers and a designer, they will hopefully realize what they have been missing.

So there are my five initiatives that I would propose if I were put in charge of encouraging new ventures and supporting existing ones.  What would you add to the list?

There are a few reviews of android apps post G1 launch, so I thought I would add my thoughts on my five favorites that you may not have seen elsewhere.

ConnectBot

What's ConnectBot? Only a full-featured terminal emulation and ssh client that runs on your phone, that's all. As a consultant and small business owner who hates to ever be out of touch with servers, this is the ultimate security blanket for me. It looks and feels just like a command-line ssh client on Linux so there is almost no learning curve. Not something a typical phone consumer is probably looking for, but a critical app for me.

K9Mail

K9Mail is a fork of the build-in Android email code base. While it currently only provides a minimal set of improvements (Delete actually deleting mail on the IMAP server, allowing keyboard shortcuts for some actions), I am hopeful that it will be a springboard for some slick email features. It also shows the power of an open platform, so the choice is partially philosophical.

Twidroid

I am not a huge Twitter user (yet?) but this simple, attractive Twitter client is a great improvement over accessing the website via the Browser app.

Coloroid

Maybe this is a game that is well-known to others on other platforms, but I have not seen it before. The premise is simple: you start from a single block of homogeneous color and select a sequence of color changes. Whatever color you choose will cause your current captured set to expand into any adjacent color block that matches your selected color. Your goal is to keep the number of changes beneath some maximum while attempting to capture every color block on the board. It sounds complicated, but it is really not. Through judicious selection of color sequences, you can grab large sets of blocks at one time and keep the number of color switches to a minimums. It's the perfect thing to kill 5 or 10 minutes with that can be picked up and put down without worrying about timers counting down, remember where you were in the game, etc.

pTerminal

pTerminal is a shell for the Android OS. I haven't played around with it much, but it is useful to check out what services are running, and to run some simple commands such as ping, which can be critically useful when needed. There are apparently some good lists of commands out there that I should track down to really get the most value out of it.

Are you a G1 user with a favorite app? Let me know in the comments.

I ordered a T-mobile G1 prerelease and was one of the lucky ones who received theirs on October 21st. I've been playing around with, and installing many different applications such as Locale, which allows you to set system configuration based on your physical location, for instance if you want your phone to go on vibrate when you get to work or after 10PM. This application relies on the ability to run in the background, monitoring your current location and then taking actions as appropriate. Because of that requirement, it could never be ported to the iPhone, which does not allow background processes. It got me thinking about whether this restriction will prevent any great applications from being developed for the iPhone, and relegate it to a high-quality consumer device that is unfit for enterprise use in the same way that macs once developed that stigma.

[On a side note: remember that up until Mac OS X, the Macintosh had a non-preemptive process scheduler, meaning that the foreground process got basically all of the CPU and could more-or-less refuse to cede it; this was great for low-latency applications like digital music, but annoying to horrendous for day-to-day computing. The parallels with the current iPhone decisions are striking.]

Here is the problem in a nutshell: the refusal to allow background processes imposes an application development philosophy that is incompatible with building something of depth and sophistication. An application must be designed to focus solely on interactions with the user and to do no offline, out-of-band processing. That works fine for web browser, email, and other interactive applications, but you only have to Google "iPhone instant messenger" to see the problem. IM is something that you naturally start and stop, and that needs to sit in the background waiting for more information. There are IM applications for the iPhone, but you can't do anything else while you use one.

As an application developer, this is a deal-breaker for me. I literally cannot conceive of a useful application that doesn't have some sort of background processing capability, and while there are certainly many well-designed and useful applications available through the app store, the current software selection has been widely criticized for its shallowness. I think that those two things go hand-and-hand. The foreground-only restriction encourages the development of simple tools with flashy user interfaces and games, both of which are in abundance for the iPhone. It prevents the development of applications that passively observe context, process information asynchronously, take actions on the users behalf, and push information to them at appropriate times, all key pieces of software that I and many others like to develop, and find personally valuable.

Apple has argued that these background processes consume an inordinate amount of battery life, although that seems like an odd argument given that it would be easy enough for a user to turn on and off as needed. To address the issue, Apple stated a deadline of early October for integration of a new push-notification feature into the SDK and the OS that would allow users to send notifications to Apple servers, which would be queried by individual iPhones. This attempts to get the best of both worlds in that applications can send a message to an external server to do processing in the background, and then push notifications to the user so that they can switch back to that application to get the new information while still preventing background processes from chewing up battery. This has two problems in my mind, the fact that they missed the deadline and even this level of functionality is still unavailable notwithstanding:

1) Application developers must now structure all their applications as client-server, where the iPhone is just a pretty interface and all processing is done on application servers. For instance, (assuming I am understanding how push notifications are supposed to work) for an IM solution, the server software would have to proxy for the user to check for incoming messages and push notifications to the apple servers for that user, which then show up on the phone. Since IM clients currently don't work that way, except for web-based tools like Meebo who are well-positioned for this kind of thing, they would have to be totally rewritten to take advantage of this capability, and the application developers would need to stand up a bunch of servers to do the proxying.

2) It still doesn't let an application developer monitor the phone's context and take action. Locale would still not be possible since when it was not in the foreground, it wouldn't have access to the user's state. iPhone-style Push notifications would be just as useless as the current setup for these types of applications.

There is no doubting that the iPhone was disruptive to the wireless industry, is a marvel of engineering, and has sold a zillion units to satisfied customers. I wonder though if it will all be undermined by this simple problem, or even if it is a continued consumer success, it will always feel like a toy compared to where a phone like the G1 may evolve to. Certainly it will be a long time before we know the answer, but I find one thing very telling: whenever I describe Locale to an iPhone user, I always get the same wistful and slightly concerned look.

This past year, I had the pleasure of advising a few students from my
alma mater, Oberlin College, as part of a new entrepreneurial program. Due to their hard work and keen business plan, they received a grant from the program to kick off their new venture: developing an application to help Chinese language learners learn to write the characters more efficiently. You can see this new application at skritter.com, and check out the Skritter blog for details of their development process. At the site, you can even try out parts of the product in order to help train their system and improve the recognition capabilities, which I encourage everyone to do. It's really exciting to see this all come together for them, and I wish them the best of luck as they push towards their 1.0 release.

I own a handful of domain names, some for corporate purposes, and I also have a personal domain that I use for my personal email. This domain name is sort of a pun on my last name, and it's a made-up word. Combined with a tricky orthography (there is an 'L' next to a 'T' which, when written lower case can look like a sloppy 'H'), I'm always hesitant to give it out in any form other than electronic since it will almost assuredly be mistranscribed at some point.

When I selected the domain name way back in '99, I never considered the "confusability" factor of the name. I'd love to select a new domain to use for personal purposes that is easily understood in non-electronic contexts, but I've had trouble selecting one that meets all the necessary criteria. Here are my basic constraints:

• It must be easily understood when spoken, such as when given out over the phone.
• It must be easily understood when written, either in upper or lower case letters.
• It should be interesting enough to be memorable, but not goofy or unprofessional such that I would be embarrassed to write or speak it.
• It must be available!

These constraints imply a lot of things, based on my experience.  To be understood in a spoken context, the name must:

• Consist of dictionary words, preferably a small number - Non-dictionary words, especially cutesy ones that you find in a lot of domain names, almost always require a letter-by-letter spelling.  Negative bonus points for intentional slight mispellings of a common word (Flickr and other annoying Web 2.0 convention-followers, I'm looking at you).
• Avoid homophones - People will invariably use the wrong version.  You will be surprised how many homophones there are when you start trying to come up with names that avoid them.
• Avoid numbers - Unless you want to buy both mydomainone.com and mydomain1.com
• Avoid sounds that run together and create sound-alike words - For instance, you probably don't want to go with MicePace.com

To be understood in a written context, the name must:

• Avoid i, l unless in a totally unambiguous context - They will inevitably be transcribed alternately as each other, or as the number 1.
• Avoid o, unless in a totally unambiguous context - It will inevitably be transcribed as a zero.

Finally, the trickiest one: something that is memorable, but not embarrassing must:

• Use an odd combination of words, or be oddly related to the person or service using it.
• Use hard consonants or alliteration to create a strong sound
• Evoke a strong image in a person's mind.

So what domain names currently meet all these criteria?  One great example is amazon.com.  It consists of a dictionary word, does not have a homophone or other sound-alike element, has no numbers, uses 'o' in an unambiguous context, is oddly related to the product, and evokes a strong image.  Distancesoftware.com is not outstanding, as the ending 's' of Distance and the starting 's' of Software blend together in a spoken context, but overall I've been happy with it.  If you have other examples of either very good or very bad domain names from a confusability standpoint, please post in the comments.  I'll update when I select a new personal domain.

Psychology can be a tricky thing. Experimental results often seem to indicate very surprising things about human behavior, but the lack of context in an experimental setting can often obscure the data, or make it difficult to draw clear inferences. One area in which human behavior is especially hard to understand is that of financial reasoning. This article in the LA Times (hat tip: Freakonomics Blog) does a particularly poor job, in my opinion, of drawing conclusions from some experimental data in that domain. From the article:

Would you rather be A or B?

A is waiting in line at a movie theater. When he gets to the ticket window, he is told that as he is the 100,000th customer of the theater, he has just won $100.
B
is waiting in line at a different theater. The man in front of him wins $1,000 for being the 1-millionth customer of the theater. Mr. B wins $150.

Amazingly, most people said that they would prefer to be A. In other words, they would rather forgo $50 in order to alleviate the feeling of regret that comes with not winning the thousand bucks. Essentially, they were willing to pay $50 for regret therapy.

That seems like a fairly broad claim, but the article goes on to describe experiments with capuchin monkeys and a rather innovative "fruit-based" economy, which shows that, like with humans, losses are considered to be twice as bad as gains. All of this seems like reasonable research, but the author starts in on the theme of "can you believe how irrational we are?":

This research goes a long way toward debunking one of the biggest myths in all of psychology and economics, known as "Homo economicus."
This is the theory that "economic man" is rational, self-maximizing and
efficient in making choices. But why should this be so? Given what we
now know about how irrational and emotional people are in all other
aspects of life, why would we suddenly become rational and logical when
shopping or investing?

First of all, this author clearly knows very little about modern psychology, which would shudder at his equating of emotional and irrational, but the bigger transgression is his conclusion that this is irrational behavior in the first place. Whenever a result like this is uncovered, it immediately has to be squared with notions of fitness and evolution. Either this instinct serves some bigger purpose, or it is a holdover from a time when this instinct was valuable but is no longer (or there is a remote possibility that it has been genetically "bound" to another. more valuable trait, but that can be incredibly difficult to show). The author of the article makes no attempt to try to understand why we might have such a behavior, but I would guess that we simply have a default risk-tolerance profile that was evolved to be the 2:1 gain-loss ratio. Just because this can be triggered by other unusual circumstances doesn't mean that it isn't an overall good strategy. That would be like saying that the eye-closing reflex is "irrational" because it can be triggered by imagery in 3D movies.

Later in the article, it talks about one of my favorite, and to me, most misunderstood, pieces of psychology of economics research, the ultimatum game:

Consider one more experimental example to prove the point: the
ultimatum game. You are given $100 to split between yourself and your
game partner. Whatever division of the money you propose, if your
partner accepts it, you each get to keep your share. If, however, your
partner rejects it, neither of you gets any money.

How much
should you offer? Why not suggest a $90-$10 split? If your game partner
is a rational, self-interested money-maximizer -- the very embodiment
of Homo economicus -- he isn't going to turn down a free 10
bucks, is he? He is. Research shows that proposals that offer much less
than a $70-$30 split are usually rejected.

Why? Because they
aren't fair. Says who? Says the moral emotion of "reciprocal altruism,"
which evolved over the Paleolithic eons to demand fairness on the part
of our potential exchange partners. "I'll scratch your back if you'll
scratch mine" only works if I know you will respond with something
approaching parity. The moral sense of fairness is hard-wired into our
brains and is an emotion shared by most people and primates tested for
it, including people from non-Western cultures and those living close
to how our Paleolithic ancestors lived.

Has the author never attempted to conduct a deal? Try making a few deals where you leave money on the table, and you'll find out how quickly word gets around that you are an easy mark. People citing this type of research always wan't to tie it into a notion of fairness, but I don't think fairness is a factor at all. It's about reputation. The message that you won't make a bad deal is far more valuable in terms of future dealings than the small cash you might have pocketed up front. Just because the game as played has no consequences for the future doesn't mean that we can simply turn off the instinct that says "make a statement about how you are a tough negotiator, even at the expense of a few bucks".

The final statement of the article just makes it clear that the author has an axe to grind, and does not in fact have any understanding of modern psychology:

When it comes to money, as in most other aspects of life, reason and rationality are trumped by emotions and feelings.

Scientists spent decades making statements like the above, only to have it all debunked by current researchers who wanted to solve the riddle of how we could have possibly survived with such "terrible" insticts. Many things that were once believed to be evolutionary driftwood, like emotions, have turned out to be some of our most important processing machinery. It's critical to remember that any time we have experimental results that thumb their nose at the notion of evolutionary fitness, we need to stop and seriously consider what role that instinct may be serving in the current or past survival of the species. Failure to do so is simply bad science.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I just moved into a new office space, and along with that, I set up new business service with Time Warner cable for internet and phone. I made one fatal mistake when setting it up, which was to fail to add the business line to the "do not call list" as fast as humanly possible.  My phone has been ringing off the hook with companies looking to sell me credit card processing, of all things.  Luckily, they are fairly easy to spot:

1. They call from 800 numbers or out-of-state numbers that are not known clients.
2. If I decide to pick up the phone, they invariably ask for the owner of "Dist Software", since somehow it got abbreviated in whatever registry they all get their information from.
3. They all immediately ask "Do you currently accept credit cards?"

I will never buy anything from any of these companies.  I don't accept credit cards because I have no need to.  Most clients I deal with pay by check, and for my very occasional need for credit cards, I am happy to pay the Paypal fee.  I will never buy anything from a company that is so lazy that it can't learn my actual business name, has no idea of what I do for business and therefore whether or not I need their services, and who does not see the harm or waste in endlessly calling me to sell me a service I wouldn't use.  Someday, if/when I need credit card processing, I will ask around to my contacts in the industry to find out who they use and like, get actual salespeople on the phone, and look for the right combination of features and price.  Hopefully my do-not-call list registration will kick in this week and stop this ridiculousness.

In a post a week or so ago on the United Hollywood blog added a link to someone usingTwitter to send out updates on the activities on the strike line, noting that it was "Perfect for all you nerds, hipsters and hideous nerd-hipster hybrids." I thought to myself, that pretty much sums me up. I might lean closer to geek-hipster hybrid, or hacker-hipster hybrid, but the general idea is the same: I make a lot of decisions based on both technical merit and hipness factor. Here are a few examples:

• I prefer to use emusic over iTunes.The technical reason is that they offer DRM-free mp3s, a Linux client for downloads, and you can redownload any track you have paid for any an unlimited number of times. The hipster reason is that I can get dozens of rare Jazz tracks, and bands that no one else has ever heard of, like Giant Robot.
• I am a dedicated Linux user. The technical reason is that I find it a far superior operating system in lots of ways that I care about. The hipster reason is that it's like a band that no one else has ever heard of. I'm actually concerned about it's growing popularity, especially on the desktop. If Linux gets cool, what OS am I going to have to resort to in order to maintain my geek-hipster cred? FreeBSD? AmigaOS!?!!?
• I love old games and hardware, and the world of emulation, and I insist to this day that the old games are far superior to the crap they are putting out these days (except the Wii, which is my guilty hipster pleasure).
• I will sit and debate the relative merits of hardware and software, and talk endlessly about who pioneered what, and whom was influenced by whom (like a long-winded riff on the influence of LISP on Java given that Guy Steele was part of the core specification team) without a hint of irony.

I should just get a plain black t-shirt printed up that says "Your Favorite Chip Architecture Sucks" to clearly define the genre. Hideous Nerd/Geek/Hacker-Hipsters Unite!

I feel like I've gotten into the spirit of Nablopomo this year more than last.  Last year, I had a bunch of ideas about debugging theory that I wanted to get out in some form, and each day was mostly a matter of figuring out what I wanted to write about.  With a year of on-and-off writing under my belt, and ample opportunity to write on a variety of topics, I find myself more in the position of seeing an interesting article, or video, or problem, and just immediately writing up the ideas that occur to me on the subject rather than doing an extensive pre-analysis and structuring for each post.  To me, that's what Nablopomo is really all about: getting out of the mindset that each post has to be the essence of insight and wit, and instead just turning thoughts into material as quickly and as frequently as possible.

I also have had to face more of the prospect of having nothing to write about, and using that as a springboard to come up with new and better ideas.  It reminds me of what I was taught about doing improvisational theater.  When you first start out doing improv, you cling to certain cliches: humorous "inside" references that the audience appreciates, stock characters and goofy voices that you know will get a laugh, oh-so-clever visual gags, silly plot twists, and of course, potty humor.  These things will get you a laugh or three, but they go against the essence of what good improv consists of, which is the bizarre and incredible stories and gags that a group of people who are all committed to going with whatever gets thrown out there will create when they have nothing planned in advance.

This kind of improv has a very different feel to it, both from the actors' standpoint, and the audience's standpoint.  On stage, you are caught between a lingering concern that the whole thing is going to fall apart (which it sometimes does), and the elation that somehow it just seems to be working.  Off stage, it quickly becomes clear that anything could happen at any moment and you watch with greater fascination wondering how it's all going come together, at least that's been my experience.  You don't encounter that many groups who can totally avoid preplanning what happens in the scene because of the associated fear.  It's hard to walk out on stage and just start pantomiming and talking and hope for the best.  However, after you do it for a while, and you learn some simple tricks for making it work, it becomes so enjoyable and natural that you can't imagine relying on those old planned crutches anymore.

Ideally, that's how I'd like to write blog posts.  You get a suggestion or two from the audience, in this case the many blogs and other websites I read, or the daily problems I encounter in my work, and I just sit down and try to create something right there.  In fact, that's more or less how this post was written.  The idea that I was changing my approach to writing posts occurred to me as a starting topic, but the link between my new approach and theatrical improvisation didn't cross my mind until I was a paragraph in.  Unfortunately, my posts and my improv scenes suffer from the same problem: I was never good at ending things.

I am an avid google reader user, as are many people I know.  When I first started using it, I was adding a new feed every few days, but I started realizing that once I added a feed, I felt obligated to read everything.  With a couple dozen feeds, some with multiple posts a day such as Treehugger, it's a losing battle.  I generally have somewhere between 200-1000 unread posts at any given time.  In fact, I use my unread posts count as sort of a barometer of how busy I've been lately.  Weekends are nice because few sites update, and I usually have time to whittle things down a bit, but I rarely get down to zero.  When I do, I wind up in a mental state that I can only describe as hyperinformed, since I've usually crammed hundreds of bits of info from some amalgamation of tech news, pop culture, and sports over the a short period

I've discovered that this secret hope, that I can stay on top of every feed, has made me reluctant to add new feeds, and that's my google reader dilemma.  I ask myself, is the information I'm getting enough to justify the additional feeling of inadequacy I get when I look at a high unread post count?  It's silly, because I should use the magic "mark all as read" button to make it all go away, but that somehow feels like cheating.  Instead, I think Google should add a "don't show me any posts older than X days" feature, since then I could at least cap feeds that tend to have news that "ages out of usefulness" like Techmeme.  When I can read it everyday, it's great, but three day old tech news is usually pretty stale.  

Do others out there suffer from this same problem?   Are you reluctant to add new feeds because you want to stay on top of everything?  How many feeds can one person reasonably be expected to stay on top of anyway?