The Blog of Jonas Martinsson

Maybe I am just getting old. But I simply don’t get the concept of RockMelt , the newest flockesque browser/social-thingy on the horizon. It crams IM, social networks, and a web browser into one glorified application. I quietly ask myself how I would ever be able to get work done in an environment with that amount of cognitive overload? When accessing a web page I would be bombarded with information from the social sphere. Reading a longer article in that browser would be a feat worthy of the deepest reverence. On the surface, it seems nice and innocent enough to save a couple of Alt-Tabs to access my social networks. But the Alt-Tabs are there for a reason: to separate different contexts. 95% of the time when I am on a web page, I am there for a reason, and I don’t want to be distracted by other stuff. I believe the way forward is to simplify the user experience and use separate applications for web browsing and IM/social, so that the IM/social interactions can be turned off when ...

My yearly Sweden vacations are ever so offline. Checking e-mail is 15 kilometers away, and an unexpected liberator in that. So how does this affect me? Well, last year's experience made me discover Honore's "Slow", a short book about simplifying your life, and taking time to smell the roses. During this year’s vacation, I hit the Swedish book shops with the intent to find similar titles. But I was disappointed with seemingly shallow follow-ups trying to ride the success wave of Slow. Hours of book browsing later I came back empty-handed, disappointed not because I couldn’t find what I wanted but rather because I didn't know what I was looking for. Some days later I received a gift from my mother, a book with exquisite drawings and fine writings from a Swedish lake in the Mälaren area ("Sjö" by Gunnar Brusewitz). I was extremely pleased with the gift and started to ponder how removed I had become from nature. Living a city life, commuting to a cubicle,...

I’m now back from a relaxing vacation, doing close to nothing. The return to a hectic business life is a stark contrast. This has led me to set out a plan of doing less this year. But don’t get me wrong. Last year, I had great strategies, plans and goals for FeedJournal as well as for other personal projects. But looking back, nothing much moved forward. I can find no other reason for this than that I was feeling bogged down by the weight of my commitments. That’s why I this year plan to do less. By this logic, I hope to accomplish more. As an example, the long promised rewrite of the FeedJournal Publisher interface will take the back seat to a revamp of the existing interface, which by all means is working well. Improving what is there requires some magnitudes less effort. I hope it’s as simple as that.

Do you ever feel like you want to change something but don't know how? If you are anything like me, this is a challenge you face daily. Luckily for us, the Heath brother has taken upon themselves to create a comprehensive framework for how to go about changing someone or something. What's even better is that they succeeded to write another great book, that lives up to the high expectations from their debut blockbuster Made to Stick. Switch reaches Gladwellian mastery when it comes to readability and entertainment value. But the true value comes with the concrete framework for driving change. Laying out such a framework follows in the tradition of Made to Stick, and has become something of a Heath trademark. With this framework, driving change replaces the guesswork with a more methodological approach to change where the outcome can be predicted. I enjoyed this book immensely and I expect to get as much value out of Switch as I got out of Made to Stick. I can't wait fo...

Valerie Skinner interviewed me for the IBM “Yin meets Yang” blog. I am sharing my thoughts on agile, Jazz and other software development stuff. Impeccable timing, since my company today also launches a preview of our integration product for Jazz and Lotus Connections.

Recently, I had the enjoyment to read two good books on presentations. You know, these humiliating affairs feared more than death itself. One is “Confessions of a Public Speaker”, which I panhandled from a colleague after reading his praising tweet; the other is “Presentation Zen”, a longtime item on my Wish List. I wrote Amazon reviews for both books: One thing is certain, Scott Berkun has the gift of the gab. The author's personal experiences as a speaker at conferences is greatly entertaining and full of humorous anecdotes. I promptly subscribed to his blog , to get more of Berkun's good writing. But of course, that's not why you read this book, you want to learn about public speaking. And Berkun doesn't disappoint. His first-hand, pragmatic advice on all matters related to public speaking is useful and highly relevant for budding speakers. The book is not, neither does it try to be, a complete reference - but rather a view into the hard work behind presentatio...

I read Global Catastrophic Risks not only to deepen my understanding of global risks, but also to find ways to practically do something about it. Hopefully, blogging about the chapters as I digest them will assist on both accounts. “All else being equal, not many people would prefer to destroy the world. […] Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be a mistake.” Eliezer Yudowsky goes on by describing mistakes in human reasoning and how flawed our intuition is. The heuristics we use to evaluate probabilities, form the basis for how we deal with all types of existential risk. Knowledge of human psychological flaws are therefore important as we shape agendas for risk prevention. It is interesting to note that knowledge of these very biases and flaws does not make us much smarter. Research shows that when we compensate for our known biases, they are reduced by some 50% but never go away completely. “It is a terribly frightening thing, but peopl...