Live from Austin!

Today I spent three hours tidying my desk and going through paperwork. This included going through the entire filing cabinet, removing obsolete documents. Then I shredded old information until the shredder literally burned out, emitting an unpleasant melting plastic smell. Ah well, I’d been thinking of getting a better shredder anyway, preferably one that can shred CDs.

Now I’ve traveled to the coffee house with rothko and fixed their Internet.

I was lucky enough to get on the beta list for LittleBigPlanet for PS3. I’m probably not meant to reveal too much about it, but I will say that right from the opening credits, it is utterly delightful. The kind of cute yet rich game that I would expect Nintendo to come up with. It’s basically an old-school platformer, with state of the art 3D graphics used to depict a 2D world made up of photorealistic real-world materials. Level editing tools are built in, and you’re encouraged to share your created levels with the community.

The tools seem as though they will allow people to create a wide variety of worlds. You can construct backdrops and objects from various materials (wood, polystyrene, rock, padded fabric); add various canned objects that you collect by playing the game; decorate with paint and stickers; and make everything come alive with switches, generators, string, motors, and so on. The narrator for the tutorials is Stephen Fry, some of the music is pulled straight from cult BBC show "Vision On", and there’s a Green Submarine that bears a remarkable resemblance to a famous submarine of another color. If it were any more up my alley I’d have to move it aside to wheel the trash bin out.

I’m wondering if I can build a LittleBigPlanet that resembles my desk…

Guy Kawasaki has summarized a bunch of things he thinks everyone should learn about the world of work. One of them leaped out at me:

Whether [you are] young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

Clearly he is a man after my own heart. At work I often reply with e-mails consisting of the word “Done.”

Whenever you’re writing an e-mail, you should go through what I call W5 analysis. You imagine that you’re the person who is receiving the e-mail, and answer the 5 or more questions that will run through their mind:

• Who are you?
• What’s happening?
• When is it going to happen?
• Where is it going to happen?
• Why should I care?

Those are the 5 Ws. (Note that for the purposes of this exercise, “How” is spelled with a silent ‘W’, though ‘How’ questions tend to be more specialized and less important than the others.)

Sometimes there are more than 5 Ws. For instance, if you’re asking someone to do something, you’ll want to go on and answer

• What do I need to do?
• When do I need to do it by?
• How do I do it?

Similarly, if you’re announcing a problem, you might want to add

• Why did this happen?

If you’re really lucky, you may be able to skip a question and let the reader work it out for themselves. For instance, if they know you already, you can usually skip the “Who are you?” However, if you can’t come up with at least 5 obvious W questions that the reader will want answers to, you’re probably missing something important. Try going through “Who”, “What”, “When”, “Where”, “Why” and see if they prod you to think of a question.

Once you’ve answered the W questions, those answers become the content of the e-mail. So it’s probably no coincidence that Kawasaki picks 5 sentences, and my rule of thumb is to pick the answers to 5 questions.

W5 analysis is also useful for web pages. If you’re setting up a business web site, you should definitely use W5 to decide what goes on the home page. When I go to a web site, I always want to know:

• Why does this web site exist?
• What does it contain?
• Why should I explore further?

and often

• Who owns the site?
• Where can I contact them?

It’s surprising how many sites fail to answer those questions.

In fact, once you start thinking this way, you see W5 everywhere. For instance, consider software project release announcements on SourceForge. As a user, off the top of your head, what are the 5 Ws you’d want answers to about any piece of software?

• What does it do?
• What does it cost (or what’s the license)?
• What do I need to run it?
• Who wrote it?
• Where is the documentation?

Now go through the release announcements and project pages and see how often people leave those questions unanswered. D’ohh!