Holiday travel can be a nightmare. Know your rights and know the rules when you travel.

Chris Brogan wrote a piece on his site about writing three blog posts per day. When talking about blogging, I often hear these things:

• I don’t have time
• Where do you find the time to keep engaged
• It takes so much work
• There’s no way I can do that

This is how Chris finds time:

I don’t watch TV.

I don’t read blogs endlessly.

I don’t wait in lines without doing two things at a time.

I get up before my kids (if I can help it), and write while they’re at school.

I don’t do phone calls or meetings if I can help it. If I have to, I keep them VERY brief.

I’m trying out Dragon Dictate for the Mac (no review yet).

I can type really really fast.

I like TV and I read blogs endlessly. I’m not super productive while waiting in line. I don’t have kids. I’m always in meetings. Dictation software doesn’t understand me. I can type fast.

As a result, I’m averaging about three posts a week instead of day. My goal is to be able to sustain two to three posts per week.

This is a fantastic recording of the visual note taking presentation at South by Southwest 2010 featuring Austin Kleon, Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown & Dave Gray.

Text messages are expensive. The maximum character count for a text message is 160. That’s 160 bytes for you nerds out there. Assuming the going rate of text messages at AT&T ($0.20 per message without a plan), that comes out to $1,310 per megabyte. That’s why they encourage you to sign up for their text messaging plans, also a ripoff considering the amount of data that’s transmitted over a text message.

Consider that their 2 GB plan comes to $25 for a month. If you convert their 2 GB data plan into text messages, it should cost you $0.0004 per message, or 2,500 messages for $1 (assuming my math is correct). Again, I’m making basic assumptions that a text message is 160 bytes (typically you text less than 160 characters).

photo © 2008 shredded77 | more info (via: Wylio)

That’s quite a mark up. Phone companies know this and have slowly increased text messages from 2 cents each to 20 cents each. Eventually, you have to get a messaging plan.

In a later post, I’ll do a review on alternatives to text messaging. For now, I’ll leave you with these options:

1. Use mobile IM (you’re already paying for a data plan, use it)
2. Sign up for Google Voice and get free SMS. Their newest iPhone app also includes push notification.
3. Use a mobile messaging platform.

Can anyone confirm my back of the envelope calculations?

Traditionally, projects have followed a plan, define requirements, do, test, and deploy model. There is a lot of upfront planning and scoping the project. A plan is created to design and develop a product. This cycle takes a long time and has a period where the end user custom isn’t involved in the process. When the product finally is released, it’s often disliked by the customer.

In this case, replace product with anything, be it a report, a piece of software, or a physical product.

An iterative development process breaks the development cycle down into really small chunks. This allows the product to be released as soon as possible and kept in a beta state. In the first few iterations, a smaller group of customers, typically early adopters are involved in testing out the product. Feedback from the direct customers are used to address bugs and features of the product. Over time, the product is release to the mass audience and changes are made incrementally. Google’s Gmail is an excellent example of this approach. The beta tag was kept on the logo for years before finally releasing it as a final product.

The advantage of this process is that it hits the market sooner than later and feedback is given from the actual users. By releasing features slowly, it also helps with change management efforts.

The disadvantage is that the product is released with errors and bugs. There could be a negative perception on the quality of the product. However, this can be address by communicating the continual improvement process.

I believe that the traditional development process will be obsolete. Holding on to products until its perfect will no longer work. We’ve seen more acceptance of this model through mediums like blogs, twitter, and social media.

The New York Time developed an amazing webapp that allows you to make policy decisions to attempt to close the Federal budget deficit. It’s too easy to say that congress isn’t doing their job, or the President is wrong, etc. Instead, this is your chance to sit in the chair and make the decisions. What is missing is the backlash that comes with cutting programs, may be an audio boo could be used.

This also reminds me a lot of Sim City. Simulation software can be a great tool to engage audiences in discussion. Rather than talk about issues, actually simulate it and create discussion and engagement.