For users, this way of registration is great. They can login easily, and don’t have to invent a new username or password for your site. You’ve just NOT complicated and cluttered the internet even more.

photo credit: gwen

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And using those better ways is like wearing a watch when you never did so before. It feels strange first, often you don’t realize it could help you, but then, you find enough situations where the quick glance on the watch is really much more convenient than getting out your phone buiried in your pocket, klicking a button and waiting the screen to apprear, only to have to lock the screen after that and putting the phone in its safe position.

photo credit: KatieKrueger

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What is Media

You think media means music, videos, TV and the newspapers, and thats true, but there is a lot more out there that you oftentimes don’t recognize as media. Media is a either a more or less unlimited channel of content (TV, internet in general, radio, a library) or a set size of content (a music album, a book, a video,  a videogame, a magazine, a blogpost, a newspaper). The “content” is what’s tickling your fantasy, mind, interests, thirst for knowledge, imagination, anxiety, … or just lets your brain consume  stuff so it is freed from the hard work of thinking itself. You could even argue that other people talking to you are a stream of content and therefore media. All these contents influence you and your ways of thinking.

photo credit: dearsomeone

The Problem

Technically, oftentimes you’ll find digital media bound to storage like CDs, DVDs or a lot of dead trees (formally known as paper). I never understood people hoarding their music-CDs, and their videos, be it on tape, VHS casette or DVD ar BD – even if I know a lot of people who do that. As a kid (when you watch movies dozens of times) I might have liked that myself, but since the dawn of digital media, I don’t see the point anymore at all.

The advantage of having collections of media around is that you can show off what you have, and what you’re interested in. It’s like wearing a T-shirt or your favourite movie or band: everyone instantly recognizes that interest of yours – that you’re into something. The opposite is like saying you’re a fan of Star Wars without having action figures, T-shirts or lightsabres around: people don’t instantly know.

The point of keeping books around that you might need for reference also diminishes quickly: you can keep digital versions of books and read them on screen, on your ePaper device or even your smartphone. Reusing music is common, but stories, news and movies are also not used much more often than maybe once or twice.

photo credit: jm3

Availability

Music is available through a multitude of services: either you rip them from your CD and keep it on a harddrive (or even in the cloud), sharing it with you game console and all your other household networked things. Or you buy them via iTunes and just stream them from there to anywhere. Or you use Pandora, Last.fm and all the other free music stations in the net, or the usual old radio stations which are all available digitally streamed.

Apart from music, nearly everthing else is available for download, be it in a paid version as with rented movies, music tracks or eBooks or in a free version as with a limitless source of information in form of blogposts or news. Having media bound to physical objects needs to to have them around in one place and to carry their weight if you need them somewhere else.

Prices

• Buying movies on disc isn’t too cheap. If you get a cheap 3 for 1 BD box, you might be paying 20€ if you’re lucky, but usually it’s more expensive. As opposed to renting it in a video renting service for 2,40€ per movie you can rent a movie for 2,99€ via online renting (and therefore not paying for fuel and use less time to get it) in iTunes, Playstation Network or a lot of other services I didn’t even try out.
• Buying music digitally is basically the same price as buying them in the real store. But here you can get the two songs you really like instead of the 12 tracks you don’t really want much cheaper. And you already have all the metadata included. I mean I don’t see too many people still walking around with “discmans”, so to get their stuff on their custom media player, they’d need to rip it and add all the metadata in a time consuming way.

• (Many people say they’d miss the artwork and booklet on the digital thing. To me, this is stupidity. Yeah, I also read the booklets back then, but times are changing. Enter the World Wide Web. Just head to the artists website, we’re not in the eightees anymore. There you’ll find much more artwork than you can ever hope to fit into some paper booklet. Oh, and you’ll find the lyrics there too.)

• Buying eBooks isn’t more expensive than buying a “real” book. Here the market still didn’t finish converting to the digital medium as often fiction books are still not avaible in open ebook formats, but you can see it happening faster and faster, and soon the rainforests can rejoice when all people have Kindles and iPads around and can easily obtain digital versions.
• News and information basically cost nothing. You can of course buy well researched or well authored stuff, but those authors have to fight the free price you get though the free news websites.
• Games are same price online or offline, if you can get them online. But games are a special case, because most of the publishers still stick to the old distribution model. If you’re looking at the Apple appstore, digitally distributed games might even be much cheaper than games bound to boxes, discs and paper, but that will soon be known when the Mac appstore becomes tested and when Microsoft copies the concept.
• (TV and Radio was always distributed in a way that wasn’t bound to physical objects other than the receiving machine. Not much change there, other than the quality of non-paid TV broadcasts diminishes while paid services are like a flatrate for content.)

And there’s another price people don’t think about: either you spend time getting your analog media, or you pay for postage and packing that wouldn’t be necessary if you downloaded the digital versions.

Conclusion

Digital Media does not rot. After about 10 years, a CD or casette might even be unreadable and thereby broken. Digital media can be copied an infinite number of times and you can create as many backups as you want.

The main point of this post is that analog media is written on three dimensional stuff that just takes up a lot of space. For that space, you usually pay rent (or pay interest on loans in my case). Therefore, your media should pay a part of your rent. But it doesn’t. So please understand that media is about content, and not about collections of paper, CDs, DVDs and such. The digital versions are much more economic, overall cost less time and money to obtain and are better for the planet’s ecological environment.

photo credit: purplemattfish

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Therefore I developed a kind of shopping that doesn’t cost much time. Firstly, I’m getting a lot of clothes online and send the unfitting 80% back. I’ll do this two or three times and I never invest much time in picking the stuff. My girlfriend tells me whether the clothes fit or not and my selfvision is impaired when it comes to clothing.

This usually helps getting shirts and shoes. For the rest, I acually need to go shopping. I always know what kind of clothes I need to buy, and I don’t look for anything else. When I’m in the shop, I pick the 3-10 bestlooking things and try them. My girlfriend again helps me watching for errors in my vision and then I just buy that stuff.

My girlfriend uses a different approarch: she likes shopping. She looks for everything she likes, and shopping usually takes 6+ hours. She also asks me if I like the clothes, but doesn’t take my advice seriously. Things like these will happen dozens of times a day:

She: “What do you think?”

Me (big eyes): “Whoa! I really love it … you definitely should buy it! Amazing!”

She: “Mhmm. Nah.”

Results and Costs

Well, I could go to much more detail here, but all I want to say is that the results (the stuff you bought and the fun you had buying it) and the costs (time and money) matter at the end of the day.This is the same equotation for work. Think of work. The results count, it counts if you have fun in your job and it counts how much money you spend and how much time it costed.

For me, the fun in shopping is always nonexistant. As I don’t have money problems I also value time higher than money. So I try to get best best stuff as fast as possible. I would rather work than go shopping as my work is more fun.

Optimize Shopping

This equotation doesn’t only count for shopping for clothes, but for all kinds of acquisitions. And shopping for everything that matters for you should be optimized, as that way you can save time and money and spare yourself from a lot of frustration. I already told you how I tried to optimize shopping for clothes. Optimizing your weekly shopping for food and the regular goods is another kind of work that should be optimized for everyone’s life, as its just another load of work you’ll have to do for your whole life.

I’ll usually do my weekly shopping once per week by car. I use an iPhone list of things to buy with me, where items can be ticked off and the whole list can be reused every week. Therefore, I only need to add items I never bought before and can just untick the things I need this week, leaving the ones ticked that I don’t need again this week. When I’m at the cheap supermarket, I’ll try to get everything as fast as I can, not looking for the other distractions and superflous offers I could find. After that I’ll get the rest of the things I didn’t get at the cheap store in the more expensive supermarket, where I also only go for the things I really need. This helps me getting this done fast, going only once per week saves a lot of time. I don’t buy more than the planned amount of sweets too, which is good for my weight.

The time invested could also be invested in work. Therefore, I see these shopping trips as work.

Big investments

Big investments need to be done with a completely other way of buying. I think about everything where you sign a contract as a big investment, be that a mobile plan, a flat you rent or a car you buy. When I watch the TV show where people want to rent or buy houses and flats, I cannot but slap my head each time I see it. Some estate agent presents two different houses or flats to their clients, and in about 80% of the cases the people just take one of the objects. What people in these shows don’t seem to get: Buying a house or a flat is a life changing investment. You’ll live there a long time, and your whole perception of your life is influenced by this. Additionally, the prices are often much too high.

If you’re doing a big investment, I will always pay off if you research for a long time about what it is and what are the alternatives of your purchase. Don’t shop big things like clothes.

It took my girlfriend and me one year of research and about 50 visits in flats and houses till we got a lucky chance to buy a very nice and big flat and get a cheap loan from one of the about 7 banks we asked and played off against each other. It will be paid off in about 15 years, is about 20% cheaper than the usual rent of such a flat is a retirement provision that we don’t have to buy additionally. Its 10 minutes away from both of our workplaces and its damn beautiful.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk

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A smartphone needs a more expensive priced mobile plan and is very expensive in general. So if you need a smartphone, accept that it will be expensive. Therefore, you should plan ahead what you are going to do with the small computer in your pocket – and if you only find reasons like “oh well I’ll surf the web on the busride”, then I believe you should better buy a book.

Smartphones have the capability to be your mobile data center – and I think this is the main use case. Besides, having mobile E-Mail and other means of communications at hand, like IM or Twitter, is the second biggest use case. After that, you may not forget that a smartphone should replace your MP3-player, your notebook, your calendar, your shopping-lists, the books you carry around and in a very fortunate situation even the netbook you only take with you to do exactly what a smartphone can do for you.

photo credit: andyi

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Isn’t that a waste of time?

I was quite shocked, as I think that I can’t use my private time much wiser than by training the skills I’m earning my money with, having fun on a project I like and maybe get something out of it at the end that I might like to play myself and maybe even get some money via advertising, to come up for the server costs. So the answer is clearly: no, it’s not a waste of time. But it got me thinking what a waste of time is in my eyes. To answer this question, I must first address this question:

What is meaningful?

My first definition is: Wasting time means that you do something meaningless instead of something meaningful.

Meaningful would be something, that you had to do anyways or that gives you something in the long term. This includes learning for your job, acting to reach or keep your desired familiy situation (dating, learn to know new people – or spending time with your family), working to develop your economic measures and grow your character.

Not meaningful would be something that gives you nothing in the long term. Watching TV, playing games, consuming drugs / alcohol / cigarettes, surfing the web, listening music, comsume sports in the media, sleeping (longer than 8 hours), watching funny stuff on YouTube, relaxing on the couch, … the list goes on.

Hobbies

Hobbies are a special thing here – basically because everyone will constantly tell you that some of those “WasteOfTime”-activities just are important for them, as the person is not fullfilled or not happy without them.

Using time on a hobby for some time of the day makes you happy and fullfilled in the long term – so if you would count computergaming or watching a certain TV series as a hobby, I’d say its meaningful – for a certain amount of time, where its not procrastination of other things, that are really important or that would have to be done anyways.

If you don’t do the other stuff, that would bring you forward, hobbies are a waste of time. Especially the behavioural pattern of acting out this hobby is addictive – as usual for World of Warcraft-playing or online addiction nowadays – then I would clearly brand this as waste of time.

What helps me and others in doing meaningful stuff is the Getting Things Done-methods, that clearly stress your long-term-goals. After formulating them, you should try to do one task that is connected with your goal every day – which makes sure you evolve. (btw.: At Abelssoft we”re developing a ToDo-application that will also help you developing your goals, I’ll update you on this one as there’s still a lot of development to be done)

Bonus: the Time Eater

My definition is of course only a subjective view on this topic – even if I think its pretty nicely thought out. In spire of this, for some people, the most useful activity is giving in into some drive, like being lazy, eating or watching TV or gaming or taking drugs all day. THAT is clearly a waste of time in my eyes.

Especially the TV set earns an honorable mention here: is a time-eating machine. Most people burn time in their TV – and a TV set already is declared as a necessity of life by law! And as I already said in a former acticle I wrote in german: Time is the stuff that life is made of. Its the most precious good there is. With time, you can have fun, generate money, live your dreams. So don’t burn it in the TV-oven. Some also use the TV in a meaningful way, but that usually means watching the news – which doesn’t take long anways.

Final Thoughts

Make a list. Define who you want to be, which character traits you want to develop or get rid of, define which kind of social (family?) situation you want, which goods you want to have (car? home?), what you want to reach (professionally, skills, achievements) and put all this on this list. These are your goals. Try to do one thing that gets you into this directions every day, before you give in to your drives. It might take years, but you will see success sooner than you think.

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Well some statements to Tante’s post:

• People don’t earn money by blogging anyways. There are more people getting rich by winning a lottery than people who can make a living with blogging. Therefore, blogging doesn’t earn you much money with Flattr too, but maybe enough so that you can give that away to Flattr other people.
• This way, the money pools at the guys that are already “big”. This really sucks.
• Tante also summed up, that there should be a way to Flattr people who don’t use Flattr. This is not possible technically of course as they couldn’t determine who gets the money and as there would be transmission taxes if the money doesn’t get transferred into their own system but outwards. But there should be a way for people to register at Flattr and flattr random people by entering those people’s E-Mail or Twitter name and the website for which the flattery is made, so that Flattr can connect to the flattered person telling him that he was flattered and that he can open up an account to recieve this flattery.

Some more critizism:

• For this reason, it should and MUST be possible to register without putting in money using a Twitter name, an E-Mail and random “things” – so you could recieve flattery and pass it on.
• They do this “you must put money” now, as this way the whole thing can be financed, but I really hope they don’t force you when they come out of their beta.
• To combat the problem of the big money pools that the popurlar blogs would create if they used flattr, the value you give each month should be dependent on what you earn via flattr.
• Flattr is technically not the best there could be. Their plugin places iframes on my page, which slows loading times a lot.Please update your WordPress plugin with a JavaScript that calles a cross-domain JavaScript if the div or the (included!) image is clicked. This would speed up things a lot.

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