This might sound like a good idea on the surface, provide incentives to those closest to the day to day operations of government, but if you look a little deeper it could seriously backfire.

First, spend a few minutes brushing up on the latest phsycology of motivation.  Here’s a quick video of Dan Pink speaking about his research:

What Dan Pink has found, is that for anything other than basic assembly line type production, fincancial incentives always result in LOWER productivity, and worse moral overall.

It sounds counterintuitive, and I bet that’s what the government hopes you will think as well. It seems to me more and more that the Conservatives are a govern-by-gut party that has little interest in evidence-based descision making. Better to go with what feels right.

Now government operations not only have to worry bout how thier actions might look politically, but how anyone inside the organization might try to turn anything they do into a financial witchhunt, so they can make a few bucks. I can see how this would result in very tense working environments, and really discourage good people from entering into management.

It’s like the larger problem in our society; why would a smart kid choose engineering when she can make 10 times more money going into financial services? Great for her, but with our dwindling production of things, we’re looking at a dark future for growth if we don’t get more smart kids inventing stuff people want.

I’m sure Mr. Day thinks this is a great idea, and I’m sure many Canadians will too. Who knows, it might even work; hey, you might win the lottery too. But the evidence seem to say this just will not work at best, and at worst, toxify the public service working environment.

I love the internet because it’s probably the most signifiant wealth enabler in the history of mankind. At least since the invention of stone and then metal tools.

When I sit in front of my screens and bang out line after line of code, I’m doing more than just building web properties. I’m creating wealth!

Not only that, when I make a web property or service that people want, I deliver to all customers at once. Unlike a blacksmith who creates wealth one horseshoe at a time, I make one horseshoe and as many people who want it get it at the exact same time; with zero incremental cost of delivery. This kind of wealth multiplier has never existed before. It has a dark side of course; every mistake is multiplied as well, but the positives far outweigh the negatives. You can respond extremely quickly and cheaply to people’s changing wants.

This is not news, but I’m working hard with my team on building our digitalOttawa.ca startup. we’re moving into our new offices downtown this week, and I’ve been reading and watching all kinds of business wisdom & inspiration to get me pumped up about pushing forward.

Here we go!

I think this indicates a significant change in the WordPress direction. There are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of active WordPress driven websites out there; what WordPress.org does inevitably shapes the web.

It seems to me that the WordPress CMS is changing from an “instant-on blogging platform” to an “instant-on open social network framework”. One that uses open protocols and may even be getting ready to play nice with wave.google.com, which could very well be the future of ALL social media platforms.

I’ve been playing around with Buddypress.org recently and I think whatever it becomes over the next 18 months is what will replace “blogs” over most of the web.

Since WordPress might be integrating the best of buddypress, WordPress.com will become much more like Facebook soon. Being able to instantly “spawn” your own “Facebook” that connects and syncs with any other WordPress setup on the web (and other SM like twitter, flickr and Facebook) will be what someone might call the “post-blogosphere”.

Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Flickr are all great, but they are at their core very similar to AOL in 1999. A walled garden that will inevitably choke itself to death.

The good news is the mainstream inside-out social network is coming very soon. One where semantic data & relationship links IS the network, not your list of users, and the more that linked network is open, the more value it will have. Just as the post AOL internet took all their users.

groan!

It’s suppose to refer to how short twitter/sms-like status updates are starting to replace blog posts and comments as way people share their thoughts across social networks.

I’ve been saying for the last year that users syncing updates across all socail platforms would be the big thing. Maybe I should start referring to it as everyone’s syncosphere? My syncopshere includes Twitter, Facebook, jasonprini.com, and my mobile device. But I have several syncospheres. For example workstudents.ca auto syncs updates with Facebook and Twitter, and can be easily pushed by users to other networks like LinkedIn.

But really, do we need these buzzwords at all? Maybe once “social media” jumps the chasm and turns back into just “media” again, we’ll be able to move on past these word-crutches. But probably not.

The Conservatives are saying that the Liberals are getting in the way of the “letting the money flow”. But as I understand it, you can’t spend next year’s money until it is next year.

What’s more interesting to me is why “shovel ready” projects that already had money allocated this year are being canceled to role that money into next year’s stimulus.

Whaaa!?!

Case in point, the Renfrew water treatment upgrades. The project meets all of the requirements of the stimulus, and already had money allocated. But it’s been canceled to divert that cash to next year’s stimulus package, which won’t get money to the shovels until the fall at best. Why?

My faith in the Conservatives was actually growing, until that economic update in December. They seem to have compromised almost all of their values and ideals to hold on to power by the fingernails. Now they’re posturing to appear “strong”, but to me it looks like they’re desperate to look like they’re doing something.

I now envision the Conservatives as slaves to their database. The big database they maintain of thousands of Canadians and they use to simulate different policy strategies and tactics. Example: mandatory sentancing won’t do anything to reduce crime, but it poles well with middle-aged suburban women.

Ignatieff should ignore Harper completely and speak directly to Canadians. Just like Obama ignored McCain’s attacks and made him look stupid. The Liberals may not be ready to lead today, but a lot can happen in a very short time in politics.

I hope the majority of Canadians are where I am; thinking that the old partisan, childish, attack-ad ways are just not acceptable anymore, period.

So the Dell turns out to not only offer some better components, but offers them in a package almost $1000 cheaper than the iMac.

So I’m watching and waiting for Apple to update the iMac, maybe they can leapfrog Dell’s offer with an i7 processor and maybe a LED backlit LCD?

I’m also watching both Windows 7 and OS X Snowleopard developments closely. Mac’s OS still offers a significant draw for me, even with the higher hardware cost.

But the fact that for the price of the iMac, I can get a great desktop and still have enough money for TWO netbooks is very compelling.

1. Thou shall not spend more than you make

I know, common sense right? Well, it seems this is not so. We have developed a habit of using cash for almost all of our transactions. Credit cards are debit cards to us; no money in the bank, no using the credit card.

2. Save, and then save some more

We don’t always have money left over to save. But when we do, we save mercilessly. Some say saving 10% is a good goal to have, but we try to pack away 50% or more of our money whenever we can. Living on 50% of your income can be difficult, so we don’t always do it. But it builds a lot of confidence in that if one of us is out of work, we can still get by without dipping into our savings.

3. Always have a parachute

Add up 6-12 months of minimum living expenses. Save that much money and put it in a liquid investment vehicle. We use a high-interest savings account that we can get access to in 24 hours. 6 month GICs are also a good idea and can sometimes pay a bit more.

4. Patch those leaks

There are so many little expenses in life that really can add up. We try to limit our expenses whenever possible. We try to buy-to-replace, and avoid buying just for the sake of having something new. We also bargain hunt (although we could do more) and look for second hand sources. This is also about looking for alternatives. For example the big guys charge about $6 for a movie rental, but the little corner-store near us has movies for $1.77. Much less selection of course, but for 1/3 the price we’re fine with that.

5. Look for more income

Reducing expenses is probably the easiest way to get your finances under control. But why not look to increase your income as well? Monetizing hobbies, partnering your skills with your friends’, and developing multiple streams of residual income (example: how I makes $2000 a year without doing very much) are some ways to expand your income. I’m always looking for my next $20/month ultra-low-effort idea. You can also take the raise or the new job approach, which can involve new learning, expanding responsibility, and more networking.

6. Cook your own food

Prepared and processed foods are more expensive than ingredients. For example we spent $80 recently on a bread-maker which has already paid for itself in reduced bread costs. Quality food is extremely important to us, so we spend more on better ingredients rather than spending more for convenience. We still order Chinese food once in a while, but the majority of our food is made from scratch.

Those are the big ones we try very hard to always follow. We are not perfect. We don’t follow all of these all the time (except for #1 – that one is really important). Developing good financial habits takes a long time, so we try to take the long-view and work incrementally.

What kind of financial commandments do you try very hard to follow?

Dubbed the ‘rewiring of Yahoo,’ Y!OS 1.0 launched this week with the introduction of the social suite. Its strategy focuses on opening up almost everything to developers, including content, traffic, and Yahoo’s user base.

I’ve been thinking the walled garden approach to social media is not very good in the long-term. It comes with the risk that if a compelling enough substitute were to come along, you lose members.

Alternatively, if a service were to use an open way of managing user profiles, it could possibly avoid the risk of be usurped. Giving up user profiles might seem risky in itself, but the service could adapt more quickly to the changing capability of a user’s profile “agents”. Today my profile might be the aggregation of my activity on Twitter+Facebook+Blog+Flickr+Google+LinkedIn+… but tomorrow it will be different, with different kinds of data. Today I manage most of all that activity manually. But just as notification of this new blog post will auto-post to Twitter and Facebook, I see a time coming soon where all of this can be done through a “dashboard” of sorts.

This dashboard would have to be stored online somewhere, in a safe place. But this profile dashboard is not like Gmail ot WordPress. It should be a kind of API instead, where a whole slew of software products can be developed to interact with your profile and in turn your profile with all the services synced to it. I could then use an iPhone client, or a web application, or a robot; I could have a robot ‘tweeting’ photos and info about my vegetable garden, and over time I could play, mashup, and mix the dataset in all kinds of ways to learn how to get more veggies.

I don’t know if Y!OS is the answer, but it seems there are a growing number of solutions that are getting us closer to when you let your profile do most of the information filtering of the blinding information that will be the web in 10 or 15 years, maybe sooner.

My primary work machine is a first gen 2006 17″ iMac 1.83Ghz 2GB RAM with a second 24″ screen set up in portrait mode. While it’s still working great for most of my tasks, I’ve been thinking I’ll be replacing it in the next 3-6 months.

Apple should be refreshing the iMac line sometime within the next 90 days or so. There’s rough ideas out there on what it will offer, from most probable to least:

• Boosted CPUs: probably 2.8-3.2Ghz (up from 2.4-3Ghz)
• NVIDIA graphics, probably 9800GT derived cards
• Dual-Link displayPort
• LED backlit screens
• 64bit chipset (for 8GB+ RAM)

These are all evolutionary upgrades, and the last two are unlikely to happen soon as most consumers won’t need 8GB+ RAM for a while, and large LED backlit screens are still expensive.

My computer will be 3 years old in April, so I’ll be looking for a replacement around that time. I hope Apple can get a LED 24″ into the iMac before then.