BrandyGalos

Novel Done!!

2007-12-10T12:30:00.000-08:00

Sorry I’ve been so quiet. I actually wrote a whole novel. It started with NaNoWri Month, but I didn’t finish it until December 6th and have been furious edit since then. It’s going to my Mom’s agent Dan as soon as I have it ready for him. We had hoped to make that on Friday, but Ruth’s cancer needed some attention. She is still OK, but they will be doing another operation to make sure that the abnormal cells they found along the edges are gone as well.

I’ve been working on my one sentence description:

A black comedy, well grey, about a rock star, his nephew the banker and their eccentric friend’s journey to come to terms with coming to terms for tragic events in the far past.

It is such a rush to know I did something like that. It changes everything. Walking into Barnes and Noble is 100% different. It’s gone from a reverent location of knowledge to the most exclusive club in the universe. Whose membership is now a holy grail and all should bow down and behold the power of the fraternity of published authors. I think it’s changed my writing as well! :-)

PM Q: What causes a project to slip?

2007-11-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

Q: What causes a product or project to slip schedule in your opinion? Where have you had the most problems in the past?

Mistake #1:

Everything in life is a tradeoff and software projects doubly so. Oversimplifying a little, the three variables of software projects are the amount of resources (and that typically means people), the product’s features and lastly, the time to market. You can not change one without affecting at least one of the others.

There are limits to this. Getting 100 people to do 100 features in a week would, in fact, create a program, but probably not something that would be a good program.

If time to market is the number one priority, then features and/or resources must be ruthlessly adjusted to keep the schedule on track.

Mistake #2:

Not enough buffer in the schedule. The different team members will give you estimates of how much work the different tasks require. The key word is estimates. There are a lot of techniques you can use to maximize the accuracy of the estimates, but in the end, people are always going to be optimistic and the only way to address this is to make sure there is room in the schedule for mistakes.

My Feelings:

It’s not IF the project will slip, it’s WHY the project slips.

Projects where the date is the most important thing are called “Slogs” or “Death Marches”. You can’t ask a team to do too many of these without repercussions. Projects that allow features to change or new ones to come in willy-nilly never ship and are just as painful to work on.

I like a reasonable number of milestones whose dates are adjusted as they approach. If too many milestones are coming in late, then program management digs in and figures out why, fixes it and then adjusts the rest of the schedule.

And to keep things more fun, besides the normal buffer, put in some time at the end for creative new ideas and market course corrections.

PM Q: How do you prioritize features?

2007-11-02T08:48:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, I'm interviewing for a new job. It's going really well. Yesterday I had to write up a screening document and I thought I would share some of my answers here.

I wish I had had a few more days to polish and simplify my answers, but they are still comprehensable. I start the document out with just about my favorite Mark Twain quote: “I'm sorry this letter is so long, but I did not have time to make it shorter”

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How do you prioritize features? What criteria do you use?

At the highest level: Must have, Should Have, Could Have.

Although generally worked out long before a feature list, big items like business priorities, time to market, globalization, industry laws/standards, revenue models, applied laws, and other items at this level are the first stop.

And I like a very tight vision statement or mantra that the whole company believes about a release. It needs to be so clear that it is immediately apparent to everybody on the team if a feature moves the release in the right direction or not. For example if this release is all about making sure we find every document, we would prioritize supporting the Macintosh over features that go very, very deep into specific file types.

I like the feature team itself to make this call. I like for the developer and tester to sit down with the PM and talk about the features in context and make the first stab at it.

I also like good user and market research, based on science if at all possible. Things like usability testing, experimental releases, betas, etc. Periodic customer Strategic Design Reviews are great. I want to know the other products in our market space better than most of their employees do.

I like to do feature level SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This can keep the most important issues front-of-mind even if they are not that obvious. Sometimes it a feature looks very cuttable until you remember that this feature plugs a hole that could keep the company out of trouble in Indonesia.

If I’m pulling together a team wide prioritized feature list then I typically need to do some balance between the different feature teams’ prioritization. With all of the above data, matching these up is generally pretty obvious. Then I publish the list in an easy to understand manner and gather feedback and make adjustments. If possible, I would love to do a team offsite on this and get bottom-up buyoff and feedback. The more I can get the team on the same page here the easier the rest of the journey is going to be.

And one last thing I like is to have some space at the end of the schedule for a feature to come back. I create a mini-milestone that can be used as extra buffer if needed or for the team to sort through all the postponed features and new ideas and pick a few that are implementable. This takes the pressure off any one feature cut and also gives a way for the team to be more creative or more responsive to any late breaking market pressures.

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More soon...

More on the Aston Martin's Green

2007-10-28T10:19:00.001-07:00

It's has been demanded that I be more honest about the Aston Martin's green.

The picture I linked to had so many lighting tricks that it really didn't show off the color unless you already knew it. The picture on the left is more accurate.

Yes, it's a lime green, only with more red and yellow. It is a shocking color. In yesterday's picture you could believe that those colors were highlights, instead of the real color.

And that brings us to the second point. It's not just the color, but also the paint. Even a 10 year old girl’s plastic glitter pony cannot compare to the amount of metal suspended in that paint. And there are a lot of layers to suspend the particles, and then they throw in a lot more layers just to be on the safe side. It would not surprise me if they told me that the paint job alone costs more than the average family car.

And it’s not just color and paint, but also the car. This is considered one of the most beautiful cars going. They guy who created the Jaguar said that the reason they were so beautiful was because they had an “eye line”. A band of light that drew your eye from end to end and helped the viewer get comfortably lost in the car’s sexy curves. The Aston has several eye lines. Actually, its eye lines have eye lines.

It’s the combination of the depth of this shocking color blanketing this car’s amazing curves adding almost a magical sparkle but keeping an aggressive, road eating feeling that make looking at one of these a mind blowing experience. They are very rare cars, so spotting one of these is like spotting a rare Blue-Spotted, Red Crested Gull would be to a bird lover. We saw it at a car show, but if we saw it on the road Mike and I would pull over and follow it while we spoke in reverent whispers “Did you see how that mud puddle was beautifully reflected on the chrome grill?”.

Putting a coat of the same lime (+red +yellow) green on a pick-up truck would be shocking, but it would not be the same.

Color Science

2007-10-27T12:41:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong, I really love what I do for a living, but there is a new field that if it had been available when I was in college I might have gone for.

I might have majored in Color Science.

You may be thinking, "What, you didn't get enough coloring books as a child?" and you would be wrong. Well, umm. Actually, you might be right, but that isn't the point.

Think of a 1970s bathroom and there is a certain orange that comes to mind.

The green of the Aston Martin this year is an amazing triumph of Color Scientists. http://www.bergoiata.org/fe/voiture-sport-90/cars_aston_martin_006.jpg, although you really have to see it in person. One more hint of yellow and it would be tacky. One more hint of green and it would be boring. A little lighter and it would hurt your eyes. A little darker and it wouldn’t contrast with the bright work. It is amazing.

The new colors in Vista are good. In many ways, Web 2.0 sites can most easily be identified by their color choices, although that doesn't always hold up.

And that 1970's orange? Make it a little brighter and it's back in style.

I think my next personal project will be to write a side bar application where you can click on a color on the screen and the program will show tints and hues and suggest color combinations for the new scRGB. The math for this isn’t trivial, but it would be so beautiful. When not in use I think I would just have it step through the spectrum.

If you think I’m exaggerating the math, here is a blurb from a color person’s blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/archive/2007/10/25/hdr-and-color-spaces.aspx

"For sRGB, the 1/2 brightness gray image will result in a numerical value of around 186, not the midpoint value of 128. This is based on an sRGB gamma of approximately 2.2. (The actual gamma calculation for the sRGB color profile is a little more complex, but we can use a value of 2.2 for an approximation for our
purposes.) This means that the sRGB profile uses 186 steps to represent the lower half of the luminance spectrum, and only 69 steps (255-186) to represent the upper half of the luminance spectrum. sRGB defines a non-linear luminance curve to provide more detailed information in the darker or shadow areas at the expense of the brighter or highlight areas. Since we're far more likely to see visual differences between each of the 255 total luminance steps, this non-linear representations significantly reduces the chance of seeing those artifacts.

What's become of me?

2007-10-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

Jeeze. My last blog was titled "Maximize Ad ROI".

What the hell??? When did I lose my sense of humor??

It wasn't even:

"Clippy says: Maximize Ad ROI."

It's just a matter of energy. I haven't been putting energy into humor. I did help Digg.com ship Microsoft ads, but it wasn't that which sucked my humor away.

I will fix this and hopefully not make this mistake again. But if you ever see another title that is as dry as the last one, please put a sign on my back that says "Kick me!"

Maximize Ad ROI

2007-09-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

A non-ad co-worker asked me if I would give some advice for a company that wanted to do more to maximize it's ROI. This was my reply:

- - - -

Generically, 1000% better than any other strategy, is for them to sell their own ad space. We are seeing a trend where even medium sized sites have at least one ad sales person. Even if they don’t go that far, having somebody spend a little time on this goes a long way. Since they know their specific users and know what they are generally looking for on different parts of their site, they can link them directly to complementary products. This can bring in 2 to 4 times as much money. Even more if you are willing to work on some joint content that highlights their products.

One-off campaigns, often times called roadblocks, can be very lucrative. One example of this is where you allow every ad placement on your site to be taken over by one company. Sometimes with a special event and content. Or even a few pages/contests etc. One site I work with has tripled their monthly income with just one weekend of this.

Targeting is another key. MSFT gets a 15% bonus for every targeting tag that is applied. I figured that for a few top-of-the line placements people can get $20.00 CPM (1000 views).

Next up is to write the code to be able to swap between a bunch of different advertising networks. Selling ad space is much like the stock exchange. Sometimes they will get $8.00 CPM (for a 1000 views) and sometimes 50 cents. If they can swap networks when the timing is right that can make a big difference. Again, this takes staff. One client has two full time people that do this just for Europe.

And lastly sign up with a single ad network that seems to specialize in their area and implement it and ignore it. Yes it won’t maximize profit, but it also won’t cost you way expensive staff time. For small sites I think this probably has a better ROI.

All of the above are generally combinable.

There are other options, but the above is what I’m seeing being done across the web.

- - - - - -

I'm happy to answer email or comments on this subject.

OMG!!! Pilot funded in Ozzie's org!!

2007-09-15T18:11:00.000-07:00

There are games that geeks play with each other. One type will go “I programmed on punch cards” and may more variations like that. A Second type will be “Only true geeks understand the fragile beauty of Popfly/Lisp/OOP/… A third type will say “I shook Bill Gates' hand”. Another of this type will say “I came within 10 feet of running over Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.”

That last person would be me. And although it’s a great story over a beer, it is certainly a rather sad high point to my individual contribution to the computer industry. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done great things. For example, Word for Windows 1.0 and actually more significantly 2.0 are giants among all products, but they were team efforts and that is just different.

There is a fourth type of geek that can say something like this:

I got a pilot program funded. With only Mike’s help I figured out something that Microsoft should be doing and how to do it AND then chased down enough of the details, and then sold it to the right people and I freaking got a pilot project funded in Ray Ozzie’s org.

I don’t know anything else yet. I don’t even know that I will be involved in its actual execution other than as an adviser. I’m hoping.

This just happened Friday afternoon. An hour later I had the last “Go For Launch” meeting with all the Digg guys. And then I stumbled home and drooled. Only in the last few hours have I come back to myself enough to wipe off the drool.

I want to be that fifth type of geek. The one that says “When I shipped the version one product from my idea …”

Office competitor: It's Partner, Pave or Pace

2007-08-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.techdirt.com/

Cool site. Way oversimplified: Companies ask a question and pay for the top 3 answers

One of thier question:

Alternatives To Microsoft Office: Two Goliaths -- What Does David Do Now?
Top 3 Insights Receive $150 Each.
Google has received quite a bit of attention for the beginnings of its office productivity suite that can operate collaboratively online (as well as offline with Google Gears). But there are already several non-Microsoft office suites that are much more mature than Google's current office apps. However, by adding the weight of its brand to the Web2.0 productivity market, Google has apparently stolen the "thunder" of the upstarts who were pitching stones at Microsoft. As one of these alternative office suite developers,
1) What are the weaknesses of Google Docs & Spreadsheets?
2) How does a smaller office software firm promote itself with two giants in the same arena?

I got to thinking about it and wanted to answer it here:

My first answer is to do better research. Office has over 85% of the market. There are not two Goliaths, there is one Goliath and somebody else with a very big mouth.

But I think the solution has to come down to: Partner, Pave or Pace.

Partner:
Do add-ons or extensions to one of the big guys. There is quite a bit of money here as the Goliaths like these people. They don’t have time to enable every feature in the world, but they have given the functionality to do this. They will even pick up a lot of your marketing expenses if you can get their attention.

Pave:
No big company is fast. (Even Google, despite what they say.) There will always be space on the bleeding edge. For example, the last bleeding edge was getting reasonable editors into the different blogging web sites. Word 2007 can do that now, so that opportunity is fading, but I’m sure there is another one raising somewhere. Yes, you will be paving the way for the big guys, but there will always be room here. Monetization might be hard.

Pace:
Run next to the big guys. Find a vertical or two and own it. This is what Apple has done. I would stay away from legal cuz it looks like the big guys are going there, but there are still lots of places untouched.

A combination of all three would probably bring the best results.

Blogging for Cats

2007-07-02T05:43:00.000-07:00

When I found out that my company kind-of frowns upon blogging, I decided to lay off for a while, but I’ve rethought the decision.

While surfing, somehow I stumbled onto a very, very, far-left political web site and saw the following:

I’m sorry; I didn’t copy down the URL. I just grabbed the screen shot because I thought it was really funny.

I just had this mental picture of thousands of pale, coke-bottle glasses wearing, significantly over or underweight people, groaning as they got up from too many hours behind their computer and grabbing pitch-forks and brooms to take on the modern U.S. Army. And I pictured the U.S. Army as the life-sized green army men that every little boy plays with. And this mind picture still makes me smile.

And it’s not a mean thing, I fit the above description and I can’t see me taking on an army either, although I don’t think I post enough to be qualify for being a blogger.

The more I thought about this quote though, the less funny it became.

Every day, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of bloggers ring a blow for freedom. Even if it’s just freedom for their cat. They take their time to stand up (sit down) and express their views in a public forum. Even though the average blog is read by 1.5 people. Even though the vast majority of posts make drivel look interesting. Even through inaccurate facts, bad grammar and document frameworks that collectively change the rotation of the earth because of all the dead English teachers spinning in their graves. Through all of this, collectively, they make a difference and that will grow with time. From tiny pieces so trivial comes the power of a collective voice and few things are as powerful.

Actually, I should say collective voices, because they certainly don’t speak with one voice. But they could. Given the right circumstances, they could.

I’m not sure that getting up from behind their computer is a good thing; their power probably lies in the magic they harness inside their computers. Every revolution needs a Thomas Paine to put up pamphlets and schedule meetings. But beyond that, I’m pretty sure that future revolutions are not going to be fought with weapons. They are gong to be fought with crowds. They will be won by thousands upon thousands of people showing up in public squares across the country and standing in front of the tanks. In a world where militaries are as strong as is possible today, the only path lies in the power of the will of the people to keep anybody from taking up arms.

And that’s the power at the fingers of the bloggers.

And if that ever comes to be, it won’t be funny at all.

And I want to be a part of that. Even if I don’t have a cat.

Last newspaper post for a while, I promise.

2007-04-13T08:03:00.000-07:00

Seattle Times decided not to hire me, so my brain and blog will be moving on. But I'm still getting mail from readers saying that newspapsers are doomed, including clippings from the mergers that are going on.

I think the national newspapers are in trouble. I think that newspapers without a vibrant web site are in trouble. But I think hybreds and eventually online only papers are just find.

The Seattle Times is doing much better with their ads in the last couple of weeks! I think they are going the right direction, i.e. towards profitability.

Here is another study:

15% Increase in Visits to Newspaper Websites

According to NAdbase released in April, 36 percent of all Internet users visited a newspaper Web site in November, 2006, and page views for newspaper Web sites increased 27 percent year over year during the second half of 2006. This latest report shows that during the second half of 2006, unique visitors to newspaper Web sites averaged 57.3 million visitors a month, or one in three of all Internet users, a 15 percent increase over the same period a year ago.

The 2007 campaign comes on the heels of last year’s success, when more than 1,000 newspapers reached more than 100 million readers, and coincides with the release of the spring 2007 Newspaper Audience Database report. In addition, 136,000 advertisers visited the campaign Web site to learn about the value of newspaper media.

NAA Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, John Kimball, said “…newspapers are succeeding in driving new innovations and growing their audiences in both size and value… no better time to launch our 2007 newspaper value campaign than the very day we provide advertisers with audience data spanning the medium’s full portfolio of print and digital products.”

The report says that newspaper Web sites have contributed to a 13.7 percent increase in total newspaper audience for the coveted 25- to 34-year-old demographic and a 9.2 percent increase for 18- to 24-year-olds.

The NAdbase analysis also shows that:

Nearly three out of four adults in the top 50 markets (115 million) read the newspaper over the course of a week (5 weekdays/1 Sunday)

65.8 percent of 18- to 34-year olds in the top 50 markets read a newspaper during the course of a week

76.9 percent of 35- to 54-year-olds, and 84.2 percent of those 55 and older, read a newspaper in the previous week

John F. Sturm, NAA President and CEO, concludes “… The ad campaign emphasizes newspaper’s ability to combine the strengths of the Internet and print while expanding its reach and influence in a time of critical transformation for the industry.”

For the complete information release, and more about Newspaper Audience Data, please visit here.

Online Advertising 101 - Larry Tate please smile upon me!

2007-04-05T08:49:00.000-07:00

I do not think online advertisements are evil.

I think, badly done, untargeted online advertisements are evil.

When you are in the market for a car, isn't it nice to see the different videos for automobiles that you didn't know about? What if "they" knew about your love of Orchids and instead of showing you an obnoxious ad for a mortgage that you are not in the market for, they showed you the latest Orchids that had arrived at your favorite nursery?

The industry is not there yet. Actually, it has a way to go.

I've been coming up to speed on the online advertising world and it's a fun one. Online advertising is not that complicated by itself, it's just that a) they have their own vocabulary and b) the whole industry is much more complex that one would guess.

I guess I thought that:

Seller would contact ad agency
Ad agency would produce a nice picture of a cow dancing and give to a web site
Web site would occasionally show ad
Seller would pay ad agency who would pay the web site

And that is true, a little. Well, it's true other than that whole "Devil is in the details" thing.

First thing are Networks.

o Think of a network in a TV way, not connecting computers. NBC and their affiliates take in commercials and display them to their viewers during different targeted
shows.
o A network can be as small as a college student’s blog displaying an ad to sell their
roommate’s bike.
o Or Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

I will limit this to a very simplified discussion on display advertisements. If you go to my personal blog you will see a banner across the top. That is a display advertisement. (And if you haven’t been there in a while, you have got to check out the sound clip I put on last week!)

The place where everything gets much more complicated than you would expect is all around two questions --

o When do you play the commercial?
o When do pay the person with the web site who displayed the commercial?

The basic answers are:

o When your targeted user (demographics) is likely to show up at a web site (keywords).
o Per Click, Per 1000 plays or per some pre-defined activity. These are described below.

A large part of the Ad Network is a bunch of tools that allow the ad people the ability to upload and manage their advertisements. The larger agencies have staffs of people who do nothing but this all day long! A single ad campaign might have over a 1000 keywords. It might also be targeted by gender, age, time of day, day of week, etc. And they might have 200 ad campaigns running simultaneously. Also, one ad might be doing better than another, so they will swap out active campaigns as quickly as they receive the data.

But the big thing here is the Advertising Stock Exchange.

o In a struggle as old as time, sellers want to pay as little per ad as possible, while publishers (web sites) want as much as possible. And because there are so many variable involved the networks (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, et al) create a real time “stock” exchange.
o Advertisers bid on keywords, demographics and time.
o The web sites also have their keywords and prices. So, the MSN Automotive web site may say we will only ever accept advertisements where the minimum cost per 1000 impressions is $2.00. If there isn’t a publisher willing to pay their price, then MSN Automotive will either show a public service advertisement or an in-house one.

Let’s walk through an example:

1. Google offers to sell CPM advertisements. This means that they will pay a fixed sum of money to a web site for each 1000 times an advertisement is displayed. Impressions mean that the advertisement was served to a web page, hence creating a chance for a user to be impressed. Google signs up to manage advertisements from Nordstrom’s and to display advertisements on CNN.com.

2. Nordstrom knows that its target customer is a college educated, 25-35 year old woman, who shops on a weekday. They may offer to pay $4.00 per 1000 impressions to try and reach this woman. But they know they have very poor turn around if it’s a man on a weekend. In this case all they might be willing to pay is $0.15 for 1000 impressions.

3. CNN.com is doing a featured story on the latest shoe styles from Paris. But they get a good return just by running their own ads advertising their own shows. CNN knows that if they don’t get $3.00 per 1000 impressions, they are losing money. So CNN.com would accept the ad from Nordstrom for the woman but not for the man.

There are more types of ads and they are dreaming up even more new ones every day. Different strategies work best for different advertisements and for different web sites and different browsers at different times of the day, etc. Research is figuring out new ways to gather demographic information and tune keywords. As you can imagine, this is a way complex real time mess. And we haven’t even started talking about the technical issues.

Print People and Online People - One metal twist away

2007-03-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

I wish I had enough time to make these shorter! And I promise I will get off newspapers soon. Send me mail/comment if you have something you would like for me to think about.

--

I spent the last newspaper post trying to address the point of view of a print newspaper guy. I really felt for the guy. This guy works hard and earns his salary. The things the online people were saying to him were just horrible. That content isn't worth paying for. That newspapers are now worthless. That a blogger working out of their living room is a better than a whole newsroom. I don’t agree with any of these things and they would make me grind my teeth, too.

Would a paper newspaper still be a thing of value if all it had was its masthead? No, its value lies in its content. The value is the printed word, but nobody ever said how that word needed to be printed. Running a local online newspaper takes exactly the same content generation and management strengths as a paper one. It’s the same basic business and the same basic processes apply. But the pulp world has different limitations than the online world. And the online world works differently. Bridging these is just one mental twist away.

So rather than looking at a newspaper and talking about how it could go online, I want to look at online sites and talk about newspapers. These trends are from report called the Digital Outlook Report by Avenue A RazorFish. The general opinion is that this report is one of the best reports made. It's 75 pages long, and I think well worth reading, but I acknowledge that statement is probably untrue for lots of people! :-)

So what do these online experts see as services that will allow sites to be more profitable? What are some of the modern site vision, mission and functionality ideas that working now? Are there things that newspapers, or should I say "News companies", are in the unique position to cash in upon?

Web Trends

… And now a show from our sponsor.
Brand communications are moving beyond being a disruptive source of product information to a functional source of content and entertainment. This could be a branded desktop application that notifies them of special deals, a banner ad that allows customers to chat with one another or a series of ultra-short films. Brand-sponsored content can help engage an audience that is increasingly looking
beyond the television for their entertainment.

Get Local.
Think about how you make your brand locally relevant. Could you create a map mashup that will help customer’s locate places of interest (and receive a brand impression in the process)? Could you use geographic targeting to provide place-specific messages? Can you connect customers on a local level and help them interact with one another?
Spread your brand around
People are not waiting to visit your web site. You need to take your brand to where your customers are living online. Think beyond your site and consider how you can distribute your brand in as many places as your customers are likely to be – both online and offline.
Extend your story
Yes your message can be longer than 30 seconds. Look to deliver your message in installments to keep your audience on the edge of their seat, guessing what might come next or eagerly waiting to see what you’ll do next. Serialized storytelling, if
it’s relevant and entertaining, can help hold your audience’s attention and dramatically increase the time customers spend with your brand.

Virtual reality gets real.
In the future the line between what is real and what is digital will blur. Think about ways you can extend the experience your customers have online to their real-world lives. How can digital experience and tools enhance and enrich life in the real world? Can a digital experience substitute for a real-world test drive?

Takeaway: Is the web moving towards local newspapers or the other way around? All the trends above are a page out of a newspaper's best practices. Emphasize your strengths around your local news and engagement. You have incredible amounts of expertise around these items, now figure out ways to embrace new communities, new tools and the new functionality enabled by the Internet.

All of these trends could be "owned" by either old or new media in the local news area, but the local newspaper -- it has the shortest path to being the new king.

“There’s no middle.
In every category, traffic is going to a few big players as well as a growing field of small players. You’re either MySpace or a small forum and blog site dedicated to ultimate Frisbee. … Middle-sized players are getting squeezed; lacking the focus of a niche site by trying to appeal to a broad audience, but without the size enjoyed by their field’s leaders.”

Takeaway: Don't try to compete with the national news guys. In the print world, people chose between limited options. It was one or two local newspapers and the TV. A lot of people did both.

For global and national online news you need to compete with the following web sites: http://www.cnn.com/, http://www.msnbc.com/, http://www.abcnews.com/ , http://www.cbsnews.com/, http://www.foxnews.com/, http://www.news.google.com/, http://www.news.yahoo.com/, http://www.usatoday.com/, http://www.washingtonpost.com/, http://www.nytimes.com/, http://www.wsj.com/, http://www.drudge.com/, http://www.dmz.com/, http://www.forbes.com/, http://www.time.com/, http://www.salon.com/, http://www.bbc.com/, http://www.espn.com/, http://www.cnet.com/, http://www.sciencedaily.com/, http://www.reuters.com/, http://www.wired.com/, http://www.ap.org/, http://www.apdigitalnews.com/

And many, many, more, plus the six more somebody will dream up tomorrow. Most of the above companies spend more money in a year supplying food for their meetings than the local newspaper company has for their entire annual advertising budget. (Ok, I just made that up, but doesn't it sound great!! And the point is valid anyway.)

If I could partner with a big national guy so that I didn't have to put *any* resources on this daily stuff, I would. I would still want some simple form of the content and I would want to own the local conversation about these stories, but that’s about it. Well, I might have part of one person whose job it was to write about the local angles to these stories.

But in general, Anna Nichole Smith's death is not for us. Let the people that care about this get their news from either watching a 24 hour news channel or hitting a site that is updating their ANS content every 30 minutes. They already are anyway. For normal people it takes effort to get away from stories like this and I would applaud if my local news company gave the whole thing a pass.

But that does not mean that I wouldn't put any resources on the national or global news. If I could afford it, I would put more resources here. I wonder what breaking Watergate did for the Washington Post? How proud their community was to be affiliated with them? How much their circulation grew? The benefits are probably still rolling along as more contacts are willing to talk to them and more people around the world give them instant creditability. And I’m sure that this feeds into more credibility and more circulation.

Unlike the daily “display the national news grind”, Investigating and breaking national news stories is critically important. It is something that every paper should seek out and subsidize. Over time it will pay off and give a large boost in branding and circulation and advertisement, but it may take a reporter three (or more) years to achieve this. What would a story like Watergate do in today's world where all site traffic is converted to cash? How many people across the world would check the site every day for updates? Which advertisers would be drooling to get a piece of that? Could a large percentage of the traffic be kept forever? I hope that Watergate level stories are rare, but I don't think that good investigative stories are rare; they are just generally resource starved.

“The Internet is where general interest goes to die
The digital media space is widely viewed by marketers to be a means of tapping into niche audiences and content interests. … The digital space has allowed for users to connect, purchase and understand products and content once unimaginable in a mass-culture world. That said, we continued to sense pent-up demand among the digital class for even more content, connection and interaction surrounding the specific interests. … This leads us to believe that low-cost ways to create specialized communities, social networks and content sites will continue to proliferate and become increasing import means of augmenting and supporting both the user experience and display media campaigns. "

Takeaway: Give your valuable reporters time to dig in and really get into the details of a story. In the print world you were limited by column inches and number of pages. These items do no apply to the online site.

Increase coverage of local niche communities. There is nothing wrong with amateur content on your site as long as it is identified as such. Create an area for pee-wee baseball and get a volunteer from the league to keep it basically up to date and upload pictures. They are going to do that work for somebody's web page; the whole league will be thrilled if it it’s on the news company’s site. Make this a generic tool and allow other local sports teams to do the same. With some minor development work you could become the go-to place for all amateur league sports. This will impress the local sports stores and gyms and your advertising base and the number of advertisers and your revenue will rise.

Get Nordstrom's make-up counter to do a weekly makeover with pictures and text just by doing a few point and clicks in your tool. This could give you increased ad revenue by local salons and maybe international makeup companies that wouldn't give you the time of day otherwise. Maybe Nordstrom's would be willing to offer a coupon to go along with this. Maybe they would give the company a cut.

There are a couple of themes here. One is that you need to develop tools to enable others to produce content. This takes a team of web professionals. In hindsight I think I might have dismissed the savings that a news company could reap by not printing. These people are the cost of success in the online world, but they are your conduit to great content and an abundance of readers.

“Get in on the interaction.
Static, one-way conversations are dead. Consumers use brands to build and reflect their personal identities. Consider ways you can enable customers to personalize or take ownership of your brand without sacrificing its integrity. Are you making it easy for customers to tag your brand or incorporate it into their creations, their worlds, their personas?”
“The digital channel is kinetic; it requires constant innovation. Marketers who embrace this dynamism will evolve their message from 30-second commandments to open ended dialogs with customers … a much more favorable interaction!”

Takeaway: Don't just throw your content over the wall and be done with it.

It’s the perfect storm. All the players come together in your space for a perfect interactive storm. Other sites might be able to pull this off, but not as well, not as quickly and with a lot more work. Every article you write is the beginning of a conversation if you capitalize on it. Every advertisement is too. Every special feature, every weather map, every photograph, every link, everything can be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

The online news cycle is not a daily one. It's not even a few times a day. When you post new stories is a side issue. There should never be a second when your site isn't growing. Unlike the 24 hour news channels, you don't need to say every word, but you do need to enable the interaction. News is now about having an ongoing conversation.

“Yes, I said it. Newspapers are a dying medium. They have been for the last several years, and it's only going to get worse. Ask anyone in print journalism behind closed doors...they know their days are numbered. And don't just think I'm ripping print people because I'm a broadcast guy, because I've been involved in print for nearly nine years.” Jason Salas

Someday I may take on Mr. Salas’ whole article because it’s about 10% dead right and 90% really clueless. Mr. Salas works out of a Guam TV station and this was in a blog post of his. As Mr. Salas puts a wreath on the future grave of print newspapers, he makes the most poignant argument yet for why news companies will live. As I read this page, I actually (hand to god) saw an ad with a link on a topic I’ve been researching and I clicked on it. His company made money off of something he wrote 2/16/2005.

The old delivery mediums, paper, radio or TV, doesn’t really matter. Broadcast guys can still be newsman. Radio guys can still be newsman. And writing a blog post doesn’t begin to make somebody a newsman and everybody knows it.

Five years ago, if somebody suddenly made printing on paper illegal, newspapers could have moved their format online without too much work and not much would have needed to change. Most of them started echoing their content online anyway. This print on paper or no paper or both argument is a side issue. The answer will probably change depending upon the location. Northern rural routes where delivery is expensive may go with a 100% online solution. Florida, where the older generations flock, may stay mostly on paper.

Paper has many advantages over online. The smell of coffee and the Sunday paper screams lazy Sunday morning to me and I don’t want to give that up forever. So if any competent local news company has to (or already is) suppling both print and online content, what’s the beef? If the question is not which delivery vehicle is better; what is the online advocate’s point? What are the online people upset about?

“Each time there was a major advance in the ability to generate, store or disseminate knowledge, it was followed by an "information surge" and with it a sudden acceleration in the level of innovation.

When information surge happens, it sweeps through human society in a powerful, innovating wave that in some way changes everything everywhere. Surge brings together people and places and ideas in totally new ways. From these new relationships come new entities and new ways of living.” James Burke

Newspapers have been delivering on this paper based information surge for the last few centuries. When newspapers were first printed they changed the world in such fundamental ways that those of us who were born past that time can not imagine how profound the change was. Nothing works the same way any longer. Newspapers are our society’s bedrock. For god’s sake, they have their own amendment. Not just that, but they have the first amendment. They are a beast whose powers are so vast and strong that nothing can kill it. Although one or two may be perverted ten more spring up to take its place. Even during the darkest times of WW2, underground newspapers were the lifeline of many people, even though possessing them could mean death.

This is the heritage of the print newspaper and it is a great one.

Online people are merely asking for the same thing.

But they want the information produced, designed and packaged for the online world. News companies will not be able to successfully create magic online (or for society) by repacking paper content in a design that mirrors the strengths and limitations of the printed page. Their world is fundamentally different, although the principles are the same. Online people can do different things. How information is generated is very different. Online people can tackle displaying different kinds of information. The time flow and display characteristics are the opposite that exist in the paper world. And online people can interact. Online people can interact with everything. Online people want to generate, store and disseminate information online. Online people can smell the information surge. Online people are reaching out with all our might.

But the paper newspaper people, so far, have not embraced the online world.

Online people want to interact with you, with the facts and with other readers. Online people want companies and other players that have a vested interest in the information come to the table as they play well with others. Online people would like to interact with anybody who might have something interesting to say. What you do on paper is good, but it is so last century. What you are doing right now has little to do what is being done in other areas online. And all of it, all of it so far, is nothing compared to what will be done online.

And that’s that mental twist I wanted newspaper people to make:

Rather than looking down on print people, online people are jealous of them.

James Burke Information Surge talk

2007-03-28T10:26:00.000-07:00

James Burke came to Microsoft and gave this speech when I was on WinWord 2.0 (or so). It rocked my world. The whole Word team changed a bit of their focus away from adding more features and towards creating ways for people to re-order information. I just found this talk online and didn't want to risk such a treasure getting lost in the mists of time. I think you can still see the truth of this reverberating through society over the PC specifically.

---------------

Each time there was a major advance in the ability to generate, store or disseminate knowledge, it was followed by an "information surge" and with it a sudden acceleration in the level of innovation.

Thanks to information surge, each one of us in the modern world has more machine power available at a fingertip than any Roman emperor. A medieval king would have needed legions of horsemen riding for months to be able to deliver one-thousandth of the number of messages we can transmit in a few moments to the ends of the earth by phone or fax. A single CD-ROM can carry the whole of Renaissance science and philosophy.

When information surge happens, it sweeps through human society in a powerful, innovating wave that in some way changes everything everywhere. Surge brings together people and places and ideas in totally new ways. From these new relationships come new entities and new ways of living. Most important of all, information surge changes the way we think. We are experiencing a transformational surge of innovation and convergence of information technologies.

Three thousand years ago the Greek alphabet was the first truly transparent means of communication, because it could be used to express any language. But in the way left-to-right script was processed in the brain, the alphabet also triggered the analytical, step-by-step mode of thought that would give us logic. We could now cut up the universe the better to understand it. Before the alphabet, such an idea was, literally, unthinkable.

Today we stand on the threshold of another such revolution in thought. It is already happening in the most esoteric disciplines of science. Some of the most important equations in fundamental particle research, for instance, can now be attempted only because supercomputers can solve them in a few months. Before, since they would have taken more than a researcher's lifetime to complete, they could not even be attempted. Bringing this extraordinary aspect of knowledge manufacture to the service of society as a whole raises questions that will have to be answered. For example, can we accept and live with innovation that cannot be explained by the innovation machines because we do not live long enough to hear the whole explanation?

The answer to this kind of challenge may lie within the same systems that generate them, in the form of electronic agents. These surrogates are not new. Each time surge occurs (and with it, massive increases in the levels of innovation), society has delegated responsibility for handling the effects to filtering entities. After Descartes' scientific method triggered the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the avalanche of data was diverted into different management disciplines. Today there are over twenty thousand of them, from anatomy to zoomorphology.

Electronic agents will explore the treasure house of this specialist, arcane knowledge that will be made available to everybody by the next information surge, in order to find for us only what we need at the time and to translate the data into forms that are individually meaningful to each of us.

This new freedom of access to information through the networks spanning the globe will also change the social meaning of information. Up to now, the limitations of communication technology at any time gave special importance to all knowledge, irrespective of what it might have been, simply because it was inaccessible. What was not generally available was usually regarded as valuable.

The innovations produced by the few people who had access to this secret knowledge were, from time to time, let loose upon communities who had to adapt to it as best they might. Such esoteric innovation was impossible to prepare for because it was inaccessible, its effects were serendipitous. How could anyone have foreseen that Venturi's investigation of water-flow dynamics would lead to the perfume spray that would in turn make possible the carburetor?

The coming information systems will offer the chance for people to see these patterns of innovation even as they occur and to make judgments about them before their effect on society has to be accommodated. With open sources of information, technology assessment will finally be possible, unhindered by ideological half-truths. The same will be true of the process of political participation, suggesting a rapid end to the present representative system, designed for the eighteenth century and failing us today.

Institutions of many kinds will be changed or even removed by the next surge. When an American manager can, in real time, run automated factories in Argentina the way a Rome accountant says the Berlin headquarters requires, with software uplinked via a Japanese satellite from Korea, what happens to national sovereignty and the hundreds of items of domestic legislation that will then be obsolete?

This kind of networking is typical of the way in which information surge generates social complexity and, with it, diffusion of power outwards from the center. The fifteenth-century printing press broke the hegemony of Rome, gave political control to a hundred kings and princes around Europe, and brought the birth of the nation-state. The next surge will also shift power in much the same way, but at every level and in every place around the world.

(c) James Burke

The Newspaper Lament

2007-03-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

I had a comment (which I HUGELY appreciate) suggesting I read a column and rebuttal by David Lazarus that appeared the San Francisco Chronicle to get a feeling for how people in the industry feel about the same kind of things I’ve been saying about their industry.

I think the author is feeling a little depressed about the kind of things that people said and rightly so. I would have been devastated by the things the clueless idiots were saying. But he is still wrong.

But these articles say it’s really all about paper and the business model that has grown up around it. It’s absolutely fascinating reading, especially by us online types that have created large web sites.

Here are some of the most relevant quotes:

"The main point of my earlier column was that newspaper content has value. Once you acknowledge that, you have to acknowledge that newspaper Web sites are giving away something valuable in exchange for ... what? "

I acknowledge that. I'm a huge fan, especially of reporters and editors. If my life had run a little bit differently it might have been a journalism major in college. My browser’s home page is the Seattle Times, so I generally read it several times a day. I acknowledge my local paper as THE best site for quality local content. I acknowledge the sacred trust you hold in your hands and understand that this must be a heavy burden to bear for a lifetime.

But I don't agree with the rest of this statement, but let me rebut it in a second.

“The harsh reality, though, is that most newspaper Web sites account for only about 5 percent of total revenue. That means a news organization that relies primarily on the Internet couldn't possibly support a newsroom as large or resourceful as what the paid-for print product allows.”

Two points here:

1 – This is a self fulfilling point. The companies that make their money from publishing on dead trees make their money by publishing on dead trees. The delivery method doesn’t make a difference to the content or the quality of the content (Layout yes, functionality yes, content no.) And the Seattle Times costs around fifty cents a day. I doubt that with all the costs from pringing and deliver they make much money off of this, but rather the advertising that goes onto the pulp.

2 - Another harsh reality; just because YOUR online revenue is 5%, it does not follow that:

a) it has to stay that low

b) YOU couldn’t be replaced by a different news site who does as good a job delivering high quality content. Somebody else could hire reporters and have a sustainable online profit margin with free content. Imagine a newspaper where everybody works from home, with no printing costs and hence no printing office space. I’m not saying that this is what I want, but their bottom line would be substantially lower with out a drop in the quality of the content. After all, this is the model that “foreign correspondents” used to create their great content and they have broken many an important story.

Compare the amount and quality of the online advertising on the Seattle Times and an offbeat local newspaper called The Stranger. I bet the Stranger makes more that 5% of its revenue from online advertising. (But I don’t know for sure.).

“And that means this glorious new paradigm of content that's not worth paying for would allow news organizations to be capable of doing only a fraction of the investigative and watchdog work they currently perform.

The stakes couldn't be higher -- that is, unless bloggers and cyberreaders are satisfied to accept the words of Washington politicians, or companies like Halliburton and Enron, at face value.”

Again, you are right.

And I’m very sad about it. Especially when we are talking about the old quasi-National pages that are in very deep trouble now. They were the ones with the deep pockets and super contacts to really protect the world. But the sacred trust that professional journalist have isn’t going to go away no matter if it’s pulp or bits. And news companies are just going to have to find new ways to accomplish this if they want to stay competitive.

I also reject your assumption that online newspapers will never make enough money to support a large staff. So you make 95% of your profit on the pulp side now. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t another 95% to make from the online side. Maybe you will be able to do more. Maybe the disaster that was the build up to the Iraq war would never be able to happen in the new world.

Perhaps newspapers will need to join together to investigate and break big stories. Maybe a reporter working for the Seattle Times could partner with somebody from the SF Chronicle and NY Times to expose a scandal. This could create an army of smaller newspapers who currently don’t have the resources to play on the big stage. Maybe they could even partner with the best of bloggers. Maybe instead of two reporters breaking Watergate, it could have been 6 and they could have ferreted out the details in half the time.

On a side note, I do agree with you about 99% of the bloggers out there. They are like eager puppies that really don’t have a clue about “real” reporting. But that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t train them or find some other clever ways to use them. That’s what Editors are for, isn’t it? A lot of reporting is dull drudge work, if you could offload some of this from your reporters or rely less on wire services; the quality of news could go up, not down.

Rather than lamenting that the Internet was invented, newspaper companies need to be asking themselves how they can take advantage of it.

"… I suggested in my earlier column that another, albeit temporary, remedy may lie in seeking an exemption to antitrust laws so that newspapers as an industry can unite in charging for some or all online content."

You go to antitrust laws for your answer? That’s your answer to this huge opportunity? Not to join the 21st century and innovate but instead to have the government protect your right to carry on like you used to? And even if you get the government to protect you, it doesn’t take a newspaper company to put quality news on the internet. MSNBC – a web site with no newspaper has over 3 million visitors a day and doesn’t charge for content. TV stations are putting more and more local content on their web sites and have unparalleled free advertisements. If the newspaper industry creates a vacuum for free, quality, local content, somebody else will just fill it.

It will always be about quality content no matter if it’s delivered on pulp, bits or both. The business model and monetization for the online segment must change. The online experience for the Seattle Times is not as high quality as the print version and I resent that. If I had a better local choice, they would be my home page.

But, what if the best seller’s list had links to a book seller that was willing to give the newspaper a cut. What if they got a cut from coupons (thanks anonymous comment person!) What if this “get a cut” model was available to almost every ad in the paper? What about for links in the main stories and columns? What if when the newspaper published a map to a location, the map showed some advertisements for businesses that were along the way? What if, what if, what if, I could go on and on. The world has already changed and most newspaper companies are not taking advantage of it.

These are exactly the kinds of things that people mean when they say the Newspaper industry needs to change. Just because the news world used to work a certain way, it doesn’t mean that it still should in the future. Radio didn’t kill all newspapers, but it did change them. TV didn’t kill all newspapers, but they did have to differentiate themselves from them. I don’t believe the Internet is going to kill all newspapers either, but the newspaper industry must again embrace change. They are still thinking in pulp terms and I don’t think that will win in the long run.

The question really is: Will it be an existing pulp newspaper company that is up for the challenge or somebody else?

In a year, will it be my local newspaper company that is my home page or will I have found somebody else that works better online for me? I would be sad to change away from the Seattle Times, but it wouldn’t take much to entice me to switch to a new source that has embraced the 21st Century.

Yea Seth Godin!!!! -- Doing the Basics Well!

2007-03-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

I slammed Seth in one of my posts in January, so I thought it only fair that I promote him to almost godhood in another.

He says about upping your site's traffic --

Hey. It's not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you. If you are transparent and accurate and doing what's good for the surfer, people will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of content that's worth seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people (being generous) will tell other people. It turns out that it's easier and faster to do that than to spend all your time on the shortcuts.

I've been trying to tell my clients this for years. Like everything else in business, it's all about doing the basics well. When you finish that, you can move on to the fancy-shmancy things. The misleading part of that statement is that I don't know of anybody that has ever finished with doing the basics well.

Local Newspapers again. They really are feeling well!

2007-03-12T16:26:00.000-07:00

The Economist did a scary story on how newspapers are dying and everybody freaked out to the place where corporations have started divesting themselves of their newspaper business. But as an industry trend, it just isn’t true. There is very little data to back it up and lots of data that contradicts it. One study did say that print circulation is down 2%. (Yes, but is circulation up on the newspaper's web site?) TV viewing is also down by about that same amount, but nobody is saying that the TV is dead.

I talked about this once before. About how they are measuring increases of market penetration of over 50% for papers with a web site.

And here is another link to back it up:

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, newspaper circulation is growing and new
newspapers are being launched at a remarkable rate, new and revised data from
the World Association of Newspapers shows.“

http://www.wan-press.org/article12949.html

I think the big guys may be in trouble and that is creating a skewed picture. It used to be that one of the few choices you had for national / global news was a big newspaper. It was the local paper or the NY Times or Wall Street Journal. But now national and global news comes at us 24 / 7 from every direction and every type of media format. I see this market continuing to splinter. The success of Fox news and Olbermann’s rocket growth makes me think that more and more people are seeking out a news source that matches their own biases.

I wonder if this is a trend. It used to be that news sources did their best not to have a bias. Most would say they still do, but I’m not sure it’s possible in today’s time. Is news like Fox News a trend that is going to grow or a flash in the pan? Something I need to think about.

On the other hand, the local newspapers themselves are doing fine. It’s a little scary right now because things are changing for them, but I think that local papers have some amazing opportunities now.

Good web properties can make millions and millions a year from online advertising and sponsored links. Anybody or anything that can capture a good chunk of readers is in line to make money. I think local newspapers have a huge advantage going into this business. For example, they already have relationships with all the big local advertisers; they already have brand awareness and trust from the readers, they have niches for in-depth, investigative and/or local coverage.

And probably their biggest advantage they have is that they already have me. Eventually I realized that I was going to have to make some space and time for my local news. Where does one go for local news? Duh – the local newspaper. And once I get started with one news source it will take a lot to make me feel like picking up another

It’s a huge advantage.

And although some people will tell you that the bloggers (i.e. new media) are going to take over the world, I would answer that this might be true as soon as they get off their asses and actually cover a 5 car pileup on the highway at 11:00 pm on a rainy Sunday night. Right now 99% of what they do is sit around and criticize the content created by old media. This isn’t a bad thing. Actually, it’s a really, really, really cool thing, but not an empire toppling kind of thing. Especially the same empire that gives them their content.

Maybe the print side of the newspaper is going away, or at least slowing down. But to me, the delivery format is not what a newspaper is about.

A newspaper is:

· A lot of useful information in a useful package.
· The go-to place for trusted investigative information.
· The go-to place for trusted local coverage. Nobody else does that
· Good judgment and cachet. If they cover something, it’s important and it’s real.
· Free (or pocket change.) They make their revenue from advertising.
· What ever else I need to achieve the basic goal of being part of “a well-informed citizenry.”

On a high level I want my local newspaper to take their responsibilities seriously:
· Original Content -- Not just a rehash of news I can get elsewhere. This content needs to be touched by a local human.
· Branding -- TRUST -- How do you know if it's true? A known bias. Be my friend.
· Investigation -- this is the value add over blogs. Again – a local human.
· Murrow level reporting: Justice for the powerless and protection from the powerful
· Pride – I want them to break open a national scandal occasionally. Play in the same sphere as the NYT or LAT. We need every media outlet to step up to the responsibilities now. Local scandals as well, but that’s more obvious than national ones.

I was in Miami for this winter's big Seattle wind storm and blackout. My husband had lost power and so I could only talk to him once or twice a day. I lived on the Seattle Times site. I felt like they were there for me and I felt like they were fanning out across the area for me. They were on the ground, seeing and feeling and helping. This is something the local papers know how to do. They’ve been doing it for two centuries. They are not going to be taken down by the cost of paper and ink.

Talk: Online Marketing Trends that include Web 2.0

2007-02-27T12:08:00.000-08:00

I've learned my lesson. No more Worth1000.com for me. I'm like an addict!

I'm working on a session for a confrence given by Seattle BizNik.

I know my target audiance is a small business owner that in many ways doesn't want to know about this. They know they should, but it's never worth the time to sit down and sort it out. They are confused about Web 2.0 and don't know which direction to turn.

“Online Marketing Trends that include Web 2.0” (I don’t like the title. Suggestions?)

This talk will be a speedy romp through hot trends and technologies. Logic says that businesses should apply at least one hot trend every year, but which one? Which will give the most dazzle for the buck? Online marketing will be the focus, but no marketing campaign should stand alone.

Many businesses are frustrated when they try to apply one or a mix of online strategies. How is a person supposed to target their marketing in a world where the experts do not agree on anything? There are multiple definitions for even things as basic as what Web 2.0 actually is. Not to mention that every expert is giving contradictory predictions for what they think is going to be the next big thing. The long-tail supporters and trendwatchers.com say that the days of having one mega-trend are over. Business people have to get a passing understanding of all of the top trends and technologies and how to apply them appropriately in order to best get their message out.

This talk will relieve some of this confusion. We will have to move fast to give a glimpse of these trends and technologies. Some of the trends we will cover are honor, sharing, social/community, transparency (no spin), reciprocity, participation, global collaboration and viral. Some of the technologies we will talk about are the web, blogs/RSS, spaces, stores and associates, podcasts and wikis. We will stay on the practical side spotlighting things that are neither prohibitively expensive nor
difficult.

All suggestions are welcome!

10 Things to Think About For Your First Web Site

2007-02-18T13:40:00.000-08:00

A person I know has recently decided to take the plunge and develop her first web site for her business. She is, she says, "a people person and not a computer person". She is understandably a little lost as to how to even get started. Below is my answer to her.

Most non-technical people have no idea of how much of their time and money they are going to need to spend to have somebody do this. Everybody wants something like http://www.vulcan.com/ without having any idea that this site was probably way over 40K to produce and it’s hard to imagine how many artists, sound editors, flash animators, writers, editors, photographers, developers, testers, project managers and time went into it. You can get a very good site for $500 to $1,000 if you are very organized and willing to compromise.

You will generally get a better site and it will generally take much less of your time if you can spend more money, but I’ve seen some amazing sites done for very little money because the customer was so well prepared. There are some key things you can do that will make any site better and also reduce the costs. You should do most of this before you get real estimates for your site. Since it is harder to do this on the cheap, I will focus there.

Rules for a cheaper web site:

1. Know the vision, mission and goals for your website. It is probably marketing related; describing the business, contact information and maybe gathering names for a mailing list. But you might also want to ease office processes, like having forms to fill out or something like that. Go to your competitors' web sites and see what they do and what you like. Add these site addresses to your Favorites.

2. Let your webmaster pick a template for you and stay away from creating a design or a "look". If you get too much into what colors should be next to each other and how much space there should be between thing x and thing y add at least a $1,000 if not $10,000. In general it is cheaper to mix in on the design side as little as possible. I used to tell my customers on a budget "Don't let perfect stand in the way of good." Pick your colors in a general way like a bride might. Be ready to show a few printouts from a variety of designs of sites you liked from step #1. But otherwise just stay open. It never hurts to ask questions but something as little as specifying rounded corners .vs. square corners can cost you a bundle and send everything back to the drawing board.

Stay away from anything very arty. Pictures are OK, but not animations. Very arty sites are very hard to do well. Most of them are way too slow, are not very usable and do not get along well with the search engines. Technically most of what I’m trying to say here is; for sites done on the cheap, stay away from the computer program called Flash.

3. You will probably need your own URL. There are whole books written about this. It's a big deal. If you have any doubts at all, get some help. http://www.networksolutions.com is the site to test different naming ideas. You can also go to http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp and they will tell you who owns the URL. Even if they show a domain as unavailable, it's often worth going there or doing a google search for it. There are companies like http://www.vztools.com/ that buy lots of address for the express point of reselling them. Often times they are not that much more expensive than going through Network Solutions.

4. You probably want your site to be professionally hosted and you will write a check to these people every month. There are free site hosters but your customers will really pay a bad price for this and it doesn't reflect well on you. There are lots of little things that will make a big difference in the price. Things like having the address be www.~~~~~.com is more expensive. Having five email addresses at person@~~~~~.com is probably free. Having 6 may cost you $10.00 extra a month. How many visitors you think you will have will be important. Are there going to be photos and videos on your site or will you link to other sites. Be willing to dive in here and really think these things through.

5. Document the kind of words your customers would type into a search engine to find you. These are called keywords for obvious reasons. I would recommend spending at least 40 hours on this. Yes, it really is worth a week of your time. Search for your competitors and see what words work for them and where they get listed. Make sure you have this down cold. You will need to create a Priority 1 list of approximately 20 to 40 words for the search engines. *

6. Create as much of the site as you can in Word or Excel. Use all the buzzwords that you came up with in the previous step as much as possible while creating easy to read prose. Make sure that you have all the pictures/photos done and all the copy solid. I mean solid as in “it's been through a professional editor” solid. Good professional editors that do not take very long to go through a few documents are are worth their weight in gold. Changing any of this stuff after the webmaster has done their magic will be much more expensive.

7. Now, if you want, you can take a shot at bringing up your own site. For a non-technical person I think this is similar in scope to asking a novice to create a real TV commercial by themselves, so expect a bit of a bumpy ride. Right now for sites on the lower end I like http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/ (they charge ~$8 a month) or http://www.officelive.com. There are lots of others, but these guys are not going anywhere. If you run into problems, get help first from a more technical friend before your paid consultant.

Bring up a space on MySpace. It will be ugly, but the experiance will be good for you and it's something you will probably need to do anyway and at least you will understand what MySpace is about.

8. With all that said, if I didn’t have any web presence in this day and age I wouldn’t start with a static web site. I would start with a blog. To answer the question of why this is true would take a whole other post, but users now expect a site that has dynamic content and they also want to forge a personal link with you. Plan on posting new entries at least three times a week, 5 days a week would be better.

9. Jump into the water and get your toes wet right now. You can do it without having to do all the dreary prep work listed above. All of the following sites have templates and you can you play around getting things the way you want all the time. I have a blog on just about every service for fun. I put my mother and mother-in-law on http://spaces.live.com/ because it is by far the easiest to use. http://www.facebook.com is another direction that might be a good start. For the more technical business types I would tell them to check out http://www.terapad.com. All of these are free, which is somehow OK in the blog world. http://www.vox.com/ is fun too.

10. It doesn't matter if you went with a blog or a site, now you need to get the name out. There are lots of tricks to do this and I say avoid them all. Just do a very good faith effort to 1) make your site relevent to your customers 2) take the word of your site to them, for example make thoughtful posts on other people's blogs and leave the address to your blog, and 3) give it some time. The Internet is a big place and it takes some time for it to sort itself out.

None of this is that hard, assuming you use templates for the design of your site and you have a technical friend that can be bribed by beer and/or cookies to get you through the rough spots. I think that non-technical types would be happier having the site built by somebody else but would do just fine with a blog.

Dive in and good luck!

* From the Keyword step:

A trick that may help generate keyword ideas is, as you visit competitors' sites, right click on the white space on the page and then choose “View Source”. You will then see a bunch of text/tags, most of which we don’t care about. Look for a section that looks something like: "META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Power, performance, motivational, inspirational, quotes …” with angled braces around it. This is the list of the keywords that your competitors think are important and where your list of priority one keywords is destined to go. This will not work on every site, but is generally worth a try.

Apple and Linux in Proportion

2007-02-16T12:02:00.000-08:00

Or why Bigfoot can clean the floor with Mac and Linux.

About 18% of the US population believes that Bigfoot and Nessie will eventually be found. Only about 3% have chosen to believe the marketing claims around the Macintosh and Linux operating systems. If the Internet was a level soapbox, we would see six times more buzz on Bigfoot and Nessie as we do on Mac and Linux. That means that there would be 44.7 blog posts about animals that are quite possibly imaginary for every one post about the Linux operating system.

Or if you took all the Mac and Linux people and organized a tug of war against all the people that think that the moon landing never happened, the moon landing people would win. By a lot. It wouldn’t really be a contest because the Mac and Linux people, again, make up about 3% of the operating system market and the “Moon landing was faked” crowd are double that number or 6% of the US population.

Just a note: I know that I'm playing a little fast and loose with these numbers, but I'm making sure that I'm coloring inside the lines. If you double all the Mac and Linux numbers and halve all of the rest of the numbers, these points would still be valid.

Africa has about 3% of world Internet usage - again, a little more than Mac and Linux users combined. Assuming that all Mac and Linux people participate on the Internet we can get a feel of what the relevant contribution their percentage of people should feel like. All the packets that go through the network backbones that address African issues do not begin to compare with Mac and Linux packets. By the way, African Internet usage is up 625.8 percent this year. Apple and Red Hat don't even dare to dream of that level of growth, but it is out there.

Assuming that the Internet is a truck and not a series of tubes, Mac and Linux users can be represented by a large stuffed animal flopping around the empty bed. Or if we want more of a "series of tubes" like example, think of draining only a gallon of water from a very full bathtub. Oh, and Chicago has about 3% of the US population. Five percent, which is roughly twice the number of people that make up Mac and Linux users, think that The Da Vinci Code is real. Globally, 5% of people online have a blog. Three times (13%) as many people believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to kill JFK than use Mac and Linux operating systems. On a much more sobering note, roughly the same percentage (12.5%) of the U.S. population is living at or below a subsistence level.

The world is not how I would have it. And Ok, so the internet is not a level playing field and never will be. Returning to levity, I know that there is no way you could get Macintosh and Linux users together to do anything, much less all play tug-of-war. Having them pull the same direction at the same time would be unprecedented. Actually, it would be beyond amazing if you could get even 50% of just the Linux users pulling the same direction. But this whole subject still bugs me.

I recently saw this quote in the Seattle Times, "Nobody makes a move at music, movie, computer, phone and consumer-electronics companies nowadays without first asking themselves, what would Jobs do?" Some of that quote I understand, but come on!

The buzz and respect Macintosh computers gets is unworldly. Although Microsoft is begrudgingly invited to the table, Apple will sit at the head and get all the attention. This is like the President of the USA running everything past the mayor of Chicago. (Maybe this explains a lot!) Why aren't Macintosh users treated like the "Moon Landing was Faked" crowd? How come subcultures that are four or five times larger in size than the Mac people get a thousand times less respect?

I think I remember when I was working on Mac Word 5 that the Macintosh had about a 20% market share. Now they are sitting at 2.5%. Why on earth would anybody deify the company that lost that much market share? In 1980 Apple had a 26% market share. Radio Shack was more successful! So Apple has gone from 26% to 2.5%. Apple computers have always been a second or third ranked player. If I were a betting man, I'm not sure the smart money is on Jobs/Apple holding on to their iPod market domination. I mean, I hope they do. I have nothing against Apple (well, one thing from the Mac Word days) and I absolutely worship the Apple marketing team. How on earth can they keep their company as the top PC go-to-guy?

When I was four years old I started on a grand quest for fairness. Although I try, I haven't ever been quite strong enough to stop it. I know this isn't how the world works, but still, it just doesn't seem fair that Macintosh users have the status level of cheerleaders instead of conspiracy nuts. Everyone of their PC versus Mac guy commercials make me grind my teeth. For 20 years Apple's battle cry has been "Apple good, PC suck". Isn't it time that they stand on their own? Win or lose the debate on what is great about the Macintosh OS alone, not just as a warped mirror of the PC. There is a market of people that will buy anything other than Windows; the size of that market seems to be around 2.5%. Apple used to be about more than that.

And as far as Linux users go, the real ones that I've met really have been conspiracy theorists. Many of them seem to be united against Microsoft rather than for something else. But I have to say that I haven't really spent too much time thinking about them. With 0.4% of the market share, I'm not quite sure why I should. OK, yes, I had to play with the technology and keep my fingers in the pot. And also I had to do some research when what I was hearing and what I was seeing became very different. Windows Servers lead Linux Servers with nearly 20% more annual uptime. This is because of, according to the Linux people, bad documentation. It bothers me that Linux users talk about their bright new and shiny OS. Anybody can look it up and see that GNU came out the same year as MS-DOS 3.0 and Linux came out the same year as Windows 3.1. Between all the hype and hate speech, they just lost me somewhere. A part of me used to root for them in that cute underdog kind of way, but now it just seems sad.

So big bad Microsoft doesn't need me to stand up for them. With a 97% market share they don't need to stand up for themselves. I suppose that explains why Mac and Linux users can take on the airs that they do. Microsoft will never squash these two systems because it is in their best interest for them to have at least a tiny bit of competition to show to the monopoly committee. Nobody will ever accuse Microsoft of really being fast to market on the bleeding edge, but they are good competitors and have done a reasonable job improving people’s computer life inch by inch. But that doesn't make me feel better either.

I was there when the big operating system wars were happening. MS-DOS and CP/M were slugging it out with graphical interface operating systems. Macintosh OS and Windows and IBM's OS/2 were at each other's throats. More innovation happened in one year back then than in five years now. (God I sound old!) OK, I know some of that was because there wasn't the fragile user installed base that there is now, but I don't think that would stop a lot of innovation if the people behind these operating systems were competing against each other claw and hoof.

I want wonderful things. I want my computer to reinvent itself with more than just another slightly buggy "Web 2.0" (what ever that really means) application. The operating system is like the foundation for everything. It is all if the utilities that run in to my house all put together. This should be bigger than it is now, it should be more exciting and it should be like something I would read in a science fiction story.

Speaking of Science Fiction, sometimes I feel slightly miffed that I don't have the flying car that was promised to me by Disney World's Horizons. But it does seem like if I can't have OS innovation or a flying car or even a jet pack, can we at least get rid of the PC / Mac TV commercials?

Click here for a reasonably sized picture of the following chart.

How to be Remarkable & Is Your Boss an Asshole?

2007-02-09T12:21:00.000-08:00

The Battle of the Asses

Blogger has made a mess of the formatting of this post, but I wanted the table layout more than anything else. The HTML is clean (except to blogger) and you can see a clear version of it here. I hate blogger. While reading this on blogger, be sure to scroll down a lot.

When I read Guy Kawasaki's post this morning, I couldn't help but recall Seth Godin's post from a few months ago.

Are these top marketing pundits describing the same person? (I didn't change the order of these, only published these side by side)

Seth Godin's How to be Remarkable	Guy Kawasaki's Is your Boss an Asshole?
Understand the urgency of the situation. Half-measures simply won't do. The only way to grow is to abandon your strategy of doing what you did yesterday, but better. Commit.	Thinks that the rules are different for him For example, a parking space for handicapped people is really for handicapped people plus him because his time is so valuable that he can’t walk fifty additional feet. Or, the carpool lane is for cars with multiple people, hybrids, and her because she’s late for a meeting
Remarkable doesn't mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you're average, and average is for losers.	Doesn’t understand the difference between a position making a person and a person making a position. The vice-president of acquisitions for a big media company is a big deal, but all her power, and therefore the ability to act like an asshole, evaporates without this title. Assholes usually don’t understand that their current position affords them temporary privileges.
Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won't accomplish much. It's easy to pull off a stunt, but not useful.	Requires “handlers.” This means a personal assistant, appointments secretary/lover, public relations flunkie, and chauffeur. It’s funny but if an asshole didn’t have the position/money/status, he would probably be able to answer the phone, make appointments, talk to the press, and drive himself.
Extremism in the pursuit of remarkability is no sin. In fact, it's practically a requirement. People in first place, those considered the best in the world, these are the folks that get what they want. Rock stars have groupies because they're stars, not because they're good looking.	Requires the fulfillment of special requests in order to be happy/productive/efficient. For example, she needs a special brand of spring water from the south of France bottled by chanting monks when she’s making a speech. This type of actions represent flexing for the sake of flexing—not because any of this crap is necessary.
Remarkability lies in the edges. The biggest, fastest, slowest, richest, easiest, most difficult. It doesn't always matter which edge, more that you're at (or beyond) the edge.	Requires the fulfillment of special requests in order to be happy/productive/efficient. For example, she needs a special brand of spring water from the south of France bottled by chanting monks when she’s making a speech. This type of actions represent flexing for the sake of flexing—not because any of this crap is necessary.
Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be remarkable. In fact, most people don't. So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway. Your goal isn't to please everyone. Your goal is to please those that actually speak up, spread the word, buy new things or hire the talented.	Relates to people primarily in terms of what they can do for him. In other words, “good” people can do a lot for him. “Lousy” people aren’t useful. The way a lousy person becomes a good person is by showing that he can help your boss in some way.
If it's in a manual, if it's the accepted wisdom, if you can find it in a Dummies book, then guess what? It's boring, not remarkable. Part of what it takes to do something remarkable is to do something first and best. Roger Bannister was remarkable. The next guy, the guy who broke Bannister's record wasn't. He was just faster ... but it doesn't matter.	Judges people by her personal values, not the employees’ or society’s values. Assholes judge people according to only what they think is important. For example, a boss may value only professional accomplishments, so someone who is “merely” a mom or dad with a focus on a family is therefore inferior
It's not really as frightening as it seems. They keep the masses in line by threatening them (us) with all manner of horrible outcomes if we dare to step out of line. But who loses their jobs at the mass layoffs? Who has trouble finding a new gig? Not the remarkable minority, that's for sure.	Judges employees’ results and his intentions. A boss never comes up short when he juxtaposes his intentions (“I intended to do your quarterly review”) versus an employee’s results (“You didn’t finish the software on time”). Instead, a boss should judge his results against his employees’ results and never mix results and intentions
If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it? No use being remarkable at something that people don't care about. Not ALL people, mind you, just a few. A few people insanely focused on what you do is far far better than thousands of people who might be mildly interested, right?	Asks you to do something that he wouldn’t do. This is a good, all-purpose test. Does your boss ask you to fly coach while she flies first class? Does she ask you to work weekends while he’s off at a hockey tournament? I’m all for using boss time effectively (for example, not making her drop off a package at Federal Express), but were it not that your boss could be doing something more valuable for the company, would she do what she’s asking you to do?
What's fashionable soon becomes unfashionable. While you might be remarkable for a time, if you don't reinvest and reinvent, you won't be for long. Instead of resting on your laurels, you must commit to being remarkable again quite soon.	Calls employees at home or on the weekends. Rarely, as in once per year, this is okay, but any more often and your boss is certifiable. His happiness is not your problem 24 x 7. You are entitled to your personal time and space because slavery was abolished a long time ago in America.
	Believes that the world is out to get her when faced with criticism or even omission. For example, bloggers don’t write about her because they are all jealous of her. Frankly, it’s more likely that he’s not worth writing about than the blogosphere is colluding against him. This boss needs to learn that “it’s no always about her.”
	Slows down or halts your career progress. One can forgive or ignore the previous nine issues, but this one is by far the worst thing an asshole boss can do. Usually it’s a matter of convenience: “How can you leave me? I need you.” For doing this, a boss should go into the anals (sic) of asshole-dom. God didn’t put you on this earth to make your boss’s life better, so don’t hesitate to abandon a boss who holds you back.

Viacom gets it or Jon Stewart .vs. YouTube

2007-02-09T10:58:00.000-08:00

Viacom moves on without YouTube CNET News.com:

"YouTube throws down the gauntlet for any television network or content producer to ask, 'Why is it better for people to consume our video on YouTube rather than my site?' Erik Flannigan, senior vice president of digital media for Comedy Central"

I can't believe I'm saying this but Viacom gets it.

Around 33% of Generation-Next watches Viacom's Comedy Central channel's Daily Show every week. That is ONE FREAKING THIRD of the KEY generation! I doubt that as many of them actually visit YouTube.com on any given week (but I didn't look for statistics to back that up.)

Who believes that now when Jon Stewart says something funny, his viewers will be too confused by the lack of "youtube" in the link that they couldn't possibly email it to their friends?

YouTube is a great storage place for videos and they have built an unbelievably great community. For people making amateur or short independent videos there isn't any place better right now, and there may never be one. And I agree that they have changed the world in wonderful ways and that they still have a lot of world changing zing left in them.

But I agree with the Viacom CEO when he described what he would have said to YouTube -- "You are not going to take the stuff that we made in our house and control it for other people." Not to mention a little thing like giving up the advertising profits.

So, step one in the fall of the current mega-sites has begun. The circle of life continues.

The Platinum Rule

2007-02-09T08:54:00.000-08:00

Over in the Seattle Biznik community, I got into a discussion about Squeezed Pages (see below). And I came up with a particularly clever turn of phrase, even if I do say so myself! Below are my replies from that discussion, edited a little to keep this as small as possible. But the phrase is:

Just goes to prove the Platinum Rule, which is “There is no Platinum Rule.”

It seems like there are all these rules of marketing and management. There is always somebody telling you that you should do X because of some rule. And then somebody else will come along and tell you that doing X will break another rule. I have always found that when people start quoting rules, it is really time to rethink the project. But now I have the the Platinum Rule to quote.

Ok, here is the phrase in context:
--
Squeezed .vs. Non-Squeezed Web Sites

Non-Squeezed world:
1) Visitors can explore your site without joining first
2) When they join, you gather just the name/email visitor information
3) You send out generic mass mailings

Squeezed world:
1) Site visitors must join your site before they can see anything
2) You gather email and as much other information as you think you can get from site visitors
3) You send personalized mailings to individuals.

How do I say this? A squeezed site is considered slimy by many people. Not that slimy is necessarily wrong, but there is a cost to be paid for employing those tactics.

Modern trends suggest implementing this using transparency and reciprocation.

Visitors are able to play around your site and get to know you before you ask them for their information. And when visitors do give you something (their information), you should give them something. So a more polite version of Squeezed Marketing would be an offer to email them one of four eBooks for signing up on the site. You can then make your response back to that user more personal by using something from the book they chose.

- - -

Overnight I thought of two squeezed sites that are good: The New York Times and LA Times are very quick to make visitors join and ask for a lot of information and they send targeted mass mailings. But somehow it's OK coming from them.

Just goes to prove the Platinum Rule, which is "There is no Platinum Rule". :-)

The Sacred Trinity of Marketing: Relevance, Credibility and Value

2007-02-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

Quote by Dominic Caterbury or for a link to his web site

The Sacred Trinity of Marketing: Relevance, Credibility and Value

He argues that start ups are only lacking Credibility, so they can put all their potatoes there. His overall message is that the power has tipped to the customers and that the old rules don't work.

Although simple enough to have come from one of my college marketing text books, is deep enough to make me think.

And yes, I'm still working on post 2 of the matrix.

Brandy's Market Matrix

2007-02-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

I just couldn't get the blogger tools to accept a 6 page HTML document with any kind of grace and I don't have time to re-write it here. Maybe if I checked out Google Writer, but that is for another day.

http://www.galos.net/Brandy/Blogive/Matrix1.htm.

I'm sorry for the inconvience.

Or you could also to to my spaces blog (3 clicks to publish from Word 2007) if you know that URL.

I think it is worth your time.

Super Bowl Ads

2007-02-05T08:41:00.000-08:00

Link to Super Bowl Ads: 2007 - IFILM

I thought they were especially bad this year. The Coke commercials were happy, but I couldn't believe how much bad will there was in most of the commercials. Maybe because I watched them all on line in a row, but it really got to me after a while.

Some of the worst ones:

All the Budweiser commercials.
Snickers: Kiss
All of the Career Builder ads
American Heart Association - Gotta Have Heart
GM: Robot

I don't think every commercial needs to be happy or up lifting, but is this the best they can do? With almost unlimited resources to bring to one short commercial, they have to fall back on physical and mental abuse, homophobia and capitalize on our fear of being destitute?

OK, I did like the Robert Goulet one. It was, at least, an original theme.

Draft: Brandy's Market Matrix

2007-02-04T13:04:00.000-08:00

Here is the matrix I'm working on. It's taking a while to write it up. Keep watching this space.

Here it is with Word 07 SmartArt making it all beautiful. Except, there isn't a way to label the arrows, so it's pretty useless.

Still, when I think back to the old days when you had to enter raw postscript (read "printer driver") commands to get basic stuff into your document, it isn't so bad!

Spaces and Want Ads

2007-02-04T11:52:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been working on something in my mind and it’s taken a lot of thought to figure it out. But first it seems like I need to get this rant off my chest.

I’ve applied for a job at Microsoft Windows Live Spaces. I especially liked the want ad: “Windows Live Spaces is the world’s largest blogging, photo sharing, and social networking service with over 135 million monthly unique visitors and is available in over 30 countries. Despite its size however, Windows Live Spaces has limited brand recognition in most markets and does not have a deep connection with users as of yet. …”

I can’t believe how many job descriptions make my eyes glaze over by the time I’m on the sixth word. I doubt that you can find a more motivated audience than me and yet sometimes they are just so badly written. Here is a real example of an average want ad:

… enterprise customer communication solutions that enable dynamic conversations between companies … Our interactive communication solution is a blend of advanced multi-channel applications built upon enterprise software. It delivers its services through a software service model. Businesses use their technology to leverage their rich enterprise-level customer data to proactively and personally interact with their customers with timely, relevant information.

But I really liked how the Spaces one started with obvious passion about the
product and an acknowledgement that not everything is perfect.

The average want ad can be summed up as:

We are the perfect company. We have the perfect product. Our people are perfect. You must have demonstrated expertise in being perfect and everything this job might ever need and being able to do the bosses’/teams’ jobs for them would be good, too.

A few weeks ago I was nibbled by a company that basically wanted me to do the same job that I did around 10 years ago. It was a very high prestige start up, but I just couldn’t go there. Yes, I was qualified by their exacting list, but I would have been miserable by the lack of challenge and lack of growth.

In The Macintosh Way, my hero Guy Kawasaki says, “…Experience is frequently a false god. It is better to hire people who can get you to where you want to be than people who profess to have been there before.”

Kawasaki says to hire people that are passionate, have high bandwidth, have the ability to deal with stress and ambiguity and are high energy. That would certainly make for a job description that wouldn’t glaze my eyes over.

OK, now on to the real posts where I will eventually give you my take on the Spaces issue.

Growth Industry: Newspapers!

2007-01-29T12:44:00.000-08:00

Wahh?

Center for Media Research - Daily Brief: "According to a special release from The media Audit, newspapers are increasing their market penetration beyond 60, 70 and even 80 percent with the help of their websites. Ten daily newspapers ave achieved a net reach of more than 80 percent. "

When I was younger I got the local paper and the Sunday New York Times and often The Wall Street Journal. Then I started to get all my news through the Internet. I had searches set up for all the topics I really cared about and I thought it was really cool that I didn't have to deal with the things I wasn't interested in.

But over time I realized that I really missed the local news. And what was worse was that the little cocoon that my customized searches wrapped me in was leading me down a road towards ignorance. There were important stories that I would miss because nothing in my direct universe intersected with them.

Now I love my local newspaper's web site. I tend to read the articles in the local section every day and glance at the national items. It acts like a very valuable focus for me and obviously many of my neighbors. After that, things change. There are so many choices for national news and it seems like all of them offer a slightly different level of functionality / slant that the focus shatters to a thousand pieces.

I don’t miss the “easy weekend morning with the NY Times” too much. Although I don’t read it that often, I love the new NYT reader. Part of the ex-eBooks team were key in building this and it is beautiful to behold. Other than not being a local newspaper for me, this is the best of all worlds. It is very beautiful and immersive to read. Plus it is smart about pre-loading content so it’s already there when I want it to be and it keeps the well rounded coverage that is so needed. I hope this Reader and other innovations they have going are enough to overcome the hurdles facing them now.

One other personal note: The Wall Street Journal is an abomination. They are one of the few sites that accept advertising and also charge an annual fee ($80.00). This is like HBO running advertisements along with their premium content. It isn’t the money, it’s the principle. It’s the time and effort and distraction level.

But I don’t know if this strategy is a brilliant abomination or a stupid abomination. (The following are really rough numbers that I could find without too much work.)

WSJ paper: ~ 2 million circulation a day
CNN TV: ~ 1 million viewers a day
MSNBC web site: ~3 million visitors a day (this is not the largest news website, but it’s the one that I helped start, so there!)

Have they seen the writing on the wall and making sure the “gettings are good”? The WSJ is losing circulation and my guess is that their base is shrinking and will shrink dramatically over time as the paper generation dies off. Besides this, they are as susceptible to negative fashion trends as MySpace.

This is a great scene from the British TV Show “Yes, Minister”. It shows two very distinguished older gentlemen at what is obviously a very exclusive club.

Sir Humphrey: "Didn't you read the Financial Times this morning?"
Sir Desmond Glazebrook: "Never do."
Sir Humphrey: "Well you're a banker, surely you read the Financial Times?"
Sir Desmond: "Can't understand it. Full of economic theory."
Sir Humphrey: "Why do you buy it?"
Sir Desmond: "Oh, you know, it's part of the uniform."

Yes, Minister.
Series 2
Episode 6
The Quality of Life
First Aired: 3/30/81

I’ve heard so many things about how newspapers are struggling. The New York Times’ troubles are making the national headlines almost every day. There are those who say that newspapers are dead and I’m very happy that the above research proves them half-way wrong. I think that the old time delivery methods are going and the old time business models are gone. But the local news sites are going to become increasingly popular and local newspapers have a huge start on building their infrastructure, staff, resources, audience and branding. The business model for web sites is very different than the 200 year old newspaper model, but that doesn’t make it any less profitable.

Managing a Test Manager or Seeing the Big Picture

2007-01-28T13:57:00.000-08:00

I was waxing nostalgic about my old career as a test manager and found a blog entry that was the same rant that I used to rant about all the time: http://shrinik.blogspot.com/2006/12/why-counting-is-bad-idea.html

I wrote comment on the blog, and although it’s written to other testers, I think its biggest value could be to those people that have to manage test managers.

When I was a test manager, almost without exception, I was managed by people who had no clue about a) the purpose of test b) what test managers and test teams could do for them and c) when or why test needed any of their time, except for ship weeks. I had to teach my bosses the answer to all three of those things, but it was often hard because they thought they had the answers.

One of the lessons I learned as a test manager combined with those I learned running my own business can be summed up as this: Achieving the big picture is more important than getting people to tell you about it. Yes, managers have to know the progress towards a goal, but there is a right way and a wrong way to achieve that. I think every manager needs to be reminded occasionally that the purpose of employees is not to make their job easier. And sometimes, like with a test team, it isn’t as straight forward as it seems. Understanding the underlying strategic purpose of each person or group’s job is really the key to success.

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Ok, back to the post, "Why counting is a bad idea", basically says that anybody who thinks that they are getting good information when test is forced to produce reports that say things like: “Number of Test cases prepared: 1230, Number of Test cases Executed: 345, Number of Test cases Failed : 50” is wrong.

As an ex-test manager I disagree that numbers are bad, they are vital, but probably not why you think.

The purpose of testing is not to find a large number of bugs. I remember a project where I had two very different developers. Developer 1 was a little sloppy and did mostly UI type programming and his weekly large check-in was worth an easy 20 bugs. Developer 2, who was a god, did the deep architectural stuff and did a check in perhaps every month. We were lucky if we got one bug off of his code with a solid week of testing. Typically all the bugs from the testers of these developers were high risk bugs, but 80 bugs to 1 bug was no way to judge the productivity of the testers or the stability of the product.

Testing’s job is not about quality assurance, either. Everybody on the entire product team must own quality. If anything close to a “They will find this in test” attitude grows in your development team, that product is doomed to be low quality. This product will never feel right, it will never be smooth. No matter how much time and effort the test team puts on it. The old joke between Microsoft Test Managers was “I own quality for the length of time it takes my boss to walk to my office.”

So, if the purpose of the test team isn’t to find a large number of bugs (even high risk bugs) and it’s not to assure quality, what is it that they are asking us to do?

The purpose of the test team is to accurately communicate the status of the product.

The amount of testing applied and the number of bug reported are the best way to know the current status. But only when the status is communicated in context of the entire environment, which includes people, bugs and coverage, project goals and schedule. Those that try to simplify something thing this big and complex in to “500 cases run and 4 bugs” is very likely to have a huge surprise waiting for them at ship time.

Or to put it another way: A spec isn’t done when it hits 100 pages, why is it logical to think test is done at 100 test cases?

In the above example, I, the test manager, knowing what I know about the changes the developers are making and seeing the number, location and types of bugs, and by talking to the whole product team (especially testers), could make a very good educated guess as to accurate product status.

I could say something like, on a scale of one to ten, we are a three. Last week we were a two. But there is a lot of new code coming in, so I suspect next week we will be a two again. But after that, we are doing a stability drive towards beta, and if things go as planned, and we are mostly on track for it; right now I have a confidence level of nine. These are the numbers they really want, but don’t know how to ask for. This kind of roll-up needs to be done for all the different product areas, too.

If you do not give the rest of the product team that kind of black and white numerical status roll-up, they will find some horrid way to squeeze one out of you, and they generally go to test cases or worse.

One exception to numbers that I have seen work is pictures. I’ve known of some product unit mangers that were most happy with something as simple as a picture of a stop light. Green – Things were humming along as planned, Yellow – there were some storm clouds gathering that should be addressed now and Red – the product was blocked or there was some other huge catastrophe. It sounds simple, but it generally takes the test manager quite a few hours to accurately color.

The management team just wants some simple way to accurately know the status of the project. It’s not their desire for numbers that is wrong. In a void of anything else, they ask for what they think they want. It works out much better if the test team can supply them with the status numbers they really need before they think to ask for those other abominations.

Moments of Transition

2007-01-26T17:30:00.000-08:00

"The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain." Babylon 5.

The companies that produce computer software products are in a moment of transition. I’m not talking about the big products like Windows and Office and Photoshop, they are now a different thing. I’m talking about the newer stuff. The unnamed stuff. Although there is an incredible amount of activity all around us, we are all waiting for real answers. We are in a moment of transition.

I was always taught that just about any problem can be broken down into Who, What, When, Where, Why and sometimes How. But we are in such a great moment of transition right now; most of those questions do not matter any longer.

Easy ones first

When is now, it’s always now on the web.

Where doesn’t really matter. I need a link. It can be to anyplace.

What has consumed both How and Why

It used to be that if IBM made one product you liked, odds were that you would like their other products. But perhaps more importantly all IBM products would work together. And you could stand around at cocktail parties and say “I use IBM” and everybody around you would go “Oh, yes, quite right.”

But, the pace of innovation (technical & societal) has increased so quickly that companies are scrambling to get any kind of offering out there. The best of breed product might be from one of the big guys or by two college students working out of their dorm room. And that could change tomorrow. The big guys used to have the distribution channel to protect their markets, but those days are gone. Now chatting on MySpace about a particular product you use would probably bring as many comments of “That one Rocks” as “That one Sucks”.

Why do you produce this product? So many business models are in the air and a thousand other things are shaking out. Profit motive is always good and eventually necessary, but it’s not a good enough reason to dive into a moment of transition. There is one thing that still counts. Why do you produce your product? Passion. Customers will not accept a different answer. They need to feel like you are worth the time and effort they’ll take to deal with your product. That you are going to stick in there with them. That next week’s version will be better than this week’s had been. That you won’t turn tail but instead your company is going to stay on top of this moment of transition until it’s time to take a deep breath.

There are not a lot of variables over How to build it. Hire excellent people and treat them really well. Do lots of quick product cycles. Stay in an almost a perpetual beta. Take in as much end user feedback and content as is possible. Write to open standards where available and open your own standards to the public when you have to invent new ones.

And How to market is simplified. Your message is the message detailed by the What section. It is to use Web Pages, Blogs, Communities, Email, Web Casts, etc. that all talk about What your company is producing and, oh yes, how passionate about it everybody is. You can’t even dig down into features and cost benefit analyst because all that could change tomorrow.

So, right now, it all comes back to What. Anytime the only question that makes sense is “What the heck are we doing?” it is a sure sign we are in a moment of transition.

I’m not saying that things are easy or even as black and white as I’ve portrayed them above. And doing the exact opposite of everybody else but being really clever about it can work every time, too. No, the thing to take away from this is where to put your resources. During a moment of transition, transition the company. This is the time to try as many new and unique things as possible. Really let your employees soar and step out of anything that might be considered traditional for your company or market.

The moment of revelation is coming soon. This is the time when people are no longer interested in becoming something new, but instead want to figure out who they are. We will all want to simplify our lives, pick what really works and jettison the rest. Of the hundreds of things that were tried during the transition, a very few of them will become part of us, part of our future. When that moment of revelation comes; Nuance matters, Polish matters, Quality matters.

This moment is also a moment with great potential, and you will know when it is back because the five W’s will be back.

eBooks and pBooks

2007-01-23T09:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I said "For example, I read all the time, but only some of that is done in pBooks or eBooks."

And it was pointed out to me that pBooks is a rather obscure term.

Here is the definition:

pBook:

Semi-portable macroscopic devices into which information and stories were typically inscribed by means of inks printed into "paper". Primarily made from trees and various plants and fibers, and commonly found glossed and polished on the outside or wrapped in cowhides.

P-books were considerably weighty depending on the amount of information stored inside them, and despite their size USUALLY CONTAINED ONLY ONE TITLE!!

Full sets of Encyclopedia inscribed in p-book format often WEIGHED MORE THAN A HUMAN BEING!!

"Libraries" of the time were ENTIRE BUILDINGS DEVOTED TO LESS THAN ONE EXABYTE of information!!!

You will never know the joys of owning over a thousand p-books until you move them down six flights of stairs and back up three more. Makes you wonder how people lived through their University days back then without constant chiropractic care..

http://p-book.urbanup.com/1593807 .com/1593807

Google plots e-books coup

2007-01-22T13:28:00.000-08:00

Google plots e-books coup - Sunday Times - Times Online

Every seven years somebody resurrects the idea of eBooks. I was on the Microsoft Reader 1.0 team in 2000. They were some of the best days of my life. We had a saying: Every seven years the eBook comet comes back through earth’s solar system. We thought that we were the generation that was going to make the comet impact on earth, but we only got it to graze the planet. Now it looks like Google is going to take up the current rotation. I wish them a better ride than we had and thought I would share some of the lessons I learned.

Do NOT talk to the Publishers.

As a rule these guys are greedy and clueless. Just look at what the record producers are doing for media players and you get a sense of what these guys can do to eBooks. There are exceptions, but I still wouldn’t get into bed with them. These guys sucked 30 to 60% of the eBooks business development and marketing efforts away and we had very, very little to show for it. What little we did get wasn’t enough in the end. The book industry has been struggling for 30 years. Things are so confused that many authors are not sure who, if anybody, has the rights to publish their books in an electric format. Their book may not even exist any longer in electronic format. Anything easy you ask the publishers to do for you will be almost impossible for them. They can sure talk a good talk though. They had our guys going the whole time. Every time your business development person falls into the trap of thinking that all will be well if we get the publishers in our playground, slap him/her very hard.

Oh, and approaching authors directly was a lot of fun but ultimately just as frustrating.

Figure out a way to do both paper and screen layout.

Adobe Reader is all about paper page layout. If an author says that word “x” is the last word on page 1, then word “x” will always be the last word on page 1. It doesn’t matter if the document is being viewed on a 21 inch flat screen or a cell phone. This is necessary for business documents where you want to be able to say something like “Turn to page 24 of your document” and have it be meaningful.

Microsoft Reader went the opposite direction; we were all about the screen. We invented ClearType and gave it to the operating systems. A LIT file will always format itself as best as it can for the screen it’s being displayed upon. There isn’t even a concept of real paper. If you wanted to print out a passage from a book you need to copy and paste it into a different program. But the readably inside the Reader is to die for. No matter what your screen size, you can almost smell the scent of fine heavily clayed paper.

Both of these programs are correct. As an author sometimes I will want one and sometimes the other. Sometimes a document will only work one way and sometimes the mode I need is situational. I need the reader to do the right thing on every platform and screen size or give me an easy way to control this as an author.

Microsoft = readability and immersion. Adobe = business and collaboration. Put both of these together and the world will beat a path to your doorstep.

It *so* isn’t about DRM.

About 30% of the Microsoft Reader’s product team’s efforts went into DRM and it was a pretty big failure. Yes, some sites still use it, although it has been hacked a few times. Mostly you hear users that have over $100.00 worth of eBooks who can’t read their books any longer clamoring for Congress to do something. So to sum it up, Microsoft Reader DRM really made people angry and it didn’t work.

The thing that is saving the record industry is new artists and people ripping their old CD’s. The new artist angle can work for eBooks but not the CD ripping. So if your efforts to get current content will be mostly fruitless that leaves new content. That’s OK, there is a boom going on in the self publishing industry and it’s only going to get better. Everybody who has kept a blog for any length of time could easily create a book and already has an audience.

To avoid DRM, but to keep it simple, you have two kinds of eBooks; those with advertising and those without. Just like the Google Blogger model, it is up to the author which path they would like to go down. This way if somebody posts the eBook, that’s great! They email it to their friends, great! There is no genie to keep in the bottle because there isn’t a bottle.

I would also add the sub-case where a book can be sponsored, but that could probably wait for the second version. It would be nice if the advertising payback could be enough that best selling authors will still be able to make about the same amount of money or more. It would be nice if the authors could have some say over what ads go into their book. It would be nice if the author could choose to include more or less ads to change their monetary rates. It would be nice to do a bunch of other things, but all of them pale in comparison to the effort it takes to do a small DRM system.

Other Random Notes:

Don’t count Microsoft out. The number of LIT files that are sold each quarter steadily grows. It is sites like this and this and Powells that keep the train chugging along. Yes, the Reader program itself is getting a little long in the tooth, but the new stuff in Word is very cool. But the real core, the people that made up the heart and soul of the Reader team, still work together. They could suit up and be taking prisoners very quickly if Microsoft decides to really go down this road again.

I would try to keep eBooks as just one of my design criteria. For example, I read all the time, but only some of that is done in pBooks or eBooks. It would be nice if my RSS feeds were on my device every morning and I could go through during lunch them in a pretty way. Or perhaps any RSS post that was over 3000 characters would automatically switch to an easier to process format. A lot of people on the Reader team would create photo albums in LIT format because they were so beautiful on every device and also had the killer compression.

Be the king of the study guide. Everybody uses their computers to do research. I want to be able to bookmark content in blogs and web pages, office documents and PDFs, etc. I want to be able to do it by keyword. So if I’m writing an essay on something, I can bookmark anything that looks interesting and it all comes together in a Google eBook for me to study.

Join me and worship at the feet of Bill Hill and OSPREY. Not all the time, but whenever possible.
Empower anybody to create a document for your reader. Try to stay as far away as you can from creating authoring tools. I would look seriously into using Word’s new .DocX XML format as my native format. (It is now an open standard approved by ECMA and free to use.) It would rock if you could read PDF and LIT files.

Ok, this one is really cynical, but by law publishers need to offer handicapped people a reasonable product experience. Publishers may be more inclined to offer their books in your format if your reader is the absolute best for disabled people. I would also make sure the non-profits that might pursue this are well funded.

Give money to the University of Virginia Library. They rocked and Microsoft kind of left them high and dry when the Reader team was reorganized.

NIST used to be really into eBooks and were doing a great job driving reasonable standards but I don’t see anything current on their web site.

Automatically create the infrastructure so that every eBook has its own web community (social) on your servers. Capture the author's contact information and keywords and a summary, and of course an advertisement. Allow the author to customize these sites and sign up for a cut of the advertising revenue. Yes, 98% of these communities will languish, but they are still helpful just in their uniformity. The ones that take off will more than make up for any costs here. (Imagine if you got a penny for every web page ever written…)

Do *not* piss off librarians. They are very nice people and very, very smart. As much as the publisher’s don’t get it, librarians do. Also, nothing will happen in this space without them. Win them to your side early and court them constantly.

Expect some pretty bruised feelings from customers, vendors, ISVs, publishers and authors. We (the Microsoft Reader team) were so sure that this time was the time and it ended up we were wrong, the comet needs to make another pass. I wish Google the best.

Open souce OS - You get what you pay for.

2007-01-21T12:27:00.000-08:00

The “My father has a barn, let’s all put on a play!!!” of software operating systems. Or one of the places where the t-shirts have it wrong.

Open Source: This is a term that most people are familiar with, but it's worth re-stating. The open source revolution, where information is freely distributed and editable, is already reshaping a number of industries and upsetting traditional economic and intellectual property models. Wikipedia has very quickly become the world's largest repository of encyclopedic information. Linux and other open source software continue to rival the big players. And looking further down the line, there's the potential for open source science, culture, and the disturbing potential for open
source warfare. -- http://sentientdevelopments.blogspot.com/2007/01/must-know-terms-for-21st-century_11.html

I hate how these religious zealots steal the meaning whenever anybody does anything nice. They claim that Ben Franklin was all about Open Source. Just because people want to give something back to the community doesn’t mean they want to give it all. Read Franklin’s autobiography, he was very clever in how he went about making his fortune and doing good things for society at the same time, not in exclusion to each other.

And I absolutely love the “open source software continue to rival the big players.” They can never give me one example. Netscape was a huge before it was Open Source, but now it has a less that 1% market share. If Linux was going to take off it would have already. Linux market share is 0.37%. Yes, that’s right. The software that is “rivaling” the big players has less than a 1% market share after over 15 years of trying. Linux first came out about the same time as Windows 3.1 did. (Market Share Source = http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2.)

Yes, free is a great thing to college students. It’s very cool to hate Microsoft. Apple computers haven’t been that wonderful lately (4.15% market share). And it makes a person feel so empowered to be writing chunks of operating systems before they’ve graduated from college. Our rebellious lost boys need a wonderland; they need to find Open Source Land where everything is free (especially food and rent) and everybody always does good things for each other and all the problems are equally hard and fun to work on and candy grows on trees.

I know people that worry about this while working at Microsoft. They think that Microsoft’s short term prospects are dim because of open source. And it does seem like the one thing that all the open source people all have in common is a deep dislike of Microsoft. I commiserate. It must really hurt to want to be an operating system programmer more than anything else in your life and the only company that really does it won’t hire you. And it has to be awful to be a competitor to Microsoft, especially if your company needs an operating system. Microsoft was pretty much the only game in town until modern Linux. Actually Microsoft still is the only game in town, but you can make up for spurning them by using Linux with zero cost of goods and some PR.

Doing it for free is just a huge chunk of the problem. Yes, it’s nice to give something back, and there are ways that are 95 times (i.e. Windows market share) more effective. They can make the world better and give something back in Windows world, but it just isn’t considered cool enough. How Junior High does that sound?

But did they ever stop and think about who does get paid at a Linux company? The janitor sure does. None of them would volunteer their time and effort cleaning up because of the glory of open source. The guys that market Linux get paid extremely well. We are talking "high end BMWs" well. They are saving companies like IBM millions of dollars. Managers? Yes, paid very well again. Product Support Phone Answerers? Yes, they get paid pretty well. Program Managers? Not needed, any attempt at managing this program would be ignored. Testers? Not needed, there really isn’t such a thing as formal testing going on (and IMHO, this is part of the reason that the market share is stuck under 1%.) Developers? Not paid. Nothing. They are being used to do almost 100% of the real work and I do not understand why people this smart haven’t figured that they're the only ones not getting paid.

To me, real tragedy is that we live in a time in history where t-shirts are probably the most powerful people and they can effect change on a global level with very little effort. There is a window now that is unprecedented and nobody knows how long it will last. A program they write today could be run by a million Chinese people tomorrow. The Chinese government is already taking steps to protect their populace from us. It's pretty cool to be feared by the largest country on earth.

T-shirts are also some of the most idealistic people on earth, espcially the ones I know that are into open source. Most of them really strive to use their powers for good. But because of the open source movement this opportunity is drained away to things that do not count for much. Some of the smartest people in my generation’s life work are only seen by a fraction of people because it's cool to hate Microsoft. Some of the neediest causes will not get donations because the people that would give to them have put their best efforts in to endeavors where they don’t get paid. And rather than doing something about that Chinese thing, they are worrying about which of 8 different desktop mangers is the best this week.

Rather than empowering the world, open source drains it.

MySpace is dead.

2007-01-20T16:41:00.000-08:00

Ok, it's not dead yet. It's feeling particularly well, but it is doomed.

It won't go away 100% but it will go away 80%. Why?

1. AOL.

AOL flourished and expanded and was considered "the" place while the whole of the Internet existed. I remember the day AOL turned on their portal to Usenet (primitive discussion boards where practically the whole Internet population gathered to talk). It was a scary thing because suddenly all these AOL people started talking about how unsafe things were and the first spam started and all the old Internet people just shuddered.

After the first wave, most of the AOL people never ventured out of the safe AOL boards for a decade. They were afraid of the vastness and chaos of the Internet and so they crawled back into their little fish bowl. It was a no brainer for most AOL members. They got a CD in the mail and stuck it into their computer and found a board or two that they liked and they were happy.
They turned into vocal ambassadors for AOL. Loudly proclaiming that it was THE place to be. I was even belittled by an AOL member because I couldn't read the same board that she did. When I replied that I didn't want to pay the monthly fee, she told me that I could never be anybody unless I joined AOL.

But over time the AOL members got used to ocean that is the Internet. They explored. They found the rules and limitations of AOL were too limiting and that there were other people that they wanted to interact with that weren't on AOL and so they moved out of the fish bowl.
It's now about 10 years since their heyday and AOL has all but disappeared. They don't have members any more, anybody can see their boards. They are still a reasonable conglomerate of content, but nothing that you can't get elsewhere with more value.

MySpace is a fish bowl. It's a beachhead where teens can own their first Internet property and not have to think about the vastness of the Internet ocean. It has the functionality they need to feel cozy, just like AOL had the easiest user interface. (Although I must say that the MySpace user interface sucks.) But time, functionality and the Internet march on. And every generation gets more comfortable with the Internet out of the womb.

2. Cliques

Teenagers do not exist in the same space without somebody getting hurt. Although I doubt I'm talking Columbine hurt, I do think that the virtual equivalent will probably happen if it hasn't already. Security on MySpace isn't great and once you log in as the person you are angry at, a host of evil possibilities are easily in your reach.

Although this will hurt MySpace, it's not really the thing that's going to kill them.
If you look in the cafeteria of any high school or junior high, you will notice that the kids sit in cliques. Freaks hate the Jocks. Computer Geek's hate the Student Government types, etc., etc., etc. The Cheerleaders are not going to co-exist in close approximation to the Stoners any longer than is necessary. They would like to exist in an exalted and exclusive board with lots of pink and other Cheerleaders. This way they can plot how to be extra mean to all the people around them. (Can you tell I wasn't a cheerleader?)

This is a small twist on the LongTail "don't be a Big Fish" thing and "Small is the new big."

3. That is *so* 2006!

If the right teen idol declares that MySpace isn't cool they could lose 50% of their traffic overnight.

When the next mini-generation notices that all the un-cool older people are on MySpace, they will find a new place (or many new places) to swarm to.

4. Time

As the number of social networks that people belong to grows, the time it takes to service each network becomes more irksome. The number of blog hits is contracting right now rather than growing because they all just became too much for people to keep up with.

As MySpace becomes less valuable to their users the cost of time to maintain my profile/email/blog, etc become a drag.

(This point could also have been made in the AOL section)

5. When I became I man I put away childhood things

People grow up, move on and leave childhood behind them. None of my high school friends (4-Eva) kept in touch, even though we all were home for the holidays. We had moved on.
None of my college friends keep in touch, same reason. Same with single friends, same with friends before we moved across country, etc.

My brother keeps in touch with his high school friends and even gets together with them once a year, but they organize it through email. They wouldn't put up with the advertisements, spam and other crap that is MySpace.

So MySpace is doomed and there is nothing they can do about it. Changing their interface isn't going to stop the march of time. Creating Clique Groups isn't going to change the fickle fashion sense of teenagers and teenage idols. Streamlining everything to reduce their drag is going to kill their bottom line and not broker peace between the freaks and the jocks.

The bottom line is that in the long run, you can not successfully create a fish bowl for humans.

Which Google Bubble is bursting?

2007-01-20T16:28:00.000-08:00

Some sites are running lotteries for when the Google bubble will burst, but I don’t think it’s that simple.

I think that people mean very different things when they refer to the bubble.

1) That Google's value is not in relation to their stock price.
2) That Google will be replaced
3) That Google will reach the limit of the advertising revenue
4) That Google will blow it.

And now in detail:

1. Dot Com is back, baby!

The tone that many investors and analysts take about Google is very similar to what I used to hear back in the dot com days. Back then there were so many idiots with stars in their eyes that any kind of common sense was in very short supply.

People would run up your stock no matter what the P/E ratio was. Financial reason took a far back seat to dreams of striking it rich. Rich, I say! The value of Google’s stock price is no longer hitched up to the value of Google the company.

But, this doesn’t mean the Google isn’t a good investment. Individual stock buyers may run up the price to twice the current level. Or one day it may crash back to the levels supported by their current business value. This is what some people refer to as the bursting of the Google bubble.

But when this bubble bursts Google’s value will not have really changed at all. Their business and web properties will be the same. Unless they have been very smart, their war chest will be a lot smaller. And they will have a much harder time getting as much good PR and recruiting great employees and rewarding their current ones.

2. Two Slovakian teenagers.

At the very heart of Google's success is the algorithm they use for indexing sites to search. So it just takes one guy to figure out a better way to do 2 + 2 = 4 and things could start to change. And the question here is not really IF such a thing could happen, it’s WHEN it will happen.

Google came out of nowhere. When they showed up they did nothing that was shockingly new. Google's huge key to success was that the results that it returned were a lot better than anybody else’s. The other search engines have caught up a little, but they do not offer enough value over Google for users to leave the tribe. (I guess that would be “The ‘the Google’” tribe)

Google has lots of other properties that are valuable, but none of them are lacking competition. And none of them are that much better. If Google were a luxury brand like Porsche or Apple, there would be more breathing room, but they have marketed themselves as a utility.

Still, Google is a very smart company. They could buy off the teenagers. They could change their brand identity. They could do a lot of things to hold off the wolves for a while, but it’s very, very rare that a utility product holds on to this much market share for long if consumers can easily attain greater value by switching.

Google could be replaced and this would sound more like a bubble deflating rather than bursting.

3. They hit the limit of their advertising revenue. As if!

Lots of people think that there is a limit to the amount of advertising dollars that Google can reach. They say things like “The whole market is 50 billion and Google gets 40% of that now, so they can only get 60% more and not every advertising dollar is going to go to Google.” or something like that. No Way. They are not seeing the big picture. Nobody knows the limits to this brave new world of advertising!

If you bring up Google Maps and type in “New York, NY” or “Seattle, WA” and then zoom in you can now see the brave new world of one kind of Google advertising site. This is the one place on the planet where you should list your business (Well, this and http://local.live.com/, which is actually better.) This is the Yellow Pages marketing model on steroids. Imagine their revenue if they got a dime for every business on the planet every year?

And that’s just their maps business. Nope, there is no real limit. No bubble bursting from this point.

4, The one in which Google the company blows it.

I saw this happen at Microsoft. (Not that Microsoft has blown it in every single market niche they compete in. And I would certainly NEVER count them out. And I still have a certain amount of fondess for the old blibbet.) The company's stocks go up beyond all expectations, their technology is the best in the world and the money really starts flowing in and around. Then the early people get rich and leave (30% of them are already gone from Google). The next wave of people do not get it as much. The Competition gets close and even passes the company’s current offering. The next hot software slips a little so income that was forecasted shows up late. And everything starts changing very slowly.

I see in Google the thing that IMHO really burst Microsoft's bubble. The core business of a software company has to be about producing killer software. Instead it slowly becomes about making business deals, partnerships and acquisitions. The best software comes from a compromise between the two (but that's a different post). Microsoft keeps telling its self that it's about software development, but the product teams are not the people they listen to. Microsoft's VP's and the guys who report to the VP's are so inbred that they no longer have eyes to see.

Once a company starts really rewarding and trusting the average deal maker over the t-shirts their bubble is going to burst. Notice the Google hasn’t done very much with Google Earth since they purchased them. Google Earth was the most exciting map product but now Microsoft’s has leapfrogged them. Google tried to purchase all the advantages and hasn’t been able to do a darn thing with them.

I don’t think that too many people think of this when the say they Google bubble will burst, but to me this is the real one. This is the one that will make the world a little worse than it used to be.

Repost: Apollo 13 & Space Colonization

2007-01-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Mike and I watched Apollo 13 on TV last night. The main plot is gripping and they didn't even go into 1/10th of the crises that had to be solved to keep these guys alive. For example, the computer in the landing module didn't know about stellar navigation. It only knew about landing on the moon. So it wasn't the easy transfer that they showed in the movie. They had to do the equivalent of programming one of today's digital cameras to get them home.

What really hit me watching it through this time is just how badly NASA blew it. In the 16th century, explorers who came to the new world journeyed longer, had a higher percentage of deaths and had a more unpredictable environment (i.e. native people, bears, ...) than will ever be on the moon. Oh, and a trip to the moon costs less.

There are plenty of people that would colonize the moon given a chance. If we could get a craft to the moon and back seven years after being asked what we could do for our country, then we can certainly get a thriving moon colony is less time.

I guess nobody could really articulate WHY we should do this. For the new world, it was really furs that made it economically feasible. For space we have minerals and perfect ball bearings. Actually, these are better than furs.

So if there is a profit motive, why did it take business so long to reach for the stars? I think some of that is because NASA so "owned" going to space. That space belonged to the US after we won the space race. It wasn't until lots of other countries got there that it began to dawn on people that anybody could go! If one of NASA's missions had been to empower business then we would live in a very different world, and I'm not just talking about Tang.

Repost: How to be Remarkable -- What Crap!!!

2007-01-20T13:29:00.000-08:00

Monday, January 08, 2007

This is such crap, and the tragedy is that some people take it to heart: This is one of the top 20 (or so) blogs in the world.

Seth's Blog: How to be remarkable

some quotes:

"Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you're average, and average is for losers"

"So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway...."

"But who loses their jobs at the mass layoffs? Who has trouble finding a new gig? Not the remarkable minority, that's for sure."

I can not express what bullshit this is.

I think he should re-title the article "How to be an Ass." I don't know anybody who ever did even 3 out of the 10 items that was not called an ass behind their back.

So I should measure my life / worth on the quality of the gossip that surrounds me? That anybody who thinks that the people around them are ostriches/losers is ever going to be remarkable in a positive way? That talented / remarkable people don't lose their jobs, get bad bosses, get screwed by the luck of the draw? That the millions of people that prefer the more quiet path are all losers?

If you look at the comments there are lots of bloggers tracking back and quoting with positive glee and taking these lessons to heart.

Well, here is my list:

How to be Remarkable.

1) You are. Just try to get people to shut up about anything.

If you want to be remarkable in a positive way, then try live up to your potential.

If you are not sure what that is, then it's probably wise to go to http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/ to take the VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire, something that can always make a person feel good about themself.

Repost: Internet TV is Now

2007-01-20T13:24:00.000-08:00

Fundamentally it's the wrong question.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

From: http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2007/01/10/streaming-online-content-to-tv-has-some-worried/

Streaming Online Content to TV Has Some Worried

New products from Sony, Microsoft, and Slingbox that allow consumers to
stream content from their PCs - such as YouTube videos - onto their televisions
were among the myriad devices shown off at CES this year. And they might
yet challenge traditional media distribution channels and strategies, such as
cable TV's video on demand services, writes Reuters.

However, consumers are currently unwilling to pay more for a device
that lets them view PC content on TV screens, according to a poll of 5,000 U.S.
homes by Forrester Research. Moreover, the bandwidth constraints of current
broadband services essentially rule out downloading or streaming of
high-definition programs.

Moreover, DirecTV, a rival to cable, is already in talks with YouTube
and MySpace to let viewers watch content directly on TV - without needing to use
the new devices.

It's not a question about WHO or HOW content gets delivered, it's all about being entertained versus being bored.

It's the networks that have created the universally understood whine "There's nothing on TV!" All DirecTV did was change the wording to "There are 1000 channels and there still isn't anything on TV!" This tells me that these two entities are not meeting the needs of their consumers and are going to be knocked out of the market the second something changes unless they are very, very smart or very, very lucky.

Right now there are only a few people that would pay extra for the content that's available on the Internet; not because they want it coming from one the current TV services, but because the quality of the content stinks. And I seriously doubt that even 2% of the videos on MySpace will ever be compelling. And I believe the jury is still out on YouTube's being the "go to" place in the future. (But that's another post.)

Generation Content (and the geeks that mostly stay on the edge) don't give a damn about the issues raised in the above article . They care about being entertained and they have all the tools in the world to find what they want. And I mean "they" the individual, not "they" the generation. This is a huge new concept that is not familiar to the today's TV services.

This blog (along with every other blog on the planet) is the equivalent of a TV Channel. I organize videos I like and people who trust my tastes may watch them. It's not a question of how these videos get delivered. I could easily say "Watch House on TV tonight", but ultimately it's much more convenient if I post an link with the channel and schedule information.

Some people get paid to do this (TV networks and Big Name Bloggers). I don't and I don't even mind. It's not why I do it. So, the question really is, do consumers need formal channels (blog or TV)? Not really. They know how to use Google. But maybe if the channel brings enough individual value to the relationship there's still a place for it. This is something TV networks have been struggling with since cable.

When I knew that Bill Gates was giving his keynote at CES I was a bit surprised that I couldn't tune in and watch it on my TV. I could get it on my computer. Same with Steve Jobs and the Apple iPhone announcement. And if Gene Roddenberry was alive, do you really think that he would put up with all the stuff the network put him through when he knew he could easily release his videos directly on the Internet? This would give him a great revenue stream, with no censorship, full creative control and no middle man. There are millions and millions of content streams and no TV network or distribution medium is going to be nimble and smart and fast enough to catch all but a very small percentage of them.

Another point that is missed is that most homes already have dedicated Media Center PC's. "Whaa??" You say. In the next year or just about everybody will be buying a new PC to run Vista. What are they do with their old boxes? This may not happen next year because the content on the Internet still stinks, but once it crosses a threshold, it's going to go fast.

And I don't buy for one second the argument that connection speeds are not fast enough. Hello!! We used to sit through 12 minutes of commercials for every 30 minutes of TV shows. I guess people without digital recorders still do. I almost never watch "live" TV any longer. What makes anybody think that I suddenly would if the content was coming into my house from a different plug? There is an hour long delay when recording an hour long show and it doesn't stop anybody from loving their digital recorder. Still, I think watching live TV is the corner case.

The most common case is that people will RSS (subscribe) to content conglomerates (Web Pages / Blogs, Celebrities, Producers, etc) that they like and as new shows become available consumers will have the content automatically downloaded to their digital recorder (computer). They will watch what sounds good to them and delete the rest. Every Media Center PC will have it's own TV schedule. To compete in the future, TV cannot be a question of watching what is on, or worrying about who it comes from, but purely the individual quest to be entertained with as few hassles / hurdles/ interruptions as possible.

Update: One last note. The creation of information has always moved from the hands of the very few (i.e. Monks writing books for Kings) to the masses. It's an unstoppable force that shows up with every new form of ordering information. Along with this are the people who say it will never happen! It kind of makes one feel all warm and fuzzy that things are so predictable!

Repost: A gold toothed howling wolf or why conglomeration sites are not all bad.

2007-01-20T13:10:00.000-08:00

Monday, January 15, 2007

I wanted to clarify something that was mistakenly implied in my TV post.

Conglomeration and Aggregation sites are not bad. They can really help you find something that you wouldn't have found on your own. They will be around for ever. And sometimes society will be very "into" them (like we are right now with mySpace and YouTube). And sometimes society won't be very interested (like the fact that we are not embracing newspapers/news sites right now, or how about the fact that even AOL isn't exclusive any longer.) Some times they will be done very badly (iTunes, but that's a different post) and sometimes, sometimes they will be spectacular:

Yes, that is a wolf's head with a gold tooth. And the wolf is howling. And from what I can tell (especially going by the price) it is very well done.

There would be a very small number of people on my gift lists for which I would consider a gold toothed wolf's head. But I'm sure for some people that list would be very long indeed. Finding the stores that services these people by searching on Google is almost impossible. How can you search for something you can't really name? Right now, try to think of a way to find something like this without using the words "gold toothed wolf's head."

Enter: http://www.refinery29shops.com/ . They are a virtual mall. They sell the gold toothed wolf's head. They also sell high end clothes/shoes/etc. for the sort of people that would like the gold toothed wolf's head.

You click around a "real" looking mall to visit the different retailers who have joined into this conglomeration. Oh, they have done a few improvements over the information board found in any mall, but not a lot. The success of their site is based upon their knowledge of the people that would like a gold toothed wolf's head and servicing them with the right products (other than more wolf's heads, because realistically, how many of those does any girl need?? Price would normally play a role in this equation also, but I'm not sure that the gold toothed wolf's head crowd is too big on price pressure.)

In 5 years, can you imagine Refinery 29 adding a theater? They could bring together the right kind of content for their wolf's head clients. Maybe it's just a video that plays around the clock that will turn wall TV's into art. I'm sure they could generate 20 ideas on what kind of video content their clients would pay for.

So in 5 years some of the big guys will probably be almost gone. Most content business do not understand how they really bring value to the end users. Many of them have never actually had to bring value because their business was about distribution, so producers and customers have had little choice (TV Channels). Something that happened with the PC industry was that "men in suits" didn't believe the "kids in t-shirts" could pull it off. This is exactly where we are with content. The "men in suits" are standing around buying into the "bigger is better" motto, while the artists and viewers are dreaming about real entertainment.

Yes, there are worlds to change, profits to reap and exciting new business opportunities on both sides of this conundrum, but the press releases where I see the largest mistakes being made are the ones that read something like "Conglomerations rock 4-eva".

repost - Note to NBCU - How to use Social Networks

2007-01-20T12:54:00.000-08:00

January 17, 2007

After I shreaded NBCU's press release, I've been asked what NBCU should do about social networking.

First I would spend a lot more than an hour or two thinking about it and I would make decisions based on research and not my gut. Also, I'm not assuming that NBCU should do anything about social networks. I think an overall NBC site would be almost worthless (but that's another post).

One "given" is that there will always be numerous communities that exist for every TV show. The least popular shows probably have a few thousand. There is no way to create a community that is so good that these other communities won’t exist.

And even trying is a mistake. Each of these communities represent approximately a few hundred people that love the show (or tens of thousands). These are your evangelists not your competition. It's never a good idea to squash your fans. The fact that there is a vibrant community on MySpace is awesome news. All the Network needs to do is augment these communities.

They should find every The Office community and figure out ways to make those communities better. They should give awards to the best The Office community. They should budget some of their stars' time to do chats on these sites. The more they make these sites successful, the harder these armies of evangelists are going to work to make The Office a success. Holding contests is great, but communities win, not individuals. You can still be the host of content (as opposed to YouTube), but you are not the "go to" place. Create the content so that 24 sites can do things like have scavenger hunts around the net for some mocked up terrorist pages. Touched by an Angel communities could have charity drives and good works goals.

I would have a team of people whose job would be making these communities a little better every day. Their jobs would range from programming a custom widget for a particular community to helping another community tune their Google search information. The average team should breakdown something like this:

• 1 Manager
• 1 Marketer (not a publicist, that’s done elsewhere)
• 1 PR person
• 3 Program Managers (technical project managers and marketers)
• 3 Code Programmers
• 1 Flash Developer
• 4 Testers
• 3 Editors/writers
• 3 Graphic Artists
• ----- 20 people (and some times larger depending upon the
show).

That sounds like a lot of people. And I don't think every social site on the web needs 20 people. Sometimes a half of one person is enough. But the overall number of viewers to be serviced here is huge. One of the biggest mistakes I see companies do is to make a push into this wacky world of social networking and then leave after they have "something" built. It’s like inviting a bunch of people to a party, decorating and leaving 10 minutes after the guests arrive. The guests are all going leave after a little while because they are just too uncomfortable. They will also be a little angry for having been lied to.

Every community you build (or even a community of communities) needs nurturing. To keep people coming back it needs to be updated often with very compelling content. Somebody’s got to create that content. It’s either going to be the network or a few overworked and harried community managers that are doing this “for fun”. It takes a lot of technical people and infrastructure to create excellent online communities.

I would staff these teams with creative people that are fans of the show from around the world. They should be little islands separate from the other little islands and the network mothership. They must feel uncensored ownership and creative freedom and have the charter to do what is best for their show. Then I would sit back and watch the scores of evangelists recruit new evangelists and a groundswell of new viewers watch the show.

Now, this assumes that all of this is about getting new viewers. If NBCU is trying to build a site to drive new ad revenue that's a different story. Maybe that's possible, but it's still not the best idea and a very, very different approach is needed (but that's a different post).

repost - Trend Watching 2007

2007-01-20T12:44:00.000-08:00

Link to trendwatching.com: January 2007 trend briefing TOP 5 CONSUMER TRENDS FOR 2007

In my cynical mind, any site called TrendWatching.com is probably going to suck. But it *doesn't*.

The above post makes my brain melt to read it, but I think they get it.

1. Status Lifestyles

But conspicuous consumption for conspicuous consumption's sake is going
out. Now it's about experiences and diversity of life. Grabbing the
gusto in new areas kind of stuff.

2. Transparency Tyranny

Every wart in society is exposed via blogs, pictures, cell phone videos,
etc. Not only should you get used to it, but you must let this guide your
every business decision.

3. Web N+1

Nobody can agree on what the next thing will be and there won't be ONE next
thing

4. Trysumers

A little redundant with the experience seekers in #1. With so much of the
world reviewed and sanitized, why not try new things?

5. The Global Brain

Kind of like the next incarnation of Wikipedia, but on everything and harnessed
by businesses.

There is kind of a gusto attitude that sums it all up. It's like the whole '911 pull deep into our dens' is over and we are looking for light hearted adventures both on line and off.

repost - NBCU misadventures with social networks.

2007-01-20T12:40:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

I keep saying that I'm going to get away from the TV networks and post about something else. I don't even *care* that much about them, they are just fumbling things so badly that I can't keep my mouth shut.

Today MediaPost has this article "Just An Online Minute ... If you build it: NBCU and Social Sites"

“NBCU is building a core social networking platform that will provide various
tools and functionality on all our major properties to enable users to
self-express and find, interact and share with other like-minded users,”
Kanaujia wrote on his blog. “There is no reason why users should go to/create
‘The Office’ community on MySpace when NBCU has the competitive advantage and the ability to provide a differentiated experience on NBC.com.”

OMG!! The advantage of a differentiated experience can be leveled by one blogger linking to that content.

I posted the following comment to Media Post:

Social networking is about is people having fun hanging around with their friends and other people just like them. People go to these sites because they are entertaining and because they tie into their identity.

Yes, the networks can do some killer sites around their shows, but these sites will not be the end-all be-all last word or even necessarily the “go to” place. The reason is because there are many different types of communities, and many of their properties are mutually exclusive.
For example, there are people who insist on communities where every piece of user generated content has been guaranteed “safe” by the community manager. Other people insist on the opposite and don't want to go anywhere near what they call censorship. Think of the red state/blue state divide and then add more passion to the arguments.

Good content is not the top deliverable of a community, the actual community is. This means the people and the tone are as important as content and the networks can’t guarantee that the right people show up at the right time. Yes, they have an advantage, but not a huge one.

...

This doesn't even get into the feelings of identity people have with different communities and also the drive, by some communities, to actually create content. (The Starwars Wiki). Some of those fans will want to stick with the canon and others use it as a jumping off base. There is every reason in the world why there is a vibrant MySpace community around The Office and it will continue to exist no matter what NBCU does.

Why don't the suits at NBCU hire some t-shirts and listen to them?

2007 -- Out with the old and in with the new

2007-01-20T12:26:00.000-08:00

Over the years I have created many different blogs with many different types of content all mixed together in many different blogging sites.

Many of my friends don't really care about my brilliant insights into technology, while my business associates don't really care about the orphaned deer I rescued and raised.

So this year I'm going to fix it. This blog is my business related musing.

I'm going to move some of my posts from my old blog as time permits.

Thanks for visiting!