08-03-11

Engage Me.

“You must first engage users…”

There it was. Sitting there in 14pt black and white pixels: one giant statement of hypocrisy. The most un-engaging statement…in the world.

Engage.

Buzzwords are surprisingly unengaging. They are empty compared to what they should be. They act as stand-ins to a bountiful plethora of rich, meaty ideas that could have been but are instead replaced with a handful of syllables because the author (1.) didn’t care enough to find the more appropriate words that would lead users down an deeply intoxicating adventure of great emotional and spiritual importance or 2.) is a slave to word count.

Using buzzwords is just wasting the audience’s time. Respect the audience, don’t use buzzwords.

07-21-11

Arena

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

T. Roosevelt “Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910 via a bookmarklet on the bed at the eo inn in Orlando

06-09-11

Emotional Contagion in Steve Jobs Presentation

I’ve spent the night doing a bit of research (i.e. catching up on blogs and presentations that I refused to let my self get distracted by today while working on more pressing articles) for tips on how not to bore you fine creatures for the whole day that I have your attention this October at the conference in J-burg when I came across this beauty.

Wait for it…

…watch for it…

THERE! @ 10:00. It takes a whole 1/5 of a second, so if you blink you’ll miss it. She mentions Steve Jobs using an emotional contagion tactic in his speeches. Swoon.

But watch the whole thing, honestly, it’s divine. Especially Martin Luther King, JR at 11:50 as infographic. Genius.

Nancy Duarte’s talk at TEDx East from Duarte Design on Vimeo.

06-06-11

Red Light District

A funny thing about classical conditioning.

It can sneak up on you anywhere. In the laboratory it’s called “behavioral research,” in business it’s called “management,” in sales it’s called “CRM,” and in dating it’s called “issues”.

06-05-11

What Angel Investors can learn from the fail of Blippy

Blippy died. A horribly quiet death.

oh noes! yo

No one cared.

“So it turns out that almost nobody wants people to check out their purchases.” quoth the article here at TechCrunch on its recent official demise. And it was over.

The CEO shrugs his shoulders, kicks the ground with his shoe and says a timid “opps. my bad.”

No one cares.

But maybe, just maybe a few people cared. After all, Blippy was launched with over $13m in funding. That had to come from someone’s pockets, somewhere.

“We don’t think people want to share their purchases period,”  Swipely CEO Angus Davis told me after his service had pivoted, “I don’t know how to be more emphatic than that.”

The article discusses creating something a user wants. But what TechCrunch missed, the most crucial point of the whole, expensive experiment is this: that little fact about the business model not catering to a user need, yeah, that one… could have been figured out PRIOR to a $13m investment!

Expensive mistake.

How much money could investors have saved if they put, say 1/4 of that money into product testing and market research instead of just jumping in on the hype?

via SMI
Do you see him, in the corner? The ghost of the Pets.com sock dog is grinning at us again.

Kids, kids, settle down. Let me explain something to you. See this man:

If you keep throwing your money at every doe-eyed computer nerd with a dream that comes to your office with the next best thing, you will never be like him.

Here’s what you do: ask to see the numbers, ask to hear their process. How did they come up with the idea? Hype doesn’t matter. Anyone can come up with a delightfully intoxicating power point.

You don’t even have to pay Microsoft for the pleasure of making a power point in order to make a power point anymore. You can do it for free. Think about all the awesome people who like free shit.

So what does it boil down to? How do you stop yourself from blowing $13m in a company (unless it strategically makes sense to you and your accountant, of course)?

via iheartcharts
Look at the data!!!!

Don’t know how to do that? Hang around here for a bit. You’ll figure things out.
P.S. Is this explanation ok, or should I turn it into a power point just to be safe?

05-28-11

Generation Lost

This is the reality of our time. We don’t want pity and we don’t want to assign blame. I take exception to the simplistic view that Generation Y is optimistic because Cosby, Barney and Mr. Rogers taught our parents to make us feel special. We are optimistic because we don’t expect to be given anything easily and we’ve come to terms with that.

In Defense of My Generation by Jason Oberholtzer

05-26-11

Think about this…

“Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy.  Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.”

R. Krulwich’s Commencement Address for the Berkley School of Journalism. Go and read it, journalist or not.

If you can… fall in love, with the work, with people you work with, with your dreams and their dreams. Whatever it was that got you to this school, don’t let it go. Whatever kept you here, don’t let that go. Believe in your friends. Believe that what you and your friends have to say… that the way you’re saying it – is something new in the world.

And don’t stop. Just hold on… and keep loving what you love… and you’ll see. In the end, they’ll let you stay.

01-08-11

Ebook conundrum

Perhaps we need to redefine the term “author”. I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out how to add the interactive crowdsourcing element that defines the 2.0-scape with Ann Landers without turning it into a Yahoo Answers style trainwreck.

Just the same, I can’t figure out how to make print media compete with the crowd-driven, wiki style means of collecting and distributing data unless a single “author” becomes a group of “information curators” and books are printed from database driven collaborative projects, instantly. The biography you bought two days ago might not be the same book I buy today, one day after the person is deceased. The name remains the same, the content is just different. This produces the problem of the ISBN: does it need to change everytime the content changes?

But then, when ebooks start to embrace hypertextual theory, aren’t we just packaging a website and selling it as a product? Doesn’t this elude to the subscription based model of information access that goes against the free model environment that is the great and powerful tubes? See Chris Anderson’s work for more on this topic either in this article here, for free: http://is.gd/kmRon or buy his book on the same subject here: http://is.gd/kmRsc.

So which did you do? Visit the article or buy the book? Did you read the article first, then decide to buy the book? Did you do either, even? Would you have if you were reading this as an ebook or an app? What if they were QR-codes in a print book? Would you dig out your camera and see where they took you or would you just skip over them? How does the packaging effect what we are or are not willing to do in the process of “reading”?

12-13-10

on Identity and Kipling

Dear Shell,

My wife of ten years and I are currently separating, and my world is falling apart. This is the first time in my life I have been single. I don’t know what to do.

~ Crushed and Confused

Dear Crushed,

Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If–” defines strength as facing life’s challenges with dignity and grace. Most of the poem involves practicing virtuous self restraint in our decisions and actions (ex. “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you”), but one verse in particular stands out from the rest:

“Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:”

The rest of the poem involves traits we can develop except this: rebuilding will happen over time whether we consciously try to cultivate it or not. It’s a continuous cycle: we build, it breaks, we build again. Walls crumble, people change, relationships redefine themselves. We get in trouble when our personal identities are built upon anything that is susceptible to change.

When things like these fall out or change we are left very little more than pain and time. The pain you are experiencing now is not only normal, but very real. When something changes physically with our body: a bone breaks, we get a nose job or cancer consumes healthy cells your body informs you of the change via pain. When our identities change, there is still pain but instead of physical it is cognitive. Some call it an Identity Crisis. Psychoanalytical theorist Erik Erikson describes the situation as “Moratorium” or the state when identities are being explored. It’s not a crisis but a time of exploration.

You had a cohesive identity when you were in your previous relationship, it dissolved and now you need to redefine your identity to regain cohesion. People often throw around terms like “co-dependency” to describe a person defining their identity by their relationships with others, but a fine line separates the unhealthy state of co-dependency and normalcy and that usually involves additions or abuse.

Anybody who has been in a relationship sees the way it alters reality. Things like friends, hobbies and priorities change when you go from “single” to “couple”. It’s only normal that identities are altered in some way by the presence and absence of interpersonal relationships.

So what can you do? Gather those tools of yours: Time, Distraction and Experience. It’s time to fill in the holes in your identity, which you will ultimately learn is not built on others but on the way we handle the inevitable obstacles that come with the natural progression of life.

Solitude and rumination are deadly right now. Get out there and distract yourself: try new things, new friendships, new social clubs, and new hobbies. Throw yourself into life head first. You are at an amazing point in your life, you can redefine whoever and whatever you want to become for the remaining portion of it. You’re allowed to make mistakes in the process.

The best thing you can do right now is give yourself time. Time moves all things forward and life puts itself back together with a little patience, just allow it to happen.

“If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”

12-09-10

Dear All,

Ok, so the new proposal has been sent. Fingers crossed. I can’t even begin to thank all of my dear friends and fans who helped me in so many ways: from sanity maintenance to questions to editing to helping me find my voice. You guys are amazing. I love you all.

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