Bissellator's Weblog

Transmedia

bissellator — Tue, 9 Mar 2010 17:11:13 -0800

Sometimes you need a new word, but most of the time there is a perfectly good word that you don't know or maybe just don't like. Corporate America loves new words, and I'm not sure why, after all, they don't treat the words they have particularly well...

Take this word: Transmedia. While it sounds like the transexual porn section of the video store, it's actually a marketing term that refers to storytelling, where "content becomes invasive and permeates fully the audience's lifestyle." (wiki).

Which means omnipresent storytelling, or cross-media, or just plain pervasive media.

Creating a word to describe your idea isn't new, but we used to call it "branding." You would come up with an idea for a new soft drink, coin a term, trademark it, and create Coca Cola. Eventually the word Coke means any soft drink. The generic word "soft drink" is still there, but the mainstream use of "Coke" only happens after the brand, and therefore the word, is established in popular culture.

The prevailing thought now is to create a word, and use it enough that you force it into popular culture. It almost never works, as seen with the broken trail of words and jargon.

The problem I have with making up words is based in one of my basic maxims: This stuff is complicated enough, we don't have to make it more complicated. The process of explaining your concept of pervasive storytelling is slowed down by creating a word that could be gay porn or a Soviet telegraph.

I'm not saying that "pervasive storytelling" isn't a mouthful, but if I look up the words on Dictionary.com or, lord help us, in a book, the words have meaning and I don't need a wiki or a jargon dictionary to figure out the concept on my own.

Now take your crazy talk and get off my lawn...

That magical little tablet

bissellator — Mon, 8 Mar 2010 22:40:10 -0800

The iPad got a release date and a spiffy ad on the Oscars last night. I gotta say, they make it look sexy...

Oh, wait, that's not the iPad, that's a tablet PC from HP. And it's got Flash, multi-tasking, and a full operating system.

Phil McKinney, vice president and chief technology officer for HP�s personal system group posted on HP's blog, "With this slate product, you�re getting a full web browsing experience in the palm of your hand. No watered-down internet, no sacrifices."

Unfortunately, we don't know when or how much, but if there's one good thing coming out of Apple's aggressive marketing it would be upping the ante and other players stepping up.

How your website can be in two places at once

bissellator — Thu, 4 Mar 2010 09:49:57 -0800

I get questions from clients often about how long it takes to move a website. Sometimes when we move a site, it seems like it's still running in two places at once, and that's because it really is -- not every computer on the Internet has gotten the new location of the web site.

As a kind of geek-translation review, here's what happens when you move a web address:

1) Whois Record/Name Servers
When you register your domain name, you tell the registrar what name servers you're going to use. So if I look up Conquent.com I see two name servers listed:

    NS1.CONQUENT.COM
    NS2.CONQUENT.COM

There are two name servers for redundancy, one that's the primary and one that gets a copy of the address from the primary. So, if I change the numeric address for www.conquent.com from, say 204.181.197.6 to 204.181.197.21, it can take time for the secondary server to get the new address.

2) Your provider's Name Server
Your computer doesn't go directly to NS1.CONQUENT.COM to locate my web site, instead, your computer asks your ISP, such as Comcast. When you look up www.conquent.com you ask Comcast to, in turn, ask NS1. Comcast can cache (or keep a copy) of the old record for up to 24 hours -- so even if you're on a computer that's never visited the website, you still might get the old IP address.

Keep in mind, this is a good thing -- it means that all the people who are visiting sites don't overwhelm NS1.CONQUENT.COM with requests. You visit www.conquent.com on Comcast, it looks up the address, and then your neighbor visits, and Comcast doesn't have to bug us again asking for the same info -- it's part of that redundant system concept that makes the Internet work.

3) Your personal computer DNS cache
Just as Comcast holds onto a copy of the old DNS record, your personal computer holds onto a copy. Restarting your computer can flush the local copies of the old DNS, or you can get geeky and (in Windows), shut down all your browsers, run the Command prompt and type:

    ipconfig /flushdns

but most folks who even have the technical savvy to do this probably won't go to that extent.

Even when I try to translate these concepts into plain English, I know it's still pretty thick. But that's why I say, yeah... it's complicated.

Masterpieces created by sheer volume

bissellator — Wed, 3 Mar 2010 10:13:36 -0800

One of my favorite movies is Casablanca. It's a great love triangle and you really don't know exactly where the story going the first time you watch it. It's almost like the writers didn't know how the movie was going to end as it was being filmed... well, it's exactly like that. They wrote the last scene pretty much just before they shot it.

Ingrid Bergman plays Ilsa as being in love with both Rick and Victor not because she's a great actress (which she was), but because she honestly didn't know which man Ilsa ended up with. The dramatic twist ending ("Round up the usual suspects") was the most expedient way to end the film.

This was the studio system era where a studio would knock out 52 movies a year with whatever talent they had on hand. The cast was whoever Warner Brothers had available, and they had lots of different ideas of who should play whom; we just got lucky. They used a staff composer and got Max Steiner (Gone with the Wind) and the signature "As Time Goes By" only stayed in the movie because there wasn't time to write a new piece of music -- 52 movies a year means you keep on schedule.

It turns out that Casablanca is one of the greatest films of all time not because someone worked hard to create a masterpiece, but because of random numbers and volume. It's like the idea that an infinite number of monkeys on keyboards with infinite amount of time will eventually randomly type Shakespeare's Hamlet. Enough random banging at the studio and you get Casablanca.

And here we are with the Internet and everyone posting their random thoughts, pictures, and films. There's some amazing stuff online and more amazing stuff coming down the pipe if only because the sheer volume of creativity that's being captured and distributed.

Sure, 99.999999999% of it is useless crap, but I'll argue that in the next few years we're going to see some work of art come out of nowhere, and the only reason we'll get to see it is because we live in an age where there's so much content that quantum physics comes into play for the next great masterpiece.

Suing over lack of originality

bissellator — Tue, 2 Mar 2010 12:20:21 -0800

Quick primer on what a patent really is: A fantastic oxymoron where the government decides you're creative and grants you a dry legal right to sue people with similar ideas. It's a first come first serve system, regardless of who actually created what.

Today Apple sued HTC because Apple has patents that say they're the first company to patent a number of things, even when they obviously weren't the first to do these things. For example

Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image I had this on a Sony Clie running Palm OS in 2003
System And Method For Managing Power Conditions Within A Digital Camera DeviceI believe Nokia is suing Apple over this very thing
Object-Oriented Graphic System They already lost this one when they sued Microsoft mainly because Apple stole the idea from Xerox

Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, said Tuesday in a statement. "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

It's not easy to say where an idea comes from, but we all know that they aren't created in a vacuum. If you come up with something really cool, it doesn't mean that someone else didn't come up with the same idea. "Not steal ours" is insulting to the tech world -- HTC could have independently come up with the same ideas, ideas that Apple obviously didn't come up with independently.

Patents are supposed to make it easier to protect your investment. I may dis Apple regularly, but the iPhone is a great integration of a lot of different ideas, and it's the gestalt of those ideas that makes it king, not the little widgets that they bamboozled the US Patent office into awarding legal "wow" status to.

The reality is innovation slows when you treat little ideas like big ideas and sue people because they have some of the same little ideas -- if Apple had its way, there would be no Microsoft, there would be no Linux. There's a whole universe of ideas that Steve Jobs didn't patent, or maybe he did, and failed to enforce his patents. And the world is a richer place for that.

A Primer on Internet Fame -- dancing babies, hamsters, numa numa, and more...

bissellator — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:19:53 -0800

The Internet gives you the chance to be famous. Unfortunately, it's usually for the stupidest stuff on the planet... stuff that sticks in our minds and won't get out. My problem is that I find myself referencing one of these bits of Internet pop culture that went wild and then the person I'm talking to gives me a blank stare. I mean it's bad enough that I referenced it, it's worse when I have to try to explain what the hell I'm talking about.

So, as a public service, okay, a self-service, I decided to put together a quick primer of some of the, ahem, "high" points of Internet pop culture gone wild.

It all started with a dancing baby:

This is the one that started as the crappy animated GIF you see here and went all the way to being a guest character on Ally McBeal (and there's a dated TV reference if I've ever seen one).

About the same time we got the amazingly annoying dancing hamster site. I have to embed a YouTube video of it as the site no longer exists, but let me warn you before you hit play, the song gets stuck in your head:

The original was actually just four images repeated over and over again and a short WAV file looping -- this was amazning! Animation AND audio! And it NEVER ended... The original tune (Whistle Stop by Roger Miller) isn't really much less annoying, but it's more mellow...

Of course, with the invention of YouTube, we got a lot more annoying song and dance numbers. The most famous being the Numa Numa guy.

I don't know what it is about this fat guy lip syncing to Dragostea Din Tei, but it a catchy tune (be sure to check out the original O-Zone version, the opera version and The Bloodhound Gang's cover).

Where Gary Brolsma embraced being the "numa numa guy", the Star Wars kid decided to sue after some friends released this video of him goofing off in front of the camera (you don't have to watch the whole thing to get the gist):

Someone else took the video and made this amazing redeaux:

Personally, I would have been pretty thrilled to have my goofy antics turned into kickass Jedi moves. Other people thought is was cool too, so they made versions of it for Matrix, Kill Bill and more.

But then let's not forget the guy who really worked it: Tay Zonday and his oddly compelling original song, "Chocolate Rain"

He's an anomaly because he's, well, odd, but he created his own slice of pop culture. He turned a buck off his Internet fame by selling out to Dr. Pepper for his own Cherry Chocolate Rain Parody

If it wasn't for the Internet, nobodies would never get their odd little messages out. Oh, except for that movable type thing and Martin Luther... and the Underground in WWII... and pirate radio... oh, and gossip... and...

Checking my messages

bissellator — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:58:09 -0800

My alarm goes off at 6:30 in the morning, and if that doesn't get me out of bed, the trucks rumbling by get noisier by 7. Most mornings I roll over, grab my phone and check my email -- although the first email of the day is more of a purging of spam that slipped through the filter over night. I occasionally also have to respond to a text message that came in the dark of night from some drunk or desperate friend or maybe one of those East coast colleagues who forget it's three hours earlier here...

Then I wander downstairs to my computer where I check Twitter for mentions @bissell, Direct Messages, and new followers I might want to follow back. More and more often the followers are Twitter whores trying to sell me services to get more followers, so less and less do I follow them back (an ironic circle when you think about it).

Next I pop over to the Facebook tab to respond to any messages and check notifications. Granted, I already know if I have messages before I get there as I get a notice in my email, but responding still requires a visit to the ever changing Facebook interface.

I peek in on LinkedIn somewhere in there, but as I'm not actively hiring, and LinkedIn has become more of an online job fair, I don't seem to get a lot of contact there.

Of course I need to check out my blog to see if there are comments that need to be purged or responded to. While I'm there, I look over the logs which tell me not only how many people have visited my blog but where a lot of them came from. So, if I see an intriguing keyword or a link from a site I'm not familiar with, I have to take a peek just to see in what context people are talking about me. (Someone liked my blog about being out of shape today... Hmm...)

Messages are sometimes hidden in data, so I have to check the stats from other logs for the primary Conquent websites and projects. I have a little overview dashboard that pulls stats from multiple places so I know things like Google owes Conquent 11 bucks for advertising, the Hallmark Channel Valentines Day campaign is over, and I found that Jokeindex.com was broken because there was no traffic at all.

Over to the Conquent Task Manager where I assign a quick task to the tech managing Jokeindex, review a couple other tasks assigned to me, and write the appropriate responses.

Back to the cell phone to check voice mail, and then I can take a shower, finish my coffee and get my ass to the office. Of course when I get to the office there's US Mail, FedEx pouches and UPS boxes, but we don't really count that as part of our daily communication anymore, do we?

Rules are made to be broken -- in a reasoned, systematic way

bissellator — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:35:39 -0800

I have a real problem with rules.... Some people say that "rules are made to be broken" but I think more along the lines that rules are made by someone else, and that makes them easy to ignore.

The real problem I have with rules is other people's blind faith in the rules. I agree, rules are necessary for society to function, but not all rules are laws, and not all laws are rational or even reasonable.

The complex world we live in often needs complex rules, but solving problems in this world means forgetting about rules and looking at the issues. Maybe that's what I like about scientific method -- the idea is to break the rules except for one -- the solution needs to work and be repeatable by others.

"Just do it because I said and Damn the rules!" is just as emotional and irrational as "I don't care if we're all going to die, the rules say we can't!" There is a time, just about every day in my world, where we have to say, "We need to ignore that rule because..."

And here's the rub. The explanation for why we need to ignore a rule is often so complicated your audience might as well hear "because I said so."

Which gets me back to pure science as a business tool... Science breaks rules by documenting how the rule is irrelevant or changed by new information. That new information is reviewed by other people who know the subject matter, and then they either agree or disagree. Once there's agreement, we're not breaking the rules anymore, we've adapted the rules to the new reality.

The problem is that business needs to turn these ideas around faster than the scientific community changes the laws of physics, or even comes to agreement on evolution or global warming.

What we need is a plain English, standardized method to explore business ideas. It's not the technology that's missing (Wiki's are great for this model), it's the business culture, and the only way I can see getting business people to adopt scientific process is to say "Just do it because I said so!" and that's not the mindset that adopts this model.

Guess I'll just keep breaking rules...

So many accounts, so few passwords

bissellator — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:08:51 -0800

Watching the Twitter stream this morning, I saw a couple notes go by from @chrisorourke:

Hmm looks like someone is hitting all of my online account password recovery tools. 17 texts in the last 10 minutes... about 3 hours ago from Seesmic

Looks like they didn't manage to break into any of my accounts. Nice try, Mr. Hacker. 5 minutes ago from web

DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS!!! 2 minutes ago from web

GOD DAMNIT, IT WAS PHONE!!! 2 minutes ago from web

Now, I'm not sure if that last post came from Chris or the hacker, but it sounds like he got hacked (cracked?) because someone had access to at least one of his email accounts -- that is, all they were doing was asking services to send login information to the email address on file, and once they got that, they were in.

This might not have been a big problem back in the day that we only had a couple passwords for a couple places. But now we a have couple passwords for multiple email accounts, Facebook, Twitter, flickr or some other photo share and a host of services that, in turn, tie into these things.

Most people I know only have one, or maybe two, passwords, so if you get the password to one account, you're in most of the other accounts. Changing those passwords regularly is almost impossible -- I have literally dozens of social media accounts out there, and I've set up logins on various bulletin boards or other information services that I don't even remember visiting. If I used my real email address and a repetitive password on all of those, then I just handed login info to OTHER sites to whoever runs that board.

I try to be careful and use an obscure Hotmail account and provide no personal information, but it's getting harder to avoid. Ping.fm and Google both have access to a LOT of my accounts. Maybe they don't have my passwords (well, Google does), but it effectively doesn't matter -- bad boy cracker gets into a master account like one of those, and he can spam dozens of websites simultaneously.

This is, in part, the cost of Joe Everyman wanting the spotlight. Everyone wants their voice to rise above the noise, but self publishing online is hard work. People get lazy managing multiple accounts, but when a hacker/slacker/code cracker gets in and uses your accounts for a moment of mental masturbation (why else are the fake postings always about sex?), it's not just the time recovering face, it's the time it takes recovering all those accounts...

Who really uses Twitter? 60% of Twitter's traffic isn't on Twitter

bissellator — Mon, 8 Feb 2010 10:08:50 -0800

There are two ways to post and read stuff on Twitter -- you can fire up your web browser and go to www.twitter.com or you can or you can use the API. Well, not really "use the API" but rather, use a program that some geek wrote that uses the API.

And there are LOTS of Twitter programs out there. I'm running a report right now that grabs what program people use to post comments on Twitter and in less than 24 hours I've seen over 350 unique apps. Sure, most of them are hardly used at all, but that's kind of my point -- people don't use Twitter, they use Twitter's database.

Let me see if some numbers help... From a sampling of 12,760 postings, we saw 351 unique programs posting to Twitter. People posted to Twitter using Twitter's web interface less than 40% of the time. That means that 60% of the traffic on Twitter never sees Twitter.com.

This is completely backwards from every web application out there. The idea has always been to build traffic. I remember a conversation I had with the folks at MSN who kept talking about "eyeballs" -- they wanted as many people to show up as possible, and then get those people to spend as much time on MSN websites as possible so they could deliver as many ads as possible.

MSN is one of the biggest properties on the Internet and their revenue model is the same one we had with tiny sites back in the 90's. Getting people to your site means controlling what they see and creating inventory that you can sell.

But Twitter is literally giving away inventory. It's like owning a shopping mall only you aren't charging the stores for using your building. You let them put up their own signs, sell products, and be completely autonomous while you provide the space and the infrastructure.

Now, I know Twitter got that $1 Billion valuation last year (New York Times), but I still have no idea why investors think this is such a valuable property -- sure, there are 13 million active users and 75 million accounts, and so many postings I won't even hazard a guess, but, who really sees Twitter?

And how do you leverage your customers if you don't see 60% of them?

The Web is a Jerry Rigged Kludge

bissellator — Thu, 4 Feb 2010 09:44:36 -0800

We've all run into the website from hell, and a lot of times it's an important company like a bank or utility company. You can't figure out the navigation, you search the help pages and they talk about things that don't even exist, you get halfway through filling out the required information and suddenly find yourself kicked out of the system or trapped in an endless loop of screens... And you yell at the screen, "Who the hell builds a piece of shit like this?!?"

Everybody builds that piece of shit.

I say "everybody" because it's the programmer, the graphic designer, the marketing guy, the operations manager, the CEO, the hardware vendor, the admin assistant's cousin's daughter's boyfriend... Everybody gets their 2 cents in, and that pile of pennies turns into a pile of crap really fast. And that's just when building the site.

But let's pretend for a moment that the project followed the specification perfectly and a beautiful, functional web application hits the Internet. A couple months later something changes and a programmer is told to add a feature. The system wasn't really designed for this feature, but being a good problem solver, he opens the hood, finds a place he can bolt on the functionality, maybe gets a graphic designer to give it a nice paint job, and everything's good.

Then they do it again. And again. And again. Sometimes it's small additions, sometimes it takes huge modifications. And at the end of the day you end up with The Site From Hell, a Frankenstein's monster of add-ons, changes, and ideas that were really important for about 10 minutes in a board meeting a year ago.

Obviously not all web projects are run like this, but you'd be amazed at the size and sophistication of companies that do run their projects "on the fly." I've been invited into more than one company to tell them what they should do to fix their web issues, and the answer is almost always to throw it away and start over.

But even starting over is tough for these companies. The reason their web application got so screwed up in the first place is because their management is so screwed up. They assign someone, sometimes the head of marketing, sometimes the IT guy (who is often not the head of anything), sometimes a administrator who just got the job of "fixing our web site" but almost never a committee of department heads who are directly affected by the impact of the web.

A primary point of contact is one thing, a "decider" is important... but one person can't know all the ways the web needs to interact with an entire company. So the design specification is often missing something critical, and the process begins again.

I'll say it again -- the web is not your bastard stepchild. It IS your business. It's the first thing your prospects see, and it's the place that your customers want to go to interact with you. I don't care if you work in a broom closet, your website should imply greatness, and it should follow through with that greatness.

Otherwise your whole company is a jerry-rigged kludge.

Twitter: Asleep at the Mouse Wheel

bissellator — Tue, 2 Feb 2010 09:11:34 -0800

There's an article on ComputerWorld's website saying "Twitter now has 75M users; most asleep at the mouse." While there are 75 million people on Twitter, only 17% of them actively posted anything to Twitter last month -- that's still almost 13 million people actively posting crap to Twitter.

I always find these articles on metrics amusing, that is amusing in the context of how to lie with statistics, or in this case, how to get all excited about nothing with statistics. You can read a lot of different things into the huge numbers of people not actively using their Twitter accounts but here are a few things to consider.

Placeholder Accounts: Most of the social media folks I know have more than one account -- Conquent naturally has its company account, which pretty much says "Follow @bissell," and then there are the accounts that people get for misspellings just as we've been doing with domain names for years. These are important accounts as brands like Michelin should own their name on Twitter, but they might not have anything to say every day.

Event Accounts: Before there were lists, and even now that there are lists, people set up special accounts for one-off events. Things like @SocialMediaConf where @AdBroad and I spoke in September has been dark since... Well, September. Show's over. Move along.

Fictional Characters: The Mad Men Twitterers all have multiple accounts, and when the curtain falls on the season, so does the chatter on Twitter about Mad Men. There are scores of other seasonal twitter workers out there, and they may fade away completely, but like placeholder accounts, they have a place in the Twitterverse.

Lurkers: The term "lurker" has been around for a long time, referring to people who read but don't write anything in places like chat rooms and (going way back) bulletin boards. Interesting thing about Twitter lurkers is that they aren't necessarily people but accounts set up to siphon links and comments out of the stream of tweets and post the info somewhere else.

That last one, lurkers, is particularly interesting. Twitter is different from any publishing platform we've seen so far because the information is so easy to grab and reuse, making the content that comes out of Twitter ubiquitous nuggets of info flowing all over the Internet.

So what if 13 million people generate the bulk of the content, only 1,400 people supposedly edit Wikipedia (see my blog on that topic) and yet no one seems to have stopped using it, nor do I think Twitter is going away anytime soon.

But, with this qualifier on the stats in hand, you're welcome to resume panicking about the death-knell of Twitter now.

Where regulation is good: Google Voice and Vonage

bissellator — Mon, 1 Feb 2010 14:14:18 -0800

I can't imagine being a government employee trying to keep up on what the government should be regulating and what it shouldn't. Take Google and Vonage, for example. These aren't phone companies, per se, but they sure act like phone companies -- they give you a phone number that can be dialed from any phone, and a service that lets you dial any other phone. Making two phones talk to each other seems like a phone company to me no matter what other services you offer or what technology you're using.

But Google and Vonage don't get regulated like phone companies because they're classed as "information services" which means they don't have to play by the same rules as all the other companies that connect phones to each other. Some of those rules are bunk, based on maintaining the infrastructure built by Ma Bell once upon a time (much of which is superceded by cable and wireless in the Voice over IP world of Google and Vonage).

But some of it is consumer protection. Things like phone number portability, which means that if you use Google Voice for your main business line (which I'm finding increasingly common in the consultant world) and you decide you want to change service, you can't keep your number.

Take the Conquent phone number in Portland, for example. When the company started 11 years ago, it was just me on a cell phone. But it was a regulated phone number owned by Qwest. So when I got sick of Qwest, I flipped it to Verizon. Then I used a little trick they had at the time that let me forward all my calls for a flat fee, so as Conquent grew and moved into different offices, I was able to point the number where I wanted, kind of like Google Voice today.

But one day, Verizon started metering all the calls being forwarded, which meant we were paying cell phone rates for every minute on inbound calls -- they didn't tell us, we just suddenly got a phone bill for over $1,000 where it had been $25. Again, because it was a regulated service, we were able to move the number and contest the bill. We then moved the old cell number to our land-line phone service, where it sits today, just like any other landline.

Enter the unregulated services -- Google and Vonage own those phone numbers, and they're in pools of numbers that aren't necessarily able to be moved to another carrier, even if they wanted to. Without consumer protections we have with the traditional telcos, a story like Conquent's wouldn't have such a simple, happy ending. Instead, all the time, effort, and money invested into a phone number goes away, and there's nothing you can do about it.

How Facebook is (unintentionally) forcing programmers to piss off users

bissellator — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:00:00 -0800

I'm on Facebook, just like just about everyone else on the planet. (I visualize some tribal scene with a feather clad, makeup smeared warrior pulling out his iPhone and typing LOL on some random picture posted to his Wall.) Most of my friends on Facebook are either family or old schoolmates unlike my Twitter where I'm a little less selective, and a little more careful about clicking on links or engaging with people.

I don't engage in a lot of the quizzes and random stuff on FB, but when Alyssa Jenkins "hit me with a pillow" I went ahead and added the app and "hit her back." Over the next few days we hit each other with various pillows -- she'd hit me with the Luxury Pillow, I'd hit her with the Leather Pillow. Each time we hit the other, the Pillow Fight app would post the photo of the pillow being used to our respective walls and send a note to the person getting hit saying "you've got 2 days to hit back or you lose!"

With two days to hit back (an eternity for someone online as much as I am), the game could go on forever, which wouldn't be a problem until I got a roadblock that if I didn't grant them constant access to my account (meaning they could post whatever they wanted whenever they wanted) AND give them my real email address, not the FaceBook proxy, or else I wouldn't be able to hit Alyssa back.

I conceded the fight and deleted the app.

Normally this would be the end of the story, but after rating the app 1 out of 5 stars, one of the Pillow Fight developers sent me a note (because of my comment and previous use of the game, the Facebook app allows him to send a message via the Facebook messaging system) and he gave me some background.

First was the link to the FB Developers blog Communicating Directly with Your Users via Email explaining that Facebook is encouraging developers to communicate directly with users rather than using the FB messaging system. Second was a link to the developers roadmap wiki showing that Facebook will actually be taking away the current notification functionality.

Not only that, but there seems to be a bug in the FB API which creates a loop, that is to say, I can't get out of the "give us your email" messages and play the game, because FB doesn't give the programmers a way to get out of it.

Facebook is a tricky place to write applications -- you have to create most of your programming on your own servers but interact with custom code that Facebook keeps changing. The Pillow Fight guys seem sincere in trying to provide a fun game, and while they have the aesthetics of programmers (which means their interface isn't exactly a work of art), I know the frustration of having to write code and rewrite code based on events outside your control.

Of course, this is one of those themes I keep getting back to -- when your business model is completely dependent on one company, be it Facebook, Apple, or the coal mine, you're going to get screwed. Your interests are not the same as the big corporation you're playing with, and all it takes is a casual flick of a corporate finger somewhere to accidentally kill you.

The Twit Cleaner

bissellator — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:28:02 -0800

I seem to talk a lot about filtering the noise of all the yammering online. I also talk about how silly most of the applications names are, but I figured this one was worth mentioning as it really helps you understand your Twitter followers.

The Twit Cleaner (which is not a cheap prostitute for the Upper Class Twit of the Year) will run the most detailed analysis of who you're following that I've seen so far.

If you're not someone who uses twitter a lot you may ask, "why do I need to look at who I'm following? Shouldn't I know these people?" The answer is, yes, you SHOULD know these people, but following people on Twitter is often a lot like exchanging business cards at a mixer. You think you understand who that person is, and you want to return the favor because they gave you their card, but now they have direct access to you.

I'm mainly concerned with people who don't follow me back -- I follow people to have a conversation, or at least to have some mutual exchange of ideas. But there are accounts like the @MarsPhoenix or @stephenfry whom I 'm interested in, but I don't honestly expect them to be interested in me -- I don't want to use a tool that just automatically unfollows everyone who isn't following me, but I need a way to categorize the activity of the people I'm following.

The Twit Cleaner has three main categories which they then break down into subsections. It takes a few minutes to run, and they actually send you a message when it's done rather than waiting on your browser like friendorfollow.com. I assume if you're one of those twitterers following 50,000 people that it would take much more than a few minutes. But the report you get back is pretty interesting.

For completeness, here's the list I got back when I ran my report (knowing they're Aussies explains the terms and spelling).

Dodgy Behaviour

Try To Sell You Crap
Uses common spam phrases

Nothing but Links
Posts nothing but links

Tweeting the same links all the time
Duplicates the same link more than 25% of the time

Tweeting Identical Tweets All The Time
Posts the same tweet too many times

Other Dodgy Behaviour, Now Absent
Any dodgy behaviour, plus haven't posted in ages

No Activity in Over a Month

No Activity In Over A Month
No tweets in a very long time

Accounts that Ignore You

Not Active Yet (Fewer Than 10 Tweets)
Fewer than 10 tweets

Don't Interact With Anyone
Never interacts with any of their followers

Hardly Follow Anyone
People that follow back less than 10% of the people who follow them

Not Following You
Have no followers at all

The page made it pretty easy to find out what accounts I wanted to toss immediately, and then take my time as I get through less and less critical categories. It also offers a tool to let you unfollow everyone on the list, with the option to exclude the accounts you want to keep (like the Mars rover and Sir Stephen Fry for example).

I did a quick paranoia test on myself by running the Twit Cleaner from the Conquent account (which is just a company placeholder and just follows @bissell) and I was happy to see that my daily Twitter account didn't show up in any of the garbage categories.

But, at the end of the day, while the automatic filters are getting better, I still think there's nothing like a little human oversight on these sorts of things...

Perfect Secretary's pitch for @Adbroad (and the Youtube API)

bissellator — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:40:28 -0800

@AdBroad is in the running for a Shorty Award in #advertising. It's a community effort, getting a Shorty Award, and the very lovely, somewhat provocative, Perfect Sectretary has added her own short video pitch for @Adbroad.

Click to view

It made great sense to post it to the BrandFictionFactory.com website. I really like the work Conquent did building the site so naturally we wanted to make it a little kitschier than a simple "here's my YouTube video". Now, we could have mastered a second copy of the video and uploaded it to the server, but keeping it all on YouTube lets @PerfectSec keep track of how many people watch the video whether it's on YouTube or BrandFictionFactory.com and we don't have to worry about peak loads or any of the other headaches hosting your own streaming video causes.

So the team dug in and found out that Youtube actually has an API (Application Programming Interface). Turns out you can control just about everything that happens in a YouTube video with JavaScript.

All we really needed to do was dress up the video a little -- it's still YouTube, but we put a TV over the top of it. The problem with that is that the image of the TV covers up all the controls for Youtube, which means you couldn't play or pause the damn thing.

With a little magic from the YouTube API, we were able to create controls so all you have to do is click on the video to toggle play and pause (just like a regular YouTube video) and the real cool factor is that at the end of the video, we can swap out the video and put in a screen to direct people to go vote.

Pretty damn cool...

The Emotions of Text

bissellator — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:31:31 -0800

Probably one of the most interesting developments of the 21st Century is how many people communicate via text. I don't mean just text messaging (which Purnima referred to as the return to the telegraph message), I mean things like, well, this text.

Blogs, status updates, notes on Facebook walls... There's a lot of typing going on, and a lot of amateur writers flexing their meta-carpals all over the Internet.

The problem is that we just don't quite get the emotional nuance in text that we do face to face. Part of that is the lack of real-time interaction. If I post something to you and it takes hours for you to get back to me, I might start forming opinions about your thoughts about my message. I can't see if I offended you and quickly correct my meaning -- and if I did, that offense can fester and your reply can be equally offensive, then we get a good old fashioned flame war going on.

People often use smileys and other emoticons to try to add that emotional nuance. I hate emoticons, and I generally refuse to use them. They're the equivalent of Cindi-with-an-I dotting that "i" with a heart. Or like the comedian who tells a joke and then says, "Get it? Get it? It was the rabbi!" I prefer the satisfaction of getting the joke on my own.

I like to think of myself as a skilled enough writer that I can imbue some level of emotional certainty into my writing, but let's be honest -- if I use phrases like "imbue emotional certainty" I'm going to come off as a pompous Ivory Tower asshole more often than not, which is just as bad as coming off as some twittering tween with smileys.

It was interesting to see the emotional content in response to my blog yesterday (The Shorty Awards Scandal -- Manual Spam is still Spam). It was one of my general examinations of how social media is changing, but it got a lot more response than normal. Sure, I used the word "scandal" but I meant it as a tongue and cheek commentary because how can you really have "scandal" with something as unstructured, and honestly unimportant, as a fan-based award for who's the best Twitterer in a range of categories?

If you read the comments, you'll see there are a lot of pretty strong opinions in there. And despite my premise that we should be able to tell the intended mood of the author, I honestly can't say how many of these folks are genuinely pissed. I know I wasn't, but I think @jonacoca thought I was pissed at him for trying to help out @iwearyourshirt (I think he even called me a "hater" on Twitter...)

Maybe I should have used a few emoticons...

The Shorty Awards Scandal -- Manual Spam is still Spam

bissellator — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:52:07 -0800

In the quest for winning the not-really-so-coveted "Shorty Award", our favorite fictional ad man, @FrankAdMan, found himself losing to a T-Shirt. No big deal, after all, Frank, himself, is fictional, so why shouldn't he be beaten by a T-Shirt?

But then he came across a 16 year old who's entire Twitter stream seemed to consist of "@twittername Do you want to be the best person ever? Vote for@iwearyourshirt to win a shorty http://bit.ly/Shortaaay" and Frank found himself thinking about fish and Denmark...

My first impression was that someone wrote a script that worked the way Twitter whores spam people (see my blog "Twitter Followers Don't Matter, ask the porn sites"). But I was a little curious why all the postings came from "Echofone" which is a legitimate Twitter client. I figured he could have spoofed the name to make it look more legit, but why not do "from web" at the point?

Then I got a message from the spammy account. @jonacoca describes himself as "I'm a fun, Energetic, and intelligent sixteen year old who loves Social Media, sports, and the business world!" and he assures me he is not a bot.

I did some quick research and he posted very similar messages about 125 times. Not as much as a bot would probably do, but way more than a 40 year old man would do. The behavior of 16 year old boys often seems unlikely to their older and slower counterparts, but my guess is that he's copying and pasting and soliciting strangers -- which isn't much different than sending a 16 year old down to the mall to hand out fliers (which I did when I was 16-ish).

Except this is the Social Media frontier and while it's still the unruly frontier with sex, profanity, and a sense of "whatever I can get away with is okay," there are some things we consider improper. One of which is soliciting strangers without their permission, consent or warning.

I don't know what the Shorty's are going to do with this situation -- a little forensics could probably toss out all the votes that were solicited this way, but part of the problem is that this IS the frontier. The fact that there aren't any hard cast rules of engagement makes it harder to separate aggressive campaigning from improper, ne, disqualifying tactics.

But I gotta love the silliness of it all in the midst of the moral quandary...

Clarification on January 28
My intent with this blog posting was to cover the issue of what constitutes spam, but the discussion below has evolved into a discussion about what makes a good Shorty submission. Now, the Shorty Awards has a fairly complex set of rules, and they did their initial audit of the votes to see how they comply with these rules.

Lee Semel (@semel) a co-founder of the Shorty Awards, posted this today:

@rafael_jornal can explain further over info[at]shortyawards.com email, but 'because...' votes, repeats and retweets weighted less

Which might help to explain how FrankAdMan with 346 votes is currently in first place while iwearyourshirt is in 6th with 361 votes. I'm pretty sure that iwearyourshirt wasn't docked heavily by jonacoca's enthusiasm, as the number of votes that iwearyourshirt got from the campaign was (at his estimate) very limited.

Food for thought, though...

Google Analytics, the cloud and missing numbers #fail

bissellator — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:19:38 -0800

We ran the backend for a sweepstakes project for ABC/Lost this month -- it was one of those projects you simultaneously love and dread because a company like ABC/Disney can push a LOT of people to the microsite all at once. So, we set up the site on Rackspace's cloud (you can read the details about setting up the project here) and it all worked great.

As a bit of an experiment, we hooked up Google Analytics to the site to track visitors. Now, keep in mind, server stats are always a little tricky, what with bots and other automatic processes hitting your site all the time, but for something as tightly controlled as this sweepstakes site, this was a pretty good test of the technology.

And Google failed.

This conclusion wasn't from an arduous comparison of server logs and weighting what might be a real visit and what might be a bot -- that would be one of those vague, subjective conversations. The fact is that Google reported fewer page views than registrations -- which is impossible as a visitor would have to look at two pages minimum to register. One page to answer the questions, and the thank you page saying "You got the right!"

Google Analytics is run on the client browser with JavaScript; I know visitors had to have JavaScript turned on to register for the sweepstakes because they couldn't have gotten into the site from ABC without JavaScript turned on. So, either Google is overwhelmed and not picking up the visits as we flood the server, or people are blocking Google's scripts.

No matter what the reason, that kind of discrepancy can't be ignored. We usually create special tracking scripts (on the server side) to filter out all the noise in the server logs, which is kind of the thought behind Google Analytics. But our tests so far show that a client side, JavaScript driven tracker, even by the geniuses at Google, just doesn't work...

Helen Klein Ross & Michael Bissell Interview at Adweek's Social Media Strategies Conference

bissellator — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:00:00 -0800

The sound track gets off a little from the video, but it's a nice little interview with me and Helen KleinRoss when we spoke at the Adweek Social Media Strategies Conference in September of '09.

The topic is how we managed to tweet in character for Roger Sterling and Betty Draper

The Internet is the New 60's

bissellator — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:41:02 -0800

I got into an online conversation today with @Gennefer on the topic that the 60's social movement makes a great metaphor for the way we use the Internet today. It's not just the easy access to sex, drugs and illegal music, but also the way social networks are creating awareness of social issues and promoting art and culture outside the establishment.

As we tossed our 140 character comments back and forth, it occurred to me that the it's not the Internet that needs a metaphor, but the way communication and information changes society.

There have been a few really great communications revolutions that have been followed by huge sociological shifts. Sea travel, which brought not only goods from far away, but new ways of thinking and doing things (including the recipe for gunpowder) is often overlooked as a communications revolution, but it was the knowledge traders brought back that started the Renaissance much more than the goods themselves.

Not overlooked is movable type -- without the printing press to get his message out, Martin Luther would have just been another priest strung up to a wall somewhere and the Catholic Church would still be the only church for Christians, and a hugely corrupt power, at that.

We still romanticize the Pony Express, but it was really the telegraph that cemented so much of the North American continent as a future world power. And, of course, the telegraph was quickly followed by radio and then television rapidly making the world smaller, creating a more homogeneous culture with national advertising and even changing the way we talk by smoothing out regional accents and dialects.

What really made the 60's such a watershed time was a huge population of people all about the same age spawned from a post-war baby boom. Ironically, these kids were the first to be raised by TV and shared a lot of the same ideas and ideals and culture not from their families but from TV and the toys and commercial products they grew up with.

And they could find each other more easily than ever before. TV news was maturing and spreading the word about things like Woodstock or marches in Washington. It's not just that they could get their message out more easily (this was the dawn of self-publishing with cheap mimeographs and copiers coming on the scene), it's that they all spoke the same message and learned that message faster than their elders.

All of which is true with the Internet. The Internet is quickly helping to homogenize culture on a global scale, although it's not as if the "Internet" is a single medium -- television, movies, blogs, advertising, casual interactions online, and the fact we all use the same basic stuff every day give us common ground to start a conversation. And all these little interactions take us a step closer to a global culture, which is definitely one of the biggest revolutions we've seen.

Just as the stuffed shirts in the 60s tried to mimic or co-opt the "youth culture" stuffed shirts (and not so stuffed) are trying to do the same today. It's too big even with our multi-national global companies supplying so much of this revolutionary culture, it's not the things or even the individuals driving this revolution, it's just the unchecked speed of communication.

Cougars from New Zealand (and I don't mean big cats)

bissellator — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:11:23 -0800

Seems to me that as the world gets smaller, what we find controversial gets less relevant. Take this video for example (posted by @Ryan_Drumwright on his Facebook page). The comment on the video says:

"The ad from air New Zealand, to advertise their grabaseat deals, that had to be banned from the air due to people's complaints about the use of the term cougar.... "

Naturally, I found the thing amusing, as it was intended. Of course, I like women of that age, but then I'm not a Cub -- yeah, they had to come up with a name for the young men that Cougars apparently prey on. Not that I've actually heard of a man in his 20s complaining that he got picked up by a woman who only had sex on her mind, other than maybe she wasn't the hot 20-something he was hoping to take home that night...

Anyhow, I figured the office would enjoy the clip, so I pulled it up on the big screen in the front room and, surprise, no offense, but there was one question: "What's a P Addict?"

Apparently it's a Kiwi term for a meth addict, which is interesting because people are more upset about the use of the word Cougar than they are about using "P Addicts" to "cull their numbers." I mean, outrage is warranted for an ad that trivializes a debilitating addiction, but not because older, single women, are interested in casual encounters with younger, also single, adult men.

But, with the Internet, anything can become controversy really fast, and be forgotten equally fast.

Also in tonight's news, Haiti, economic crisis in the US continues, I need to scoop the cat box and a whole bunch of stuff more important than women who want to have sex.

Adding facts together, or why you can't charge your cell phone from wifi

bissellator — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:44:08 -0800

Got this random bit of tech news from Nabil Maynard (@Nadreck) from the twitter stream the other day... The article was about a device that can recharge your cellphone by converting ambient wi-fi radio frequencies into electricity. (RCA's Airenergy charger converts WiFi energy to electricity)

Before getting into the physics of this, I had one of those cynical "That can't be right" moments. My first thought was that there should be a lot of OTHER ambient radio frequency bouncing around that should be a lot stronger than wi-fi. I mean, why wi-fi? Other than saying "why, oh why, wi-fi?" is so much fun...

Then the math kicks in (thanks to the comments in the article). The output from a wireless router is around 100 milliwatts, or .01 watts -- it would take about 250 hours to charge a device using that kind of output. Now, the idea is that the device collects and stores a charge in its own battery all the time, so you can get a quick hit, but the reality is you'd still have to wait a week to get that charge back on this device...

My point in posting this here is basic critical thinking. Well, I say basic, but it's not that basic when it's so rarely used. The article in question didn't do the extra math or try to prove or disprove the idea that this device works, it took readers to do the math and disprove it, and very few of those readers at that. Most people just said, coool...

While one school of thought says "just post the facts" we need people to report more than the facts they were given. Do a little research and add a little more to the world than just forwarding stuff along and maybe the world will be a slightly better place...

Social Media and the Destruction of the World

bissellator — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:21:09 -0800

We're always looking for patterns in things -- the rise and fall of the markets, the increase in global temperatures, what color will be the new black this season, whether that cute girl always takes the 7:32 bus... We're pattern obsessed to the point that it gets us in trouble with games of chance (our brains are trying to figure out when that 777 will come up on the slot machine, so we keep spending).

The reason for this obsession with patterns is simple biology -- if you can't figure out what berries are good for you and which will kill you, you're dead, and your genes don't move on to the next generation. If you can track more complicated patterns, like the seasons and what plants you can grow, or what animals you can herd, you can build the kind of civilization that supports over six billion people.

So patterns are naturally really important to us. We judge intelligence on the use of patterns -- SETI is looking for repetitious patterns in the radio noise of space under the assumption that if an intelligent species was going to try to contact us, they'd use mathematical progressions, or at least a steady beat.

I'd like to argue that visible patterns are getting harder to find as the Internet evolves. The way we interact with each other and the incomprehensible amount of information flying around is changing civilization in ways we don't understand. It's not just the random noise drowning out intelligent discourse, it's that the random noise is becoming intelligent discourse.

I have always been a generalist, and often answer questions correctly without knowing how I know the answer. I have a pretty good foundation in rational thought (having been called a Saganist because I subscribe to the philosophies of Carl Sagan), so I'm pretty good at filtering the random noise, rating it, and learning from it. But most of my peers are linear thinkers and base their answers on education and experience that is becoming less relevant.

Just as toddlers are able to pick up a mouse and keyboard and surf the Internet, I'm seeing a generation that doesn't find the idea of random information disturbing, and I'm seeing an older generation that is perplexed by it.

We are seeing the dark side of this Information Revolution -- as one school of thought (the search for ordered patterns in the world) is augmented by another (the acceptance of randomness and chaos), we see information based crises like the mortgage crisis where the patterns went from manageable to complex to uncontrollable to disaster.

I think we're also just starting to see the tip of the obsolesce of a lot of professions based in the information world. I'm talking the top of our economy -- lawyers, bankers, managers and even politicians who not only can't keep up with the rate of change, but whose livelihood was based on being one step ahead by watching patterns that no longer exist.

So, maybe the lawyers are the first with their backs against the wall now that the revolution is here.

Rabid Fans vs Passive Viewers -- The Coco vs Leno saga

bissellator — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:09:26 -0800

There's been a lot of buzz around who's going to get the Tonight Show, and while I don't even watch late night TV, I found a concept on one of Time's Blogs interesting. They say that one of the reasons the debate exists is because Conan O'Brien's fan base is younger, online, and tweeting like crazy, whereas Leno's fans are older, and far less rabid.

Obviously, how we place value on a vocal minority has a lot more social implications than just who gets the Tonight show. And for this posting I'm going leave aside the rabid right, and the wacky left in politics -- but keep the 2008 election in mind with Obama in the Conan role and McCain in the Leno...

What we're seeing is the evolution of fandom: you don't have to wait for the Neilsen's to tabulate numbers, and even when you do, they're often way out of whack from the buzz being generated online, keeping in mind that that buzz might be controlled by a handful of rabid fans and that the actual audience may have a very different opinion.

But the question that still remains in my mind is if that vocal minority is a better target for advertisers than the lackadaisical "I'll watch what's on" crowd -- active fans can be active consumers, but passive viewers may be better targets for traditional advertising.

We probably won't know how traditional broadcast advertising fits with mobilized social media fans until TV as we know it goes away entirely -- which judging by this battle, may be happening really soon.

How to tell someone to retweet (without using up your 140 characters)

bissellator — Thu, 7 Jan 2010 13:34:48 -0800

Twitter is like a giant gossip engine, and gossip can be a good thing when you want everyone to learn about something really juicy. The problem is explaining in 140 characters why someone should pass along a message.

Say I post a comment like this:

I nominate @adbroad for a Shorty Award in #advertising because she knows how to blend old and new school media

Because it's a contest, the posting has to be formatted a certain way, and even though there is room to add "Please Retweet" to the end of the posting, you don't really have enough room to explain WHY you want them to retweet.

So, we came up with a clever way to ask people to tweet something without having to give them all the text. First, you create a link to twitter that automatically fills in someone's status. You construct a status link like this:

twitter.com/?status=Words+separated+by+plus+signs

The trick is you have to escape URL, which means converting some characters to wacky %XX codes. If you're web savvy you'll know what I'm talking about (like changing the # to a %23), if you're not... maybe I'll get one of the guys to write a script to do this automatically...

So once you you escape your status update it reads like this:

http://twitter.com/?status=I+nominate+@adbroad+for+a+Shorty+Award+in+
%23advertising+because+she+knows+how+to+blend+old+and+new+school+media

Now you shorten the URL with a tinyurl generator (see my blog about tinyurls). So that big long link becomes

http://t.conquent.com/p700

Which means you can now write a more detailed message like:

Help @Adbroad win the Shorty Award in #advertising by posting your vote for her on Twitter: http://t.conquent.com/p700

That still leaves room for a RT @somehandle AND your whole, unedited message can still get posted.

I know, it's a little convoluted, and the reasons for embedding the longer message in a status link vary, but it seemed like a cool idea to me. If it catches on, I want a gold star.

You can't buy social media

bissellator — Wed, 6 Jan 2010 10:36:13 -0800

While watching stats for the LOST project, I noticed a huge spike in registrations. As we did our research, it seems to have been from a twitter posting by @Agent_M, the Editor of Marvel.com. He has around 1.4 million followers, so you have to figure a lot of people see his postings even when you take into account the transitory nature of Twitter postings.

In a moment of blatant self-promotion, I posted "Looks like @Agent_M tweeted the LOST Sweepstakes and created a traffic surge to the microsite. I love it when Social Media works." CarriBugbee responded "That's surprising to hear from a social media curmudgeon" which got me into a little online discussion with her about the fact that I'm NOT a Social Media curmudgeon, I'm a sales curmudgeon.

I think what's happening with communication tools is amazing, but it's not a product, and it's not something you can create out of nothing. Words like "authenticity" are tossed about by inauthentic speakers (see my blog about wayward words with baggage). Social Media "experts" talk about being able to manipulate people's passions to commercial ends -- and that may be true some of the time, but you have to start and end with something that people love.

The reason Agent_M has 1.4 million followers is because he's got an inside line on comic books and movies -- it's a broad audience, and it's something he does every day, not just a part time promotional gig. When he mentioned LOST, there was a core group of people who were right in the sweet spot for our promotion. It was relevant, but more importantly, it was spontaneous and something that the guy felt was relevant. We didn't buy his time, he just passed along a message he thought people would like.

And, even aside from the spike from this one, popular, twitterer, it's the fact that the fans of LOST were excited to have a chance to win something relevant to the show they love.

Bottom line -- organic traffic is honest traffic, and honest traffic can't be bought.

A book unopened is but a block of paper

bissellator — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:21:27 -0800

I'm a big believer in open communication and information. You can't make informed decisions, learn new things and grow if you don't have easy access to facts, and it's amazing to me how often we don't have access to facts. Political censorship actively clouds what we can learn -- and I don't just mean government politics; corporate, scholarly, and individual politics shape a lot of what we know.

But information that disappears into bowels of academia also puts a huge hole in what's been known and can be learned. The classic example is the Roman Library of Alexandria in Egypt. We know some of what was in that library before it burned, things like the circumference of the Earth and its location in the solar system. Things that hundreds of years later the Church was burning people for heresy... knowledge that we think of as part of the modern world but was very much a part of the ancient world.

But we don't know what was lost. There were too few copies of the books that were stored in Alexandria. There were no backups, no copies stored at some other library -- that was it. And when it burned, that was that, it was gone.

Granted, much of the written word of the 20th century is crap, and a lot more of the 21st century's writings are turning out the same way. But this is where search comes in. At the moment the king of search is Google, but there are lots of ways to find what you want to learn about, if it's digitized.

The problem is that most of our knowledge isn't searchable -- it's on paper in books. Books are a great archival resource, but as the old Chinese proverb goes, "A book unopened is but a block of paper." A book that's been scanned, indexed and placed online, on the other hand, is a searchable resource, which means even if you know nothing of some obscure work, you may find it and get a Eureka moment without having to fly to Stanford University and toil in the stacks.

So, Google's initiative to scan millions of books and put them online is core to my philosophy that knowledge should be easily available. I was troubled by the news that they'll end up holding de facto copyright on some books because, in my opinion, copyright ties up knowledge. But, on watching the PBS News Hour segment (embedded below), it seems that the only books in question are books that actually are copyrighted but where the copyright holder is difficult to locate.

In one sense, this props up what I feel is the biggest impediment to the free distribution of knowledge -- extended copyright laws. In another sense, this brings millions of books into the light of day (or the glow of monitors) that may otherwise be sitting on a stack in one or two libraries.

Think of it like that rare plant in the jungle that unlocks the cure for cancer. I don't honestly think there is a single book out there with all the answers, but if what we're doing is making knowledge available, albeit within the framework of existing copyright restrictions, then maybe that cure for cancer is one step closer.

Building the LOST: The Final Season Sweepstakes

bissellator — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:36:03 -0800

We were contracted to build a sweepstakes site for Disney/ABC for the final season of the TV show LOST (or as they put it LOST: The Final Season, which sounds more ominous). It was a pretty straightforward database project, with two major wrinkles.

First off, they needed it in a week. I was thinking two weeks when we agreed to do it, but when you consider we had Christmas right in the middle of the project, we pretty much had to get it done in a week.

Purnima did a great job of creating custom graphics for the site based on the imagery we were provided, and Eric got the programming and server set up done in short order. Even the HTML came together, which is remarkable when you consider how short-handed we are in that department at the moment.

But the real thing that had me worried about this project is that this is LOST; this is a show with a fan base that put fanatical back in the word "fan". There are over a million fans on the LOST Facebook page which could pummel a web application. Then there's the fact ABC will be advertising the sweepstakes on TV, which can get thousands of people to hit the site at the same moment.

Fortunately Conquent has faced this before and we were able to get a site set up on Rackspace's cloud -- we looked at Amazon and Google (even considered Microsoft's), but what made Rackspace work for me was that I had a couple business cards from meeting tech and sales guys in Vegas at the CLIO awards. Yep, I made the business decision from hanging out in the cabanas by the pool at the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas.

It's not that they had plied me with booze and wifi, it's that I was able to pick up the phone and talk to someone who was able to help my team set up the right solution. No matter how hard you try, you just can't automate real customer service. Even with over a decade of doing exactly these kinds of projects, cloud computing is new, and I honestly didn't know enough about how the technology works to understand how the pricing works or how we might get in trouble with one package versus another.

We're in Day 2 of the sweepstakes as I write this, and it's running so smoothly it's almost disturbing. I mean, I don't want to break the site, but I'd like to see the thing strain a little. But so far, it's just another ho-hum miracle.

Here's a link to the sweepstakes site, which probably will be pulled down a week before the February 2nd season premiere:

http://abc.go.com/shows/lost/final-season-sweepstakes

Holiday SPAM (or the lack thereof)

bissellator — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 11:54:52 -0800

Our social patterns are echoed in the Internet in strange ways. For example, my joke website gets a lot more traffic on Fridays than other days (I guess there's lot more goofing off Friday afternoon).

But a particularly interesting echo is that there's less SPAM on holiday weekends than normal. The reason? People are more likely to shut down their computers for a long weekend than for a normal weekend.

You see, most SPAM comes from individual personal computers that have a virus. Not a crippling virus, just one that quietly sends out emails about drug offers, fake luxury products, and letters from Nigerian princes. They go out at a steady pace, not too much to raise an alarm or slow your machine down too much, but still hundreds every hour.

The fact that we see a noticeable drop in SPAM over Christmas shows just how many computers are working for someone other than their owners. These computers aren't just sending SPAM -- they also infect other computers, steal personal information from servers, and gang together to take down websites in extortion rackets.

This is where I'm supposed to put the obligatory virus software pitch, but I have this sneaking suspicion that even if everyone installed all their updates and ran all the virus/spyware programs we'd still have this stuff slipping through. Most of this stuff comes from smart, underemployed Russians and Chinese who have far more time to figure out how to hijack your computer than you have time to block them.

No matter what, it's nice to have a holiday from Spam...

Archiving Twitter

bissellator — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:15:38 -0800

Twitter is aptly named what with people just twittering about nothing. Although sometimes there's a conversation you want to keep track of. The problem is that with so much idle chatter on Twitter, you can't find that conversation or event after a couple weeks.

The reason is the simple fact that Twitter can only store so much data for so long, and even if they do keep the data, it gets so voluminous that real-time searches are next to impossible.

Conquent has created a tool to help out with this -- we can grab and store, ahem, "tweets" for future posterity. Most recently we did this for @FrankAdman's #Twittertini Christmas party, set in the mid 1960s in San Francisco. You can see the archive by visiting tweet.conquent.com/Twittertini

We've used the same concept to create the dynamic soccer ball at the United Nations Foundation's Malaria awareness website at www.unitedagainstmalria.org:

With this, we also pull Facebook at little videos from 12seconds.tv.

At the end of the day, I feel that if you want to keep track of your words, or what people are saying about you, you gotta grab 'em and hold them tight. Get them someplace where you know you can keep them safe so that if Twitter goes away, you can still reference that strange little idea that came from the stream of consciousness we call the Internet.

Too Many Toolbars

bissellator — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:01:08 -0800

As a web development company we're always dealing with the fact that no one's machine is exactly the same. Not just the fact that displays go from 640x480 through 1600xwhatever, but then people install toolbars that take up space.

Here's an extreme example:

I like to believe that this doesn't really happen, but I gotta say, I've had plenty of clients tell me "Hey! I can't see the content without scrolling" and it turns out they're running low-res with a BUNCH of toolbars...

Random Censorship with Google Adwords

bissellator — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:07:44 -0800

Back in the dawn of time (1998) I created a little website called Jokeindex.com. It started because it was fashionable at the time to forward jokes to everyone in your address book -- I created a folder in Outlook called "Humor" and dragged them in there as I got them.

One day I looked and noticed I had a couple thousand jokes in that email folder. Yeah, a couple thousand... I wanted to learn about database programming on the web, so I dumped the folder to a file, created a little database to categorize and rate them, and, here it is, almost 12 years later and it's still up and running.

I still use the site for the same purpose -- a place to learn about new technologies. I rarely censor anything, just rate it X if I think it's really offensive, although I do have a tendency to exclude things that I just don't think count as jokes (racial jokes usually fall into this category).

Because of this, I get something like 750 unique visitors and 4,000 page views a day mainly from search engine traffic. Pretty much type in anything into Google and Jokeindex.com is going to be somewhere in the results -- maybe on page 50, but somewhere. And a lot of joke searches (like haunaka jokes) come up on the top of the list.

I figured I should try out Google's Adsense -- that's the "Ads by Google" thing you see all over the web. Not being in it for the money, I made a subtle link at the bottom of the page and get a whopping 25 cents or so a day off the thing.

But it's been interesting seeing how the Google words work -- the JavaScript looks at the content on the page and then decides what adwords to show. So, if I've got a joke about Christmas, you get things like "Work Christmas Party" or "Christmas Cookie."

Now, about the censorship -- and bear in mind, I'm not censoring this blog, so be prepared for naughty words.

From time to time I look at a joke and there's no Google ad. At first I thought I had done something wrong, but then I realized it was usually on jokes with the word "fucking." What's odd is that it's not consistent; sometimes "fuck" is okay, sometimes it needs "fuck" AND "fucking" to not get an ad. Certainly the joke about the little boy on the nude beach (with the phrase "little nude boy") got caught as something Google didn't want to be associated with (it's dirty, but not pedophilia).

Some dirty jokes seem to be just fine, and the very disturbing picture of Bin Laden and Bush having sex just gets links for "Funny Pics" and "Freelance Editor," which makes me wonder what Google's programmers think a Freelance Editor does with their time...

I don't know what it all means, other than Google's policy of non-censorship doesn't apply to their ads, which is probably fine. I don't necessarily want my clients' ads showing up on a porn site, but I wish I really understood the cut-off for what's too dirty and what's just dirty enough.

Come to think of it, I'd like to learn that rule for conversation, too, but so far my own censorship isn't working out to well...

Accessibility and Shopping Online

bissellator — Tue, 1 Dec 2009 10:17:48 -0800

Every Christmas you hear about how much more people are buying online -- it's not just because it's easier than fighting the malls and the traffic only to find you couldn't get what you wanted. As our population ages it's becoming the ONLY option for shopping -- as the Boomers get older, there are more people with vision problems, mobility issues, and a whole slew of disabilities that make it nearly impossible for these folks to shop on their own, and even worse during the Christmas rush.

The problem is that most of the web isn't accessible for people with disabilities. A lot of our clients want shiny objects, with more and more JavaScript and Flash and cool new things that don't work at all for people with screen readers.

About a year ago, I was approached by Michael Dorety who has been working for a long time addressing these issues. He's no stranger to complicated technical projects having built hardware platforms for the deaf, worked with Microsoft and their vendors to create accessibility tools that actually work, and a lot of other projects that boggle the mind.

But, creating an easy way to let shoppers find products in an accessible environment turned out to be a lot tougher than he had thought. For starters, there's the whole set of 508 Accessibility regulations -- you know it's going to be complicated pretty much any time you reference a body of Federal law, and when mix in a bunch of technology... well let's just say it isn't easy making things easy.

Then, add the fact that just because you're 508 compliant doesn't mean you're actually "screen reader friendly" -- you can follow all the rules and still have a confusing site that's just plain frustrating for someone who can't see all the little clues you think are so obvious.

It's been a bumpy road, but we all came together and got the site up and running at EmpowerEveryone.com. The site lets visitors search for products in a quick, easy to use format -- it's not perfect as the retailers still take your money, and their sites aren't necessarily up to snuff, but we can lead folks to the products they're looking for and ease the frustration.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens over the next few months as the site starts to get some attention. We've been very careful to include a lot of beta testers with real-world tools, but this is a big, tricky world out there with different people -- so, if you get a chance, check out EmpowerEveryone.com and let me know what you think.

Twisted path to customer service

bissellator — Sun, 8 Nov 2009 09:30:41 -0800

I was looking at the logs for my Blog on Conquent yesterday and I found that my posting We've got an app for that, it's called the web was getting traffic from Microsoft's search engine (called Bing this week). I checked it out, and it turns out it's the third listing when you search on the phrase "Yeah, we've got an app for that" or the fourth when you type in "We've got an app for that."

It's particularly amusing when you consider A) I really hate Apple�s campaign, and B) I�m not a big believer in SEO, yet here I am getting traffic to my blog under their catchy advertising phrase.

Being a good self-promoter, I quickly posted it to my various status updates on the social media sites. I use a service called Ping.fm which lets me post it to a dozen sites all at once. Here's what I posted:

Fun with Search Engine Optimization. Conquent's #3 on Bing with "yeah, we've got an app for that" http://www.t.conquent.com/S700

The trouble is that different sites interpret text differently. For example Twitter takes @whatever and turns it into a link to twitter.com/whatever and rewrites hashtags to take you to search results for the tag (a hashtag is just a keyword with a # symbol in front of it, so if you want to watch what people are saying about tonight's episode of Mad Men, you would search on #madmen -- provided people are using that tag, that is).

About an hour after I posted it, I got a cryptic email from a business associate who said, "same to you!" and a bunch of Japanese characters. I was worried that something went horribly wrong and that my t.conquent.com url was taking him to the wrong place, but it turned out that LinkedIn is now using hashtags like Twitter does -- only #3 took him to some page with a Japanese discussion.

I found this amusing so I posted a comment to Twitter and ended up with a quick exchange with Taylor, a Conquent Alum who now works for LinkedIn:

bissell: Using one tool to update all Social Media gets trickier: LinkedIn now has a local version of hashtags in their status updates

episod @bissell pointing to one of the apps I'm product manager for even, Company Buzz. ;)

bissell: @episod FYI When I mentioned being #3 on bing, LinkedIn made it a link to some Japanese page. Twitter didn't bother making it clickable

episod @bissell I'll suggest we link on hashtags >1 ch

This dull exchange is one of the most fascinating aspects of how we communicate today. Let's go through that process again:

I review random traffic to my blog on Conquent

I learn a random fact about Conquent on Bing.com

I post a random comment to the universe

I get a cryptic response

I learn something new about LinkedIn

I randomly share that new knowledge on Twitter

LinkedIn ends up making a change based on this convoluted path

All in about an hour.

With our almost telepathic level of communication, we can learn important information about our own products or services, even when the topic has nothing to do with us. Forget customer comment cards, it's unrelated tidbits like these that gives us the real human experience -- if you're paying attention that is.

Flash: Shiny objects blinding your audience

bissellator — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 09:38:12 -0800

Okay, this is another one of those geeky rants based on years of ranting about this very topic and still not believing people don't agree with my vast understanding of how the world works.

Let me say for the record, I think Flash is a great plug-in. Lighter than Java applets, more secure than anything Microsoft tried to do, and so easy to install it ended up on over 95% of desktop computers. The development tools make it really easy to do cool animation and program logic, and I've seen some amazing stuff done using Flash.

But don't build your whole website around it.

The biggest problem I have with an entire site being built in Flash is that you can't bookmark pages, and in this age of link sharing through social media, that can be a site killer. ("Okay, go to www.bigassflashsite.com, click on the news link, look for the recent videos link, and scroll down to the one posted three months ago, then click..." as opposed to "go to http://tinyurl.com/xxxx.")

But this is an implementation issue, like so many problems I have with Flash driven websites. Flash sites are more likely to have that annoying intro, so annoying that it's become standard to put "Skip Intro" on the home page -- why, oh dear lord, why, would you make the FIRST thing someone sees something that you KNOW they are going to want to skip? Get me to the meat right off the bat, and tease me with your dancing robots after I'm hooked.

This goes for the long, complex transitions from one screen to another. If I have to watch a "Loading......" animation just to click on your Contact Us page, precious moments are slipping away where I might give up, get a phone call from your competitor, or decide I have to go to the bathroom.

The Web is an amazing tool for distributing information. Don't let the shiny objects blind your audience.

Twollow and other gold rush scripts

bissellator — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:44:22 -0800

[Appologies in advance -- this is just a poorly structured rant after spending time playing with code. One of the reasons I hate programming is that it just makes me cranky.]

I wanted to test a theory about autofollowing on Twitter, so I went to Google to find a script or a service that would follow people for my account automatically based on keywords and I was amazed at not only the fact most of the charged for the service, but how much they charged.

Twollow charges $15 a month to follow people based on 5 keywords. Five. You want 10? It'll cost you 20 bucks a month.

I find this shocking because the Twitter API is free and I wrote an auto follow script of my own in about an hour. Granted, I bill my time at well over 20 bucks a month, but it wouldn't take long for me to get ten customers to pay me 20 bucks each to cover my time.

I call it a gold rush because it's still new and clients don't know that there are easy ways to incorporate this kind of stuff into their own web tools -- I'm not saying that dropping 40 bucks for a couple months isn't worth it; it's certainly cheaper than home rolling your own script, but this is the kind of stuff that the geeks are usually giving away for free, which maybe I'll do...

But at the end of the day, it always bugs me when I see short sighted business models (Twollow has an annual plan, but who's to say Twitter won't change their API in the next 12 months?) taking advantage of businesses who aren't planning ahead, have no strategy and are just rushing into the hills hoping to strike some gold.

GPS in a Laptop computer

bissellator — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 08:26:25 -0800

I found myself on a random blog on notebooks.com which was questioning if there is an actual use that justifies GPS in notebooks. There seems to be an idea that GPS is only used in those consoles in your dashboard and the only time you would want to know where you are is if you're in a car.

I use Google Maps on my Windows Mobile phone all the time to find businesses nearby. That "nearby" bit is important because when I'm traveling I often have no idea where I am (the cab driver knows where the hotel is, I don't have to).

I usually work around the lack of GPS in my laptop by typing in the name of the hotel or the office that I'm at, and Google finds it. But there are the times I don't have enough info to really figure out where I am, right now, on Google, and asking someone "Where am I?" doesn't exactly give that executive air of confidence I like to exude at business meetings.

Not only that, but if you read my blog Socializing is more than Social Media you'll know that I believe real-world connections are important, and social media is still too random -- if you're in the coffee shop and want to connect with your, ahem, Tweeple, a GPS tool in your laptop can make it easier to find them and announce your location.

So, having GPS on my laptop would give me a lot more geographically relevant info with a better interface than my phone -- and damn straight that's an actual use that justifies GPS in a notebook.

Thinking outside the box... There was a box?

bissellator — Thu, 8 Oct 2009 18:49:53 -0800

Every now and then I hear the phrase "think outside the box." You'd think it would be worn out and people wouldn't be using the tired cliche, but there it is, just as the box is there. I remember hearing a voice in the back of my head asking, "There was a box?"

Looking over my shoulder at all the companies that deliver easy to understand products or services, I saw a galaxy of boxes. I had to ask myself, "What is are these boxes, and why do we need them?" After all, my job isn't just outside the box, but, to be honest, it's all about building new boxes.

Boxes keep everything from scattering on the floor, whether stuff in your basement, the thoughts in your head or the structure of your company -- and it can be rewarding exploring the compartments of a box, finding relevant ideas or brilliant products. In the structure and order of having things organized, there is the opportunity to do much more than in the chaos of things jumbled and lost.

Boxes are good, but they're only good if you can get things out of them. A box taped shut, on the bottom of a shelf, hidden behind other boxes may be safe, but there's no use for that box until it is opened and the contents are enjoyed and shared.

To me, the phrase, "Think outside the box" is redundant. "Thinking" requires you to be outside the structure, otherwise it's simply being. But, simply being is just as valuable -- once you've thought outside the box, you need to put those thoughts in order if you ever want to find them again.

Twitter was designed for Text Messaging

bissellator — Wed, 7 Oct 2009 15:25:51 -0800

I find it ironic that people forget that Twitter was originally designed as a way to create groups for text messaging. After all, where did you think that 140 character limit came from? SMS has a 160 limit, and they reserved 20 characters for Twitter to add instructions or labels to the message.

So, rather than texting a whole bunch of your friends individually, you send a text message, then twitter relays it to their phones, and they can decide whether or not to get those text messages.

You send your updates to Twitter by texting to 40404 (in the US). The updates show up online just like a posting from any other Twitter client. This is handy if you have an old phone without a Twitter client or you just don't want to run, log in, and deal with a Twitter client or web on your phone.

The feature is still there, and you can choose to turn it on with a few simple steps:

1) Log into Twitter on the web

2) Click on Settings (just like if you were going to change your profile settings)

3) Click on Devices, add your phone number.

4) Got to notices and you can turn on DMs to your phone.

5) To get updates from individuals texted to you, go to their profile and click that little mobile icon. (This would get really annoying if you turned on updates for everyone you follow if you follow thousands of people).

You'll be given instructions for how to verify your phone number before you start receiving texts from Twitter, but it's pretty simple.

Of course, there are other text message services like Twitpic or Facebook Mobile, both of which I've been known to use, but not many of them actually text YOU when something happens on your account, and that's one way Twitter is different.

It's not the corporations, damnit

bissellator — Mon, 5 Oct 2009 08:30:46 -0800

@karlong mentioned on Twitter last night: "social media is probably the key to changing unsustainable corporate practices, corporations should work for us :)" which @kram followed up with "If we could end corporate personhood... everything would change."

There seems to be an idea that floats around that corporations should have some sort of social responsibility built in. While I agree with the idea that we should all have social responsibility, whether as individuals or working together in a corporation, there's a not so subtle problem that I see with this: corporations aren't people, they are a tax entity used to control assets.

Sure, corporations have rights and responsibilities, and they provide a layer of protection for the people who are running (and profiting) from the corporation. But corporations do what they do because of the decisions of people including management, investors, employees and customers.

Investors, employees and customers are three very different groups of people with different needs. Metaphors for managing these needs slide quickly to herding cats and designing by committee.

Then there are laws in place to represent the interests of these three groups -- securities and exchange laws for investors, labor laws for employees and consumer protection laws for the customers. This is a complex minefield that gets worse the bigger your company gets.

I'm not suggesting that criminals like Ken Lay or executive bonuses in the banking industry are okay -- these guys are individuals taking advantage of a very complex system of safeguards for personal profit. But so are union guys who take advantage of the system, or customers who sue for millions because they misused a product and got a bruise.

This gets down to individual accountability -- if we live in a culture of "I'd better take advantage of the other guy before he screws me" then it doesn't matter if we're talking about corporate thievery or personal integrity because at the end of the day, it's the same thing.

Entrepreneur or Dreamer?

bissellator — Sun, 4 Oct 2009 10:52:32 -0800

Over the years, Conquent has worked with a lot of entrepreneurs. It's a good thing we also have worked with boring, established companies, or Conquent would never have made it ten years, or ten months for that matter.

I get pulled into these things because I have that ability to translate business ideas into things you can actually hire someone to do. It's a rare skill to actually talk about business in terms of problem solving and a skill that most entrepreneurs lack.

They have a vision, but a vision is often hard to separate from a dream, and if you've ever had someone try to describe their dream over breakfast, you know there isn't a lot of logic to hang onto. ("Christine Brinkley, David Brinkley, I don't know, I just know there was a Brinkley..." I gotta know which one as I have two very different ideas of what I'd do with Christine vs. David...)

I would like to believe that people start businesses for solid reasons -- they want to bring something into the world that no one else can do, that they have some unique talent or idea that will really make a splash, and hopefully some money.

But most people just hate their jobs. What they don't understand is that 99% of the time, people who start their own businesses are simply making a job for themselves, and usually the same job they just came from. Only now, they have to not only do the job they they hated (cook, draft, sell widgets, whatever) but they also have to become an accountant, learn law, make sure they toilets are clean, maintain supplies, collect payments, and corral people who hate their jobs.

And so the dream of being the master of your own domain crashes and burns. Part of it is being alone (which is part of the dream), and part of it is not being able to let go of the fuzzy parts of the dream, or understanding when your vision is lacking.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't chase your dreams, but you shouldn't do it alone. You need partners who think differently than you to clear out the fuzzy parts. Most importantly, and probably most rarely, you need to respect those differences just as they need to respect your way of thinking.

One of my favorite phrases is "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts" but this is only true if you get the right partners. I've been involved in far too many projects where the whole is substantially less than the sum of the parts; the partners aren't letting each other do their jobs, the process is broken and dragging everyone down.

We're working on a business model to help address a lot of these problems -- giving people the ability to do what they're good at but the security of a broader organization. The model will help, but at the end of the day, it's the relationships we're building as we're taking our own fuzzy vision and turning it into something understandable that can be delivered.

Adweek Social Media Twitter for Brands Presentation

bissellator — Sat, 3 Oct 2009 14:48:38 -0800

Helen Ross and I spoke together at the Adweek Social Media Strategies Conference in San Francisco a couple weeks back. Here's a copy of the slide deck that we presented, although I think our conversational style of presenting made it a bit more interesting than the deck alone -- if you'd like to hear our presenation and watch the back of some guy's head, you can find a copy by clicking here.

Twitter for Brands

Socializing is more than Social Media

bissellator — Fri, 2 Oct 2009 09:34:03 -0800

After work last night I went down to Mark's gallery showing in the Pearl. I wouldn't have been aware of it if he hadn't sent me a direct message on Twitter telling me about it, and I probably would have been less likely to go execept for the fact that we've met at a number of Beer and Blog events.

I also wandered over to Eve's pastel exhibit a few blocks away. Although Eve and Michael are good friends whom we see frequently, I knew about the event because of being on her email list. Again, I get lots of these kinds of invites, but when your friends invite you to their art opening, you go.

After hooking up with some friends for drinks, we ended up at Whiffies. Whiffies is in a food cart corral in SE Portland; they fry small pies while you wait -- amazingly good street food at part of what makes Portland great. And a place I would never have darkened had I not met the owner, followed him on Twitter, and was subtly reminded to visit as I saw his postings slide by my screen along with others talking about how much they love Whiffies.

Great thing about that food corral is that I always seem to run into people I know online, but don't see very often in person. Heck, last night I ran into a woman who was incredulous that I was even on Twitter, and it turned out we were already following each other. Now we know.

Which brings me to the title of this posting -- social media, or social promotion, works a hell of a lot better if you actually have some kind of social connection with your online connections. It doesn't have to be close friends like Eve and Michael, but it helps if you meet your potential fans or promoters like Mark.

Sure, there are other ways to build those connections (hey, it's one of the reasons I blog), but I think the piece marketers are missing is that if you really want social promotion to work, you can't just exepect mindless compliance with your message -- you have to add a bit of humanity and a little socializing into the mix.

Generational Marketing is a Myth (or Who's your Daddy?)

bissellator — Thu, 1 Oct 2009 12:08:50 -0800

In that Social Media Video I blogged about yesterday, there was a stat that John pointed out to me: "By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers."

John responded with:

The sociological studies put the baby boomers as 1945 � 1963-65 (depending on researcher), gen x as mid �60�s to mid 70�s or �80�s (depending on researcher) and generation y later.

Here�s the rub: baby boomers are the kids of WWII people. Gen X are boomer�s babies. And gen Y are also boomer�s babies or others that came along later and the sociologists don�t know what to do with. This is not reasonable social science and I suppose I take particular issue because there is no place for anyone who didn�t fight in WWI or WWII, and there is no place for anyone who is not a baby or the grandchild of the WWII people.

I think this whole thing of targeting a generation based on who you parents are probably made sense when women were done having babies at 25, but even then, I don't think it mattered, because men were still making babies at 50. Maybe generations mattered more when wealth was based more on succession (even if we're the same age, if I'm your Uncle, I inherit when your Dad inherits, but you gotta wait until your dad dies). Who's your daddy doesn't matter in an egalitarian society.

Age-based marketing, however, does matter. My youngest sister and my niece are about the same age, and they hang out together. The share culture not based on their parents, but on the media they have consumed and the technologies that have learned when they were young (as opposed to my history of the computer).

I would market to both of them exactly the same way, and it doesn't matter than one of them is the daughter of a depression kid and the other is the grand daughter of the depression kid (Gen Z?).

So, to sum up my rather vague point with a really esoteric statement: it's not generational marketing, its temporal culture -- not where you're from, but WHEN you're from.

Social Media is Just the Way We Use the Internet

bissellator — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:41:38 -0800

I'm an expert on Internet technology and culture. I've been told I'm an expert on Social Media, but I keep getting back to the question, what the hell is Social Media?

There are some obvious things that go in this box, Twitter, facebook, mySpace, and a tools like digg. But way too many things are being thrown into the box with websites that are driven by users interacting with each other.

Part of it is hype. If you have a few minutes to feel like something really exciting is happening, watch this video that pretty much makes any successful website part of "Social Media."

The numbers these people bandy about are amazing, but why not talk about how many billions of people make phone calls, or write letters, or attend community meetings? When you start talking about the millions of people doing things online as if the Internet created communication, you miss the entire point.

It's not Social Media, it's people being social using the most ubiquitous medium -- the Internet. The Internet is an amazing communication tool. It combines audio, visual, text and a way of referencing information that's never existed before. But, this idea that everything you never did online before 2008 is somehow "Social Media" completely misinterprets what the revolution is.

Reading a book on your Kindle is NOT social media -- telling a friend about a book on Facebook is social media. Watching a video online is NOT social media -- I don't care if you found the link to the latest episode of The Daily Show from a friend, the site that shows the program is a traditional content publisher.

All of this is just accelerated communication and faster access to information. The fact that people are involved in creating that information and communicating with each other means the Internet is going to be filled with that kind of activity.

But let's be clear -- Twitter and Facebook are just how we use the Internet today. The revolution is far from over.

Twitter Followers Don't Matter (ask the porn sites)

bissellator — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:41:18 -0800

Twitter is a popularity contest, but it doesn't really matter if you're popular -- you can still go to the party. And partying there is the brand of twitters I like to call Twitter Whores.

Some of them really are whores -- porn sites trying to get you to dig into your trousers and open your wallet to see a little boobage (and more, obviously). Some are just people who want lots of followers to try to sell those followers other products and services. And while you would never talk to these people if they tried to cold call you, they have been successful getting followers simply by following, because everyone wants to be more popular on Twitter.

These aren't your friends or your colleagues, and as we get better filters, they aren't being as successful in getting followers. I'll let them follow me (unless I really hate their avatar image) but I'm not going to follow them back.

But they are finally figuring out that they don't need you to follow them to reach you on Twitter -- instead, they just randomly mention you. I'll always look for mentions of my name, so I'll see their posting. And, they can be vague enough to get you to click through to their websites with a "@bissell: did you see this? http://somelink/xyz"

It's completely automated (just scan for Twitter handles and post your tweet), easy to scale (you can set up new accounts faster than Twitter can shut you down) and you don't need anyone to follow you. And with shortened URLs, it's hard to know where you're going until you land -- nearly guaranteed traffic generation.

Regardless of whether anyone buys the Viagra or porn membership on the other end of these links isn't really even the point. It's the theme I keep getting back to -- as our social lives change and use more tools to broaden who we consider friends, our filters don't keep up, and there will always be clever people out there figuring out ways to get past your defenses and into your pants.

The Internet is Gooder than Books

bissellator — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:34:12 -0800

I've been taking some crap lately because I seem to have stopped reading books, and more directly that I'm not a reader of novels. This isn't to say that I don't read -- I actually read a lot, but I tend to read articles and and non-fiction.

I get a lot of my information from the web. This shouldn't be terribly surprising when you consider I spend most of my working hours online, although one might find it surprising I spend so many of my non-working hours online. But I think there is a misconception that a novel has implied value because someone wrote a whole book and got it printed.

The big flaw is in that fact that publishers aren't in it for the greater good, but the lowest common denominator. A great novel comes rarely, but a New York Times Best Seller comes along weekly. It is true that there is a level of filtering and editing that gives the publishing business a better product the way a good restaurant produces a better product than grandma's home cooking, but the emphasis is on the word product, not on good.

There is also the belief that if you can sit still and read an entire novel you have bettered your synapses in your brain -- simply by being forced to keep a story straight in your head and visualize the characters and settings, you exercise creative parts of your brain.

My first argument against synaptic calisthenics can be summed up in two words: Harlequin Romances. I would argue that a lot of the pap on the NYT Best Sellers list isn't much more complex than a good bodice ripper. Maybe written at an 8th grade level rather than a 5th but probably at a 5th rather than a 3rd.

My second argument is that I spend a great deal of time exercising my brain, and the Internet is a big part of that. Not just as part of my job translating complex business objectives into technical deliverables (which, as boring as it sounds, take a bit of mental agility), but I would argue that the era of what we're calling social media has a huge give and take.

Obviously most of what goes by in a twitter stream or on a Facebook page is garbage -- but that's true of all human creation. The weekly best sellers are filled with gems but there are thousands of books that didn't make the list because they are mind-numbing crap. Our blogs, Facebook updates and, ahem, "tweets" are all hit or miss because we haven't built really good filters yet like a Twitter reviewer for the Times.

But these unfiltered social media streams are forcing a whole generation to become more articulate using the written word, sometimes in long form emails and blogs, sometimes in the limitations of text messaging, or what I like to call the Sonnet of the Internet.

And about that written word thing, let me jump to the defense of video. Granted, reading versus watching leaves you with better understanding and retention, but we've confused the mechanism of that retention. The written words allows you to back up and re-read a sentence, or stop for a moment and look up a word.

I'll argue that most people don't actually look up words they don't understand, and most people I know who argue strongly for reading novels, seem to skim rather than really read the words in front of them -- it's just too much volume, and honestly, not important enough for them to really invest themselves into the literary nuances, but rather they're getting the gist of the story.

Which is to say that watching a news snippet posted by a friend on Facebook might actually give you more depth than reading the paper. You can pause, you can look up things you don't understand, and you have access to all that reference right there on your computer. No longer do you need a smoking jacket and a dark wood paneled library in your house to be the Professor who can find the answer.

With new media come the arguments that we are becoming more attention deficit; I argue we are becoming more discerning. If we aren't learning or getting what we want out of a medium, we move onto another until we find what we are looking for. When we find it, we hold hugely complex ideas and concepts in our heads.

Take TV in the 70s compared to today, for example. In the 70s the intellectual programs were things like Mary Tyler Moore or M*A*S*H -- quick, 30 minute sitcoms with a little message and no continuity. Now our trash is Battlestar Gallactica or Mad Men -- complex, far reaching story arcs with a message that is so ingrained in the story telling that you don't fell like there's a message at all, but it gives you pause for thought and interesting conversations (perhaps online) later.

The Internet is revolutionary, just as the printing press was. With revolution comes confusion and distrust -- but while we know this is the end of the an age, we can't know where this New Information Age is really taking us. But I can tell you, it's going to be far more different than novels versus movies versus video games.

It's going to change our synaptic connections beyond recognition, so hang on, it might get a little bumpy.

Sometimes you don't want your campaign to go viral

bissellator — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:30:12 -0800

I just don�t know when Microsoft is going to learn they aren't cool. I�ll defend Microsoft on a lot of territory -- their open platform (not as open as Linux, but WAY more open than Apple), the customization the OS allows with a wide range of hardware, and a lot of great software from the dull but very functional office suite through their gaming platform and even their mobile software (now that WM 6.1 is out).

But they have to stop trying to be cool.

In particularly, there's this lame video trying to get people to host a Windows 7 Launch Party. Sure, people have parties for all sorts of commercial things like season premiers and new books or debates and elections. But this? I think not

Of course, there's the problem with trying to get your message out there in a cool hip way when you're obviously not cool or hip. People will make fun of you, and it's usually going to be a LOT more amusing to watch. Like this censored version of the same video -- not only more entertaining, but a lot shorter too:

Maybe that idea to tap into social networks needed a little thought first...

Best Twitter Branding Campaign

bissellator — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:05:05 -0800

If you've ever looked at Conquent's branding, you'll notice we keep a pretty low profile. It kind of gets into my philosophy of "it's complicated enough, let's not make it any more complicated." But every now and then, something happens that's pretty cool and I feel like I really have to toot the horn.

As you may know, I post for Roger Sterling on Twitter; it's a side gig, but I've learned a lot, and the Conquent team has gotten to play with technologies we wouldn't otherwise be looking at. There are lots of people involved, some are agency folks, some are fans who do it purely for the love of the characters, and some, well, I have no idea who tweets for the dog or the toilet.

It's really an amazing facet of the Internet. AMC has nothing to do with what is one of the more remarkable outreach campaigns online. Not that everyone involved agrees that it's a campaign at all, but we've seen people get into the TV show because they got into the banter from the Twitter characters, there's been mainstream press about the twittering and now, the Mad Men Twitterers have done another first -- the fans got an award for a campaign.

The project made it to the final three, up against the green M&M and a travel site. The judges said they were overwhelmed with submissions, and I know there's a lot of great stuff going on out there in the world of branding on Twitter. To have this ad hoc group beat out major agencies for a seat with the Finalists is a great honor, and a great insight into how Social Media changes the rules, or maybe just doesn't know what the rules are.

Like flies to crap, Spammy Twitter Followers don't really go away

bissellator — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:56:30 -0800

Twitter is filling up with the kind of annoying people who you avoid at parties like the guy with the stack of business cards whose only small-talk is lifted from a textbook on how to "engage the prospect." When I asked on Twitter what we should call these people in Twitter parlance (Spamters? Spweeters? Twammers?), @Lelonopo responded simply, "We call them lame asses."

So after some sake and ouzo last night, I started blocking a few of the more obvious advertising followers. What was interesting was that as I started to complain on Twitter about the idiot Twitter-spammers, more started following me. Like swatting flies, or maybe blood in the water to sharks (but I hate to elevate these people to shark status), as I got rid of some, others would show up.

Of course, the reason for this is bots following key words, so if I start talking about idiots selling weight loss products, their programs will see "weight loss" and automatically follow me. What surprises me is how many people follow these annoying bots; but then, Twitter rewards getting followers by letting you follow even more people (you can only follow 2,000 people, unless you get 2,000 people to follow you, then you have to maintain some kind of ratio to keep following more).

So people let the bots follow them, and maybe even encourage them. It's a weird world where people encourage spammy advertisers to talk to them...

iPhone SMS Security Hole

bissellator — Mon, 3 Aug 2009 14:30:02 -0800

This isn't really an iPhone rant -- lots of smartphones have had security holes which could be exploited with the right kind of attack, and honestly this problem isn't limited to the iPhone (Google's Android platform is apparently affected, too).

Apple describes it like this:

A memory corruption issue exists in the decoding of SMS messages. Receiving a maliciously crafted SMS message may lead to an unexpected service interruption or arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue through improved error handling.

In plain English, a hacker could basically get root access (super user) by sending a series of text messages that would cause the phone to almost crash, and then the hacker can run programs while the phone is dazed.

Of course I find it ironic that the iPhone is vulnerable to a text messaging attack while it doesn't even support Multimedia Messaging.

If you want a little ranting, when I went to update the iPhone (which Markie never synchronizes) it didn't just install a quick security patch, but instead wanted to install around 150MB of updates for Quicktime, Safari, and some kind of My Mobile platform.

The Android update, by comparison, was small and painless. We actually had to go check that it had happened it was so quick and easy.

And, perhaps surprisingly, my Windows Mobile 6 phone wasn't affected at all.

How Flipmytweet works

bissellator — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:41:58 -0800

I'm like the cynic at a magic show when I see the little web tricks people get excited about. I generally look and say, "dear lord, we did that eons ago an you're getting excited now?"

But, I saw this tweet today with upside down text and could not figure out how it was done.

http://www.flipmytweet.com/ ʞuıl sıɥʇ ʍolloɟ sıɥʇ op oʇ ʍoɥ

It's not that I don't know of tricks to fiddle with text using JavaScript or other tools, but this is in the 140 character, plain text world of Twitter, not exactly a place you're going to embed stylesheets or code.

Turns out to be an interesting trick, and really esoteric. They wrote a script that first reverses your text (abc becomes cba) and the substitutes each character with something that LOOKS like the upside down version of the letter.

So, the "h" for example, is substituted with the latin mu (wait, that's not mu.. damn, can't remember my Greek alphabet...). Some are easier, like d becomes p and visa versa.

Of course, in this era of search engine optimization and text messaging, I wouldn't want to rely on a mix of Unicode and ascii text, but then again, I doubt whoever figured this out was really interested in conforming to standards.

Cell Phones as Microscopes

bissellator — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:41:46 -0800

I've been preaching for years that with the right bandwidth, you don't need a lot of computer to do massively complex work in the field. Cell phones are now becoming that ultra-slim portal to the vast computing power and data storage system we call the Internet, and I gotta say, this little doodad really steps the idea up a notch.

It's a microscope attached to a cell phone.

Granted, it's not designed for really detailed microscopic viewing, but it takes an image using fluorescence to highlight certain biological features, such as finding Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria in humans, or sickle-shaped red blood cells.

So, you're in rural Africa trying to figure out what's wrong with a patient. You take a sample, zap it with your cell phone, it goes back to the lab and you get a call shortly telling you they've got malaria. You don't have to ship the sample over impassible roads to a lab someplace far away, you could literally get results from the lab while you wait, and that lab could be on the other side of the planet.

I think the really cool part of this system is that you can do this from just about any phone, you don't need a fancy iPhone or Blackberry, just a phone with a camera that can transmit the image.

It's all about being connected.

Digg is not the Hijacker -- You Are

bissellator — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:11:14 -0800

Digg is a service that lets you easily rate articles as you wander around the 'net. It's a great idea, the sort of "digestive reporting" that we need for finding relevant content in a world full of irrelevant information flowing like the New York sewers during halftime on the Super Bowl.

Publishers can include a little snippet of code to let people with Digg accounts rate the article; you just click a "digg-it" button, and your vote is counted without you ever leaving the page.

Now when people come look at your page, they can see a rating (how many people liked the article) and it's added to Digg's database so people might find you through Digg's website under popular topics.

They also provide a service that lets you grab a "tiny url" that lets you share the article with a friend -- so rather than following http://conquent.com/bissellator/index.cqs?blogid=f8cfdef2eee3e4c33e71e68ea9aa6406 you can have a short URL like http://digg.com/d1xYTX

And here's where people are getting pissed.

There are lots of TinyUrl redirects out there (I referenced Conquent's own with the links above), and the expected behavior is that they'll just send you along to your link. Only now, Digg is stopping you on their site, showing you an advertisement, and offering other, similar content.

Honestly, I don't see any problem with this -- after all you're using Digg's service, server, and bandwidth, even if you are just bouncing off their server and moving along to the link. And this underscores what I had realized a long time ago: if you rely on a free, third party service to link to your website, you're handing those people the keys to your traffic. You're not building a bunch of links to YOUR site out there when you use tinyurl, or digg -- you're building links to them and trusting that they'll stay in business and keep sending your traffic along.

Digg provides a great, relevant service, and I think the folks getting upset about the "link hijacking" are just surprised -- remember Digg isn't hijacking a damn thing, you're hijacking THEIR bandwidth, and it's only reasonable to give a little something back to them and build a better, richer service.

Otherwise, install your own url redirect software. And if you don't know how, let me know and we'll get you hooked up.

Can you digg it?

Steve Ballmer -- the walking dead?

bissellator — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:31:09 -0800

I posted this image yesterday on Facebook and Twitpic posing the question, is it just me, or does Steve Ballmer look more and more like the Monster in Young Frankenstein?

Aside from the obvious separated at birth similarities, it got me thinking of the fact we might actually be seeing the walking dead -- not Ballmer himself, but Microsoft.

Microsoft is a stitched together carcass of bits and pieces of technology, and those bits and pieces are beginning to smell funny. They lost the browser war to Firefox, they lost the music player war to the iPod and iTunes, they're not doing so hot in the mobile market with the iPhone and Blackberry fighting for first, and the games market... well, I suppose the Xbox does okay, but it's no PS3 or Wii. (Should never named it "Ex" as in the ex-box...)

I think of the photo of the Monster with his finger on fire as an artistic metaphor for Ballmer discovering that Google has an operating system...

Twitter as an open mic poetry reading

bissellator — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:42:55 -0800

I took my friend Bruce down to Beerandblog. It's a great slice of Portland with creative geeks drinking high proof beer at the Green Dragon Brewpub. This week it was in the outdoor patio by the quanza hut (which causes a slowdown in the drinking as you can't just wander up to the bar and order -- taking it out, onto the sidewalk and into the garden violates some sort of OLCC rule).

It's an interesting mix of creative extroverts and not-so-creative extroverts with a number of folks who would really like to be extroverts but just haven't had enough beer yet. Tech jokes go over well, word play is normal communication, and the mismatched socks aren't by accident.

Tonight's main event was the #whattheshit readings of favorite tweets. Think open mic poetry reading with the found poems of the 140 character postings one finds on twitter. When asked if I would read favorite tweets in a theatrical, poetic style I said, "Sure!" not realizing that most of the dozen or so participants had been researching for weeks to find a perfect blend of tweets to recite.

I quickly got on my phone's web browser and started searching for crowd pleasing tidbits. I started with "Michael Jackson" thinking that being topical might be good, but, really, I have to think in retrospect, that was dumb... So I moved on to "fuck twitter" which got some interesting tweets, but I decided I didn't want EVERY thing I said to have a FUCK in the middle of it. I finally searched on "twitter sucks" which definitely gave me some tweets perfect for the cynical, beer quaffing, blogging crowd.

Here's what I came up with:

Looooooooooooooooool

@kladkins: twitter sucks twitter sucks twitter sucks twitter sucks!

@thomas_x: playing on twitter, checking out my sister's twitter page, wondering why scifi became syfy, I know why, but god it sucks

@amuldoon: Nevermind; Twitter sucks. I really don't get why people use this, haha. Facebook ftwwwwwwwwww.

@frankshyong: excellent twitter account activity. I like that you only follow me and shaq. ILL sucks pretty hard @Ian_Graves

@ryansentz: Life sucks and so does twitter

@mollydotcom: I will never understand / s/he who follows in twitter land / that which offends and makes one shout / haven't you heard? / OPT THE FUCK OUT.

The poem I placed at the end was golden. Who would have thought that 5-10 minutes on a cell phone would garner such a perfect #whattheshit tweet.

Automatic Social [un]Awareness

bissellator — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:02:10 -0800

Taking on a political issue in a business setting is usually a bad idea -- but I'll take a whack at it anyhow.

There is a Twitter App called "Support #IranElection" which lets you turn your twitter avatar green to show your support of the protesters in Iran. All you have to do is log into Twitter using their special link, and BAM, your avatar turns green.

I can't say I know a lot about what's going on in Iran -- I know there are two groups of people, one slightly less conservative than the other, but that both groups are really conservative. I heard the alternatives described as either North Korea (totalitarian with no Western access) or China (totalitarian with some Western access).

There are questions about the validity of the election, but it's hard to say if it was rigged or not. There are questions about how the protesters have been treated, but it's hard to say who's causing the disruptions.

There are a lot of questions, and not a lot of answers, but there is this App that lets you show support for the less totalitarian crowd with one click.

As I cruise around the Internet I'm seeing a lot of green pictures, but I have to wonder if the people supporting the Iran Election protests are doing so because they have a deep belief that the protesters are right and the government is wrong, or if it's a fashionable thing to do.

I think expressing your opinions and beliefs is a good idea (otherwise I wouldn't have posted this), but I think they should be YOUR opinions and beliefs. My fear about these kinds of quick "me-too" apps is that it dilutes the message and can derail a campaign, and ultimately distract people from really learning about an issue because they've already "joined the cause" in one click.

Of course, when we run campaigns at Conquent, we want to see the numbers swell, and remove as many obstacles between a person and their ability to show support. I think the trick in the long run is to find ways to engage those people beyond just a ribbon or a color -- engage, teach, and spread a message with a credible, educated following.

First splash for United Against Malaria

bissellator — Thu, 28 May 2009 08:11:22 -0800

Conquent is developing a website for Hill and Knowlton's client, the UN Foundation's United Against Malaria project. Not only is it always great to work with such high profile projects, but it's an amazingly important cause and I'm personally glad to be a part of it.

The campaign is centered around the 2010 World Cup in Africa next year. So, the placeholder page went live today for the match between Tunisia and Sudan this afternoon (2PM Eastern).

The whole thing underscores to me how the web makes the world a little smaller, yet shows us how big it is. I mean, as an American, I have to admit I didn't even know there was a team in Tunisia called "The Carthage Eagles"; and the fact that Sudan faces Benin June 7 forced me to go to Wikipedia and look up Benin (squeezed between Nigeria and Togo, Benin was known as Dahomey until 1975 -- not that I knew where or what Dahomey was...).

I'm looking forward to tracking the matches over the next year and, in the process, I expect I'll learn more about soccer, Africa, and of course, malaria on the continent.

(You can read the article in the Tunisia Online News about the match today by clicking here.)

New Media/Old Media and the CLIO Awards

bissellator — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:03:20 -0800

I'll be heading to the 2009 Clio Awards tomorrow. No, I'm not getting an award, other than the honor of having been invited and getting a full pass to all the events. The invite was for the work that Carri, Helen and I did on the Mad Men Twitter campaign and they'd like us to live, ahem, tweet¹

It's exciting, sure, but...

Look, I've been pushing this envelope for so long you could put a small country in it. I started online advertising in '95 when the only ad model was a 468x60 banner and the only option was to buy or sell on a cost per thousand impression model.

We invented ways to track clicks and then buy and sell clicks, then we had to invent ways to track purchases or form fill outs so we could buy and sell on actions. Then we shattered the banner ad and got into all sorts of stuff.

I had a Palm Pilot with a cell modem on it back in 97 and we started developing mobile apps for sales people who needed mobile sales and inventory tracking (there was an App for that a LONG time ago, Apple). And, don't get me started on Social Media widgets, which I was working on back in '98 when Social Media was called "viral".

The thing that has slowed me down over the years has been being too far ahead of the curve. When I was selling web development back in '95, I had to sell dial-up to get people online and THEN get them interested in a website. Fairly long sales cycle.

When I was pitching mobile apps in 2000, most people were still just getting the hang of text messaging. Heck, when I was selling computers in the late '80s there were bulletin boards, but no Internet...

Over the past couple years things have come together. Not only has the market matured, but Conquent has the portfolio and the experience to bridge a wide range of industries and the equally wide range of media you can push your message through (web, social platforms, mobile, and don't screw traditional in the process). Getting the multimedia world of broadband right across all these properties is a trick, but nothing new to the team.

What's exciting is taking these tested ideas (mobile, social media and just plain old fashioned web) and hooking them up in new ways to new campaigns. Our recent work with Hill and Knowlton has shown me that the traditional world is hungry for these tools. It's hard to find a group that can talk plain english about these complex topics, and that's where Conquent comes in. It's not buzzwords, it's not jumping on the latest band wagon, it's just plain old business and marketing sense using the tools to get the job done.

I'm really looking forward to talking with folks at the CLIOs to see what they're looking for next, and maybe show them a few things they haven't thought of...

Note 1: I really hate that term "tweet"; I mean "posting" is fine. But as we don't search, we "Google", the branding of activities continues to grow.

Interview at SXSW: Mad Men Twitter And Tracking

bissellator — Sat, 9 May 2009 14:35:15 -0800

This interview was taken right after the panel discussion at SXSW Interactive conference.

We've got an App for that -- it's called the Web

bissellator — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:03:11 -0800

We've got an App for that -- it's called the Web

There's an ad running for the iPhone which I will paraphrase:

Say you're a small business owner and you need to run a credit card. We've got an app for that. Now say you need to print a shipping label. We've got an app for that. Now say you want to make sure it got there. We've got an app for that, too.

Yeah. It's called the web.

Look, you can run your customer's credit card through any number of payment portals through a simple web page, through a LOT of browsers installed on a LOT of phones. You can pull up printable labels, but if you're on a phone you have to switch to a local wifi connection to print it and how often do you do that? Finally, FedEx has had lots of ways to track packages remotely since pagers. Yeah, I said "pagers" as in "the iPhone is as good as a crack dealer's pager."

I know I rant on Apple, but I think what I really rant about is the fact that they're taking credit for a whole lot of stuff that already exists. I can do all that they talk about in that ad on my Windows Mobile phone.

But, more importantly, I could do most of what they're talking about in 1997 on my Palm Pilot. It's not new, it's just packaged well.

Let's not even go into the absurdity of printing a shipping label from your phone. Instead, let's consider the exclusivity Apple is breeding with their campaign. Their advertising implies the ONLY mobile computing is on the iPhone. It's an us and them mentality that stifles true innovation and the sharing of information, and if you want to be honest about it, it's a campaign that fosters bigotry.

If you think the word "bigotry" is too strong, think about the "I'm a Mac, you're a pathetic idiot" campaign.

Am I overreacting? Maybe. But let's really think different for a moment. If your company is built on the concept that you're cooler than everyone else, why do you have to take petty shots at people who work for a living ("I'm a PC, I have poor fashion sense and work hard" "I'm a Mac; I'm a slacker who can't even dress himself")? Why do you pretend that you're the only one on the block who thought about accessing FedEx through a cell phone?

Apple is not the counter culture revolution. Apple IS the man. Just a Man who dresses casually, but also a man who hasn't got a creative bone in his body.

Understanding Google To Get Your Resume Noticed

bissellator — Thu, 2 Apr 2009 19:36:07 -0800

One of the key underlying technologies for �Web 2.0� (which is just a marketing buzz word; it�s the same web it�s always been) is �search� capabilities. This is the backbone of Google, Windows Live!, Yahoo, etc. To put it simply, it is a combination of character recognition (words and phrases) and indexing on a massive scale.

Understanding how search tools work is one of the keys to any online endeavors such as blogging, selling any sort of product/service, and�job hunting.

Think of the yellow pages and how they are indexed. By topic, then by entry alphabetically. To find what you are looking for, you have to *know* what it is classified under. The one that always annoyed me was that cab companies are listed under �taxi�. If I didn�t know to look under �taxi� I�d never get to the airport!

Now think of using Google. You are looking for something very specific, like a dry cleaner that is environmentally friendly in your area. You start your search a number of ways, like:

Dry cleaner Chicago green

You may get 254 hits across the metro area, and you live in Glen Ellyn. So you change your search to

Dry cleaner Glen Ellyn green

You *could* also do something like

Green dry cleaner 60137

The more creative you get with your searching, the more refined �or broad- your results will be. Most people think in pretty basic terms and get tons of results, then have to look through all them to find what they are looking for.
The way Google and other search engines identify the results of any search is based on the content on the page. The engine searches for keywords, indexes them, and returns them as results. The keywords are called �metadata tags�. (Often if you see a list of terms at the bottom of an article or blog posting, those are tags the author has identified for metadata search tools.)

So from a recruiting perspective, how do we �find� the right candidate? By keyword searching. Usually when we receive a job description, recruiters create a list of keywords that they will use to search for candidates. All major job boards and Applicant Tracking Systems use keyword searching. Here is the *most important* piece of information for the job seeker: these databases return results based on a stack-ranked system. That system ranks *by the number of times the word appears in the profile.* So the old �stick to one page� resume advice isn�t always your best bet.

Like every other profession, some recruiters are good at this aspect of their job, others aren�t. A seasoned recruiter knows how to vary their search based on related terms that may or may not be in the job description. But many don�t have the luxury of experimenting with variety, or don�t know the value of it. So it is very important to make sure your resume, if you are applying for a specific job, is tailored to the job�s keywords. If you are using a general resume on a job board such as Monster or CareerBuilder, keep in mind the keyword stack ranking when you are composing your resume.

The trouble with Wordpress and other templates

bissellator — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 10:52:39 -0800

We just completed a project which included the installation of Wordpress; while Conquent doesn't usually use Wordpress, the client has a volunteer team working on content and they all have familiarity with the system, which made Wordpress the right choice to get the content up and running.

The project helped me to articulate why Conquent, philosophically, doesn't embrace any single platform or tool to get projects done. The problem isn't necessarily from the programming or the tool itself but stems from the very fact that tools are designed to simplify problems.

To simplify the management of content you have to create rules. To create those rules, you have to make assumptions. Those assumptions will ultimately sacrifice flexibility.

That's fine when you have a straightforward need. But systems like Wordpress try to be "all things to all people." As soon as you start adding things, you start to conflict with the idea of simplifying the system.

Instead of a basic content system, you end up with plug-ins, special pages, and a bunch of add-ons that make sense in their own context, but create a mess for people who don't need or use those functions, and even a bigger mess when you start combining these unrelated tools.

At the same time, you're still limited by the constraints of the system. So, now you have an environment with its own set of rules getting in the way of making things look and work the way you want at the same time you're dealing with a complex framework.

Keeping this in mind at the beginning of a project is really important. Don't start with the rules of the content management system, instead start with the rules of your business strategy and marketing. Technology, by the very definition of the word, is to apply science to solving problems.

Too often we apply technology without really understanding the problem we're trying to solve. Then people spend all their effort solving problems that wouldn't have existed if they had just picked the right tool at the beginning of the project.

In this case, Wordpress was the right tool, and having a team that's able to "get under the hood" helped us make that decision and advise future clients when they have a problem seeking a solution.

Wayward Words with Baggage

bissellator — Wed, 4 Mar 2009 15:24:07 -0800

While trying to explain what Conquent does, I'm constantly running into words with baggage. These were good words once, but bad people got a hold of them and abused them, either by twisting the word into something it never was, or making the poor word work so hard it loses any meaning it had.

Topping the list is the word "Synergy." Honestly, it's the best word to describe how we put the right people and the right resources together to get a project done, but the word was used by sales people who would say it phonetically and never actually consider what it meant. This led the word into a life of shame and ridicule, to the point that if you try to introduce it into polite society, you'll be laughed at, and never invited back.

John hates the word "robust." "Robust" would have been a fine word, but it strayed from its roots in coffee and wine. "Robust management team" might mean that they've been roasted to get a full, rich flavor, but in the context of describing Conquent's approach to management, we want to say that the team has strength and vigor. "Robust" just doesn't mean anything anymore.

We can't use words like "innovative" or "solutions" (and certainly not "innovative solutions") because most people who use those words are neither innovative nor do they actually solve anything. It's not that the words are wrong, it's that we've been lied to too many times with these words and we've lost trust in them because of who they hang around with.

Tech people have started using the word "ecosystem" to describe the interrelation of hardware, software, data, people, and, well... the "ecosystem" of technology. It's probably exactly the right word, but I'm afraid that we're about to kill another good word.

We have to find other words or phrases rather than dealing with the baggage these abused words carry. In a sense, I feel that marketers and sales people who are over using good words are crippling the language. Rather like a life in pornography, the words are so pretty when they start out, but they get dirty in a dirty industry, and are never the same.

Maybe we should start a home for wayward words to help rehabilitate words and help keep other words from falling in with the wrong crowd. But, what we really need to do is get the abusers in for some therapy before they kill again.

Marketers and Sales People -- you're on notice.

Speaking at SXSW March 17th

bissellator — Tue, 3 Mar 2009 14:37:40 -0800

I have been asked to speak at SXSW on March 17th, along with Carri Bugbee and Helen Ross, for our work with what we've been calling the Mad Men experiment.

We started twittering as characters from the AMC show Mad Men back in August for plain old fun. It's kind of a form of performance art, with a huge need for improvisational talent. Not only do we create scenarios for what our characters might be doing (as Twitter asks), but we have to keep them within the constraints of 1962 AND not violate the story on the series -- tricky to do when you're not privy to the writers notes.

I was originally going to write for Don Draper, but the character was already taken -- no problem, turns out Roger Sterling is a lot more fun. After all, he's done what I've always wanted to do with my company, that is, get to the point where he really has little to do all day. He drinks, smokes, and chases women (catching them from time to time). It turned out to be disturbingly easy to channel him.

As it progressed we started learning a lot about how Twitter works and, more importantly, how Twitter culture works. Talking off-line helped us get a better feel for what was going on with each other's characters, and it let us organize events like the #Madparty, our Twitter-only Christmas party. A little prep offline can go a long ways online.

We also started developing more sophisticated tracking tools -- knowing how a specific event helped build interest, or lose followers, helps keep the message on track. While there's a lot you can do by hand, it gets hard to manage communications from thousands or tens of thousands of followers.

And then there's all the buzz from people who AREN'T following you. Tracking the blogs, the news articles, and the general chit chat outside your immediate world takes time -- any tool we can use to minimize that time means more time to interact with fans and hecklers.

In the end, we got press in The Wall Street Journal, and Business Week among others, which has led to speaking at SXSW.

All in all, it was a great learning experience, and shows that it's something you need to be constantly learning about and adapting to -- "Social media" is still a buzzword, but if you happen to be in Austin March 17th and want to get past the buzz, be sure to come to our panel discussion. I'll be hitting town on the 15th if anyone wants martini drinking lessons.

The fleeting Memory of the Internet

bissellator — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:56:20 -0800

The Internet is an amazing compendium of random thought, and like thoughts, a lot of this information is fleeting. Some of it is fleeting because who really wants to hear the Dancing Hamster song again, and some of it is fleeting because the place the information was stored, like dying nerves in the brain, is gone. Unless your bit of information was important enough to be copied to another place on the Internet, it's probably gone for ever.

Aside from the technical reasons we lose information online, I think the main reason is that we simply don't care about the information. If it's important, or particularly memorable, it probably will stick around. But so much of the content we see online is just a written version of what we talk about at the water cooler -- important in context, but as time goes by, less necessary to keep around.

We have backups of data at Conquent, but who would really mourn the lost data from some guy's random blog? Unless something happens and I attain celebrity status, it's unlikely that people will be digging through my past ramblings. The problem is that those ramblings will be gone without conscious effort to retain them.

Of course, there's lots of random stuff stuck in the corners of the Internet, and I wonder what kind of picture would emerge of me if some forensic anthropologist tried to piece the bits together later. There are lots of random photos of Anna Frank, for example, where she was in the background of a photo and only because we cared later, did those photos surface. But what we really know about the girl is limited to what she wrote in her famous journal.

The memory of the Internet is fleeting, malleable, and constantly susceptible to sensory overload. The way we store data online is less like the great archives of a library and more like a gossip tree -- things get distorted as they pass from person to person and get re-interpreted or get processed through Photoshop.

You can't believe everything you see online because it's not the truth, it's just the bit of information we remember right now, and it's going to change again tomorrow...

It's okay to say 'I don't know'

bissellator — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:17:18 -0800

Being a professional consultant means coming in and saving the day. People are relying on you to answer questions, and there's definitely a sense of pride as you come into a situation and knock things off one by one.

But there's a danger in being too cocky. It's easy to believe that you have the situation in hand and that you don't need to look any further than your brain. It's disturbingly easy for a technical consultant to dismiss the client when they tell you "I think it's my hard drive," when you believe it's the power supply. After all, what does the client know? They hired you for your expertise, you obviously know better.

I don't know how many times I've had an employee who doesn't know the answer, but doesn't want to be bothered with explaining that he needs to figure it out, so he makes something up. Everyone does it sometime or another, we're busy people and sometimes it's easier to hide behind jargon and technical babble, but it's better for everyone just to say you don't know.

For one thing, admitting that this stuff is complicated and that you need to do a little research proves to your client that you're dealing honestly with them. You're building rapport with your client, and in the long run that means you're going to have a friend and a loyal customer.

And, if you lie, you're going to get caught.

My favorite story came from a client of mine who was interviewing tech companies for a fairly large project.

Every question he asked the tech was answered with, "No problem, we've got that covered." So, my client asks the guy, "What about the new X-32 protocols?" to which the tech replied, "We've looked at it and we're sure it's not going to be a problem."

Then my client asks, "what about the fact I just made up the X-32 protocols?"

Obviously there wasn't much the tech could do at that point to salvage the account. Anything he said would be suspect, because he proved that he would say anything, including bald faced lies, to get the business.

Being a professional means it's okay to be a little vulnerable. Your clients want to know you're going to take care of them, and they need to know that what you say is what you mean. There are so many geeks in every line of work who will try to dazzle their customers and prospects with big words, complicated descriptions and outright deception that our clients find it refreshing when we say, "I don't know... But, I'll find out."

Nike Takes Over Conquent

bissellator — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:57:05 -0800

One of the nice things about having a cool space for an office is the fact that Nike wants it in their advertising. I mean, I'm sure they have their own cool spaces, but a 1940s bungalow set against an early 1900's bridge, nestled between a restaurant and row houses... Let's just say that sometimes the Knight has to come to the castle.

We were visited by a Weiden+Kennedy subcontractor a week or so ago who had apparently been scouting the area for an urban mix of old architecture in the city. They're putting together a viral campaign with some video footage -- they didn't tell me much, beyond offering to compensate Conquent for the time they would be on the property and to get some release forms.

Somehow I had gotten the impression they would be setting up a long shot for some kind of time lapse photo. But instead, at 6:00 this afternoon, three unmarked white vans and a large rental panel truck all showed up in front of the office.

People jumped out and started setting up cones to close off the street while others hauling equipment all over the place with lots of handheld radio chatter and stressed movement. It's the kind of scene that, in the movies, is usually followed up with either a large explosion or an alien running for the cover of the bushes.

Of course, six o'clock is about the time we usually get out of the office. I was in the unusual position of having gone home for lunch and ridden my bicycle back to the office, somehow forgetting my shoes. This left me walking barefoot and without a jacket around all the hubbub as filming started. Fortunately I did pack my panniers with street clothes, otherwise I might have been mistaken for the alien heading for the bushes.

Five or six athletic looking guys kept running back and forth in front of the office, with some director on the bridge on the other side of our parking area running direction through the radios. We were able to sneak out in between the athletic guys just as the athletic women showed up, which is as much a testament to bad timing as to just how hard it was to work around having your property turned into a film set (you don't exactly say, "Oh, wait, babes... We'll go later," after you've brought the entire filming to a halt so you can get your car out...)

Ah well, just another day at Conquent.

Facebook owns this title

bissellator — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:52:09 -0800

I have heard some snide comments from time to time regarding the fact I don't like to use canned applications, and I like hosted services (like Livejournal) even less. There are great advantages to letting someone else do all your programming, but when you run a company that specializes in applicaiton development, it seems silly to be tied to some, unknown technology.

Of course I have accounts all over the place. I'm on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Wordpress.com, Twitter, Plaxo, Blogsot, and a few more I can't really even recall off the top of my head. And every time I sign up for one of those service I blithely accept the terms of service.

Now Facebook seems to have pushed the envelope in what they feel they get to do with what I create on their service. In an article in Business Week, I learned that simply by posting someting, be it a photo, a comment, a note, or any other content, Facebook has "an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license" to use, retain, and display content posted to the site." Even after you cancel your account.

This gives me one more reason to maintain a blog on Conquent.com and simply post links to that blog on these other services. I know where the data is and, as my company owns the server, I know that I haven't just given away my content for life.

Not that pictures of me dressed as Santa or playing the Boudrahn are going to be big intellectual property rights later, but it's nice to know I can choose to remove a photo later, or edit a blog to my choosing. It's also nice to know that if anyone is going to make money off my efforts it's going to be me or the people I choose, not some face(book)less company because I happened to click on a checkbox saying I understood their terms of service.

Update 2009-18-10:16
CNN Reports that Facebook backs down, reverses on user information policy.

"As Mark expressed in his blog post on Monday, it was never our intention to confuse people or make them uneasy about sharing on Facebook," company spokesman Barry Schnitt said in a blog post. "I also want to be very clear that Facebook does not, nor have we ever, claimed ownership over people's content. Your content belongs to you."

Of course, it's all fiction -- if Facebook can change their terms of services at anytime, and so easily apparently, then is there really a standard set of terms?

Excuses, excuses

bissellator — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:52:55 -0800

I don't want to imply that there is nothing wrong with the economy, but I'm increasingly getting the impression that some companies are using the economic problems as an excuse to do the dirty things they've wanted to do for a long time.

For example, Boeing has dropped it's employee wellness program citing costs. In reality, the wellness program is a good thing for the employees, but a pain in the ass for the company. With everyone fearing layoffs, Boeing can kill the program, and not worry about an exodus of skilled labor -- where would employees go in this market?

Then there's Microsoft's recent layoff of around 5,000 people. By far, the bulk of those layoffs hit the H1B employees -- foreigners here on a work visa. Microsoft has been using H1B employees for a long time, but it doesn't change the fact that there's a certain level of overhead involved, and the fact the Justice Department keeps tagging the Evil Empire for improper hiring procedures. Again, no problem getting domestic workers in this market, so dump the annoyance and blame the economy.

I've talked about the slow pay issue, that is, companies that are using the economy as an excuse to treat Net30 like Net-when-we-get-around-to-it. And now, I'm seeing organizations change their internal rules for how money is allocated, spent, and protected. Banks are sitting on huge piles of cash -- cash we gave them in the bailout -- but rather than putting it towards business growth, they're keeping it in reserve for when things get really bad.

That's telling it itself. It means the banks don't really believe it's really bad yet. Bad, sure, but no, oh shit bad. Not, "I'm going to throw myself out the window" bad.

In the meantime, the folks on the bottom are being raped by those who still have it good. Not because Boeing can't afford a wellness program, not because Microsoft is losing money and has to lay people off, not even because companies and banks don't have money to pay bills with. They're doing it because they have the perfect excuse to continue to be shortsighted and greedy.

A little on Social Media

bissellator — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:38:58 -0800

Because @PeggyOlson won the Shorty Award last night, we outed all our Mad Men Characters to the Wall Street Journal which they posted in an article called Behind the Twitter Mad-ness.

We learned a lot about social media in the Mad Men experiement. One of the problems that I've seen in the "industry" is that there are a lot of folks out there who present themselves as experts in something that is rapidly evolving and difficult to define.

This makes it difficult to explain exactly what an agency can do for you if you're looking for a Social Media "expert."

In our exploration of the Twitterverse, I think we've defined a few constants that might help if you're considering getting into social marketing.

Monitoring
Although there are a lot of tools out there to keep an eye on Twitter and other streams, it's the experienced human being who knows what to do and when to act that's important. Catching negative comments and forwarding them to the appropriate department or agency is different than engaging discussion and turning a negative into a positive.

For example, the decision to shut down the Mad Men accounts became a positive for us and we can prove it through the blogs and mainstream press it generated -- they missed the boat and inadvertently created more buzz by doing something stupid.

Engagement
This is, of course, what people expect Social Media to be all about -- you can go out and make friends. But making them, keeping them, and keeping them interested, are all different things. This takes creative writing skills and an understanding of the message and letting that message change as the medium changes.

Honestly it got harder for me to tweet as Roger Sterling after he became so smitten with Jane -- an aloof, skirt-chasing drunkard gives lots of opportunity to engage people with quick comments. But using that relationship in the Mad Party was brilliant -- it gave not only all our characters something to talk about, but it also gave our friends something juicy to dish on.

Redirecting/Harnessing
The Mad Men experiment doesn't really give us an opportunity to do anything beyond engaging people -- we are not involved with the show, and it would be inappropriate to co-opt the brand. But the agency could have done some really cool promotions through the brand by creating a Sterling Cooper company website, with links to promotional items, teasers and fun stuff.

Star Trek has been doing this for years with "fan" sites which are often driven by Paramount. Even more "in your face" goals like the Bissell Pet Photo contest use the engagement on the web to bring visitors to the site and build basic brand awareness.

This, naturally, requires a nimble team that can create these destinations AND be flexible enough to keep up with the fast pace of the social scene.

Tracking
Finally, if you're going to do any kind of campaign, you have to have tracking to see how your efforts are panning out. This is different than monitoring in that it's more like tagging your efforts to separate them from the general buzz. For me, this has been similar to existing advertising tracking; pretty much track IP address and referring pages so I know when something really goes viral (like my Songsmith blog).

The data sources keep changing, and I've found my needs keep evolving as I learn more about where data comes from (and goes) and what sources there are to monitor that data. Turns out my blog gets steady traffic from Google Reader, which I only saw when I started including remote images in my blog, so I modified my tracking to system to accommodate RSS readers and found people reading my blog using Firefox's embedded reader, Google Reader, and a couple unidentified sources which may be bots; I don't know yet -- but with tools in place, I can learn.

In the end, it's all about being aware and learning more as you go. Social media lets you do it faster and with a lot more random energy and therefore a lot more opportunity for random creative ways of interacting with people.

Feeding on Content

bissellator — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 08:28:13 -0800

There are lots of people out there peddling the concept of social media and search engine optimization. Before you say, "WTF?" believe me, I don't think they're connected either. Except in one small way -- it takes fresh content to be found by, and indexed by, the search engines.

One trick to keep fresh content on your website is to grab a feed from another website (you can grab all the content from this blog by going to bissellator.conquent.com/feed for example). The problem with that is you end up with just a copy of someone else's content, so the search engine sees no value in your site.

Which leads to the next trick where you grab content from a number of sources with a query. An herein lies the problem -- it's not your content, so you don't really know what the other guy is writing about.

My long standing search string example is the client I had back in 1999 who wanted to show up on search engines under the word "card." Of course "card" can refer to playing cards, computer parts, the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, greeting cards, visa/mastercard/bloomingdales charge cards...

It doesn't really matter what you're searching for, if you automate it, you're going to get some "unanticipated results." And as people become more sophisticated, they notice the irregularities more, and deduct points.

Remember, the point of any communication is to deliver relevant information. Throwing shit on the wall might get you a Jackson Pollock masterpiece, but only if you're Jackson Pollock. Most of the time you just get a big mess to clean up.

Attack of the Bots

bissellator — Mon, 9 Feb 2009 08:18:54 -0800

I'm noticing a huge increase in traffic to my blog, and I don't think it's because I'm a scintillating writer. The logs we keep for blogs are pretty specific, so it's not hard to see what's going on.

The bots are taking over.

By "bots" I mean a range of automatic systems including search engines, feed readers, and more nefarious systems like tools designed to post bogus comments on your blog or worse yet, find a security weakness to hack or crack the server.

Some bots are better behaved than others -- Google drops by every now and then and grabs a copy of the site for their search engine. MSN seems to be indexing the information constantly. I'd say the bulk of the search engine traffic, and a big part of the overall blog traffic, is from MSN.

Then there are the dozen or so Twitter addons which are constantly watching when people post links on Twitter -- guaranteed I'll get a few dozen hits on the server every time a post a link. And these seem to have spawned a new generation of blog search engines which are constantly grabbing the RSS feed and also indexing the HTML version of the page, giving a double hit to the server.

Of course, the structure of the site causes a little extra traffic simply because I present my blog in three categories, Professional, Personal, and Combined. If it gets posted in either Professional or Personal, it shows up automatically in Combined, giving the bots a little more to chew on.

More disturbing are the bots trying to hijack the site in one way or another. There are bots which try to post their own content to the site via the comment system. Over the past few days the traffic has really picked up on that one, and it looks like it's coming from personal computers with viruses -- no rhyme or reason, the postings come from all over the world and all times of day.

We've stooped the spamming with a simple CAPTCHA (which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."); that's why you have to enter that word when you post a comment. The traffic is still there, they just aren't getting their postings through.

Then there are the bots trying to find security weaknesses -- it's amusing to see Windows exploits being tested on our LINUX environment, but it's annoying to know that the barbarians are constantly at the gate trying to get in.

The real problem with this is tracking the effectiveness of marketing Conquent. The blog is one way people find the site, and knowing what kind of traffic we have coming to the blog helps us to understand who's visiting and how we might want to get some traction with those people. But we're constantly spending time filtering out things like "internetserviceteam.com" from real people who appreciate the information and insights they get from this blog.

At the end of the day it probably doesn't matter. Real interactions with real human beings are what make a company like Conquent succeed, and if someone likes what they when they visit the site, the next step is usually an email or phone call.

And that's the best result to track.

Web 1.0

bissellator — Wed, 4 Feb 2009 22:08:37 -0800

This may seem like a snitty little tirade, but it's something that bothers me a lot. People use the term "web 2.0" to describe new, web based businesses, and I think it's just so much jargon.

I've suggested that Twitter is just the Internet equivalent of Sherlock Holmes' London Times, that Facebook is the bulletin board in the campus commons, that RSS is a throwback to flat files of the 80's.

Web 2.0 is an Edsel with fins.

This pretty much falls under my "there's nothing really new" cynical tirade. The more optimistic side of me knows that there really are new and innovative ideas, but let's face it, those ideas involve things like Velcro, magnetic levitation trains, or the backbone of the Internet itself.

But "Web 2.0" doesn't hit the world of dreams and wonder, unless you count "I wonder about that dream..." Just because you say you're doing something earth shatteringly innovative doesn't make it so.

Part of the problem is in the definition. The current wiki entry doesn't seem to give a solid explanation of what "Web 2.0" means. It seems to mean social networking or perhaps cool AJAX tricks (which is just JavaScript and XML tricks, kind of cool but not Velcro).

It gets back to my argument about tool users versus the folks who create the tools. The things we do on the Internet are amazing, but they are amazing because of the amazing invention of the Internet itself, or "Web negative 1."

I think that's what really offends me about the idea of Web 2.0 -- whatever the kids in the coffee shops are doing with JavaScript and social media, no matter how interesting and new it may seem, the web sites people are building today under the banner of "Web 2.0" don't come close to the true invention and impact of the web that was there 10 or 15 years ago, and is still there, albeit a little faster with a few more bells and whistles.

But bells and whistles do not make a fundamental shift in the universe.

Net Neutrality

bissellator — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:14:45 -0800

The question of Net Neutrality seems to be coming up more often lately, although that question seems to vary from person to person. Usually the question is, "What the heck is Net Neutrality?"

The Internet works because different providers cooperate with each other. Conquent uses Sprint for its hosting facility, Sprint in turn connects to other networks, so if you want to look at www.conquent.com, the data will flow out our Sprint connection, across a couple other providers and eventually through the connection you pay for through your local provider.

We all connect to the Internet using different local providers; it may be a cable company like Comcast or Brighthouse, or it may be a phone company like Qwest or Verizon. And with faster wireless, it may be through the air on the cell network or WiMax.

It's this "last leg," or rather your personal connection, that all the fuss is about. Companies like Google pay a lot of money to the big boys like Sprint or AT&T to handle the huge amount of data they are sending out. The problem is that Comcast has no control over whether Google starts streaming video -- suddenly your connection could get slow because everyone else in the neighborhood is watching John Stewart throw a pie.

Now, that video may compete with Comcast's television service. So, Comcast might block Google's video service in order to promote their own service. Or they might charge Google to get priority, which means that Hulu would suck, but Google would be great.

And there's the rub. The innovation of the Internet hasn't come about because of back-room deals, it's because any service gets the same priority as any other service. Don't forget the cooperation part of the Internet -- private networks like AOL and CompuServe are gone because they couldn't be innovative enough to keep up with the "greater good" policy of Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality means that Google can start as a small potatoes search engine, and as it grows, it keeps building up its own infrastructure, with no graft to some cable company in Idaho or Florida. Google has created new tools, and new revenue models, and helped keep an entire industry healthy and happy.

Google may go away someday because someone else comes along with a more innovative idea than search, just as Google has knocked AltaVista off the map. But without the ability for anyone to float an idea out there and see how it plays, the Internet will calcify into a few big players. And THAT is why we need Net Neutrality.

If you're interested in whether your provider is choking your bandwidth (and not living up to what you're paying them for), you can check up on them with these tools developed by a coalition of universities and private industry (yes, Google was a big part): http://measurementlab.net/.

Getting clever with data feeds

bissellator — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:07:49 -0800

There is a lot of data available out there on the Internet these days, and more and more of this data is being made available in various forms of feeds or APIs (Application Programming Interface). For kicks, we wrote a feed from Twitter to Conquent so you can see live results scroll by at http://conquent.com/scroller/ and I also display my recent blog postings and Twitter postings through RSS on various portal pages.

But let's talk about the value for business.

Our accessible shopping comparison engine at http://empower.conquent.com/ pulls the literally millions of records from Shopzilla and other data sources and formats the results in a way that's easy for screen readers like JAWS or Window-Eyes to read as well as making it easier for mobility impaired, or vision impaired visitors without readers, to view the results.

The problem is with querying millions of items "on the fly." You can't do it efficiently -- even with solid bandwidth and good servers, pulling down millions of records takes time to process. And hitting the source data every time someone wants to see vacuum cleaners makes the user experience crawl and eventually lay down and die.

We worked around this problem with an "on-demand caching" of results. Shopzilla updates their system every 24 hours, so there's no reason to grab a set of data if we've seen it in the last 24 hours. The first time someone hits a category that hasn't been viewed in 24 hours, we fire up the process to grab the data, process it and cache it -- it's a little slower for that one person, but for the rest of the day it's lightning fast.

At the same time, we don't have to store unused categories -- if no one ever browses "tires" on empower.conquent.com, we haven't ever wasted bandwidth and processor time by grabbing something no one cares about. Granted, every time Google or MSN comes by they'll trip the category, but that works to our advantage creating a slow, background cache copy in the event someone DOES come by -- but if we don't already have it, the visitor will always get the most recent copy, regardless of whether we already grabbed it or not.

Building in these simple efficiencies makes the site a lot more scalable, faster, and keeps our content provider happier as we're not crowding them with unnecessary requests.

The Other Credit Crisis

bissellator — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0800

We've heard a lot about the problems with the credit market -- banks aren't lending or, worse yet, they're pulling lines of credit back from good customers. I'm of the mind to play the drinking game "Do a shot every time you hear the phrase economic crisis," except for that kidney stone a couple months back...

There's another credit market we haven't been talking about, a huge slush fund of credit that's impossible to track, and one that's growing daily.

Net Terms.

Well, implied net terms. If we send out an invoice to a client, it says "Due on Receipt" unless we've made other arrangements with the client. Traditionally, however, our clients have treated that as "I'll pay in the next payment cycle, or in 30 days... or so." As long as we all expect it, it's okay; everyone knows when the money will show up, and they can manage their cash flow accordingly.

Only now clients and vendors are playing long-term credit games. For some reason not paying vendors is different than taking out a loan from a bank and not paying it. Sitting on a payable for 30, 60 or even 90 days is just fine for many business people, and the reality is the only ones who get paid on time are companies with big sticks like the banks.

As a business owner I obviously have problems with people not paying the company. We're pretty good about managing our debt, but most established companies carry a line of credit or credit card debt. If we have to tap that line of credit to make payroll or other expenses our clients are using our line of credit indirectly.

Even with the interest charges built into every contract, it's hard to recoup that cost of carrying the debt. As a business owner, you want to maintain a good relationship with your clients, especially the ones that spend (and therefore borrow) a lot of money. So, you use the interest charges as a last resort to get them to pay attention, and then waive them as part of the "thank you" for getting paid.

In the process, you discount the work or product you've already sold. It would be like knocking 20% off the invoice just because your client didn't meet the terms of your agreement. In other words, you punish your own company for the mistakes of others.

Now we're seeing a ripple effect where people aren't getting paid at all. If we have a client who slow pays us for an invoice, it causes us to slow pay the vendor we used for the project, which causes him to slow pay HIS vendors... You could be 6 degrees from the guy who didn't pay in the first place and still get screwed.

The game only works if the chain remains unbroken and everyone pays; as we get further and further out of sync from products delivered or services rendered, the chain is gets weaker.

The best solution is to have your clients secure credit directly before going into the project or delivering the product. The downside is that offering direct terms is often a deciding factor in choosing otherwise equal vendors.

Rather than making the obvious statement, maybe I'll just skip ahead to doing a shot.

The Broadband Inauguration

bissellator — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0800

Millions of people watched the Inauguration online -- one content provider said that they had a peak of 7.7 million viewers of streaming content alone during the Big Day. Making it hard to get a real count is the fact that video from the inauguration ceremony and surrounding events was streamed all over the Web. Sites such as Hulu and Ustream were busy along with the sites of major news outlets.

And it was far from perfect.

CNN.com, one of the most popular viewing destinations, had to cut off viewers and establish a wait list. It's like queuing up to peer in the peephole for the old kinescope.

I'm personally really surprised that CNN, of all the news outlets, had to resort to rationing bandwidth. We're in the era of huge data pipes and cloud computing. We certainly have learned a lot over the years about distributed processing from tools like the SETI desktop (search for intelligent life while not using your computer) to better file sharing systems like BitTorrent (I've been known to download movies in a fraction of the time it takes to view them).

But, even with the hitches, I believe the future of television is broadcast over broadband. It's just too damn convenient and ubiquitous -- I have more computer screens than I have televisions screens both at home and work, and the TV screens double as computer screens. On my recent trip to DC, I watched streaming movies from Netflix over my AT&T Air Card (cell modem) on my laptop and I never turned on the TV itself.

We need to get better tools for pausing and rewinding in the stream; information, even live information, needs to be digested. The moment is never "gone" in the era of constant recording, and computer broadcasting offers us a lot more ways to interact with the information.

I wonder, though, if January 20th, 2009 will be remembered for being the day the first black president took office, or for the day online broadcasting really came to life.

T-Mobile owns Magenta and Other Patent Stories

bissellator — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0800

We had a discussion in the office yesterday about patent infringement, and a T-Mobile case from 2007 came up. Apparently they own magenta.

Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile to the USA) has used magenta (No. 395 52 630 "magenta" or RAL 4010) for designating its services and in its advertising since September 12, 2000 when it registered it on the basis of a proven secondary meaning for goods and services in the field of telecommunications.

Now, my feeling is that a patent is only as good as the money you have to burn defending it -- getting L'eggs to remove all their magenta packaging for their hosiery, or Taco Bell to change the color of the Bell is going to be a bit of a trick. But it does mean that they can create a nuisance, just as when McDonalds sued a member of clan McDonald for their tea shop in Scotland.

I've seen a lot of dumb patents awarded over the years. The "pop-under" which is basically two lines of JavaScript, was patented by a couple guys who didn't have anything to do with the development of JavaScript. It would be one thing if you created the JavaScript engine, but to write two lines of code and patent it?

After years of discussion and worry that it will have a chilling effect on the Internet they got the patents last June (7,386,555 & 7,353,229). It should be interesting to see them sue news agencies like CNN and entertainment portals like the Internet Movie Database which is owned by "One click" patent holder Amazon.

The "One Click" patent, by the way, is where you click on a link from an external website that takes you right to the checkout process on Amazon's website. Somehow they patented the simple HTML link from what I gather... I know it's more complicated than that... I really hope it's more complicated than that.

Then there's the whole world of genetic patents. When I went in for my CAT scan last month, I had to sign a release form allowing the docs to use any samples they got from me for medical experiments, and if they created some wonder drug based on my DNA, they would own my DNA.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, there's no way I could create a wonder drug from my colon, but on the other hand, if some competing pharmaceutical wants to pay me a million for a piece of my ass so they can try to make their own wonder drug, I should be able to do that, but now I can't.

I've been seriously considering applying for a process patent for the process by which an individual or group uses muscular pressure to exchange air in an organic chamber.

I get a nickel every time you take a breath or I'll sue.

The Risk-takers, Doers and Makers of Things

bissellator — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:47:03 -0800

Having seen a bit of this country, I know that not everyone was thrilled today with Obama taking office. But even his opponents have said what an incredible speaker he is, and, for me, it's a relief to have a President who actually sounds like a President.

But more than his oratory style, I find substance in what he says. In particular:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

This is sums up so much of my frustration with my industry and business culture. When I talk about tools, or doing things half-way, it's not the tools, or even that I feel we should be working all the time -- it's that valuable work is hard. If you're truly creating value, you're taking the risks, you're fighting for something, and you're not taking the easy path just because it is there.

The brilliant work Conquent alumni have produced over the years may not be glamorous, and it may not have the eye of the media, but the work we have done has saved lives, created wealth, and has been rewarding it its own way simply for creating something never seen before, and knowing that the work couldn't have been done without the teamwork that made it happen.

I have seen too much effort wasted over the years by the soloist, whether the rogue programmer or independent business owner. The idea that "I know better" and that the easy path will work has led to failure time after time.

Conquent is celebrating it's 10th anniversary this year. It hasn't been easy, it hasn't been handed to anyone, and the work continues to change and grow as the company does. It is our own small team of risk-takers, doers and makers of things that has shared the dream, learned new things, and prospered because of it.

The noise of 20,000+ Twitter Followers

bissellator — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:34:23 -0800

I got a number of new followers on Twitter over the weekend. What was odd about them was the large number of people a lot of them were following and, to a lesser extent, the number of followers they have.

I'm talking about people following 5,000, 10,000 or even more than 20,000 people. That's a good sized town; imagine if you could hear everyone's conversations in town at once. It would be deafening.

The cacophony of 20,000 tweets scrolling by is equally deafening. You might catch a snippet here and there, but if you're following that many people, it's probably pretty indiscriminate content. You might as watch every tweet with the letter "e" in it.

I think that the future of twitter is going to be people dipping into the stream with more sophisticated search tools. And I think that means that followers won't matter as much. I posted a link to my Microsoft Songmsith and while my followers showed up, I also got a lot of Twitter traffic from search results, both on search.twitter.com and Google.

There are a lot of tools out there to help you manage larger groups of followers on Twitter, but the reality is that as your base of people you follow grows, the less they are YOUR people. I keep a couple scroller search tabs open for Bissell and Conquent to keep tabs on what people are saying to and about me on Twitter. I've replied to them, and they've replied to me, all without either of us following each other.

The only advantage you have to following someone is to allow them to Direct Message you. Personally, I try to let people contact me in other ways than a DM on Twitter -- use the Contact form on Conquent, leave a note on my blog, send email to the company. A DM is as personal as an email, and I don't hand out my email to everyone.

I plan to watch the Inauguration on Twitter using Conquent's scroller at http://conquent.com/scroller/?q=Inauguration, and with the millions of people in DC, and everyone else online, it's nice to know I can watch the flow, but I don't have to know them all personally.

30,000 feet, 500 MPH Suburban Strip Mall

bissellator — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:28:33 -0800

It's not the suburbs I hate, or even McDonald's, per se, it's the overwhelming noise of mediocre homogeneity that is thrust upon you anywhere, anytime. I'm sitting on a Frontier flight between DC and Denver; every seat has a TV in the back -- a TV which I have no way to turn off. And on this TV runs constant advertising for new shows on TNT, FOX or some other international cable station.

If I have to see that American Idol ad one more time... Well, I can't say because Homeland Security would probably be on my ass.

It's not even the content; I'm not anti-TV, there are shows I absolutely go out of my way to watch. But it's not my choosing, just as the fact that I'm fine with burgers and cheap chinese food doesn't mean I want to be forced to smell the mall food court all day or have someone constantly walking by with samples of chicken on a stick.

Let me drop you in a mall in DC or Denver or Portland for that matter, and you'll have no clue where you are. Just some mall in America. Now, you're transported to a house in a residential development. Go ahead, step outside, and you still won't know where you are.

Now, let's put you on a plane and put a TV in front of you; you're not even at 30,000 feet going 500 miles an hour, you're just in a noisy room in the the 'burbs.

To me it's that "been-there-done-that" familiarity that is so wearing about TVs, fast food and generic architecture. Heck, generic design in general. You're not learning anything new in these familiar places, and you're not saying anything of interest when you design them.

The web has this problem, and as with many things on line, it has the problem the way a crack addict has a "dependency issue." Internet communications are all about creating something accessible by as many people as possible, so your message has to make sense in Brooklyn and Bangor.

I always push for creative design, but it's not easy. Not only do we fight the limitations of the boxy display, but with the limitations of web technology in general; it's not just the broad audience that waters down the message, it's the tools you use.

My rants against tools like Dreamweaver or Microsoft Songsmith aren't rants against the tools, they are rants against settling for what the tool can do and, worse yet, accepting the results of an unskilled tool user because the results are functional or near enough so.

You can't live on a diet of McDonald's despite what the company says (Supersize Me proved that one pretty well). Just as your body fails on a diet of poorly conceived food, you spirit fails on a diet of poorly conceived creations. We need more to thrive, and we should demand more.

Cellphones, toilets and the Inauguration

bissellator — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:57:37 -0800

It's Friday, just a few days before the Inauguration and it's quiet in DC. Well, as quiet as the town gets. My guess is that the locals have fled and the visitors haven't shown up yet. But the visitors are coming -- I've heard they're expecting up to 5 million people are going to try to get down to the festivities on Tuesday. That means that if you got everyone in the entire state of Oregon, and then made a stop and picked up everyone in Idaho, you'd still be short a few hundred thousand bodies to make up the difference.

This is the modern age, and preparations for 5 million people include a new wrinkle: mobile communications. Think of it, 5 million people texting their friends with photos of 5 million people. I've seen estimates of more than 1.4 billion mobile messages are expected to be delivered nationwide on Inauguration Day...

This doesn't count all the people trying to call each other to figure out where they are in the crush of humanity. Tons of emergency calls are a given for the statistical certainty of injury or illness.

Which brings us mobile, mobile communications. The main providers have set up an encampment on the east end of the mall with temporary cell towers:

I don't know how they tie back into the rest of the network, whether they tapped into a trunk or if they have a satellited dish hidden behind the fence, but the fact that such a resource can be deployed on a temporary basis is pretty damn cool.

Another note on Inaugural Infrastructure comes from the "Everybody poops" department. The Great Wall of Portapotties has been built from the Capitol for as far down the Mall as I could see. Photos don't do it justice, the sheer volume of plastic boxes is almost overwhelming. Sure, they're building huge scaffolding to hold up huge TVs, the news centers are being built, but the line up of crappers, that's how you know you live in a modern age.

The End of Days (of song): Microsoft Songsmith Example

bissellator — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:11:39 -0800

@ericgerhardt posted a link to a Microsoft SongSmith song in response to my blog, the Death of your Soul... and it's exactly what I feared... Actually, it might be worse...

I grabbed a copy for posterity, and for when the revolution comes so I have a torture device close at hand. Be prepared, it isn't pretty, but it is probably a perfect example of a Microsoft Songsmith "song" with a, um, "SongSmith cover" of Running with the Devil.

As a side note, I publish this blog in the hobbyist vein -- I don't expect to generate much of a stir, but I am surprised at the amount of traffic this topic has generated to the site. I think there are a lot of folks showing up here because they are looking for more information on how to use it and actually want to use the tool.

If you're one of those folks, leave a comment, or send a private note using our contact form. I really hope I don't hear a radio jingle using Songsmith, but I'd like to see how people can make something good from this soulless thing...

Browser Bigotry

bissellator — Fri, 9 Jan 2009 10:04:37 -0800

My usual routine in the morning is to get up, check my email, delete my spam, take a shower, read the news online, and check on some web stats. This morning I followed a link to tweatweather.com on the old box at home, and it immediately redirected me to the Firefox download page.

Now, my first thought was that something had gone wrong with the reporting software I was using. There was no explanation, I was just on the Firefox page. My second thought was that they had done something almost clever -- build up traffic then force all traffic to a revenue share deal to make a couple bucks.

But, no, it was just that they didn't code for Internet Explorer 6. They didn't bother telling me that I needed a new browser for their site by giving me an alert or a pop-up page, instead they just forced me to use their browser.

W3C stats shows IE6 still at 19.6% of the market as of December 2008 (just last month). If we assume there are 1.5 billion people online, that means they are ignoring 294 million people. Granted, they aren't all going to be interested in what people are saying on Twitter about the weather, but, talk about limiting your audience right out the gate -- 20% BAM, gone.

It's like saying, "No darkies allowed at the bar." And forcing me away without explanation is just that, shoving me off into a corner.

There are legitimate reasons people may have older browsers, including they aren't allowed to install anything else but more importantly, personal choice. If I choose one browser over another, and certain functions don't work, then that's my call.

Your website should work for any major browser. That's the beauty of the web, I don't have to install anything; I just open a browser, click on links, and see the stuff I want to see. Sure, you might have to install plug-ins like Flash, but it's already installed in over 90% of the browsers, so writing for Flash is pretty safe.

I understand not liking the mess the browser manufacturers have made of CSS and JavaScript, but if you're a coder, learn to code within the limitations of the environment. We push a lot of functions onto the server, and we use HTML that may be "deprecated" by W3C standards, but works on all the major browsers.

It's a matter of respecting other people and the choices they make, or are forced into for reasons beyond their, and your, control. Anytime you insist they do something that's not part of the core goals of your website, is a time that you're forcing them away from you.

The Death of your Soul: Microsoft Songsmith

bissellator — Thu, 8 Jan 2009 11:08:30 -0800

Now THIS is what I'm talking about when I try to explain the difference between using a tool and creating something.

Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer�s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC�s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos.

Create really, really, crappy background music for you.

You may have a song in your head, something beautiful and wonderful to share, and this monstrosity will make it sound like show tunes on the Love Boat. Rather than creating something new, this thing destroys your creativity and replaces it with soulless pap.

This is the same problem with desktop publishing, the camcorder, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver. The tools give you the appearance of having a talent, but it doesn't actually give you that talent.

Socrates said about writing (because he apparently didn't write), "To your students you give an appearance of wisdom, not the reality of it." Now, I'm not saying that the written word is bad, but we've had literally (pun intended) thousands of years to learn how to use the tool.

It's creative when you're the first one to use a tool a new way. Some of the early Internet phenomena were total crap, like the dancing hamster site. People went to these things in droves because no one had done it before, but the talent it took to create a few animated gifs and speed up a wave file was simple. Then the thousands of knock-offs made the Internet a terrible place.

I feel that it's our destiny in life to raise the bar, to constantly find new things, and deeper understanding of old things. Finding a simpler way to do something like adding chord progressions to a vocal track is great, but when you put it into a package like Songsmith, you create a superficial distraction.

Nothing new will come from Songsmith users, and they will be so self impressed, and so distracted by their little creations that they will never evolve, they will never learn new things about themselves or learn how to create real music. And, most likely, they will never learn what real music is.

Turn off the chord generator, and just sing.

Creative Development or Developing Creatively?

bissellator — Wed, 7 Jan 2009 09:45:33 -0800

I don't know, but "Creative Development" sounds like one of those undergrad courses you take to fill out your schedule, not a career, yet here I sit, at the head of a growing empire of which the divisions share the thread of "Creative Development."

I think the problem I have with the phrase is the same problem I have with describing what it is Conquent does -- "creative" is almost diametrically opposed to "development." When you think of a developer you think of a guy who builds houses, when you think of a creative, you think of someone with nerdy glasses doing applique.

Of course, when you think Internet developer, you think of a guy with nerdy glasses in a coffee house building applications...

It takes a special mindset to be able to apply creative solutions to dull problems, and still care that the dull problems are important. Following strict process and procedure doesn't solve problems, but ignoring it entirely can unravel an entire project.

Trying to explain this mindset to clients who "just want it built" is the challenge. People have come to Conquent over the years looking for a construction company, without an architect, without plans, and a fairly blurry vision of what they're trying to build.

We generally solve this by writing specifications, which I metaphorically refer to as "road maps." The nice thing about a road map is that you can take side trips and see other things along the way, but get back on course. Those side trips are the new ideas that come along as you develop something from nothing, and they are what make a project richer and more successful.

The problem with side trips is that it takes time and money, and you can't say "Well, you should have thought of that before." Creativity is an exploration, and discoveries aren't always pleasant...

The Myth of Wikipedia (or the Wiki-1400)

bissellator — Sat, 3 Jan 2009 12:20:11 -0800

Okay, let's talk about the myth of Wikipedia... The story goes that the Wiki is comprised of millions of tiny bits of data coming in from millions of people, and that the gestalt is an accurate document created by the hive mind of humanity.

The reality seems to be a little different. "...in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits" according to Jimbo Wales, the face of Wikipedia in Raw Thought: Who Writes Wikipedia?.

Now, some argue that this number is based on the corrections made constant monitoring of vandalism and change backs, but in reality, it means that this "gestalt" is really crafted in the image of these prolific watchdogs, just as the PTA can ban Alice in Wonderland, so can the Wiki-1400.

At the same time, these 1,400 people can't possibly know everything, and a lot of the articles are started by the other 98% of the wiki population. Filtering is part of what makes the process work, and, honestly, most of us don't have time to sit online looking at recent changes on Wiki.

The Wiki is as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica (which oddly enough is based in Chicago). But knowing what we know about the Wiki-1400, maybe it's not a fair comparison. Wiki-zealots are always talking about the accuracy of the wiki, and comparing it to traditional encyclopedias for validation. If the Wiki-1400 are constantly striving towards that goal, then the first thing they would do is check the Britannica, and roll back the entry if it doesn't agree.

I think the real bottom line is that the Wiki-1400 share a philosophy, and philosophy more than anything else, filters what we believe to be true and what we believe to be false. You can cross reference and document evolution all you want, but a creationist won't agree.

I'm not suggesting that the Wiki-1400 have that overt of blinders, but blinders they must have, and knowing this, we need to check other sources of information than the Wiki when expanding our own knowledge.

Online/Offline Sales -- is it really that bad?

bissellator — Fri, 2 Jan 2009 15:31:16 -0800

I read that holiday sales this year were the worst in nearly 40 years (MSNBC), and I figured, heck, it's just like the blacksmith losing sales as horses went away, I'm sure they made up for it online. Unfortunately, online holiday sales were also the lowest since 2001 (Bizjournals).

But let's take a look at the real statistics here. Online sales, while lower, were still $25.5 billion between Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's a drop of about a billion, nothing to sneeze at, but certainly not a complete dead-in-the-water scenario. And while the dire words of this being the worst shopping year in 40 years, we're talking around 1% in sales drop.

The problem is that we're still tied to the idea of growth economics. If you don't make more and more money every year, you're failing. The market gets jittery if you're making the same 25 billion a month, and drops you like a stone -- regardless of the fact that there was 25 BILLION in sales.

Growing a company is important, but making a reasonable profit, consistently, is more important than constant growth. Sure, some of these retailers are going to hurt big time, a lot of stores are going to close. However, I would argue that having a Best Buy, a Circuit City and a Fry's all on the same block isn't offering market differentiation, just unnecessary growth providing unnecessary waste of consumer spending on another box with crappy service.

Is PayPal Tacky?

bissellator — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:15:59 -0800

I posted this question on Linked In yesterday:

I have a client who wants to use PayPal rather than traditional credit card processing on his site. I think it's tacky, am I wrong?
Maybe I'm old school, but I've been online since 1994, and my feeling is that it cheapens the site.

I got a lot of answers, mainly from people who supported the idea of using PayPal. Most folks who responded seemed to lean on the side that PayPal is known, that it's secure and that they offer great customer service. It's apparently more expensive than traditional credit card processing, but it gives a known quantity, where your small company brand may not.

One of the things I find interesting is the assumption that I was talking about a small business, which pretty much underscores my belief that if you use PayPal, your customers will perceive you as a small company. It's also interesting to see that most of the people who really like it are the merchants themselves -- I'm still not sure what the perception of the average consumer is when they see a PayPal logo and get diverted from the site.

I try to filter the grandstanding people like to do while answering LinkedIn questions, but it's difficult to ignore the "I KNOW better than Thou" tone people put into their responses, while not providing a lot of foundation or credibility. For example:

Tacky? This is the 21st century. I've been online since before most people knew what a modem was, and hackers were judged on how well they could whistle at 300 baud. The only form of online payment I take for any transaction is via PayPal. I only make exceptions in rare situations, such as when using a service like Escrow.Com.

Which is great, except his title lists him as "ITIL Evangelist and Professional Cat Herder" and his resume is engineering and instructing at Learning Tree. It's not that the answer isn't valid, but this question is about brand perception, not the functionality of PayPal (or herding cats) and his assertion that the "only form of online payment" he takes is PayPal actually supports my assertion that PayPal is small business because the impression I get from his resume is that he doing small business.

The site in question is www.gmsparts.com, which, honestly, I think is some of the better work Conquent has done over the years. We took a really bad site (I mean REALLY bad: take a peek at the archived original site) and brought these guys into the 21st century. They now run neck and neck with their main competitor, who they used to whollop in traditional space, and now have regained their place with a great online presence.

I think the best answer came from Mark Lowe, who lists himself as a CTO, Strategic Advantage Technology Solutions - Specialists in e-Business and e-Commerce. He summed up his answer with a very basic, common sense suggestion:

The ideal situation is not to accept either or, but both - the first rule of successful ecommerce is to make it as easy as possible for the customer to transact with the merchant. The customer is king and this should override any personal preference of the merchant.

So, what I need to go back to my customer with is the basic, common sense question: why do you want to take PayPal? Is it for the customer, or is it because you like it yourself?

Ultimately I believe that there is a place for PayPal and Google Checkout, but at the end of the day, I think that these services solve problems for a limited audience, and the question is always going to be, is it YOUR audience.

Quick follow-up prompted by the guy I derided for his Cat Herder title.

Apparently most of the major retails DO take PayPal, although they seem to minimize its visibility, anyone using the Amazon store technology (like Barnes and Nobel) will see the PayPal link.

So, the bottom line seems to be do both. Leave options open, and don't bring your own prejudices to the table.

Old School Web Design Still Works

bissellator — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:17:24 -0800

I might just be getting old, but I don't understand these kids these days... Oh, crap, it's sentences like that where you know you're getting old.

But my point is this -- web design is getting unnecessarily complex. Part of the problem is the need for innovation, this constant push to create something cool and new, which is great. But as you do that, you abandon the people who aren't keeping up.

@brampitoyo wrote "With JavaScript engine getting faster and faster, it is possible to put more complex AJAX feature on a site." This assumes that everyone is keeping their JavaScript engine up to date, which is a bad assumption.

Not only are there lots of old systems out there (which I find run new browsers really slowly) but there are new, mobile browsers that don't support all the bells and whistles of the most current JavaScript engine.

Then there's the fact that not all implementations of JavaScript are the same. Microsoft seems to always do things differently from the rest of the world, but Opera, Safari and Firefox all seem to treat style sheet/JavaScript combinations very differently. And I won't go into Chrome...

We did a site back in 2001 for the Portland Opera company using tables. Check it out on the archive at conquent.com/portlandopera/2002/. Everything still works in every browser I've checked, and it's all tables and GIF images. When you click into an individual show you'll see up to four images layered on top of each other in table cells -- the code may be deprecated by the W3C standards, but not by the real-world.

Albert Einstein wrote "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." So much of what we do in code is theory, otherwise you wouldn't hear technical people say, "It shouldn't do that" so often. It's still a matter of knowing who's going to see what you're working on, and guessing how they're going to break it.

Cutting edge is cool, but that sharp edge can cut your nose off if you're not careful.

Domain Squatting

bissellator — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 07:00:00 -0800

I read an article today about Verizon winning a $33 million lawsuit over a company that has been using domains like myverizonwireless.com and verizononline.com to grab traffic and spoof users (Verizon awarded $33.15m against cybersquatter).

People have been fighting over domain names since the beginning. In the early days it was free to register domain names, so folks were getting domain names for their dog, or refrigerator, or grabbing up brand names with the idea that they could sell them to the companies who owned the brand.

Free went out the window (and with a monopoly and at $75 a year Network Solutions was making serious bank) and ICANN made a very simple rule -- if you own the trademark, or if you have demonstrable prior use, you can take the domain name away from someone.

Under this rule, Sting was able to get his domain name from a fan, but Madonna apparently had some trouble with the Catholic Church and prior use. Of course Sting, Madonna and the Catholic Church all have a lot of money to put together their cases before ICANN.

Free has come back in a fashion -- OnlineNIC got all those domain names by being a registrar -- they could register them for a week without paying their ICANN fees, drop them and then re-register them. Of course, with $7 registration from GoDaddy, squatting (some say "speculating") is a pretty cheap game. We have a client who paid $26,000 for a domain name, just because he thought it sounded good, not for trademark reasons.

What made the Verizon lawsuit interesting was that they got a judgment for $50,000 for each of the 633 domains Verizon claims were created specifically to be confused with legitimate Verizon brands, totaling up to that $33.15 million. That is, the got a judgment against OnlineNIC, but they can't actually find anyone who works for the company.

Ironically, Verizon got what they could have with a simple ICANN complaint, that is, they got control of the domain names. I say "ironically" because they've parked all those domains with Network Solutions, who runs advertising on parked domains, which is exactly the complaint Verizon had with OnlineNIC. The end game is the same, only it's a friendly company getting the ad revenue instead of the obscure company Verizon sued.

Green Chri$tma$

bissellator — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 11:00:39 -0800

Stan Freberg pretty much got kicked out of the advertising inustry for this one. Remember that this was 1958, even pre-Mad Men era.

Ignore the video, but enjoy the audio (it's what I could find this morning).

QA 101

bissellator — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:13:40 -0800

Websites are becoming increasingly complex with the addition of AJAX controls, cloud computing, and a growing list of data sources to drive a single page. There is a lot to keep track of when creating these sites, but some of the basics still apply.

Check your work.

It seems to be a stupidly simple piece of advice, yet it's amazing how often I run into problems from a simple lack of looking. This is QA 101, and as with a lot of basics we learned earlier in life, we've forgotten them as we get more sophisticated.

I don't know how often people assume that they wrote their code correctly, so things should work and they don't bother looking at the page in a browser. I just ran into this with one of my programmers who moved a site, and forgot to include the file that told the server what to do with the code. The whole site was printing source code, not pretty HTML.

Then there was a more subtle problem I saw with incompatible browsers. We had a programmer who wrote some nasty things about the client in the code thinking it will never show up. Except it was in the source frameset, and the client visited the site with a browser that didn't support frames (they still exist).

And this isn't just a technical issue -- turn on your spell check before sending an email but be sure to READ the email before hitting send. We wrote a proposal for a warehouse system, and the guy accepted the spelling correction blindly. Apparently we ended up bidding on a whorehouse system instead.

Fortunately we generally check each other's work at Conquent. It's better to find these things out before the client does, but it's even better to find it or for yourself before publishing it.

Portland Snow

bissellator — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 14:01:57 -0800

It doesn't snow very often in Portland, and while I try to keep this blog on topic for business, I thought I'd post a couple quick images here as I'm snowed in today...

Get some return on that web traffic

bissellator — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:47:31 -0800

3 click or 3 minutes
We're busy people; we don't have time to figure things out. If we can't find what we're looking for in a few easy clicks, or a few quick minutes, we'll move on and try to find it someplace else.

Remember, if your visitor doesn't figure it out, you've wasted an opportunity, and if you paid good money to drive that person to your site, you wasted your money. Just because they showed up means nothing unless you're making money.

Sites that make it really clear what you're supposed to do are the most effective. A big "Start Here" and a simple 1, 2, 3 series of forms that don't confuse and don't frustrate are obviously preferable to a website that some programmer said, "They'll figure it out..."

And that's because most people won't figure it out.

A quick primer on web ad models
There are three basic advertising models on the web:

Cost Per Impression: You pay every time someone sees your ad

Cost Per Click: You pay when someone clicks on your ad

Cost Per Action: You pay when someone completes an action on your website

You are ultimately looking at your final cost per action which means you need to know what that action is. If your website makes money from selling a product or service, that action is a purchase. If you're selling advertising on your site, then you need to get that visitor to look at as many pages as possible and, preferably, click on those ads.

The trick is to balance the model you're paying for traffic against your acceptable cost. So, if one advertising source has a really high conversion rate (everyone who clicks buys) you might want to pay on a per click model. Alternatively, if you get really high click through, maybe pay on an impression model.

But you have to watch and learn and adapt as you implement your plan. You need to modify your advertising to drive more qualified traffic and you need to modify your site to maximize the return on that traffic.

I think they have a backup...

bissellator — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:44:08 -0800

You bought One's and Zeros -- Don't Let it Become a Big Zero
Your entire investment is electronic when it's on the web. If you pay $30,000 for a spiffy, cool, fantastic web based program, you don't want to lose it just because someone accidentally wiped a hard drive.

Getting a copy of the site on a CD usually doesn't do you a lot of good. Don't forget, web applications aren't static. Much of what you see on a day to day basis comes out of a database. Beyond that, much of what makes your website work depends on other programs that may or may not be available when your web developer disappears off the face of the earth.

Your best bet is to have a live backup that synchronizes a couple times a day to a server you can check up on. It's even better if you can have that backup server sit in your office so that, in an absolute worst case scenario, you can pick up the box, go to a new ISP and be up and running again.

Get the passwords
I don't care if you have no idea what an SSH shell is, or an FTP server, for that matter, make sure you get all the passwords for all the services you're paying for. If something goes horribly wrong with your developer, you can hand the cryptic list to another developer and get out of trouble.

Remember: letting your web developer control everything means your web developer controls YOU as well.

I'd love to have that problem

bissellator — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:30:42 -0800

It's still a problem
I hate it when people "I'd love to have that problem" when I ask "What will you do when 1,000 people all show up on the site at once?"

When business picks up it doesn't mean the money will be there to solve the problems you don't want to deal with now. The truth is that it's easier to deal with problems when you don't have 1,000 people banging on the door demanding products or services, or worse yet, their money back because you can't deliver.

You need experienced partners
Just because someone knows more than you do, it doesn't mean they know anything important. In the web world the classic mistake is assuming that some kid who can bang out a website should be put in charge of your entire web enterprise because he can ramble on for hours about AJAX controls and because he got a snippet of his code posted on Slashdot.

Your cousin's sister's kid might be a whiz at building cool looking sites, but you need someone who knows what works in the market, not in DIV layer. You need an architect with business experience AND technical experience to bridge the vision of the company with the realities of creating a deliverable product.

You can avoid having to rebuild your web site if you start out right and address the problems before they arise. The right partners will help you do that, just as the right legal staff will keep you out of jail and the right accountant will keep the IRS off your back.

Completely rebuilding the site may not cost much in dollars, but it's going to cost a lot in time and credibility. You're going to lose potential customers and business partners before you ever get to the redesign if the site doesn't live up to expectations.

The [un]importance of statistics

bissellator — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:36:17 -0800

The (un)importance of statistics

@CarriBugbee took a look at my note about creating a Conquent branded url shortener and mentioned a service she uses that gives her tracking. Which is great -- the Conquent version has tracking, too, but only for internal use.

But this brought up a point that I've been unable to make for years -- people don't care about statistics. They'll say they do, they'll demand statistics, they'll pour over the details, but at the end of the day, they won't make a single, substantive change in their plans based on statistics.

Much of what we do in the entrepreneurial world is based on faith. Faith that we know something other people don't know and that facts are deceiving. Faith that even though everything seems to be pointing in the other direction, we're headed the right way.

I've found that when my clients are faced with cold hard facts, be they statistics or surveys or focus groups or whatever, they tend to rationalize why the numbers are wrong. Sure, they may authorize some minor tweaks to a media plan, but overall business direction usually remains the same no matter what.

I'm not saying that statistics aren't relevant; to the contrary, you can't make a firm decision without the facts. What I'm saying is that these statistics are usually irrelevant to most business people. Unless a client is willing to let go of the emotional or political investment they have in their project, statistics will just be a point of argument, not a change in direction.

Don't be a tool of viral marketing

bissellator — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:53:53 -0800

There are a lot of brands that have taken over the meaning of the product. We've had Jell-o and Band-Aids instead of gelatin and bandages for years. We now have Google instead of searching (it was Yahoo, but these things change).

Now there are a lot of people trying to grab hold of simple web activities and make their brand synonymous with simple technology. Just as AOL was once email, Wordpress is now blogging, and my favorite snippet of technology that's become a brand is the TinyUrl concept.

Every time I post something on at bissellator.wordpress.com and announce it to the world, I promote Wordpress. Every time I shorten an URL using TinyUrl from something like http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/mac/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212500783&subSection=News to http://tinyurl.com/5aobpk I'm promoting TinyUrl.

Much better for my brand is to use conquent.com/bissellator/ or shorten my URL to http://t.conquent.com/N000.

You may argue that developing such technology locally is expensive and "why reinvent the wheel?" First off, most of this technology isn't that tough to build. We're talking web tools we could have built back in 1997. And we did build them in 1997.

Secondly, you nick the skin of your brand slightly each time you send some of your audience through tinyurl or to wordpress.com. Like the matador and the bull, you slowly lose your own brand integrity and people see more value in the tools you don't own than in the things you're trying to promote.

Install tools on your server when you can. And look at the technology you're "micro-promoting" to see how valuable that tool is, and how easy it would be to have your own version or copy. It may not be for everyone, but if you're serious about building your brand, don't tear it apart with a million tinyurl cuts along the way.

I've been asked by a couple people how hard it was to set up t.conquent.com, and the answer was, kind of, but not impossible. Which led to the obvious question, can we do it for others?

Absoultely.

Pretty much anything you see us do at Conquent is something we're able and willing to do for others. With our Quickieweb Technology, Quickelist Email Service, and a wide range of complex programming projects (e.g. GMS Products, Tech Hero and American Dream Planner), we've got the tools, you just need to let us know what you're looking for.

Emails, discussions, blogs, wiki and web content

bissellator — Tue, 2 Dec 2008 12:06:27 -0800

My HR person, Kristen, asked me for a blog the other day. This brought up the question of "What IS a blog, really, and why do we all need them?" I know, old question to a lot of people. But it spurred an interesting conversation about different kinds of online communication. Let's review quickly:

Email
We do a LOT of communication via email. We often use our email as document storage systems ("Let's see... I know I sent that word doc to Bob back in May... of '06..."). With open copies sent on the cc line, email acts as a discussion board, helping bring people together to work out ideas.

Email is selective -- you decide who you're sharing information with, and it's one of the few Internet based systems that doesn't get spidered by Google. It still lets your ideas out "in the wild" if someone decides to forward your note, but it's like having a conversation in the office, not standing on the stage with a microphone.

Discussion Groups
At one time the Internet was filled with chat rooms which in turn evolved into threaded discussion groups. I'm not entirely sure why these seem to have fallen out of favor, but I still see them when I'm looking up technical answers.

The nice thing about threaded discussions is that you can come in late to the game and see replies directly below previous comments. Sometimes you get a back and forth going -- this conversation can wander off into its own corner and you can read the direct responses to the original comment.

I'd like to see Wiki's discussions become threaded, and maybe that's out there somewhere...

Blogs
Teagan in my office pointed out that Blogs are linear; that is to say, blogs are a good place to record things as they happen. This goes well with my idea that blogs are like open journals -- be careful what you put in your journal if EVEYONE can read it.

I think of blogs as a great place to sum up ideas or things you're working on. Nothing is ever really a finished work, but the thing about blogs is that you can go back over time and look at the evolution of an idea and see how it's changed.

Wikis
If blogs are linear and provide history, wiki's are "what's true now." I like the fact that wiki's have a history component, but the change history for a document is very different than a series of different documents on the same idea.

Wiki's are a great place for clearly thought out documentation that's constantly changing. We have our project management system hooked up to a wiki so projects and clients can have a back story -- who is this client, why are we doing this project and what are some of the things we need to know to stay out of trouble? It's a great way to keep documents in a semi-public place (that wiki isn't available outside the company).

We're also looking at setting up a wiki to let our experts within the company document important aspects of their area of expertise. For example, Kristen wants to be able to provide documentation about the importance of staffing and Human Resources, and this may tie into our accessibility division where they co-edit documents on accessibility and staffing.

Web Content
But let's not forget good old fashioned web content. Your website will always have information that changes, but there are things that aren't open for everyone to edit and aren't always changing.

On the other extreme, your website should include "machine generated content" or data driven content. We still need a new word... there's all that data that gets processed, like order information and shipping status. This is content, and shouldn't be ignored, and in a sense, it closes the loop as it can generate new questions, new discussions, a blog or two, and update to the wiki, and a change to the company content.

You Designed for Print First

bissellator — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:00:00 -0800

The web is cheaper to change
Entrepreneurs often miss a great opportunity when starting out. They usually start by getting business cards and 5,000 flyers printed up which talk about their product or service, but they created the text in a vacuum.

After they start handing out the flyers, they realize they need to change some key copy or images, only they still have 4,500 flyers left that they're going to have to throw away.

A better approach is to build your website first. You have an opportunity to have as many people as you can grab proof your work and making changes only costs the labor. Once the copy and supporting images have been tested online, the print collateral follows.

Print and Web are different
The web is limited in what it can show. Print can use gold foil, the web can do animation, but not visa versa. Make sure your basic elements, like your logo and product imagery, will work in both places.

Be sure to keep in mind that web graphics are lower resolution than print graphics. If you want to use something from the web in print, your designer will need to create images for the website at print resolution, and then scale them down to the web.

You let someone else register your domain name

bissellator — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:00:00 -0800

Your domain is more important than your phone number
Your domain name is extremely valuable and irreplaceable. You can lose it forever if you're not careful, along with all that money you've put into marketing and printing. And you won't get a friendly "The Domain Name has changed" message like you do when your phone number changes.

YOU need to register your domain name, not your web developer or your consultant. You can have them walk you through the process, but you need to do it yourself, because if you don't, then you may well be developing a brand around a domain that your consultant owns, not you.

Your developer has a big stick if you have a dispute and they control your domain name. They control your email, your web presence, and your ability to be in business, all because of a $10 a year domain name.

Keep your old email address
You need to make sure that you keep the email address you used to set up the domain, so that as it comes up for expiration, you'll get notified. There's nothing worse than finding your site, and your business, are down because someone forgot to tell you to pay the registrar.

Of course they can't send you information for how to renew your domain if the only email address they have for you is you@yourexpireddomain.com.

Buy it for a long time
Getting a domain name for 10 years is cheap in the grand scheme of things. Heck, you can get 100 year registrations. If you buy it now, and tie it down for virtually forever, you'll never run the risk of it expiring when you aren't watching.

You figured .biz, .info, .us would work fine

bissellator — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:02:24 -0800

[This is part of a series I'm putting together for a talk at the OTBC about classic web blunders.]

Whose business are you promoting?
You've decided it's time to start that new company. You've got a name all picked out, let's call it Widget Co. Unfortunately, widget.com is taken. So are widgetco.com and widget-co.com. But, widgetco.biz is available.

So you buy the name, invest in business cards, letterhead and advertising. You get out and start networking, leaving voicemails, and talking to anyone who will listen about your company.

You don't know why that VP of Biz Dev you met at that chamber meeting never sent you that email he said he would send. You know the email with his product requirements so you could give him a proposal for his next big purchase.

Unfortunately, the guys who own widgetco.com are in pretty much the same work you are, and they start getting random hits on their website, and random phone calls for work they can do. And they get the email to sales@widgetco.com from that VP of Biz Dev, and THEY bid the work.

Make it easy
You're better off changing the name of your company than having a similar domain name to a competitor.

You don't want to use tricky misspellings that could become someone else's domain or overly long domain names. Real words are best, but go ahead and invent a word if you need to. It worked out pretty well for Verizon and Comcast.

What's after the Integrated Circuit?

bissellator — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:59:41 -0800

I was having this discussion on the plane with the guy in the seat next to me the other day. He "provides information to the intelligence community" and he had pretty sophisticated sounding set up to allow his people to work remotely. Of course, I've had the ability to use my machine at work from just about any computer I sit down at for years, but we'll let that slide.

His point was that computers have stagnated. His argument is that we went from tubes, to transistors, to integrated circuits and stopped there. And, perhaps that's true, although what they're doing with integrated circuits now is amazing compared to what we had in the 80's.

But, my point was the innovation is happening in other areas. Look at screen technology with high definition, or the stuff coming down the pipe like flexible LCDs. Or storage capacity...

The main place I think things are exciting is in how much information is zipping around and how you can have your main systems sitting someplace other than on your desktop. Web pages are something we almost take for granted, and forget that that page has to sit on a server someplace and that you need to be able to grab that information quickly through countless wires and switches.

I'm literally transferring gigabytes of data in the background today as I write this. I decided to sync up my music library at the office with the one on my home machine and found dozens of albums not in both places, so I just copy it over the Internet, probably about four gigs. Remember that 20 megabyte hard drive that would hold more information than you would ever need?

But then there's the fact that I can log into my machine at home from my phone, queue up some music and listen to it on my cell phone. Look how tiny that thing is that I hold in my hand, but where the technology that makes it all work is spread out all over the place.

Heck, just think about cell phones for a second. I've got a bluetooth device, which if I hit the button on the side of my ear, it will let me say a name, which is transmitted to my phone, which in turn dials a number to a big switching center someplace out over the airwaves. The amount of computing going on isn't limited to a single device, but the collection of devices that all act as a single unit.

Then there are Massive Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). That's a thing you could never do without the combined power of all the thousands of machines tied into a single game where everyone is sharing their processing, memory, and other local resources to tie into a big server that sends the game around the world in realtime.

I'm just surprised at how he could think that advances are slowing...

Intelligent life is out there (but it's bugger all down here on earth)

bissellator — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:04:30 -0800

I was skimming through the headlines on Google News and came across Paul Allen's latest spending exercise: the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) designed to look for signals from other stars. www.space.com/spacewatch/071011-seti-ata-inauguration.html.

Now, I'm a big sci-fi fan. I've run the SETI desktop application to help see if there are signals coming in from other stars, and I truly believe that life is not unique to our rock. What I'm beginning to believe, however, is that our definition of Intelligent Life is not out there.

Hell, I'm not sure we have even defined what Intelligence is down here.

I've found that so many of our assumptions and motivations are hardwired to our evolution, and that most of the things we strive for are based on keeping the species moving forward. Not just the species, but our little genetic niche of the species.

We're amazingly xenophobic, despite the desire to swim with dolphins, we're more likely to squish a spider or shoot a cougar. Anthropomorphism is a way to cope with our disdain for things that are different, and as soon as Sparky pulls his lips back and menaces our children, it's time to put him down; he's not the cuddly creature we thought he was.

Oh, and then there's that whole Catholic/Protestant/Moslem/Jew thing. If you've got the wrong skin or wrong belief system, you aren't even really human. We can justify indiscriminate killing for variations on the same foundation of faith.

I think one of the phrases I hear most often is, "I just don't understand..." If you don't understand your neighbor (and I can argue both sides of "can't" and "won't" on that topic), then how the hell are you going to understand the signals from a planet around another star with something that doesn't have anything in common with us?

Oh, and I'm not trying to say I'm somehow exempt from this understanding thing. There are plenty of people who, for the life of me, make NO SENSE whatsoever. I have to assume, on some logical plane, that they have a semblance of intelligence, but it doesn't reflect what I consider to be intelligence...

Then again, I'd rather see Paul Allen spending money on radio telescopes than the Blazers...

Subject Matter Experts Talking Other Subject Matter

bissellator — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:06:04 -0800

One of the titles I've given myself over the years is "Geek Translator." I'm pretty good at talking about the technology we develop at Conquent in business and marketing terms. Perhaps being the metaphor king helps. Even so, once you remove all the tech jargon, and maybe substitute a little business jargon, it's still tough to be able to get non-technical people to understand issues with technical delivery.

I do a lot of other kinds of translation, too. The print world talks entirely differently than the web world, the web world talks differently than the video world, the video world talks differently from the motion-animation world. All are visual media, but they all have their own jargon and ways of doing things.

A great project is one where everyone understands and respects each other's skills and challenges. If you have a web developer who speaks a smattering of print design, but he knows he's NOT a designer, your designer and web developer will get along great.

Traditionally the project manager has to be the translator. Then the project manager translates to the account manager, who in turn translates to the client. Things get lost in translation and work has to be redone, but if the creative person can't translate clearly directly to the client, there isn't much you can do about it.

Unless...

I envision a world where we cross pollinate language and skills more. The graphic designer needs a programmer "trail buddy" to bounce things off of, just as the programmer needs a designer to talk about stuff with. Think of a revolutionary cell network, where a programmer knows a web developer and a designer, and they're all constantly learning each other's language.

I've had this basic model at Conquent since the beginning. It makes everyone better at dealing with the different aspects of the project, and it makes everyone better at dealing directly with the client.

Ultimately I still believe that you need a person to be simultaneous project and account manager. Project management is it's own service, and coupled directly with the client, it can become much more of a communications focal point, and less of a top-down management model.

The Totalitarian Regime of Apple

bissellator — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:31:28 -0800

There's an article on CNET at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10011338-37.html entitled Apple boots $1,000 app from App Store. The gist of it is that Apple is being inconsistent and uncommunicative about removing programs from the store.

If you're not familiar with it, the App Store is where third party developers can sell their iPhone applications. The programs must first be approved by Apple and apple keeps 30% of the sale.

Obviously, they hold all the cards -- they own the hardware, the operating system, the development tools, and the distribution network. This is great from an old-school, IBM business model, but Apple doesn't sell to Lockheed Martin suits, Apple sells to the avant-guard, open source, artistic world.

Apple controls 70% of all digital music sold online and could control a quarter of all music sold in the world by 2012 (see http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2008/04/itunes_birthday). In a creative world where content and copyright philosophies are changing, it's appalling to see so much of the world's creativity locked up in one box.

It's a weird psychological twist. Here's the anti-establishment community saying "We want to build new ways of living and doing business -- where's my iPhone?" I can guarantee you that there would be a mob with torches and a battering ram if anyone other than Apple tried to pull Apple's crap.

Microsoft created a great, open platform. I can buy programs straight from the company that wrote them and I can use my own music software (and organize my files the way I want). The Windows environment created the PC revolution by encouraging innovation, which is why Mac is still only 5% of the desktop market.

Hell, Apple's very success with the iPod is because they were able to develop an interface on Windows. Microsoft doesn't make a dime off music sales through iTunes on Windows -- I seriously doubt Apple would have allowed that to be reversed.

My point is this: Apple is evil. And like anything completely evil, it's seductive. But get past the clean lines, the pretty interface and the "At least it isn't Microsoft" and fight the totalitarian regime.

To get further input on this idea, I also posted the question to my Linked in account as follows:

Why do creative, anti-establishment thinkers choose Mac?
Apple runs a totalitarian monoculture. It's more like IBM than Google. Hell, Microsoft is more like Google than Apple is like Google. And yet, with the App Store showing how they will at a whim remove software (for which developers paid to develop) and the meglomaniac control of music via iTunes, they continue to prove to be an anti-creative, anti-free thinking, anti-open development platform.

So why do open source, social networkers choose to be duped by the Corporation?

Some of those answers are included below.

Oversimplifying how people work

bissellator — Sat, 9 Aug 2008 08:29:02 -0800

I'm not a big fan of describing things in extremes, but, heck, I'll do it anyway.

There are two extremes in how people work. On one end you have the people who want very specific tasks which fit well within their skill set. No surprises, do the job, and you're done. On the other extreme, you have people who believe they can do ANYTHING and are constantly outside their existing skill set trying to learn new things.

I don't want to work with people in either of these extremes. Doing the assigned task is dull work and you while you don't get any bad surprises, you don't get any pleasant ones, either. You have to push your limits to learn and grow and make discoveries.

But, I hate working with the guy who thinks he can do anything because he constantly fails. You're always getting bad surprises with this person, and rarely pleasant surprises. Getting the job done sometimes requires finding someone who can actually do it. And one of the things this person never seems to learn is that there are some things you just aren't going to be good at.

Delivering creative services is a balance between being creative and actually delivering a product at the end of the day. I think the over confident, over creative type forgets about the day-to-day work involved in delivering, and the plodder forgets about pushing the boundaries and being creative.

crowdSPRING

bissellator — Fri, 8 Aug 2008 15:30:52 -0800

Carri got a note from @crowdSPRING in response to a posting on Twitter about needing a designer. She then forwarded the link to me -- www.crowdspring.com.

I took a peek at it, and posted to twitter that crowdSPRING wasn't going to do it for me as an employer. I was then pretty impressed that Angeline of crowdSPRING was trolling twitter well enough to not only find leads (Carri) but to see me talking about her company and followed up with me.

So I wrote her a nice email explaining what I didn't like about the service, which I'll elaborate on here.

The quick answer to what I didn't like is that "the kind of project you want to start" didn't have my kind of project. If I want web, I'm going to need more than a pretty picture, I need HTML (and actually, in my case, I need a Flash person).

The cateogries are extremely limited to

Graphic design
- Logo
- Logo AND Stationery
- Stationery (letterhead, business card, envelope)
- Illustration
- Print design
- PowerPoint

Web design
- Website (uncoded)
- Icons and Buttons
- Ad banner

Photography
- Custom photography
- Photo retouching

I believe it's commodity service as opposed to, say, Guru.com which is for much more custom development. But because it's so limited I'm going to be much more likely to use other services and not revisit crowdSPRING.

But then, there are lots of people out there who just need a logo and your service will probably work great for them. The caveat I posted was "as an employer" but for someone just starting their SoHo company, it's probably just fine.

Angeline
2008-08-08 16:23
Hi Michael!
I was going to reach out to your input via email, but as you've posted your thoughts in the Blog, I thought it'd be nice to comment here.

First off - I really hope they call you "The Bissellator." That's pretty amazing. My big bad wolf name at work is "Angelineasaurus Rex."

Okay, now that I've gotten that out of the way, here goes..

Thank you, thank you, thank you times a hundred for your input. Just so you (and the whole internet) know, we are an infant company. Our staff of 8 is very proud to have over 4,000+ creatives participating on our site's projects.

We call ourselves the creative marketplace because we have plans - big ones.

Eventually, we want crowdSPRING to be a place where you can get your entire web site (including Flash and coding), a commercial, music, basically anything creative. But - given our small staff, there are only so many hours in a day, and we want to work on making everything super stellar in the design area before branching out.

So, long story short - Thanks for mentioning us and checking us out! It's one more person that knows about us, and that makes me smile. Hopefully we'll be on our way to comprehensive creative service greatness.

Best of luck with your design search!

Traditional agencies vs. the 'new model'

bissellator — Thu, 7 Aug 2008 12:45:46 -0800

As we've been talking about the "new model" we keep talking about how the big, traditional agencies get all the big work. Here's a crude attempt at comparing my, personal view of traditional agencies with what I think we're heading towards.

First, traditional agencies:

In my little graphic I'm trying to illustrate the rigidity of the traditional agency model. The agency is a hierarchical model of staff through management.

Agencies are always chasing larger accounts. I've found it interesting that the value of a client often is based on the volume of money, not the quality of work or even the profitability of that client. ($3 million ad budget, $2.99 million in outside expenses. A hell of a good client!)

Once the client has been brought in, they are separated from the service providers by layers of management. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's rare for a competent, articulate graphic designer to have direct contact with the client they're working for -- that's the account manager's job and it's guarded closely.

Staff is hired for specific tasks, if the agency doesn't have the skills within, they contract it out -- internal staff is rarely given the chance to work on tasks other than what they were hired for.

Which brings me to the fluid, new agency model:

First off, clients should be measured on their needs and resources -- if you want to do meaningful, award winning work, you need to look at the WHOLE client.

Good "Management" is simply good communication. If the prepress guy is competent enough to explain why the posters aren't going to print right, let him through the gate and explain it. Good communication still needs to be managed, and the client is going to have to have a point of contact, but that point of contact doesn't have to guard the client like a eunuch in the palace harem, they just need to keep the information flowing clearly.

Finally, the ability to do a job shouldn't be determined by a title, it should be determined by your competency and ability to deliver. This works both ways -- if you're a topnotch provider, but you want to, say, go live in India for three months, that's okay, you can do less critical work.

This could either be an ad-hoc contractor model or an employee model. The advantage of an ad-hoc model is rapid scalability and flexibility; consider again the ability to downgrade your involvement (hard to do that once you're a manager in an agency).

I'm thinking we're heading for a hybrid, but this is very much an idea in evolution, and I'm being public with my process in an attempt to be innovative and get to the right answer. Any help in fleshing it out is more than welcome...

Creative Services for the New World

bissellator — Tue, 5 Aug 2008 14:31:15 -0800

As I keep exploring what I want to do with my next steps, I'm thinking a lot about how to bring together all the random, and not so random, creative energy that I see flowing around on the Internet, and the evolution of an ad hoc agency is forming in my mind.

There are two extremes for how people offer their services. The first is the JWT model of corporate agencies. Even the 10-15 person companies follow this model to some degree. You get cubbied into a box, and your workflow and process are at the whims of management. And there's a LOT of management -- creative directors, account managers, partners.

The large agency model attracts work, but it churns through people like the meat grinder that the Agency world is.

Then there is the independent contractor, otherwise known as the feast or famine model. As annoying as a creative director is, you get direction in an agency model, and you get cross fertilization from other disciplines.

Working alone tends to stagnate your skills, and you're so busy taking care of billing and getting new business, you don't have much time for anything other than the task at hand.

As for building new business, the only people who know you are people you already know -- you get work from word of mouth, repeat business or cold calling. The odds are slim to none that a decision maker will wake up one morning and say, "Hey! I need to hire so-and-so to do a project today!" And while social networking is changing this to some degree, the cacophony of voices gets in the way of your success.

Corporate decision makers know Wieden+Kennedy, JWT, and cmd. If they're an Intel or an HP, they're going to try branded agencies before some independent contractor.

I recently wrote a blog entitled It's the Brand, Baby. What I'm thinking now is that we need to create an umbrella brand -- if we can get 50-100 independent creative under the same brand, we can start generating some serious traction.

The problem is account management. If you have a bunch of independent contractors bringing together work, they all want to manage the client. But as a client evolves and needs more services (graphic design to web to photography to video to viral marketing), the initial contractor may not be the best person to manage the account.

In the independent world everyone is an account manager, but no one is. It's always the part time job of the designer, the writer, or whoever got the client. I want to find a way to provide account and project management services without causing a lot of agency friction with a group of independent, free thinking, individuals.

Account management is based on relationships, which means keeping involved with the client. Project management is resource management and requires a boss to make final decision and keep things on track, which is good for the client, good for the project, but can be painful for the creative-type.

There are lots of ways this model could be implemented. It could be completely virtual or it could have one big office space. Even if everyone signs off on using the brand, the question is to what extent, and how much variation are they allowed?

So, options may include

License the brand
Coop agency space
Social network style membership website
Project by project contracts

And there I stop... I need to talk with independent creative types to get an idea of what they want and what they can stomach. Again, ownership of the client, the tug of war of money... That's going to be tough.

Thoughts?

Reverse Anthropomorphism

bissellator — Mon, 4 Aug 2008 19:41:32 -0800

I came up with the term "reverse anthropomorphism" yesterday while writing about Time (click here to see that blog). The idea is that while we often put human traits on non human things, we also tend to adopt non-human traits.

I ended up asking the LinkedIn crowd what they thought and I got a number of great answers. D.L. Kirby responded with "Dehumanization" which, while good, it had a negative stigma that I was trying to avoid. I don't think that saying "the brain is like clockwork" or saying it works like a computer necessarily dehumanizes us.

I got a few responses for Objectify, or Objectification. On its own, the word works, but, again, I think that we have a lot of baggage with the word Objectification.

John Riutta suggested "antikemophism" which is a great word, with no baggage, but it kind of slides off the front of the brain. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much about the over intellectualization of the response -- you're not going to generate conversations with people about anthropomorphism at the truck stop.

Toby Younis suggested "anthromechanization" which in turn led me to Mechomorphism. I liked the psychology student's concept of "ratomorphism", but I think it only applies to people who emulate rats or machines. Now that's a hell of a a big topic to explore in our post modernist world....

Top honors go to Matthew Vaughn for "Emulation" which is by far the most appropriate word. It's exactly the right word, already exists with no other baggage. We emulate the Internet in our social networking structures.

After so many interesting twists and turns, "Emulation" is almost a letdown -- I mean, I wanted something NEW, something shiny this big, new world we're creating everyday. Isn't that what we do online? Create new words?

Ultimately I have to say it's a good thing to know that the English language still works for us, and we didn't have to make up a word to describe the changing (or maybe not so changing) world.

Update as of August 5
I just got the suggestion Xenopromorphization from Jeff Ello. Wow. Great word. Not nearly as boring as Emulation, no baggage, and worth a HUGE number of points in Scrabble.

I might have to revise the winner of the word!

The End of Time

bissellator — Mon, 4 Aug 2008 12:58:23 -0800

If I recall correctly, it was between 1500 and 1510 that Peter Henlein of Nuremberg, Germany, invented the spring-powered clock. This was an amazing invention, and allowed us to know the answer to "what time is it?" wherever we may be.

Its main benefit was to revolutionize navigation -- with reliable time and the sun or stars, you always know where you are, and a new era of exploration and trade began.

But as we entered the mid 1800's, we became obsessed with time. "Efficiency experts" were born, train schedules were invented, and soon after, we started punching the clock, figuratively and sometimes literally.

By mastering time, men (and I do mean men) became masters of the masses, making hundreds, then thousands, and eventually billions of people conform to the idea of "Getting to work on time", "Lunch Hours" and "Coffee Breaks."

Our lives are wound around the springs in Henlein's clocks, or, more likely synchronized to the timed pulses of electricity through quartz or silicon. Even our children have to keep detailed schedules, because we can't imagine a world that isn't structured by the hours in the day.

The Internet is built on these principles of time; it's all about latency measured in milliseconds and packets moving in mathematical harmony. But what's so ironic is that the effect of the Internet is to break down the very notion that things have to happen on a schedule, or have a purpose.

Email was first, and it's wonderful trans-temporal medium. We can now have conversations the way that Victorian gentry played chess by the mail. I can consider, and reconsider your point, write a response, retract it, and then write it again, all without you knowing. I might respond as soon as I get your message, I might wait a few hours, and it's all the same to you.

We have broken time.

I think humans have a tendency to practice "reverse anthropromorphization" that is, when humans take on the traits of objects or systems around us. We used to say the human mind worked like clockwork, now we say it works like a computer.

And now we're beginning to reflect the randomness of the Internet in our social models. Nothing happens to all of us at once, but it happens as the packets propagate through the network.

I've been online long enough to remember the dancing hamster site. And it came back to haunt me in the form of a singing greeting card. It's like an echo from the past. Ideas, photos, pleas for help, all continue like ghosts long after the initial "yop."

But this echo effect, this lack of temporal moorage, has opened up new ways of thinking for human beings. We expect instant access to information where before we had to wait on the library hours. At the same time, we expect that there will be a delay in responses from friends or social networks as we post things; we can put things out there, like this blog, and wait to see what happens, as opposed to being tied to the Monday issue of the paper.

There is no Monday issue, there is no construct of Time.

We now find ourselves in a point in time with events that have no agenda (such as http://www.barcamp.org), which brings us so close to events with no set time. Things happen when it's right, as they did before we measured time. And it's the Internet, based on the springs and gears of 16th century German science that is bringing us bring us back to the basic, tribal nature of living.

Better Living Through Twitter

bissellator — Fri, 1 Aug 2008 13:19:26 -0800

I've been playing around on Twitter, which is a tough thing to explain to people who don't play around on Twitter. It kind of reminds me of "prairie dogging" in corporate cubicle land -- that's where you stand up, head above the cube line, and throw a couple comments back and forth with another standing coworker.

Everyone sees your comments, but you don't necessarily know what everyone else's comments are about. Some things are interesting and pertinent to your world, but others are just random tidbits of someone's life (mmm... hot dogs...).

I've been asked "what's the point?" by people who don't live online, and honestly, I don't know that there is a point, any more than socializing with coworkers or business associates ever has a point. It's part of the human experience and it doesn't have to have a point.

It brings to light how much random energy is flowing. I was going to say "flowing through the Internet" but the Internet is just a communications medium for society as a whole. I think the Internet may amplify the energy, or at least give it a sense of focus. Note that I say "a sense of focus" -- really, there isn't much focus in our lives online, no matter what you want to think.

Not to sound to philosophical, but focus must come from within, and I'm in a generation, in a long line of generations, who are accustomed to being given focus from the outside. The idea that you need to find your own meaning in random bits of information is as old as the I Ching, but adapting the western mind to finding meaning is tough.

Of course, there's plenty that's meaningless -- well meaningless to you. Or maybe, meaningless to everyone. It's part of the human experience to simply exist and share with others, and that can be enough meaning.

The greatest part of the new model of social networking is that it's breaking down some of those barriers we built up in our post-modern world. We don't have to save it all up and remember we saw a man carrying a raccoon, we can shout it out, and everyone gets to know us a little better because of the weird shit we talk about all day.

I learned about the earthquake in Los Angeles via Twitter, and about the changes to the surface of Mars. I went to the community wireless event at the Lucky Lab last night because I saw it mentioned on Twitter.

I think the "point" is to enrich your experience as you go through life. It might be business, it might be social, it might just be vicarious living. No matter what, it's about doing more than getting up, going to work, and going home -- however you find that is up to you, but I think the tools are getting better to help us all do that.

Lessons Learned From Apple

bissellator — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:22:33 -0800

I was forwarded this story: How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong

Interesting story... There are really two stories in there, one which talks about Jobs' management style, and the other that talks about the idea of how much you keep secret and how much you share as you go.

On a management side, I agree that, ultimately, any project needs to have a boss, a "decider", a deus ex machina, or some person with ultimate power to say, "Okay, you've all had your say, and we're going to do it this way." Design by committee shows, and decisions by committee are always diluted and rarely let the true visionary shine. But you don't have to be an asshole to do that, and anyone who thinks he has all the answers is usually wrong.

What makes Jobs different is that he seems to actually have the answers, and his vision works. But what's going to happen to Apple after Jobs moves on is what I think I see happening to Microsoft now that Bill has settled down with Melinda and started doing charity work. The vision will be lost, and the R&D infrastructure won't survive without a visionary tyrant.

But the other story about Apple is the secrecy outside the company, and I feel that's their marketing genius. They've built an elitist culture that makes people want to get in and keeping secrets is a great way to create buzz (my example of the Ginger cum Segway hype). As long as you're turning out a great product to fulfill the promise, then, great. But then then Segway hasn't exactly lived up to its original hype...

Secrecy also let's you hide your failures. Microsoft might have done better if they hadn't touted Vista so loudly, then missed release after release, only to give us the bloated beast they did finally bring to market. I have to wonder how many of those kinds of projects have been smothered in the crib at Apple, saving face and making Jobs look more infallible than he probably is.

So, the lessons to learn from this?

If you have a visionary, let him lead and live with his eccentricities.
Marketing is always hype, and secrecy is a tool for that hype.
Anything can backfire, but arrogance backfires bigger if you fail.

Or, at least that's what I believe... I don't exactly make the richest people list in Forbes...

It's the Brand, Baby

bissellator — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:38:00 -0800

I really believe that we can build a sexy brand that people love, evangelize, and want to be part of. I don't even care what the product is, but I've attracted a lot of amazing talent over the years with a mediocre business model, hardly any pay, and an unfocused brand.

It's my belief in the "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" and that the human experience is a hell of a lot more than sitting in a cube and doing linear work that attracts people to Conquent. I've got a hip work ethic, and a boring business model supporting bunch of dull clients.

So, let's take the kernel of what gets me up in the middle of the night to hammer on my keyboard and dissect the problems.

Old School and New Media
There are basically two kinds of companies online. There are the new media companies like Google and Facebook. Heck, throw in Yahoo and MSN while we're at it.

These companies succeed as maverick, explosive growth, edgy companies. While traditional business looks at the Facebook model, they look at it the way you look at a concept car at an auto show -- it's cool as hell, but you won't ever drive the thing.

The credible companies online are credible because of their offline presence. I'm talking traditional news outlets like CNN and The New York Times. They lean heavily on their old school practices and existing infrastructure.

Merging old school and new media hasn't worked very well for companies like Time Warner (and they're partly a tech company), although it's hard to say what's what in the corporate ownership game these days.

I have always tried to bring new media to old school companies. And it doesn't work. Old School companies have to be ready to change, and as soon as you shine the brilliant light of the internet into the mausoleum that is traditional business, the skeletons start to get ugly and you get dragged down into the pit.

Okay, maybe a bit too colorful of a metaphor, but the reality is that I've allowed my clients to set the standard of work for my company, and that has got to change. Yet, I still have to make money. So, I need to attract clients who are really ready to make the jump into the new world.

It's the brand, baby
We've talked about Apple with their amazing strategy of perfection and secrecy to create an elite brand. We know Nike (anyone who succeeds in getting people to get a tattoo of their logo is doing a hell of a job), and then there are cult things like PBR (be prepared to watch it disappear now that Miller owns them) and the fashion/music/Hollywood world where the brand is all there is.

I think what's got me inspired right now is Barack Obama. This man is succeeding because he's built a brand that's hip and encourages hip people to play. It's simultaneously the most old-school, grey suited product (federal politics) and the sexiest power position on the planet.

Anyone can understand the outcome, but you can play in so many ways. Bumper stickers and yard signs be damned, we're talking ring tones, social networks, micro donations, and easy access to the process.

Moving forward
We need that ONE thing people understand. Something sexy, but easy to understand. Something cool, which can be used by anyone. We need to use it as the evangelical point. We need a follow up.

We need a way to get people involved beyond using the thing. We need them to buy into the collaborative, mobile, mentality. We're living in the future right now, and we need to open up as many of those mausoleums as we can and clean some dust out of the brains of our peers.

New media tools aren't making us dumb, they're making us think differently. We have instant access to the sum of human knowledge. Well, some of us do.

So my core philosophy is to get everyone in the mix, find a way to organize their blogs, their communities, their business propositions, and learn what we have at the end of the today, and then see what we have when we wake up in the morning.

Business Architecture vs. Web Construction

bissellator — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:15:00 -0800

Conquent's prospects are looking for someone to build complex websites. Unfortunately, that means we compete with tool users for construction jobs, when what we really do is more architectural.

The process is completely backwards in this business. People come to me looking for a technological solution before they figure out the details of what they want to say. Let alone a core business philosophy to drive the company.

Think of it this way -- you hire someone to build a great restaurant for you in a bucolic setting. You know you don't have sewer or water, but you figure once the restaurant is up and running you'll be able to pay to have it hooked up. Oh, and you don't know how to cook.

If I'm just the builder, I don't have the opportunity to review your credentials, business plan, or, really, check out your story. Now, I'm stuck telling you that there's no way I can finish the job because we can't hook up the plumbing, which you assured me would be there.

Not only that, as I work with you, I slowly lose faith that you can even make a restaurant work as I learn how little of your plan actually exists. This makes it harder to get the crew excited enough to come up with innovative ideas to work around the problems, and the project is likely to wither.

Oh, and then there's the expectation that the painter will be able to fix your plumbing problem, but let's leave that aside...

The flaw with the entrepreneurial market is that inexperience and seat of the pants development is the norm, to the point that a 23 year old kid is offered millions for an untested technology. The bank wouldn't loan someone with no restaurant experience money, but the VC and Angel world still hands money out to techies with no business experience and little resume.

What's worse is how people invest their own money, and their relatives' money, into tech companies with no tech people. That's where Conquent has come in many times -- we get hired to actually build the vague idea that the non-technical, non-business person has talked other non-technical, non-business friends and family out of money.

So, the unanswered question sits on my desk: how do I position my company on the front end of the process, helping people design their businesses before they go down technical dead ends?

On Truth

bissellator — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:35:32 -0800

Seeing as I'm starting this thing out, I figured I should dredge up this old posting from my Myspace page http://www.myspace.com/bissellator as a statement of the fact that anything I may post here may or may not be true...

The problem with human communication is that it's fluid, not absolute.

What I say today may feel absolutely true at this moment, but what I say tomorrow may contradict today's statement. I don't care if this is emotional communication (like between friends or lovers) or if it's business communication.

Granted, if you keep track, try to look at some sort of drift check, then maybe you can discern from your own statements what you believe. Or rather, what you profess to believe.

But the problem rests in that very word. Belief. Beliefs, despite what we'd like to, er, believe, are transitory. Sometimes beliefs take time to morph; obviously what I believe about what the world is has changed since I was five -- new information has come along.

Aside from facts, we end up with emotional content. What I believe about the integrity of a person may morph over time simply from repetitive experience. Or it might be augmented by something baser like they smell bad. Stupid, theoretically dismissible, but that wad of dog crap wedged in their shoe may woo my opinion from Good to Bad.

Unfortunately, these influences are often subtler than that (Because, said Scrooge, a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!) You don't always know why you form an opinion or take an action, but more often than not, it's not a logical decision.

And I don't think that's all that bad. We have to be human, after all, and part of the human condition is being wooed by our organic nature. I believe it's that randomness that adds a sense of mystery and wonder to the world, but at the same time, it can't be the only thing that runs our lives...

No answers, just a ramble...

Inverse Peter Principle

bissellator — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 12:00:00 -0800

We're dealing with a problem vendor at work. He's an old hand at what he does, and at one time probably did know more than anyone else in the business. But the industry continues to change and he is dead certain that he's still right, even without checking. Steve and I were talking about this, and it seems that this is a variation on an old business theme.

The "Peter Principle" refers to someone who is promoted JUST outside of their ability. The theory is that if you do a good job in a big company, then you get promoted. If you do a good job in your new position, you get promoted again. Until you finally get promoted to a point where you can't really do a very good job, so you stop getting promoted AND you're doing a crappy job.

So, you have someone who did a fantastic job for the company promoted until they're not only not doing the job they were good at, but doing a bad job in your new position, doubling your liability and killing your company because you wanted to reward a good worker.

But, this is something different. This guy was on top of his game, and then the game changed. It's sort of the inverse Peter Principle. If you're really good at something, eventually things will change around you and (if you don't change) you won't be good at it anymore.

Or maybe it's more of task obsolescence. Not the whole job, like a blacksmith or a steamship captain or Fortran Programmer. It's that pieces of your job aren't applicable anymore. So your job is still there, but your skills don't apply. Which means you're no longer suited for the job that you were once the king of.

And that has got to hurt. Deeply. I never want to end up in that place, and I think as the Boomers age, we're going to see a lot of people ending up there. They still gotta work, they built careers on being whiz kids, but they just aren't anymore.

So the question in my mind is, is it a choice? I think it is, but I don't know what choices lead to this. Some of it is life choices (I'd rather live my life than grind at my job and learn more), some of it is simple arrogance (I've explained this so many times that I'm not even going to discuss it anymore, and therefore not learn when I'm suddenly wrong).

But some of it is biology. I'm slowing down a little, and I'm just 40. How do you avoid that? Once the ulcer kicks in the coffee doesn't make it as a top choice... diet and exercise while living the good life (or meeting with clients all the time) gets to be a tricky tightrope walk (but that's choices again).

Well, damnit, at least I know I'm right about this. (I hope)

Random Knowledge

bissellator — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 12:00:00 -0800

I'm a knowledge junkie, or maybe just and information junkie. Well, probably not just information. I hate sitting around watching the news, current events are usually too fleeting to really catch my attention for long.

But I love to learn new things. It's one of the reasons I'm in the profession I am. Sure, there's the aspect of the ever changing face of technology, but I also get to learn about other people's businesses and therefore whole new areas of knowledge I never knew existed.

In the last eight years running Conquent, I've had the challenge/opportunity to pitch to such enormous entities as Microsoft and the US Department of Transportation (really when you get the politics in it and I'm talking with senatorial staffers, it's kinda like pitching to the US Government in general). DOT got me to DC which was amazing, Microsoft got me to the Microsoft campus, which is also amazing, but in a very different, and more disturbing way.

I've worked with Allergan to track Botox insurance policies (not for the face, for the spasms and migraines, mind you). I've worked through a client to work with Herbalife as they changed hands from a family company to a ex-Disney executive team (THAT was a lesson in corporate management).

I've learned about the world of manufacturer's reps, electrical engineering, artistic rubber stamps, the production of fine wine, auto shops, franchising in general, customer service software, land use planning, clean room manufacturing, copier repair, railroad crossing materials, opera, multi level marketing, dentistry, surrogates and egg donors, tractors, naval swell predictions, and... the list keeps going.

Then there's my personal time online. I surf to the strangest places, finding things like a spoof of Pulp's "Common People", a popular description of the formation of black holes in the center of galaxies, pictures from the mars rovers, tech news, regular news, satellite photos... Because of watching Torchwood, I pulled up Cardiff on Google Maps and explored the city a little from 1,500 feet. It's funny when you start recognizing places you've never been.

What I do with this odd collection of business, personal and pop knowledge is beyond me. It does mean that I can hold my own in just about any conversational situation. I can talk about hair products or astrophysics, and I find either topic to be interesting, depending on the give and take of the conversationalist.

What I have learned for certain is that no one knows all the bits and pieces I know. But, as it turns out, no one knows all the bits and pieces you know either. We're all picking up random bits of knowledge as we go. Some people go broad, others go deep, some of us go deep and wide.

And it's that randomness that makes us what we are. As a culture we keep trying to define what people need to learn, and by omission, what they don't need to know. It's that omission that's so dangerous. It often seems that that odd, cross fertilization (pasta from China, the number zero from Arabia) is what ends up making life worth living or gives everyone a huge boost to new areas they never dreamed of.

No conclusions, just a random bit...

The Hive

bissellator — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0800

[this is a repost of a blog I put on Myspace back in 2006]

There's this great article in this month's Atlantic Monthly about Wikipedia.

I bring it up here because a big part of my being on MySpace is exploring how the Internet is changing the way humans think. Or at least how we learn.

For example, before Google, you needed tons of books to do the kind of work I do. You'd get the book on progamming language "A", the "Tips and Tricks" book for some quick examples, the 500 page book you got because there was this one section, maybe two pages long, that explained EXACTLY how to do something you wanted to do.

But now you just Google it. And, if you're any good at putting your keywords together, you get an answer almost intantly.

Wiki is more abstract, but still amazing. I was out in Redmond, Oregon, a couple weeks back for a wedding. At the little resort community, in the middle of nowhere, there was a mini-auto show for Pierce-Arrow autos. Well, I'm looking at this 1904 bicycle that the company made, and there's a schrader valve sticking out of the rim.

"Schrader valve?" I ask the guy. "Weren't those introduced later?"

He didn't know. So, I pull out my Palm Treo, pop online (I had digital signal in the desert), look up "schrader valve" on Wiki, get the page for Shreader Valve, follow the link for the whole background August Schrader and find that the valve was invented in 1891 and in wide use by the time the bike I was looking at was around.

The fact that I can get that level of information in the middle of butt-nowhere, and give an accurate, relevant detail to someone who, in theory, is an expert, is absolutely amazing to me.

So, this MySpace thing... within a couple days of setting up a MySpace page, a friend finds me out of the blue. BAM, she was bored, and she set up a page and then started searching for all her friends. Within days of me... No corrolation, just the way it worked out.

Where Wiki is for the collection of interesting information, MySpace is the random gut of the Internet. We'll see what happens with it next...