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7/29/2005 15:27
I'm getting excited to go to the Blog Business Summit August 17-19 in San Francisco. There's an all-star lineup of speakers (yours trulyneeds a new photo pretty badly! She has had many much needed haircuts since, thank goodness!). Tara will be there, too. I'm thrilled to be speaking on a panel with Robert Scoble. We shared a slice of cheese from his birthday at the last Blog Business Summit in January. He actually brought a wheel of it into the reception in his backpack. What a hoot. I'm looking forward to a good exchange of ideas on stage this time. (If you have any questions for Robert, let me know.) If you'd like to get a reduced rate ticket to the event, simply go here to register. I think they're still honoring the reduced rate. Marqui is a sponsor, so it's a benefit we're able to offer Our Dear Readers. I hope to see you in SFO.
7/27/2005 13:39
I had a great time this morning participating in a panel on the future of publishing. My hosts for the morning at SFU's Harbor Centre (wow - talk about a beautiful setting) were Robert Ouimet and Emma Payne of at large media. Go. Read their bios. They're extremely impressive people, facilitating a fascinating conversation about blogging and branding. My co-presenters were equally impressive. In alphabetical order by first name (which has never been an issue for me, as I've spent my whole life as Janet Johnson; but which is also my excuse for never understanding how to organize and file properly): Arieanna Foley, Blogaholics Consulting - young, impressive, grabbing a huge opportunity for herself by writing more than ten blogs and consulting with businesses about them. She's one year out of college - keep an eye on her. Ben Garfinkel, Industrial Brand Creative - smart, creative and generous in actions and spirit - he really 'gets' how the brand has evolved through all communications media, and his clients undoutably enjoy the benefits. Eric Karjaluoto, SmashLab - extremely funny, and experiencing the power of viral marketing firsthand with his new ad campaign. (warning: I gasped when I saw their site load (pardon the euphamism - then immediately had to pass the URL on...) Take the time to look around at their other client work - it's not all edgy! Kris Krug, bryght - who embodies that rare mixture of geeksmart and social. He's also a photographer, author and talented speaker. I look forward to seeing him (and having more time to talk, I hope) at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco in August. I was honored to talk with the people in the room about the results we've experienced at Marqui through entering the blogosphere, and lessons learned. I am constantly challenged by questions, observations and thoughts provoked in these encounters. And the more I am exposed to these conversations, the more I realize that the future of publishing is here - and that only those who refuse to enter into the conversations will lose.
7/26/2005 10:02
I am very fortunate to be able to be in beautiful Vancouver, BC today and tomorrow. What a gorgeous city. I'm here to spend time in our Vancouver office, hanging with the technical wizards at Marqui. Tomorrow, I'm fortunate to be participating on a panel covering The Future of Publishing at SFU. It should be very interesting to be able to spend three hours discussing the notion of how brands and publishing are changing with the proliferation of online conversations (blogging and podcasting) and (dare I say convergence) of mobile devices connecting millions to the conversations. Carrie-May Siggins of The Tyee (a Fiesty One Online) wrote an interesting article in which I was quoted yesterday about ethics of paying bloggers - called Tainted Love (o o o oh). It was well researched and written, and what a great title! I still have the song stuck in my head.
7/26/2005 9:47
You gotta love companies that take something as bland and irritating as a 404 error page and do something fun with it. For instance, while browsing Technorati yesterday, I accidentally typed an extra character in the URL. Instead of getting the standard "page not found" message, I got: "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that." Very clever. This got me wondering whether there are other interesting 404 pages lurking about, and guess what? There are entire Web sites devoted to this topic. For instance, there is the 404 Research Lab (warning: some of the links on this site are R-rated, but many of the 404 pages are pretty funny). And a simple Google search yields dozens of discussions on the topic. The reason I bring this up? Companies could be missing a great opportunity to communicate with site visitors by "neglecting" their 404 page. Some of the suggestions I found on the 404 Research site include: *Encourage people to go somewhere other than back by providing links to key pages on the site. *Include a search box to search the site. *List the links on the site that are similar to what was entered, in order to guess what the visitor was looking for. The point being to keep people on the site and/or drive them to pages you want them to visit. Marqui will be revamping its Web site in the next few weeks, so it'll be interesting to see what we can cook up along these lines...
7/21/2005 15:44
Yep, it's that little red box (a.k.a. a "chicklet") under the list of recent entries. In theory, FeedCount will help Janet and I track how many folks are subscribing to our RSS feeds. It's one of the many services available through FeedBurner, a company that specializes in helping folks make the most of RSS. Of course, I've only started digging into what FeedBurner has to offer and I currently understand maybe 60% of the info on the company's Web site (can you say geek speak?), so stay tuned for more on this later. I'll try to decipher as much as I can...
7/21/2005 12:26
Funny, I just popped into Janet's office to tell her I was blogging about that MarketingSherpa copyright article, only to find she'd beaten me to the punch. Great minds think alike, I guess...only she seems to think a bit faster! At any rate, this is just a quick post to say Flackster is at it again. Michael O'Connor Clarke has posted his latest and greatest on the Seven Deadly Agency Types: If It Moves, Bill It. Bottom line: Agencies, knock off those smarmy billing practices. Clients, make sure you are keeping an eye on those invoices and think twice before you spend 45 minutes chatting up your account team about the weather.
7/21/2005 10:43
I read an article on MarketingSherpa today about re-blogging. In it, the author, Anne Holland said:
"...recently I've begun to see an ugly trend emerging. Bloggers have begun cutting and pasting the entire text of our articles in their blogs. Sometimes it appears as though they wrote the article, sometimes they give a little credit "from MarketingSherpa." Either way, I have to contact them with a little cease-and-desist note or risk losing the intellectual property that our company is built on...."I've always said there's a light side and a dark side to the blogosphere. But that it's also self-cleansing, which is essential to the integrity of the whole thing. C'mon, people. Proper attribution and the courtesy to wrap your own thoughts around the essence of any article is mandatory. There are too many tools and honest people out there to ever think you'll get away with fraud. In fact, a dear friend in the blogosphere, Meryl passed along a great idea that I'd like to share with everyone. It's a site called Change This. And they believe good ideas will spread, because people are optimists (and basically good). Take the time to go have a look. Be optimistic. And above all, be honest.
7/19/2005 9:22
For those of you who haven't heard, PR Newswire just introduced its new media measurement service, MediaSense. According to the web site, MediaSense delivers "easy to interpret reports that provide a comprehensive analysis of your media coverage." It reports volume, tone and overall quality of coverage, share of coverage, presence of key messages, advertising equivalency value and more. Reports are delivered monthly, with a total cost of $2,500/quarter for the basic package. (A full year of basic reports is $8,500.) This sounds very similar to services already offered by Delahaye and Burrelles, although at first glance it appears to be a significantly cheaper option. Of course, the "basic package" is probably nowhere near as comprehensive as, say, the Delahaye reports, which are fabulous...but pretty pricey. So, for organizations with a more modest budget, PR Newswire might be the way to go. Once I have an opportunity to test MediaSense out, I will certainly report back on the results.
7/15/2005 15:53
Stewart Butterfield Flickr/Yahoo Flickr was started year and a half ago - recently acquired by Yahoo. He got into the internet because he was a "phish-head." He got really into it because of the instant accessibility of information on the net. He became an addict after learning HTML and making web sites work. His world really got rocked when 'I find my people.' The ability to build connections was very very cool to him. Rigid design constraints can foster creativity. Try designing a web page under 5k. He showed a bunch of cool math tricks representing bits and nodes - mathematically. But you have more than 240,960 (?) possibilities in that constraint.
Design is the successive application of constraints until only a unique product is left. - Richard PewAs we learned what was possible, possibilities exponentially exploded - over time in designing for the web. Contstraints, though, are everywhere creativity happen. Music has meters and keys. Architecture has load requirements, poetry has rhyming schemes. Experimentation and creativity usually means playing with constraints. Eunoia - Christian Bok - Book where each chapter only contained words which have one vowel. Another wow think of that constraint - he read a passage from his favorite chapter, "E." Flickr - introduced a feature called show slideshows that 'tag photos' and allow you to make a slide show based on tags. It will deliver a slide show, for example, of round photos. People are now spontaneously choosing constraints (the tags) and making shows of them. Then a guy (out of LA) took all the round photos and put them together into a round (mathematically derived somehow) mosaic of all of them. One of his slides said, what works, you feel. This was beautiful. Play - Children play quite naturally. They rarely stop playing until the instinct is squashed. As adults, we rarely play. But kids will play to the edge of their constraints.
Play is the exultation of the possible. - Martin Breuer (? - sorry)The web is our global playground.
7/15/2005 15:14
Wow. This was a great presentation at WebVisions 2005 on why simplicity in design matters. I hope the notes translate well. BJ Fogg Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab What People Love, Inc. Why Simplicity Matters – he had great, beautiful slides - nary a word on them. He told a story about being at SeaWorld, "Watching operant conditioning" with fish. As they were going home, they were heading up I-5 – and he watched a truck turning in front of them. He knew they were going to smash into the truck. He was immediately surprised by noise and jarring – more than he'd imagine. The first thing that went through his mind – before anything else, was Ctrl-Z (for those of us who use a keyboard, that is the keystoke combination for undo.) Lesson: The tools we use change us. Ctrl-Z was an instinct to him at that moment. He knew a ballerina once, well enough to see her toes. Ballerina shoes had deformed her toes. We're at a pivot point in the world. We're replacing roles that kings, bishops, shamans, etc. used to play. People shaping technology are reshaping the rituals of today and of the future. As we design systems, we need to look at the impacts we can have in the world. Fascinated that computers can change beliefs and behaviours. Became concerned – now says how computers can manipulate people. Power behind design is like fire – it can be used to warm, shed light, or can be destructive - torturous. State of computing today is like a slow torture. How many hours / month do you spend solving computer problems? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we didn't have to spend one minute working on problems with our digital products? The digital products we create today will shape the future of the planet. He showed a cute video he'd made about a Monkey trying to find the weather on Saturday for a picnic. He went to his nagging computer – ... Microsoft updates are available… ... you have a message from Brittany spears… ... you should archive your files… ... you should check for viruses… He says no for all the nags. he left the session knowing the weather, but feeling poked, prodded and nagged by his computer. Notes on computer / human interaction: Frustration: that feeling that we get when something is harder to do than we think it should be. Along with it comes powerlessness and resentment. Those feelings spill to the brand of the company making it hard. Delight: benefits go well beyond the cost Satisfaction: Costs and benefits are even. Stay out of the frustration corner. Reduce tasks to the bare minimum. Design for simplicity. Why? 1) We're lazy – we're born to be efficient. Hardwired to be lazy. (shot of lion sleeping) 2) We have limited abilities. 40% of American adults are either illiterate of semi-literate. Wow. These are people who don't have limited opportunities… or didn't work hard. They simply can't read or write effectively. 3) We are busy. We don't have tolerance for not getting things done. 4) Simplicity sells. Google, Netflix, consumer products world are way ahead of technology companies. Solve for focused needs. What are the problems people are having, and how can we solve them? 5) Inclusiveness is imperative. Excluding people is unfair. 6) We free people through designing for simplicity. Ride the extra energy they have. 7) Radical simplicity is a relatively untouched field. We have plenty of opportunity here. Benefits of designing with simplicity: 1) Learning – as you learn more, the costs go down. You can introduce fun or entertainment, which makes the costs come down. People love a sense of growing competency. That's the secret sauce in the gaming world – immediate feedback that you're getting better. Gratitude is ‘healthiest emotion you can feel.' What's getting in our way of designing for simplicity? Standing still on your hands is 5x harder than walking on hands – because you can fudge to stay up. You have to get everything just right to just stand simply on your hands. 2) Simplicity is brittle. Manufacturing product changes in – challenge in designing systems to preserve the design. 3) Benefits are fickle – what people feel are benefits change quickly based on these costs: time/physical resources/money/cognitive load What do you have the least of? Depends on where you are in your life. Individual costs are individual, and designing to those scarce resources and costs are 5x harder - which is why fewer people are doing it. Avocates of Radical Simplicity 1) Research – boil it down to something you can get a hold of. a. “I just want to get a phone that makes phone calls� b. Women, seniors are different from young male engineers who are generally creating technology. 2) Empathy – it's a quality you can develop with practice – the #1 quality he wishes from his design students at Stanford. If you have great empathy, you can go a little lighter in the research phase of design. 3) Courage – don't be afraid to say no. Too many people just jump at “we can add this feature!� Everything should be data driven. Add features only when they're data driven. Every feature you add or element you add to your product or website adds to your risk of failure. Start each day asking yourself: What is my true north, what are my values? What do I do best? Focus on those things as you do your work. Simplicity will follow.
7/15/2005 12:57
Back again from Webvisions 2005 - and this time I'll link here to the event page. I'm now going to listen to DL Byron speak about Blogging Your Portfolio - how designers can use blogs to get the word out about their serives. Byron is an "A-List" blogger, a creator of the Clip-n-Seal which is an awesome storage product (seal your chips) and has launched through blogging (if the shuttle ever gets off the ground, they'll be on it), and all around very nice guy. My hope is that I can blog this presentation more effectively than the last, and that someone, somewhere will be grateful that I did. Publish and Prosper from New Riders is a new book he's writing that's due out in the fall. Google loves blogs because they're fresh, have lots of links, and are easily indexed. You're going to be higher in Google indexes and easier to find. He started Pug Blog and it went to #1 on Google in seven days. Check out the pugcast there. Not blogging now? You should be... Open it up to be easily found, indexed, syndicated, commented - like a snowball. You blog on something, someone else blogs on it, someone else picks it up, everyone links together, and it'll be like a snowball. Find your passion and talk about it. It's all coming back to content... back in the beginning of the web, it was black text, white background, and blue links. Now, through RSS, it's back to black text, white background, and blue links. So make your content compelling. People will experience your content before they experience your brand. Wow. Think about that. Writing style is part of your design now. Differentiation in blogging: you can blog without really trying. Or study well-designed blogs. (We've written about the dearth of them here.) Here's a beauty he showed. His slides are up on sampleblog.com. Go have a look. They're very good.
Q. About personal information on the blog? He has a personal blog, but he rarely puts personal information on his corporate blog. What is your blog about? Is it personal or business? Byron is a business blogger - and he has to be very careful to position his blogs as business communication.Lots of ethical debate about paying bloggers, faking blogs, etc. If you're going to be out there, you're going to be spotted. If you want good Google juice, pay attention to what you write?
Q. What are you writing on your blog vs. what you write on your web site? Microsoft's bloggers put a face to the company - with Clip-n-Seal, we talk about what we're doing. Going through the patent process, etc. and it shows people we're small, we're designers, and we love what we do. Let's talk about what we do with the product - we landed a plastics manufacturer...Byron makes an example of Astericks Design and a company who's done a great job of blogging his portfolio. Byron says bloggers are the new rockstars. Daring Fireball is an example of a blogger who's blogging to make money. Another good example is Tour de France. Apparently the tdfblogger makes enough money on his blog to pay his mortgage and car payment. He's a posting maniac. Byron is calling Trackbacks "crackbacks" - because of all the spammers who've started spamming them. (We're getting inundated with trackback spam here - and I'm very frustrated with it.) Apparently MT is especially vulnerable to trackback SPAM. You have to touch every one of the trackbacks to ban the IP addresses. Boeing is going to start screening every comment. On his Clip-n-Seal site, Byron doesn't allow comments. Because of the SPAM. He doesn't want any comments about porn or casinos to affect his visitors.
Skeptic in the audience: I'm bored with blogs. Byron: You're right, maybe 99% of the stuff out there is crap. But let me make the case for passionate writing. Haydn Trumpets knows trumpets. The owner is passionate about what he does, and there's a lot to know about trumpets. He's offering a small community of people (trumpeters) a place to go in order to learn more.Boeing launched their blog on the same day Airbus launched their jumbo giant plane. They wanted to turn the attention back to what Boeing is doing. It worked. It turned attention to what they were developing. It shows they have really smart people working there, it's a brand experience about Boeing. Some design blog links are up in his presentation. Click on the picture or links and you'll go right there. I liked Airbag a lot. Weightshift was a great example of a blog that looks just like a website, allows comments and has RSS built-in. Good blog design is good for content. Always have an About page. Building an audience: A guy videotaped himself driving for four hours in the car with Abba's Dancing Queen playing. People picked it up - memed it (people passed it around ) and it inundated his site. He drove so much traffic to his site that he sold tons of his own product.
7/15/2005 11:19
I'm at the Webvisions 2005 conference, listening to a panel talking about the future of content. The conference is filled with web designers and developers, and is in Portland, OR. The energy is good, and the conference organizers should be proud. I'm happy to share my notes - as incoherent as they might be, just because it's fun to share 'as it happens' - an opportunity which is now open as a result of the blogosphere. Webvisions 2005 Future of Content Panelists Nick Finck (nickfink.com) Molly (molly.com) Keith Robinson (Asterisk) Kevin Smokler (kevinsmokler.com) What is content? We're trying to communicate a message. Content is whatever that message is. People get the medium mixed up with the message. This can be confusing because enabling technology is not content. Format is different – from blogs to podcasts to flash – they're all delivery technologies. Content is not color or font – the non-graphical information on a web site. Discussion around blogging and web site and technology that facilitate them. 99% of users don't recognize the technology around content. Flickr and de.li.cio.us – great examples of enabling technologies. Users should not care how they get their information. They care about the content. RSS: if we have content, and a feed is available, people in the industry know what it means, but real users don't know what that means. Be careful to remember who we're serving and the way they think/ consume content. Definition of RSS: smokler – imagine a window on your desktop that will allow you to get updated results from web sites you visit regularly – without going there. Two-way messages with content. One of the beauties of today's environment is that global conversations are being facilitated much more easily. Being extended across the network, and using multiple media. Global, multifaceted conversations. There is a blurring between experience and meaning – people in technology have that blur. Delicious is an information site designed by engineers and used by everyone else. Molly uses it like a drive-by to store ideas (side blogs, etc.). Tagging content – social networking sites – user-defined content. Phenomenon of passive benefit – every user adds things for selfish reasons, but the aggregation of the information benefits everyone. If you've got a group of users needing to share information, consider using one of the social networking sites like flickr or delicious. Content vs. information… is there a distinction? Or does it matter? Designing for content Today we are using many means of expressing ourselves through the network. Through podcasting, blogging, RSS feeds, web sites. Design without content is backwards. Clients and designers should collaborate for the best design based on content. Good idea for designers to do a "content brief" in addition to a "creative brief." Ask why someone is looking for a new blog, a new website? Do devices affect content? Must make content editing decisions... With RSS being able to be accessed by phones, it's important that the content first tagged on your story or your site is relevant. Content is the #1 way to optimize for search. Amen. Not design, not usability, just content. Relevant or irrelevant post? Let me know.
7/13/2005 12:13
...and this time it's in San Francisco from August 17-19, 2005. Marqui was a big supporter of the first Summit and we've signed on for this one as well. Janet and I will both be there, so anyone planning to attend should stop by and say hello. Haven't signed up yet? Friends of Marqui get a discount and a special registration page. Click here to register! Can't make the show? We'll be blogging live from the event, so visit Marqui's World for recaps and commentary about the sessions.
July 7, 2005
As some of you may recall, I posted a little rant a while back about wire services. I raised the question as to whether or not it made sense for smaller, private organizations to bother using the big name services (i.e., Business Wire and PR Newswire) given the high cost and seemingly marginal results. So, I embarked on a little experiment and compared the four primary services: PR Newswire, Business Wire, PrimeZone and Market Wire. I also took a look at what happens using no service at all.
Now, before I dive into the results, let me briefly explain my methodology. It was pretty simple -- I wired press releases using each service and then compared them based on cost, ease-of-use, reporting capabilities and overall impact. A little disclaimer here: I couldn't exactly wire the same exact release on the same exact day using four different services, so obviously one could argue that my results are skewed by variations in date and the "newsworthiness" of each release. But hey, I don't work in a lab and I'm not exactly a scientist, so bear with me.
7/6/2005 9:20
In a simple graphic, once again, we can see the patterns that a human eye makes when 'reading' e-mail. Eyetools has a 'heat tracking' system that can track how an eye scans material - where they go, how much they linger, and what they pay no attention to. Advertising Age carried a story about the technology and how agencies are (ahem) looking at it. You may have to subscribe (free) to see it. Have a look at the image map of the e-mail study here. It's really quite fascinating. The cool thing is that some agencies are starting to use their technology to create better material for their clients. The really cool thing is that there's an Eyetools blog where you can see some of their research findings. Today's post is about branding - and there's a fabulous shot of how a brand can be literally hidden from sight in a couple of sports shots. Scroll down the page - you'll find it. Poke around the Eyetools site and their blog. It's worth the time.
7/5/2005 17:09
I exchanged a couple of e-mails with Flackster's Michael O'Connor Clarke last week, and it reminded me how much I've been enjoying his posts on the Seven Deadly Agency Types. For those of you who are at all familiar with the PR world and haven't had a chance to read these yet, you should check them out. Immediately. He still has three more to go (which he promises he is working on!), but here are the first four: Part One: The Classic Sweatshop Part Two: The One Trick Pony Part Three: The Behemoth Part Four: The Flack of All Trades
7/1/2005 10:23
Politics used to influence my everyday life a lot when I didn't feel I had a voice. I went to high school and college in the 70's at the height of the feminist movement. My sister still teases me about my intolerance for things like "men working" signs back then. Thank goodness we've come so far beyond that. I rarely have the feminist in me (she's still there) pop up and speak out - it's usually a surprise when she does! One of the proudest moments of my life came in September of 1981 when Sandra Day O'Connor was selected to serve on the US Supreme Court. Today as she announces her retirement, I am joined by many of my friends and colleagues in remembering how proud and hopeful she made us - especially as women. We are grateful for your service. Thank you for all that you've done for us. Live well.
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