2005: Links in Review

I know I’ve been fairly MIA for the last few weeks, but I’ve been on vacation and haven’t had much internet access. I hope you have not all deserted me for greener pastures. (If you have, then I guess I’m talking to myself at this point.) Anyway . . . as a way to make it up for you I’ve got my first year-in-review post and this one is plump with my favorite links of the year (a la Kottke’s Best Links). So here goes nothing . . .

Links ‘O the Year

In no specific order (except possibly chronological).

1. The Big Fish: It’s the incredibly long and fascinating story of Suck.com, one of the first great websites. A great look at the web in its infancy and at some interesting people trying to do something with a medium that may never be repeated. (Related NoahBrier.com post: Hyperlinkology)
2. Balls Out: In 1970 pitcher Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates . . . on acid.
3. I Caught Sight of: Matt Webb argues that the web is modeled after San Francisco circa 2001, making a lot of good points along the way.
4. How Mark Felt Became ‘Deep Throat’: This is the article Bob Woodward’s been waiting to write, and Nixon fanatics’ waiting to read, for the last 30 years.
5. The Choirboy: If this story were about anyone it would be incredible. The fact it’s about Lawrence Lessig’s abuse at the hands of a choir school director seems to take it a step further and make it that much more disturbing.
6. Apocolypse Soon: When Robert McNamara tells you the world is in danger, it’s probably worth listening.
7. What Goes Up . . .: The music industry moves at dizzying speeds today. In this article, the Guardian discusses the trend and ends with a faux-timeline depicting the “firework” career of a fictional band.
8. . . . But Seriously: Another Guardian article about music. This one discusses people’s musical skeletons in the closet.
9. Covering Teen Wolf: One Coach’s Guide: I’ve mentioned this over and over, but it’s seriously the funniest thing I’ve read in ages. An excerpt: “As coach, you need to recognize that your job isn’t to do the impossible; you’re not going to stop Teen Wolf entirely, but you can try to contain him by making him play your team’s style of basketball. Discipline and defensive fundamentals help: nose on the ball, feet moving, channeling him into traps—careful with those, though. Soon as Teen Wolf gets two guys on him, he tends to find the open man. He’s a heads-up ballplayer with great court sense, so if you’re going to bring a trapping zone against Teen Wolf, make sure you have solid weak-side rotation and your defenders are communicating.”
10. Change or Die: Fast Company on just why it’s so damn hard for people to change and some suggestions on how we might go about changing that.
11. Open Letter to Kansas School Board: I don’t think there’s anyone that hasn’t read it yet, but this is the letter that started the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster/Pastafarianism craze.
12. Users Don’t Care If You Are the Best: This one has a lot of personal importance because it’s impacted a lot of my work this year. Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users writes about how companies should stop talking about how great they are and start talking about how great they make their customers.
13. Forget-Me-Not Panties: The grand prize winner of the Contagious Media Showdown provides the world with a way to keep track of your girlfriend at all times. To quote the site: “Unlike the cumbersome and uncomfortable chastity belts of the past, these panties are 100% cotton, and use cutting-edge technology to help you protect what matters most.”
14. The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media: I read this article and something clicked in my head. New technology is forcing things to become unbundled: Gone are the 30 minutes shows with 5 commercial breaks and the album with 13 tracks, replaced with Tivo and iTunes. (Related: NoahBrier.com entries on Unbundling)

Well, that’s it for now. Hope you enjoy all the reading. I’ve still got some other year-end wrap-ups coming, so be prepared. Also, thanks for sticking around for another year, it’s been a great one.

Happy New Years to everyone and if we haven’t ever actually talked (via mouth, email or comments), then how about you get in touch with me and tell me who you are? Consider it a New Year’s resolution.

December 31, 2005

The Brainstorming “M Curve”

For anyone who has ever been involved in a brainstorm, or just been trying to figure out a problem, you know about how there’s always that low point. It’s normally the time when everyone has come up with a bunch of good ideas and it doesn’t seem like there are many other interesting places to go. Often brainstorms even end at this point. However, as I learned while having a drink with a friend of mine currently getting his MBA, if you push through that valley of ideas you will see another, even more fruitful peak. That’s when the really great ideas come out. The innovative ideas.

Let me illustrate for you:

Essentially what you get in that first curve is some good ideas. Sometimes they can even be great. But if you push through the low point, you have a chance to come up with even more innovative approaches to solving the problem at hand.

As someone who is quite fond of brainstorming, I’m always looking for new tips and techniques to help make ideation more fruitful. The “m curve” seems like something you can take far beyond a brainstorm, however. There’s a larger lesson here about the benefits of sticking with something. Funny enough, just today I was reading an article about the importance of grit in someone’s success. The article points to a recent University of Pennsylvania study, which found “that the gritty are more likely to achieve success in school, work and other pursuits — perhaps because their passion and commitment help them endure the inevitable setbacks that occur in any long-term undertaking.”

In an effort not to sound like some kind of self-help preacher, I’m going to cut myself off here. You always hear that innovative ideas come at the most unexpected times, but maybe if we just fought a little harder through our “idea block” we’d find innovation more easily.

Just as a last note, I found very little (other than this blog entry) on the “m curve” in a very limited Google search. If anyone finds any more information on it, I’d be greatly appreciative.

December 21, 2005

Blog Design Sucks!

Blog design generally sucks. It seems to be a fact of life. People have accepted that blogs look like blogs and refuse to try and think past that. On multiple occasions I have gotten into arguments about what a blog “should” look like. My argument is always that a blog is just a website and that whatever design best presents the information should determine its look. Unfortunately there are many that don’t agree and think every blog needs to have two columns and every entry on the homepage.

I’ve been thinking a lot about information architecture lately and I thought that maybe I could share some of those thoughts as they relate to blog design. Information architecture essentially determines how information is to be arranged, that can mean anything from a site map that determines what pages link together to a wireframe that determines the hierarchy of information on a page. (If you want to read more check out What is information architecture?)

So much blog design doesn’t give the slightest thought to whether the information is organized in a clear and concise manner, instead going with the status quo. Does it really make sense to have 30 entries on your homepage? Is a two-column layout the best choice based on your content? Do you need to list the last 4 songs you listened to on your homepage or is there some other place to put it?

I’m not sure I can answer those questions. They require taking a good, long look at your audience and deciding what is best for them. It’s important to understand who is coming to your site and how they’re getting there. Are the people that visit your homepage the same as the people who comment? (Often they are not on this site because many commenters are subscribed to the RSS feed, for example.)

My big point is that it’s important to challenge conventions in this stuff. For those of you who have been following this site for a while you’ve seen a number of different designs. I’m happy to report that I’m almost completely happy with the current design and I could explain the thinking behind every piece. I have also gotten far more comments on the current design than any of the previous, leading me to believe I must have something right.

Anyway, I decided it might be helpful to make a list of the questions I think people should ask themselves. So . . .

Questions to ask yourself when designing a blog.

1. Is your search box accessible? (Because most blogs have horrendous archive pages, search becomes a very important way for visitors to find old entries.)
2. Are you organizing your information by more than just date? (Functioning Form has some good tips for better-architected blog archives.)
3. Are you displaying too much information on your homepage? (Adaptive Path wrote a very good article about corporate homepages suffering from the disease of trying to be too much to too many.)
4. Do you know what the most important thing on the page is at all times? (Most often it will be the content. And in that case . . . )
5. If your content is the most important feature of the site does the design reflect and communicate that?
6. Is your navigation easy to locate? (That was a problem of this site for a long time and I’m not convinced navigation is as important in blogs as it is in other places.)
7. Is it easy to get from an individual entry to the archive? (Especially for those coming from search engines, it should be easy to find more related content.)
8. Have you prepared for what happens when bad things happen? (A customized comment error message and a good 404 message are recommended).
9. Is it easy to find your contact information? (Blogs are very personal and it’s often nice to reach out to the authors. Make yourself easy to find.)
10. Do you really need all those links at the bottom of an entry? (This is really a pet-peeve of mine. Do you really need a link to permalink, comments and trackbacks? They all go to the same page!)
11. Is your RSS feed embedded into all your pages?
12. Have you explained whether your comments allow html? (I fail at this one.)
13. Have you designed a comment preview page? (There’s nothing that kills a nicely designed blog like a comment preview page that hasn’t been touched.)

I think that’s it for now. Give them some thought and if you’ve got any to add, please do. I’ll be returning with more thoughts specifically on the awfulness of blog archives (including this one).

Update (12/20/05): Nathan Smith reminds me of a good Jakob Nielsen article about the top 10 blog mistakes. Also, added question 12 & 13.

December 20, 2005

Another Day, Another Links Roundup

Del.icio.us goes down and nobody knows what to do with themselves anymore. I’m stuck here with about 15 open windows just waiting to be bookmarked. So, as 90% Crud put it, I’m just going to have to go with the old-fashioned way: link-blogging.

Design

• Speak Up on what can be learned about branding from the icon that is Santa.
• PVRblog interviews Michael Cronan the man behind the Tivo name and icon. He explains the because Tivo was such a revolutionary product he felt the need to keep the name and logo familiary and friendly.

Just noticed del.icio.us is back up, yet I will go on anyway.

Marketing

• Cultural theorist Grant McCracken considers the reasons why small agencies are flourishing.
• A note from a buzz marketer: I’d love this product even if I weren’t a stealth marketer.

The Rest

• Mike Wallace on the question he’d ask George W.: “What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn’t want to travel. You knew very little about the military. . . . The governor of Texas doesn’t have the kind of power that some governors have. . . . Why do you think they nominated you? . . . Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the country is so [expletive] up?”
• Mona Lisa is officially smiling, according to some crazy software.

That ends today’s links. Come back tomorrow for your regularly scheduled blogging. I hopefully have an entry on tap this week about the sorry state of blog information architecture as well as my top 50 albums of 2005. Wooohooo.

December 19, 2005

I Love Links

It’s about that time for another edition of my links roundup. (Just as a friendly reminder, it’s easy to subscribe to my links with the Sidenotes RSS feed.) Anyway, it was another busy week, hence the serious slowdown in posts. I’ve been averaging just about three a week, which isn’t terrible, but I think I can do better. Anyway, that’s enough blabbering, here’s what you’ve all been waiting for:

Typography

• Mark Boulton writes everything you could want to know about Gill Sans, the typeface the BBC and Church of England amongst others.
• An amazing Notorious B.I.G. video done entirely with the typeface Baskerville Old Face. There’s something incredibly poetic about seeing a man known for his words celebrated in type.
• Andy Hume discusses the similarities and differences between typography on the web and in print.

Entrepreneurship

• Part of the Signal vs. Noise Small Biz 101 series (1, 2), Ryan Carson lets the world know most successful entrepreneurs’ dirty little secret: “They didn’t know if they were going to be successful when they started.”
• Particletree covers the boring bits of starting a business (accounting, bookkeeping, incorporating, oh my!).

Four More

1. Airbag Industries makes some big time 2006 predictions. (“Having written an app for everything already, Google will unveil an API to their cafeteria allowing bloggers to choose what employees will eat at lunchtime — Lutefisk will go ranked number 1 for 47 weeks straight.”)
2. New York Times Consumed columnist Rob Walker discusses CafePress and the idea of “Mass-Produced Individuality”.
3. Stylus Magazine’s lists their top 50 singles and it includes my guilty pleasure Robyn – Be mine.
4. In geek related news, Microsoft announced it will use Firefox’s little orange RSS symbol in it’s own products.

That’s it for today. GO BEARS! Have a great weekend.

December 17, 2005

Lunchtime Bloggy Thoughts

Today I got taken to lunch by some people at Ipswitch (makes of WS FTP). It was kind of an very laid back focus group. They had something like seven New York based bloggers and we all sat around tables eating lunch and discussing trends in blogging/podcasting. Bring a bunch of passionate people together and it’s easy to fill a few hours with conversation.

While I was sitting there, though, I realized that I have some different opinions on blogging than other people. I wouldn’t call them more negative, but rather framed a bit differently. In an effort to further expand on my thoughts, here are some of them in writing:

1. Blogs are not really going to revolutionize the world. It’s people that will revolutionize it. Blogs are just really good content management systems, the big idea here is that people now have a voice. There’s nothing stopping them from publishing their thoughts, ideas or just what they ate that morning. It’s a medium vs. message issue. We need to stop getting caught up on the word ‘blog’ and start looking at the larger impacts they’re having on culture.
2. It’s not a fight between us and them. It’s not big media vs. blogs. There are much larger trends going on in the media landscape for blogs to be a big enough blip on their radar that it’s worth targeting. Blogs are indicative of a larger movement towards unbundling. Once the internet came around it was clear that no one news source is going to provide the entire spectrum of information necessary to make an informed decision.
3. People should start thinking about blog design because it generally sucks. It’s not well architected. It’s time to step back and stop thinking about blogs as blogs, but rather think about blogs as websites. Would you ever put an archive of everything ever written on a website on one page? I hope not.
4. I’ve mentioned this before, but in the near future people won’t know what’s a blog and what’s not. Increasing large sites are running on software like Movable Type because it’s a cheap content management system. So, as sites increasingly choose blogging platforms to manage their content, how will the world differentiate what’s a blog and what’s not?
5. And, more importantly, does it matter if we differentiate what’s a blog and what’s not?

Anyway, just a couple quick ones. Thanks to Ipswitch for the lunch. I think it’s a pretty brilliant idea, I might add. You get a couple of bloggers together in some random city, you buy them lunch (who doesn’t like free food?), they tell you what they think will be the next big thing, you listen. At the end you pay the $100 or $200 for lunch and you’ve saved a bundle on a focus group while at the same time doing a bit of brand marketing for yourself. I mean, there’s no question I’ll think of the company in a whole new (positive) light. (Though I must admit that I’ve always been a huge WS FTP fan anyway . . . although I didn’t realize that was their product until I got there.)

That’s it.

December 14, 2005

What Have You Done for Me Lately?

[Editor's Note: This is kind of part three in a series on unbundled media (see part one and part two). Here I take a step back and try to explain the unbundling process on a media-wide level.]

“Revenue isn’t the problem; audience is the problem.” At least according to Terry Heatona it is. He of unbundled media fame claims that it’s the number one thing he tells his clients. It’s not that surprising to read Jeff Jarvis echoing the same sentiments in his amazing epitaph for the newspaper industry. In the piece, Jarvis quotes Herbert Burda, a German media mogul a bit more in touch with digital technology than your average publisher. “Printing will not go away, but I do not plan to open a single new printing plant,” Burda said. “We now concentrate on using social software to build closer relations with the communities of readers around our magazines.”

To which Jarvis replied, “I’ll say it again: Distribution is not king. Content is not king. Conversation is the kingdom. It’s about relationships.” His emphatic reply not only summarizes the state of the newspaper industry, but also offers a glimpse to the state of big media in general. The game is changing. Newspapers ruled the roost because they were an incredibly efficient way to distribute a great deal of news daily. Just think about how cheap the paper is: the ink rubs off onto your fingers for goodness sake! Television and radio came along, but neither were direct competitors as it’s generally easier to deeply comprehend something when we read it. But then the internet came along, and all of a sudden the newspaper industry’s monopoly over the quickly delivered written word came to a screeching halt.

Instead of accepting their shortcomings, however, newspapers have tried to keep stuffing the same product down customers’ throats: in the process missing larger trends that were happening. Yeah, people were reading fewer newspapers, but at the same time they were reading more news. They happened to be doing it on via screen rather than an unwieldy gray thing, but they were reading it nonetheless. Those that have embraced the net have seen it help shape their fortunes. The Washington Post, for example, has embraced the web, a factor Jay Rosen cited when he explained, “The New York Times is not any longer–in my mind–the greatest newspaper in the land. Nor is it the base line for the public narrative that it once was. Some time in the last year or so I moved the Washington Post into that position…” In our digital world, where competition is feverish, relationships are all the more important. By avoiding things like TimesSelect, the Washington Post is building relationships that could last a lifetime. The same lifetime, I might add, that could very well see the end of the broadsheet daily and the prestige that comes along with it. At that point, what will The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal be left with?

If I’m a newspaper publisher at this point I’m asking, “what should I do about it?” Well, start by reading Jarvis’ article and following his advice, he ends it with thoughts on how to save the newspaper industry piece by piece. Beyond that, though, it’s important to think about how you can add value to the consumer. With the net at their fingertips, they’re in the driver’s seat, not you. Burda explains further, “News has now become a commodity, thanks to the Internet, so we must differentiate ourselves in other ways,” Burda said. “Content alone can no longer win. You must build and interact with audiences.” That message goes to the media industry in general and brings us back around to Terry Heaton’s quote which opened this article, “Revenue isn’t the problem; audience is the problem.” In a Field of Dreams sort of way, if you build the audience, the revenue will come. So figure it out.

Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson suggests following this four-step process:

1 – Microchunk it – Reduce the content to its simplest form.
2 – Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it.
3 – Syndicate it – Let anyone take it and run with it.
4 – Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.

I mentioned it last time, but it seems even more appropriate now to talk about the Washington Post Remix blog, which features other people’s mash ups using Post content. In the introduction to the blog, they write: “Why are we doing this? Because we want to foster innovation, and because we want to see your ideas about new ways of displaying news and information on the Web.”

You’re not going to beat the technology, so you might as well embrace it and start developing some real relationships with your customers. Because otherwise, they’re just going to find the next guy who will.

Questions to answer in the next installment: Where are the marketing opportunities in all this? Do they lay more on the media or advertiser side? Where does TV and the thirty-second spot fall in? What about online advertising? And I’m sure there are more . . .

December 11, 2005

If You’ve Got Nothing to Say . . .

I’m in the process of finishing up some year end stuff both at work and at home, which accounts for this serious slowdown in entries lately. For those that haven’t already, I suggest subscribing to the Sidenotes which have been updated fairly often. Anyway, as usual when I don’t have anything substantial to say, here’s an entry full of links to other people’s content. Cause that’s easy.

Best of 2005

It’s that time of year again, I’m working on my top 50 albums of 2005 (here’s my top 50 of 2004) and so is everyone else . . .

• Amazon’s top 100 editor’s picks is always one of my favorite lists because it’s not indie for the sake of being indie. They always include a lot of gems from genres I never listen to.
• Largehearted Boy is a great MP3 blog. The top 11 albums of the year all have multiple MP3s for your listening pleasure.
• Speaking of listening pleasure, here’s the hype machine’s top 52 songs of the year as posted on MP3 blogs across the net.
• And, just to prove I don’t take myself too seriously, My Blog is Poop’s tips for making a ‘hip’ end of year best of list includes such gems as, “Don’t include your actual favorite album. It may have been good when you started listening to it, but now it’s cliche. Deal with it.”

Business

• Evan Williams started Blogger and Odeo, I think that makes him a fairly good person to write Ten Rules for Web Startups.
• Do you have a small business? Here are ten good questions to ask yourself about your business.
• Here’s a good list of things great managers do.
• Last, but not least, Google lists the 10 rules that make them what they are. Nothing overly revolutionary in here, but it’s definitely interesting to see it all together and working as well as it is for Google.

Fun

• Rudolph, seriously man, don’t give in to Santa, he doesn’t care about you!
• Does the fact I can now laugh at design jokes make me more or less geeky? While you ponder that hop over and check out some CMYK jokes.
• Yeah, you’re not supposed to mess with Texas, but what happens if Texas shows up to the party already drunk with the Girlfriend nobody likes? Sounds like a socially awkward situation in which it would be okay to mess with Texas.
• And if you haven’t read it yet, GO BACK AND READ “COVERING TEEN WOLF: ONE COACH’S GUIDE”. It’s probably the funniest thing I’ve read all year.

That’s all for today. It’s holiday party season.

December 9, 2005

SANTACON ’05

[Editor's Note: This is an email I got from a friend of mine yesterday. It cracked me up and I asked him if he'd mind me posting it. He didn't. I'll be joining him for SANTACON, let me know if you're interested in attending.]

I was standing in central park a few weeks before xmas my sophmore year with my parents who had come out to see nyc all decked out for the holidays. We were minding our own business when over the hill came dozens then hundreds of santas. Tall santas short santas good santas, bad santas, elves biker santas, hannakah harrys, s&m santas the one thing they had in common (besides a vague approximation of the same outfit) was that they were all drunk. Needless to saw my parents and I were dumbfounded. Even more shocking was that 5 hours and 80 blocks later the same parade of now even drunker santas walked by my dorm south of chinatown.

It wasnt until a year later that I learned the cause of this yuletide miracle. SANTACON. www.santacon.com

I have wanted to be a part of this for the last several years but I was either out of town or unable to convince anyone to join me in the best way to celebrate the season that doesnt involve watching the “He-Man and She-Ra Christmas special”. But we all have another chance at redclad daytime drinking this Saturday when Santacon 2005 occurs. I know this is only a few days away and I know most of you people suck but go to the website, look at pictures from Santacons past and start throwing together a halfassed Santa outfit cause this is worth doing.

Let me know if you want to go and if you dont I hope a drunken Santa pisses in your stocking this Christmas.

- Reverend Dave Kienzler, U.L.C.

Reverend Dave is a member of the Universal Life Church and also a writer at Da’ Bears Blog.

December 8, 2005

Everything You Want via Text

If you’re like me you often find yourself walking around and need some random bit of information. Maybe it’s the number for a restaurant to make a reservation or the score of the Monday Night Football game. Well, wonder no longer, there’s a better way than calling that friend of yours who’s always around a computer and asking them. There are two text message services that will answer your questions for you. The best part is, they’ll do it for free (assuming you’ve got free text messages or some large number of prepaid).

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while since it’s one of those things where everyone around ooohs and aaaahs whenever I do it. Now, my faithful reader, it’s time for me to impart my wisdom onto you, so you may impress your friends with your mobile savvy. So here’s the deal:

4INFO

Also known as 44636, 4INFO is the best way to get your sports fix while you’re on the go. Just text a team, say “Chicago Bears” to 4INFO (44636) and they’ll get right back to you with the score of the game (or the time if it hasn’t been played yet). Want to know all the scores? That’s easy too, just text “NFL” (obviously you don’t need the quotes). Other good ones are “NCAAF” (NCAA football), “NCAAB” (NCAA basketball), plus the obvious ones like “NBA” and “MLB.” Plus, and I didn’t know this until I visited their site, you can get fantasy football stats this way too? Want to know how many yards Kyle Orton threw for in this afternoon’s game against the Packers? (Not many.) Just text “Kyle Orton” to 4INFO and they’ll return text you with the answer. There are lots of other uses for 4INFO, you can get a list on their FAQ or just text “help” to 44636 and they’ll return text you with the lowdown. (Another one I just noticed is “pu” for “pickup line.”) Anyway, poke around, I’m sure you’ll find lots of other cool uses. Or, you could try . . .

GOOGL

Also known as 46645, this is Google’s SMS search. I use it primarily to find phone numbers and addresses for things around New York City (which 4INFO can do as well). Want to make a reservation at Balthazar but don’t have the phone number? Just text “Balthazar New York City” to GOOGL and they’ll get back to you with the address and phone number. On top of the basic local lookup, GOOGL has weather (text “weather” and your zip code), movies (text “movies” and your zip code) as well as other goodies. My personal favorite feature, however, is the basic questions. Having an argument at a bar about how old Shaun Alexander of the Seatlle Seahawks is? (This question may come from personal experience.) All you have to do is text “how old is shaun alexander?” to GOOGL and they’ll get back to you with his age (he was born in 1977). Similarly, GOOGL also has a defintion feature. Just text “define” and your word to 46645 and Google will tell you the definition. Great for those impromptu street Scrabble battles . . . I guess.

Well, that concludes today’s lesson. I hope you will find these text message services as useful as I have. And, as always, if you’ve got any suggestions or know of any other cool related stuff, drop a comment.

December 5, 2005

Design Blogs

Advertising/Design Goodness: Dubbed as “the best and sometimes the worst around the globe,” this is the site of design/art director Frederik Samuel. There’s lots of inspiring advertising here (that kind of feels like a strange thing to say).

Designers who Blog: Can you guess what this blog is all about? I especially enjoy visiting designers’ blogs to look at the design. I think so much of blog design is stale and it’s nice to see some designers taking different approaches to a medium that is caught in a design rut.

Design Observer: A fantastic group blog. Some very insightful writing. I don’t really have anything else to say about it, it’s just good. Did I say insightful? Good? Yeah. Uh huh. Okay, I’m stopping now. Really.

Reluct: Design and architecture news. Lots of pictures (which I like). It’s mostly links around the net, not a lot of commentary. But there’s nothing wrong with links. I like them.

Signal vs. Noise: I think this is a design blog. It’s the blog of software company 37signals, makers of Basecamp. They write lots about design and business and other random stuff. According to them it’s about “design, customer experience, entertainment, politics, Basecamp, Backpack, products we like, small business, ourselves, and more,” so I guess that works.

Speak Up: This is my favorite design commentary blog. It has a good amount of posts a day, not too many, not too few. Some of the writing is quite insightful (there’s that word again!), while other entries are just light and fun. I pretty much read every entry posted ’cause it’s good like ‘dat.

swissmiss: Tina Roth is a “Swiss designer gone NYC.” She finds more amazing nick-nacks (is that how you spell it??) and links than you can shake a stick at. I don’t know exactly where she finds the time to post the 10-15 entries a day, but I’m certainly glad she does. This is definitely my favorite non-commentary design blog on the market.

Veer: The Skinny: Veer sells “visual elements for creatives.” Their blog, not surprisingly, features visual elements by creatives. Great links to videos, portfolios and the like. This was a recent discovery and I’m glad I ran across it.

And that concludes this installment of design blogs, if you know of some design blogs that I missed, please let me know. Word.

December 1, 2005

Marketing 2.0

[Editor's Note: This is a continuation of a piece I wrote about a week ago on unbundled media. Unbundled media is a trend we will increasingly see where people consume media in bite-sized chunks rather than the 30-minute show or album that once supported big media companies.]

The effect of unbundling is being felt far and wide, both inside advertising and out. With the help of blogs, the fundamental unit of the web has officially moved to the article/entry, passing both “the individual page” as well as “the site” in terms of importance. The permalinks of blogs have created an atmosphere where it’s completely possible to bypass homepages all together, connecting directly with the desired content. Throw in RSS feeds and the whole idea of a website changes from destination to synidcation.

In the olden days, the only aggregators were the media networks. They put together the programming lineup. They syndicated their content across the country and they reaped the rewards in the form of commercials. All that is changing. As Joshua Porter eloquently put in a Digital Web Magazine article from last year:

Aggregators are promoting a shift in the control of content. They’re challenging the idea . . . that users must view things in the way we prescribe, and that our hierarchy is best to present our content. This change is also suggesting that we need the help of others to market our own ideas. It is plausible that another’s approach to our information may be working better than our own.

Now that there are so many aggregators out there, from sites like IFILM to the million of blogs around the world and increasingly to individual bookmarkers on sites like del.icio.us, publishers can no longer trust that consumers are receiving their content just how they planned it. Whether it’s newspaper articles republished on blogs or television shows downloaded with BitTorrent, the perfect little bundle is being unraveled and it’s going to have big effects on media companies and the advertisers that pay their bills.

But, as Yoda would have said if he were an account planner, “with great change, comes great opportunity.” Digital technology changes the economic model we’ve grown accustomed to. The long tail is in full effect on sites like Amazon, where the bottom 80 reaps great rewards. By building in feedback mechanisms, Amazon has turned what was once a valley of niches into a mountain of money. As Umair Haque explains on Bubblegeneration, “It’s about the fact that consumption is connected – in a networked world, when you consume something, your consumption has an externality: I generally know how much satisfaction you got. As enough of this info is aggregated, demand within the niche increases for high-quality goods (and decreases correspondingly for low-quality goods).” The better the quality, the more people are exposed to your product, the more people buy your product, the more people are exposed to your product, and so on and so forth.

In a situation like that it’s not the mass media driving your product, it’s the individuals. In essence, with the help of distributors you’ve allowed people to become both active and inactive co-marketers. They can add reviews and blog about your product on the active side, while on the inactive, collaborative filtering does most of the heavy lifting. Essentially, it’s all about ceding control. Things like APIs allow you to extend your brand beyond its normal boundaries, exposing it to individuals who might not otherwise be exposed. Of course, that doesn’t come without a catch, because you have no control of the look and feel of that content those people are seeing.

However, big risks can reap big rewards, just ask Google who entered a marketplace saturated by Mapquest and garnered the admiration of the developer community by opening up their map API. At this point, who hasn’t heard of a Google Map Mashup? Or ask the Washington Post who opened up a blog recently that highlights Washington Post mashups. Rather than sending cease and desist letters, they’re sending traffic. What do they get in return? Good geek cred and a better liklihood that people will use their content rather than the New York Times’ in their next web application.

After that semi-tangent, let me get back to the larger point at hand. What all of this shows is that unbundled media is here to stay and marketers will need to embrace this fact as well as publishers. Technology like Tivo is only accelerating a trend we’ve been seeing over the last thirty years away from blockbusters. As Terry Heaton writes, we need to unbundle our mass media products and send the pieces on their merry way. As marketers we need to look at these unbundled pieces and see where they can add value to our clients.

It’s going to be about working directly with the creators and attaching advertising directly to video content, rather than running it as a pre-roll on a website. It’s going to be about finding the connectors (maybe with the help of AttentionTrust) and getting the products in their hands for them to blog about. It’s going to be about providing a destination site that adds value to customers by acting as an aggregator of news and content (even if it comes from your competitor). It’s going to be about getting a voice into the community that speaks their language and can be trusted. It’s going to be about being inventive, innovative, exciting and most of all, fast.

Like Yoda said, “with great change, comes great opportunity.”

November 29, 2005

Monday Reads

[Editor's Note: Since I've now gotten rid of the links roundup in the RSS feed, I'm going to try and do a weekly roundup of some good links to check out. (For those interested in subscribing directly to the links, grab the Sidenotes RSS feed.) What you will read below is said link roundup. Enjoy.]

Design

• The Telegraph has an interview/profile of Jonathan Ive the Apple designer behind the iPod, iMac, etc. It’s decent, but if you’d like something a little more in-depth, check out this interview from 2003.
• Want to make design a more important part of your business but can’t get your bosses to buy in on the idea? BusinessWeek offers some tips on getting bosses to buy off on the benefits of a more design-centric approach.
• From Adaptive Path: “Is Your Homepage Immature? looks specifically at getting the most out of your homepage design.
• MisprintedType is the very nice portfolio site of Brazilian designer Eduardo Recife.
• And, if you missed it, a post of mine about Elegance in Design that includes some very interesting quotes (not mine).

Unbundled Media

If you missed the post originally, I’m planning on writing a magazine article about the shift to unbundled media. With that in mind, I’ve been collecting some links which I think are interesting in their own right, but especially as it relates to that.

• Terry Heaton writes about why we need to stop trying to create “blockbusters”, in the entry he links to . . .
• A fascinating article about the snowball effect which basically says that as aggregation continues to increase, if your product is quality it will become more exponentially popular in niches. (It’s basically a long tail idea.)
• Attaching ads directly to content become far more important in an unbundled world. That theory will become quite apparent in pre-roll video.

Other

This defies categorization, but is well worth a read.

• Was God really an intelligent designer? The New Yorker imagines what the conversation might have sounded like.

November 28, 2005

Mobile Phone Must-Haves

After trying to help my sister get her new Motorola Razr up and running today, I got to thinking a lot about the just what my must-have cell phone interface features are. I’m pretty passionate about my mobile interfaces and am an admitted Nokia junky (though I’m not using one at the moment). What this is, however, is a list of features that would make my perfect phone, lumped into the “musts” and the “nice” (what I’d prefer a phone had).

Musts

• One-button acess to both phonebook and text messaging.
• Ability to view phonebook from phone memory or sim card.
• Multiple numbers per name (cell, home, work, etc.)
• Easily switch between vibrate and ring. (I hate the idea of having to go into a stupid menu to try and turn my ringer off.)
• Well displayed missed call notification as well as voicemail notification with number of new voicemails.
• Ability to put a first and last name in the phonebook. (What can I say? I like to have people’s full names.)
• Easily clear sim and phone memory (seperately, that is).
• Key lock. (I think all phones have it at this point, but I would be calling all over the world if it weren’t for this handy feature.)

Nice

• Ability to custom set some of the home buttons for easy access to frequent used commands/programs.
• I’m not sure how to explain this, but when I skipped down the phone list based on a letter of the alphabet, on my Nokia it only displayed that letter. For instance, if I skipped to the “n” it only showed people whose name started with “n.” Whereas my Siemens skips you to the “n” part of the list, but when you scroll down it goes straight to “o” next. This is only annoying because on my Nokia there were people who were at the end of a letter that I knew I could just hit “up” to the get to. Pressing the “up” button got me to the bottom of the “n” list. (Does that make any sense?)
• Ability to set the primary number when multiples are listed. (I used to have this feature on my Nokia, basically it allows you to say I want to call this person’s cell when I hit their name unless I specify otherwise.)
• Bluetooth. (Okay, so it’s not really part of the interface. But, it can make the interface a whole lot easier to deal with by allowing you to input via your computer and sync.)
• Easily send a text message to multiple contacts.
• Date listing or at least quick acess to it.

I think that’s about all I can think of at the moment. What am I missing? What are the features you can’t live with out? What about the ones you’d love to see?

November 27, 2005

Elegance in Design

This quote comes from Invention and Evolution: Design in Nature and Engineering by M.J. French via a Functioning Form guest post by Jim Leftwich (boy that was a mouthful):

One characteristic of functional design is elegance. Most people find a buttercup beautiful, and many would say that the locomotive was at least pleasant to look at. However, the buttercup has an essential elegance, much more fundamental than its mere appearance. It is an elegant solution to a difficult problem in functional design; it has leaves to gather sunlight, oxygen and carbon dioxide from the air, and roots to extract water and minerals from the soil and hold it fast in the ground. Its stems support the leaves and flowers and transmit materials and signals (in the form of special substances). In its cells it makes and distributes many substances. It grows, it repairs damage to itself and it flowers and produces seed. It does all this in a fiercely competitive world with an extreme economy of living material, and its beautiful outward form is a reflection of its economical design.

The buttercup is a splendid piece of engineering, much more advanced and refined than the locomotive. But even so, the locomotive is an elegant design, economical in its use of energy and material, with its balanced mechanisms and well-proportioned parts, full of ingenious detail and thoughtful refinements, and the overall coherence and unity that results so often from a single purpose intelligently pursued. It has beauty for the educated eye – and because of its simple action the education need only be slight – and that beauty comes nearly all from its functional design, and very little from conscious aesthetic intention.

Design to me is the embodiment of elegance, it’s trying to use just enough to do/communicate the most. It was actually another book, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age that turned me onto the idea of design elegance. One of the characters, Miss Pao explains, “there is an ineffable quality to some technology, described by its creators as concinnitous, or technically sweet, or a nice hack — signs that it was made with great care by one who was not merely motivated but inspired. It is the difference between an engineer and a hacker.”

Great design moves out of a singular realm and solves a problem on multiple levels as simply as needed, just look at what Flickr’s done (quote from the Business 2.0 article “The Flickrization of Yahoo!”

“What struck him was that Flickr solves the problem in a very elegant way: Instead of teaching computers to identify images, Flickr gets people to do the heavy lifting. Most users describe their photos with tags and make them public for the benefit of friends and family, without realizing that they’re greasing the wheels of a great social media machine. Add together all those labels and you have millions of keywords — a gold mine of image search. For a good time, try sampling the 94,000 photos Flickr users have tagged with the word ‘fun.’”

It’s not less is more. It’s not simple as possible. It’s just what’s needed, no more, no less.

(Just as a side note, this is my 400th post on NoahBrier.com and I just wanted to thank everyone who’s been along for the ride over the last year and a half. Lately this site has meant more to me than ever. It’s just became a great place for me to bounce around ideas, speak my mind and hash out thoughts. Thanks to everyone who’s commented, contributed and just been friendly along the way. I don’t know why I feel especially nostalgic tonight, but I do. Must be the turkey in the air.)

November 22, 2005

More Thoughts on Attention

On my walk to work this morning, I had what I think is a little epiphany about this whole Attention thing I wrote about the other day. One of the things that kept tripping me up was that everyone kept referring to “advertisers” as the ones being interested in attention data. While I do agree, I think the primary target is retailers (like Amazon), and especially those who advertise with Search Engine Marketing. The idea is that rather than going with a cost-per-click model, wouldn’t they rather go with a cost-per-lead, since that’s what they’re hoping will come with a click anyway?

I’m completely aware that this is a semantic issue, but it seems like a pretty big one. Maybe I’ve completely missed it again, but if not I think AttentionTrust and those involved need to consider their messaging must more closely. I know that retailer is probably not the best term, but advertiser to me is very misleading. Maybe it’s because I’m in the advertising industry, but when I hear advertiser I think either marketing company or I think huge conglomerate (read: Nike). For big brands, especially those offline, advertising is not so much about generating leads as it is about generating brand awareness. Of course a lead is what they eventually hope to generate, but because of the offline purchase cycle, this becomes an important step.

As I write this, however, I realize that even for big companies this could be important as a tool to find influencers. As I mentioned in my last post, the one thing that jumped out with AttentionTrust was the opportunity to market one-to-one. There’s no better way to move product than to find the influencers (cool kids) and get your products in their hand, on their feet and in their head. Word of mouth works.

I agree that it does offer some big opportunities for cutting out the middlemen and talking directly to companies that you’re interested in. With all that said, though, there are still a number of unanswered questions in my mind. So here’s a lit of things I get and don’t get about AttentionTrust

1. I get that I deserve to own my own attention data and with the help of the Attention Recorder I can hold onto that information. I also understand that someone like /ROOT can, in theory, help me to find companies who are interested in exchanging my data for goods or services.

2. I don’t get how this process could work the opposite way. If you’re a company trying to generate a lead where you reach out to the consumer, how could you use attention data to find that person without them offering it to you?

3. I don’t get how a company knows your attention data is actually valuable. Joshua Porter mentioned this in the comments of the last entry and I think he’s right: how do you know it’s not false metadata?

4. I get that I can choose to share or not share my Attention data with whoever I choose and that there are big opportunities for companies to use my attention data to give me extremely personalized services.

That’s about all I can think of for now. I’m enjoying this conversation and feel like I’m actually starting to wrap my head around this Attention stuff. But there’s one really big thing.

If it’s this hard to understand, it’ll never catch on.

I think it’s important to remember that.

November 21, 2005

What’s the Big Deal about Attention?

In response to my “Unbundled Opoportunities” post, Joshua Porter asked, “what does attention have to do with it?” When Joshua says “attention,” he’s referring to it in terms of AttentionTrust, who’s mission is to give people back their attention data. Basically the idea is that whenever you visit a site your giving your attention in the form of metadata. When you’re on Amazon they know what you click on, what you’ve bought, and so on. They use that information to make recommendations for you. Google has different kinds of information and so does Netflix. Those who believe in AttentionTrust believe that you should have all that metadata and that in the future it will have value to marketers who want to understand you better. (For those in the know, please critique that description, it’s how I understand. Here’s Joshua’s description to compare it to.)

Anyway, when Joshua made the comment, he was asking specifically what the role of attention is in terms of unbundled media. After spending a lot of time thinking about it, I think I have more questions than answers, but I want to at least try to get my thoughts down on paper (or blog as the case may be).

Question #1: What about the aggregators?

As I understand it, there’s currently an implicit agreement between aggregators (including your average television station) and consumers saying, “you give me content or services I want in exchange for my attention.” A media company pays to make that 30-minute show because they know that they can sell portions of your attention to advertisers. An RSS aggregator like Bloglines offers you the service of bringing together your multiple feeds in one place in exchange for the fact that they know everything you read (disregard the fact that they don’t sell ads at the moment). I’m pretty sure this is understood by AttentionTrust, being that one of the three points in their mission is to, “Educate people about the value of their attention and the existence of “attention data”. However, it’s important to point out that the idea of “attention” is not entirely new.

Question #2: So where’s the value?

So now that we’ve established that attention data exists already, the real difference between AttentionTrust (from now on to be referred to as AT) and the status quo is that AT wants to return that data to it’s rightful owners: US! But my big issue here is that once attention data’s been removed from a context, doesn’t it lose a great deal of value? I mean, yeah it’s great that I know that you visit XYZ.com, XZZ.com and ZZZ.com, but if you’re trying to convince me to buy that data, then you better tell me how I can make money off it and right now, just knowing that doesn’t really help. Yes, it is great if I want to spend the money to talk to you one-to-one (and I will discuss these possibilities a bit later), but other than that where’s the value? I still don’t know when to put the message in front of you. Unless I put it together en-masse, where’s the value to marketers? And if I do combine it with the attention data of others, what makes it any different than market research? (Not to say market research isn’t incredibly valuable, but if AT is pushing glorified market research, then there’s a whole lot of hubbub over nothing.)

With all that said, there are possibilities . . .

Idea #1: One-to-One

This seems like the biggest opportunity, you sell me your attention data and I know just what to give you to sample. Whether it’s a new website, or product, I can understand you well enough to put something in front of you that you’ll actually appreciate.

Other than that, at the moment I’m having trouble envisioning how AT could really change the world. Yeah I would like to own my attention metadata and know everywhere I go and everything I do on the net. And yes, I could sell that data to a company in exchange for some services, but I don’t completely see how this is flipping the model we currently have on its head. I mean, they’d be able to build one hell of an application and I’d spend a lot of time there and they’d know a lot about me, but so does Bloglines . . . Of course, I could just be missing something obvious, but what’s so revolutionary about this?

Update (11/19/05): Right after writing this, I read this entry by a brand planner about inverting the marketing funnel. In it he suggests that the funnel may have moved from “awareness – familiarity – attitude – action” to “intrigue (among a small group) – co-option – investigation – consideration/opinion – publicity”. Thinking about attention in that context, attention makes a lot of sense to marketers as a way to identify opinion makers (the “small group”) and hit them with free product. Just an idea.

Update (11/20/05): Alright, so I did some more AttentionTrust homework and am starting to get my head around it I think. I started with Seth Goldstein’s entry, “Media Futures: From Theory to Practice”, which explains how AttentionTrust and ROOT Markets came to be and followed that up with “Following the Lead to a More Transparent Future” over at ClickZ. One clarification I’ve gotten is that AttentionTrust is about lead generation. It’s about delivering qualified customers to companies. As I understand it, in some way it makes advertising a bit irrelevant by connecting customers directly with companies (of course those companies still need to close the sale). What’s more, from Peter Caputa’s comments on a Jason Calcanis entry on Attention, I began to better understand some of the benefits that can be offered to publishers:

If it squeezes “traditional publishers” or “blog publishers that have adopted traditional business models”, so be it. But, what Seth points out, is that this is a huge opportunity for publishers too. If the ad serving technology on engadget could be customized based on the visitor’s wish list or what products they’ve browsed on amazon.com, and the ad would be more likely to result in a sale or a lead that makes engadget $20. Now, if that happens 5 times per thousand impression, you’ve made a bit more than you are making now.

November 20, 2005

Unbundled Opportunities

[Editor's Note: I'm thinking about shopping an article around about unbundled media, here's a kind of pitch for it. I'd love to get some feedback.]

The move to unbundled media will be scary for many in the advertising world, as those used to the status quo are forced to find new innovative ways to reach consumers. But Influx Insights does a good job of reminding that it offers huge opportunities to agencies accepting of change. “Many agencies may be wondering how to cope and adjust,” they explain. “But you could easily take the opposite point-of-view, that there’s never have been a more exciting time to be in the ad business. It’s a great opportunity for the brave and imaginative, that can think beyond the 30-second spot and collaborate to create new forms of content and distribution.”

It’s true. There are huge opportunities to break new and exciting ground as media becomes consumed in this new way. While the 30-second spot is by no means dead, it too has become unbundled, being featured or continued on microsites and across the web in places like IFILM. While on one hand RSS takes the content out of the perfect little site you’ve created, it offers new and exciting ways to connect with consumers on their own terms.

I really think this is where the biggest opportunities are for unbundled media. Marketers can actually add value as the media becomes unbundled by doing things like helping to aggregate content, subsidizing cost or even by becoming media creators in their own right. While it’s probably a bit scary for the big guys who have spent their entire careers working in 30-second chunks, it offers huge opportunities to those who can move quickly and embraced the unbundledness.

Update (11/18/05): David Card found this quote: “Advertising revenue at NBC, CBS and ABC declined 21.5% to $2.2 billion in the third quarter, with much of the drop stemming from the absence of Summer Olympics ads that bolstered the year-ago period.”

Update (11/19/05): Mark Lewis comments on the programming @radical is creating for ESPN, MTV and Nike: “But what is to stop them hiring a few planners and just becoming a new kind of creative/strategic hotshop – one producing cool content which is truly relevant. Another production company, Dogmatic has already hired someone super smart to help do just that.”

November 18, 2005

Bears, RSS and Wine

I don’t really have it in me to write a full entry tonight (I tried, really I did). But there are a couple quick things I wanted to make reference to. So, that’s what I shall do.

1. If you happened to miss the sidenotes link today, Gawker’s sister sports blog Deadspin named Da Bears Blog the number three Chicago Bears blog out there. Hell yeah DBB and let’s go Bears this weekend as they face the Carolina Panthers! (Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t subscribed to the sidenotes, go do it and please tell me if I should get rid of the daily links roundup in the main RSS feed. Thanks.)
2. Gary Stein makes an interesting argument for those little HTML things that you create and then post on your own site being today’s “send to friend” button. With the number of blogs out there, he’s probably onto something.
3. Has anyone created an RSS aggregator that takes an approach to organizing feeds other than just putting them in a big list, like folders, and allowing you to click on them to open them? Just curious.
4. Remember how I said I was going to try Rojo, well it didn’t last very long. Turns out the fact that they don’t use frames gets really annoying when you have a whole lot of feeds you read (like I do). You have to scroll down every time to get back to where you were in your feed list.
5. It’s really hard to try and make insightful comments every day, or even every other day. I’ve been realizing that a lot lately.
6. The new crop of Beaujolais Nouveau was released today. I just ran down to the local wine store and bought a Duboeuf bottle and it’s just as delicious as I remember it being last year. (By the way, I think this has added to my inability to write a “proper” post tonight.) For more info on what the big deal is about Beaujolais Nouveau, heres a good explanation.
7. This $100 laptop thing could really change the world. Quote me on that.

I think that’s it. I’m out.

November 18, 2005

It’s Not a Brainstorm without a Leader

In the comments of Bringing Brainstorming to the Boardroom, Ben brings up an interesting point that I failed to mention:

This was all very interesting. I’ve been thinking about brainstorming in groups a lot lately, as this is frequently the type of thing you’re expected to do in law school. Its been my experience lately that when you put a bunch of bright, creative people together in a room, there is a tendency for everyone to go around saying their ideas, not really building on or developing any of them. I don’t think people are purposefully closed-minded, I think its just a natural reaction to want to flesh out your own idea before considering another person’s.

One of the things that has kept our brainstorming going is having a group leader who kind of moderates everything and steers the discussion towards collaboration. But I think having a leader is probably just one way to confront the problem. I bet if you have a group of people who do a lot of brainstorming–say at a marketing company for example–after a while you probably can dispense with a leader because everyone is familiar with the process.

I wish Ben was right about the ability to dispense with the leader in a marketing setting, but it’s just not the case. It is incredibly important to always have a leader in a brainstorm, otherwise, just what Ben mentioned tends to happen. Even worse at an agency you run the risk of a brainstorm turning into a tactical discussion without the help of a leader. The rules I mentioned for a great brainstorm were aimed at brainstormees, not the leader, who must assume a much different role.

The leader of the brainstorm should not actually be a participating member, instead their job is to guide the discussion, keep people on path, make sure people are following the rules and write everything down. It’s sometimes hard to let go of control as the leader of a brainstorm, but it’s important to accept that position going in; as the leader it’s not your job to contribute ideas and you need to deal with it.

Once the brainstorm has ended the leader takes those ideas that the group has come up with and starts to evaluate them and shape them. By writing the ideas down in a more coherent format, holes start to show up and next steps and needs emerge.

So for Ben, and anyone else who’s brainstorming, next time you get a bunch of smart people in the room, make sure there’s someone leading the discussion, things should work much better that way.

November 16, 2005

Subscribe to Sidenotes

Those subscribed to the NoahBrier.com RSS feed please read this.

For those that have been to the refreshed page (and if you haven’t go right now), you’ve noticed that I’ve split up my sidenotes and main entries, I did this for a bunch of reasons, many of which I already outlined. One of the reasons, though, was that I wanted to easily offer up an RSS feed just for my sidenotes (which includes both links and now “quickies” entries). So, without any further ado, I offer up:

NoahBrier.com’s Sidenotes RSS feed.

But I’ve also got a question for all you RSS readers out there. Now that I’ve got a separate feed for my links, would you rather I stopped including a daily link roundup in my feed? A while back I asked the same question, but I didn’t have the feed going. Some people have mentioned to me in the past that they’d rather not wade through my links every day. So tell me what you think. Please. Pretty please with sugar on top.

November 16, 2005

Bringing Brainstorm to the Boardroom

If you asked me what I like most about my job, I’d be quick to answer. That’s because since the day I started, brainstorming has been something I’ve not only enjoyed, but has also made me think a great deal about creativity, business and thinking (amongst others).

You see, brainstorming is just an incredibly different way of approaching a problem when compared to what you encounter on a day-to-day basis. Normally, we think about a problem by starting with the ultimate goal and trying to fill in the pieces that lead up to it. If we wanted to take over the world, we’d start by trying to figure out how to do it. What will we need to take France? Should we start with Canada? And so on and so on.

Brainstorming, however, is about taking a markedly different approach to solving a problem that has plagued megalomaniacs for ages. Instead of starting with trying to answer the big questions, we’d start with what we know and work our way up. We know roughly how many people live in the world, where they live and how they live. We have a basic idea of their languages, cultures and religions.

By first taking inventory of those things, we can start by thinking about just what it means to take over the world. This is where we let the thoughts flow, allowing our mind to work without the barriers that normally hold it back. We can and should say anything, we can worry about judging ideas later. Maybe one person suggests it’s about unification, which leads us to a conversation about commonalities in the world’s cultures. Eventually, we come up with a plan to preach a story of mutual understanding that celebrates cultural differences instead of trying to make everyone the same. Whether or not this would change the world is not the point, what we can see with this example is that what seemed like a problem about guns and blood turned into an answer of peace and love. By abandoning the traditional notions we came to an unexpected conclusion.

Disregarding the absurdity of the example, my point is that brainstorming can lead to new answers, which to me means innovation. In a recent entry, Kareem Mayan discussed the reasons so many big companies have trouble innovating. Mayan spends time focusing on the fact that many big companies see the negative in new ideas, shooting them down before they have a chance to grow. Or, even worse, creating a corporate culture where employees internally censor, making the decision not to come out with that new idea because their boss will just think it’s dumb. It’s this kind of culture, one where so many employ the devil’s advocate approach that stands in the way of innovation.

It’s also just that kind of culture that could learn a whole lot from brainstorming. The same rules employed to make a great brainstorm, can also make a great company, even a great big company.

Walk in Stupid

This is one of the five rules of Wieden + Kennedy, by coming to work without preconceived notions you allow new ideas to flourish. Throughout history some of the most unexpected people have solved some of the most vexing problems. That’s because so often specialists who all know the same things come to same conclusion. When you bring in someone new who’s willing to try new things, who doesn’t know this or that method won’t work, sometimes they can imagine a completely different kind of answer.

No Negativity

This is the number one rule of improvisation. Don’t shoot down anyone’s idea, instead add to it, let it play itself out and then decide whether it’s good or not. What you come up with in a brainstorm is a seed of an idea that needs to be cultivated to grow. You’ll never know what that tree looks like if you don’t plant the seed.

Cultivate Diversity

Mutts are generally healthier than pure-bread dogs because they have a much wider range of genes. Ideas work the same way. The more different the people are who are working on an idea, the more diverse their experiences, the strong the idea can be. When everyone brings something different to the table, you can be sure an idea won’t be one-dimensional. Someone will be willing to ask the “stupid” question, someone else willing to make the “stupid” suggestion because they don’t know any better. (And because there are no stupid questions or ideas in brainstorms!) But it’s those kinds of questions, which may seem obvious to some, that can lead to innovative ideas.

Remember: Big Ideas Grow, They Don’t Hatch

I’ve written about this in the past, but it’s important not to forget that big ideas must evolve into being. They don’t just happen all of a sudden. Too many people think that they just hatch out of thin air, already fully developed ideas, instead of trying to come up with small ideas and working them, massaging them and cultivating them into big ones. By creating a culture where this is understood, people will be more willing to just throw ideas out there without fear.

Stay Small

Keep a brainstorm small (I’ve found around eight people or less is best), creates an atmosphere where everyone has a chance to make their voice heard and a group who can move quickly from idea to idea. This, however, is the most difficult rule to translate to a large company. After all, by definition, a big company is no longer small. But that doesn’t mean they can’t act that way. What makes small companies so successful is their ability to move quickly and encourage ideation to flow from the bottom up, better utilizing a staff of smart and talented people. These ideas can be translated, but it’s probably one of the most difficult thing a big company will face. Many look to Google, who allow their employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on their own projects. What this does is create a corporate culture where ideas flow from the bottom-up, just as they do in a small company, as opposed to the top-down. When employees feel involved in the process it’s good for everyone: ideas tend to be better than those that come out of the boardroom, employees are happy with their contributions and turnover rates are lower.

Of course, not every company can or should add a 20 percent rule, but they can create other ways to encourage the company to act small. Kareem also talked about Google’s Founders’ Awards, which awards stock to employees who have deliver lucrative projects. In essence they’ve created a culture where everyone feels some ownership in the company, and isn’t that what really differentiates the big companies from the little ones?

Obviously these rules won’t work for everyone company out there, but by employing a bit of brainstorm into the business, innovation seems a whole lot more likely.

November 14, 2005

Saturday Night Links

Well folks, it was a busy week with the design refresh and all. (Is it fair to call it a realignment?) I’ve been cleaning up some stuff and what not and I think everything is just about done. Today was also my big opportunity to finally catch up on a ton of reading that I’ve been hoarding. With that said, I’ve got lots of good links to direct you all to (with some notes by me of course), so enjoy.

Design

My interest in design keeps increasing, I’m just amazed that it wasn’t until just about a year ago that I had really contemplated these things. Design plays such a huge role in every aspect our of lives and for a majority of mine I hadn’t given it a second thought. Kind of makes me feel like an idiot when I state it that way.

• What do you think about the design of pizza flyers? Yeah they’re ugly, but as Jonathan Baldwin eloquently states, “The fact is, pizza flyers set up precisely the right expectations about the product and the service: cheap, cheerful and quick. The choice of visual language any graphic designer makes should be appropriate both to the message and to the intended audience.”
• Design in Flight has a good interview with Khoi Vinh. He’s the blogger and design behind Sutbtraction as well as the recent Onion redesign.
• Simplicity is a big word at the moment. Jason Fried explains 37signals’ simple approach in BusinessWeek. Mark Wallace of Wallace Church explains simplicity in brand design specifically discussing a recent Lean Cuisine redesign (sounds fascinating, huh?). Plus, as a bonus, if you’re not reading John Maeda’s Simplicity blog, get on it.

Business/Advertising

• Copy Goes Here is a short film by Coudal Partners that anyone in the advertising industry can appreciate (or at least I can . . . ).
• HOWdesign has a great list of 10 things clients really want from doing good work to keeping promises. It seems obvious, but it never hurts to be reminded.

Generation Y

I’m not quite sure why all these articles on generation y (roughly 10-24-year-olds) showed up this week, but they’re almost always a good topic. These aren’t revolutionary, but they do provide some interesting insights into a generation that has been shaped by digital technology. As a side note, I was recently having a conversation about the possibility of a link between the increasing casualness of communication amongst youth and how it relates to their generally casual feelings towards sex. It’s definitely an interesting idea and probably something worthy of a more serious entry.

• USA Today talks about generation y’s feelings towards work. Gen Y’ers generally feel as though they deserve to run the company after a week in the office. They are willing to switch jobs on a dime and they have a tendency to question authority (which is both good and bad).
• A Guardian article all about their relationship to technology. You can’t send a Gen Y’er to their room because that’s where everything they need/want is.

Web Stuff

• Thanks to Joshua Porter I finally understand what AttentionTrust is. I’m working on a big entry about it, but essentially it’s a way for you to record everywhere you go on the web and what you do there with the express intent of eventually being able to sell that information to advertisers so they could better understand/target you. A service like Root.net would help you do just that.
• While I’m on the attention subject, Dirk Knemeyer’s article for the new UX matters titled “Data — The Essence of a Digital Lifestyle” is a great look at just what value this type of attention data has.
• Aggregation seems to keep coming up lately and two new sites all about aggregating various bits of digital data popped up this week. MonitorThis gives you an OPML file with RSS feeds from across search engines with any search term you’d like.
• SuprGlu allows you to aggregate various digital identities in one place, it’s a kind of DLA, very related to what I wrote about last week.
• This may be coolest of all: Tape It Off The Internet promises to be, “A global TV guide, Torrent tracking, your favourites and recommendations plus an innovative social layer to hang it off.” Imagine TiVo/Netflix functionality using BitTorrent. Sounds amazing, let’s see if it actually happens . . .

Funny

Even I can’t take myself seriously all the time.

• How about some great domain names? Like Mole Station Native Nursery’s “molestationnursery.com” or Pen Island’s “penisland.com”.
• Last, but not least, be sure to check out some 2001 forum posts from Mac aficionado upset about the boring new product release of the iPod: “Great just what the world needs, another freaking MP3 player. Go Steve! Where’s the Newton?!”

That’s it folks, have a good evening.

November 12, 2005

Design Refresh

Those of you who look at this site will notice a bit of a change in the design (for those of you that read it via RSS, come on over and tell me what you think). I felt like it was time for a slight change for a few reasons:

Standards

I’d been flirting with standards for a while, but I hadn’t fixed up this site to meet them. Now that’s changed. The whole site is now XHTML and CSS standards complaint. (Most of the time at least, there are still certain little things, like the non-expiring New York Times links that don’t pass the old W3C test.)

Separated Links

While I still fight against this in theory, so many people have asked me to separate my links from my content. After a long contemplation I finally decided to give in. I’ve put all my links to the right side of the page, where I also plan to include some shorter blog entries in the future.

Less on the Homepage

Look, I know it’s a blog and “blogs always have all their content on the homepage,” but I was just getting tired of scrolling for six years. So now there’s one full entry and five excerpts on the home page. (Make sure to check out the green rainbow for the last five entries.)

Navigation

Essentially the old version had no navigation. This was on purpose, as I still believe that pretty much everything you could have needed was easy enough to get to. With that said, it’s now a hell of a lot easier. There is a nav that included about, archives and contact at the top of each and every page on NoahBrier.com (and it moves up and down as you mouseover . . . ohhhhhhh . . . ).

Footer

I was kind of sick of not having a footer and because everything was positioned absolute, it wasn’t gonna happen. Now that everything’s all cleaned up however, a nice-looking footer was no problem at all.

9rules

This was really what kicked my ass into gear. 9rules is opening up submissions for 24 hours on the 14th of November. For those of you not familiar with 9rules, it’s a network of great blogs from all across the web. Some of my favorite bloggers including Richard McManus and Garrett Dimon (to name a few) are part of the crew and I would be honored to be included. So I’m gonna throw my refreshed site in the mix and see what happens.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the refresh and if you run into any difficulty please let me know either in the comments or by email. Thanks.

November 11, 2005

Thank You Rojo

I’ve mentioned in the past that I think by default when you read something in your RSS reader it should mark it as read. You shouldn’t have to click a stupid little button that does it for you. This is a huge reason why I’ve stuck with Bloglines all this time. With the number of feeds I read, sometimes the nicest thing is the ability to just click a feed and have all the entries just disappear. Viola, clean slate.

Well, after writing that last entry, I contact Rojo and asked them about the feature, mentioning that it was a huge barrier for me. I got a very nice response telling me that they’ve heard that feedback before and that it should be coming relatively soon. Since then, I’ve been thinking about it more and more as Bloglines has been especially terrible lately. It seems that any time I stay on for an extended period eventually I’ll start clicking on feeds that say there are new entries and the entries will disappear when I click them, never to return. I think it probably has to do with the ability to navigate with the keyboard, which Bloglines added, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, I was incredibly pleasantly surprised to find this email today:

Hi Noah,

I just wanted to follow up that we’ve completed your request. Mark as
Read can happen on an intermediate feed level without a click. You
need to go to My Account Settings, under Display, and check the box
next to “Automatically mark feeds read.”. Now the ‘How frequently
Read’, ‘Unread Story Count’, and ‘Name’ views will automatically mark
feeds read as you move down your list.

Thank you very much for giving this new feature your support. As you
know, we appreciate our user’s feedback so if you have any more great
suggestions, please don’t hesitate to send them in to Feedback or
post them on the user forums!

Sincerely,

Barbara Stephenson
Customer Support
Rojo Networks, Inc.

So not only did they add the feature I requested, but they were nice enough to write me an email and let me know about it. Wow. So the first thing I did was head on over to Rojo and sure enough, it works just as advertised. That means, I’m moving everything over and giving it Rojo a shot, if it’s as good as everyone says it is, I’m sure I’ll love it. I’ve got to admit, they’re already looking pretty good in my book.

A special thanks to Barbara Stephenson who took the time to write the email and allowed me to post it here, I appreciate it very much.

November 10, 2005

Unbundled Identities

I’ve talked lots in the past about the fragmentation of traditional media because of digital technology. With everything in bits instead of old-fashioned analog signals, we can now do things like cut out the junk with our Tivo. The interesting thing about the fragmentation, however, was that it was primarily happening on the consumer side. If the TV networks and radio stations had it their way, we wouldn’t be able to cut out the commercials or download podcasts. On the contrary, in their perfect little world they own all the channels we watch, controlling the content and charging top dollars to advertisers for our impressions. Thank goodness the world isn’t perfect.

Instead, the media landscape is being forced to pull apart it’s perfect little packages. New technology is making them consider offering some of their packages unbundled: TV shows sans commercials or even pieces of shows, individual songs and radio show segments to name a few. As part of his TV News in a Postmodern World series, Terry Heaton examines some “The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media” in his new essay.

Remarkable they are, if they’re willing to let go of control. Heaton covers everything from the boring “put ads in or around the items” to the more interesting “help users rebundle,” citing things like the Los Angeles Times’ branded RSS aggregator. Media companies have huge opportunities to cash in on this unbundled media revolution if they’re willing to take a huge leap and actually cede some control to the user.

It’s not just the media implications I’m interested in relation to unbundled media, however. I think Heaton has hit on something that extends beyond just the mediascape. Unbundled is a great term for what’s happening all over the place, as digital technology both continues to move into every sphere of our physical world as well as having a huge impact on our culture as a whole.

As the web continues to become a more and more social place, increasingly our identities are becoming unbundled. As opposed to meeting me in person, for example, where I am obviously a person made up of many interests, online it is possible to see my interests individually and then find out about the person. Or, not know of the person at all.

Let me explain (because I’m pretty sure I’m not making any sense): You could be visiting Flickr and find my photos. At that point, I am little more than a set of photographs which you can try to piece together to form some cohesive picture of my personality. The same for del.icio.us, where you can see what I bookmark and try to understand who I am, but not get the full picture. Even those of you that read this blog don’t truly know me (although you’re probably the closest). My point is that, before digital technology, regular people were not unbundled like this. We generally traveled as a whole. Yeah, we were different people in different environments, there would have been work Noah, brother Noah, friend Noah, etc., but still there was a physical presence anchoring everything. But now, it’s like we’re all media personalities, who have always been unbundled in one way or another. (An actor, for instance, plays a part from which you could try to glean some insights into their personality, but you would be hard pressed to truly understand who they are.)

It’s a fascinating shift and brings me back to the idea of a digital lifestyle aggregator, which would essentially bring together these elements of you and help you construct a more holistic digital identity. What’s even bigger, though, is what happens when people take this shift offline. I’m not sure I can comprehend this fully at the moment (I’m feeling pretty sick and out of it to be honest), but I think it could extend to something like wearable computing which contains some record of our interests and specializations and communicates that to other users (and idea I discussed with the other Noah last week).

I’m sure there’s more, but until this fever passes, I’m going to have to turn to all of you for input.

November 9, 2005

Tell Me Who You Are

After having a good time meeting up with Noah from OKDork.com , I decided to ask more people who read my site to introduce themselves. Tell me who you are, what you do, how you happened upon the site and, if you’ve got your own blog, what the address is. Or just say hi. Either way, I’d like to meet you. Leave a comment or drop me an email.

Thanks.

November 7, 2005

A Costume Fit for a Geek

This, ladies and gentlemen, was my award-winning Halloween costume. I was a semicolon.

For the record, when I actually won the award (company Halloween costume contest), I had the full getup on, which included fake claws with fingers missing.

That made me a misused semicolon; I was separating incomplete clauses.

(Boy do I hope that semicolon use was right.)

Anyway, once again this goes a long way to proving I’m a geek.

November 4, 2005

Awareness Online

“The more kids are involved with digital content creation, the more thinkers will emerge that will eventually produce tomorrow’s innovative products.”

Sounds like the quote of some kind of cultural/technological theorist, but it’s not. Nope, that’s the quote Brendan Erazo, a 15-year-old Florida high school student from a New York Times article titled, “The Lives of Teenagers Now: Open Blogs, Not Locked Diaries”. Not surprisingly, I think Erazo’s right on. This is a generation growing up with a completely different relationship to information. Erazo himself, “mixes and publishes his own Christian-themed dance tracks under the name DJ Xsjado at the Kids’ Internet Radio Project (projectkir.org).” He’s not alone either, according to a new Pew report titled Teen Content Creators and Consumers, some 57% of teens are content creators.

Think about that number. This is a group of people who teachers struggle with to do their homework or write a 500-word essay. But every day, millions of them are sitting in front of the computer and creating. With that said, however, it’s those taking it a step further that I find even more encouraging. According to the same study, 19% of internet-using teens are content remixers (as opposed to 18% of adults). That means nearly one in five of them have a hyperactive relationship with content.

Instead of coming home and watching cartoons, they’re remixing them.

This is so important because an active relationship with content encourages self-reflexivity. Think about it. All you bloggers out there, how much time do you spend thinking about what you’re going to blog? How many situations or articles do you read with an eye towards whether it will make good fodder for an entry? It’s only natural, and it’s incredibly important. Kids seldom are encouraged to think in that way at school. Instead, they’re just told they need to know these things “because.” No one was ever able to answer to me why I’d need to know calculus (which may account for why I’ve had ZERO use for it since I left 12th grade). But seriously, there was never any good reason to read with any seriousness, because the bigger picture was seldom articulated. Why should I spend a year learning chemistry? (Yes, I know that some people grow up to be chemists, but I could have told you then — and still tell you now — chemistry’s not in my future.) Anyway, if high school is about exposing young people to lots of different subjects how come I took three sciences in four years?

With the abundance of information available on the net, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the best way to become informed is to take in lots of little pieces, rather than a few big ones. George Siemens examined this shift in a recent blog entry:

What happens when we change how we interact with information? We “ramp up” our processing habits. Instead of reading, we skim. Instead of exploring and responding to each item, we try and link it to existing understanding. We move (in regards to most information we encounter) from specific to general thinking…from deep to shallow thinking. Shallow thinking, in this sense, isn’t as negative as its connotations. Shallow thinking (perhaps I need a better phrase) involves exploring many different sources of information without focusing too heavily on one source. Aggregating at this level helps us to stay informed across broad disciplines. So much of education intends to provide “deep learningâ€?. Often, however, “shallow learning is desiredâ€? (i.e. we want to know of a concept, but we don’t have time or interest to explore it deeply). All we need at this stage is simply the understanding (awareness?) that it exists. Often, learning is simply about opening a door…

The awareness of one’s self and actions is integral to becoming a good thinker. Some of the smartest people in history, Einstein comes to mind immediately, had trouble concentrating on any one target. Malcolm Gladwell, author and connector extraordinaire, explains, “I guess I’ve always been a horizontal thinker, not a vertical one. I don’t have the patience to dig down into a subject, so I’m left instead with the need to go sideways and try and link together disparate ideas.”

The beauty of the internet is that it affords everyone the same opportunity Gladwell has to everyone. He’s a professional journalist who essentially gets paid to read a little about lots of different things and then connect them, but thanks to the abundance of content and new delivery mechanisms, I can structure my consumption habits in just the same way. I don’t need to read books. My reading habits are not left to the discretion of a newspaper. I create my own media landscape, then I contribute to it. Those kind of consumption habits make me very aware of my own thinking because they force me to constantly make my own choices. Do I want to read this feed or that one, this blog or the other? I don’t have the New York Times here to tell me what the most important story is unless I choose to visit them. Even then, I have hundreds of other sources competing for attention.

The abundance of choice makes me more aware of my decisions. When you shop online there is something far more active about it. Online you don’t throw that $5 thing in your cart on the way out and then regret you bought it. If you buy it online you have no one to blame but yourself. There were plenty of opportunities to back out as you were asked to confirm everything sixteen times. Esther Dyson, CNET editor and futurist, explains it like this

The fundamental change is that most individuals have more choice. They also have more responsibility: if they don’t like the way things are, they can’t complain as much–at least not with moral justification. And not everybody likes that. It can be comfortable just to follow orders. But if you consider that most people have a better chance of getting what they want because they have more choices, then by and large, there’s progress. People have more choice: they have more power “to,” even though they don’t have more power “over.”

I think she’s right on. When you’re on the net, every cause (click) has an obvious effect. We’re more aware of our actions, and that’s a damn good thing.

November 4, 2005

Redesigning the Pill Bottle

In April, New York Magazine ran a great feature story about a School of Visual Arts grad student who redesigned the pill bottle. After her grandmother accidentally swallowed the wrong pills, Deborah Adler decided it was time for a change. Her SVA thesis, called Safe Rx, was eventually picked up by Target, who debuted the new pill containers in May. Her design addresses many of the flaws of the old-style bottles, some noticeable, some not. More than anything, though, the redesign is a great design story. As Michael Beirut explains in this Design Observer story:

As someone who has tried for years to interest the general public in graphic design without much success, I can tell you straight out that this story has it all. The subject is a common object with which nearly everyone is familiar, and with which everyone is frustrated to boot. The problem to be solved is not mere ugliness (although an amber-colored prescription bottle is ugly) but literally a matter of life or death. Even the moment of inspiration is appealing: who can’t relate to the story of those confused grandparents, and cheer when graphic design comes to the rescue?

The bottle looks great, and it really is a design story people can grab on and relate to.

Also, and what really made me want to write this entry, until November 23rd the School of Visual Arts is running a show titled ClearRX: From Master’s Thesis to Medicine Cabinet, so if you live in New York, make sure to check it out. I’ll make sure to let you know how it is after I stop by.

October 31, 2005

Links in Review

Since I know that people seem to enjoy these link entries, here’s a quick roundup of some of my favorite links of the week.

Funny/Strange

• On Thursday all of Manhattan smelled of maple syrup. I guess at one point it was investigated as a terrorist attack . . . the most delicious terrorist attack in history.
• Stop trying to imagine what it would have been like if Fox News had been there throughout history.
• Squirrels in London are on crack. Enough said.
• Little known fact: Before he got to Margaritaville, Jimmy Buffet spent some time in Slipperynippleberg.

Advertising/Marketing

• It was a good week online for Renegade, going live with AfterHoursCity.com and The Color of Mystery (where you can win a Swiss bank account and a shitload of other stuff).
• A while ago I posted about someone throwing a bunch of bouncy balls down a San Francisco street, well it turns out it was a new commercial for Sony.
• Do you know the history of the Nike swoosh and that originally, it only cost $35 for the design?

Design

• Design trends as seen by Murray Moss.
• Redesigning is all well and good, but it’s realigning that makes the real difference.
• Why the new Target ClearRX pill bottle is a great design story.
• Take a look at the design maturity continuum, I think it really speaks to the different levels of design and relates directly to A List Apart’s realignment article.

Sports

• Bears play the Lions this weekend in a huge NFC North showdown. But you know that already, right? Since you’re all already reading Da’ Bears Blog?

That’s it for tonight. Happy Halloween. Enjoy yourself. Trick or treat responsibly.

For anyone interested, and if you’ve made it this far I’ll assume you are, I am dressing up as a semi-colon for Halloween.

I am a geek.

October 29, 2005

The Death of Blogging

When asked about some predictions for next year, I suggested that 2006 is the year that will mark the end of blogging. Obviously I don’t mean an end to the millions of people writing on the web daily, but rather the end of the differentiation. Blogging is a meaningless term. The only thing different about a blog and a regular website is the software it runs on. Blogging is a software revolution, and as that software becomes more widespread and people get more comfortable with it, the idea of ‘blogging’ will fall by the wayside. Think about it. If you visit the Movable Type homepage, is that a blog? Well it’s built on the same software that makes this site work. I’ve spoken about this before and I know it’s kind of kicking a dead horse and harping on a semantic issue, but I really can’t resist.

I think as more people jump on board the blogging bandwagon, blogging will be exposed like the wizard behind the curtain. You know what? This is a great thing. Because once we move past the terms and the aura, we can really begin to explore the medium. All ‘blogs’ don’t have to look the same, sound the same or dress the same. Just the other day, Kottke pointed to tumblelogs, a kind of retro blog where people stop the absurdly long posts so many of us are guilty of and return to a short, linklog style. For the last year so many people have been too caught up in what a blog should be that they’ve missed opportunities to do new and different things.

This is everyone’s big chance.

October 29, 2005

Job/Personal Creativity

[Editor's Note: This is really just me bitching. Because this is my site, I can do whatever I want. Sometimes that means wasting space with a meaningless rant like the one below. Sorry to waste your time.]

Tonight I had something said to me where it was implied that the work I do at my job is somehow less interesting than the work I do in my personal life. It bothered me quite a bit. While this may be the norm, for people to go to a job where they’re told what to do and they do, that is not me. I used to work for a magazine where I pitched and wrote my own stories. I wrote about the things I was interested in, topics like RSS, blogs in politics and street art as a marketing platform. Try to find the line there between my personal and professional life. For anyone that’s read this blog for any amount of time they’ll recognize that those are just the kind of topics I write about here. That’s because I was doing something I was passionate about.

Sure, I wouldn’t include everything I wrote while at American Demographics in a portfolio, but it’s still work I’m proud of. Since then I’ve moved to a new company, a marketing agency. Does that mean that all the work I do is purely what the client tells me? The answer is most definitely no. I wouldn’t be somewhere like that and I was offended by the implication I would be. I am at a place where I am given the responsibility to come up with ideas that have never been seen before. I do more than just write a few lines of copy, I’m involved in every piece of the puzzle from ideation on.

Not that any of this really matters, and I could have just blown off the comment, but something about it really bothered me. It’s like the artist who holds their nose above everyone else because their work is somehow less pure. It’s absurdity. Limitations are a part of life.

Working within limitations can often be a far better gauge of just how creative a person is than the limitlessness of ‘pure art.’

Sorry, just had to get it off my chest.

October 26, 2005

Rosa Parks

October 26, 2005

(Mostly Not) Irish Observations

So, I’m back from Ireland. It was quite a whirlwind tour of the country and I’m feeling recharged. If you happen to be interested, I’ve posted some photos over at Flickr for your enjoyment.

Rather than giving some boring rundown of my trip, I decided to just copy some observations from my journal. Most of them are completely unrelated to Ireland, but that’s the fun, isn’t it?

Mostly Non-Irish Observations

• With so many people using cellphones as a watch, when you get onto a plane and can’t use it, no one knows the damn time. It’s crazy. I couldn’t find anyone around to let me know how long we’d been flying.
• All of Ireland is under construction.
• The hacker and designer are kind of parallel figures. Both are looking to achieve a certain elegance in what they do, whether it be code or design. They are trying to do as much as possible with only as much as they need. (As a side note, less is not more. Less is more implies less for less’ sake. The goal is not less, but rather elegance — a point inspired by Neal Stephenson’s excellent The Diamond Age.)
• There seem to be fewer pay phones than ever because everyone has a cellphone. That’s a serious problem for travelers. It seems like a good opportunity for a low priced mobile phone rental business. Imagine if you could rent a shitty phone for like $50 and it included something like 200 minutes to America. I’d do it. Not sure if it’s viable, but it seems like it shouldn’t be that unreasonable. (That’s probably completely untrue.)
• There are a lot of bars in Ireland.

Thanks a bunch to my mom for covering for me while I was gone . . . you did an excellent job. Now that I’m back all you readers can expect a return to the regularly scheduled boredom. Hope you enjoyed the hiatus.

October 25, 2005

The Whys of iPod Video

If you’re a sports fan, make sure you read this. It could change your life . . . well, I don’t think this entry will necessarily, but if the predictions come true it could.

Why video?

Why not? That’s the beauty of the move. By making video standard as part of the iPod and not raising the price Apple has absolutely nothing to lose. Steve Jobs has said in the past that video is not an interesting market to him and that he didn’t think a portable video player was a good idea because watching must be a primary activity (versus listening, which can be secondary). So what does he do? Make an iPod that just happens to play video. People are going to buy iPods because they are the best MP3 player on the market. Now, they just happen to play video as well. It’s a can’t lose situation and those are always good.

Why Disney?

Because Disney’s the only entertainment company out there who wants something Jobs has. He could never waltz into Viacom or News Corporation and ask them to let him sell their shows for $1.99, they’d never go for it. Not with a single song selling on iTunes for $.99. So what Jobs does is approach Robert Iger, new chief of Disney, whose major goal is to re-up their distribution deal with Jobs’ Pixar. Jobs holds all the cards and gets Iger to sign up ABC and two of America’s most popular television shows (Lost and Desperate Housewives). Now, assuming it does well, Apple has set the price themselves and other companies will have no choice but to jump onboard at $1.99.

That’s it?

Nope. There’s much more to the Disney story, and this is where it gets really interesting. Disney also owns ESPN, the be-all-and-end-all of sports broadcasting who is looking to extend their brand. Sports is where mobile video really makes sense. Imagine this scenario: You’re a commuter and a sports fan (as many American men are). Every morning you get on the train and hit play on SportsCenter, ESPN’s hugely popular daily sports highlight show. One hour train rides have never been so good. What would you pay for this? I say $20 easy. I mean, if I had an hour commute and an opportunity to watch SportsCenter on it, commercial free, every morning I’d jump at it. I expect there are a lot of other sports fans who would agree. It’s a cash cow. It’d be reason enough to buy an iPod (which I don’t own, by the way). And it doesn’t seem that unreasonable, does it?

October 24, 2005

It’s All About the Relationship

By Barbara Rubin Brier

In my last post, which I intended to be about mentoring, I got waylaid by a connection that took me by surprise. What I learned from that is that blogging can be a very self-indulgent enterprise. Self-indulgence is certainly nothing to be sneezed at – who better to indulge? But on reflection, I realized that there was something I really wanted to say about mentoring before my days as Noah’s guest blogger expired.

As I said, after close to a year of research on principal mentoring, it all really came down to this: having someone who genuinely listens, supports and encourages your personal and/or professional growth is invaluable. Not to belabor the point, but … duh!!! It’s all about the relationship. What we seem to forget is that it’s always been all about the relationship, whether we’re students, teachers or principals.

Here’s my point: it is ironic — and extremely unfortunate — that schools can’t seem to retain that information. They’re always looking for a magic bullet here or there, when we all know that a good teacher and/or mentor (they’re often synonymous) can change a student’s life. The movie, In and Out, springs immediately to mind: a former student, receiving an academy award, thanks his high school English teacher. The movie may be about the accidental outing of the Kevin Kline character, but the situation – thanking a teacher in a time of personal accomplishment – is pretty ubiquitous. (It works in the reverse as well, witness Noah’s previous post.)

Sadly, being an educational change consultant, I see school improvement initiatives come and go all the time — so often, in fact, that veteran teachers generally respond to new ideas with the attitude that ‘this too shall pass.’ (The upside of this attitude is that it’s enabled many educators to withstand the stress of No Child Left Behind – hopefully, it will pass soon!)

But skeptical as I may be, I applaud the growing interest in principal mentoring and sincerely hope schools and school districts heed the need for leadership support. (It wouldn’t hurt if the typical central office bureaucrats assumed some responsibility for this, either!)

Then, if we could develop more comprehensive teacher and student mentoring programs, and remember that having someone who genuinely listens, supports and encourages your personal and/or professional growth is invaluable, we might actually be able to make a consistent difference in young people’s lives.

As I’ve said before, in the long run, I think that the role of secondary school teachers will focus more on things like mentoring and facilitating higher order thinking. But until then, what we desperately need in our poorer communities and urban centers are teachers, administrators and people like you and me – people who care about kids and are willing to be there for them – to facilitate their learning based on their individual needs (which often have nothing to do with academics!)

So become a mentor! It offers as many rewards to the mentor as it does to the mentee. My sister just signed up with an organization called iMentor, which operates in the New York metropolitan area and is specifically geared to electronic interaction, but almost every major school system has some sort of student mentoring program. Just call your local school, district office or board of education to find out and sign up. That’s it — that’s what I wanted to say about mentoring.

P.S. This is my final entry as Noah’s guest blogger, as I’m off to GWU for parents’ weekend and then to Providence for a conference. So I’d like to thank Noah for trusting me with this. It is all about the relationship — and it means the world to me.

October 20, 2005

Question Everything

[Editor's Note: Since I'm currently away on vacation and don't have anything to write at the moment, I decided to post my college entrance essay. My mom recently emailed it to me and I think it really explains a lot about the way I think. I hope you enjoy and that everything's going okay here while I'm gone.]

Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, or risk that you have taken and its impact on you.

Question everything. It’s a lesson I learned in the eighth grade and it has really helped shape the way I think. The setting: U.S. History class, the day before winter vacation. The teacher: Mr. Bauer, a 28-year veteran who asked the same bonus question every year and then swore his students to secrecy. The question: What woman accompanied the three Americans involved in the XYZ affair to their meeting with Tallyrand? The reward: the first student to bring in the correct answer and source would receive an automatic A for the third quarter. I really wanted to be on vacation, but the idea of no homework or tests in history for a whole quarter was very tempting. As soon as I got home, I asked my mother to drive me to the library.

Others had obviously beaten me there. The only reference I could find said nothing about a woman. I looked through a couple of encyclopedias, nothing there either. I convinced my mother to take me to a library in another town. There I found a whole book just on the XYZ Affair. I was so confident I’d find what I needed I checked it out and went home. But again, no woman. I found the reference at a third library the next day.

As happy as I was, something was bothering me. Why had the answer only been in that one book? It seemed like a pretty important point; it just didn’t make sense. I noticed that the book with the answer seemed much older than the other. I looked at the copyright dates. The book with the answer had been published some time in the fifties, the one called The XYZ Affair in 1981. Now I was even more puzzled. Why would a more recent book, written specifically about the incident, not mention this important detail?

The only thing I could think of doing was to ask the author. But if I wrote a letter through the publisher, I’d never have the information back in time to be first at school. That’s when I noticed that the flyleaf said the author, William Stinchcombe, was a professor at Syracuse University. I decided to call and find out if he still worked there, figuring I’d ask for an e-mail address. Much to my astonishment, the operator told me to hold on and she’d connect me. When the voice on the other end of the line said, “Bill Stinchcombe,� I somehow managed to mumble something about why I was calling. At first, I didn’t even mention my name. (It was rather intimidating to talk to a college professor.) I have no idea what he must have thought about a kid calling to ask a question like that, but his answer was really direct. He not only told me my teacher was wrong, he told me where I could find the proof. I asked if he would mind sending me an e-mail because I was afraid Mr. Bauer would think I was lying.

There were five people ahead of me on the first day back after vacation, but I was the only one who could prove the question was wrong. Mr. Bauer gave the A to the first person on line with the ‘correct’ answer. He also gave me one — and never asked that question again. (A copy of the e-mail I received from Professor Stinchcombe is attached.) [Ed: Not to this blog post.]

Update (10/24/05): My mother was nice enough to type up the email I received from Professor Stinchcombe:

Mr. Brier:

I am a professor of history at Syracuse specializing in United States Diplomatic history.

It is absolutely clear that Madame Villette never accompanied the three American diplomats in their infrequent meetings with Tallyrand.

Madame Villete was never in the picture until they met W (Nicholas Hubbard), X Jean Hottinguer, Y Pierre Bellamy, and Z Lucien Hauteval. This is clear from two sources: the dispatches sent back to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and in the Marshall Journal. Both sources are in The Papers of John Marshall, vol. 3, which I edited.

Another source is the article of mine “THe Diplomacy of the WXYZ Affair,” which appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1977.

My guess is that Mr. Bauer is reciting the old, and quite discredited, view that Madame Villette approached Charles C. Pinckney at a party. This rumor is taken care of in the article mentioned above.

I am sorry to quote only myself but on this issue my work is the most definitive.

October 19, 2005

Drilling Down

By Barbara Rubin Brier

A good deal of my professional time in the past year has been spent on principal mentoring, i.e., supporting aspiring and new principals as they take on the extraordinarily demanding responsibility of running a school. Never easy, the stress of this complex role has become unbearable for many in this era of ‘No Child Left Behind.’ As a result, there have been more retirees and fewer potential candidates for their jobs in recent years, which has led to an explosion of ‘new’ programs [such as mentoring] to identify, train and retain principals.

Having written what feels like hundreds of pages on the theory and practice of mentoring, I have to say that it really comes down to this: having someone who genuinely listens, supports and encourages your personal and/or professional growth is invaluable.

You might have guessed that what set me on this train of thought was writing for this blog – forcing myself to reflect on what I wanted to make public – and I am struck by how deeply it has encouraged me to drill down. I started by making the connection to mentoring from what I said in my last post about learning from Noah. But then the layers of my life started peeling away. I was all the way back to my first art professor’s thesis on contour drawing — and had even googled his name (Robert Kaupelis) – when I realized that I was conducting a networked search. It is too cool that the internet is a metaphor for the way we think; it just blows me away!

By the way, Kaupelis’ thesis was that contour drawing – drawing without looking at the paper – forced you to really see what you were drawing rather than fall back on the image of ‘flower’, ‘face’, or ‘waterfall’ that is stored in your brain as a kind of caricature – a visual ‘tag,’ if you will. Quite the connection, no?

October 17, 2005

Oh My …

By Barbara Rubin Brier

I can’t believe how daunting it feels to have been entrusted with writing for Noah’s blog! And the ‘brilliant’ billing certainly didn’t help — I can’t remember when I’ve felt so at a loss. I’ve been racking my brain, trying to come up with something pithy (I LOVE that word!), reminding myself that that’s not what blogging is about, writing something but re-reading and finding it uninspiring … you get my drift. Then I opened an e-mail from a friend who happens to read Noah’s blog – who I actually met though Noah’s blog – who I told how nervous I was — and she said:

“I don’t know if I mentioned this to you, but I’m pretty close to starting a blog, but I’m still too nervous, for the reasons you mentioned re your contribution to Noah’s blog. I think there is a definite process involved in getting comfortable with thinking that what you have to say is *important* enough or *cool* enough for others to read and not think it’s a waste of time…â€?

So I’ve decided to tell you the story of how I met Andrea. It is, at the very least, an interesting twist on making connections. (Please be patient if I screw up the linking process!)

Some months ago, Noah posted a blog on thinking and tagging that really struck me, and I posted a comment, as I often do. In my post, I mentioned having enjoyed a post on tags by Jakob Lodwick, which Noah had linked to. I also wrote enough gushy mother stuff that Noah responded to my comment with two words: “Thanks mom.�

Later that day, I got an e-mail from someone named Andrea who began her note by saying, “I enjoyed your son Noah’s post about tagging and I really enjoyed your response. You see, I am Jakob Lodwick’s mom (he of the tagwebs essay)â€?, and concluded it with, “I just thought you might enjoy hearing from another proud mother-of-an-adult-child-on-display-on-the-internet.â€?

In fact, I was tickled pink to hear from Andrea, and responded (in part): “I loved getting your e-mail –both as a proud mom and as an ardent admirer of people who actively think about the impact of digital technology. You’re right; not too many years ago, we would have had to depend on occasional visits and phone calls to keep up with our kids’ lives. Now we have this special window that gives us access to what they really think about, know and do. More important, they’re comfortable with that transparency in their lives, a characteristic I think is bred by a combination of their instinctive(?), reflective natures and their exposure to this extraordinary new digital world.â€?

I don’t know how many parents talk about this dimension of blogging, and I suspect some are less than thrilled with what their children post. But for me, Noah’s blog has reinforced our relationship during a period in his life when communication between us might well have dwindled. Blogging, and the internet, have given me an opportunity to learn from my son. As a result, it has expanded the scope of our relationship in a way that I’m not sure would have been possible otherwise. That’s really something …

AND I made a new friend! (Last week, Andrea and I spent a day together in NYC, getting to know each other.)

October 14, 2005