November 2005 Archives
It's time for the next generation of marketing.
[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."
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From getting bosses to buy in on design to the "snowball effect" and everything in between.
[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
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.
Other
This defies categorization, but is well worth a read.
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What features must a mobile phone interface have for you to buy it?
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?
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The ultimate goal of design is to find an elegant solution to a problem.
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.)
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As I think more about this whole Attention thing, I'm beginning to wrap my head around. Took long enough, huh?
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.
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Attention is a hot topic on the net these days. But after giving it a fair amont of thought, I'm not quite sure what the big deal is.
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.
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While the shift towards unbundled media may seem scary to some, it offers big opportunities to the little guys.
[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."
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Lots of little things to say, nothing big.
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.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- This $100 laptop thing could really change the world. Quote me on that.
I think that's it. I'm out.
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It's important to always have someone leading a brainstorm who follows a different set of rules and guidelines from everyone else.
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.
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I now offer seperate RSS feeds for the main blog and the sidenotes. Pretty exciting.
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.
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What keeps big companies from innovating? It could be a lack of storming brains around the office.
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.
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Live from New York it's Saturday night.
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.
Business/Advertising
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.
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.
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NoahBrier.com's design gets a refresh and finally some standards compliance . . . woohoo!
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.
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Not only did Rojo add my requested feature, they emailed me to let me know they did.
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.
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It's not just media becoming unbundled online, it's also our 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.
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I want to get to know you. Please introduce yourself.
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.
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I finally unveil my award-winning halloween costume to NoahBrier.com readers around the world.
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.
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How the internet is changing our relationship to content and, in turn, our own thinking about ourselves.
"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 learning�. Often, however, “shallow learning is desired� (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.
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Hi, I'm 