I've actually had this conversation with a few people recently. I can't remember who suggested it, but I decided to go with a tiered approach. I've got a "friends" folder, a "searches" folder (which always gets read first and includes all my ego feeds) and then "tier 1", "tier 2" and "tier 3." To be perfectly honest, I never really get to tier three and hardly even get to two. So, I open up the floor to you (and test comments in the quickies column): How do you organize your RSS feeds?
If you use Apple's Mail.app at work you've probably run across this problem: Someone's default address changes to their home address without you noticing and you end up sending work correspondence to their personal email. After it happened to me today, I finally decided to take action and ask metafilter. Within minutes I had my answer: Select "Previous Recipients" under "Window" and search for the email you don't want to send to anymore. Then just remove it from the list. Easy answer to an annoying problem.
Interesting article from this month's Wired all about Doug Morris, chair and CEO of Universal Music Group. It's a great look into how the music industry got into this mess. The two most interesting nuggest are about the industry's (lack of) techno-savviness ("'There's no one in the record company that's a technologist,' Morris explains.") and Apple ("We were just grateful that someone was selling online. The problem is, he became a gatekeeper. We make a lot of money from him, and suddenly you're wearing golden handcuffs. We would hate to give up that income.").
Google has added an experimental feature where you can vote up or reject search results. Looks like it only works for your results for now, but how long can it be before they start factoring this kind of information into the algorithm. As a sidenote, this made me think about Google Web History. I've been saying for a while it's the feature that speaks best to a future plan for Google: Recording all your web behavior and making recommendations based on collaborative filtering (a la Amazon's "people who like this like that"). If you haven't tried it, it's quite fascinating (the interesting items tend to be amazingly accurate).
Interesting move by Corbis. They're going to let bloggers use their photos for free and embed an ad in it. According to the article, they're also going to offer "bloggers the opportunity to earn ad revenue based on how many times Web users click on the images posted to their blogs, according to the Web site." I think more and more companies are going to start looking into this revenue sharing route. Seems like such a no-brainer.
Looks like after tackling world's information, Google is ready to take on energy. Yesterday they announced plans to find a renewable energy source less expensive than coal. "We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers," said Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. "We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal."
I love this for two reasons. First, Google is not doing this for completely altruistic reasons: They believe this initiative will save them a lot of money in the long run and be good for business. With that kind of motivation I expect them to get more done. Second, I get excited when people who know very little about a problem approach it (see this great Wired article on the Verifier Method).
For those of you reading this at NoahBrier.com you'll note things look fairly different around here. For those of you who get the RSS feed a) you'll have noticed a whole bunch of new entries pop up and b) click over to the homepage and check it out.
Anyway, I wanted to give a little explanation for what's going on:
I wanted a new look. The other one had been around for about a year and a half and I was getting bored. If you miss it, you can still see it on every page other than the homepage, where I haven't gotten around to switching things over yet.
I have changed the "sidenotes" thing. Lately I've been pretty busy and haven't been able to blog as much as I would like. However, that doesn't mean I haven't had lots of ideas and done a bunch of reading. The old format, which was just a straight feed from my del.icio.us, wasn't really doing the trick. So the idea for this new format is to do short posts, mostly around links and other assorted stuff, kind of like those links roundup I do every so often. The other big decision was to include them in the main RSS feed. I don't plan to post them that often, so I hope it won't get to overwhelming, but if it does I'll go back to the old version.
I really wanted to better integrate the email subscription mechanism (now in the header).
I really wanted a print and email buttons (now attached to each post . . . don't love the solution for email, but I'll keep working on that).
So I think that's it. Pop on over to the site and let me know what you think. If you have any thoughts on how to improve it, I'd love to hear them. I will try to roll out the rest of the site over the new week or two. Thanks for the patience.
Rob Walker offers up a nice counterargument for Saturday's New York Times article by Joe Nocera about a la carte cable. Nocera argued that in the end it would be more expensive for consumers in the end: "Take, for instance, ESPN, which charges the highest amount of any cable network: $3 per subscriber per month. (I’m borrowing this example from a recent research note by Craig Moffett, the Sanford C. Bernstein cable analyst.) Suppose in an àla carte world, 25 percent of the nation’s cable subscribers take ESPN. If that were the case, the network would have to charge each subscriber not $3, but $12 a month to keep its revenue the same." Anyway, read both, I think Rob Walker makes some very fair points, like "if it’s really true that lots of cable channels would die out if they weren’t buffered from the actual marketplace by cable-company bundling, well then, why shouldn’t we just let that happen?"
An excerpt from the upcoming book on basketball phenom Lebron James. A few of my favorite tidbits: "Reebok really grabbed the family's attention when CEO Paul Fireman pulled out a $10 million cashier's check made out to James. If he signed that night, he could take it with him. Reebok said it was a one-time offer, take it or leave it." and "The company [Adidas] rented signs and plastered the sides of city buses with messages such as DO YOU WANT TO BE THE NEXT SUPERSTAR? specifically targeted to James. Yes, adidas was recruiting James on the streets of his home town by renting billboards to be seen by anyone driving around or taking a walk."
Never thought about the difference between ad inventory on TV and online before . . . "On TV, if a show attracts more viewers than promised, advertisers essentially get “free� exposure on top of what they paid for, as deals cover specific episode dates and times. But online, a network can cease running an ad once it has delivered the number of viewers the advertiser has previously requested. Broadband programs that satisfy viewership commitments more quickly provide networks with more leverage to force advertisers to negotiate another round of sales."
Turns out the release of the original Sesame Street on DVD includes a warning that the content may not be suitable for children. As Virginia Heffernan so nicely puts it: "The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist." Two facts I learned from the article: 1) Snuffleupagus is how you spell Snuffleupagus and 2) Cookie Monster was "Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay." (If you want some more, check out this NPR interview with Heffernan.)
Umair quoting ad:tech panel description: "...Brand nation is about marketers to get loyal customers to be citizens of their brand nation regardless of global boundaries." He goes on to explain, "From an economic point of view, it's exactly the opposite: connected consumers (sometimes, in those rare instances that firms actually do something cool and create value) want firms to be citizens of their microcultures." Nice and succinct . . .
Was reading Sporting News tonight (they roped me in with one of those free subscriptions and now I actually pay for it) and came upon yet another article talking about Barry Bonds. This one mentioned that Sporting News had named him their Player of the 1990s and that they had also named Pete Rose their Player of the 1970s. Can you imagine another sport where two of the best players in history will go down in such infamy?
About 10 times in this article I thought it was going to go off the deep end in one direction or another. In the end, though, it turns out to be a fairly good look at the speed at which culture moves today (especially music) and includes some good insights (like the erosion of the local band).
Gladwell on how FBI profiling is a lot like being a psychic: You offer a bunch of fuzzy predictions and assume people will only remember the ones that were right.
Grant McCracken on how simplicity and complexity work hand in hand. Good summary quote: "And there was awhile in the 1990s when people would roll out talk of mother boards, chip speeds and baud rates. But that's over now, isn't it? We now understand that every new advance in technology will be yet another measure of how little we understand and far we are falling behind. Now mastery is finding the escape key and the willingness to use it early and often."
Thinking about dangers of old media fighting new media and why blogging has hit a rough patch.
The other morning I had breakfast with chartreuse. After a few debates about sports, media and the state of the universe we got on the topic of blogs. I believe it began with us both saying we were generally unimpressed by what's out there at the moment. Not sure what it is, but it seems like there's less and less of interest being written (which of course leads to less interesting writing since everyone is really commenting on everyone else).
Anyway, the conversation eventually shifted and I got into my speech on why big media companies are having difficulty fighting in this new age. I think I've said it here before, but the argument goes something like this: Big media companies are used to fighting against other big media companies. CBS and ABC will fight over ad revenue or programming, but neither is willing to undercut the other at the expense of the television model. The incentive, then, is for a competitor to undercut the competition ever so slightly while at the same time raising the water line for all the players.
Today, however, CBS and ABC are competing against me. Obviously I don't have the numbers, but on a micro level, every minute you spend here is a minute not spent with them. The danger for the big media companies is that I don't care about their model: I haven't made a dime directly off this blog and don't plan to. That means they're fighting the crazy guy, and, as everyone knows, you never want to fight the guy with nothing to lose.
After going through my whole explanation (which I've rehearsed many times before), chartreuse looked at me and said "what would you do if you were a big media company?" I gave it some thought, and replied with something dumb . . . clearly he had an answer in mind, but I couldn't resist trying to come up with something. So after I gave my fairly dim-witted response, he gave me five words: "Give them something to lose.
And, as often is the case, he was exactly right. When I read Umair's post "Blogonomics 2007, Or How The Blogosphere Lost It's Mojo the other day, I knew I had to write about our conversation. Umair writes, "Most of the blogs that have gone pro have lost their mojo. They're boring now - not fun to read, losing their appetite for risk, they almost never take a position on anything anymore, in lieu of the same old middle-of-the-road presentation you can get, well, in any lame old newspaper."
In other words, they now have something to lose.
PS - I am updating the site a bit. Anyone who is over at the homepage will see that the Sidenotes have changed a bit (now include video) and there is a complete overhaul in the works. If anyone wouldn't mind helping me out by taking a look at the new design, I'd love feedback. You can see an early version at http://www.noahbrier.com/nb4.
I'm just about to leave for my Thanksgiving vacation and I figured I should leave some links and such for those who have to work tomorrow. So, here's a grab-bag of thoughts, links and randomness.
The next likemind is November 30th (also the last of 2007). Be there or be square.
Russell Davies makes a great point about the beautiful future of marketing (aka a world where marketing becomes so targeted that it ceases being marketing). He points to the already existing world of blog outreach, and just how bad it can be, despite the unbelievable amount of personal info to work off. Russell explains, "what's both worse and more interesting is that the people who can be arsed to do a little bit of research send even more annoying and frustrating emails. They plunge into a kind of direct marketing uncanny valley where the more desperately they try to personalise their message the more I'm reminded that they're not really my friend. The more 'personal' information they utilise the more it freaks me out. (But again, not always, and maybe it's in the 'not always' where salvation lies, but I doubt it.)"
Can't remember whether I mentioned it or not, but RCRD LBL launched and it's pretty sweet. Go play around and download some good music.
I've been playing a lot with Tumblr and I have a whole post about niche blogging platforms in my head . . . just haven't gotten it out of there yet. Any thoughts?
I really want to move this site over to Wordpress (from Movable Type). Anyone have any experience with that? Tips for maintaining permalink structure? Or just know someone I could pay to do it for me?
If you have a BlackBerry, make sure to check out the Facebook application for it. It's the best-designed mobile app I've used (much better than either Gmail or Google Maps mobile) and makes me start to believe in Facebook again.
Okay, I think that's it for now. Will try to get back to somewhat regular posting at some point in the near future. Until then, have a great Thanksgiving.
For a while now I've been collecting SEO (search engine optimization) info. I've used some of those tips on this site andothers. A few months ago I put together a presentation with what I'd learned to share with some folks. After recently digging it up again, I cleaned it up a bit and decided to post it on SlideShare. However, as I was playing around with Keynote (my presentation tool of choice), I noticed a nifty feature: You can record yourself doing a presentation and export it to video.
So, I figured why not give it a shot. Now this video is a bit long at around 7 mins (and maybe a bit boring), but hopefully it's pretty informative. If you guys are into it I'd love to go back and record one for my power law presentation as well.
Anyway, without any further ado . . .
And, if you prefer not to hear my voice . . . here's just the slides.
Music paints a pretty accurate picture of what's going on in media at the moment.
About an hour ago I received this IM: "Can you write a bitchy response to this?
i can't understand how this is a failure when the band is taking $2.26/unit when signed bands typically earn about $0.02-$0.10 per record"
The article in question, Most Consumers Grabbed 'In Rainbows' for Free, not surprisingly refers to Radiohead's In Rainbows which let people download the album for any price they chose. Numbers have started to emerge from the experiment and pundits everywhere are debating about its relative success.
My take: This very debate lies at the heart of the problem. Success, like just about everything else in the universe, is not a binary. Things are not either successes or failures, rather it's a relative measure based on a number of factors. (It's a very postmodern take, I know.)
Now when it comes to most articles, the focus is that 6 out of 10 people paid nothing to get the album, leaving the whole experiment with an average price-per-album of $2.26. The other half of the equation, however, is that of the 38% who chose to pay something, they "forked over an average of $6, with U.S. consumers paying almost twice as much ($8.05) as those from other countries ($4.64)." Now sure this is less than the cost of a physical album or download on iTunes, but maybe, just maybe, what people are telling us is that these things cost too much. Plus, has anyone asked what percentage of people actually pay for albums? Is it unreasonable to think that if Britney Spears sells 2 million records, another 3 million people steal it? (Sounds about right to me.)
Part of the reason I've been so focused on music lately is because I think it's a nice case study for what's going on in media generally. Here are a couple thoughts on how:
Music is stuck in a contradiction: While it's more popular than ever before (how many people do you see with white headphones), it's also less profitable in traditional terms (that is record labels are struggling).
Digital production has fundamentally altered the economics of creating music (garage band is a piece of software, not a bunch of guys with nowhere else to practice).
It's increasingly unbundled (the shift to a world of singles rather than albums is all but complete -- hink about all the people who listen to playlists or shuffle on their iPod).
Musicians are discovering it's not the size of the audience, it's what you do with them. (This is a lesson I've been explaining using NoahBrier.com as an example: I don't make any money directly off this site, however, the platform has allowed me to start things like likemind, which certainly have monetary value.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, the best distribution platform anyone ever built for it is free. Napster was better than any record store that ever existed. I didn't need to leave my house and I could get anything I wanted in seconds. Oink, which was a giant BitTorrent site that just got shut down, had everything on the planet in every format you could ever imagine. Even musicians liked it: As Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails explained, "I'll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world's greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn't the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don't feel cool when I go there. I'm tired of seeing John Mayer's face pop up. I feel like I'm being hustled when I visit there, and I don't think their product is that great." Or, as DJ Rupture put it: "In many cases, I believe that downloading an album from Oink would be both faster (more on this in a bit) and give you more information about the CD than sites like iTunes."
As usual, I haven't really answered anything here, just added a whole lot more questions. But, as Terry Heaton so nicely put it, "Postmodernism offers no answers, but asks questions that might lead to answers, if we're willing to ask them."
Update (11/11/07): Keith makes a great point: "What I failed to realize when the news hit was, regardless of how much coin the band makes from the actual sales, they’ve just built a most impressive consumer database. In order to download the album, you must give your address, e-mail address (obvs), and mobile phone number!" Think about the value of a database of over a million of your fans. Amazing.
More links (and another presentation) for your enjoyment.
So things haven't really slowed down lately. Between work and some exciting likemind stuff, I've been fairly lazy about keeping this thing updated (which is an effect of lack of quality input in the form of reading). With that said, I haven't been a complete waste lately, so at least here are some thoughts/links/randomness.
First off, more presentation action (and further fascination with SlideShare. This one is from a talk I gave on the bundling/unbundling of marketing agencies at ad:tech Chicago.
After reading this Technology Review article on the role of quants on Wall Street, I couldn't help but think maybe the marketing industry is in dire need of a quant revolution similar to the one the financial industry saw in the 1980s. I wonder if someone couldn't come along and blow up the industry with some really creative math. Mmmmmmm . . .
I've started playing with Tumblr. No idea if I'll maintain it, but I've put up a site at heyitsnoah.tumblr.com. To be honest, it could end up being a lot like these random link posts . . .
Chris Anderson makes some good points in his blog post "Free is more complicated than you think". My favorite of them is that he plans to give versions of his new book away in order to "Give speeches, customizing my analysis and research for specific companies and industries. The free book is simply marketing for that, which can be more lucrative than book royalties." This is a perfect example of giving away the product and selling a service on top of it. I keep explaining the ROI of blogging this way: Sure I don't make any money directly off the blog, but the audience I have has enabled me to do things and make money in ways I never would have been able to without it.
I'm still thinking lots about weak ties and social networks. If anyone has any particularly good insights or links about network theory I'd love to hear them. Two recent reads (though not recent articles): Metcalfe's Law is Wrong and Network Theory's New Math.
My friend Justin is very funny. His latest gem: "If taglines were honest". A few of my favorites: "Ikea: One day you’ll be able to afford real furniture." and "PopTarts: Until you realize how disgusting they are, we’ll keep making them."
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Mostly random thought (from Twitter): Wow, I am now getting Ground Zero Mosque comment spam ... I don't know whether to be impressed or disturbed. (31 August 2010, 11:54 am)
Q: What is this site all about?
A: I think Michael Bierut explained it nicely a few years ago in response to people asking him why he didn't write more about design on Design Observer: "But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be." Replace "graphic design" with "media/marketing/technology" (or whatever you'd like to call my field) and you've got my deal.
Q: Where else do you live?
A: Good question. All over the place as a matter of fact. On Tumblr for more randomness, Twitter for short bursts, Dopplr for places I'm going, Delicious for things I'm reading, last.fm for music I'm listening to, Flickr for photos I'm taking and Facebook because I don't really have a choice. (Oh, and Amazon for stuff I want people to buy me.)
Q: I meant that literally. Where do you live?
A: Oh, sorry, Brooklyn, New York is where I call home at the moment.
Q: Any other side projects you'd like to tell us about?
A: As a matter of fact, yes. There's How Much Does it Buy?, a calculator for the rest of us. Holy Crap! Facts (and accompanying Twitter feed) which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Da' Bears Blog is, in my opinion, the best Chicago Bears blog on the web (I don't write it, I just helped it get off the ground) and Tweemail is a little PHP script I wrote for getting Twitter updates by email. I'm also always working on a few other things and will let you know when they're ready for public consumption.
Q: Um okay.
A: Yeah, that's a fake question mostly so I can throw in this one other quote I like that I think sums up some of what I try to do here. This one comes from Albert Einstein (or at least the internet says so) and goes something like, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Words to live by.
Hi, I'm 