Doing Words

The Errol Flynn Skill Set

// October 29th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Me, Relationships

Gavin Heaton and Mark Pollard are curating A Perfect Gift For A Man — a book about manhood arising from the blogosphere’s contributions to Reach Out and Triple J’s Man Week project. There’s #manweek on Twitter too.

UPDATE: there’s now an ebook and a printed book (AUD$44.95) available through Blurb. The following contribution didn’t make the book but that’s because the stories in the book are even better. Go buy it now (and by “now” I mean as soon as you’ve read the following…

They’re calling for submissions, so here’s mine…

What does Australian web history tell us? The only constant is rapid change

// August 10th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Industry

With age, comes wisdom. At least, that’s the theory. So far, all I’ve acquired is a tendency to ramble in introductory paragraphs, reading glasses, and arthritis in my left thumb. Actually, that’s not strictly true; I think I’ve also acquired a broader perspective.

For instance, I’m excited that the Australian Interactive Media Association (AIMIA), Nielsen Online, Interaction Consortium and Paul McCarthy have developed this interactive history of the internet in Australia. At the same time, my broader perspective means I draw some different conclusions from the data.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the problem that the time scale starts in 2001, when consumer web activity probably began in earnest about six years prior, meaning this experiment only charts about half Australia’s actual web history. Telstra established a consumer ISP/portal called On Australia circa 1995 and Sean Howard’s OzeMail (which had been providing email services since the early 1980s) started offering web hosting in late 1994 or early 1995, if memory serves me. This is probably because the research industry tracking the internet has itself grown up in the same decade, from no tracking at all in the early days, to laughably inaccurate tracking in the late ’90s, to the arguably-better-than-traditional-media-research-but-still-full-of-holes research we see today.

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Free photo editing for presenters

// July 14th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Presentation

Here’s a photo editing tip that can save you hundreds of dollars if you need to edit photos to use in presentations.

Last week I was in Wellington, NZ to study the craft of Presentation Zen (or ‘PZ’) from the sensei himself, Garr Reynolds. Garr is a great guy — engaging, warm, generous (lots of schwag!) and a talented presenter. He teaches that ‘Death by PowerPoint‘ can be avoided by using slides that convey emotion rather than information, using images and design rather than big blocks of bullet-point text.

I’ve been mimicking elements of Presentation Zen design for a while now, inspired by the work of others (such as @trib, @liubinskas and @factoryjoe) but this was my first chance to learn the whole thing first-hand. It was ground-breaking and thought-provoking stuff – I’d highly recommend doing the course.

But much to my surprise, I knew something about designing presentations that Garr Sensei did not — how to create great images for slides on your Mac, on the cheap…

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Secret media relations: how to criticise your competitors

// May 30th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Media relations, Other news

This is the second in a series of posts on the secrets of media relations, drawn from my previous career in PR and the time I’ve spent as a senior exec with web startups. You can find the first post, on how to keep secrets, here. This is new for me, so I need to ask: are you enjoying these? Not enjoying them? Let me know in the comments at the end of this post.

A startup friend emailed me today, to ask: “This Google Wave thing is ambitious and complicated. I doubt it’s going to be popular with consumers. At the same time, some of the things Wave does are similar to of the things my product does. Maybe we’re competitors now. Should I look for opportunities to criticise Google Wave and talk up my own product?”

photo credit: timsamoff

The answer, as always when you consult a specialist, is “yes, and no.” The fine art of criticism takes lots of practice, and when you engage in a critical battle that is waged in a third-party medium (news, blogs, forums, tweets) one step removed (communicating via employees, customers, partners, investors, journalists, bloggers and consumers) it’s easy for your carefully-aimed arrows to morph into shotgun blasts, or worse, boomerangs.

Here are three simple rules I’ve learned through painful experience. Stick to these three rules to present yourself in the best possible light, while at the same time undermining your competitor.

Rule 1 : never be anything other than constructively critical of someone else’s product.

In other words, don’t say, “Google Wave is too complicated” say “Here’s a way Google Wave could be even better.”

Rule 2: If you can, wait to be asked.

Don’t offer an unsolicited opinion. When you say something (even constructively critical) without being asked, it looks like you need the attention more than the other guy. If you can, engineer the situation so that a third-party (e.g. conference convener, analyst, blogger) you can trust asks for your opinion before you give it.

Rule 3: Don’t position your product as a threat to the behemoths

The behemoths for the moment are Google and Microsoft in software, Cisco, Intel and Apple in hardware.

Behemoths have more fans than you do, and those fans will bury you in rebuttals. The behemoths have detractors too, but aligning them with your point of view is like herding cats. Online debates are always won by the argument with the most supporters, not by the correct point of view.

Then there’s the relationship with the behemoth themselves. While they don’t see you as a threat, or aren’t even aware of your existence, you can thrive. Once there are a few people at Google or Microsoft whose only job is to evaluate you as a potential threat and take you out, business gets a whole lot harder.

This is made worse by journalists and their need to get readers to stop scanning headlines and read a story. To get an interesting angle for a story, journalists will take any tiny hint of potential competition between a behemoth and a startup and blow it way out of proportion. And once you’re perceived as a competitor, it spreads fast.

If you try to deny it the headline just reads “Startup founder denies his product is a threat to Google.” If you’re at Google and you’re reading that, the subtext is, “We are going to kill Google one day, we’re just not ready to announce that yet.” That’s when they  press the button on their command chair  labelled “launch ninjas”. You don’t want that.

So there you have go: it’s sometimes necessary to compare your product and your company to others. It’s hard to compare without being critical. But being critical comes with risks. Don’t do it lightly and follow these rules.

Master “W Fu” — the secret art of media relations

// May 28th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Startup

photo credit: laverrue

Despite my baby-face, I’m so old that I had a career as a journalist and PR consultant before my interweb production career. While I no longer have to practice media relations every day, most startup founders find they have to wear many hats, and one of those may be the natty trilby hat of media relations. (more…)

Internet Explorer 8: the unfaithful ex-girlfriend

// April 23rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Fun, software, Writing

Sorry, but I'm with someone new, and it's better (photo by Michael Sarver)

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer IE 8 showing up now is like an unfaithful ex-partner showing up a long time after you’ve found someone better looking and less likely to break your heart.

Wrote this post after Amnesia Razorfish asked me to write about IE8, for Microsoft’s http://microsoft.com.au/ie8debate. You can find other opinion-leaders and read their leading opinions there (warning: many are not as funny as mine). I’m impressed Amnesia Razorfish and Microsoft were up for constructive criticism since IE8 is such an important product. Evidence Microsoft is learning to listen and ready to begin changing. You can contribute your opinion on http://microsoft.com.au/ie8debate or just twitter with the hashtag #ie8debate

There was a time (though it seems like centuries ago now) that Internet Explorer had me by the heart-strings. It was the mid-nineties, I was but a young stripling then, and all I could think about was the beauty and the power of the internet. I was a producer with a small internet business called Yahoo! that hoped to make some money selling ads on web pages when people went searching for stuff (as if!) and Internet Explorer was one of two browsers that most consumers used to access what many people still called “the world wide web.”

Back then Internet Explorer (IE) had a small but rapidly growing slice of the market and I was in love with her promise of fast times, with her sexy interface. (Can an interface be “sexy”? Can I get a “hell yeah” from the geeks in the audience?) In those days, compared to Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer was attractive; alluring, even. IE was great for me, great for Yahoo! and great for our customers. She made me look good, and she was going to help me make money — who can ask for more from a girlfriend?

Then the relationship began to go bad.

IE started to get carried away with the power she had over me. She wanted more money to keep Yahoo! search as an option for IE users searching the web. She wanted me to adopt new technologies like ActiveX that weren’t compatible with Navigator. By now, Navigator was just another browser I was just friends with, but that wasn’t enough for IE — she wanted me all to herself.

Then she started to hang around with a bad crowd, and developed a crack habit. Spyware and malware and all manner of nasty types started exploiting security vulnerabilities I hadn’t noticed when we first started dating. She had a problem, and although she kept releasing updates to address each vulnerability, there seemed to be a new crack in her armour almost every week.

At first I thought it was just a phase she’d grow out of. Slowly the crack habit began affecting the time we spent together — I’d have to download and install a big new patch before I began browsing the web, and it was costing me money and time in bandwidth (which was expensive and slow back then) just to maintain our relationship.

Even then, I probably would have stayed with her if it weren’t for two of her friends: MSN and Windows.

There’s a common observation in single guy relationship theory: the more beautiful the woman, the more likely she is to have a needy, unattractive best friend. The unattractive best friend (who my mate Tony calls “the bonus monster”) doesn’t like you, and will always be around just when you really want to be alone and romantic. She will undermine you, and if you’re not careful, she’ll manage to shut you out altogether.

IE’s bonus monster was MSN, this overweight, insecure, unattractive consumer web portal that kinda-sorta-wanted-to-be-AOL-and-Yahoo!-put-together. At first I didn’t believe MSN was a threat to my relationship with IE because nobody who knew how to change their default homepage really wanted to use it. But soon IE started to insist that we think of MSN’s feelings on every decision we were making; including MSN in everything we did together, even insisting I use MSN if I was going to do something online. Ick.

Then there was IE’s fat, clumsy and often aggressive big bully brother, Windows. At lot has changed since Windows got in trouble with the law and lost, but back then, Windows was a pretty scary guy to deal with. There was a tiny core at the centre of Windows — a brainstem that remained almost literally unchanged since the Jurassic equivalent of consumer computing evolution — and on top of that, all manner of computing services had been stacked, sometimes carefully, sometimes haphazardly. Sometimes the stack would fall over several times a day.

(Once I taught myself to juggle during a two week period of hell when Windows would crash my laptop hourly and then take 5-10 minutes to recover itself when I rebooted.)

Microsoft, IE’s dad, decided about mid-way through our relationship that it would be a good idea for IE to spend more time with Windows, and began insisting that they hang out together in what became an uncomfortable, unnatural way. It seemed like the more successful IE became, the more determined Microsoft became to make IE take care of her bully brother. Sometimes it was like Windows and IE were just one person; they started sharing a plate, started hugging a little too closely, began finishing each other’s sentences. It was wrong on so many levels. It was incest. And yet, when the courts finally sought to intervene, for a while Microsoft tried to say it was no longer possible for Windows to exist without IE. That was so weird it was embarrassing.

I’d been through a lot all this time, putting up with the constant downtimes, updates and workarounds I needed just to stay in this relationship, but I still had eyes only for IE. At least, until poor bloated, dependency-addled IE could no longer keep up with advances in HTML itself. And I bought an iPod.

See, for the past decade my employer had chosen the operating system I used at work, and while my shiny new iPod worked OK with my Windows laptop at work, I was blown away by the ease-of-use and clean simplicity of my iPod. I’d used Macs before in the past (I’d been a Mac evangelist and Editor of Australian Macworld magazine before there really was an Internet) and I began to wonder if perhaps the great times I was having with my iPod would be the same if I tried using Mac’s OS X instead of Windows.

When I left Yahoo! to go do my own thing, I bought a Mac. On my Mac there was IE, but not the IE 6.x I was used to, just something slow and clunky labelled IE 5.x. Not very much like the IE 5.x I’d used on Windows before. There was also Safari, another browser from Apple, which was basic and short on some features I’d miss a bit, but it was much faster than IE, and it was really stable.

There was also this new girl: Firefox. Somehow while I’d been focused on just getting by in my tumultuous relationship with IE, the un-sexy, clunky Navigator I’d known in the ’90s had dramatically changed. After a near-death experience and a long time in rehab she had gone into a kind of group therapy called Open Source and come out transformed. She was now everything I might want, and as my needs changed, the open source community ensured that she not only changed with my needs but often anticipated my needs before they changed. She was light, she was fast, she was flexible, and I could dress her up with themes to suit any occasion.

She was even OK that I was still good friends with Safari and wanted to stay that way. I’d found the girl of my dreams.

So a few years went by. Then just the other day, Firefox and Safari and were are at the coffee shop, working and talking via Twitter and Skype and Jabber with our friends, and you’d never guess who walked in. Internet Explorer 8. Looking cleaner, less seedy, and for a change, not joined at the hip to her scary brother Windows and her ugly best friend, MSN. I hardly recognised her.

So I asked Firefox and Safari if they’d excuse me, and I moved to another table to talk with IE 8 for a while. And every thing I learned just made me certain I’d made the right decision in leaving her.

She made it clear that she wanted me back, but I don’t think she even really knows what I want anymore. Yes, she has has some new features but I’m not overwhelmed by them, in fact, I’m not even whelmed. They’re very similar to stuff I already get with Firefox and Safari. Yes, IE 8 is now less befuddled with crud than before and more able to support the advanced scripting web services like to do these days, but that’s something I’d expect of any modern girl.

We went through a lot together, IE8 and I. I know it hurt both of us, not just me. But it takes a long time for those scars to heal. It takes a lot of upside for me to give her a second chance. I can’t see that upside in her right now.

And I’m a Mac guy now. Is there an IE8 for Mac guys? Ah, no. In fact, there isn’t even that terrible IE 5.x for Mac users anymore.

Sorry IE, but you’re the unfaithful ex-girfriend, and I’m in a better place now.

When I first started as a web producer, everybody I knew worked with only Netscape Navigator and IE in mind and they did it only from PCs. Now, in my consulting gig at Pollenizer.com Our team are nearly all Mac-based and we work mainly in Firefox and Safari (when we’re not testing for browser-compatibility). Times have changed for me. How have they changed for you?

About the bottom of your emails

// April 6th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Fun, Writing

If you’re going to be wasting bytes by putting all that fine print at the bottom of your emails, at least be honest and do try to be funny. Here’s how:

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Status Epilepticus: 50+ funny status messages from web history

// March 31st, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Fun

In 2001-2003, when instant messaging was in its infancy and social networking was something we did in bars, I probably spent too much time trying to write funnier status messages for Yahoo! Messenger than the 500-odd other employees. Is it any wonder they were happy to see me go?

Interestingly, in my original collection I had saved, “Is there anyone out there?” — what seemed like a funny thing to say in 2001 seems just weird to ask these days. Can you even imagine what it was like when there were whole chunks of the day when nobody was there in your buddy list?

These days, everybody’s got at least one status message, mood or “What I’m doing now” attached to an online profile. I bet the Dalai Llama’s says, “Laughing, again” and Kim Jong-Il’s says something like, “I feel like launching missles today.” So here are some of the most interesting status messages I’ve collected over the last few years.

Where known, I’ve credited their author by their Yahoo! Messenger ID. Many of those people still go by the same IDs, so if you’re interested, try googling them (oops, I mean “yahooing” them.) The remainder are my own work, hope you like them.

Think I write well? I’m available for hire!

• 10,000 Leagues Under The C++
• Wireless and clueless
• Disk space, the final frontier
• Do, or Ctrl-Z, there is no ‘try’
• Home is where the base href is
• There’s no page like home
• About to be replaced by a shell script
• On the internet, noone knows I’m a parent
• Living la vida Yoda
• The less i know the more i appear to understand
• Phasers set to stun
• Savaging the soothed beast
• Filmed in Cinemascope
• Communication creates the illusion of progress
• Not at your desk
• But more, much more than this, you’ll do it my way!
• I am a work of speculative fiction
• Luck can’t last a lifetime unless you die young
• Conan the Humanitarian (naikrovek, 2002)
• Let the Wookie win (naikrovek, 2002)
• Stigmata – high-five gone awry (karen jackson 2002)
• Winona, if you don’t steal, i’ll go out with you (naikrovek, 2002)
• Only the young die young
• It hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year
• My PDA says it’s your birthday, but it cares more than I do
• Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commision
• Pull apart my buns and smear them with butter (Easter)
• Capitalisation is in the eye of the shareholder
• What if the Hokey-Pokey IS what it’s all about? (Stephanie Snyder, 2001)
• Camel, eye of needle… grease…
• 99% of the game is half mental
• All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power
• Like a snowball gathering steam (the_bigtee 2003)
• Busier than a leper in an all-hands meeting (goonker 2003)
• I went to buy some camouflage pants, but I couldn’t find any (Travis Wright)

Getting right to the bones of a business story

// May 13th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Communication, Featured, Startup, Writing

Stephen Sammartino, founder of Rentoid.com, has a great article in Anthill magazine on the importance of good story-telling in business and the article is available online for free.

Blogs are about quick snippets, so here’s the upshot: practice, practice and more practice separates you and I from the great business story tellers of our age (Stephen uses Steve Jobs as a great example – have you ever watched Job’s address to Stanford University students? It’s incredible. I’ve added it at the end of this story.)

Sammartino makes a valuable point: don’t leave it until the moment it really counts to practice your business stories. When you meet that potential investor, you need your business stories polished to a high sheen. When you’re trying to engage a potential hire you really need, you want to set their imagination on fire. When you’re pitching to your first customers, you want them to be swept away. (more…)