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…

Me and my Dad. Like Errol Flynn, without the woman trouble.

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.

It’s true, as AIMIA says, there are some obvious findings:

Over the period, internet penetration increased 60% (from 7.2M to 11.7M Australians) while usage doubled (from 9.25hrs per month to 21 hours per month.) I think we’d all recognise that we spend way more time online than we did in 2001 — internet banking was in its infancy, there was no YouTube, no MySpace or Facebook and no widespread ADSL network to pipe it to us quickly back then. What’s much more interesting to an old man like me is the acceleration in usage in the past 2-3 years — the history project doesn’t allow for much accuracy but to my naked, rheumy old eyes it looks like growth in time online has been accelerating rapidly these past few years.

The study shows the largely unrecognised force which is Bebo.com in Australia.  Like most things out of Europe without a crazy Silicon Valley valuation and not owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media have largely missed Bebo’s growth. In Australia it has real brand advertisers, a younger audience than Facebook, and I’ve always wondered why nobody in the industry paid it enough attention. I think it’s because there’s no gritty, gruff local CEO to take calls from journalists. No local office at all, in fact. Maybe now it’ll break through? According to Nielsen’s numbers Bebo has enjoyed an average compound growth of 90% since 1995.

But what really stands out for me is the short time any one brand or even any single sector has enjoyed a dominant position in the Australian market. Five years maximum, more typically, two to three years. That’s not a lot of time to return value to shareholders and get the hell out of Dodge.

Everyone running a successful web business seems to fall into the same trap: when they achieve market dominance, their priorities change from “how do I achieve dominance?” to “how do I defend my market dominance?” It will doom you to failure in the four years at most you have left. Approaching the challenge from the direction of defence always means you try to do more of the same thing, instead of a different thing. Social media network, search engine, free email provider, ISP — it doesn’t matter what your sector is, you can’t count on it being the Biggest Thing Online for longer than five years no matter what you do.

Look at poor old Yahoo!’s struggles — it’s trying to find its way out of its problems by doing a better job of what it has always done, instead of trying to become an entirely different business that can prosper in these very different times. Some of its own products have evolved faster and further than the company itself. Microsoft is fading, MySpace is fading, Google will fade, Facebook will fade, Twitter will fade.

The correct question to ask yourself is, “when my market dominance inevitably ends, how will I transition my business? Do I negotiate an exit now while my valuation is highest? Do I use my market power to acquire future potential businesses? How do I make sure I put all my energies behind those new businesses instead of stifling them because I’m still really running my old business as if it will last forever?”

A couple of other minor points on the project: first being, where’s the mobile numbers? In another five years I expect the mobile web to comprise at least 30% of Australia’s total time online and I’m certain it makes up at least 5% today — I don’t have data but my arthritic thumb say so. It needs to be factored into the present of the Australian web and can’t be ignored in the future.

Second, the interactive chart points back to the AIMIA homepage, which today has an item on the history project, but in six months that will be buried in an archive somewhere and the AIMIA homepage will be all about some other topic. Neither do the Interactive Consortium or Nielsen logos link back to anything specifically about the history project.

Finally, the interactive chart has no detail on the methodology, no Help or FAQ section, or contact details. It doesn’t even allow you to share your favourite mashup of the data with friends/colleagues on your favourite social media or… say… this blog. They haven’t uploaded clips to YouTube or Vimeo. In this day and age, not good enough, young folk.

In my day, we ran our web servers in box in middle of road… mutter, mutter…

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…

About your image problem

The Presentation Zen style of presentation design calls for great images. Garr recommends using stock photo services like iStockphoto.com when you need to (and if you attend his course he’ll give you iStockphoto coupons for free photo credits – yay!) and he also recommends taking your own photos.

In my experience, taking my own photos doesn’t usually work out. Most slides need space for at least a few words, so an image needs either a large area of homogeneous colour I can run type over, or I need to crop the image, mask it, and/or anti-alias the edges so the subject of the image can be lifted from the original photo and dropped smoothly onto a slide background. Real-world photo backgrounds usually have lots of stuff in the background and I don’t have access to a photo studio or large, homogenous background in a well-lit space.

On the left, a photo from the real world (the Webstock PZ class at lunch) with all sorts of stuff going on in the background. On the right, a stock image from iStockphoto, with a plain white background - much easier to use in presentation design.

Have you paid your Adobe Tax?

You need image editing software to do things like crop, mask and anti-alias an object. Garr’s been presenting for decades and is a presentation designer, so for him the time and money required to buy and learn the Adobe suite of graphics software makes sense. But those products cost hundreds of dollars (I call it your “Adobe Tax”) and for people who don’t want to be designers, they aren’t easy to learn.

For me and the vast majority of part-time presenters, is there a cheaper, easier way? Turns out the answer is yes, for those of us on a Mac running the current version of OSX.

Preview: your overlooked best friend

In each OSX installation Apple includes some basic free apps, and one of those, Preview, pops up regularly as the app that shows you the contents of an email attachment if it’s a PDF, text or image file. By default, it’s the viewer for many common file types. Other than that, the other functions of Preview remain a mystery for most of us.

Delve a little deeper into Preview and all sorts of hidden treasures are revealed. Preview can make an easy and effective image editor for a lot of common tasks. It supports transparent background in the PNG image format (referred to as the ‘alpha channel’ by professionals) and with it you can select areas of an image by colour so they can be cropped out. It also has a lasso selection tool for isolating an object by its outline. It also has a feature called Extract Shape specifically for pulling objects out of a photo. It even has some good controls for changing image properties that will allow you to adjust exposure, saturation, temperature, tint and more.

…but very few people seem to know they even exist!

Here's where Apple hides the best tools in Preview

The Instant Alpha and Extract Shape tools are a bit hidden — you’ll have to click and hold down on the selection button on the Preview toolbar to see them. The colour adjustment features are hidden in the Adjust Colour item in the Tools menu.

(By the way, if you’re wondering why I have so many more buttons on my Preview toolbar than you have, it’s also worth checking out all the other features hidden in Preview. Go to Customise Toolbar… in the View menu to see more cool things you can do with Preview, like annotate and bookmark pages in a lengthy PDF…)

教師を展開！(Extract the Sensei!)

Let’s start with a perfect example — a fuzzy, poorly-lit photo I took of Garr in the workshop on my iPhone. If we can extract something clean and useful from a photo as bad as this, we know we’ve got a useful tool.

I'd like to take Garr out of the background to use in a presentation slide, let's do it using Preview.

Let’s take Garr out of that background and insert him into a different background.

First, use the Extract Shape tool to remove most of the background. Using the tool, drag around the outline of the person or thing you want to extract. You’ll see a red line following your mouse around the image. If you don’t get it quite right, don’t worry — once you’re finished drawing around the outline, Preview will add a draggable outline to the image and you can fine-tune your outline by dragging the little square points in and out, and up and down, until you’ve got the outline nailed.

Using the Extract Shape tool, you'll get a red outline indicating the path you've drawn

The background area that will be discarded is greyed-out

Once you’ve completed this step, Preview will automatically put you in Instant Alpha mode to allow you to fine-tune the crop still further (you can also select Instant Alpha mode from the Select button on the toolbar at any time.)

Instant Alpha is easy to use — just select the Instant Alpha tool, then click and drag on the coloured areas in the image you’d like to remove.

Using Instant Alpha, click on a colour you'd like to remove, and then drag the mouse towards the other side of that colour area. The area you're selecting will turn pink. If Garr starts to turn pink, you've selected too much! Don't worry, just drag the mouse back in the opposite direction a little way.

Here’s our extracted Garr. But before we leave Preview, let’s use the Adjust Colours panel to improve his brightness, contrast and saturation a little:

Let's add a little colour to Garr, brighten him up and soften him a little to remove some noise from the image.

ドロップは、先生！(Drop the Sensei!)

Now we’ve got the sensei we want, we could just drop his image onto a background in PowerPoint or Keynote, but to reward you for reading this far, I want to tell you about another great little tool I like to use to add drop-shadows, reflections, perspective, rotation, elevation and borders to images like these.

Take the time to check out Picturesque, from Acqualia. It costs USD$35, but that’s way less than the Adobe Tax, and it’s a super-easy way to add shiny effects to images. Here’s Garr with some additional depth and a nice border courtesy of Picturesque.

Sensei now has a nice shadow, border frame, all masked and anti-aliased and ready to drop into Keynote.

Picturesque really comes in handy when you need to jazz up a screen dump or product box shot, like this:

Original screendump on the left, Picturesque's improved version on the right. Enough said!

を提示する準備ができている先生！(The Sensei is ready to present!)

Anyway, here’s our final Keynote slide with Sensei in action:

Here's our Sensei, in Keynote, ready to go.

PS: special thanks to the most excellent Mike and Tash from Webstock for putting on the Southern Hemisphere’s best geek events!

EXTRA UNZUD BONUS VIDEO: One night while aimlessly flipping between channels in my hotel room I saw this freaky NZ martial art.

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.

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.

I’m so old that the PR agency I first worked for had a secretarial pool who had the only word processors. All the consultant staff wrote up correspondence long-hand for the secretaries to type. Then I’d have to proof-read the draft and ask them to make corrections, then check another draft, and so on. And I rode a brontosaurus to work… kidding about the brontosaurus — the rest is true.

We all know the practice of journalism has been dramatically changed by the advent of the interweb, but less well-known is how much media relations has changed. So in the next few posts I’m going to share some tips for startup founders who find themselves donning the media relations hat.

First, let’s talk about the role secrecy plays in startup evolution, and how to balance secrecy against disclosure to win friends and influence people.

Let’s talk about secrecy and startups

Secrecy is sexy, ain’t it? There’s nothing more enticing than a private beta page, inviting me to leave my email address, suggesting that  maybe one day I might be allowed to try something otherwise explained by nothing more than a logo and three bullet points. If there’s such a thing as frisson in business, this is it.

Early in the development of your startup business, it will be important to keep some information secret from your business contacts, the marketplace, the media and perhaps even your friends and employees.

But such is the sexiness of secrecy, it can sometimes get a bit out of control: friends get annoyed because they don’t know what you’re doing anymore, the market decides you’re paranoid and won’t deal with you, or journalists start writing snarky pieces about you and your plans because you won’t give anything away. It’s not really your fault — secrecy is sexy — but you need to start sharing information at some point.

Sometimes the transition from total secrecy to disclosure can get very bumpy. You don’t want to piss-off the media by giving information exclusively to some journalists and not others. You don’t want to be taken out of context or mis-quoted. You don’t want a colleague saying more than you (or feeling like they’re restricted to saying less than you.) When is it OK to tell friends what you’re doing? What if you have friends who are also journalists? Or bloggers? It gets bumpy.

The best way to balance on the fine line between saying nothing and giving away everything is to “withhold the four Ws” or as I like to call this, “W Fu” (pronounced “Woo foo“). Note that people in media relations will tell you there are usually five ‘Ws’ but I’ve added a sixth W: “What will it cost?” because sometimes that’s the whole angle of a story:

1. Who
2. What
3. Where
4. When
5. Why
6. What will it cost?

How to become a W Fu Grandmaster

I think it was the ancient venerated sage Preswun Toocontinew who once said, “A true W Fu Grandmaster appears open, trusting, honest and relaxed, yet he or she is actually in control of the exchange of information, protecting themselves and their startup from the harm of excessive or premature disclosure.” (No wonder he’s no longer widely quoted.)

You too can become a W Fu Grandmaster by practicing the art of telling most people only the What and the Why.

Here’s an example of using only the What and the Why:

“I love my cell phone but I hate my monthly phone bill. So we’re working on a web platform that will help consumers understand their phone bill and make better choices about switching plans and carriers.”

Without knowing the Who (me and the celebrity ex-CEO everyone loves), the Where (in the shiny new offices on 14th St), the When (we launch 14 October) or the What will it cost? (it’s free!) there’s not really enough to make a good story that a blog editor might run as their lead for the day, or that might get passed word-of-mouth through your industry contacts and straight to your competitors. At most, you risk a little gossip item up the back page but even that will have a positive effect, because it tells people you’re doing something exciting, worthwhile and valuable but it doesn’t give away anything that can be used against you.

The W Fu is strong in this one!

Even if what you’re building is truly the first solution to a problem that has plagued all of humanity throughout recorded history, the sensitive information is not that you’re building it. The sensitive information is your solution to the What. (Ooh, do I need to make my rule “How to withhold the four Ws and an S”? nah, that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?)

Journalists are here to help you, if you let them

Often the startup founders I’ve worked with have started off on the wrong foot with industry journalists. That is most often because the founder has been so uncertain of what they can say that they’ve chosen to say nothing at all, repeatedly, or over a long period of time. Their W Fu is weak. Perhaps they have no W Fu at all!

That’s crazy. Journalists aren’t your enemy — though they can be, if you choose to make it harder to fill their quota of words or airtime. They are usually keen to help you promote yourself and your business if you’re able to disclose more than just the What and the Why.

However, it’s very important to agree with your other stakeholders in advance on what other Ws are disclosable, to what level of detail, because you’ll damage the relationship if you disclose something to one and not another, and you’ll make yourself look foolish and unreliable if your business partner is saying too much while you’re disclosing not enough.

So take the time to work this out in advance early on. Typically, you might decide that the Who is going to come out soon enough anyway and is OK to disclose next, then a little later on, perhaps when you have key distribution or retail relationships secured or your marketing strategy is finalised, it might become OK to disclose either the When or the What it will cost.

Should you ever disclose all six Ws before you launch?

Keep in mind that as soon as you disclose all six Ws, all you have left to disclose to the market is the experience of the product or the service itself. Only companies that almost always execute well (such as Apple Computer) can safely disclose that much information in advance, confident that the consumer experience will be so positive that it will generate a wave of great coverage when D-Day comes. Don’t try that at home, folks.

OK, I get it with journalists, but what about friends and family?

We all have friends who are bloggers and Facebook users, and these socially-active web users are effectively journalists with a smaller audience. Social media connects these small audiences together, making large virtual audiences or long chains of audience that can stretch out to mainstream media.

So it’s good practice to exercise your W Fu skillz by withholding the same elements of the story from your friends too, since any of them might kick off attention you don’t need right now.

This is hard! My W Fu is weak!

Wax on! Wax off! OK, it’s not just about practice. The easiest way to withhold Ws is just to appear really humble about what you’re doing — practice including fewer Ws when you talk about your venture with just about anybody and you’ll soon find that you come off sounding humble rather than secretive. Humble is the ‘new black’ in this new econolyptic era. Nobody hates a humble startup guy. But lots of people will start disliking you if you remain a secretive startup guy.

Meanwhile: Wax on! Wax off!

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?

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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)

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.

Nobody – not me, not Steve Jobs – gets that to happen without a lot of practice; but how to start? First, we need to dig down to the bones of the story.

Getting started on digging up your bones

Start right now. Write one of your business stories down. Choose one of the following; (a) what your business offers customers; (b) how your business was founded; or (3) the most valuable lesson you learned since you started this business.

Don’t get fixated on how long or short the story is in the first draft, and write it in your own story-telling style, without being formal, and without using business jargon wherever possible.

Once your first draft is done, put it away and let it mature overnight. During the maturation, your mind will be polishing it, even when you’re not consciously thinking about it.

The following day, pick it up again and write a second draft. If the first draft was longer than 500 words, try to get it down to under 500 words by removing elements of the story that aren’t necessary rather than by changing the language you’ve used.

Put the second draft away again to mature for at least another day.

When you pick up the second draft again, read it through again and you should now find that you have the ‘skeleton’ of the story clear in your mind. Like a joke must have a punchline, a story has a skeleton – the essential points that must be delivered for the story to have meaning. You should be able to remove the ‘flesh’ of the story itself from the story (the language) and still see a connected, coherent skeleton underneath.

Write down the skeleton of your story as a brief series of bullet-points. These are the bones of your story’s skeleton.

The story’s bones are the memory aid you need to deliver your story flawlessly every time. You only need memorise each bone and then deliver them in the correct order for your story-telling to get a ‘B’ in story-telling school.

Because the story’s bones are so light and easy to carry in your memory, you’ll find you’re capable of carrying the bones of the many different business stories you’ll need with you everywhere you go.

Memorise your bones however you like, but there’s nothing wrong with writing them on your hand for a few days. I have it on good authority that Steve Jobs is so passionate about portable devices (Apple’s Newton, iPod and iPhone) because he can’t stand having pen scribbles on the inside of his wrist all the time

Now, go practice your bones!

Until your bones are polished, you won’t deliver them any better than you would delivering any other randomly-chosen series of bullet points. You need to practice the story-telling process now, which is the act of putting the flesh back on the bones each time you tell the story. Start with your first bone, flesh it out, then move to the second bone, and repeat.

This method of story-telling lets you develop slightly different story flesh for different audiences. A potential investor may hope to see the ‘muscles’ across your revenue model in a bit more detail than a potential alliance partner. An audience member might interrupt you with a question just as you move from one bone to the next. Using the bone metaphor you are still OK, because you know the bone you’ve just fleshed-out, you know which bone comes next, and within the time available you can build out any part of the body of the story as you need to, as long as you deliver each of the bones you’ve memorised.

When you’ve mastered the art of getting to the bones of a story, you’ll be ready for the next step: adding pace, drama and colour to a story. I’ll write that soon.

In the meantime, how many bones can you count in Steve Jobs’ commencement speech on YouTube? How well do they connect?