Doing Words

Crowdsourcing: if pain persists, see your doctor

// December 11th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Social Media

I was discussing the future of advice with a friend yesterday, and their opinion was that services like Wordy would one day replace most professional services, and that products like Yahoo! Answers would one day be capable of acting as your primary source of general life advice.

Yeah, maybe, but I’m betting no. There’s a good reason why bad advice is free and good advice is expensive. Sometimes you get lucky and you can score some good advice for free, but you can waste a lot of time acting on bad advice before that happens.

In the meantime, this module in Yahoo! Answers on men’s health made me laugh.

Why Yahoo! Answers isn't my first source of medical advice

Story thumbnail photo by Editrixie.

Welcome to the Century of Live Streaming Semi-Conciousness

// December 10th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Mobile

If this century is to be remembered for anything other than fiddling while Rome burned, Beijing fumed and various tiny island nations sank slowly beneath the waves, I predict we will be remembered for the tremendous progress we’ve made in communicating nothing interesting, to millions of people worldwide. This is the Century Of Live Streaming Semi-Conciousness.

The professionals have been doing it for a century or so (I’m looking at you, Daily Mirror, Fox News, Big Brother) but until very recently they’ve been constrained by the need to make a profit from it. We amateurs have no such constraint — we do it because we like to be watched, and because we like to think that someone is watching us.

With each passing day I learn of new ways I can say nothing interesting in front of an ever-growing audience, sitting at desks, in living rooms, glued to their mobile phone, all waiting to see what kind of nothing I’ll talk about next.

Today was a big day in Nothing Publishing, with the release of Ustream.tv’s free iPhone app, Ustream Live Broadcaster. Until now, Ustream’s thousands of nothing-broadcasting users have been stuck in front of the webcam stuck on top of their computers, and most of the video on the Ustream network is stream-of-semi-conciousness stuff, poorly-lit by a too-close LCD monitor, with heavy shadow on the wall of the den in the background.

With the release of Ustream Live Broadcaster, at last the semi-concious live video broadcasters of the world are set free to roam the pavements and hallways of the world, shuffling slowly like zombies, mouths half-agape as they try to frame the shot, try to keep it steady and think of nothing to say while they create an online poll with one finger and scout around with half an eye, looking desperately for something — anything — that might be happening, which would be twice as interesting as the nothing they’re filming right now.

I’ve installed Ustream Live Broadcaster on my iPhone, I’ve carried it with me to the car, mounted it in the windscreen cradle so my iPhone can play rather-ordinary-GPS, and then driven up to the tennis courts to pick Boy8 up from school. Nothing much happens. There’s some traffic, and I couldn’t think of nothing to say, but I’ve left the afternoon ABC news on the radio for you so you won’t fall asleep while you watch.

The best bit about this app is that I don’t need to take a hand off the steering wheel to publish my video about nothing to thousands of ‘friends’ on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The worst bit about it is that even when my network coverage was strong, the quality of the video takes you right back to the beginning of the last century (you remember, The Century Of Everybody Watching The Same TV Show About Nothing.)

No, wait, I’m forgetting: the worst bit is, despite the technology, I still have nothing interesting to say.

Yes, we can all now broadcast live streaming video from our iPhones. Now all we need is something interesting to broadcast.

Apple’s tablet might change the way writers and photographers are paid

// December 3rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Media, News, platform

Today I watched an amazing video demo from Time Inc., showing some of the things they can do with Sports Illustrated magazine when it’s available on devices like the rumoured Apple Tablet. The video in question is reproduced just below, for your future-reading pleasure. While watching the reader navigate their own way around the publication not just on a page-order basis but subhead and by image or video, it occurred to me: this could really change the way ‘real’ (read: print) journalists and photographers get paid for their work.

At the moment, most of the journalists in the world who still have paying work are paid by newspapers and magazines. And most of those journalists — whether on staff or freelance — are paid either by the number of words or pictures published, or paid a salary.

When you watch this video, take a moment to consider how much the reader is able to customise their reading material. It’s almost like no reader will read the magazine the same way. When you think about it, that’s probably true with most readers of print publications today; most of us start at the front and flip pages, but many of us start on a favourite section and hop around from section to section. (more…)

Twitter is: a sushi train where we are both customer and chef

// November 23rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Social Media

“Twitter is like a big dinner party with a group of interesting friends who are having several conversations on different topics at the same time. You’re able to dip in and out of conversations around the table. Sometimes you contribute, sometimes you just listen, and sometimes you pick up on something interesting from one conversation and carry it across to another conversation to share it there. You don’t need to be paying attention to everything all the time — if you need to go to the bathroom you can get an update when you return or just relax and enjoy how the conversations have evolved since you left.”

Twitter is like a sushi train restaurant because a sushi train has a wide variety of bite-sized morsels — and Twitter offers a variety of bite-sized ideas/complains/jokes/whatever. Like a sushi train, you can select the morsels you like and maybe share some of it with your companions to either side. And like a sushi train, things don’t disappear — they go around and around, and if one serve of salmon sashimi is taken, there’ll be another one around in a minute.

Kevin Marks talking about the flow-past web and more at Web 2.0 Expo recently.

I don’t want more iPhone apps, I want better iPhone apps

// November 18th, 2009 // 0 Comments // software, strategy

Fred Wilson writes in The Power of Instant Approval that Apple is risking its lead in the smartphone app market by forcing app developers to wait on approval from Apple before publishing their apps on iTunes Store. It’s a growing industry concern — does Apple risk being overtaken by competitors? I think Apple understands the consumer relationship better than any competitor in the smartphone market and that’s why in this case, the cathedral can win over the bazaar.

The greater risk is that the industry may turn away from Apple if groupthink decides that Apple’s strategy is flawed. We’ve seen it before.

Could Google's Android Market really overtake Apple's iTunes Store?

(more…)

Font Viewer – myFontbook.com

// November 9th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Reviews

Sometimes we all want to use a new font. Apple gives me a free Font Book app in OS X but it frustrates me because I can’t just flip through a book of type samples — it makes me click on each font name before I get to see a sample of type. Grrr.

myFontbook.com lets me flip through a library of fonts and see type samples just as I’d like to do in Font Book. It’s cool because it loads fast and looks just like an app running in OS X, not at all like like a browser-based app it is. And it’s slightly spooky because it’s not just displaying a generic library of fonts — it’s displaying the fonts I have installed on my Mac. Learning how it does that will probably make my simple brain hurt so let’s not go there; instead lets just wonder at the magic that allows it to happen.

It works with all modern browsers (that does not include you, IE6.x users) and only seems to have rendering problems with some condensed versions of some font families.

myFontbook.com is free and you don’t even need to register (though if you do it’ll remember your font library and the collections and tags you add to manage them.)

I particularly like that it will display a few columns of body type in 8, 10 and 12pt sizes. It’ll even print out a nicely-formatted proof sheet.

Once again, I am a font of all knowledge.

Businesses: just tell me where you are!

// October 30th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Ecommerce, Marketing

This Friday afternoon finds me googling for coffee machine retailers, and cursing at small business websites that bury their location information deep on an About or a Contact page. Each time, I’m reduced to shouting, “Just tell me where you are!” in frustration at discovering each promising-looking supplier is located a thousand, two thousand, even three thousand kilometers away. ARGH!

I’m googling because our Baby Gaggia coffee machine has been back for repairs once too many times and my caffeine levels are critically low, but mainly it’s because my searching highlights how crazy small business owners are if they don’t make their store location front-and-centre on their website.

Newsflash: just because you now have a website and might in theory be able to sell your product or service to customers worldwide, in practice, 98% of the time, you won’t. Building global sales was an early promise of the interweb that turned out to not be true, most of the time, for most businesses.

Your market is the people who can be bothered driving to your store. Your web presence is an important part of convincing them (a) that the drive will be worth it; and (b) your store is the only one they need drive to. No more than one in a hundred thousand online businesses will be the next Zappos.

Even large corporations selling intangible services (such as Yahoo! and Google) can confirm that selling is still best conducted face-to-face. Certainly, both Google and Yahoo! are often able to sell a global audience to marketers, but both companies must maintain local sales teams in each major market to service their advertising customers. They mostly sell their audiences to advertising customers within a taxi ride of their office.

So this afternoon, I’m yelling at the nine browser tabs I have open, each displaying a very nicely designed coffee retailer’s website. My local, Forsyth Coffee, would be the logical choice, and they sell a very nice Expobar Minore III at a good price. But they don’t keep it in stock and owner Rob is more than a little hazy when it comes to delivery and installation. It was meant to be here today, and when I rang him this afternoon he said he’d call them Monday. This could drag on another week. And. I. Need. A. Coffee. Machine. Like. Now. Rob has until end of Monday and then I’m cancelling my order. He’s an all-star roaster and he has my bean business for life but this machine thing just can’t go on.

Mind wandering. Let’s finish this blog post and then see if I can control this with a beer. Where was I? Yes: the supreme importance of LOCATION.

Very nice website design but WHERE ARE YOU LOCATED?

Here’s a beautiful website design for fivesensescoffee.com.au. Great visual elements, lots of personality and interest. They’re so cool they’re even offering free tickets to the most excellent Edge Of The Web conference as prizes to customers. And their SEO work has been good enough for them to appear in my first three Google search results.

But guess what? They’re in Western Australia. I could buy a coffee machine in Singapore and it would be closer and cost less to ship here. All of the machines they sell are available from other retailers in Sydney (if I go to the trouble of establishing which-of-the-bastards are located in Sydney, that is.)

How to help me find you

If you accept (and you better, because I’m scary right now) that most of your customers will be local and not global, there’s one very important thing you must, at a minimum, do: include your suburb and postal code (preferably your entire address) somewhere prominent on your homepage. You might also consider including it in the title and metatags of your home and other pages (though these days that makes somewhere between less-to-no of a difference.) You should definitely take the time to ensure your business and its location are listed on Google Local and any other online yellow/whitepages directories service your area (many of which will be free.)Google Local has a way to go in most markets before it really kicks butt, and Google needs to maintain an uneasy truce between it and its own competing paid search ads, but it’s well worth using, since it’s free, only takes a minute to create a listing, and even comes with some tidy reporting that associates impressions and clickthrus with the search terms used.

Almost nobody interacts with my Google Local listing. But at least I can see that (thumbs nose at Yellow Pages).

Added bonus: better conversion rates!

Wondering why your web business gets so many visitors and so few customers? Well, could that be because you’re attracting site visitors located several thousand kilometers away from your shop? Want to improve your visitor-to-customer conversion rates? I bet you could make a big dent in that just by including more location information on your homepage and making sure it appears in your business information on all the major search engines.

Enough rational thought. SOMEBODY BRING ME A BEER!

Turning advertising audiences into brand advocates

// October 23rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Advertising, Branding, Marketing, Social Media

Mike Walsh Trailer from Mike Walsh on Vimeo.

Catching up on some reading, I loved a recent post from strategist, speaker and author, Mike Walsh, Be Sweet, Please Retweet. If you’re learning how to build brand relationships with social media it’s well worth the reading. If you don’t have time, a couple of Mike’s points really stand out for me:

Broadcast networks now compete with ‘audience networks’

“On the Internet, there is no concept of prime-time. You can program television, but when online people discover and consume content, it is often because it has been sent to them by other people they know. Whether a tweet on Twitter, a blog post on WordPress or a shared link on Facebook, the most influential distribution assets now are not broadcast networks but rather audience networks.”

Social media only works if your creative benefits the consumer’s personal brand:

“Stunning art direction is useless if no one actually watches your ad. In a world of audience networks, people will only forward your content to their friends and followers if it makes them look smarter or cooler by doing so. Their brand, not yours is at stake.”

A passive broadcast audience must be persuaded to become an active brand evangelist:

“Broadcast is a powerful medium for rapidly raising awareness, but the reality of media fragmentation means that to get real engagement requires your customers to do the distribution for you. And that, quite frankly, is not easy. The trick of turning audiences into advocates requires more than just savvy media planning or bribing people with free iPods… it takes true creative genius.”

I don’t know that it always takes true creative genius. If you don’t have true creative genius on hand, aim for great creative, some luck, good timing and most important of all: give your audience something that will be good for their personal brand if they share it with friends.

Let your users show you the money

// October 22nd, 2009 // 0 Comments // platform, Products, Startup, strategy

To paraphrase William Gibson, “The street always finds its own uses for things.” If you’re starting an online marketplace, or a social messaging platform, or an online community, one of the big challenges is to stay in touch with your users, to learn more about how they use your platform.

Why? Often ‘the street’ (your customers) will use your platform for surprising purposes. Likely, purposes you didn’t have in mind. Should you ignore their preference and try to force customers to bend to your will, or bend to theirsand try to find a commercially successful model for what they’re doing? (more…)

Christmas wish: an iPod Touch with camera

// October 14th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Products

Parents of the first world need an iPod Touch with a camera, but to really understand why, I need to tell you about the best school holiday experience I’ve ever had first.

Boy8* and I played together at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney for nearly three hours last week. We could have stayed another hour or two easy if we weren’t beginning to starve.

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