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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.

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Thursday, August 25, 2005

Guard Your 8- to 14-Year-Olds

They aren’t children anymore. You may think so, but growing evidence indicates they are just short teenagers. “Tweeners” – kids aged 8 to 14 years, are one of the hottest consumer demographic clusters and this, according to Audio-Tech Trends Magazine, makes them one of the fastest growing “opportunities” for marketers. Among the ways marketers, the stalwarts of capitalism, will sneak in to influence your family:

• product  placements in movies, television and video games
• web advertisements
• event sponsorships
• textbook covers

Textbook covers?! There is a growing backlash against advertisers who target this group (think McDonald’s and Oreos) but it’s just too tempting to ignore. Advertisers can’t help themselves. They just have to give our children the benefits and wonderful opportunities their products offer. Other interesting tidbits in the article:

• Time magazine recently reported that children under 13 influence $600 billion in their parents’ spending. (You gotta be kidding!)
• According to 360 Youth, the marketing research arm of Alloy, Inc., America’s tweeners independently spend $51 billion. (Talk about an allowance.)
• TD Monthly, a trade magazine for the toy industry, reports that the 20 million tweeners in the U.S. abandon toys for products that appeal to their older, teenaged siblings. Tweener boys buy electronic, video, and Internet games. Girls prefer products that focus on fashion and social interaction.

The end of innocence comes sooner and sooner. I don’t think this is a good thing.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 5:28 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Cheater's Guide to LinkedIn

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 4:36 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Business & Finance, Strategy

Three Keys to Motivating Personal Change

Knowledge Jolt author Jack Vinson captures three keys to driving change in personal behaviors:

One motivation to rule them all

Is there a core problem that explains all of these behaviors? What motivates me to do anything? Conviction that it is important to me. At the same time, I need to see a path to change, and have some confidence that the path is going to lead me the right way while not creating any additional problems (or that I can overcome obstacles). But without that critical conviction, I am not going to be interested in making the effort to change.

Vinson’s observation comes while considering Dave Pollard’s Nine reasons we don't do what we should do, an excellent summary of tendencies, traits, and trends explaining why we never seem to accomplish as much as we think we should.

I like Vinson’s three keys. They apply to all personal change, whether directed at ourselves or others. One challenge many of us face, as working professionals in knowledge-based industries, is getting our companies, colleagues, and customers to embrace the many new collaborative tools – blogs, wikis, IM, presence, etc. – that we have found so beneficial. We struggle to explain this new paradigm and toolset, but we don’t often succeed because we don’t successfully turn all three keys.

We can generate some initial motivation, because we have a critical conviction that the tools are good, right, and will help them. But we fail on the other two. Conviction is contagious, but fragile. When we don’t show a clear, simple path or don’t have a believable plan to remove or overcome obstacles our most impassioned arguments lie fallow and die.

Clearly then, the work must be done to better understand the customer or colleague’s perspective, and too supply keys that have been carved to fit their circumstances.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 4:22 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Productivity, Strategy

Meetup Spam

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 8:21 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Mind Your Time

I talked to an old friend today. He was a professor I had in college and, as much as anyone, is responsible for whatever progress I’ve had in my life. He gave me my first job in the graphics industry and, over the years has been both a mentor and a friend.

We were supposed to get together in June. He runs a big publishing and fulfillment company and was scheduled to come to Atlanta for some business. But he had to cancel because he wasn’t feeling well. I hadn’t heard from him since. Today he told me that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer and, at the age of 60, is fighting for his life.

He was healthy, had regular checkups, and had no reason to think anything was wrong. Until it was.

Mind your time. Take care of the important things rather than the urgent ones. Life is tenuous no matter how much we like to think otherwise.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 4:49 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Why Tagging is Like Sex

Or, it’s about context, Stupid.

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How many times have you seen this? I see it every time I go to Technorati, which isn't often anymore. This service - and this general idea of tagging everything, everywhere, by everybody - is a real loser. It's the "1,000 monkeys typing Shakespear" theory, writ across the web. To believe that random acts of tagging, by unrelated people and for unrelated purposes, is going to give birth to deep meaning and the secrets of the universe is, well, bullshit. At least, it's bullshit if you want anything useful to emerge in the average human lifespan (which is about how long it takes for Technorati to return search results.) Tagging is a great idea, but there are some great ideas that just don’t scale. Like sex. Sex with one person? Great idea. Sex with 1,000 people? Bad idea. Tagging is like that.

Matt Mower is a pioneer in the tagging space, developing several innovative tools for assigning topics to blog entries, and working on early versions of eVectors’ K-Collector group aggregator. He’s been hammering away at the senselessness of Technorati for some time now.

Weave a circle round him thrice

I just Kevin Burton's response to Jason Kottke abandoning Technorati in which he says:

I'd rather have a Technorati that was fast and always worked even if that meant only indexing 1M blogs. Even 500k blogs as long as they are the top 500k blogs.

Which is, I think, indicative of a class of problems people are experiencing in thinking about the blogosphere that revolve around a concept I'll call Leaderboardism.

Right now Technorati are claiming to index 15.7 million blogs and have a database of 1.4 billion links. WOW! Those numbers are certainly impressive. But what does this huge data-warehouse buy us? Gripes about performance and database outtages aside, not much it would seem. I don't get anything from a Technorati search that I value over, say, a Google search. In particular I don't seem to get value from Technorati understanding the blogosphere better than Google which you would think they really should.

Kevin thinks a better idea is to just index the most important 500,000 (3% of Technorati's claimed reach) of blogs in the blogosphere. Sure that would make Technorati fast. But would it make it more useful? After all, who is deciding who is important? How are they deciding it? And isn't importance subjective anyway? To my way of thinking what Kevin is advocating would make Technorati faster and less useful in equal measure (unless you are mainly interested in what the usual suspects think).

The problem is that the blogosphere has grown too large for summary statistics to be relevant to a large group of people anymore. Your Top 100 isn't mine because you aren't interested in basketweaving and vole racing and I am.

I think Technorati (and Feedster who seem, so far, to have avoided many of Technorati's pitfalls) should abandon Leaderboardism and focus instead on how to make their database relevant to each individual.

Relevance is about understanding the context of the reader and delivering the results they would have asked for if they'd only known what they were. I will consider it a success not when I can see The Top 100 Blogs but when I can see The Top 100 Blogs you've never come across but will wish you had! For reference I read 2 of Technorati's Top 100 (although I have read about 30% at one time or other and am familiar with over half) so clearly their measure of relevance doesn't match mine very closely.

This takes me all the way back to where I started thinking about Village Shops in Blogspace.

I just did a quick count on the Technorati Top 100. The score:

• Blogs I read regularly – 3
• Blogs I read occassionally – 8
• Blogs I used to read – 3
• Blogs I’ve heard of – 8

So 22% of the Top 100 has some (but maybe not much) relevance for me. Or, put another way, 78% of the Top 100 is irrelevant for me. Not only that, but if there were other blogs in that Top 100 that were relevant I’d be hard pressed to figure it out. Technorati gives no clue.

What is clear is that if you don’t care about politics, software, web design, techno-gadgets, or pc hardware the Top 100 is useless. Which begs the question, Top 100 for who? Blogs for all manner of special interests are popping up, and they are far more relevant to their readers than a random collection of blogs rated by a frenzy of strangers. Folksonomy arguments aside, TagOrgies just don’t work. Tagging is personal and there must be, at some level, some shared context for tagging to have significant valuable.

If the taggers can reconnect with the idea of context, and apply their efforts to helping groups and communities speak to each other we can make progress. But until then, we’re just a bunch of monkeys looking for a publishing contract.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 11:43 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Technology

Monday, August 22, 2005

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Badges

... or certifications, or training, or fancy offices. We can do it ourselves. Dammit.

I spend a couple hundred dollars a year on having my teeth cleaned professionally. I go to a fancy office, have an attractive, female hygenist pry my mouth open, and proceed to sandblast my teeth with a little nozzle that shoots out baking soda solution under pressure. This all works well enough, except it seems like a lot of money. And it doesn't really do the job on overall whitening of stains from coffee and such.

So I figured there ought to be some sort of alternative. I mean, how hard can it be to squirt pressurized baking soda at your teeth? A little googling me to Dental Air Force - The Home Dental Cleaning System. According to the site this thing does, essentially, everything the hygenist does. It's not as attractive as my hygenist, but it works to steadily whiten your teeth if you mix the blasting powder with hydrogen peroxide for the cleaning solution.

This is a great thing, if it works. And according to Whole Earth News and TotalHealth Magazine, it does. So for a little more than the cost of a couple of trips to the hygenist, I could have clean teeth all the time, and whiter, too. As someone once told me, "Fresh breath is its own reward." Is this a great country, or what?

As you can see, the little unit looks like a lot of powered toothwasher/irrigator thingys, and I can already feel the temptation to write stuff on the bathroom mirror like an airbrush. But I can't tell anything about its durability or construction and with any kind of power tool, especially one for self-service healthcare, durability and reliability are key. Which makes me think I might be better off sticking to something solid and foolproof, like this field-ready body stapler kit from Cabella's.

I can see it now. You're out in the wilderness, being manly and mindlessly slaughtering some wildebeasts with WLDs (Weapons of Local Destruction). Suddenly, your drunken hunting buddy mistakes you for his missing six-pack and spears you with a machete in a misguided attempt to retrieve it. Now blood is gushing from the severed artery in your leg, and you may well die before Darrell can find the keys to the Humvee. But all you need to do is grab your trusty, sterile, DIY body stapler and you can save the day. Just like Rambo. Body stapler by Cabella's. Just $22. Gee, makes me long for the great outdoors.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 11:33 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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