b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Flickr Users Stunned by Obvious
"I'll take a pound of relevance, to go please."
The CSS Zen Garden
Guard Your 8- to 14-Year-Olds
Cheater's Guide to LinkedIn
Three Keys to Motivating Personal Change
Meetup Spam
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
A Tag I Can Learn to Love
Tag: irrelevant. There are a paltry 27 links at technorati and a piss-poor 2 at delicious. Why aren't there more? This is a tag that means something. A tag we can all use. A tag that says "this is just more internet bs."Everyday, more and more, the internet reminds me of that carnival game where you whack the little gopher on the head with a mallet, and the person who whacks the most gophers wins.
Flickr Users Stunned by Obvious
This Wired article bespeaks a monumental naivete on the part of Flickr users. Massively commercial mega-portal (MCMP) Yahoo! bought the photo service in March and - surprise! surprise! - is going to commercialize it without hesitation. Now users are in an uproar:"If Flickr really forces me to join Yahoo in 2006 in order to still use my account, I will quit 24 hours before the deadline," wrote Thomas Müller, a Hamburg, Germany-based artist who shows more than 1,400 photos at the site. On Wednesday, Müller created a protest group, Flick Off, that has attracted almost 400 members.
[...]
"This comes after many of us have invested so much time and effort; it makes it a chore to do anything except bend over, grab our ankles and smile," said Dana Smith, a San Francisco-based Flick Off supporter whose photographs rank among Flickr's most interesting material.
A few months ago I wrote that "...dumping thousands of photos into some beta service that could disappear tomorrow seems like a giant time sink hole." It's astounding that people could really believe a service like Flickr could exist in a technical nirvana where no one has to pay the bills. Or that the purchase and integration of such a service wouldn't be irresistable to MCMPs.
So get your Yahoo! account or get out. But quit whining. Anyone who can prop a single eye open for more than a minute could see this coming.
"I'll take a pound of relevance, to go please."
Doug Kay, in the August 28 IT Conversations newsletter, says:I wonder if all those bloggers proudly promoting their "Top X" ranking would just as soon publish their "ads by gooooooooogle" revenue figures. Seems to me that's what the popularity contest is all about, right? That's a contest I can understand.The Top Podcast?
Feedster just released their Top 500 most interesting and important blogs and IT Conversations is rated #26 - higher than any other podcast. Cool! But as Dave Slusher pointed out, lists like this, iTunes, Podcast Alley, etc., suggest that what's important is volume: that the goal is the largest possible audience. This is the fat-head (as opposed to the long-tail) position. It's all about hits and stars, and follows the lead of broadcasting and the traditional music biz. But the best blogs and podcasts aren't those that appeal to the largest and most generic audiences, but rather those that deliver the greatest value to an audience, regardless of the size of that audience. One might have a blog or podcast about organ transplants, for example. Wouldn't make the Top Anything list, but for the intended readers/listeners, it would be #1. Old media can't do that. New media can and should. Change lives in as profound a way as possible.
I can also see why, and how, mass marketers (and Madison Ave) would be interested in this sort of mass ranking as some sort of generalized view to where the mass market is going.
But to the rest of us, it's irrelevant.
Monday, August 29, 2005
The CSS Zen Garden
I was having an IM discussion with Matt Mower this morning and he pointed me to the CSS Zen Garden. Marvelous. Wonderful stuff. You can click through dozens of stylesheets and see them applied to the same content. It's an amazing display of what can be done, if you know how. Unfortunately, I don't. So my site will remain simple and ugly. Such is life.Thursday, August 25, 2005
Guard Your 8- to 14-Year-Olds
They arent 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 McDonalds and Oreos) but its just too tempting to ignore. Advertisers cant 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., Americas 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 dont think this is a good thing.
Cheater's Guide to LinkedIn
This comprehensive, practical, how-to guide for networking via LinkedIn is chock-full of techniques I would never think of myself. LinkedIn is a great tool for those who live in and around Silicon Valley. I’m not at all sure how valuable it is for those of us who live in the remaining 99.999% of the world, but even if you don’t use LinkedIn this guide is full of ideas applicable to both online and offline networking. [Thanks to Atlanta PR Madame Jeneane Sessum for the link.]
Terry Frazier at 4:36 PM
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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.
Vinsons observation comes while considering Dave Pollards 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 Vinsons 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 dont often succeed because we dont 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 dont show a clear, simple path or dont 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 colleagues perspective, and too supply keys that have been carved to fit their circumstances.
Terry Frazier at 4:22 PM
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Meetup Spam
I got meetup.com spam today. I unsubscribed myself from their service months ago, and haven't gotten anything since. But I guess they did a "restore" on some old files, because today I got a warm invite from co-founder Matt Meeker encouraging me to "make a weblogger Meetup happen" and volunteer as an organizer. To seal the deal Matt offered to give me a FULL REFUND of my $19 fee if things didn't go well.Hmm. Can I resist? Time will tell.
Meetup.com. Another floundering idea brought to you by Draper Fischer Jurvetson.
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