Author: Drew Kime

The Echo Chamber and The Death of Self-doubt


Photo by: Rubber Cat

If you believed the germ theory of disease in the 17th century you might find some obscure texts to support you, but mostly you were alone in the wilderness. To stick with that belief in the face of universal scorn, you had to have some really compelling (at least to yourself) evidence.

Most people won’t persist with an unpopular belief. Until late in the 20th century, if your neighbors didn’t share a belief, for most people you might as well be the only person in the world who holds that view.

Today though, you can pick any outlandish theory — the moon program was faked, 9/11 was a government plot, Britney Spears can sing — and you can find more blogs and news sites trumpeting that fact than you can read in a lifetime. Everything is confirmed. No one has to question their assumptions if they don’t want to. And frankly, none of us really want to.

The current media saturation means it’s possible for the first time in history to read only media that confirms your bias, no matter what that bias is.

How To End Piracy


Photo by: peasap

All the talk of people pirating music — and movies, and software — is enough to make you think it’s a hard problem to solve. But it’s not, really. All you have to do is disincentivise copying. (That’s sarcasm, for those who missed it.)

The MPAA and RIAA have tried licensing, lawsuits, lobbying (I didn’t do that on purpose, I swear) but the copying doesn’t stop. People are amoral thieves!

Or … maybe people remember that when the compact disc format came out, it was supposed to be cheaper than cassettes. They cost less to produce, so as soon as the studios recouped the cost of building the new technology we’d see prices drop. It’s been over 27 years now, have they recouped that investment yet?

Apple to the Rescue

Continue reading How To End Piracy

How To Make $200 / Hour Doing Web Analytics

If you plan to make $200 per hour doing something, you first need to believe that someone is willing to pay that much for what you do. So what makes web analytics worth $200 per hour? Convincing people that you’re worth that much is your second challenge. Your first challenge is convincing someone they need to pay someone to do web analytics at all.

This isn’t a new problem. Kevin Kelly talks about the changing network effects in different phases of the evolution of all new markets:

Maximizing the value of the net itself soon becomes the number one strategy for a firm. For instance, game companies will devote as much energy to promoting the platform—the tangle of users, game developers, and hardware manufacturers—as they do to their games … During certain phases of growth, feeding the network is as important as feeding the firm.

What he’s saying is that people have to want a game before they can want your game. It’s the same with analytics. People have to want analytics services before they can want your analytics services.

Do Not Want!

Web analytics suffers from the same issues as copywriting: Everyone thinks they can write, so they don’t value good writing. Same with analytics. Anyone can read charts on Google, and with a couple of days practice you can even set up split tests. What do you need to pay someone for?

The consultants already making money at it will tell you that that yes, anyone can optimize a site with enough testing. What you’re paying the big bucks for is someone who can skip past two months of split testing and show results in the first week. Some people are that good. Identifying them out of all the ones claiming to be that good is hard.

Your challenge in getting clients is mostly going to be convincing them the service can have a large impact. Large companies already know this. That won’t help you, because they already have people doing it.

That leaves small businesses. There’s a ton of opportunity for small businesses to use an analytics consultant. Convincing them of that is the hard part. Do you plan on cold-calling small businesses? How will you get leads? What’s your pitch going to be?

Oh, you don’t want to be a salesman? You don’t want to sell yourself that way? Sorry then, I guess I can’t tell you how to make $200 per hour doing analytics after all.

Who Wants a Netbook?


Photo by: zieak

I know what I want a netbook for. First I’m a guy, and it’s a gadget, and it’s just cool as hell. So yeah, I want an expensive toy. But beyond that, it’s something that’s small enough I can take it with me almost anywhere and get some work done. It’s more capable than a smartphone at all of the non-phone things. (And by the way, I still want a plain old phone that just makes calls and stores phone numbers. Can I buy that, please?)

But I don’t understand who the target market is

What Do They Do?

The iPhone does things no other cellphone did, in a form factor that lets you bring it places you wouldn’t bring a laptop. So no matter which you compare it to, there’s something the iPhone does that was unique.

What does a netbook do that’s unique? It’s smaller than a laptop, but not so much so that you’ll throw it in your pocket and have it always with you. You can, but you won’t, it’s just a bit too big for that.

It’s more usable than a phone, with a more human-scale user interface, but not as usable as a sub-notebook.

That leaves … playing DVDs? And games? When I said I wanted a toy I didn’t mean that’s all I thought it was good for. But now I’m not so sure. Where would I realistically want to have a computer, that I could have a netbook, that I wouldn’t want to have a laptop?

I’m coming up blank here.

You Are Not Special


Photo by: Ethan Hein

Everybody wants to think they are a unique and special snowflake. And they are … in a blizzard of other unique and special snowflakes.

If I seem to be going a little Tyler Durden here, it’s because I am sick to death of people assuming that the challenges they face are unique. That no one else in the history of the world has ever faced quite what they face. And in particular, that working in IT is just so completely different from every other profession out there. Despite the fact that they’ve never worked in any other profession, and don’t realize it’s the same everywhere.

“Technical Debt” … AKA Taking Shortcuts

People who write code for a living have a very specialized vocabulary, just like every other profession. And just like in every other profession, knowing the lingo is a screening tool to separate “us” from “them”. But people immersed in the vocabulary every day don’t know that they’re using jargon to describe a well-known concept.

Take technical debt. People in IT write articles arguing whether it exists or not, what to do about it, how stupid managers are for allowing it to build up. But all it means is that if you take a shortcut today, at some point in the future you’re going to have to pay for it, and it will probably cost more when you do. Yes, this is exactly what Fram was talking about when they said, “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.”

It doesn’t sound so impressive once you realize they’re just copying an old commercial, does it?

“Arbitrary Skill Lists” … AKA Weeding Out Resumés

Job listings in IT tend to be full of acronyms, and list how many years you should have worked with each technology. These lists are “unreasonable” and “arbitrary”. And exactly the same as job listings in every other industry.

What does a degree in Art History have to do with being an office manager? Not a damn thing, but you need “a college degree” to get in the door. Any old degree is fine.

And four or more years of experience with this specific vendor’s purchasing system, which has only existed for four years, is “preferred but not required”.

Oh, and Clarity for project management.

And Peoplesoft for HR.

And SAP.

And Oracle Forms.

And Sharepoint.

And this is for the entry-level admin assistant job. The Office Manager job has already been promised to the current admin assistant, but HR says they have to advertise the opening anyway.

Same as it Ever Was

Sure, there are things about every industry and segment that are unique to that area. But it’s not nearly as much as people seem to think. Odds are whatever you’re thinking is unique really isn’t. It’s the things you do every day without thinking about them that set you apart.

One-liners for your Fortune File

From here:

Whoever is doing this is either a bot, a genius, or a lunatic.

===

From here:

“Simplicity = 1/Flexibility”

That’s awesome. I’m stealing that.

– and –

I opened this thread and suddenly felt a cool breeze coming from my monitor. Curious as to the source of this phenomenon, I read through to the end, and there I found the answer. It was the furious handwaving.

===

From here:

Sometimes “technically correct” is the worst kind of correct.

Teenagers vs. The Internet: Teens Win

Today I was talking to a friend who has a teenage daughter. One night a month or so ago, she was babysitting and brought along her new phone. Which mom and dad are paying for. Since IM worked, she assumed it was free. I’m sure you see where this is going.

A one-day $900+ phone bill later, they had a talk with her about her IM-ing habits. I recalled the discussions I’d seen about a teen racking up 14k messages in a single month, and people claiming to have seen twice that.

The math is just astounding, until you realize how they’re doing it: Every kid has a contact group of all their friends, and every IM goes to all of them. They’ve built their own follow lists, and are tweeting constantly.

In other words, teenagers have already routed around Twitter and created a distributed system to solve this use case.

Do you love your customers?

Forget the money for a second. They’re all broke, just divorced or downsized, moved back in with Mom and Dad. But you get up each morning looking forward to seeing them, talking to them, spending time with them.

Oh, and selling them stuff. Stuff that you know they’re going to totally dig, because you totally dig it. And they love you right back for selling it to them.

Who wants to be that guy?

But you’re not. “That guy” — the sleazeball that’s always pimping the latest multi-level marketing crap at parties — doesn’t really love his customers. He loves their money.

You love them for what they are. You’re one of them. Except that you’re good at something most of them aren’t. Maybe you write music. Or you’re a painter. Or you’re just really good at finding great new restaurants. So you do it for them.

“Do what you love … yadda yadda … heard it all before.”

Close, but not quite. Maybe you heard it from Brian Clark:

Do what you love and don’t worry about the consequences.

Or you saw the Venn diagram everyone uses to tell you what to do with your life:

But maybe you also heard that you have to always put the reader first. To start from what your customers need and give it to them.

But all of this advice is missing something important.

Who are your customers?

Who do you want to spend your day with?

If you love building and painting choppers, you’ll probably spend lots of time with bikers. You like grooming Pomeranians? You’ll be with little old ladies and gay men.

Is that who you want to spend your day with? Every day?

Because once you’ve picked your niche, once you’ve picked who you’re going to follow, that’s who you’re going to spend your working life with.

Pick them on purpose

Contrary to every other piece of advice I’ve seen on this, I’m telling you to pick your customers first. Don’t start from your interests and look for a market. And definitely don’t pick a market just because it’s a market.

Look for people you like. People you’re willing to spend time with. Lots of time. Too much time.

If you don’t love spending time with these people, it’ll show. You may get by for a while, finding the intersection between what they want and what you want to give.

But if you love them, you’ll be willing to follow them where they want to go.

Is Google the general-purpose Napster?

Napster has become an icon in the war between entertainment industry giants on one side; and fans, legal activists and computer programmers on the other. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) technically “won” that battle, but they seem to be losing the ongoing war. And the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is intensely interested in that outcome.

It’s hard to discuss the issue though, because there are so many players involved. Because they’re actually fighting for or against different things. And frequently they’re using arguments that have more to do with politics than with their actual goals. For instance:

  • Fans talk about sharing and mix tapes, while admittedly lots of them just like free stuff.
  • Legal activists talk about first amendment and fourth amendment rights and fair use, but often in the larger context of resisting the corporatization of government.
  • Computer programmers talk about non-infringing uses of technology and the technical impossibility of implementing certain regulations, while often echoing the legal activist’s resistance to corporatization.
  • The recording industry talks about piracy, theft, and the rights of the artists, while their real concern is control of the marketing and distribution channels.

This last point is the one I want to look at.

The official position

The RIAA has long held that any duplication of an audio recording made without the express permission of the copyright holder is, and should be, illegal. This is not technically correct.

There is, at a minimum, the fair use doctrine, which holds that works can be copied and reproduced for the purposes of comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. So the RIAA is already stretching the truth, although they have been fairly direct in their efforts to limit the scope of fair use and restrict its application, but so far these exemptions exist.

Based on creative accounting

Have they stretched any other truths? Courtney Love and Janis Ian both argue pretty persuasively that protecting the artists is not what this is all about. Even a million-selling album barely makes the artists any money, while various industry segments take all the profit.

But repeated studies, some of which Ian mentioned, have shown that Napster users actually spent more money on new CDs. So why would the RIAA oppose it? For that you have to look at what music Napster users were buying. It was more likely to be back catalog or from a minor label. And the RIAA is designed to promote blockbuster releases from Top 40 artists.

So killing Napster was really about restricting the number of choices listeners have, and making sure the record labels own all of the remaining choices.

It’s not the music, it’s the information

Seen in this light, it’s more clear that the RIAA is not in the music business per se. They are in the marketing and distribution business. And Napster performed both of these functions for free. And did it better than the RIAA could, because it directly reflected the preferences of the users. It’s no wonder the RIAA attacked them.

So here is the iconic battle: The status quo industry controls information and access. The upstart provides information from the users, to the users, without industry input. Industry uses legal means to squash the upstart. But the genie is out of the bottle.

Who does information now?

In the generic terms I just used, you can see echoes of this battle in online search and advertising. Google, through their PageRank algorithm, represents the preferences of their users. Marketers coming from the broadcast model, where money equals attention, claim a lack of “fairness” in the system, saying that the content producers should control how their sites appear in indexes.

The battle is playing out differently this time, for a few key reasons.

First, Google got very big, very fast. By the time traditional marketers realized what was happening Google was already dominant.

Second, traditional marketing was fragmented and highly competitive. They didn’t have a single trade group dictating the market the way the RIAA was controlling the bulk of the music industry.

Third, Google had a business model before they came under attack. Which means they had money for legal defense.

Fourth, and possibly most important, Google knew the fight was about information and access. They weren’t distracted by arguments about artists and creators.

Which side are you on?

“You’re not promoting the right thing … Stop listening to what users say they like, I’m the one paying money, I’ll tell you what people should like … It’s not fair, I’ve spent all this time and money on market research and your system is saying that my product still isn’t popular …”

It sounds like the same arguments the RIAA made. Companies with a vested business interest are unhappy that people don’t like their product, and they’re trying to shoot the messenger.

Where are you in this fight? Insisting that Google should list you because you paid more? Or analyzing what PageRank says about how people view your content, and giving users what they want?