Kindred Crowd

16 ways to use Twitter as a B2B marketing tool

2010-03-24T21:09:00.000-05:00

I saw a documentary a decade or so ago about a group protesting logging in BC; they were fairly activist, and intended to chain themselves to the loggers' equipment. They'd been at it for months or years. Of course, the RCMP had to step in and at least play the role of mediator. They could have used pepper spray, but the officer in charge engaged in a long conversation over several days with the protesters. In time, they came to respect him greatly. At one point, before their began their civil disobedience, the officer was invited into an aboriginal-style prayer circle, and he held hands with the protesters as they prayed or whatever. Then, they chained themselves to the equipment, and, without incident, he cut their handcuffs or chains and arrested them one by one. No one showed any remorse. It was almost like theatre.

What happened in my view is that the officer became an honest broker. The logging company knew that violence would lead to national news coverage and, perhaps, government investigations into the extent of the logging activity; they appreciated the honest-broker officer. The protesters of course wanted government oversight and national media coverage, but were too decent to engage in violence. They appreciated the honest-broker officer.

How many times in our life are we respected by two opposing sides at once?

In my view, this is the core of Twitter. The tech aspect of it is secondary; it removes almost all friction from the media-social relationship and, absent costumes, reveals people and their relationships as they are. Are you generous? Are you insecure? Are you genuine? It's difficult to maintain a serious presence on Twitter without revealing these things.

We live in an age where culture and "soft" skills are rising in importance, as other previously important aspects of life become commodified. Southwest Airlines claims that it owes it success to its culture; to a less centralized system of management in which employees help one another; it's not necessarily due to superior yield management software or aggressive purchasing teams or more powerful advertising.

The generation coming to prominence is exceptionally distrustful of media, seeing almost all traditional forms of media as akin to a type of door-to-door electricity-contract salesman. Just in time, hard innovation has enabled the development of social media tools that permit a more genuine type of communication, in which those who are fake are loosers.

All that said, let me explain how I see Twitter as a B2B marketing tool.

16 ways to use Twitter as a B2B marketing tool

The obvious -- obtain followers and build generous, genuine relationships with (many of) them.
Answer questions -- either with 140-character answers, or by directing followers to your content or other content that provides the answer.
Make news or express thought leadership -- again, either in a text tweet, or by linking to your content.
Be re-tweeted and go viral! If you say something really powerful to 200 people, it can conceivably reach 200,000 in two or three hours if people fine it valuable enough to re-tweet (re-post to their own list of followers.)
Follow and be followed by other social organizations. For example, if a car manufacturer is able to win genuine respect from an environmental group, which itself is respected and followed by tens of thousands of people, a re-tweet by the environmental group lends tremendous cachet back to the for-profit organization.
Troll the Twittersphere for rumblings about your organization. Mitigate a negative movement by correcting misinformation in its earliest stages.
Lend a more human character to your organization. Enterprise accounts should probably focus on business, but there's no reason not to tweet or re-tweet about worthwhile community initiatives or events or cultural significance. Promote stuff that's cool. Be a person.
Promote your team; use the lists feature to create lists of teams within your organization. Followers of a corporate account are free to then follow some or all members of these lists.
Develop and show your knowledge of the space you operate in by aggregating external thought leadership and tweeting straight links or short commentary and links -- i.e., peruse your industry's periodicals and other forms of thought leadership and tweet what's top to your followers. As a side effect, this creates an excellent repository of industry content for internal and external review.
Show that you're dynamic simply by using social media correctly.
Create a community around what you do and own the space. Be at the centre of discussion. Own the cool-kids table so your competitors do not ... or be collaborative with them. Whatever.
Recruit -- I think the best way to do this, especially for a Big Four firm such as mine, would have dozens of the recently graduated adopt accounts like @JohnSmithatBigFourFirm; these accounts could be promoted at targetted campuses, and the account holders could also naturally connect with any friends/profs they have at these campuses. The accounts then serve as excellent links directly and deeply into a firm, dispelling much of the Big Scary Glass Building feelings, as I had at 23. Standards would be needed, but above all, it would have to feel and be genuine.
Aggregate all of your news and other sources of knowledge into Twitter. Instead of visiting 12 websites a day/week to glean headlines, run a Twitter stream down the margin of your desktop (available in Vista, or as an iGoogle plugin) to passively stay abreast of the world, without actually "surfing the web" like our grandparents did ;-).
Provide advance warning of events: be it the upcoming release of interesting content by the firm, an media placement, a speaking engagement or an actual event where live human people gather their warm bodies under a single roof (this still happens!)
Live-tweet events (where "live" is a verb); I'm not entirely sold on this. It would be weird for an account that tweets twice a day to suddenly tweet 25 times in an hour. It could work with advance warning. Perhaps 12 tweets an hour; and perhaps some linking to blog-style substantive commentary from an event.
Be like Conan O'Brien, who followed nobody and had perhaps a half million followers when he announced that he would follow one person. She is a 19 year old girl in Michigan whose followers increased from a few dozen to 28,000 at last count. She seems very kind and decent; she's getting married and "running for the cure" and Conan has in some ways changed her life by drawing thousands of followers and, in turn, millions of people to her. What he did is a bit silly; and that's what he does. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you have the weight, throw it at someone who perhaps could use it. At the least it's a nice gesture; at best it looks good enya.

Please comment with 17 and more ...

Minimalism overtakes technology (again)

2010-03-14T10:40:00.000-05:00

This is a good post on the evolution of technology to meet the abilities of non-techy users. The author -- Rob -- argues that the "http://" in URLs renders the entire URL system to be Greek to the majority of web surfers. I agree that this might apply to grandmothers, but I find it hard to believe that the majority of society cannot learn something like this. The proof: six of Ask.com's top 10 searches last year were for other websites; sites like Facebook, Craigslist and -- unbelievably -- Google. People actually use Ask.com to search for Google. (Which I gather feels like walking from your front door to a bus stop to take a bus to your house to drive to work.)

I cannot believe Rob's thesis because people do adapt, and are not stupid in the majority. Cars are pretty hard to drive if you've never done it; but they're so useful that hundreds of millions of people operate them and negotiate highway systems daily. Cars are not a "take me to cake and pie" technology; they're hard to use than that. I suppose the argument in favour of Rob is that, if the voice-command car existed, only a few people would bother learning how to steer and navigate.

It's an interesting concept on a higher level. Rob also writes"in the iPhone OS, the concept of the file is essentially gone. It’s been replaced by 'apps and their stuff.'" Well, it does make sense that digital cameras present you with the photos you took, rather than a folder filled with applications and jpegs. It also makes sense that CD players in the early 1980s simply played music tracks, not files and root data. Toaster ovens don't cook by watts; they cook by a number from one to six.

When technology ceases to have "http://"'s and file folders, and starts having meaningless numbers from one to six, etc., it becomes an appliance. And any walk through a Sears store will tell you that people who don't care about how a thing works will drop thousands of dollars on appliances. They buy the result -- the cooked chicken or the collection of photographs, etc.

YouTube and recorded music

2009-12-11T13:02:00.000-05:00

For most of my life, it has been a high crime to record a live performance by a musician. Independent of this, in the last three years, YouTube has been filled with music that is ordinarily for sale -- both studio recordings and amateur concert videos.

But one artist at least, Joanna Newsom, has ended up with an interesting approach to these two issues. I don't know whether it is her intention, but there seems to be very few or no studio versions of her songs on YouTube, but loads of videos of her in intimate theatres, halls, etc.

I think this is the right strategy. You can no longer prevent music from being shared -- whether online or sneaker-P2P. But if you let all your fans post cell-phone videos of your songs, this is fantastic publicity that cannot replace the quality of a studio recording.

PS -- check out Sawdust and Diamonds.

Saving the music album -- the studio mix tape

2009-12-10T15:03:00.000-05:00

Bat out of Hell. Srg. Pepper. Led Zeppelin IV. The Wall.

Musicians have made a few excellent albums. But by and large the music industry has delivered a fifty-year swindle to music consumers and their comeuppance has clearly, um, come. By swindle, I simply mean when a band produces one or two excellent singles, and places them on an album with 10 or filler tracks. For literally decades, this was how it was done -- a $3 song was packaged with ten 10 cent songs and sold for $18. Magic value.

Today, these $3 songs are all on sale for $1 at iTunes. So you only buy an album if has the stature of a classic album, like The Wall, or if you just like to own physical media for some reason. The most creative response to this in my view has been to sell albums at the cash in places like Starbucks; Sheryl Crow sort of goes with the Starbucks image and if you're spending $7 on two lattes, maybe you'll spend another $15 on a CD for your car. The other approach, made famous by Radiohead, has been to sell the album on a pay-what-you-can basis; this is not a bad approach either. Certainly, if you imagine bands receiving just $1 or $2 per CD sold, then by delivering albums direct (less production and any marketing costs) it wouldn't be hard to match or beat that; heck, sell the whole album for $1.50 and then sell a bonus video for $1 -- you're already ahead.

But I thought today that there is another approach that tackles the core flaw in retail music. Perhaps the meaning of the album needs to be revisited. Instead of an album being the coherent narrative of, say, five guys in a beach house over a month, let it incorporate more than one solo artist. What I'm proposing is part way between a compilation CD and a classic album. Imagine if Sheryl Crow, Taylor Swift and ... I don't know ... KELLY CLARKSON, got together and released an album with 12 songs -- four each. There would be little or no overlap in vocals, but substantial cooperation in theme, lyrics, production, etc., so the coherence of a classic album emerges.

The album would be released with a title reflecting its narrative, not their brands -- something like Sand in the Sunscreen; -- I have no idea. But with a coherent theme and narrative there is a coherent audience; such an approach captures not only the built in audience for each artist, but also a new audience for their narrative. There's also the benefit of being so big that the publicity outweighs what it otherwise would -- a $5 million lottery prize receives an average number of purchased tickets, but a $25 million lottery prize might receive an extra $10 million worth of tickets, so that $5 million = $5 million, but $25 million = $35 million.

Or, in this case, 1+1+1 = 5.

Finally, taking such an approach and labelling it as a series -- something similar to the "unplugged" series in the 1990s -- produces an additional benefit in that consumers would come to expect the all killer, no filler quality of the product.

Note: this is my first post actually written for the Kindred Crowd blog; the previous ones were just the tech-related posts written for my personal blog.

When did bit.ly become del.icio.us?

2009-10-07T22:00:00.000-05:00

Seriously. Props for recognizing a social media angle to what I think was just a silly side industry dominated by tiny URL until twitter got big.

Now, delicious is a personal repository and bit.ly is 2/3 tool and 1/3 social.

EDIT -- I seem to have mistaken their "history" feature for a non-existent "what's hot" feature (seemed unlikely that all that was hot was mine). Anyway, is there more value in holding their perpetual poll of websites close to their chest, or in sharing?

Taglocity -- making MSOutlook more like Gmail

2009-10-02T20:14:00.001-05:00

I prefer Gmail because it's quicker and less bloated. But Outlook will definitely be with us for some time, and while it is, Taglocity offers a product that closes the gap a little.

I'm running Taglocity 3.0 professional edition (free trial; soon to revert to standard edition), after using the 2.0 for about eight months.

In a nutshell, Taglocity radically enhances an existing Outlook feature called "Categories." (Categories = tags). For some time, Outlook has allowed you to categorize emails, but it was clunky.

Here's how I set up and use Taglocity, after installing it:

Assuming you currently store your Outlook email in folders, open a folder and select all emails. Now, use the Taglocity Pane (atop your main Outlook page) to assign a tag to all items in this folder. You can just use the name of the folder, but I believe in following these conventions:

a) don't pluralize ("report" not "reports") or capitalize, except
b) capitalize acronyms ("PR", not "pr"), and
c) add a hypen after tags that would otherwise form words or parts of words; e.g., "PR-" and "Toronto-". This will pay off later if you run a search for "professional". [Granted, it will fail if your email includes something like, "Toronto-based accountant"].
Go through all your folders and repeat this
Open your Tag Bar window (click "Tag Bar") clean up your tags. Through right-clicking you can consolidate similar tags.
Now, within your Tag Bar window, move the tags around into groups and then assign a colour to each group (e.g., industries are blue; administration is green; personal is yellow)
Still within the Tag Bar window, add a half dozen of your most popular tags to the actual Tag Bar. This bar sits atop Outlook's main page, and makes it easier to assign tags to emails.
Now, go back and see where you can assign more than one existing tag to an email. E.g., you have an email about a flight on Air Canada and another about consulting services to Air Canada. Tag both "air-canada" but tag one "flight" and another "consulting" or something.
When you've done all this, put all of your email in an "archive" folder and delete your other folders. One caveat, for repetitive projects, I prefer to use folders to tags. E.g., I write a monthly newsletter and I store material for it throughout each month; I will tag this material with the name of the newsletter, but I also store it in a folder called "May 2009" or whatever.

Yes, all of this takes some time. You may not follow all these steps for the email you received in the past. But the process demonstrates how to use Taglocity for email as you receive it. When an email arrives, once it's dealt with as a work task, you can click twice and deal with it as clutter.

Finding anything is simply about narrowing down the options -- triangulating. If, in six months, you need details about that Air Canada flight, you can use Outlook's search box to run a keyword search "category:air-canada, category:flight". Even if this produces 100 emails, you can easily scroll to the rough period of the flight. And you can combine the search with "from:dave"-type commands.

If the size of your company permits it, you can benefit from a network effect by making all of your tags public; i.e., the tags you assign to an email will travel with the email when an email is forwarded or replied to. If you invest the time to create a taxonomy for your firm, email conversations will only have to be tagged once, rather than by each recipient.

Sounds complicated, but in fact the top benefits I've experienced from using this are:

if you equate a tag to a folder, you can put one email in two or more "folders" at the same time, so it's easier to find regardless of how your brain is working when you need the email. E.g., you might spend a year storing email first by industry (or client) and then by service performed, and then decide you want to store by service performed first and then by industry/client within those folders. With tags, you just do both.
it's ridiculously quick to tag and drag emails to a single folder than to drag up and down Outlook and through nested folders.
though command-line searches are not popular, in fact we have all become used to them through Google; they're quite quick when you get used to them. have you ever watched someone painfully spend two or three minutes trying to find a simple email? if you can narrow the problem down by two or three tags (and perhaps a rough date), it shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen seconds to find a needle in a 10,000 email haystack.

In time, people will no doubt have personal taxonomies. You'll add 100 tags to Gmail and you'll use them for all work documents, personal documents, calendar items, emails, photos and videos, and basically any discrete piece of content you store.

The Kitchen PC -- Asus

2009-02-19T13:08:00.000-05:00

It's not quite a fridgebook, but life is incremental.

Asus Kitchen PC.

(Does anyone else remember Commodore 64's being pushed for the capacity to organize recipes?)

Online, half a second delay is death

2009-02-04T16:40:00.000-05:00

Link.

Creative web searching

2008-11-29T08:19:00.000-05:00

For a brief period, just knowing what google was, and how to do a keyword search, made you a magic ambassador of factology.

But the value in web2.0 sites spills over into the commons; ie. these sites tend to organize the internet in ways other than keywords.

Del.icio.us is a tool for storing one's bookmarks in the "cloud". I've written before that its best use is actually clipping and sharing news stories -- a sort of live repository of external content related to what you care about (ie. you and five friends agree to store all articles on the business strategy of Furbees in there).

But Del.icio.us also works as a research tool. The site's designers chose to use a logical, word-based hierarchy for their URLs (there's a better name for that?!). Ie. if your name is david11, your del.icio.us account is del.icio.us/david11.

What made Delicious (getting tired of the periods) unique when it emerged was its use of tagging. So, instead of just saving a news story or website to Delicious, you assign a few keywords (or tags) to it as well, allowing you to find this URL easily in time.

So, the spillover effect of most of the internet being tagged is that you can search for content by its tag, and with the logical URL system they use, that's as easy as:

http://del.icio.us/tag/a-word-that-describes-whatever-the-heck-you're-looking-for.

Even better, you can do a keyword search within this tag.

My last post was on Ryanair's business strategy. If you Google that, the results are annoying. Plan B is del.icio.us/tag/ryanair ... and then a keyword search for strategy (there are 11 answers, all of which are interesting).

Furthermore, I not only have 11 answers, but 11 people/accounts, each of which could lead to related ideas ... things I haven't yet thought of. Sort of like, if I like Fiest and RHCP, an algorithm predicts that I may like your cousins weird band from Wisconsin (most likely, I would hate it).

Google, you know algorithms ... get on this Delicious train!

Tagging takes extreme discipline

2008-10-24T09:29:00.000-05:00

But it pays off.

Rather than storing documents in folders, tagging those documents with extreme discipline and using smart folders (and/or quick searches) makes it much easier to findlocate yer stuff.

Cool article on metatagging on OSX; Vista is similar.

Big Box web

2008-10-23T20:09:00.000-05:00

I live in a town that's grown from about 20,000 people to about 65,000 people in six or so years. It's a suburb of Toronto; or, in a sense, a suburb of the Toronto suburbs.

I think, of the 45,000 people who just moved here, most came from the nearby suburbs. One thing you notice about this town is how few people shop on its traditional main street -- it's a pretty street with traditional shops, but at peak times it's dead. My theory is that, these people who came from other suburbs return to those suburbs to shop; they are used to the big box stores with big value. To the locals, it may seem odd to drive for 45 minutes to buy meat, but to suburbanites that's an average Saturday (ie. hell). You could say that main street has been disintermediated by people whose commute has conditioned them to long drives.

I think something similar occurs on the Web. I was listening to Cat Stevens on youtube (ie. the universal juke box) and wanted a listing of tracks on a cassette tape that I likely lost five years ago; I wanted to listen to the songs on YouTube in the same order as the album/cassette.

What did I do? Until recently, I would have gone to hmv.com, because that's a Canadian website at the online source for physical music media. But before I started typing, I realized that Amazon is better than HMV. I don't really care that much that it's in the U.S.

I don't care about the more local option; all that I care about is the one big answer that I can store in my head. I can keep a few dozen URLs in there, and Amazon.com covers off a lot of products.

So, as far as the web goes, maybe things are spiky and not flat. Maybe there's only room for one Amazon, and one eBay and one Google, etc. The Network Effect supports this, too.

But the flat Earth argument would be that sophisticated searches could flatten all of the Amazon competitors and provide me with a list of prices. So Amazon becomes where I research and price determines where I buy. But maybe Joe the plumber/surfer doesn't use that type of thing.

The FridgeBook

2008-10-22T20:01:00.000-05:00

Have you read about the Asus Eee? For well under $500 ($300 on Amazon at the moment), you can get a pretty basic, really small, Linux laptop.

You're not meant to audit GE on it, but by relying a bit on the cloud, you can do quite a bit, for really not very much. Great for students. Good as a "household junker" laptop; I'm sure a few will find their ways to garage workshops or on whatever floor of the house currently lacks a terminal.

But, let's by frank, at 7" the thing's still a clunker. If it were a search engine, it'd be Yahoo, not Google.

I think that, somewhere between the iPhone -- which sits in pockets on street corners, and comes out in meetings and bathrooms -- and the Asus Eee, is an untapped market that I call the FridgeBook (or fridge computer ... whatever).

FridgeBooks would be like iPhones, but with much larger screens. They'd have magnets that would let you stick 'em to your fridge. They'd be always-on and always on wifi. So as families do what families do at home -- more often than not in and around the kitchen -- they have a device so efficient and close, it can tell them:

what to wear outside
what movie to see
family TTD
grocery list
family calendar
a recipe ...
whatever TV has/will become
visual voicemail(R)(C)(A)

I've said before: the difference between getting that type of information in 3 seconds or 10 seconds is critical. Go grab your Vista or OSX laptop and try one of these searches ... walking, booting up, etc ... it's 2 minutes or more. Asus Eee may be closer to 10 seconds. I'm saying, I want 3.

This FridgeBook(D) will be a seamless part of every nuclear family, just like cooking with radiation.

For now, the iPod Touch makes a pretty good substitute. Goods: wifi, Web, touch screen. Bads: small, no frigg'n magnets.

Algorithms are the new "brand"

2008-10-03T09:47:00.000-05:00

If you spend a million bucks establishing a brand, and you do it well, you could benefit from that investment for years. But if you spend a million bucks on innovation, society will benefit forever.

Establishing market share has been important since the start of the post-war consumer economy ... an era that hasn't ended, but has morphed a little into to the knowledge economy. As a business tactic branding is still relevant. Ask Jeeves, Yahoo and even Google are cute and huggable -- more so than the racks of computers that comprise their offering.

But, clearly, one of these is winning where the others are not, and it's not because people want to hug it. It's nice that a search for "blue jays" no longer returns ornithology, as it easily could have prior to Google, but the company's better search results are only the first taste of how algorithms will displace brands.

Plentyoffish.com is a dating site. It could be the most profitable company in the history of legitimate business (income is suggested to be $5 - $10 million annually). One man manages one website -- oh, and he writes algorithms, which form the core of his site. He doesn't advertise and clearly has never worked with a graphic artist. I'm not even sure if his neighbours know what he does. What does he do? He simple runs a dating website that learns about people's tastes and matches them with similar people. But here's the brilliant part -- rather than coding psychology, he simple allows his members to interact with one another, providing real-time feedback on what makes people get along. If, all things being equal, people who like Ikea furniture also want to visit Thailand ... Pentyoffish.com probably knows this. Over time, the site introduces members to fewer duds and, like how Google gives you the right Blue Jays, builds its popularity by continually improving its ability to match potential mates.

Not that lava life doesn't have sexy ads. They do.

Amazon has been doing this with books for nearly a decade, but their system doesn't appear as sophisticated. Web2.0 definitions may miss the boat when they talk about Ajax and social networking. FaceBook is cool, but so are those hub caps that spin around when you stop. What's really of value are the algorithms that build value in a knowledge economy, and displace the need for branding.

Radian6 -- social media monitoring

2008-09-25T22:32:00.000-05:00

I guess they're reading this.

'Cause that's what Radian6 does; it reads tiny little blogs (and big ones), and all other manor of social media, finding what people say about its clients. I would have thought you could just do this with google, technorati and maybe a few phantom flickr and facebook accounts. Maybe they do? But they hint that they have a substantial back end.

This is a nice article as it doubles as both a look at where social media meets PR, and it profiles the unique strategy Radian6 used to launch their start-up. They gave it away for free to a small, local sub of a global PR firm, in exchange for feedback (and cred.) It worked brilliantly.

Link to Globe & Mail.

CIO.com interview on Social Networking for business

2008-09-22T14:18:00.000-05:00

... companies must avoid the "Kumbaya Zone" - the place where social media is ultimately a time-waster and has little business value.

Link.

Skimbit

2008-09-17T22:23:00.000-05:00

The last time I used this service it was called del.icio.us.

Seriously, I think the functionality is pretty much the same, but it's how Skimbit uses social bookmarking that makes it interesting.

Key phrases for this site are: collaboration, decision-making, web-clipping, social bookmarking.

Okay, say you need to decide what hotel you and four lads will stay in in Paris. So you set up a Skimbit account, create a project called Paris Hotel, and invite everyone to join the project. Then each member can go off and clip suggestions from web searches at the leisure with a handy little button on their browser. Each suggestion is ranked by the critieria you set at the outset (price, location, near a bar). After a week or two, you have loads of options and a good point from which you can decide.

That's the collaborative part -- you can do it in Google Docs and it's only a little more ugly.

But I think the social part -- the ability to view some of the other users' decisions -- that will provide the web2.0 value; it'll play a role in organizing the web's content.

http://skimbit.com

TechCrunch 50 review

2008-09-15T23:23:00.000-05:00

Okay, I've read through the 50 profiles and a few look cool. That said, anything around developer's tools, gambling or video games aren't interesting to me.

Also, I think the point of this post is not to highlight an angel investment opportunity, but to show a few directions the web is going in (that's the kind of grammar up with which I will not put!).

http://www.dotspots.com/

This enriches news stories. For bloggers, etc, you annotate a block of text and that annotation is shared in some way with others. So, say there's a CNN story on something like "McCain apologizes for pig ad," a million people could annotate that "meme" and come to some wisdom-of-the-crowds solution for what it means.

Applied to all web content, it could be interesting.

Revenue stream: not obvious.

www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=53

Yammar. It's like twitter, but for colleagues. It looks like there is a single webpage with status updates for everyone. Ie. "finishing the headline; mocking up the icons; testing the mail lists; brainstorming"; etc.

http://www.copyboxapp.com/

Mass customization of interactive content, for the non-technical writer. (ie. if it's raining today in the home city of the web-site visitor, a cute joke about that is the headline.) I think this will feel weird and forced at first, much like those animated paintings must have seemed odd when Hogwarts first got them. But, seriously, how much more rich can you make media?

On the other hand, there's a small chance you'll visit this website on an iPhone and it will advise you to flush.

http://tingz.net/whats-this-ting/

This gets a gold star. Widgets are sorta neat, but tingz are widgets built specifically for mobile computers, and which are meant to work across platforms. In my future, people will have screens with magnets stuck to their fridge. They yank them off, add a few items to the grocery list, and check out their schedule for the weekend. Ten minutes later, the husband goes into the grocery store and sees a his updated list on his iPhone. (Or robots just anticipate and fulfil our needs; it depends on the time frame).

http://beta.me-trics.com/

I don't know what this is, but it caught my eye. I think you enter a track a wide range of personal metrics (weight, HR, $ life savings, weekly run mileage, avg. commuting time) and then do something with it.

http://www.fitbit.com/

You wear a thingy that tracks all your personal health activity and then it wifi's it up to a site that analyzes and reports the exact minute of your death (I made the last bit up.)

http://www.forwordinput.com/

Swype.

This gets my second gold star. It could totally fail, like the guy who invented a keyboard that was better than QWERTY like a century after every secretary learned QWERTY. Or it could succeed like the BlackBerry's little buttons.

It's a better way to enter text on tiny keyboards. The company is really just an algorithm that forms words based, not on tapping keys, but on swiping a pen over a flat screen image of keys. So it's still QWERTY, but much more fluid. A small change, but if you can go from 10 WPM to 50 WPM on your iPhone/BlackBerry, it's good.

What caught my eye is that the co-founder invented T9; that predictive typing app. for SMS that's on like 2.5 billion or so phones.

http://www.getdropbox.com/

Turns your desktop into a wormhole. Except instead of sending documents to a universe where Sarah Palin is POTUSA, it goes to another desktop. Like your home one when you're at work. Coolest part is that it appears to work without you having to do anything special. Just put a doc in a folder (a magic folder).

Google Chrome

2008-09-13T15:41:00.000-05:00

Had it for 10 min.

Hooked.

the long tail

2008-09-10T15:54:00.000-05:00

This is to the Internet what "The Making of the President" was to the making of the President (after 1960).

FTA: "Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody.... Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are ... In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. ). "

McKinsey on Enterprise 2.0

2008-08-12T14:55:00.000-05:00

Services (transactional) above wikis blogs, videos
Internal above external.
Asia & Europe above NA.

Spreeder -- reading on a computer

2008-07-30T16:35:00.000-05:00

This isn't really a web technology ... it could have been invented 25 years ago.

When you read a physical newspaper or magazine, the whole theory is that you move your eyes left to right and they encounter new words in a particular order to create meaning.

Spreeder flashes 1 or a few words at a time, and then takes it/them away and shows you the next word in the sentence. I guess the idea is that people who mentally sound out words learn not to. I do it for sure; am now.

I like having 2 words on the screen at once, and I like pauses after comma's, etc. These can all be set in the advanced settings. 650 wpm is a little fast, but doable at these settings.

http://www.spreeder.com/

Using del.icio.us as an edited news reader

2008-07-24T08:25:00.001-05:00

When newspapers go online, they tend to use a content management system (CMS); no one "hard-codes" the home page. An RSS news feed can also be viewed as a CMS, albeit one you have only sky-level control over. However, when all news exists in a CMS, and RSS abounds, it begs the question, what exactly is the meaning or relevance of a media title.

I want news by topic, relevance, popularity or author. I'm not sure the name on the journalist's paycheque is relevant to me.

That said, I've stumpled upon an interesting use for del.icio.us -- the "social bookmarking" website famous for inventing (or popularizing) the use of tags. I wrote an earlier post here about my mis-use of tagging, when I first joined del.icio.us -- spasmodically, I tagged every bookmark with a cathartic splurge of verbage. Any and all words that I associated with that website, or the unerlying concept, found their way into the tag line. In theory, a year or a decade down the road, your brain would not have changed so much than a slightly more restrained splurge of verbage, in a search, would not return the saught-for bookmark.

This was all stupid. Tags are not psycho-analysis. They are categories. They are an improvement on the Mac/Windows "folder" concept in that, though they still are folders,

there can be multiple folders for one bookmark.

I don't have much use for the "social" aspect of del.icio.us. I don't care what's "hot" there. Digg does that better. And I have even less use for it as an alternative to my browser's favourites feature. I do use del.icio.us as a very functional storage vehicle for news and other "thought leadership." My job requires me to know a lot about what's going on ... not just what news stories "have legs," but what smart people are saying about the economy and business, etc. Since I spend a lot of time each day reading original news (and thought leadership) sources, I take the opportunity to save interesting articles in del.icio.us. By tagging, I can look back over categories, which could equate with industries or clients, etc. Furthermore, since del.icio.us' URL conventions are logical (ie. a list of all posts you've tagged "IFRS" can be found at del.icio.us/your_name/IFRS), it is extremely easy to share segregated news feeds with others.

Network effect

2008-07-03T13:06:00.000-05:00

I used to call this the "fax machine effect" ... then I googled it. (you could also call it the inverted hockey stick __________] ... there's a long tail before explosive growth.)

It explains a lot in business and economics. The effect drives the growth of the Internet, many consumer electronics, stock markets, English ...

Futurism? Virtual bike race.

2008-05-03T11:32:00.000-05:00

GPS's for bicycles are emerging, and they offer a lot. No more measuring the radius of your wheel ... just add batteries and go. Some include heart rate montiors (with the constrictive chest strap).

Though bike-focused GPS units do well as bike computers, in time they will likely do more. Imagine hitting a website and downloading a local route or waypoints from a friend or stranger to the unit. Then make your way to the starting point and hit GO to start the race. Nevermind that your competitor may have done his/her race weeks or years earlier ... you're going head to head on the screen! And you can upload the results for bragging rights.

In a race with waves, downloading the progress of others in real time (which goes beyond a GPS's capability now) would make it more of a head-to-head race.

What if data about poorly surveyed areas was aggregated to give a sense of the altitude of land masses?

Or if non-road routes were aggregates for map makers, who could analyze the data to locate popular trails that may have never been recorded (or intended by any authority!). Or imagine you were in an unfamiliar area and you could download non-road paths that were popular -- ie. to the GPS unit a field is a field, but if 30 people have ridden a particular route through that field, it might suggest the same to you.

They would likely also serve as Black Boxes in the case of an accident -- something that cyclists prone to breaking traffic laws should be mindful of.

Rubber, meet road -- Twitter finds a use.

2008-04-16T19:32:00.001-05:00

Student's Twitter messages alert world to arrest in Egypt.

Gravatar = Globally Recognized AVATAR (≠ gravity guitar)

2008-04-11T22:38:00.000-05:00

Huge.

http://en.gravatar.com/

What tags are not.

2008-03-23T10:18:00.001-05:00

I got excited about Web2.0 about two years ago; I read an article about flickr, which fawned over its novel photo "tagging" feature. That article speculated that OS's will adopt tagging in place of hierarchical folders.

Here's where I went askew. This article -- or how I read it -- led me to see tagging as a brainstorm-esq -- almost sub-conscious -- process. Ie. for each flickr photo, delicious link, or local file, you were to just spew a series of words (or hyphenated phrases), and in months or years to come, you or any reasonable person would spew a similar set of words when pondering the photo/link/file.

I even developed this into an idea for a service-business: Staples and Grand & Toy have notoriously difficult information architectures -- both in their physical stores and online. How do you categorize whiteboards and CD jewel cases in one dimension? But if a sample of the population assigned 6 intuitive tags to every Staples SKU, eventually, any non-caveman would be able to find stuff with a command-line-style search.

This is all interesting, but the point of this post is that tags should not be spewed in a brainstorm; they should be carefully considered. My delicious account has tags like: business, company, business-idea, start-up, entrepreneur, entrepreneurialism. So I feel forced to re-tag every cool start-up with six tags, where one will do.

No, the right approach to tagging is to assign the right tag in both your brain and the tagging system. Have one word for one underlying concept. Tag-clouds and other nifty features help with this ... you can assign what you have most-often assigned.

Tagging takes discipline. Rather than re-build my delilcious account (and not super-happy with Blink List), I'm going to take the opportunity to start-over with diigo.com, which techcrunch rates well.

Planning travel with the web is so helpful, you can almost skip the trip!

2007-12-10T08:28:00.000-05:00

Lonely Planet was, and is, the gold standard for travel books. Want to know a $45 a night hotel in Paris that's safe and clean -- spend $25 on Lonely Planet Paris.

But, frankly, reading such a book is not a very rich experience. You can't really tell if your wife would prefer Paris' Marais district over Saint Germain des pres. And you have no idea whether the information is up to date.

Flickr & Youtube

Today, I still plan travel with a Lonely Planet guide, but I go beyond. The photo management site Flickr, sold as a tool to store and share photos, doubles as tagged photographic evidence of everything on Earth. Want to see an Andalucian Villa? Do a Flickr search. The key I've found is to search for both a place name and an activity. Searching for "paris" is too general. Do "Paris" and "Shopping" or "Seville" and "yelling." If you're going outside the tourist season (when most photos are taken), throw in a month or season name. Before booking a hotel room, search for that ... most often than not, I've found one person has taken the obligatory room and window shots.

Flickr is enjoyed by photo snobs, so there are plenty of beautiful shots. Not so much with youtube. But by searching for videos taken within a town or street -- even if they're of two kids doing skateboard tricks -- instantly immerses you in the overseas environment. Seeing the action can make what is at first foreign come to be natural.

Tripadvisor.com

These guys seemed to get very smart in the past year -- or, like fax machines, they only became useful after they become popular. Either way, it seems that even the most remote hotel is now reviewed by multiple people, with detailed written reviews, a quantitative survey and even, occasioannly, amateur photographs. In many cases, by reading individual reviews, you can reconcile wildly different review scores. For example, one person may give a hotel 5 stars and comment that it was very clean and friendly, while another would give it 2 stars and add that the towels were sub-par and it room service was slow; the first person may have splurged on a rare, nice hotel, whereas the latter may be used to extravagance and found this place lacking.

Expedia also has hotel reviews, and I believe they are tied to actual reservations made through Expedia, so they're much more likely to be authentic -- that said, as a writer, I like to think I can spot a bullshit review.

Booking

Hotels.com and other sites often have very good special prices. They key here is to check every day for weeks in advance of a trip. Furthermore, it's worth it to call the hotel to confirm the reservation within a few hours of making it through one of these sites.

Information

Finally, if I can't find some information anywhere else, I use Yahoo Answers. Here I can post a question and categorize it narrowly -- often, within 2-3 hours I have multiple responses. Typical questions may be: how much is a taxi from XX airport to the centre of town.

Why satellite radio will beat iTunes, IMHO

2006-05-12T09:34:00.000-05:00

Regardless of whether Napster was itself illegal, it was only popular because no alternative existed which had the blessing of music "owners." Today, the iTunes store is a very popular web-tool that essentially gives users what Napster did, but with the blessing of the music "owners."

Some people who use iTunes own fewer than 1000 songs. In my opinion, in a library of 1000 songs, about 200 are truly enjoyable. However, a typical core library of 200 songs begins to lose its "freshness" after about three months of rotation. Adding songs to that list through iTunes costs $1 a song, so even being very careful and adding only "core" songs, it will cost $198 to gain another three months of "freshness," or $66 per month. Some people will pay this, and enjoy picking the songs. Many will find the cost -- and agony (watch someone sweat over a large, unfamiliar menu) of making 66 individual choices per month -- prohibitive.

Satellite radio (or Internet radio, TV radio, or other digital audio), on the other hand, can be thought of as someone with a library of 250,000 songs, including every new one. The key advantage, however, is in the feedback. If a satellite radio station can be "trained" to know your musical tastes, then it can not only deliver old songs that you are likely to enjoy, but predict which new songs you will also like. In fact, if it can narrow your tastes well enough, you may even be able to receive just a core of 200 good songs, out of a selection of 250,000 possible songs, and this core will automatically update with newly released songs every day, completely updating before any song becomes stale.

In the case of portable music, an iPod is comparable in price to a satellite receiver (it is likely cheaper, but has a shorter life). However, satellite radio costs close to $15 per month, while 66 new songs per month on iTunes costs $65. Furthermore, for the average consumer, no decision-making is required.

Despite my love of iTunes, I think that, within a decade, music-as-content will be stored on central servers and streamed to users, rather than "owned" by individuals.