What a day to leave
What a day to leave Toronto. We started off the day with a transit system strike that was unannounced and unexpected, and we quickly got our heat and humidity warnings for the day.
Then the smog alert came. For most of the day the air quality was at "good" or "moderate" and by late afternoon had gone to "poor" and people with any sort of breathing problems were being told to stay indoors.
What do you do on a day like that? We did the only thing we could, got on a plane and flew east. PEI is literally heaven in comparison right now.
We are at Laurel’s family home in Charlottetown today and we head further east to the cottage tomorrow for a few nights before she goes to Cambodia for 6 weeks.
When we walked out of the airport we took a deeeep breath. The air was sweet and salty, crisp. Our family laughed at us, thinking we were joking. But after a year in a highrise, we are ready for this. We were serious about taking that deep breath.
So thank you Toronto for a great year. You were great for my work, and Laurel is glad to be getting the best education she can in this country.
Thank you Charlottetown, you don’t have all the sushi joints and hangouts, but we ate at Aing’s Teahouse today, and will be at Formosa tomorrow, and we still haven’t found anything as good or friendly in Toronto restaurants.
Thank you PEI. You are nothing close to boring. You put me at ease and keep our families safe and in good health.
We will be back in Toronto in September. We have only discovered a fraction of the city. We still have Koreatown to visit, and the beaches, and we’ve only scratched the surface of Little Italy and Little India. We will find that Spanish hamlet, and there is that Brazilian restaurant with the belly dancers and all you can eat barbeque that I want to try.
And there is the great new tech scene in Toronto. Thanks to everyone working on DemoCamp, Torcamp and everything else. Toronto is turning into great place to run a technology business.
It’s not hard to tell why someone like Rob left Toronto so many years ago, but it’s not hard to see why people go there to find opportunity either.
Tags: toronto, PEI, democamp, torcamp, queen street commons, red point, charlottetown
I call bullshit
If the telcos want to own this whole thing, they can watch it crumble in front of them.
How do these idiots think that a captive net is going to work? Compuserve, AOL and a hundred others tried it on a massive scale for almost a decade. Consumers wanted something else, and Compuserve got killed in the process, AOL ended up making a lot more money than when they had to produce all the information themselves.
Now, you want to go back to the compuserve model? Tell me, Bell, AT&T, Verizon,… Who is going to produce your content?
If you dimwits took 5 minutes to look at the top traffic attracting sites on the internet your would notice that with a few exceptions, they are all capitalizing on user generated content, not your corporate shill.
Rogers, so cute
I called Rogers this morning to either suspend or cancel my highspeed Internet while Laurel and I go traveling and back home to PEI for most of the summer.
I have been more or less happy with Rogers. Happy with the service, a little put out by the 55$ bill I pay for it every month, so I have had thoughts of switch to the faster and cheaper 3web, which gets great reviews.
It made sense to me that it would probably be easiest to just suspend my Rogers service over the summer though and reactivate on our return. I knew I was paying 3$/month for a modem rental right now, so I figured that I would still have to pay that fee. To my surprise, the Rogers rep on the phone also had 2 other charges that I was going to have to pay. A 3.95$+tax/month fee for just existing (literally, it was for nothing. The girl said "it is for the fact that we are still putting signal on your line"… "but I am saving you sending out a technical to disconnect the line by agreeing to suspend and not just cancel") and the other was some $1.95+tax/month "service fee" of some sort.
I then decided "I will just cancel, there are cheaper providers I can go with in September" and I told her that I wasn’t really interested in paying some ridiculous fees that no other provider charges me (on PEI I have had my Aliant account suspended for 9 months now, not a peep from them). She, I think, could see the reason in this and hmm’d and haw’d. Her first response was "It wouldn’t really be fair that everyone else has to pay this fee but you don’t"… I just kind of stayed silent, and she finally agreed to remove it.
Now, it is only something like 18$ of fees over the 3 months. Not much. I probably lose more than that in lost change in my couch, but I really needed a good reason not to dump Rogers and make the switch to another provider, and they were giving me no reason and no respect.
Before we hang up she also lets me know that because I have considered moving my service, Rogers will match the 3web price in September for me (29.99$/month vs 47$/month with Rogers — and 3web is TWICE as fast).
So, they have been overcharging me for a year on a service that the competition charges far less for. Sounds like a real sense of entitlement to me.
Tags: rogers, 3web, highspeed internet
The coy one
You know him. Always a glare, few words that mean much, friendliest with those never to be seen again.
He talks big, but with no aim. His gossip is like a machine gun firing buckshot, messy and the blood gets everywhere.
The coy one.
Repost: You can’t lose what you never had
Here is a post from September 2003 about viral marketing and branding.
You can’t lose what you never had: Saturation was never persuasion
In his recent article in BrandWeek Robert Wheatley of Wheatley & Timmons makes an honest and straightforward statement: "Call it media saturation, message overload, cynicism, skepticism or evolution of the species, the groundswell of change now facing marketers of any and every product is what we’ll conveniently call the credibility gap."
With each new gimmick and product launch, consumers are becoming more and more skeptical about the messages they are being bombarded with. Overexposure and negative stimulation have lowered consumer expectations over time. This was fine in the beginning; lower expectations meant easier sales. The quality of the consumers purchase wasn’t in question, the customer only gauged satisfaction at the register. Much like biting into your next double whopper upsized McDeal, we still gauge much of our satisfaction based on what we achieve in the short term with our purchase.
The problem is that the consumer is becoming more than the consumer. Amazon.com has launched their customers into the position of reviewer and, eventually, expert. For Amazon the benefits are threefold;
- Community Building takes place inside the reviews and people attribute the quality and insight of the customer reviews directly to Amazon. The customer feels a relationship with Amazon, much like a star employee can make a customer feel like their friend on the floor, except the costs for Amazon are much lower.
- Cost are reduced dramatically from the high overhead storefront and employee training that traditional shops must employ. Wal-Mart may be famous for cutting costs, but they still employ some of the most cash-draining community building ideas to date. Instead of just using their employees as models each week they should also be reserving 5 pages of their flyer to customer reviews – negative and positive. If Wal-Mart takes their community centered ideas to the web – watch out.
- Customers recycle Amazon.com into their general shopping habits. Because Amazon is both a reputable place to buy products, and they have a large database of customer reviews, they are becoming directly involved in any buying decision that their past customers make. Stores such as Futureshop are seeing some degree of success with this, but poor design and implementation choices are hindering the customers experience.
Have traditional mega-campaigns lost their ability to persuade? I’m not sure they ever did persuade. What we have seen from campaigns such as Kraft, Inc’s $750million+ each year in advertising is not a better product, or stronger customer loyalty, or even a sustainable reputation. What Kraft has built is a lost-cost low-quality machine that pumps in new consumers and pumps out the old. Middle class families stop buying craft products as soon as the idea of buying real cheese and real pasta is more affordable. What Kraft is, however, is one component of a larger corporate machine that produces everything from Cigarettes to Fuel; sustainability is not achieved on a single product basis for them.
Robert Wheatley believes that we are entering the age of custom media development, that companies must employ "Strategies that respect and reach out to the heavy users" and that these heavy users are the ones who can spread the news for you. There is a lot of truth to his statements, but we must be careful to understand the nature of the "heavy user" for what he is: a critical and often cynical ally who wants to be convinced. Bringing this type of consumer into the fold as defacto spokesperson isn’t the job of PR or marketing firms. It is a process that has to take place directly inside the organization. By bringing the organizations competencies to the heavy user, they become engaged on a level that begs their loyalty.
This is already taking place in the development world. Companies such as Macromedia are providing venues for their most talented developers and producers to engage their customers. The producer is no longer a stranger but becomes a part of the community in which the client lives, and buys.
The art of real persuasion probably never existed in the world of Pepsi Vs. Coke, Kraft Dinner or Windows 95. The art of persuasion is about taking a corporate machine and making it a little more real. The only way to do that is to let some of your real assets, your thinkers and leaders, be shown off to the world. How that happens depends on what you are selling, but I have yet to see a sector where there can be no application of persuasion.
Repost: Autistic World
Another post dug from the archives. 2004
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The Heart of the Problem
Autistic children are not naturally able to understand, or develop, meaningful social relationships in the way most of us are used to doing. Their relationships are often transactional, and there is not enough emotional bandwidth in their interactions for any additional emotional or social payload.
I have had a chance to see this in a different situation with a client of ours who has asked us to develop a community for an internal group of disabled people. A common point we have heard from members of this group is that, as part of being generally misunderstood by the rest of the world (which I have come to acknowledge as being mostly true), they are not able to form any sort of meaningful relationship with the people they encounter. In both cases, the subject either lacks emotional intelligence, or they are unable to accurately communicate their emotional understanding of the interaction.
Usually, an autistic child is taught how they can fake their way through social interactions. They are taught scripts for common situations, and how they must make eye contact and avoid annoying habits. Essentially, they are taught to hide themselves, while still only placing a superficial value on the transactional component of the relationship.
Does our network model suffer?
It may seem like these groups are in a precarious situation. The inability to leverage any sort of emotional intelligence is completely limiting to a healthy understanding, and use, of human relationships. The truth is, however, somewhat more difficult to swallow. We are all surrounded by colleagues, friends, family and even partners who are completely unable to guage, and invest in, the value of a relationship. The implications here are that the links in our social networks can be weakened by people (nodes) who suffer from this.
We must now not only use our own emotional intelligence, but we must measure the EI of anyone we are interacting with. This is our only defense against forming a relationship with someone who simply does not have the capacity to see any real value in the relationship, beyond it’s benefit to them.
The Natural Model
As members of a network, we must learn a few rules of the game. We must pull our own weight, we must not overestimate our load-bearing ability, do not attempt to short-circuit paths which do not exists, and more. Perhaps more importantly though, we must learn that being a member of a network involves social referencing. We must learn that our actions affect the health of the entire network, and that we must exercise due diligence in deciding to act. We learn this as babies, and now we must re-learn it in a new context. The relationships that we leverage must be ones that actually mean something to use, and that we are willing to invest in.
In his model, Steven Gustein does not teach autistic children to go by scripts, or to fake their feelings. He teaches them the real value of a relationship, and they find that they truly are able to value and love those around them.
As we enter a natural network model of doing business, we are becoming babies again in so many way, and many will struggle with the basic difficulties of interaction that so many others in the world fight in their day-to-day lives.
Repost: Why the client hates your software
Here is a repost from my old blog, which is now lost. Posted in 2003
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It’s been over two years now since I have sworn off being a web developer and software hocker. I didn’t do this because I had to, I did it because it became clear to me that I could no longer do work that I wasn’t passionate about. I applied this thought to every space in my life that made sense. I made family a passion, I was passionate about the girl I love, our cat, my belief in god, I had passion as my driver. I am still learning about this, and I believe I always will be.
In this change, I came to hate the essence of the software I had been producing, even when I was making a lot of money doing it. I saw this because there were two parts to what I was doing. I was building tools that had FIV (the virus which causes featureitis) and the other half of my time was spent fixing the screw-ups of other vendors (this is where I got to see how much the client suffers).
At this time, I began to become fascinated by community building – I fell in love with the idea that people could connect with each-other, online, on a meaningfull level. I saw that we weren’t stuck in the old software world forever, we could make software that meant something to the people who used it. I got to do some cool work on internal communities with some big organizations, but I saw that I couldn’t make much of a business of it at the time, the dot-com boom was still rolling along, albeit on it’s last legs.
It was then that I noticed on key fact: The client hates the software – and he may start to hate you.
Software, web apps, utilities, databases, they all cause headaches. I wish I could bet on this at the casino, because there is almost no argument here. So little software is actually well made that organizations have been forced to funnel money into IT and the only cost-effective training is teaching the employee how to run damage control when needed. This is true for all software, open-source included.
It is still true however, that: If you don’t know a thing about the software, you’re going to look like an idiot.
If you are building a business on this software, it doesn’t matter who you are, you have to understand the software. Even considering the last point in this post (coming up), the tool does matter enough that it can break your relationship with the client.
There is a different way: Be passionate about your build, and connect that to the client.
The fact is, most developers are incredibly passionate about what they are building. The software that a programmer develops is most likely a major source of pride in his/her life. It is somewhere between the coders, the sale department, the management, and the client that the love gets lost. The connection between the programmer and the client needs to be made again – let them smile at each-other, and let your developer tell the client a few secrets here or there, or fill a feature request in record time, just for them. This is the only way you can foster a real long-term integrity. The easiest way to start is to have your developers blog on their own section of your company site.
No matter how good you think you are: Your software doesn’t matter
In the end, what matters most is how well your client can actually use the software. There is no other result (including your bottom line) that will sustain you over the long term. By being in the trenches with them and pushing the adoption curve, you will get impromptu phone calls from your client in a few months, just to tell you how well everything has been working, and just to say thanks.
It can’t be anything else
I get pretty tired of a few discussions
- Pinko/Evangelist/whatever *aka cheap* marketing.
- The citizen journalism debate
Hearing media people, from media orgs, talk about what will work and what doesn’t work and how the future still needs editors, or doesn’t need editors and will have great journalists,…. journalists will stay,.. the newsroom can’t change……
If one thing has to change, it’s the newsroom.
I am a believer in this whole blogosphere thing. I’ve been here for a long time, but I think I am getting sick of the same old debates going on.
At Mesh, Jian Ghomeshi said he didn’t think that most of the big players were going to die. He’s right. Some will hurt, some arcane old pubs will certainly fight to the grave, but most will adapt.
There is one thing that has to change, and will change however, so we probably don’t have to dwell on the question anymore, we can just start asking how?
Individuals, who we now call consumers will have significant content and directional input into all media organizations within 5 years.
You just need to ask the smart people, because the smart people are doing it. The folks at Minnesota Public Radio are doing it now and it is working.
 Chris Lydon’s Radio Open Source is radio that is informed and directed by it’s listeners. Chris is a sort of pragmatic uncle who can tell great stories, and the stories can be anything. His stories are interviews.
It’s working, the direction of the future is not in question. The only question is who will come, and what will they bring?
Tags: radio, media, citizen journalism, public insight journalism, mesh06
Backstage by Bryght
Wow, Backstage - by Bryght is looking incredible
The emperor does have clothes!
NPR ran an item on All Things Considered last night about this.
My colleague Kashmir said it best this morning
You may have already seen this – it’s an absolute classic cock up. BBC staff scrambling to get a spokesman from Apple Computers into the studio, could not find him, accidentally grabbed a taxi driver who was there, dragged him into the studio, wired him up and began the interview.
Watch the guy’s face when the interview begins as the host introduces him with the wrong name… the interview is brilliant because it speaks to the ‘news’ that has no substance, churning the same old platitudes over and over and the power of being ‘the guy’ in the suit and what a fine suit it is…
This is no joke and yet it is the central joke in media today. What a show!
