Archive for May, 2005
Gadget induced memory loss
A couple of years ago while journaling in my Circa notebook, I posed
the following question (to myself I guess…how sad): With the ubiquity of the
Internet, ever increasing access to WiFi, and the shrinking size of
communication devices, what will be the effect on our short-term memory? I supposed that there would be a great impact, not necessarily in the short-term, but during technology’s long-term relationship with our evolution – both feeding and informing it.
Curiously, Wired magazine just posed a similar question: Are our memories
suffering from our reliance on gadgets? Respondents include Jeff
Hawkins (inventor of the Palm and co-author of On Intelligence), Kaja Perina (Editor in Chief at Psychology Today) and Tom Stafford (author of Mind Hacks).
Other thoughts?
Life of the Closed Mind
I read Anna Quindlen’s Life of the Closed Mind in the most recent issue of Newsweek and found myself identifying with the last paragraph:
So the young men and women who began their college years in the shadow of September 11 graduate in its shadow as well. The intolerant, the monomaniacal, the zealots driven by religious certainty engineered the worst attack on American soil, and the result has been intolerance, monomania and zealotry driven by religious certainty. President Bollinger [Columbia University] cited the contempt of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the legendary Supreme Court justice, for the man who "knows that he knows." If Holmes lived today, of course, he would be either lionized or demonized. And he would find, much to his sorrow, that America had been hijacked by those who cannot tell the difference between opponents and enemies, between disagreement and heresy, between discussion and destruction.
Forgetting the politics involved for a moment, when does "strong" leadership within an organization become so black and white? Is it when an imbalance exists between culture, mission and values? Can one claim to have strong leadership when opposing views aren’t embraced? Perhaps I’m still too idealistic for my own good. What is the quote (although I believe falsely attributed) from Winston Churchill?
If you’re not a
liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative
by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.
God in Ruins on the Long Tail
God in Ruins made some interesting comments about the Long Tail today with the final conclusion that "Filters=Freedom". It is both a remarkable and obvious statement, especially when we are talking about the marketplace, customer preferences and artistic expression. I’ll have to agree that search filtering systems will need to be much more intuitive and personal to accomplish this task. The question is, where do we turn? To Google? Don’t think so.
Five Common Misconceptions About Buzz Marketing
I found this article over at MarketingProfs.com – Five Common Misconceptions About Buzz Marketing. The highlights?
1. ‘Buzz spreads like wildfire!’
2. ‘All you need is a good product, and the rest will take care of itself’
3. ‘If you get buzz, you don’t need any marketing’
4. ‘To get buzz going, all you need to do is find those early adopters/connectors/evangelists (or simply really cool people)’
5. ‘Do it online! No, do it offline!’
Although Buzz and Word of Mouth is important, and can lead to great things, you simply can’t base ALL of your marketing on it and still realize your full sales potential. Even your ‘influencers’ need to be armed with the right tools to help sell to your customers.
All basic stuff, right? Perhaps. But so many people forget about the basics. As a business mentor once admonished me, "Blocking and tackling first…then the fancy moves." Of course, the sports analogies are always lost on me…but I have eventually gotten the point.
Darknets
Check out JD Lasica’s Darknet: Mini-book chapters from his new book, Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation. What’s a Darknet? Check out the Wikipedia answer as well as Lasica’s.
PIP/BuzzMetrics Study Released
PIP and BuzzMetrics released a new study this month on the effects of blogging on the 2004 Elections
The Pew/BuzzMetrics report, titled “Buzz, Blogs and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004,” analyzed not only blogs, but their intersection with online citizen chat forums, the mainstream news media and official political spin from the Democrat and Republican election camps. Pew and BuzzMetrics examined the political issues most frequently discussed from September 27, 2004 through October 31, 2004.
Although the report indicates that Blogger’s certainly had an impact on the elections, "[p]olitical bloggers were buzz followers as much as buzz makers."
Go ask!
I read this today at Paul Graham’s site. In it he discusses the virtues that come with being young, smart and inexperienced in business. I love this quote:
…I can tell you what tends to be missing when people lack experience. I’ve said that every startup needs three things: to start with good people, to make something users want, and not to spend too much money. It’s the middle one you get wrong when you’re inexperienced. There are plenty of undergrads with enough technical skill to write good software, and undergrads are not especially prone to waste money. If they get something wrong, it’s usually not realizing they have to make something people want.
This is not exclusively a failing of the young. It’s common for startup founders of all ages to build things no one wants.
Fortunately, this flaw should be easy to fix. If undergrads were all bad programmers, the problem would be a lot harder. It can take years to learn how to program. But I don’t think it takes years to learn how to make things people want. My hypothesis is that all you have to do is smack hackers on the side of the head and tell them: Wake up. Don’t sit here making up a priori theories about what users need. Go find some users and see what they need.
Most successful startups not only do something very specific, but solve a problem people already know they have.
How much does this have to be stressed? Go out and ask questions! Talk to the people you think will be your customers. Do they see the problem? Does your (proposed) solution solve it? I’ve seen quite a few small businesses as well as large corporate projects fail by not doing this.
You know…this is really a leadership challange. Do you have the stuff to stand-up and question your convictions?…and then to truly listen to the responses? This can seperate the successful start-up from the failed.
This site is crap
I’ll say it again: This site is crap. Now, we’re just talking about the site, not the company. I claim to know little to nothing about the company…which is further evidence that the site is crap.
Now, let me step back a sec. I’ve been working with a company on a branding and information architecture project and stressing the importance of having your customers know exactly what your company is about…the second they arrive at your site.
Look at their front page. OK. What have you learned about them? That they are built for speed? That they do something with content. Good god! Get a clue!
Thus endeth my obligatory blog rant.
Dan Pink come to appliedthinking, Part 4
appliedthinking: So, if the abilities you describe (Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning) are fully learnable, what do our educational institutions need to do to teach them?…and are they even prepared/structured to do so? I keep thinking about the metrics K-12 schools need to report on for No Child Left Behind. Is competency in these abilities measurable?
———-
As question four was the final question, I’d like to thank Dan for participating in this interview. I truly appreciated the opportunity for the dialogue!
Of Friedman and chimps
I ran across this article in the April 27th edition of the New York times – Matt Taibbi’s critique of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. What does he think of Friedman and the book? Judge for yourself:
Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme
of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee
loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake
well into your 50s.
