Tag - business

Better is boring

May 26, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Better is boring. Better sucks. Better is evolutionary, incremental. Better is moving the sticks a few more yards down the football field. Big deal.

Different is in. Different is sexy. Different is new. Different is exciting. Different is brandable. Different is attention-grabbing. Different is a pattern interrupter that breaks through the attention clutter and gets noticed.

From Seth Godin:

Every day, in almost every office of almost every organization, people are going to get together to make something better.

Making things better is a natural impulse, especially if you want to grow.

Unfortunately, better is not always the right strategy. Better is not always superior to different.

And from Mike Wagner:

We’re bombarded with over 3,000 marketing messages a day – and we remember next to nothing …

and

… as Kathy Sierra has so carefully articulated, the human mind comes with a crap filter. The mind filters out sameness and responds to different.

Different is revolutionary. Different is unexpected. Different is surprising.

In the neverending mashed-up undifferentiated stream of data we experience every day, unexpectedness and surprise are welcome, even craved.

As Chaucer said six hundred years ago: “Men evere seeke newfangle.”

You got it, baby.

[tags] differentiation, branding, innovation, novelty, chaucer, purple cow, seth godin, john koetsier [/tags]

Crowdsourcing, producerism, and consumers

May 25, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Wired has an important article in their June issue on what they’ve dubbed crowdsourcing. What is crowdsourcing?

Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.

Jeff Howe, the author of Crowdsourcing, gives plenty of examples: it’s people uploading photos to iStockphoto where companies and people who need photos can buy them on the cheap. It’s VH1 sourcing videos that “ordinary” people have uploaded to the internet and building a show around them. It’s Proctor & Gamble finding underemployed brainiacs who solve thorny science and engineering problems at InnoCentive. And it’s Amazon’s Mechanical Turk … outsourcing fundamentally simple and repetitive problems that humans still do better than machines.

Other examples that Howe did not give but could have include the recent development of services that enable bloggers to sell their stories to mainstream media companies … newspapers, magazines, etc. … for a fraction of what a staff writer would cost. (For the life of me I cannot find that link back – help!) Or imagine excellent podcasts being paid for retransmission on satellite or terrestrial radio. I could see this happening with Venture Voice easily.

To me, this is incredibly relevant to the discussion on my recent We Are Not Consumers post. I wrote it in quasi-response to Pete Blackshaw’s Consumer-generated media blog … and Pete responded with a lengthy comment explaining why he still prefers the term “consumer.”

However, as the Wired article lists, 57% of 12- to 17-year-olds online are contributing to the web in one way or another:

Late last year the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study revealing that 57 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds online – 12 million individuals – are creating content of some sort and posting it to the Web.

This is literally changing the world. However, if you’re a company that wants to take advantage of these new opportunities to get more work done cheaper, or to get work done that you’ve always wanted to do but could never do affordably, everything that is presented here relies on 4 things:

  1. Digitization
    All parts of the workflow must be digital. Ideally, not just in PDF form but in malleable formats: text is text, images are images, structure is structure. Everything is broken down to its component bits. 
  2. Dis-aggregation
    It must be possible to route any and every individual piece wherever it is needed to whomever is needed whenever needed. This allows you to break complex tasks down into simple component chunks, which reduces specialized knowledge needed for any individual job. 
  3. Re-aggregation
    After you’ve spread jobs all over the face of the earth, potentially, you need to be able to assemble all the bits and bytes back together. 
  4. Flexible smart project managers
    The entire process needs to be managed by smart flexible people who are open to new opportunities and able to adapt quickly to change.

Google Trends PRO: there’s a pay model here

May 25, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I’ve been playing with Google Trends a bit lately – who hasn’t?

So, for instance, it’s interesting to know that Yahoo! is in the news more than Wall Street darling Google:

And that relatively tiny Apple generates almost as much press as mighty Microsoft – the gap is even narrowing lately:

But this is a rough ruler. There’s got to be an awful lot more specificity in Google’s database.

For instance, while normalizing for various regions is nice for tiny Singapore, which now shows up near the top in a lot of searches, it may not be very useful for an entrepreneur in North America.

And, to be blunt, the graphs are simply pretty lines on the wall right now … infoporn … chart cruft. There’s no actual magnitude data (500 million searches for Apple over the past year), only comparative data (hmm … the blue line on that chart seems to go up and down a lot).

While the trends are still nice to see, you have to think that there’s something bigger here that Google will pull out of its sleeve sooner or later: a paid trends analysis tool.

I mean, if you were XYZ BigCorp™, wouldn’t you pay $1000 a month for access to data like this:

  • 3500 people searched for my product in Seattle this month
  • 0 people searched for my product in Toronto this month
  • there were 80,000 more people searching for my competitor’s product in the past month than were searching for my product
  • the number of people searching for my company or my brand(s) online is increasing every month (or decreasing every month)
  • the people who are searching for my product are also searching for these 5 other products

That would be incredibly valuable information, drawn from a huge sample, that companies would pay big dollars for. I’m wondering when Google (or Yahoo!, or any other search engine) will come out with a product like this.

The only question is: how will people using Google or the other search engines react? Will we view this as a privacy assault, or as simply a smart way to generate revenue from the wisdom of masses?

[tags] google, trends, product, marketing, competitive intelligence, yahoo, john koetsier [/tags]

We are NOT consumers

May 23, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I happened to notice a fairly informative blog today: Consumer-generated Media, by Pete Blackshaw.

The posts are on precisely what you’d expect: the read/write web, pinko marketing, and so on. But I have one beef with the site, and that’s the word “consumer” in the title.

The blog’s subtitle is “Did you get the memo? The consumer is in control!”

My question to Blackshaw is: didn’t you get the memo? It’s been right there in the Cluetrain Manifesto for years now.

Straight from the Cluetrain website:

If you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get …

We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers.

We are human beings, and our reach exceeds your grasp.

Deal with it.

As I mentioned recently, Doc Searls has coined a new term: producerism. I like it. I like it a lot.

I’ve always hated the term “consumer.” How denigrating to be referred to only as some entity with an enormous mouth, eating mass-produced, mass-marketed products 24/7. We’re moving beyond that. People are rediscovering their innate urge to create, to produce, to share.

“Consumer” is a recent term, historically speaking. I’m struggling to remember my university Communications courses, but I believe it originated almost simultaneously with modern mass media (radio, TV) and mass marketing. Before then, people were citizens. or workers. Or producers. Anything but “consumers.”

I think it’s about time we sent that term back to the trash can of history.

Yahoo! big bets: translation

May 22, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Yahoo! put together a huge presentation for their Analyst Day 2006. One part that’s particularly interesting is Yahoo’s big bets for the next 5 years:

Not being present on the actual conference call or meeting, I’m trying to articulate what they mean by each of the “big bets.” Here’s my best guess.

  1. Next-generation experience
    Web 2.0, everywhere on all devices
  2. Monetization
    a) kill AdSense, b) multi-media and multi-channel approach, c) charge for value (e.g., Flickr)
  3. Platforms
    a) standards, APIs & “mashability” b) data accessible anywhere
  4. Beyond the browser
    a) iTunes-ish applications, b) digital identies, aggregated, c) mobile devices

The presentation is immense, and so are the challenges as Yahoo! charges forward on seemingly all fronts at once.

One thing that is definitely becoming clear is that Yahoo! is determined to not play second fiddle to Google, nor does it want to be part of a Microsoft. Instead, Yahoo! has a very clear vision of itself as a “21st century media company,” and is following its own path.

[tags] yahoo, google, web 2.0, future, analysts [/tags]

Producerism (yeah that’s kinda web 2ish)

May 20, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Thank you Tom Guarriello for the great post on Doc Searls’ keynote at Syndicate.

Producerism is a term whose time has come. It is perhaps too much to be hoped for, but if only we could obliterate the insipid, derrogatory, disrespectful consumer that is so rampant in North American public discourse!

One paragraph for a taste:

Producerism and the live Web aren’t about “allowing” your customers to do things. It’s about recognizing that you don’t have the power to stop them from doing what they want. It’s about recognizing that the world has changed so fundamentally that your very survival is now tied up with engaging everyone in your “value constellation” in authentic relationships (you do know what authentic relationships are like, don’t you?) … not capturing their eyeballs, but making it important to them that they continue to be in a relationship with you; that their lives would be diminished if you weren’t there. Like mine would be if Google disappeared. Or Apple. Or TiVo. Or Jon Stewart.

Guarriello appropriate references the Cluetrain, which is, sadly, still unknown in so many companies I interact with every week.

Corporate dinosaurs, here’s the deal: learn or die.

[tags] consumer, producer, doc searls, syndicate, cluetrain, producerism [/tags]

Brand of YOU

May 20, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Mike Wagner at Own Your Brand has an interesting post on branding.

He’s got five points of branding:

  • Difference: Tell me what makes your business or organization different.
  • Invitation: Passionately invite clients to purchase your offerings or members to join your organization.
  • Relevance: Your clients should be saying, “These people understand me. They get it!”
  • Truthfulness: Organizationally tell each other the truth, hear the truth from your customers, and act on that truth.
  • Yours: Insist (and I do mean INSIST) everyone in your organization “drinks your Kool-Aid.”

The post is mostly about Whirlpool: the company itself, and what it’s doing with its brand.

But when reading it, I actually thought he was going to develop the idea of each individual person as their own brand – within their sphere of influence: colleagues, clients, partners, friends, family, and acquaintances.

So I’m going to adapt his points for each individual person. For you. For me.

  • Difference: Why are you different than 50 million other people (in your own country, and around the world)?
  • Invitation: Be generous: give all acquaintances opportunities to benefit from your unique gifts and perspective.
  • Relevance: Listen – sincerely – much more than you talk. Then only say things that are relevant to the person/people you are with.
  • Truthfulness: Fooling yourself is a temporary luxury you cannot afford. Seek honest feedback continuously, and respond to it with real, visible change.
  • Yours: Always, always, always ensure that you get proper credit for your work – without being or seeming pushy, arrogant, or needy.

One thing to keep in mind: a brand is much more about who you are than about how you want to be perceived. Inner reality always surfaces eventually.

So none of the above will work over time unless you become who you want to be.

[tags] brand, brand of you, branding, marketing [/tags]

IKEA: online assistant

May 19, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I’ve recently been having a lot of trouble with my neck, so I’m in the market for a chair that will better support my neck and head.

One of the places I’m looking is IKEA, and I was pleasantly surprised to see “Anna,” IKEA’s online assistant. You ask Anna questions; she tells you where to find what you need.

The software that powers Anna is almost certainly from Oddcast, a company I’ve used before to make little talking heads on some kid-focused websites. To be honest, though, I find these sorts of things more gimmicky than useful.

Everything’s OK when the question is relatively simple. For instance, I said:

I need a chair with a tall back to support my neck.

Anna answers with “Please have a look at the chairs,” and opens a new browser window with IKEAs chairs. Unfortunately, they’re dining room chairs, not easy chairs or arm chairs. Trying again:

Do you have any easy chairs?

Anna says “Here you will find the Other Armchairs Subcategory,” which sounds fairly cold, but she opens up yet another new browser window with, amazingly, the “other armchairs subcategory.”

I decide to have some fun with her:

Where is heaven?

Anna’s response:

I can’t really say, to be honest. Maybe you should consult a map.

Making a mental note to consult the next map that I see, I continue and ask Anna another question:

asdfad sdad fads fsdafasd adsf adsfasd

Anna is not impressed:

It’s great that you’re so linguistically impressive, but please talk to me in English.

Hrm, sounds like Anna has detected that all the keystrokes in that question were from the left side home keys, which seems to make her suspicious that I’m not really asking a question at all.

I try a little harder to fool her:

adfdas kj lk;jwe oiuweoriu m,.cxmv., cxz

Anna drops the snarky attitude and admits defeat:

I’m sure what you said made perfect sense, but I don’t understand every little thing. Perhaps you could rephrase your question or comment and I’ll be able to give you a better answer.

Once again I input nonsense, and get a different answer:

Please express your statement in a different way; I am not sure that I understood it. Thank you.

No, not at all. It was nothing. Rather, thank you for the 5 minutes of fun!

And, umm, about the chairs? Good old-fashioned hunting and pecking on the page brought me to this arm chair page, from which I’ve concluded that IKEA probably doesn’t have something that fits my personal style and needs.

[tags] IKEA, oddcast, talking head, webdesign [/tags]

Simplicity test

May 19, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Both of these companies say they’ll make your life simpler. They both make software for managing business processes, among other things.

Which one do you believe?

iRadeon go to iRadeon

37 Signals go to 37 Signals

Which one do you believe? And what does this tale of two screenshots say about your website?

[tags] simplicity, webdesign, web 2.0, 37 signals, iRadeon [/tags]

On focus groups and market research

May 19, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I saw a great quote today on Mike Hirshland’s blog.

“If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses.'”

The quote is Henry Ford’s, and the lesson is that asking people what they want is usually – repeat, usually – not likely to give you the inside track on a revolutionary new product, service, or idea.

Why?

Because most people will simply give you incremental improvements on already-existing ideas. We’ve got horse now, we want faster horses. We have buggy whips now, we want better buggy whips.

(Incidentally, this is reminiscent of Detroit’s answer to falling interest in American cars: more horsepower.)

I think there’s only two guaranteed ways of coming up with new ideas:

  1. Be a little crazy and outside-the-box yourself, and take something you’re passionate about to the nth degree.
  2. Watch people – the right people – who are trend leaders in the ecosystem that you’re trying to enter.

So the focus group is out: observation of key people (mavens in Malcolm Gladwell-speak).

In both cases you are pushing the edge, or reinventing the standard. But neither of the two approaches, of course, give you any guarantees about the quality of your new ideas.

[tags] trends, malcolm gladwell, tipping point, creativity, innovation, market research, focus groups [/tags]

Apple sues Creative: that’s what patents are for

May 18, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Three days ago the inaptly named Creative Technology sued Apple for patent infringement, saying that organizing and navigating music by artists, albums, genre, etc., was covered by U.S. Patent 6,928,433.

Now the news is out that Apple is suing Creative, claiming that Creative infringes on not one, but four patented Apple technologies.

Creative’s patent
Creative’s patent seems, on the face of it, fairly obvious. Basically, what it claims to do is provided a method of browsing and selecting music with multiple filters: album, genre, artist. From the patent filing here’s one “summarized” description of it:

Categories include items that can also be included in other categories so that the categories “overlap” with each other. Thus, a song title can be accessed in multiple different ways by starting with different categories. For example, a preferred embodiment of the invention uses the top-level categories “Albums”, “Artists”, “Genres” (or styles), and “Play Lists”. Within the Albums category are names of different albums of songs stored in the device. Within each album are the album tracks, or songs, associated with that album. Similarly, the Artists category includes names of artists which are, in turn, associated with their albums and songs. The Genre category includes types of categories of music such as “Rock”, “Hip Hop”, “Rap”, “Easy Listening”, etc. Within these sub-categories are found associated songs. Finally, the “Play Lists” category includes collections of albums and/or songs which are typically defined by the user.

And here’s the supporting artwork Creative submitted to the US Patent Office. Note the mispelled “Configuration.”

I would argue that this is a fairly obvious application of technology to playing music, whether on a handheld MP3 player, or a computer. Software has been applying filters to sort and view custom datasets for a long time. Applying this to music, once music is digital, is not qualitatively different than applying it to any other bits and bytes on a hard disk.

Apple’s patents
That said, it’s hard to evaluate the merits of Apple’s four patents – no details about which have yet been released.

Whatever they are, however, I would not be surprised in the least to find them as obvious as the Creative patent. Time will tell.

The point of patents
That’s almost irrelevant, however. The point of patents for most big businesses today is self-defence. It’s about amassing a big enough portolio of both obvious and non-obvious patent so that anyone who thinks about suing you realizes very quickly that you are not a soft target. In fact, you’re a very hard target and, with all the patents in your warchest, there’s going to be at least one which the company suing you infringes against.

In which case, of course, it’s MUCH easier to come to some sort of understanding regarding patents and MUCH easier to settle lawsuits without excessive corporate bleeding..

(The only place where this breaks down, of course, is patent sharks: where the company that is suing you owns nothing but a series of patents. If they don’t actually do anything, produce anything of value, or sell something, it’s almost impossible to find a patent of yours that they infringe on.)

So that’s what Apple is doing. They’ll probably fight the Creative suit as far as they need to to get it thrown out. But just in case, they’re suing based on the 4 other patents that they say Creative is infringing on. It’s nothing but legal insurance.

The one point of danger
In this situation, Apple’s countersuit is only as good as Creative’s desire to stay in the MP3 player business.

After all, Apple is earning billions in the space, and Creative is losing money hand over fist. Faced with a patent infringement lawsuit on your money-losing division, what would you do? Maybe, you’d just drop the money-losing division. In this scenario, if Creative kills its MP3 business, the countersuit becomes irrelevant.

My guess, however, is that this is a fight Creative is not willing to concede just yet, and so they’ll stay in the business.

Which means we’ve got a ring-side seat on some very interesting legal maneuvering in the next weeks and months!

[tags] legal, law, creative, apple, ipod, zen, patent, USPTO, MP3 [/tags]

Web 2.0 Myth & Reality

May 14, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Om Malik posted an article about web 2.0: it’s not about the mainstream, it’s going to hit big business, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think it does.

I posted a long comment on his blog, then (modestly) thought it was too good to not post here as well.

Without further ado …

Clearly, history is just one bloody thing after another, and mostly the same things in the same sequence.

“Web 2.0 is hot!”
“Web 2.0 is the Next. Big. Thing.™”
“Web 2.0 is going to take over the world!”
“Web 2.0 is over-hyped.”
“Web 2.0 is nothing but warmed-over old technologies.”
“Web 2.0 is the same old big companies doing big things for big clients.”

Ummm … haven’t we heard this already? Haven’t we been here before? Isn’t this exactly the cycle we went through with the internet, errr, web 1.0 boom a few years ago?

Here’s the simple problem:

Everyone over-estimates change in the short term and under-estimates change in the long term.

So we’re all jazzed about the New New Thing™ every couple of years, then deeply disappointed six months into the New New Thing™ when, sadly, it hasn’t solved world peace, provided food for all the hungry, and made Michael Jackson’s face look normal.

Time, my friends, heals all.

Web 2.0 is simply an extension, growth, enhancing of the people-first, user-centric, democratizing internet that we all went to the prom with a decade ago.

It is cool, it is different in degree, it is creating new business models, it is allowing small smart start-ups to compete, and it is not just for big business (as if that’s the standard by which all important technology is judged anyways).

But it’s not a silver bullet, it won’t let us get to the moon overnight, it won’t make more than 50 or 60 people “overnight” millionaires, and it won’t render the internal combustion engine obsolete.

It’s an opportunity … and opportunities, as you know, often come very well-disguised as hard work.

So let’s not expect instant miracles: let’s roll up our sleeves, use the new tools, and make some cool stuff.

[tags] web 2.0, malik, business, technology [/tags]

Steering committee

May 12, 2006
John Koetsier
news



Psychedelic rudder

Originally uploaded by johnkoetsier.

Today our steering committee had our regular monthly meeting on our president’s boat, the MoGeo (pronounced Mojo).

He took us to an island across the bay, and then, on the way back, for a little tour of Bellingham Bay.

I snapped this pick of a ship’s rudder … somewhat appropriately, seeing as it was, of course, the Steering committee that was along for the ride …

[tags] yacht, bellingham, cruise, rudder, ship [/tags]

Andy Grove on feeling out of control

May 11, 2006
John Koetsier
news

You know the bit about the airplane being off-course 90% of the time … but it still gets where it’s going?

That’s true for business too. And projects. And, maybe, even careers. That’s what makes it kind of comforting to read this quote from Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel:

“I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly …. And try not to get too depressed in the part of the journey, because there’s a professional responsibility. If you are depressed, you can’t motivate your staff to extraordinary measures. So you have to keep your own spirits up even though you well understand that you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Bob Sutton, author of the recently released Hard Facts, mentioned it during an interview on Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

I feel like I’ve just been to a support group or received a group hug. I mean, Andy Grove is a legend. He’s an incredibly-respected business leader and technologist. If he felt the way I sometimes feel, maybe it’s just OK. Maybe it’s not just me … and that the frustrations and uncertainties I feel while I’m screwing around vigorously.

Listening, learning, leading: onward!

A winning formula for successful communication

May 10, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Clarity is hard.

I know – I’ve tried and failed. Pair brevity with clarity and it’s even harder – twice as hard.

But if you want to be successful in almost anything that requires communication – any business, any marketing, any resume – you need to master clarity. And when you combine it with brevity and a pinch of originality, you’ll be able to successfully communicate your message.

I was reminded of this today when I visited an education software company’s website today, and was confronted with this paragraph on the home page:

SUNGARD Pentamation is an application software and information processing services company whose sole focus is to provide administrative information systems, performance analysis and reporting software solutions to the K-12 and Local Government markets throughout the United States. We at SUNGARD Pentamation are proud of our products, services and commitment to the markets we serve. We invite and encourage you to thoroughly explore our Web site in order to gain an insight as to who we are …

What the heck do they actually do?

I’ll tell you, I spent a few minutes wondering. But that’s only because I’m doing some research on software companies in education. If I was actually an educator looking for a software package, I’d be gone in 15 seconds.

I don’t want to thoroughly explore your website to get an insight into who you are … just tell me! In a sentence! That doesn’t include the word solution!

I’ve come to believe that the word solution is code for “I don’t really know what on earth we actually do either. But we help people with, um, problems, and, like, kind of fix them or something like that. So we provide solutions!”

If you can’t explain what you do simply and clearly in a few short words, one or more of the following are true:

  1. you don’t actually know
  2. you have no clear focus
  3. you really aren’t sure why clients pay you money because you don’t really know what problems your “solutions” solve
  4. you haven’t thought long and hard enough about it yet

Contrast the above essay-in-a-paragraph with how 37Signals presents itself:

Simple software to help you get organized.

There you have it. They build and sell software. It’s software that helps you get organized. And it’s simple.

That’s clear, brief, and even refreshingly original.

A winning formula for successful communication: Clarity. Brevity. Originality.

. . .
. . .

[tags] communication, clarity, brevity, originality, marketing, business 2.0, [/tags]

Boring

May 10, 2006
John Koetsier
news

“The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.”

— Voltaire

(Inspired by this story on why less is more in advertising).

It follows, then, that to be interesting, you have to leave some parts out. And, probably, the best way to be the most interesting is to know exactly which parts to leave out at which times.

Food for thought!

. . .
. . .

[tags] marketing, quotes, voltaire, boring, business 2.0 [/tags]

Ad agencies not advertising: why?

May 9, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Simon Sinek published this article dissing ad agencies in BrandWeek:

IF ADVERTISING is so effective, why don’t ad agencies advertise? PR firms tout themselves in releases. Event planners throw their own parties. E-marketers use the Internet. These folks all believe in the effectiveness of their disciplines. Do ad agencies disagree?

Read the rest of it to really get the sense of what he’s saying: that ad agencies know that most advertising simply does not work.

OK. I mostly agree with him. I think it’s a cluetrain thing. A pinko marketing, (or conversational marketing) thing.

But here’s one thing I’d say in ad agencies defense: their product is their ad.

In other words, the work that they do for existing clients is a powerful marketing branding and marketing campaign for their company … for good or ill.

. . .
. . .

[tags] advertising, ads, marketing [/tags]

iTunes Education Store (and library) Coming Soon?

May 7, 2006
John Koetsier
news

This past Friday I spent some time publishing a course on my iPod. (Find out how you can, too).

It’s fairly simple to create a course to run on an iPod, but there’s one problem: installing.

Installing the course takes too many steps for the average person … dragging the audio content into iTunes, syncing, then putting the iPod into disk mode, and dragging the course’s text files into the Notes section of their iPod. (More info on installing.)

There has to be a better way – and there’s a couple of forms it could take. One is very simple and immediate. The other is long-term and strategic … and that’s the one that I think Apple will do.

One: iPod Markup Language, zipped course packages
Option A would be for Apple to extend the markup language that iPods already speak, making it just a little more sophisticated. In this scenario, Apple would invent some kind of configuration format that would tell iTunes just what to do with all the course components.

Example:

A course might consist of audio content, text content, some pictures, and perhaps a few videos. The configuration file would simply be used during installation – telling iTunes what’s included, where to put it, and how it’s all linked together.

Then content providers could zip up course packages and distribute them online. People who want to install the courses would just download the file and import it into iTunes. During the next sync with their iPod, iTunes would put the components in the right places on the iPod, and users would find the courses either in the Notes section of their iPod as they currently do, or, preferably, in a dedicated courses/learning section.

Two: iTunes Education Store (and library)
That’d be a great easy solution, but here’s what I think Apple will actually do.

Apple will do for iPod-based e-learning exactly what they did for podcasts: build in the ability for content providers (both professional and amateur) to register their content at the iTunes music store.

They’ve already done this for major universities, in a sense. Currently, it’s only for audio and maybe video content. But eventually, it will be for complex content that is a mix of text, audio, video, images, and even assessment.

Once that’s been done, then Apple will make it discoverable for people browsing the iTunes Music, err everything store. You’ll be able to can “subscribe” to it just like a podcast, and bango-wango, it’ll auto-magically appear on your iPods.

There’ll be a free option for free content (that’s the library part) and, you guessed it, a commercial model for courses people and companies want to sell.

(As an aside, this is why Microsoft is so worried about Apple’s iTunes/iPod empire. It’s not the music, it’s the ecosystem. What Apple has built is a media-delivery monster, and the only limit to what this pipe can carry is the rate at which people can absorb new uses for it without getting information overload and reacting against it.)

This will be completely revolutionary, because now you will not only have an easy way to create and publish courses, you’ve got a popular, common platform on which to do it. Who needs e-books? iPod is already here!

The content is easy to create – it took me about an hour to get from having no clue how to do it to successfully publishing my course on my iPod. And the reach of the platform is unparalleled, with probably 45 million iPods in the wild today.

It’s a content provider’s dream: fairly cheap, extremely portable, good battery life, flexible, easy to publish to, a built-in distribution model, and an ecosystem full of people used to paying for content.

Is this what Duke University had in mind when they did their iPod Duke Digital Initiative? Perhaps. I’m convinced it’s going to happen.

The only question is when.

How to publish a course on iPod

May 7, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Friday nights, Friday nights. Friday nights are supposed to be for fun. For long dinners and late movies, and then a little nightcap before going to bed.

Except for geeks.

I’m only a mini-geek, so I only spent about 3 hours fiddling with technology.

But this past week Friday I got my first course up and running on an iPod. And it’s unbelievably simple.

The course consists of a series of text components – which can be basically any text you want – and some audio tracks. You access the course via the Notes menu in your iPod, and when the audio tracks are referenced, you simply click the middle select button on your iPod to play them while you continue reading the note.

How to publish a course on iPod
iPod speaks a subset of HTML – a very small subset, as far as I know. (Oddly enough, the files you transfer to your iPod have to be simple text (.txt) files and not HTML (.html) files.)

The syntax will be very familiar to anyone who has any experience with HTML:

  • Page titles: <title>this is the title</title>
  • Links: <a href=”link.txt”>this text is a link</a>
  • Line breaks: the standard <br>
  • Paragraphs: the standard <p>
  • Song/audio links: <a href=”song=My Unique Song Name”>Link to song</a>

There’s a few more – check Make Magazine for details.

Here’s a critical one, though, if you want to link audio into your course but do not want users to leave the environment of your course. Use the song/audio link mentioned about, but add the following meta tag to the top of your page: <meta name=”NowPlaying” content=”false”>. That will make the song (or audio track with training content) play while the text content remains on the screen … which is what I wanted for my little app.

All-in-all, very simple, and very cool.

My kingdom for an installer
There is one shortfall, however: no installer app or standard installer procedure. Apple needs to build something in for automatic installation.

Right now, the install procedure is as follows:

  1. Drag song/audio tracks to iTunes
  2. Sync
  3. In iTunes preferences, enable Disk Mode
  4. Drag notes bundle into iPods Notes area

That probably involves connecting/disconnecting the iPod twice, not to mention futzing with preferences. Dragging the notes bundle into the iPod notes area is dead easy, but I’ve seen way too many dead easy procedures on a computer give … umm … inexperienced users fits to believe this this is not a problem. And I haven’t even listed the part about re-connecting your iPod and disabling Disk Mode so that you can sync your music again.

Realistically, I think Apple sees the potential of iPods as learning devices with both audio and video content. Hopefully that will impell them to create some sort of mechanism that is drag-n-drop friendly for users – for example, download a zipped course, drop it on iTunes, and based on some metadata, iTunes just knows what to do with it.

Probably, however, Apple will create some kind of solution based on the iTunes Music Store.

And this is how I think they’ll do it.

More, more, more
As far as I can find out, however, there is no way of affecting either the font or size of the text you publish on iPod.

That would be a very nice feature, since (as you can see in the screenshot above) the default iPod Notes text is rather thin and spidery. I’d like to be able to beef it up a bit … make it bold or something like that.

In terms of courses, adding assessment is always a nice feature – even if it’s just self-assessment for the learner.

Currently, the only way you can add assessment to an iPod course is via branching: asking a question with a number of answers, each of which is a link. By following the link of the selected answer, the user both selects an option and (by virtue of what you put at the linked file) finds out if he/she is right or wrong.

Summing up
Adding a course to an iPod is incredibly easy … and will probably get even easier.

It would be nice if Apple would publish some specs on what you can or can’t do with Notes (in terms of tags that are supported). I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like that in the medium-term future.

But I can already see that iPod could become a very strong e-learning platform over the next 2-4 years.

WordPress versus WordPress

May 3, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I set up this tester account at WordPress.com months and months ago, when I was still running off the gilgamesh.ca domain.

I’m wondering if most of the development on WordPress (the blogging platform) is now happening on improvements for WordPress (the blog hosting platform). So I went back today and updated some of the links, added a first article, and so on.

It’s hard to say, but what I think is probably happening is that Matt & Co actually are focusing on WordPress.com, but not to give it more features than WordPress the blogging software. Rather, they seem to be trying to get it to feature parity: multiple themes, using your own domain, and so on …

Although, in a couple areas, they’re ahead of a default WordPress install on your own server. Blog stats and feed stats are nice touches that, of course, because it’s on their servers, they can offer.

Overall, WordPress.com is not bad … if it had been where it is now 6 months ago, I’m not sure I’d have needed to move my server to Media Temple, or have needed a server host at all.

On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for having your own space – and for having someone taking your money and therefore being accountable for the quality of your site’s hosting (and uptime!)

One thing’s for sure: my site definitely loads quicker.

I really wonder how WordPress.com is going to make money. Will they put Adsense on all accounts? Or start charging a minimal fee?

After all, they’re not Google – I doubt they can keep doing it for free.

Microsoft-Yahoo merger: great for Google

May 3, 2006
John Koetsier
news

The Wall Street Journal posted an article about the possibility of Microsoft acquiring or merging with Yahoo! as part of Microsoft’s ongoing fixation on beating Google.

I think it’s highly unlikely. But if it were to happen, I think the big winner would be Google.

Why?

Yahoo would be instantly less cool, first of all. So some of the geek cred that it’s built up with the APIs and developer AJAX tools that it’s released would be gone at one fell swoop.

More importantly, however, just imagine the integration challenges, the our-tech-is-better battles that would be fought at a million different levels. Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail? MSN Search or Yahoo! search? Both Microsoft and Yahoo! have hundreds of web tools and properties with tens of millions of users … and in an ideal merger situation, those would come together, user management on all the systems would be unified … the list goes on.

Working on integration on that scale would take years, likely. Google is winning because it is focused. Mergers and the resulting integration headaches are classic focus disrupters.

Blurb is out of (private) beta

May 1, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Blurb is out of private beta … and into public beta.

Blurb is building desktop software that will let ordinary everyday average people (like me) to build and publish books … recipe books, photography books, vacation books, portfolio books, you name it.

I’ve downloaded the software and am building a book. More thoughts later …

(BTW, their site has been updated and still has some hiccups, especially in Safari.)

Free web 2.0 business idea

April 30, 2006
John Koetsier
news

OK.

You want to be cool. You want to be an entrepreneur. And you want to start a shiny new web 2.0 company. Here’s an idea for you:

You 2.0. Or myspy.

I can’t decide which name I like better. But here’s the idea in four words: persistent painless personal history.

Got that?

The idea’s free. If you do it, let me know. I’d love to help in any way I can. But I’m not doing it myself, for a perfectly valid reason that might stop you too.

Here’s the idea
The business is simple: build a Firefox plugin and an Internet Explorer toolbar that do nothing but report what websites you’re visiting to a server. That builds a list of sites that you’ve visited.

That’s basically it. A few details:

  • You can go back to see the sites you’ve visited in the past
  • Others can see what sites you’ve been to
  • You can display the sites you’ve visited as a feed to your blog
  • You can search your visited sites
  • You can search all the sites that people have visited
  • You can see popular sites displayed on the home page

Over time, you build in more cool features by spidering and auto-tagging pages that people are visiting, and building pretty (but oh-so-useful) tag clouds on users’ home pages.

Pretty cool, huh? Neat for an individual, and cool because a community could develop around it. As digital becomes a huge part of our identities (Flickr, blogs, MySpace, etc.), wouldn’t you want painless personal history?

There’s only that one problem I mentioned earlier. Actually, there’s two:

1: Filthy lucre, or lack thereof
I can’t figure out how to monetize it. And without monetizing it, it would just be a cool project that, if it got popular, would bog down under its own weight of server and bandwidth costs.

In other words, I’m not convinced AdSense would cover the bills.

2: Competitors
There are three or four potential competitors that could totally and completely kill it:

  • Alexa
  • Mozilla
  • Google
  • Microsoft

All four of these already have or very easily could have toolbars that install and essentially phone home on every click. That done, the rest is easy. And for Alexa and/or Google, it would be right up their alley.

Tempting
Still, it’s tempting. You 2.0. Myspy. Persistent painless personal history. Inherently social.

Spyware where the spy-er and the spy-ee are the same person.

I like it!

Full disclosure: I ran this idea past Guy Kawasaki, and while he thought it was cool too … also did not see a viable business model. He’s a pretty clueful guy. But if you decide to prove us wrong and try to make it work: go for it!

Refreshing honesty: the best thing about blogging

April 27, 2006
John Koetsier
news

John Gruber at Daring Fireball is taking the plunge: testing out the blogging-is-my-job waters. As I was reading about that, I happened to click on his colophon, to read these delightful words:

If Daring Fireball looks like shit in your browser, you’re using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 5, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care.

Love ’em or hate ’em, the point is that they’re real.

Most businesses and marketers could learn a lot from this type of plainspoken openness. Yes, you’ll lose customers. But you’ll also gain some.

And how is being vanilla working for you right now?

Sidewalk: cool, simple forms

April 26, 2006
John Koetsier
news

This is a test of Sidewalk. Sidewalk lets you create web forms very, very simply, and stick them on your website without any application development whatsoever – and very little technical ability or knowledge at all.

Here’s my first test … tell me something that’s cool:

The best thing about this is not that anyone can do it. (OK, maybe it is.)

But the second best thing is that I don’t have to get a developer to build something. Two minutes with this tool saves me getting a developer to build something … and saves that developer an hour of his time.

The other reason that this kind of service is really, really important, is that every company or group that has a website occasionally has the need for some totally out-of-the-box wild blue-sky widget on their site. The CEO wants to check if people who buy green widgets like salted herring, or something like that.

Well, in a traditional development world, that’s somehow got to be fit into a site or application data model. It never will. And it never should.

And now, it never has to.

Credit:
I saw it first on Emily Chang’s eHub blog.

[ update May 1 ]

Two other players in a similar space: Wyacracker, and The Form Assembly. Cool thing about Form Assembly is that you can also do file uploads.

Plaxo thinks e-cards offer competitive advantage

April 26, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Ummm … I’m a little confused by this one.

I ran over to Plaxo, a company that synchronizes contact data between you, your various devices, your friends, and anyone you want. Mostly because I saw this post which says, basically, that they suck.

Checking out their products, they offer a free service, but if you upgrade you get space for more contacts, and, drum roll please, access to their e-cards.

Oh, sorry, that’s premium e-cards.

E-cards are so done, so over, so 1997-cheesy-flash-irritating-music-childish-animation that I’m at a loss for words, really, to describe how stunning it is that any company thinks there’s competive advantage in them anymore. Even ‘premium’ ones.

Am I wrong?

MicroChina: Quid pro quo

April 26, 2006
John Koetsier
news

It never changes, does it?

I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine.

Today, Microsoft basically purchased the privilege that it received a week or so ago: getting pre-installed on all of Lenovo computers made and sold in China. It’s a realpolitik manoevre that Microsoft basically had to make: buying $700 million of hardware in order to sell $1.2 billion of software.

Since software has few incremental costs to Microsoft, it’s a good deal as far as it goes. I’m sure that Microsoft views this as an investment in an ongoing campaign to fight piracy in China. At least it’s better than the alternative: continuing rampant piracy, and no revenue at all.

Of course, one wonders how an Apple or a Sun or a RedHat could compete against this. You need deep pockets to place these kinds of bribes.

Good thing China’s not in the EU.

Marketing, welcome to 2006

April 25, 2006
John Koetsier
news

How do you know it’s 2006?

I received an invite to a marketing webcast from the American Marketing Association today.

Halfway through the first paragraph:

Traditional communication methods such as mail, email and a generic “dot com” website experience are simply not working.

Wow. Innovative to traditional in less than a decade.

I think a lot of small, innovative web companies knew this, and have known it for at least a few years, but I didn’t know that the American Marketing Association knows it.

(Of course, they are pushing customer portals as the cutting-edge replacement solution, so maybe they still don’t know it.)

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