Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

Tools part of my process – part two
I posted part one in this two-part series of ‘part of my process’ posts on my blog. Part one covered Hemingway, Pinboard, Terminal and IFTTT. In this post I will cover tools that I use for content discovery and publication.

Right Relevance

Right Relevance is a web service that recommends content from social channels. It is based on areas of interest. Klout provides a similar function as part of its social measurement service. I could write a whole blog post about what’s wrong with Klout’s measurement approach. But their content recommendation function is alright. I have found from experience that Right Relevance tends to provide better quality recommendations.

For specific subject areas there are ‘subreddit’ threads at Reddit. Certain subject areas like technology have special purpose sites: for instance techmeme and Slashdot. I have included some more geek orientated options at the bottom of this post

Newsblur

The way I explain RSS to my non-tech forward friends is by an analogy. RSS is the web’s analog of a ticker tape machine. In Western’s that is the machine which put incoming messages on a strip of paper. While outgoing messages went out in Morse code on a telegraph key. In the stock exchange or newsroom; continuous computer paper replaced the thin strip of paper. A teletype machine or computer printer would print messages as they came in.

RSS sends updates from websites in a way that applications can collect the content up. Different services present it in different formats like an email type interface or digital magazine. Most people were familar with RSS from its use with Google Reader. When Google Reader shut down, it didn’t kill RSS. Instead a cottage industry of RSS readers sprang up to replace it.

My RSS reader of choice is Newsblur. Newsblur has several benefits. You can train it to filter your feeds based on author or key words over time. The unread posts can be uncovered with one click and read if you still need to.

It provides three different views
- Feed – the information as its provided in the the RSS feed. Depending on the feed this may contain images
- Text – text only. Handy for when you need speed as it filters out formating and images
- Story – what it looks like on the original site. This helps understand the context where other content is on a page alongside the main story
Newsblur has a good in-browser interface. It provides integration with both Pinboard and Buffer. It also supports Reeder, a popular desktop RSS reader for OSX.

Newsblur has a native application for both iOS and Android. A third party wrote a free native application for Windows phone. In the past there was also support on Symbian, Maemo and BlackBerry. You get a lot for your $24/year subscription.

Buffer

Buffer is the social publishing tool that I use. It provides similar benefits to Hootsuite, but is much more user friendly. Buffer also has a transparent pricing model compared to Hootsuite. It integrates in my process via IFTTT. Buffer has a native app for iOS and an in-browser interface. It integrates into sharing functionality within iOS and Newsblur. It is the end point in my automated plumbing for social content publication.

It has good basic analytics built in. I use ‘The Awesome Plan’ which costs $102/year.

Weiyun

Weiyun is a cloud file storage and sychronisation service like Dropbox. The key differences being, it is only available in Chinese and it provides 1TB of storage for free.

Weiyun has Android, iOS, Windows and OSX applications.

Here is a presentation hosted on Slideshare that highlights the tools discussed in today’s ‘part of my process’ post.

160322 everyday tools that are part of my process – part two from Ged Carroll

More everyday tools in part three.

More information

Right Relevance website
Klout – ignore the measurement, but stay for the content recommendations

Reddit
techmeme – curated by a mix of algorithms and an editorial team
Hacker News – based on a community who find interesting geeky stuff around the web

Newsblur (once you subscribe it provides you links to the different mobile apps)
Reeder – a third party RSS reader for OSX which supports Newsblur

Buffer

Weiyun English interface
How to use Weiyun
March 23, 2016
Hemingway + process
I use a range of tools including Hemingway as part of my content creation process. This came out when I had a meeting with some junior marketing agency staff last week. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss content strategy across different clients. In the end an good part of the conversation went into process and content creation.

Given that conversation I thought it might be fruitful to flag up some of the technologies that I use.

Hemingway

I use Hemingway ( a web application and a native OSX application) to write. Hemingway has two writing modes:

Editing mode looks at your copy as you create it:
- It looks at readability providing a reading age score. (Grade six is equates to 11-12 years old). The lower the reading age, the clearer the writing is. It has also aids in SEO
- It examines sentence structure, the harder a sentence is to read, the more ambiguous it may be.
- Hemingway suggests simpler alternatives to phases
- It looks at adverbs and use of the passive voice
Hemingway is like having a sub-editor sitting on your shoulder at the point of creation.

Writing mode clears the real-time editing functions to the right of the screen. It allows me to get content down as a stream of consciousness. It allows me to get ideas down before I lose the train of thought.

You can then switch to editing mode to go back and clean up your copy once you have it down.

The OSX version allows you to save documents down as a HTML file, from which you can cut and paste into a destination. It just works whether its a presentation, document, WordPress or social platforms.

Pinboard

Pinboard is a social bookmarking service that now costs $11/year. It allows me to store links and notes about websites that I find of interest.

Pinboard is a web service so my bookmarks go where I can get a web connection.

I use a bookmarklet that sits in the chrome of my browser. Every time I come across something that might be of interest, I click on the link and complete a simple form.
- URL – I only change the link if it is a temporary link such as ‘feedproxy.google.com’. I expand the link or change it to any permalink that is on the page
- Title – I edit this as necessary to reflect the article title and the website name
- Description – this is a quick explanation of why I thought the page was significant. It might be an article quote or top statistics mentioned
- Tags – categories or labels that I assign to an article which allows me to find it based on a relevance. Tags are used by other applications as well
I use Pinner for iOS on my iPhone. It integrates into the system level sharing functionality. I can create bookmarks on the move as well as at my desk.

Terminal

The Terminal app in OSX allows direct access to the power of the operating system. It is also unforgiving. Getting a command wrong can have serious consequences.

There are a few things that I can do faster in terminal than via other methods. From checking differences in documents, to batch processing file archiving. To get you started here are two examples that you can try: to see if a website is up to getting a weather forecast.

I have a copy of UNIX in a Nutshell from O’Reilly Media on my bookshelf. I use this as a back-up when I can’t remember the proper syntax or a command. I can also recommend Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell also from O’Reilly Media.

IFTTT

At the beginning of 2007 Yahoo! launched an experimental product called Yahoo! Pipes. It was flakey, it was unreliable but also revolutionary. Pipes was an easy way to stitch together services without programming expertise. After years of flakey service it was shutdown by Yahoo! in June 2015.

Pipes inspired another service IFTTT. IFTTT stands for ‘If then, then that’. It is a simple cause and effect framework that allows for the automation of actions over the web. These cause and effect formulas called recipes. It supports a range of web services and apps. Most of the discussion around this for Intenet of Things automation. I use it to automate my web content content.

More in part two.

I pulled part one together in a companion presentation.

More related content can be found here.

More information

Hemingway OSX application

Pinboard

Pinner app for iOS

IFTTT – (If Then, Then That)

Books

Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell by Dave Taylor

UNIX in a Nutshell by Arnold Robbins
March 21, 2016
Platform utility
Silicon Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz put togethers slides that cover platform utility and the role of network effects. The presentation does a good job at providing a taxonomy on different products. It comes in handy when thinking about channel role / platform utility from a media planning perspective and also evaluating start-up ideas. They define platform in terms of development, but for advertisers we can think of it wider as we are likely to be making API calls in terms of data, targeting and ad placement. It is something that we are building demand or brand equity on.

Network Effects from a16z

Key takeouts from the presentation
- A network effect occurs when a product or service becomes more valuable to users as more people use it
Network effect benefits
- Create barriers to exit for existing users
- Create barriers to entry for new companies
- Protect from competitors eating away at margins
- Creates a winner takes all style market
Communications networks laws that provide indicators likely platform utility
- Sarnoff’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the number of viewers
- Metcalfe’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the square of number of connected users
- Reed’s law – value of a group forming network is proportional to the number and ease with which groups form within it (subgroups grow faster than sheer number of P2P participants
If it isn’t clear where they fall within these networks, it’s a warning flag for brands on whether to invest in the platform.

User modes
- Single ‘player’ mode – the product has immediate utility for a single user. Examples would be Flickr in the early days for photo storage, Foursquare in the early days to bookmark places you’d been to as a locative memory. Social bookmarking sites like Pinboard, or Delicious would have been in here had it not been retired
- ‘Multiplayer’ mode – the product has no utility for a single user. This is particularly true for communications products. Examples would be Viber, Skype, Slack, Zoom etc.
- Products can be both single player and multiplayer. So the community that built around Flickr for example.
- Single player is more powerful when accompanied by an initial tactic to drive early network growth. Instagram photo filters was a way to post pictures on Twitter before there was enough critical mass. They help with adoption in the early days of a product when network effects aren’t sufficiently strong yet.
- What’s the initial growth lever or tactic that will get it to scale?
Case studies
- Facebook found that connecting a new user to 10 friends within 14 days of sign-up was key to improving retention
- Focus on daily usage (habit building) to help grow network. Focus on engagement rather than just overall number growth
- Growth usage, even as user numbers grow is a sure sign of network effects at work
- Facebook took a clustered approach: Harvard, then Stanford and eventually other universities in the US and abroad. Rather than focusing on growth. The immediate ‘single player’ utility they offered was an online school directory
- WhatsApp had a different network type to Facebook. Each WhatsApp user had about 20 connections compared to approximately 980 friends on Facebook. Fewer connections also meant clustering around family, close friends of interest based WhatsApp groups with more engagement
- AirBnB had two sides of their network. More hosts attract more guests and even become guests themselves. More guests means more business and money for hosts
- Medium found that ‘single player mode’ can help get to ‘multiplayer mode’ through building sufficient critical mass.
March 14, 2016
Lotte + more news

Lotte

Lotte shareholders reject bid to remove Chairman Shin Dong-bin as family feud continues | The Japan Times – particularly interesting Chaebol feud given the unique Japan-Korea structure of Lotte. Lotte in Korea is huge in FMCG, entertainment, hospitality and retailing. Lotte has been driven out of China by the government. More Korea related posts here

Business

Changing of the Guard – Edelman – nice bit of shade by Richard Edelman on group margins and independent versus publicly listed holding groups

Consumer behaviour

Which Generation is Most Distracted by Their Phones? | Priceonomics

Economics

Silicon Valley Has Not Saved Us From a Productivity Slowdown – The New York Times – In mature economies, higher productivity typically is required for sustained increases in living standards, but the productivity numbers in the United States have been mediocre. Labor productivity has been growing at an average of only 1.3 percent annually since the start of 2005, compared with 2.8 percent annually in the preceding 10 years – Silicon Valley failed

How to

Tracking story changes with NewsBlur – as if NewsBlur’s learning technology and mobile clients aren’t enough, being able to track changes on stories is a powerful online journalism tool

Ideas

The People’s Net – Douglas Rushkoff’s original article on the dot com crash for Yahoo! Internet Life revisited for the current age of unicorns – Time to channel my inner Dave Winer – Joi Ito’s Web and Joichi Ito on the same theme

The rise of American authoritarianism – Vox – scientific explanation behind Trump but also the pervasive fear of terrorism that has gripped the west

Korea

As 4th trial nears, Samsung asks judge: Make Apple stop talking about Korea | Ars Technica – it because perhaps they’ve mentioned the dishonest involvement in political slush funds as background to explain relative brand honesty and trustworthiness?

Media

Maxus launches mood-based planning tool | Marketing Interactive – interesting, particularly with political campaigns

Welcome to the Era of Programmable Marketing – The AppNexus Impressionist – great primer on programmatic

China’s new television rules ban homosexuality, drinking, and vengeance – Quartz – so that leaves dramas about patriotic war against the Japanese sans Nanking massacre and dramas about Mao sans cultural revolution

Online

Apple is Running BitTorrent Trackers in Cupertino – TorrentFreak – Using the file-sharing protocol, we launched a side-project called Murder and after a few days (and especially nights) of nervous full-site tinkering, it turned a 40 minute deploy process into one that lasted just 12 seconds – interesting article that touches on the enterprise use of BitTorrent. I suspect Apple’s use of trackers is IP enforcement related

Retailing

It’s Discounted, but Is It a Deal? How List Prices Lost Their Meaning | NYTimes.com – interesting article. I remember being shocked when I was first guided through Shenzhen’s markets where products originally destined for UK markets were sold to local consumers – with price reduction tags already attached.

No surprise with Powa | Steven Prowse – almost as good as The Kernel’s legendary dissection of SpinVox

So how much was Powa Technologies really worth? | FT Alphaville – clear gap between claimed value and real value even before administration (paywall)

Adidas to operate 12,000 shops in China by 2020 in bid to tap growth in leisure wear, sports participation – interesting that they are going to 3,000 additional real-world stores rather than focus on e-tailing (paywall)

Security

Swarm of Tiny Pirate Transmitters Gets the Message out in Syria – could also reinvigorate pirate radio…

The FBI Might Be Apple’s Best Ally In iPhone Encryption Flap | Fast Company – the government messed up and its backfired

Software

Microsoft canceled $8 billion Slack bid due to Bill Gates and Satya Nadella pushback – Business Insider – Qi Lu would have known Butterfield from Yahoo! ,both worked in the search business at the some time

Why I’m breaking up with Slack | Quartz – interesting perspective

Wireless

In Search of the Amazingly Elusive Non-Smartphone Owner | Recode – not really surprising. I imagine the privacy aspects might encourage a small set to follow them

March 7, 2016
6 things learned in a corporate environment
The idea for 6 things learned in a corporate environment came from having spent four months working day-in, day-out onsite at a large corporate.
- - The working environment is very different to an agency. My desk had to become much more portable. Since the space was all hot-desking with only team PAs assigned permanent desks. This meant no reference charts stuck up or post-its around the monitor. Instead I boiled my process down to the laptop, a notebook that acted as my organisation memory and a day book that focused on my tasks. That was it, no further paper work
  - Many of the traditional spaces for memos weren’t available. So the back of a toilet door with its regularly updated notices was a lifeline to what was happening where. The coffee machine, once a traditional networking point was less useful as hot desking meant that your serendipitous meetings are random in nature. They often lack the depth of what you have an agency environment. These aren’t shallow people, its a level of impermanence built into the working space
  - The importance of mobile was brought home to me. Each desk space had a phone. You keyed in your number and a PIN and your direct dial number moved with you. But 20 per cent of these phones were out of action at any given time. This wasn’t a problem as people tended to use their mobile phones a lot. We used to talk a lot, over bridged conference call numbers. You would see people on calls pacing the floor listening and talking on their calls via headsets plugged into their mobile handsets. For the first few minutes it feels slightly weird
  - Sustainability and being environmentally friendly were more than having a prominent recycling bin. There is an application that reminded me any time I printed something just how bad I was for the environment. Being green was thoughtfully built into processes rather than bolted on as an afterthought
  - Admittedly, my time at Yahoo! was in a very different company and culture, but being a client is very much a team sport. You only have a limited amount of control, a lot of work has to be done by consensus and through a process. You feel like a very small cog in that process and every small gain was an appreciable win. Making this happen takes up an inordinate amount of time
  - It seemed to be timely when writing this post that I read this article Silicon Valley Has Not Saved Us From a Productivity Slowdown – The New York Times – new enterprise software like Workday is still as reassuring clunky as their forebears. Many of the same problems of collaboration and information sharing are still being resolved
What other things learned in a corporate environment have you come across?
March 6, 2016