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.
Quick reviews of Unstuck and 11 1/2 Ideas that work.
I had been meaning to get around to reading this book for a good while. Unstuck is a trouble-shooting guide for situations when you can’t think your way out of a problem or are suffering from inertia. The book was based on a set of flash cards developed by the authors as part of an MBA module that they taught at Harvard.It is quite easy to imagine it as a big decision tree or one of them Dungeons and Dragons books that the geekiest kids at school used to read all the time as you are guided from problem recognition and diagnosis through to resolving the problem in a creative manner.
The best thing of all, unlike technical support helplines and customer service functions you are not kept on hold for an hour because they are swamped with other callers. Definitely one to keep in the desk drawer.
11 1/2 Weird Ideas That Work was a book that I read on the way back from Dresden. It is a thinkpiece for managers on how they can further develop innovation within an organisation that is not too corporate in its culture by bringing in disruptive influences and processes – a sort of ‘grain of sand’ in your shoe effect. Sutton is very particular about laying out the parameters of what kind of organisation his techniques will or won’t work for. He cites extensively examples from organisations like design and user experience company IDEO through to small business units in large corporates like phone-tapping technology company Hewlett-Packard.
Whilst the book makes for interesting reading, applying its ideas successfully may be much harder to do .
Blue Ocean Strategy is an easy to read book that I managed to zip through in next to no time at all. Kim and Mauborgne have written a book that is accessible and easy-to-read, cover-to-cover or dip in and out of for reference or inspiration.The book’s premise is that most business strategy books are about conflict and competition and this is wasteful. Instead it provides a framework for strategists to Think Different and differentiate their businesses instead.
The blue ocean of the title is the space that the business puts between itself and competitors, in contrast to the red ocean from business conflict. A classic example of a red ocean would be the Chinese approach to business. In China you will see competing restaurants right next to each other. The idea is that one might move in. It becomes successful, which encourages others to compete next to them since it is a known successful formula in that area. The neighbourhood of restaurants does bring in diners, but margins are small due to the level of competition.
A classic example would be to think about the PC manufacturers. A classic red ocean environment where IBM left due to competitive pressures, HP and Compaq merged to unsuccessfully in a failed effort to leverage the economic benefits of their combined scale and Apple and Dell are the only two long-term profitable success stories through innovation.
The problem is now that Dell’s process smarts have become the norm and both Apple and HP have used their operational efficiency techniques to improve their own businesses with leaner supply chains and total product customisation.
I wholeheartedly recommend Blue Ocean Strategy. However the type-a personalities in charge of many organisations that most need to read it, will never touch the book or hear its message and as the bard said there-in lies the rub. More book reviews here.
Over my lifetime I have had a number of moments when I felt like I saw things with crystalline clarity: one time was when I was in the library doing a job search in the papers (this is pre-Monster.com kids).I suddenly came to the conclusion that even if I got a job that I would be in the same cycle soon again and I needed to get out of the blue-collar roles, even if it meant leaving vast tracts of my life behind.
The next one was in April 2000, the internet business had gone mental, the PR agency I was employed in was in mid-flow of the dot.com boom and all the mini-bubbles that went alongside it like the Java boom, the Linux boom, the broadband boom, the web business marketplace boom, the mobile web boom and rise of the PDA.
In fact, about the only thing that we didn’t promote was micro-scooters, though we did employ a German freelancer who commuted in from Brighton and rode one everywhere he had to go around London.
Anyway, things got so busy that we had to interview clients and decide whether we wanted to work for them. I met a gentleman from an incubator fund and quickly decided that they were start-up roadkill, but I couldn’t work out why this man who was obviously a lot more clever than me was involved in the enterprise.I asked him what made his companies offering different, to which replied “Ged, I am surprised that you asked that, we are trying to move at internet-speed, so aren’t thinking about things like that.” I had a sudden jolt of crystalline vision and saw how horribly it was all going to end and that my pension fund wasn’t worth squat. The elemental truth in this moment is that common sense trumps eloquent words and intellect every time.
Which brings me on to 8vo On the outside by Mark Holt and Hamish Muir. Steve bought this for me as a Christmas present and up until my move from Yahoo! and move back to agency life I hadn’t really had a chance to read the book in full.
The book charts the rise and fall of the design agency 8vo, their work and puts into context their pivotal role in modern UK graphic design.
The book is a collaborative work written by 8vo, former employees, former clients and industry observers. It is part history lesson focusing on design and the business of design, part a tale of technological change and part catalogue.
The way the book is written it is almost as if it is therapy for Hamish Muir and Mark Holt, I found it in turns fascinating and uncomfortable as they progressed through their work and found some elemental truths in their approach to design.
Much of their style of work has been co-opted by their modern day peers, so it is no longer remarkable, however what their peers lack is a good understanding of their approach to work. More book reviews here.
Iain Tait over at Crackunit had a link to an interesting interview with Eric Reiss who learned the same elemental truths as 8vo, but via a different road: in his case Vinterberg and Von Tier’s Dogme 95 rules for film making.
Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
Anything that exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer must be eliminated.
Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page must be eliminated.
Any feature or technique that reduces the visitor’s ability to navigate freely must be reworked or eliminated.
Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be reworked or eliminated.
No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to get the site to work correctly.
Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction without it.
Break any of these rules sooner than do anything outright barbarous.
Oh one completely useless piece of information that I found out today, the ZIP in ZIP code stands for Zone Improvement Program.
The Wall Street Journal Online or as it calls itself the WSJ Online has been celebrating its tenth birthday with some retrospectives and future gazing.
WSJ Online dot com disasters
A couple of the articles caught my eye.The Best of the Worst by Kathryn Meyer (May 3, 2006) celebrates the suckiest ideas of the first dot com boom.
CyberRebate
CyberRebate did what it said on the tin; they charged you an outrageous price for an item and then promised you a rebate, they hoped to make money on the redemption drop-out – they were overwhelmed and drowned in a sea of debt.
Digital currency
Digital currency ideas (Beenz and Flooz) withered on the vine as they weren’t as universal as Mastercard or cash. PayPal survived because it kicked Western Union’s ass and we could all be credit-card merchants.
iSmell
iSmell was a device designed to release smells appropriate to the pages you surf (don’t even think about it, get your mind out of the gutter this instant) like some kind of b-movie experience enhancement craze of the 1950s.
CueCat
CueCat plugged into your PC (Windows only if you please) and allowed you to scan bar codes of magazines into your computer to get further information or content. This idea seems to have caught on in Japan with mobile phones and specialised software, so maybe they were too visionary?
3Com Audrey
The 3Com Audrey internet appliance was a great well engineered device killed by the ever decreasing price of PCs. I still rate its QNX-based OS and I like the product design on it.
PointCast
PointCast the push technology service that was a richer more engaging experience than RSS is today, but then I was sat at the end of a fat pipe whereas most users were on dial-up. Also marketers knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing used the service to carpet-bomb users with unwanted ads.
Tech trends
Tim Hanrahan’s piece on Tech’s 10-year Creep (May 8, 2006) brings out some interesting trends that have occurred. I have paraphrased and commented on his trends below
Anytime, Anywhere: Push email and wireless internet access mean that getting online whilst traveling or wire-free on your couch or at Starbucks — is possible for $60 a month or so. However it eats into the work life balance.
Think Better! Google basically.
Putting Yourself Out There: Originally people liked their privacy, caller ID on phones was pushing the envelope in terms of social disclosure. Over the past five years people have gotten used to sharing personal information online. Chat rooms, forums, online dating followed by social-networking sites; to blogs and MySpace came to dominate. Easy-to-use tools, cheap to free storage and online social interaction brought out the pioneer spirit ‘Go web young man‘.
The Post-Stuff World: Music downloads, ebooks, ripped movies. (But if its that post-stuff why is Amazon so successful selling books, everyone’s iPod is full of music ripped from CDs and people love their laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, crackberries, Nintendo and Sony handhelds). This techno-minimalism bollox didn’t wash with me.
Free Information, Free People: People are exercising their free speech and there is a maelstrom of content out there that Technorati struggles to handle. The social web has replaced the techno web – (though when Soledad O’Brien hosted a show on MSNBC that featured a young Max Headroom-type avatar sidekick named Dev ten years ago (good gosh, was it that long ago?) was it precient of Second Life?) CNN now covers blog content as if it was matter-of-fact, though blogs often don’t have the same rigorous process behind them as well-written journalism.
Picture of Soledad O’Brien courtesy of CNN.com. More related posts here.
A couple of stories related to internet freedom that came to my attention this morning.
Internet freedom in China
First off today’s New York Times magazine has an indepth feature about the challenges that China presents to Internet companies seeking a Chinese audience. Google’s China Problem (and China’s Google Problem) by Clive Thompson is balanced and well written. There are some interesting aspects to it:
The censorship is open rather than furtive
It involves self-censorship as a key element in it’s execution
Chinese people interviewed do not view freedom of speech as an absolute binary state (you’re free or you’re not) but as a continuum and are prepared to make trade-offs; so Google’s ‘Do the least evil’ approach makes more sense
The role of chat and forums in Chinese internet usage is far higher than we’re used to
The assumption that the US readership of the article enjoy ‘absolute’ freedom of speech and a resulting internet freedom
The last point brings me on to the text of a speech given by US attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales at National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
US threat to internet freedom
Vigilant civil rights activists have noticed a number of items in the speech which would extend the government powers of censorship and surveillance well beyond child pornography with the implication being that in future US legislation freedom of speech and internet freedom may not be the absolute that it once was.
In a speech a few days ago, Attorney General Gonzales announced DoJ plans to send Congress new legislation to control “pornography” and (apparently) ultimately to require activity log and other data retention by Internet Services (in follow-up interviews, Google and other search engines have been specifically discussed).Gonzales is pitching this legislation using child abuse as the hook. That is, he is arguing for tools to use against child abuse and child pornography — certainly a “third rail” issue these days where virtually everyone will support enforcement efforts.However, it’s also clear that the DoJ seems to have no intention of limiting such tools *only* to child-related areas. The legislation itself is currently titled: “Child Pornography and Obscenity Prevention Amendments of 2006”
A transcript of the Attorney General’s speech is here:
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=64319Note this key quote:“This legislation will help ensure that communications providers report the presence of child pornography on their systems by strengthening criminal penalties for failing to report it. It will also prevent people from inadvertently stumbling across pornographic images on the Internet.”Requiring the reporting of child pornography on systems (when it is known to exist) is something that few people would argue against, obviously.
But let’s examine the second sentence again: “It will also prevent people from inadvertently stumbling across pornographic images on the Internet.”This seems to be addressing the entire broad category of non-child “pornography” (which of course can be defined in any number of ways in different locales and contexts), and suggests a requirement (here we go again!) for proactive ratings/controls (presumably ID or credit
card based for “offensive” materials) for all (U.S.) Web sites. So this isn’t just about children, it’s likely about broader government controls over many U.S.-based Internet entities (of course, Gonzales doesn’t effectively address the issue of Web sites outside the country). Gonzales goes a lot further in another quote:
“The investigation and prosecution of child predators depends critically on the availability of evidence that is often in the hands of Internet service providers. This evidence will be available for us to use only if the providers retain the records for a reasonable amount of time. Unfortunately, the failure of some Internet service providers to keep records has hampered our ability to conduct investigations in this area.As a result, I have asked the appropriate experts at the Department to examine this issue and provide me with proposed recommendations. And I am going to reach out personally to the CEOs of the leading service providers and to other industry leaders to solicit their input and assistance. Record retention by Internet service providers consistent with the legitimate privacy rights of Americans, is an issue that must be addressed.”
Again, we see that protecting children — the goal that we all support — is being used as the raison d’etre to likely later propose broad data retention requirements on all manner of Internet services. Ironically, this is occurring shortly after calls for mandated data *destruction* legislation that arose in the wake of the DoJ vs. Google records battle (where I strongly supported Google’s stance).cted that this sequence would occur — though it is happening even faster than I expected.Record retention is a particularly risky area. DoJ might be expected to argue (as Gonzales implies) that such records would only be demanded in cases involving children.
That’s today’s line. But in a general records retention environment, you cannot a priori retain only the records related to child abusers whom you don’t already know about — you must retain *everyone’s* records. While the criteria for records access might be child abuse today, does anyone seriously believe that calls for access to user log data will not massively expand over time, to the extent that such data is available? Of course it will. If the data exists, all manner of ostensibly laudable reasons for government digging through users’ Internet activities will be forthcoming. And that will create a wholly different kind of Internet, where ultimately our every action on the Net may be subject to retroactive inspection. The term “slippery slope” is definitely applicable.
We need to see the specifics of legislation before detailed comments will be possible. But the handwriting is on the wall, and it does not bode well for either Internet users or Internet-related services.
