Monthly Archives: April 2009

I've Made My Peace with St. Louis Baseball

You know, except for the 2006 World Series, when I was pretty sure I was going to explode from conflicting loyalties, I’ve pretty much settled with the fact that I’m now a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. My two oldest children wear Cards hats. I have a stuffed Fredbird. It’s happened, and I have to deal with it.

I can reconcile this because my Detroit Tigers are in the opposite league.

Because of this fandom, which has grown from the fact that I’m raising my children in this fine metropolitan area, I have to say that I’m pretty excited with how the beginning of the baseball season is progressing. There is—of course—still room for the Cards to disappoint, but they’re looking good.

It is also the reason that this picture is one of my favorite baseball photos of all time:

sosa_zoom

It literally never gets old. I thought of it completely spontaneously yesterday and felt I just had to share it with you all.

links for 2009-04-16

Be the Cannonballer

There are some people who go through their entire lives waiting and watching to see what everyone else does. They predicate their actions on the success of others.

Does a venture look like a risky bet? Wait for everyone else to try it and then see what they’re saying afterwards.

Hit upon a new technique? Stand by and let someone else implement it first, then see if it was worth it.

Does the water appear cold? Nudge your friends into going in there first, then only go in yourself when it appears they’re not freezing.

Sometimes, the risk is worth it. Sometimes, you need to be the first one in there. You can’t always depend on everyone else to set the trends, because the trend-setters often enjoy success. Many times, they’re the ones who get to direct what’s going on—the ones who get to really lead.

Maybe this time, you have to be the one jumping into the cold water first. Make some waves and do a cannonball.

links for 2009-04-07

Who Has Control?

For decades, the overriding construct of good marketing and public relations was that you had to tightly control the message your company was broadcasting to the world. Commercials, press releases, and other materials were carefully meted, checked, and rechecked to make sure everything was “on message”.

In the 00′s (the “aughts,” if you’re wondering how to pronounce that), we like to call these things “talking points.” Even though we are still in an environment where the method by which we share information is changing on a frequent basis, companies still like to make sure that everyone is toeing the line. After all, you want to make sure that everything is portrayed in the most positive light possible, right?

The problem with this approach is that in this post-Cluetrain, post-information-revolution age, control is an illusion.

Companies don’t have control anymore.

The control has passed to the consumers. To the rank-and-file. Your company might try to stay on-message, but look at the statistics. People don’t trust “official” communication now. They see it as too closely managed, too dishonest and impersonal. They want to hear from someone they trust.

Your customers have already taken the conversation to places you possibly haven’t thought. Are they on Facebook? Twitter? A forum somewhere? Email lists of their colleagues? You’re not going to reach them by elbowing in on their turf with an impersonal, robotic corporate mouthpiece and a few posts somewhere. They don’t want subversion; they don’t want to be crushed. They might even be avoiding you.

They want you to participate. And they want you to participate—as in you, the person who is reading this. Not your company. Not some official place for them to gather information. They want to hear from people on the inside, from people very much like them. They want to “get to know you” and to build a relationship of trust.

Sometimes, they want to lavish praise on you. Sometimes, they want to dump on you. They want to share their opinions, and they want honest, personal responses and discussion. The reward for your participation in this conversation is that you earn a measure of trust and can then share with them things that interest you—and those are very likely the things you are working on. (At least, they should be, or you should find a different job.)

They’re in the driver’s seat now.

What are you going to do about it?

Thoughts on Ebook DRM Standards

I’ve recently been performing some research into so-called “social DRM” as it applies to digital files for my own knowledge bank. I’ve been very interested in the approaches to DRM shown by groups such as The Pragmatic Programmers and ebooks purchased from outlets like Lulu, where the name of the purchaser is automatically embedded within the purchased file in order to provide it with some measure of discouraging sharing/piracy.

iTunes has done this from the start, and even though they have dropped the traditional notion of DRM from their music files now, they still mark each and every file you download with the email address of the Apple ID used to purchase the song. It’s not used in any sort of enforcement application (that we know of to date), but knowing it’s there stops some people from posting the tracks publicly or sharing them with anyone who is not a close personal friend or relative (my conjecture).

In doing this research, I ran across a two year old blog post from Bill McCoy of Adobe. He has some words to say about the same, which is fascinating coming from the GM of their ePublishing department. His comments are in reaction to the Steve Jobs note from 2007 regarding music and DRM—something that ended up happening less than two years after the fact. I also ran into some more recent comments from McCoy, speaking to the establishment of a DRM standard that is cross-platform instead of complete advocacy for the removal of traditional DRM systems from ebook titles.

Let’s talk about why this isn’t feasible and how we can learn from the past.

Continue reading →

Once Again, It Comes Down to Value

Electronic Cottage reports that there’s a small-scale user revolt boycotting Kindle titles that are priced higher than the new release and/or bestseller $9.99 price point:

Now, Amazon has many books over the $9.99 price it promised for new releases when Kindle was first launched. That price was a major selling point to convince buyers that the large investment in a Kindle would pay off over time. The price also acknowledged the obvious: a Kindle edition is less valuable than a hardcover; although you cannot pass along your Kindle edition to friends, you are at least paying a significant amount less than the hardcover price. Unfortunately, short-sighted publishers feel they are losing dollars instead of realizing that a $9.99 Kindle sale doesn’t usurp a hardcover sale. It is a brand new entity. A plus. Pure gravy.

Kindle owners have organized a boycott of Kindle editions over $9.99. The uprising is ably helped by Amazon’s own online tools: the 9.99boycott community and a boycott discussion forum. Cleverly, the boycotters are using the Amazon tags feature to tag books over $9.99 with the 9.99boycott tag. Boy, if I were a publisher or author, I sure wouldn’t want to see my books listed at the top of the tag’s “Popular Products” under the boycott tag.

Interesting that part of the article here is that Amazon has provided customers with all the tools they need to create an uprising within their own service. Pay attention to the number of books the author says he purchased at the lower $9.99 price point. Like iPhone applications, there appears to already be a price ceiling forming with the Kindle.

I don’t think this is what Amazon was going for, nor do I think they promised everyone $9.99 books, but (again) like the App Store, the customer base is showing what they’re willing to pay.

(Via Tools of Change for Publishing.)

Twitter, Like Google, Is All About the Search

Well, actually, Google is all about the advertising, but that’s another article.

From the Twitter blog:

We went back to the original sketch and made everything far more awesome. Currently, a small subset of Twitter users are trying this new search feature in the sidebar of their Twitter home page. When you do a search, you don’t go to another page, the relevant tweets instantly show up where you’d expect them to—right on your home page where tweets love to be.

Take a look at the whole article. It’s awesome to see the design process boiled down to a simple sketch on a legal pad. Sometimes, the best ideas have very simple beginnings.