Seth's Blog: Really Bad Powerpoint

While I can't completely agree with all of Seth Godin's points in his "Really Bad PowerPoint" post, I think he definitely makes some great points. You need to pass out detailed handouts after you present, which means you don't have to cram everything you want to say into every slide. Tell a story and use visuals to back it up. However I don't think bullets are evil and I've seen "minimalist" slides that simply don't work.

I like the concept of giving folks a visual and then letting them wonder what the heck it has to do with what your talking about, but you can't do that on every slide. Bullets help people who may have zoned out momentarily and unless you're the most compelling speaker in the world, zoning will happen.

However, I know a lot of consultants that could learn from Seth's guidelines.

Seth's Blog: Really Bad Powerpoint

A Real Desktop?

Courtesy of the Human Productivity Lab, this is one of the coolest and most breakthrough tools for handling digital files that I can recall. It's called "Bumptop" and uses the analogy of your own physical desktop and how you might lay down paper-based documents and objects and takes it to an amazing new level. Microsoft, or more likely, Apple will grab this technology I'm sure. Check out the video below and be sure to check out their channel on YouTube.

U.S. Flight Pattern Visualizations...Wow!

Saw these on Digg. Very cool. It's a series of visualizations showing airline flight patterns on the U.S. It's a bit mesmerizing to watch. Flight Pattern Visualizations.

Presenting the "iBle"

I was bummed to find out I missed the deadline for entry in the Worth1000.com’s recent contest wherein people are asked to come up with a design for Apple's next big product. Above would have been my submission. I felt given the Mac's cult status they probably needed a "Good Book" of their own.

Lose a Few Hours on Similicio.us

I think there is a "Right-click/Find similar pages" function in one of the browsers, which, as I recall, sorta sucked. However Similicio.us doesn't suck. In fact I just lost a few hours playing with it. Just enter a site you like or use and Similicio.us will find similar ones using Del.icio.us. Brilliant.

http://similicio.us/

Maybe a Change Will Come

All it takes is one big label to go DRM-free and the rest, including Apple, will fall in line and be equal. Then they can start dropping prices to compete and we can play our music anywhere.

Digital Music News reports from Midem:

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/012307drm

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC plans online children's world

Why do I get a horrible feeling this idea will be corrupted by pedophiles no matter what steps they take to prevent it? Sigh.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC plans online children's world

Second Life is an OS

Someone asked if Second Life was some sort of game and I said it was more like an operating system. It's essentially useless until users add applications to it. As a blank slate like a freshly installed copy of Windows.

A Computer for Peg

We're trying to collect some money for a friend of mine who desperately needs a computer. We're using a cool site called ChipIn. Help if you can and follow our progress. Every little bit helps.

How Long Will DRM Last?

Great article at TechCrunch about the "inevitable" death of DRM. I wish a label would get the balls to release its catalog without DRM and see what happens. Will the label go broke? Will the bands go broke? Will more people buy music?

I don't think it's really that hard to imagine the scenario:

1. Napster announces that it's reached a deal with the record labels to provide high-quality downloadable non-DRM MP3s at .89 cents a pop.
2. People flock to Napster and start buying like crazy.
3. Some jerks hold off, figuring the P2P networks will soon be flooded with free music to steal.
4. Meanwhile, people continue flocking to Napster. iPod users especially appreciate the fact that their tunes will now play anywhere. iTunes, for the first time ever, sees begins to lose its marketshare, bit by bit.
5. In the meantime, seeing how gangbusters things are going at Napster, other formerly DRMed music sites start slowly signing deals and adding DRM-free MP3s. Their sales start to take off. Wal-Mart starts charging .79 cents a song, or maybe even less.
6. Soon everyone is offering MP3 songs for .79-.89 cents a song. Sales continue to chug along as people realize prices are going down. A whole album for $8? Wow! They're $16 in the store!
7. Good ideas start to pop up at the online digital music stores, adding value and getting even more CD buyers into downloading. Download the whole album and get concert tickets or band merchandise at half price. Get a video of the band playing their big hit live. Download album art and lyrics. Download a special "key" to get into a special area of the band's Web site. Get software to re-mix the band's music.
8. P2P networks continue to thrive along with the legitimate sales. Record labels and the FBI work together to continue fighting piracy, pirates continue to find new ways to get around them. Nothing new there.
9. Within five years, downloaded music sales equal CD sales. Within ten years, CDs are no longer sold. Cars come standard with MP3 players and Wi-Fi (or something like Wi-Max) for transferring. Of course why transfer MP3 files when you can simply stream them over a wireless broadband connection? If your city is equipped or you have broadband cellular, you're good to go.
10. Now that I think about it, who's to say that in ten years we won't be streaming everything no matter where we are? Who needs MP3s? Subscribe to the (someday) new RhapsodyEverywhere and listen to whatever you want whenever and wherever you want. Who the hell needs MP3s anyway?

As much as I hate DRM, since I have a RhapsodyToGo subscription, it doesn't really affect me that much. For the price of an in-store CD each month I can download to my Sansa player and stream music on my PC to my heart's content. And if I want to listen to music in the car I can either pay .79 per song to burn a CD, or, better, hook my MP3 player up to my car stereo. I want for nothing when it comes to music. That's the way it should be.

Short Burst of Text

I just read a recent article by the brilliant Gerry McGovern in which he praises the rise of content in the last 15 years. In short, the content creator revolution of blogs and social networking. However, in it he also acknowledges how mobile tools like Blackberries have changed the way our bosses communicate with us. "Short bursts of text is the new management style." he says.

This couldn't be more true. My boss (actually my boss's boss) communicates almost exclusively in short bursts of text from his Blackberry. This has led to a great deal of confusion. For instance, when presented with several possible options he may simply respond, "Yes, go with it." Now I need to respond back with "Go with which one?" To which he may respond, "Send again--short form." Meaning he doesn't want to have to read any extra "stuff", just the options.

E-mail and mobile communication can certainly make it possible for us to be "always on," but are we listening or just trying to keep up with all of it?

Are Googlers Smarter than Yahooers?

As a follow-up to my previous post, I checked to see what the Top Ten Searches were on Google this year. Surprisingly, the number one search wasn't "Britney Spears." In fact the list is downright respectable and a bit techy. In fact, I'm not even sure what #1 actually is. "Bebo?" I had to look it up and apparently it's a social networking site where you can share multimedia stuff. I'm not sure why you wouldn't just type bebo.com into a browser to find it, but I guess if you'd only heard the name you might not know how to spell it.

Anyway does the list below mean that people who use Google are older and/or smarter than the people using Yahoo? There's no Lindsey Lohan or Beyonce, there's mininova and radioblog. It's tools over people. Odd. Wonder what's going on there.

Anyway, here's the list:

Google.com-Top Searches in 2006

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

The Saddest Thing I've Ever Seen

Those of us who work in the Web field like to think we are working on the hippest thing going. The Web is cool, smart, evolutionary. Unfortunately the reality may be a little sadder than we'd prefer to admit. I base this on the 2006 Yahoo! Top Searches List that was recently published. Here's the list:

Yahoo! Top 10 Overall Searches

1 Britney Spears
2 WWE
3 Shakira
4 Jessica Simpson
5 Paris Hilton
6 American Idol
7 Beyonce Knowles
8 Chris Brown
9 Pamela Anderson
10 Lindsay Lohan

This would lead me to believe that the average Web user is under 14, is very horny, and has rotten taste in entertainment. I think I'm going to recommend my company changes the home page to include scantily clad teeny-bopper artists and a way for visitors to vote on which one is they like best. I guarantee 17,000,000 page views in our first week.

Web Workers and Email

Just discovered a new blog and a good article about e-mail. The blog is "Web Worker Daily" and the article is "How to screw up an email negotiation." Very cheeky, but very true.

The Web Team Chasm

I work at a professional association. We're a nonprofit, legally, but we're hardly a charitable organization. Dues are quite expensive and because of it we've little incentive to work hard at finding other sources of income. For instance, we have an online catalog, but it's definitely Worst of Breed. It's in Siebel, pound for pound, the worst enterprise software I've ever seen. I'm not even sure if Siebel still makes a catalog product anymore. They really shouldn't have. We have a team of full-time consultants and in-house staff dedicated completely to it which is amazing given that A) We don't do much business with it, and B) We don't have that many products. Yet the catalog sucks away most of our IT budget and labor. And at this point IT believes it has invested too much in this steaming pile to stop using it, so we're stuck with it.

Anyway, the catalog is difficult to navigate, unintuitive, ugly, and products are horribly categorized. One category is actually called "Catalog Products." Obviously, that one's not Siebel's fault, but my point is this catalog is not built to make money, it's built to meet someone's internal goal of being able to say we have an online catalog. And it's managed completely by IT.

I am not part of the team that chose Siebel for the catalog, or implemented it, or maintains it. I am, in fact, not in IT at all. I am part of the non-IT Web team that manages the rest of our Web site. In our organization the online catalog is not considered part of our Web site. To our association members it certainly is, but not to our internal staff. This means that my team is not allowed input into the online catalog. In fact, the online catalog requires a separate login from the rest of our site (also, sidenote, it doesn't work in Firefox. This didn't seem to bother our IT department so we built a redirect page that checks your browser and offers our 1-800 number if you happen to be one of the millions of people who use Firefox. IT thought we were crazy.)

The problem here is largely the structure of our "Web Team." I say "team," but I really mean, "Web Chasm." We have an IT Division and a Communications Division and I am in Communications. Our team in Communications uses a lot of the same skills as our IT counterparts, but, as they often tell us, we're not IT. We design ASP pages and forms, perform Web Analytics, conduct usability testing, develop functional and business requirements for the site, etc. but IT does not consider those things to be "IT." Also they don't believe in things like "usability" or "analytics." These are silly marketing things that have nothing to do with building Web applications and they simply don't have time because they've got Web applications to build.

Frankly I don't think any of us in Communications want to be in IT. They are largely reviled throughout our organization. People find them rude, arrogant, unhelpful, slow, and they make you fill out a Project Request if you ask them to hold the elevator for you. No, we don't want into that club. However, this puts us at their mercy when we need things like database applications built. We're not skilled at building database applications, but even if we learned how, we wouldn't be allowed to build them. That's an IT thing. Hence, we get in line with every other department that wants something from IT. And it's a long line that rarely moves.

But how, you may ask, do you react quickly to the fast-moving, always-changing Web? The answer "rarely." I estimate we stay at a steady 4-5 years behind the curve when it comes to the Web. My team follows current trends and offers up ideas to make us more competitive in the market and more relevant to our young, growing member base, but IT doesn't want to hear it. They don't have the time, the inclination, or the latest skills to help us move forward. Besides, they've got an online catalog to run.

The Myth of Mac

In a recent article about Mac quality issues, Veteran technology industry analyst Rob Enderle is quoted as saying "I think they (Apple) are feeling invulnerable right now. Because they've been so successful as of late, it looks like they can do no wrong and that customers will take whatever they give them."

I think this is probably true. Apple and its users seem to me a pretty smug lot. I'm a Windows PC user, but God knows I'm not a smug one. Windows PCs have all sorts of issues like crashes, odd behavior, susceptibility to viruses and hacks, etc. We all know this of course. We install firewalls, anti-virus programs, add memory, apply patches and do everything we can to keep our PCs running.

We also do some pretty amazing things with our PCs, just like people do with Macs. The difference seems to be that Mac users tend to look down on PC users and I really can't figure out why. Are Macs really better at most things than PCs these days? Are they really so much simpler to use? Or are they just "cooler?" Besides, there are programs for PCs that do the same things you can do on a Mac. I use most Adobe products on my PC and they're not all that different on Macs as far as I can tell. But is it more cool to say you own a Mac than a PC? Sure it is. The Mac guy on the commercial exudes laidback, trendy coolness, whereas the PC guy exudes uptight, loser dorkiness. But is a PC supposed to be cool? Is that important? If the PC I use is cool does that make me cool by extension?

When I've pressed Mac users for hard reasons why they love their Macs or what's so much better or simpler about them I usually get a response like. I don't know, they're just easier. When I press them further they end up saying PCs are just too complicated and they don't have time to mess with all of that crap. It makes me wonder why my company has a support person for our Mac users. What does he do all day, play Solitaire?

Same thing goes for iPods, which are heralded by owners and most of the press for their amazing simplicity and quality. Here's a simple fact: The majority of comments I hear from iPod users are negative. Maybe you hear differently, but all I ever hear from iPod owners is how they can't get their CDs ripped to them, and the battery runs out too fast, and for some strange reason the alarm goes off at midnight and drains the power before they wake up, and it scratches really easily and on and on. I also hear about how horrible the customer service is and how you end up paying hand over fist to get them repaired or replaced. And I truly do not get what is so stylish about them. When they first came out they looked like kitchen appliances and everyone raved about how cutting edge and trendy they were. Now pretty much all music and media players look stylish and I don't think iPods really look any more stylish than the rest.

I have a SanDisk Sansa and I really like it. It's small, stable, works with Rhapsody, holds plenty of music, and sounds great. The interface is pretty good too. Not great, but pretty good. Anyway, I don't pretend owning a Sansa makes me cool or part of some generation. It's a tool I use to listen to music and it works well. I haven't joined a Sansa discussion group or told all my friends that it's the "only mp3 player to get." And if I owned an iPod I would feel the same way. Like a Mac, it's just a tool to get things done or entertain yourself. It's not a cult, it's a piece of hardware. Get over it.

Oldie But Goodie about Spammers

This is old, but still hilarious. Rob Corddry from the Daily Show skewers spammers. I think the most amazing thing about this is that a spammer (sorry, a "high-volume email deployer") let himself be interviewed on the air.

KISS Your Zune Please

I was talking to a friend at work yesterday who I was surprised to find out was "really getting into podcasts." She isn't a technically savvy person (I've had to help her with PowerPoint) so I was shocked to hear her regale me with a list of her favorites podcasts, including the excellent National Geographic collection. She explained that she found them all on iTunes and then began to tell me how much she loved her iPod. I showed her my new Sandisk Sansa player, which is easily the best Media player I've used to date, which she thought was cool, but she thought for "non-techies" like her, the iPod was the way to go. I asked what she meant and she said "The iPod is just so easy to use." I showed her how I plug my Sansa into the PC, Rhapsody pops up, and I start dragging and dropping music onto it. "How is the iPod easier than that?" She stuck by her story that non-techies should get iPods. "But isn't that exactly what you do with your iPod?" She just shook her head and said "iPods are just easier."

So I thought about it and realized that the truth really doesn't matter in fashion. iPods have the perception of being simple so they're simple. Never mind the fact that these days there are many media players just as simple and with less gotchas and hardware issues than iPods. It doesn't matter. iPods are simple.

As Microsoft prepares to roll out its new Zune Media player I hope they realize this. Brand the Zune as the "simple choice." Downlplay the features, and focus on its simplicity. Keep the Zune music store and the transfer process simple. Simple, simple, simple. Run it through the "Mom" process. Can my Mom use it? Does my Mom get it? If not, start over.

Leaving Outlook's Tasks Behind?

I'm taking the plunge off the Outlook cliff and trying out a standalone task management program featured on LifeHacker. It's called TaskCoach and it's a free, open source program available for download from SourceForge.

So far I'm liking it. It's relatively straightforward, but, unlike Outlook, let's you easily create sub-tasks. It also offers an uncluttered view of your daily tasks with easily configured views via a "Filter Side Bar." This ease-of-view is a revelation compared to Outlook. Basically it's a one-click process to see tasks by category or status. Brilliant!

TaskCoach handily minimizes to the taskbar when closed or minimized for easy access as you work. In addition it has built-in effort timers (which I hope I never feel compelled to use, but it would probably be for the best).

The author actively solicits ideas for improvements, which gives me hope that one day it will become even better. I already have a few suggestions to make including templates, drag and drop functions, and the ability to set a default attachment folder.

Anyway, I'm going to try it out for a week and see if I can handle losing the biggest plus of using Outlook for task management, which is the fact that I can drag and drop an e-mail to create a new task, complete with the body of the e-mail. A handy VB script I found even lets me include attachments. This really has been my only reason for sticking with Outlook. However, I can already tell that if TaskCoach offered the ability to drag and drop e-mails to create tasks I'd be sold already.

A Cloudy Feature

I think tag clouds are pretty cool, but try as I might, I haven't seen much use for them. The problem is that they're usually pretty much the same. The big words are obvious.

Tech tag clouds show "Microsoft," "Google," "Apple," etc.

News tag clouds show "Bush," "Iran," "Iraq," "US," etc.

I've never really felt compelled to click on tags in a tag cloud because the tags are either too general or too boring.

What would be cool, and perhaps someone's done this, is if when you clicked on a tag in a tag cloud, it brought you to a new, more specific tag cloud with related tags. Something LIKE that exists, called Google News Cloud. However, rather than successive mini-clouds, it simply highlights related tags.

I'd like to see something similar to the wonderful Visual Thesaurus tool.