Michael Bissell Blog

When did Google Start Policing the Internet?

Conquent — Wed, 1 Sep 2010 19:19:48 -0800

About a month ago, one of the machines in the office got a nasty virus. We managed to get it cleaned up pretty quickly and moved on. What no one considered was that once one machine is compromised, lots of other, more subtle security issues might still be lurking even though the initial mess is cleaned up.

Last week we found one of those other compromises on the Rackspace Cloud server. Apparently the virus rifled through the designer's FTP passwords and sent them off to some other server. We should have, but didn't, change her passwords on the ftp site, and the malicious server rewrote a whole mess of JavaScript files to include a line of text to download malware onto your machine. Not that the offending malware was on our server, but the line of code to deliver it was definitely appended to our scripts.

No problem -- change the passwords, restore the files from our repository in the office and all is good. Until today.

It turns out that Google crawled that site during the time the malware link was on the server and today I was surprised to get a call from a client telling me that one of the site we manage for them is being blocked as a "Reported Attack Page!"

What's interesting is that to solve the problem, you have to go to Google, set up an account, and ask them to review your site. This means you have to prove to Google you own the site, and give them a little personal information (like your contact info) in order so they can communicate with you...

I'm all for free enterprise, but I'm not entirely comfortable with a single company, Google in this case, deciding what's good or bad and forcing me to create an account to get my site out of hock. In our case, the developer had already corrected the problem, but they didn't automatically go back and notice the problem was fixed. There's no indication how long it's going to take Google to decide that the site is no longer compromised, and no real path to contesting their decision beyond asking them to, pretty please, look again.

Granted, as Firefox says, "Google scans millions of websites and identifies those that are, or recently were, hosting or distributing badware. If Google later determines a site is clean, Firefox no longer reports it as an Attack Site."

I'm not sure what the alternative is, after all, my own team managed to open a crack wide enough for the bad guys to stick a knife in and put a link back to their malicious servers, so how can we expect any better from non-technical people, of which more and more are managing servers with automated tools that can go sour really fast.

But... this doesn't feel the same as dealing with the committee driven black list groups for open relays... it takes a lot longer to get out of hock, and I'm having to give a lot more of my own information to a commercial enterprise to get them to let the world see my websites again, even when we fixed it faster than they blocked it...

Getting back to HTML basics, thanks to Apple

Conquent — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:00:01 -0800

I've ranted a few times against the whole idea of "Web 2.0" and against the idea that somehow the tools are "new" or that they've made the Internet a more vibrant place. (See Old School Web Design Still Works and Flash: Shiny objects blinding your audience.) I also keep complaining about how Apple pretends to be "innovative" and "magical" while marketing tools that we've been using for years.

Ironic that we did a really basic "flash game" in basic HTML specifically to make sure the thing would work on the iPad. Didn't even have to build an app for that, existing tools worked fine.

The game itself is one of those basic interactive widgets that I, honestly, don't understand the attraction of, but people seem to love playing with. In this case, you paint the face of some fan for Tyson's fall football promotion -- you can put headgear on them, stickers on their cheeks and color their faces. Go ahead, play with the copy we've got on our development server by clicking here.

This is a classic application for Flash, only Apple has decided not to support Flash on iPhones, iTouch and iPads using their iOS (operating system). Then again, my Windows Mobile phone doesn't support Flash and I have a real problem with using any plug-in technology just because it's there.

Our team made something that actually works in web browsers -- any web browser -- using really basic HTML and GIF images. I admit, the overall execution has some flaws, but the thing works in IE6, on the iPad, and even on Opera mini on my Windows Mobile phone. That's quite a feat...

So, while I'll continue to bitch about Apple confusing the marketplace by presenting spin as technology, I have to admit, the limits placed on the world by that magical company allow us to get back to basics and make stuff that works.

I guess you just have to think different(ly).

Inspecting my Navel Base

Conquent — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:44:40 -0800

I read somewhere that there are something like 33 million blogs online. How many of them are active is up for debate, but you have to admit a lot of people are spewing their thoughts, ideas and imagination out into the blog-o-sphere.

The question that seems to be coming up over and over again is, "Yeah, so what?" Like Twitter and Facebook, blogs are just part of the stream of consciousness of humanity. I like to think my inner monologue is interesting and relevant, but most of what people get written down and posted online is somewhere between a therapy session and an acid trip -- relevant to the blogger, not so much to the reader.

I write something every day -- and you'll notice how rarely something ends up on my professional blog. Much of what I write is simply inspecting my own navel -- most people don't care about the amount of lint in my belly, but sometimes I get a brilliant idea when examining that little bit of fluff that seems to have no relevance to the universe.

As I mentioned in Emails, discussions, blogs, wiki and web content, blogs are what we believe "right now" -- they aren't the answers, and they aren't really the discussion. It's kind of like test-driving a car -- your ideas need a little road test before you completely commit to them.

The question I'm struggling with now is balance. Writing, reading other people's ideas, responding to those ideas, participating in a universe bigger than myself is... really distracting. How much we really learn from open introspection and how much we're just blathering is something that, unfortunately, I think remains to be seen.

There can be something almost cult-ish about the blogging world -- you build a core group of people who enthusiastically agree with you and you with them. You have literally billions of people to sift through to find that core group, which means, if there's someone out there for everyone, you're going to find someone and, hopefully more than one or two.

Which makes me wonder... do we really broaden our horizons by reading and participating in social media outlets like blogging, twitter and Facebook, or is it just so much inspecting our navels with an audience?

I'm just test-driving this idea, so don't be surprised if you see me driving around in an entirely different idea later...

Quantum Entanglement and the Death of Radio

Conquent — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 08:04:30 -0800

I was reading an article on Harvard Science's web page entitled "Quantum networks advance with entanglement of photons, solid-state qubits."

The frighteningly long title, the concept is that you can get two sub atomic particles to be "linked" over enormous distance -- that is, if you change the charge on one particle in New York and the other is in the middle of the Sahara Desert... it changes its charge too.

I don't even pretend to understand the math...

The idea, if it works, is that you can now have computers that are linked without wires, without networks as we think of them, but instead by exchanging information in this "spooky" way (as Albert Einstein called the theory). There are so many ways this could be used to create amazing computing power that I don't know where to start.

Instead, it made me think of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI has been scanning the skies for decades looking for radio signals from space. It only makes sense when you consider how much radio we pump out every day, but if a whole new form of communications came along like quantum entanglement, we would never know. There's no way to tap this communication, and it doesn't have the problems of distance and interference, so if you can do the math, why wouldn't you use it?

But this got me thinking one step further -- although I spend a lot of time on my cell phone, I wonder how much I actually use radio frequencies to communicate daily. Let's skip local wireless networks for a moment. We have four or five TV stations in Portland, but I mainly watch cable. I communicate by phone and over my computer a lot -- which again goes primarily through cables and when it is in the air it's point-to-point microwaves.

Sure, we're pumping out a LOT of radio frequency for all sorts of things, but I can see a day when we really don't need the 100,000 watt towers that blanket our cities, and apparently our solar system, in radio frequency.

But then, we don't have flying cars yet, either...

A shoebox vs. an online backup

Conquent — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:58:55 -0800

I keep seeing ads for online backup systems. Now, don't get me wrong, I think automatic, online backups are a perfect use of the Internet -- we've been using mirroring and synchronizing tools on our servers for years.

But I saw an ad for mozy today where this woman is holding a shoebox of photos and says, "I once stored my memories in shoeboxes. Now I know my photos will be safe for generations to come."

Really? Generations to come? I have a stack of 5 1/4" floppies with memories I'll never relive. I have CDs that are scratched and beyond readabilty. I once had a bunch of photos and documents in attachments in an old Hotmail account, but that account got deleted, along with my data. I'm not sure I know my Myspace login. And Facebook keeps changing what they do with their privacy rules -- who knows if the photos I have posted there will stay there through a class-action suit.

But I visited my dad a while back and he had photo albums going back to before I was born and it was easy enough to pick up a book and start looking without finding the right technology or password. Sure, he's converted a lot of these to digital and sent everyone in the family CDs of these photos, but the slides and photos in his closet are still the best source for memories.

mozy may be a great service, but to assume that ANY online service is going to be there for "generations" is absurd. Sure, store your photos there, but keep them in a shoebox too...

Cave Man Distribution Networks

Conquent — Fri, 9 Jul 2010 09:28:43 -0800

I had an interesting conversation with a "Senior Procurement Systems Executive" from the Ministry of Justice in the UK yesterday. I know, none of that has the ring of cliff diving in Acapulco or gazing at the stars at the observatory in La Palma, but exploring the similarities and differences of what we do as business people in very different industries and in different countries was instructive.

Personally, I love talking to people who do things that I don't do. I think of it as knitting in the edges of my knowledge -- if I learn a little about government procurement in the UK, I have a better understanding of buying and selling products in general, and buying and selling is the most universal form of communication.

Think of the evolution of commerce and go back to the wandering tribes of nomadic peoples on the plains of some ancient continent. They may not share a language, but Thag can gesture with a couple marmot pelts and point at a pile of nuts by the fire. Gugh pulls a few nuts off the pile, then a few more, until Thag smiles and hands him the pelts in exchange for the nuts.

But just as we don't wander the plains anymore, buying and selling has become a complex series of negotiations with a lot more paperwork and, honestly, just as much if not more grunting.

What did occur to me in our conversation is that the actual negotiation is still pretty much the same -- I hang onto my marmot pelts until I know how many nuts I'm getting in exchange, you dole them out carefully to make sure you're not giving me any more than you have to.

It's all a question of how many people need to be involved and how much stuff needs to be traded to make something happen. Sure, it's gotten really complicated with raw materials and manufacturing that isn't just killing something and skinning it and with distribution networks that aren't just a boy from village running some pelts to the next village.

Just as we don't use stone knives, we also have tools to know how many villages there are, how far that marmot pelt travels, and what kind of price it's getting at the edge of the world. But it's still the same process of making something, negotiating a price, and delivering it.

Dressing for Work

Conquent — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:02:17 -0800

I was having a conversation with an online Brit friend about how to dress for work. I mention the "online" part because I've never seen her workplace or how she really dresses for work, but let's just say that things are different in Portland than in the UK.

I have a pretty straight-forward, no bullshit idea about business, or as I like to say, this stuff is complicated enough, we don't have to make it any more complicated. The whole reason people dressed up for work to begin with was because the rich people owned the companies... you want to fit in with the folks in the office, you dress better than on the factory floor.

Okay, over simplification, but you get the idea. It's when I realized that the only people I saw wearing suits in downtown Portland were lawyers and suit salesmen that I knew "dressing for work" had become the equivalent of the brown polyester outfit at a fast food chain -- it's a uniform, and if you're forced to wear a tie then you're not in control of your own destiny.

So, our work culture has dressed down further and further until you get people who work for me in cargo shorts, flip flops and T-shirts with obscene messages on them (granted, I wear cargo shorts and sandals to work, but I don't think I own an obscene T-shirt anymore). You get up, get to work, sit at a desk all day, go home -- hardly a job with the kind interaction that requires the services of a dry cleaner.

Funny thing, though, I've noticed a swing towards dressing better. I don't know if this is partly because of the economy and people are dressing to say, "I'm professional, please don't fire me" or if it's just a reaction to too many T-shirts suggesting what you can do with a drunk woman at a rock concert.

What I'm realizing, despite holding onto my no-bullshit management style, is that some of the things that we perceive as bullshit (like dressing for work) sometimes swing so far in the other direction that the anti-bullshit becomes bullshit itself. Kind of like that sentence... we get so caught up fighting something that the fight becomes a muddled mess.

The team that hates itself -- Visionaries, Managers and Technicians

Conquent — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 09:43:27 -0800

I was having a conversation with a friend last night about how screwed up her workplace is. I'll keep her anonymous for that very reason... But the reason that her company isn't going to make it, in my opinion, is because three's no balance to the management team.

It takes three very different sets of skills, and honestly three very different personalities, to make a company succeed. Basically, you've got a Visionary, a Manager, and a Technician. Or Future, Past and Present...

The Visionary is typically the President or the CEO of the company and has the idea of where the company should go. The Manager, often the CFO or just plain old office manager, is concerned that the bills are paid, the taxes are filed and that the company isn't in trouble with the law. The Technician may be the COO or possibly just a working partner -- this is your classic technician who manages the projects and the people getting the day to day work done.

The problem is when there's no balance with these three people, and there usually isn't. The Visionary scares the crap out of the Manager while the Visionary feels hamstrung by the Manager. The Technician just wants everyone to get out of the way so they can get some work done.

I've had far too many clients over the years run by Visionaries with no Manager or Technician. These are the companies I've started calling "Fantasy Businesses" -- every time a real world problem comes up, like budgets or deliverables, the Visionary makes up a new scenario that makes it okay that time, and money, are slipping away until they are so far away from their original business model you can't even recognize it.

But then, there are companies where the Manager is in complete control -- they're easy to work with, but you never actually get to solve the real problems of the company. They generally believe "it's right because we've always done it this way" so all they do is become a better blacksmith, in a world without horseshoes.

And probably the worst is the Technician running the company -- decisions are based on the project, and the projects become the company which basically means you're letting your clients run your company, kind of like the fox and the henhouse, the client's interests are not your interests, and eventually you go bankrupt.

However, if you have all three of these folks working together, balancing out their weaknesses with each other's strengths, you get a company that's moving forward, taking care of business and producing work -- and you'd be amazed at how rare that is.

iBooks -- Creative Epicenter or Gatekeeper?

Conquent — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:20:41 -0800

It came up in conversation the other day that Apple has started to remove books from their iBook collection because of sexual content. While I don't see a lot of advantage to the iPad over a tablet PC, the advantage of the iPad over the Kindle is the graphics, and Apple's decision to ban content where, for example there's a gay kiss, doesn't bode well for the company that presents itself as the avant-garde epicenter of creativity.

Apple's agreement says: Applications (for apps) may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple�s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.

My problem with this is the extremely subjective nature of "objectionable" and in particularly, "defamatory." Sure, the Internet is a cesspool of porn and YouTube videos of people doing horrible things to themselves and others, but creativity is defined by the very lack of definition -- Michelangelo had to creep around in the middle of the night eviscerating corpses to learn about anatomy because Church bans on exploring the human body. Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Oscar Wilde...

We have many interpretations the First Amendment in this country, and while publishers have always had the option to decline works, there are other publishers you can shop your work to. What concerns me isn't just the idea of censorship, but the idea of a single corporation controlling so much information and then applying censorship based on shareholder interests.

Apple now controls 69% of the music market. So far as I understand, they don't censor individual works, but it's hard to say what kinds of deals they've struck with the music producers. Steve Jobs has said that Apple has 22% of the eBook market already, and if they become the reader of choice, killing the Kindle and the Sony collection of eReaders, we're suddenly looking at something a lot more important than a battle of platforms.

We're looking at Steve Job's face in the big screen in their 1984 Superbowl ad...

The Failure of Success

Conquent — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:07:39 -0800

I wrote a blog awhile back called I'd love to have that problem in response to clients saying that being overwhelmed with business is a good problem to have, except it's still a problem, and you're still going to fail if you don't solve it.

If you have the resources, you can't overbuild, but even if you don't have the ability to build a 50 story office block for your expanding company, you'd better know how you're going to get into one if your business suddenly explodes.

Of course, as I work online, I'm looking at technology failures like Twitter for my real-life examples. I don't know what Twitter is going to be like in another few years, but they are definitely having that problem of success; I still don't know how they make money, but they just doubled their capacity and they still keep failing.

We've dealt with a number of projects that end up having huge traffic surges, but nothing on the scale of Twitter. I don't think anyone has had to manage that kind of traffic, and I include Google in this... Twitter is doing something new, with realtime communication for millions of people simultaneously.

New is good, I really enjoy fooling around on Twitter with different social media experiments and just shooting shit with complete strangers. But, Twitter is new, and entirely freeform. We have no idea who is going to come up with a new way of using it, or how it's going to impact the whole of Twitterverse. In turn, that means we don't know what's going to happen next, which means we can't plan for contingencies.

One of my favorite tech quotes is, "This is complicated enough, let's not make it any more complicated." There is a huge, complicated world out there online, and if we can do one thing good, and plan for the problems that could arise if that one thing takes off like wildfire, then life will be interesting, and complicated, enough.

The Economy is Going to Get Worse, but that's okay

Conquent — Tue, 8 Jun 2010 08:38:56 -0800

There's no denying that money is a lot tighter in most places, and while we need to have optimism, there's no reason to hide from the simple fact that our economy is changing and we aren't going to see things go back to "normal" anytime soon, if ever.

There are three huge issues that are going to continue to cause a lot of chaos and just plain old economic suffering over the next couple years:

1) The Housing Market
We're nowhere close to done with this one. Although the numbers came in last month saying that foreclosures were down, the reality is repossession is UP -- that is the banks are actually taking title on more houses. The fear is that they're clearing out the backlog before they go back to foreclose some more.

Now, there is a good side to this which is that the people under the crushing debt of huge house payments don't have to make those payments anymore, but because the housing market keeps being depressed by too many cheap, bank foreclosures, no one is seeing equity come back which means A) no retirement and B) no slush funds on home equity lines.

2) Oil
The Gulf spill is bad and even if I'm wrong that the gulf is going to die from low oxygen levels and the fishing and tourism trades will never recover, the short term is that fishing and tourism are practically shut down, hitting an already economically depressed region with another blow.

Regardless of what happens in the Gulf, it's a reminder that we're doing risky stuff to keep oil flowing, and we're on the brink of oil getting much more expensive. All 33 deep sea wells are shut down in the Gulf right now, and it's not likely there will be a lot more construction going on in the near future.

Our entire economy is driven by oil, from food to computers, to all the cheap stuff we buy at IKEA -- as oil continues to climb the basic cost of getting grapes from Chile or fertilizing corn in Nebraska will continue to go up.

3) Unemployment
While it looks like the Senate is going to extend unemployment again, it's getting harder to pass and, honestly, harder to justify. Eventually a whole lot of people are going to find themselves without that federal assistance, and already a lot have lost their COBRA medical extensions -- meaning the cost of insurance is going up for these people as their income disappears.

One big problem is that a lot of the jobs that went away are never coming back. With automation, over seas labor, and just plain changes in the way businesses work, a lot of jobs just don't exist anymore. How the people who have been on unemployment looking for that finance job or mid-level management position are going to adapt to a different job market is something we don't know yet.
* * * *
Now, I'm not saying it's all doom and gloom, but we can't pretend everything is okay.

Part of this is the cost of globalization, which means the world, in general, has more people living the American Dream; they just happen to be in India, China, South America or Eastern Europe... There is lots of work out there if only because the country is in crisis. The trick is to be flexible and adapt to rapidly changing needs and understand that things really are different, and as painful as it's going to be, roller coasters can be fun.

Time lost on Twitter

Conquent — Tue, 25 May 2010 09:39:44 -0800

People are often complaining about how much time social media seems to cost them. The reasons they cite are generally along the lines of reading lots of inane material, looking at photos of people they don't really know, and responding in kind.

I think there's another, much more insidious way that we lose time on Social Media -- we edit out all the times we reload pages or wait for a response.

Think of it this way -- when you upload photos or post a note to Facebook, you click on the link, wait a few seconds, click on the post button, wait a few seconds, upload, wait a few seconds. Or, there's the fact that Twitter is often really slow. We've all seen the Fail Whale when the server cloud can't keep up with requests, so we generally hit the refresh button and get back into the flow.

All those seconds add up and next thing you know, you've spent hours of your life watching animated icons telling you to wait. And you edit that time out; that is, you don't count that as part of what you're doing, it just slips away.

In one sense this is a perfect Buddhist moment of Nirvana -- your mind is blank, you have attained a state of nothingness. In a sense of living life to the fullest, knowing that the clock is ticking... yeah, I think that's where I see the dark side of social media.

It's not that Social Media is bad, it's that the technology, and the way we use it, is stealing away our lives a few minutes at a time. It's no different than rush hour traffic, or waiting in line at the 12 items or less behind someone with 15 items and three forms of payment.

Except you eventually get home, or through the checkout lane. But with phone apps, computers at work, at home, laptops... it's like taking that traffic jam and long line with you where ever you go...

Common Sense of the New Economy

Conquent — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:20:27 -0800

Corporations are often considered the new nations. They exist to coordinate resources and maintain their workforce. But unlike representational, democratic governments, corporations do not have a responsibility to their workers; instead, they have a responsibility to their shareholders, quite often in a very legally binding sense of fiduciary responsibility.

One might argue that multi-national corporations truly live outside the law by having facilities operating under different laws, allowing them to do something that would be illegal in the US but perfectly okay in, say, China. And, through economic pressure, much as nations apply to each other, large, multi-national corporations can even get laws changed to increase their profits and make life a little worse for their employees.

But let's not confuse the concept of a corporation for the what these multi-nationals have become. Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet in 1776 that changed the course of history. (If you haven't read it, you can download a copy for free from Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3755.) The document outlines the basic idea that we need government to survive -- a man alone in the woods will die if a tree falls on him, so he lives near other people, but people don't always agree on how to deal with problems, so we create rules, then laws, and a consistent way of enforcing those laws.

Just laws come from the people who agree to live under those laws. Granted, not everyone will agree with everything, but the idea is that the majority agrees that this is the best way to do things.

We are finding two modes of business in our new, global economy. One is the multi-national corporation, which acts as an oligarchy -- the workers are only there to serve the investors. The other is the mix of independent contractors who pick and choose their work, and the rules under which they will execute that work.

Neither model is working particularly well. The large corporations are wasting billions of dollars in stupid mistakes and causing grief for millions of people. The individual contractors are living like the man in the wilderness -- if he kills a deer, he eats like a king, if not, he starves to death.

Conquent has been evolving over the years, and we are now realizing the dream of balancing the idea of independence and just rule -- it's tricky to create a structure that allows people to be safe and secure, yet still live their lives in a way that works best for them. As we have created the structure to support the ideals, the reality of paying bills, managing workflow and living life continue to intrude on Utopia.

But, whether Conquent cracks this nut or not, the evolution of business is going to happen, either in the direction of totalitarian corporate management, or in a free world of people who shape their own destiny while helping others do the same.

Twitter's back alleys and dark places

Conquent — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:36:18 -0800

Twitter keeps evolving. No, that's not really true, Twitter, itself, is pretty much what it was two years ago. But the way we USE Twitter has changed tremendously over the last year or so.

But with evolution comes unexpected consequences, and the view I'm getting lately is turning ugly. Let's see if I can sum up how Twitter is set up to fall into the sewer:

Status vs Chat
Twitter was originally called a "mircroblogging site." The idea was just to tell people what you're doing, and more precisely, to share with a specific circle of your friends. It's being used as a random chat room -- and chat almost always turns dirty.

While I don't see anything really wrong with chat, I wouldn't expect Proctor and Gamble or Comcast to put their customer service people into chat rooms where people are exchanging details about what they want to do to each other's genitalia.

Ultimately the value of chat isn't very high -- it's a useful social function, but unless you assemble an Algonquin Round Table of smart, witty, articulate people, Twitter is doomed to be "LOL! RT @DumassDude Fart noyz is kool!"

See but not seen
It is possible to keep other people from seeing your posts by setting your profile to private, but that doesn't stop people from contacting you; all they have to do is "mention" you as in "Hey, @your_name, check out this filthy link: http://linktoreallysickstuff.com". (See Twitter Followers Don't Matter (ask the porn sites))

The only way you can choose not to see something is to block an individual. Of course, everyone else can see what that person is saying about you, and if they "retweet" you'll still see it. Not only that, but all they have to do is set up another account and hit you again until you block THAT account.

This is the equivalent of responding to being verbally assaulted by putting your hands on your ears, closing your eyes and repeating, "Nah nah nah. I'm not listening." But it's your only recourse.

Adult Content
Every social media and blog site I've seen has some form of adult content notification. Yahoo has been doing this with their groups for over a decade. Facebook has age restrictions. Blogspot puts up a roadblock that says "Do you really want to see this content?" Google has "safe search." Even Craigslist, the nickel ads for hookers and swingers, has a warning on their dating and "Casual Encounters" sections.

But Twitter not only has no filters for adult content, it doesn't provide ANY filters of any kind. The fact that my company message might appear in the same stream of text as someone talking, in graphic detail, about what they're doing on their webcam, right now could prove embarrassing in the board meeting.

I'm not advocating censorship, but I am advocating tagging certain accounts for certain behavior so that if I'm not interested in dirty talk, I can turn it off. I actually like the Google solution best -- let me set my level of safety depending on my mood or what I'm doing. I may want really filtered results when at work, and I may want to go wild at home, but I should be able to choose.

Cyber Bullying
Probably one of the darker things I've been seeing on Twitter lately has been the cyber bullying. This is happening a lot with the liberal/conservative, um, "debate" is probably too nice a word.

Someone, let's say "Bob" will decide they don't like someone else, "Mary." Because Twitter is a big open forum, Bob can start saying that Mary is not only a horrible person, but can also say thing like "OMG! I can't believe she said this RT @Mary I kill puppies for fun!" Mary may never have said such a thing, but there is absolutely no recourse, or any way to validate that Mary is, indeed, a puppy killer.

This can then lead to a slew of people blocking Mary, and if enough people block her, Twitter will suspend her account, with very little recourse left to Mary. I've been through this one with an experimental account where Twitter decided I was devious, and I can tell you, proving otherwise to Twitter is a frustrating, "guilty even if proven innocent" process. My guess is that as Twitter becomes more rambunctious, the available Twitter support staff to make judgements about he says/she says arguments is only going to get worse.

Open API
For the non-technical reader, the API is a way that I can write my own programs that talk to Twitter. I see a lot of accounts that are just a stream of advertisements, and the source is almost always "API" or some program like "Twitfeed."

It's one thing to promote yourself in the course of a conversation. It's another thing to be standing in a cocktail party, chatting with you neighbor, and have someone interrupt you by shouting, "I sell cars on 9th Street! Come on over!" It's disruptive, and it's very easy to do with the tools Twitter has created.

The programs are tireless, and they are learning the limits of Twitter's monitoring programs that might otherwise shut them down for abusing the API. This means more and more "content" on Twitter isn't content at all, and people quickly lose interest as Twitter loses relevancy. But the noise remains.

The theme here is the complete lack of control in the Twitterverse. These problems can be solved, and may get solved using tools like Tweetdeck or other clients built on the Twitter API, but that always leaves the question of how Twitter will make money if no one is using Twitter's interface.

Social Media is NOT Advertising

Conquent — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:41:47 -0800

I was reading an article on Mashable the other day (What Social Media Ad Types Work Best?) where they went through seven kinds of online advertising:

banner ads -- Plain old display ad on a web page

newsletter subscription ads -- Display ad in a newsletter sent to you

corporate profiles with fans and logos -- Primarily Facebook fan pages

corporate profiles without fans or logos -- Less interactive Facebook fan page

get widgets -- something you can download an post on your site

give widgets and sponsored content -- something you can send to a friend

They basically discovered that relevance trumps all. That is, if you want to sell soup, put a basic banner ad on a cooking website.

It is true that if you let people interact, that is give your "food fight" widget to a friend, thus putting your brand out there, you'll get more eyeballs seeing your soup brand. But you won't necessarily sell more soup, at least not directly.

What I came away with from this study is that social media is so much noise -- you can't control the noise, although you can inject your own noise into the cacophony of millions of updates and snapshots and illicit conversations.

Social media advertising isn't much different than driving a truck through the city with your company name on the side. It keeps your brand in front of people, reinforcing the campaign, but it has to be part of a broader campaign. Thousands of people might see your logo trundling by on the side of a truck, but if that's all you have, your logo disappears from their minds before they even realize they saw it.

Now, don't get me wrong -- social marketing is way more than advertising, which is all this study looked at. You can't buy good, social awareness. You have to institutionalize it, and you have to use every communication tool at your disposal to truly interact with people and reinforce why your company is better than the alternative.

And that has nothing to do with social media, but just good, old fashioned, business planning.

On censorship

Conquent — Thu, 8 Apr 2010 17:09:12 -0800

I spend a lot of time surfing around the Internet as part of my job. There are a lot of people saying some pretty horrible things about each other, and other people trying to get the noise to stop by forbidding certain things to be said.

My problem is that there are a lot of very different views on the extremes of right and wrong, and as soon as you start censoring one form of speech, another form is right behind. I may not like the conservative bending of the truth and outright lying, or the wacky liberal theories based on a purple haze, but I don't want either of those extremes telling me that I can't say something.

This video showed up on some social media site or another recently. Philip Pullman has a book out entitled The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which is apparently shocking to many Christians. Below is the video where he's asked about the title and my quick transcript of his answer.

Yes it is a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live their life without being shocked. No one has the right to live their life without being offended, nobody has to read this book, nobody has to pick it up, nobody has to open it. And if they open it and read it they don't have to like it and if you read it and don't like it you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the papers, you can write to the publisher you can write your own book.

You can do all these things but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop the writing of this book. No one has the right to stop it being published or sold or bought or read.

And that's all I have to say on that subject.

I think what's important here is that he makes two points in one -- you don't have to read the book, but you don't have to be quiet about it.

While he's talking about traditional publishing, this resonated with me for a common theme I keep returning to. The Internet gives us the opportunity to learn all sorts of things that were never available to us before. As I keep stressing, we need filters so the things that we can keep from seeing the things we simply don't want to see, but those filters need to be personal filters, not general censorship.

Microsoft Courier

Conquent — Thu, 8 Apr 2010 09:29:46 -0800

With all the hype about the iPad, it's always nice to look at alternatives. I posted the HP Slate last month, and Teagan was good enough to remind me of the Microsoft Courier, which looks pretty "revolutionary and magical"

Of course, Microsoft is FANTASTIC at product demos; I don't think I've ever seen them show off a piece of technology that didn't look like the next best thing, until you get it home and try to figure out how they did the great tricks they had memorized for the presentation.

Regardless, it's always nice to see what people are thinking about, kind of like going to the auto show and seeing that car that runs on water -- you can't buy it, and it has huge drawbacks, but it's fun to think about.

Form (designers) versus Function (geeks)

Conquent — Wed, 7 Apr 2010 10:24:20 -0800

I need to make something clear -- I don't actually hate Apple. They make great products, they have amazing branding, incredible marketing, and a loyal customer base.

I hate that the competition doesn't do better.

I don't mean the competition doesn't make good products, I mean that they don't care about presentation and care more about features than usability. Technology has been controlled by the geeks, and geeks aren't exactly known for their fashion sense. Add a sense of "first to market" desperation and you get the DVD players, phones, and hard-to-use crap we spend way to much money and time on.

Most companies that try to blend form and function fail miserably -- the function guys (geeks) don't understand why the form guys (designers) insist on that shade of ecru and figure dirty white is good enough. The form guys can't understand why the function guys can't just make it work.

Instead of calling a simple device "revolutionary and magical", the geeks present a really complex, obtuse interface that does millions of things and say, "read the fucking manual" or worse yet, RTFM, being cryptic, insulting and unhelpful all in one tight little acronym. It doesn't matter that Apple's "Geniuses" are nimrods, they're friendly and polite and you feel okay about giving them a hundred bucks to throw away your old iPod.

As long as form doesn't kill you, it will always trump function. Hell, it can even kill you from time to time, cigarettes being a great example of marketing over benefit.

Somewhere on the Form<------>Function dialectic, you find management going off on a tangent. They don't care or understand either extreme and just wish the geeks and the designers would shut up and quit bitching and get a product out the door, usually rushing so the design is ugly, and the functionality just doesn't quite work.

"We'll send out a patch post-release..." The consumer shouldn't even know what a patch is, let alone a "beta" version. If they get one thing that works, that they don't have to call technical support for, that doesn't need a seminar or a training course, the will buy it. The iPad being a case in point.

Apple has mastered the art of Top Secret R&D which buys them time to get the product working, make it look and feel nice, and figure out how to make everyone believe that the limitations are really cool.

Now, if we could just get the rest of the tech world to slow down, talk a little, and produce something that works and is pleasing, then I can stop ranting about Apple.

Bad Restroom Health Sign

Conquent — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:23:40 -0800

We have the complicated job of taking business process and turning it into pretty pictures that people can follow. We call it the web, but we have close cousins in the world of instructional signs.

Unfortunately, a lot of people just don't think about how the human mind works. Take this for example:

I know they're saying wash your hands after using the restroom and before serving food, but, to me, it looks more like this process:

Enter the Restroom
Scoop some crap out of the toilet and warm it under hot water
Be sure to get it really warm
Serve the hot, wet crap on noodles

You'd think people who make restroom health signs would have a little process review. And maybe enough of a sense of humor to see this kind of thing. And, apparently, you'd be wrong.

PDXBOOM -- The power of social media and the portland pipe bomb

Conquent — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:45:00 -0800

Last night Markie and I were at home working away on our laptops when there was a deafening "boom" shaking the house and scaring the crap out of the cats -- not that I was feeling entirely relaxed about it.

I went outside to see if there was anything to see, and found all our neighbors on their porches yelling things to each other like, "What the hell was that?" It kind of reminded me of an old Twilight Zone where the world is coming to an end but we just don't quite know it yet.

Of course, the world didn't come to an end, and after calling 911 to be told "yeah, we know," everyone wandered back into their houses and their Sunday night routines (which judging by the bottles and glasses in everyone's hands, those routines include a lot of drinking...) A fire truck wandered through the neighborhood a little later, looking in vain for something to extinguish, but nothing was found.

This morning when I got up I tried to learn more about what happened. I found an article on the Oregonian's website that said the police and fire departments knew nothing, but that that Twitter was ablaze with discussion on the hashtag #pdxboom. People apparently heard it as far away as Vancouver and with no concrete answers from the city, rumors were flying online.

Twitter became a sort of a front porch with a lot more neighbors. The discussion went from concerned, somber speculation to playful fantasy where comments like Portland was trying to forcibly eject Lake Oswego and Doctor Who references abounded.

But then something more productive also happened. @spinnerin had created an interactive Google map allowing you to post where you were when you heard the BOOM and how loud it was, color coding your boom by intensity:

While completely unscientific from a data collection standpoint, this was one of those amazing Social Media moments. Suddenly you could see the "blast pattern" of noise. You could read the anecdotes of what people were doing or thought about the boom. It was better coverage than the traditional news could ever do with their random interviews of people on the street -- you could see what people around you thought, and get an idea of if your experience was the same as the people miles away.

And I like to think it helped the police find the remains of the pipe bomb. Clues were scattered through the postings, with more volume of reports than a cop on a beat could get. It was pretty obvious that the explosion happened in Sellwood, and the two reports from the river saying they saw a flash along with the boom could only have helped to focus the search on the east bank south of the Sellwood Bridge.

It's what I keep saying about filters and learning how to use these new media. It's not just Twitter, it's people using the Internet to communicate. Maybe they aren't communicating directly with anyone, maybe it's just a random posting that says "I saw a flash and heard a boom."

But this mix of random stuff brings a city of 1 million people together as if they're all on their porches figuring out what to do about the loud noise they all heard.

China and Apple -- Different organizations, same management

Conquent — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 08:38:46 -0800

I rant about Apple a lot, probably more than is healthy. Mostly I'm ranting about the disconnect between how people perceive Apple (hip, progressive, cool) and the way the company actually runs things (iron fisted control over production, distribution, and most disturbingly to me, what you can do with the product once you buy it).

Watching the issues between Google and China is kind of like watching the issues between Google and Apple. The differences aren't about technology limitations or competition for business, the differences are about who has control -- is it the individual or the organization?

Apple and China both believe the organization should control what the individual does and how they do it. It seems to work to make a happier general population; Apple users are almost fanatical about the product and the Chinese populace has a sense of national pride usually reserved for old men with nostalgia.

Except both Apple and China have their detractors with the educated crowd -- in Apple's case it's the technical savvy and in China's it's the world savvy who have gone to university and traveled and seen there are other ways to do things.

The frustration is the same -- when the organization controls the population, life becomes more homogeneous, you have fewer choices, more limitations on what you can do, and innovation stagnates.

Google provided a standard for Chinese companies to work towards, but from what I've seen and read, without an outside impetus, Chinese companies tend to copy each other rather than invest in R&D.

Apple has been steadily copying other technologies, and while they made a great MP3 player and prettier smartphone, they really offer nothing fundamentally new, to the point that even the uneducated, fanatical masses recognize the iPad as just another iPod/iPhone/iTouch clone.

The world faces some really serious challenges with too many people and too few resources. This is when we need innovation, but the problem is that the benevolent dictator model makes people happy. It's in part because all this shit is so complicated that we need someone to tell us, "This is how it works," even if there are other, better ways to make it work.

Of course it was this ideal that led to the "I was just following orders" defense...

The volume of screens

Conquent — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:04:53 -0800

A couple years back we had the unfortunate experience of purchasing the contents of a trade show booth for a client who didn't pay. Most of what you develop for a trade show booth is completely unusable for anyone other than the client, but there were a couple of 32" LCD TVs as part of the display -- after a while they ended up in my house.

This means that in addition to the 42" TV downstairs and the little 13.5" TV in the kitchen that we already had, we now have a 32" TV in the home office and another one hanging on the wall in the bedroom (I never wanted a TV in the bedroom, but when I had the flu last year, it was nice to have access to movies).

The square footage of screens that I have available to me is absolutely staggering. Let's do some quick math --

   36" Home office: 426.25"
   36" Bedroom: 426.25"
   42" Basement: 756"
   13.5" Kitchen: 93.5"

    1,703 square inches or about 12 square feet of viewing area

That's just the TVs. I've got a 14" diagonal screen on the Sony Viao I'm typing on right now and Markie's Dell has another 90 square inches. Add in the tower downstairs and we have around 14 square feet of viewable screens in the house, and that's not even counting my Windows Mobile and her iPhone screens or the company laptops that come to visit like Toughbook or the new netbook I bought for SXSW.

If we gathered all these screens together it would be an obscene display of geekdom. Heck, even having them scattered through the house it's pretty obscene. But we're not an unusual household, and the volume I have is in part because my job requires me to be online, and in part by accident -- others get here by intention.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I'm starting to think it might be paved with LCD screens.

Logorama

Conquent — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:45:57 -0800

I just watched the Oscar winning short "logorama"

Fun film, great animation, but that's pretty much how I see L.A. -- so is it really satire or just way too close to home?

Sleeping through miracles

Conquent — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:47:11 -0800

I'm mid trip on a redeye flight to Austin from Portland sitting in a noisy, brightly lit food court in Houston. By my clock it's 3:30 in the morning, although locally it's 5:30, it's still that in-between where it's not really night or morning, just that surreal sense of timelessness you get when you're trapped in the airline system for any length of time.

This is the modern land of Faerie where time has no meaning and you're whisked from your warm bed to faraway places at unimaginable speeds. The fact that this surreal world is so mundane with 50's oldies and the sound of fryers doesn't make it any less surreal or miraculous. Of course, dressing it up in poetic words doesn't make it any less annoying -- but then I think the land of Faerie was probably pretty annoying to the rare sober Irishman who wandered in.

The flight from Portland to Houston left at 11:59, maybe actually lifting into the air at the witching hour itself. Most people were already snuggling down with the airline's tiny pillows and blankets before we took off. Personally, I always stay awake until we're up, partly because take off and landing is the most interesting part of the flight, and partly because (as it's the most dangerous as well) I don't want to wake up dead.

In the air there are countless miracles of technology -- this flight had TVs in the back of the seats so everyone could choose their own show to watch at the wave of a hand. A hand waving a credit card through a card reader, that is. But then Faeries taking money from you while you race above the clouds is part of any good tale.

At some point in the flight I tiptoed down the aisle to use the facilities. A hundred men and women all facing the same way, almost all asleep faced me. They woke up a couple thousand miles from where they started, and if they had to walk back, it would take them months if not a year, if ever...

It's a world of mundane miracles, and I only wish I could have gotten comfortable enough to sleep through them all too...

Who needs an URL anyhow?

Conquent — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:43:35 -0800

The printer brought by the fliers that I'm taking with me to SXSW so we have a little more than a business card to drop on people when talking about Conquent. As usual, Purnima did a great design job:

As we were going through the design process, we decided to keep it to some of the highlights of the past year and not clutter it with words or contact info. When looking at the proof we had some discussion of whether at least www.conquent.com should have been included and we decided that it was absolutely unnecessary for a brand like Conquent.

If we were XYZ Co or Bob's Management Group, sure. But we're Conquent, and nobody else is. Go to Google and type in Conquent, you get us. Go to Conquent.com, you get us. And if you happen to stumble upon a domain squatter, our brand is pretty recognizable, and squatters are not Conquent.

I've made the point for years that you shouldn't settle for a domain name that's just like your competitor (see You figured .biz, .info, .us would work fine), but more importantly, you need a strong brand that will carry itself with no explanation. Even with something as hard to explain as Conquent.

Transmedia

Conquent — Tue, 9 Mar 2010 17:11:13 -0800

Sometimes you need a new word, but most of the time there is a perfectly good word that you don't know or maybe just don't like. Corporate America loves new words, and I'm not sure why, after all, they don't treat the words they have particularly well...

Take this word: Transmedia. While it sounds like the transexual porn section of the video store, it's actually a marketing term that refers to storytelling, where "content becomes invasive and permeates fully the audience's lifestyle." (wiki).

Which means omnipresent storytelling, or cross-media, or just plain pervasive media.

Creating a word to describe your idea isn't new, but we used to call it "branding." You would come up with an idea for a new soft drink, coin a term, trademark it, and create Coca Cola. Eventually the word Coke means any soft drink. The generic word "soft drink" is still there, but the mainstream use of "Coke" only happens after the brand, and therefore the word, is established in popular culture.

The prevailing thought now is to create a word, and use it enough that you force it into popular culture. It almost never works, as seen with the broken trail of words and jargon.

The problem I have with making up words is based in one of my basic maxims: This stuff is complicated enough, we don't have to make it more complicated. The process of explaining your concept of pervasive storytelling is slowed down by creating a word that could be gay porn or a Soviet telegraph.

I'm not saying that "pervasive storytelling" isn't a mouthful, but if I look up the words on Dictionary.com or, lord help us, in a book, the words have meaning and I don't need a wiki or a jargon dictionary to figure out the concept on my own.

Now take your crazy talk and get off my lawn...

That magical little tablet

Conquent — Mon, 8 Mar 2010 22:40:10 -0800

The iPad got a release date and a spiffy ad on the Oscars last night. I gotta say, they make it look sexy...

Oh, wait, that's not the iPad, that's a tablet PC from HP. And it's got Flash, multi-tasking, and a full operating system.

Phil McKinney, vice president and chief technology officer for HP�s personal system group posted on HP's blog, "With this slate product, you�re getting a full web browsing experience in the palm of your hand. No watered-down internet, no sacrifices."

Unfortunately, we don't know when or how much, but if there's one good thing coming out of Apple's aggressive marketing it would be upping the ante and other players stepping up.

The complications of making coffee

Conquent — Sun, 7 Mar 2010 07:57:18 -0800

Ever make Cowboy coffee? That's where you pour water and coffee into a pan, boil it, and pour it into a mug, leaving most of the grounds in the pan. It's bitter and gritty, but who cares, it's coffee on the open range.

I don't live on the open range. Nope, we have our sophisticated tastes, even in the early morning when my mouth feels like a raccoon raised a family of six in there. When I make coffee in the morning, I'm catering to two different palettes, I like a hot, steamed latte in a mug, Markie likes a tall glass of iced latte.

To make these urban coffees, I use an espresso machine which is picky about the coffee you can use. It turns out there are two kinds of espresso machines, one kind uses steam pressure to push the water through the grounds, and the other, like ours, uses mechanical pressure. You can use a finer grind of coffee because steam pressure is higher pressure than the mechanical pressure.

I learned this when I went to make espresso this morning with a new bag of freshly ground espresso and got a slow drip of dark liquid that looked like something that would come out of the oil pan in my old AMC Gremlin. Congress could pass health care reform faster than I'd get four ounces of coffee out of the machine because "espresso grind" in this case was like the clay you use for sand casting in metal shop.

That sand casting metaphor is more accurate than you might think -- if the coffee is too oily, it sticks together more, too, and your coffee pours like Eva Gabor's on Green Acres (someone will get that reference). If it's too dry, you don't really get espresso, just something more like gritty instant Folgers.

And then there's that whole trick to "tamping" the "hopper" -- again, too tight, bitter nastiness, too loose, bitter, yet flavorless, nastiness. I had been using a shot glass to tamp the espresso, but I kept getting rolling hills rather than a black tabletop. Took going to four stores to find a proper tamper (Starbucks, a specialty baking store, a specialty grocery and finally Sur la Table). And by "proper tamper" I ended up with a steel spool with one end bigger than the other...

We have a pitcher for steaming milk, which, if you don't have one, you end up with milk everywhere and 3rd degree burns on the back of your hand. Commercial lattes are steamed to about 160 degrees (70 C), and our steamer has a thermometer with a red zone between 150 and 170. I just wish they'd picked something other than red as that always says danger to me, but regardless, if I don't use the thermometer I usually end up with baked milk rather than steamed milk.

On the other extreme, icing Markie's latte requires finding the right sized glass so I keep the milk to coffee ratio correct, putting the milk into the glass before the espresso so I don't heat up that glass (or melt the plastic cup on weekdays) letting it stand for just long enough to cool down so the ice doesn't all melt, making sure my fingers are dry before I grab ice with my bare hands and freeze it to my skin (yeah, I know, use a scoop, although you still get the frozen skin issue)... basic kitchen routines always take longer to type than to do, but it's still a lot of steps for cold cup of coffee.

Maybe I should just have a a good cuppa. Just need to find the strainer, the kettle, the teapot, warm the milk a touch while I wait for the tea to steep, clean up array of dishes and spoons that seem to collect after a proper cup of tea...

Damn.

How your website can be in two places at once

Conquent — Thu, 4 Mar 2010 09:49:57 -0800

I get questions from clients often about how long it takes to move a website. Sometimes when we move a site, it seems like it's still running in two places at once, and that's because it really is -- not every computer on the Internet has gotten the new location of the web site.

As a kind of geek-translation review, here's what happens when you move a web address:

1) Whois Record/Name Servers
When you register your domain name, you tell the registrar what name servers you're going to use. So if I look up Conquent.com I see two name servers listed:

    NS1.CONQUENT.COM
    NS2.CONQUENT.COM

There are two name servers for redundancy, one that's the primary and one that gets a copy of the address from the primary. So, if I change the numeric address for www.conquent.com from, say 204.181.197.6 to 204.181.197.21, it can take time for the secondary server to get the new address.

2) Your provider's Name Server
Your computer doesn't go directly to NS1.CONQUENT.COM to locate my web site, instead, your computer asks your ISP, such as Comcast. When you look up www.conquent.com you ask Comcast to, in turn, ask NS1. Comcast can cache (or keep a copy) of the old record for up to 24 hours -- so even if you're on a computer that's never visited the website, you still might get the old IP address.

Keep in mind, this is a good thing -- it means that all the people who are visiting sites don't overwhelm NS1.CONQUENT.COM with requests. You visit www.conquent.com on Comcast, it looks up the address, and then your neighbor visits, and Comcast doesn't have to bug us again asking for the same info -- it's part of that redundant system concept that makes the Internet work.

3) Your personal computer DNS cache
Just as Comcast holds onto a copy of the old DNS record, your personal computer holds onto a copy. Restarting your computer can flush the local copies of the old DNS, or you can get geeky and (in Windows), shut down all your browsers, run the Command prompt and type:

    ipconfig /flushdns

but most folks who even have the technical savvy to do this probably won't go to that extent.

Even when I try to translate these concepts into plain English, I know it's still pretty thick. But that's why I say, yeah... it's complicated.

Masterpieces created by sheer volume

Conquent — Wed, 3 Mar 2010 10:13:36 -0800

One of my favorite movies is Casablanca. It's a great love triangle and you really don't know exactly where the story going the first time you watch it. It's almost like the writers didn't know how the movie was going to end as it was being filmed... well, it's exactly like that. They wrote the last scene pretty much just before they shot it.

Ingrid Bergman plays Ilsa as being in love with both Rick and Victor not because she's a great actress (which she was), but because she honestly didn't know which man Ilsa ended up with. The dramatic twist ending ("Round up the usual suspects") was the most expedient way to end the film.

This was the studio system era where a studio would knock out 52 movies a year with whatever talent they had on hand. The cast was whoever Warner Brothers had available, and they had lots of different ideas of who should play whom; we just got lucky. They used a staff composer and got Max Steiner (Gone with the Wind) and the signature "As Time Goes By" only stayed in the movie because there wasn't time to write a new piece of music -- 52 movies a year means you keep on schedule.

It turns out that Casablanca is one of the greatest films of all time not because someone worked hard to create a masterpiece, but because of random numbers and volume. It's like the idea that an infinite number of monkeys on keyboards with infinite amount of time will eventually randomly type Shakespeare's Hamlet. Enough random banging at the studio and you get Casablanca.

And here we are with the Internet and everyone posting their random thoughts, pictures, and films. There's some amazing stuff online and more amazing stuff coming down the pipe if only because the sheer volume of creativity that's being captured and distributed.

Sure, 99.999999999% of it is useless crap, but I'll argue that in the next few years we're going to see some work of art come out of nowhere, and the only reason we'll get to see it is because we live in an age where there's so much content that quantum physics comes into play for the next great masterpiece.

Suing over lack of originality

Conquent — Tue, 2 Mar 2010 12:20:21 -0800

Quick primer on what a patent really is: A fantastic oxymoron where the government decides you're creative and grants you a dry legal right to sue people with similar ideas. It's a first come first serve system, regardless of who actually created what.

Today Apple sued HTC because Apple has patents that say they're the first company to patent a number of things, even when they obviously weren't the first to do these things. For example

Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image I had this on a Sony Clie running Palm OS in 2003
System And Method For Managing Power Conditions Within A Digital Camera DeviceI believe Nokia is suing Apple over this very thing
Object-Oriented Graphic System They already lost this one when they sued Microsoft mainly because Apple stole the idea from Xerox

Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, said Tuesday in a statement. "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

It's not easy to say where an idea comes from, but we all know that they aren't created in a vacuum. If you come up with something really cool, it doesn't mean that someone else didn't come up with the same idea. "Not steal ours" is insulting to the tech world -- HTC could have independently come up with the same ideas, ideas that Apple obviously didn't come up with independently.

Patents are supposed to make it easier to protect your investment. I may dis Apple regularly, but the iPhone is a great integration of a lot of different ideas, and it's the gestalt of those ideas that makes it king, not the little widgets that they bamboozled the US Patent office into awarding legal "wow" status to.

The reality is innovation slows when you treat little ideas like big ideas and sue people because they have some of the same little ideas -- if Apple had its way, there would be no Microsoft, there would be no Linux. There's a whole universe of ideas that Steve Jobs didn't patent, or maybe he did, and failed to enforce his patents. And the world is a richer place for that.

A Primer on Internet Fame -- dancing babies, hamsters, numa numa, and more...

Conquent — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:19:53 -0800

The Internet gives you the chance to be famous. Unfortunately, it's usually for the stupidest stuff on the planet... stuff that sticks in our minds and won't get out. My problem is that I find myself referencing one of these bits of Internet pop culture that went wild and then the person I'm talking to gives me a blank stare. I mean it's bad enough that I referenced it, it's worse when I have to try to explain what the hell I'm talking about.

So, as a public service, okay, a self-service, I decided to put together a quick primer of some of the, ahem, "high" points of Internet pop culture gone wild.

It all started with a dancing baby:

This is the one that started as the crappy animated GIF you see here and went all the way to being a guest character on Ally McBeal (and there's a dated TV reference if I've ever seen one).

About the same time we got the amazingly annoying dancing hamster site. I have to embed a YouTube video of it as the site no longer exists, but let me warn you before you hit play, the song gets stuck in your head:

The original was actually just four images repeated over and over again and a short WAV file looping -- this was amazning! Animation AND audio! And it NEVER ended... The original tune (Whistle Stop by Roger Miller) isn't really much less annoying, but it's more mellow...

Of course, with the invention of YouTube, we got a lot more annoying song and dance numbers. The most famous being the Numa Numa guy.

I don't know what it is about this fat guy lip syncing to Dragostea Din Tei, but it a catchy tune (be sure to check out the original O-Zone version, the opera version and The Bloodhound Gang's cover).

Where Gary Brolsma embraced being the "numa numa guy", the Star Wars kid decided to sue after some friends released this video of him goofing off in front of the camera (you don't have to watch the whole thing to get the gist):

Someone else took the video and made this amazing redeaux:

Personally, I would have been pretty thrilled to have my goofy antics turned into kickass Jedi moves. Other people thought is was cool too, so they made versions of it for Matrix, Kill Bill and more.

But then let's not forget the guy who really worked it: Tay Zonday and his oddly compelling original song, "Chocolate Rain"

He's an anomaly because he's, well, odd, but he created his own slice of pop culture. He turned a buck off his Internet fame by selling out to Dr. Pepper for his own Cherry Chocolate Rain Parody

If it wasn't for the Internet, nobodies would never get their odd little messages out. Oh, except for that movable type thing and Martin Luther... and the Underground in WWII... and pirate radio... oh, and gossip... and...

The Lawsuit Lottery

Conquent — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:27:56 -0800

Not too long ago in Portland a man got separated from his kid on the Max train. It was a terrible thing, and the train driver didn't stop to let him out -- fortunately a woman at the train station saw it happen and stayed with the kid until the dad was able to change trains at the next stop and get back.

I remember the story as a heartwarming example of how people actually do step in and take care of each other, that the woman on the platform did a good thing by watching a stranger's child and everything came out okay in the end.

The driver got fired for negligence and lying to Tri-Met (he apparently told his bosses he didn't do anything because the intercom was broken, but that doesn't seem to be true). Overall I felt the problem was resolved -- the kid was okay, and the driver won't be in a position to cause such a problem again.

Except the dad is now suing Tri-Met for $300,000 for "emotional distress." I'm not saying it wasn't distressing, but it was an accident, and the problems that led to the accident have been fixed, so "sending a message to Tri-Met" is redundant.

$300K sounds like a lawyer number to me -- one of those that's big enough to be worth pursuing on a long shot, but small enough that it might just be easier for Tri-Met to settle. That settlement, of course, comes out of money we all pay in taxes, and out of a transportation budget that's already strained with fewer people working and, therefore, fewer people paying those taxes.

I just wish that when bad things happen and everything comes out okay that people would decide to "send a message" that our community works, that we take care of each other, and that we don't need to profit from the government because one ex-employee was an idiot.

Checking my messages

Conquent — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:58:09 -0800

My alarm goes off at 6:30 in the morning, and if that doesn't get me out of bed, the trucks rumbling by get noisier by 7. Most mornings I roll over, grab my phone and check my email -- although the first email of the day is more of a purging of spam that slipped through the filter over night. I occasionally also have to respond to a text message that came in the dark of night from some drunk or desperate friend or maybe one of those East coast colleagues who forget it's three hours earlier here...

Then I wander downstairs to my computer where I check Twitter for mentions @bissell, Direct Messages, and new followers I might want to follow back. More and more often the followers are Twitter whores trying to sell me services to get more followers, so less and less do I follow them back (an ironic circle when you think about it).

Next I pop over to the Facebook tab to respond to any messages and check notifications. Granted, I already know if I have messages before I get there as I get a notice in my email, but responding still requires a visit to the ever changing Facebook interface.

I peek in on LinkedIn somewhere in there, but as I'm not actively hiring, and LinkedIn has become more of an online job fair, I don't seem to get a lot of contact there.

Of course I need to check out my blog to see if there are comments that need to be purged or responded to. While I'm there, I look over the logs which tell me not only how many people have visited my blog but where a lot of them came from. So, if I see an intriguing keyword or a link from a site I'm not familiar with, I have to take a peek just to see in what context people are talking about me. (Someone liked my blog about being out of shape today... Hmm...)

Messages are sometimes hidden in data, so I have to check the stats from other logs for the primary Conquent websites and projects. I have a little overview dashboard that pulls stats from multiple places so I know things like Google owes Conquent 11 bucks for advertising, the Hallmark Channel Valentines Day campaign is over, and I found that Jokeindex.com was broken because there was no traffic at all.

Over to the Conquent Task Manager where I assign a quick task to the tech managing Jokeindex, review a couple other tasks assigned to me, and write the appropriate responses.

Back to the cell phone to check voice mail, and then I can take a shower, finish my coffee and get my ass to the office. Of course when I get to the office there's US Mail, FedEx pouches and UPS boxes, but we don't really count that as part of our daily communication anymore, do we?

Another Random Night of Arts in Portland

Conquent — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:13:01 -0800

I had to take care of some banking for one of Conquent's sister companies yesterday. After an unsatisfying conversation with a lying banker in a mind-numbingly dull building in an equally dull suburban parking lot, I needed a decent meal and some Southeast Portland culture.

The Press Club is over on SE Clinton and 26th -- Markie and I had a great lunch there in November, and it was just as good as I remembered. It has the basic coffee house vibe with lots of magazines, a menu of crepes and sandwiches, and this being Portland, a full bar. Don was doing some electrical work at New Seasons around the corner, so he came over and had a shot of Makers and some dessert crepe.

We then goaded our friend Julie into coming out for dinner and wandered over to The Savoy for some good happy hour fare, and then decided to wander back to the Press Club. And here's where Portland gets oddly Artsy on a Wednesday night...

The Clinton Street Theater had a live performance of Das Rheingold, you know, the first of Wagner's Ring series of opera. But it wasn't just an opera, no it was electric guitars and Baywatch. Damn I wish we had already had dinner, I'm sure I could have talked them into going in, but it's an experience I'll just have to imagine.

Too hungry for a two hour performance, we went back to The Press Club and found a podium and microphone set up, prompting the question, "Is there anything scarier than an open mic poetry reading?" Halfway through crepes the lilting droning started.

Look, I write in a prosaic, colorful way, my mother is a published poet, I have an ear for painting a picture with words, but I think there should be a rule: poets should not read their own poetry. First off, poetry shouldn't be explained, and certainly not mid-poem. But the other part is that most of these folks are introverted Intelligencia so their reading skills are... well, if you ever hear Morgan Freeman read IRS tax code, you'll get the basic verve, but even that might be more interesting.

And you can't just walk out on them -- it feels too much like walking out on someone's therapy session...

We skipped out when there was a break, back to the Savoy where we met up with Markie, only by then I was getting pretty tired from an afternoon and early evening of rich food and drink. Julie and I slipped out to find some espresso, but as it was a little after nine, prospects weren't good. We walked up to Division, saw some guy drinking a beer outside a non-descript building (except for the amazing light fixtures out front). He didn't know where there was coffee, but he invited us in to see the private opening for Martin Eichinger's bronze sculpture.

The event was for some sculptor's club and the place was teeming with sculptures and sculptors alike. The sculptures were mainly people frozen in motion, and some of his works reminded me of classic Rodin pieces. The sculptors were your basic Portland crowd, lubricated a little on wine. It wasn't the coffee we were looking for, but it was a surprising little side trip.

But then, that's just a normal, random Wednesday in Portland. Bourbon and crepes, poetry, Baywatch, Wagner, bronze sculptures... And then back to my desk to work for another three hours....

Rules are made to be broken -- in a reasoned, systematic way

Conquent — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:35:39 -0800

I have a real problem with rules.... Some people say that "rules are made to be broken" but I think more along the lines that rules are made by someone else, and that makes them easy to ignore.

The real problem I have with rules is other people's blind faith in the rules. I agree, rules are necessary for society to function, but not all rules are laws, and not all laws are rational or even reasonable.

The complex world we live in often needs complex rules, but solving problems in this world means forgetting about rules and looking at the issues. Maybe that's what I like about scientific method -- the idea is to break the rules except for one -- the solution needs to work and be repeatable by others.

"Just do it because I said and Damn the rules!" is just as emotional and irrational as "I don't care if we're all going to die, the rules say we can't!" There is a time, just about every day in my world, where we have to say, "We need to ignore that rule because..."

And here's the rub. The explanation for why we need to ignore a rule is often so complicated your audience might as well hear "because I said so."

Which gets me back to pure science as a business tool... Science breaks rules by documenting how the rule is irrelevant or changed by new information. That new information is reviewed by other people who know the subject matter, and then they either agree or disagree. Once there's agreement, we're not breaking the rules anymore, we've adapted the rules to the new reality.

The problem is that business needs to turn these ideas around faster than the scientific community changes the laws of physics, or even comes to agreement on evolution or global warming.

What we need is a plain English, standardized method to explore business ideas. It's not the technology that's missing (Wiki's are great for this model), it's the business culture, and the only way I can see getting business people to adopt scientific process is to say "Just do it because I said so!" and that's not the mindset that adopts this model.

Guess I'll just keep breaking rules...

So many accounts, so few passwords

Conquent — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:08:51 -0800

Watching the Twitter stream this morning, I saw a couple notes go by from @chrisorourke:

Hmm looks like someone is hitting all of my online account password recovery tools. 17 texts in the last 10 minutes... about 3 hours ago from Seesmic

Looks like they didn't manage to break into any of my accounts. Nice try, Mr. Hacker. 5 minutes ago from web

DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS!!! 2 minutes ago from web

GOD DAMNIT, IT WAS PHONE!!! 2 minutes ago from web

Now, I'm not sure if that last post came from Chris or the hacker, but it sounds like he got hacked (cracked?) because someone had access to at least one of his email accounts -- that is, all they were doing was asking services to send login information to the email address on file, and once they got that, they were in.

This might not have been a big problem back in the day that we only had a couple passwords for a couple places. But now we a have couple passwords for multiple email accounts, Facebook, Twitter, flickr or some other photo share and a host of services that, in turn, tie into these things.

Most people I know only have one, or maybe two, passwords, so if you get the password to one account, you're in most of the other accounts. Changing those passwords regularly is almost impossible -- I have literally dozens of social media accounts out there, and I've set up logins on various bulletin boards or other information services that I don't even remember visiting. If I used my real email address and a repetitive password on all of those, then I just handed login info to OTHER sites to whoever runs that board.

I try to be careful and use an obscure Hotmail account and provide no personal information, but it's getting harder to avoid. Ping.fm and Google both have access to a LOT of my accounts. Maybe they don't have my passwords (well, Google does), but it effectively doesn't matter -- bad boy cracker gets into a master account like one of those, and he can spam dozens of websites simultaneously.

This is, in part, the cost of Joe Everyman wanting the spotlight. Everyone wants their voice to rise above the noise, but self publishing online is hard work. People get lazy managing multiple accounts, but when a hacker/slacker/code cracker gets in and uses your accounts for a moment of mental masturbation (why else are the fake postings always about sex?), it's not just the time recovering face, it's the time it takes recovering all those accounts...

The Dali Lama of Hillsdale

Conquent — Tue, 9 Feb 2010 09:06:57 -0800

Conquent's office in Portland is in a great creative space -- an old bungalow in the Hillsdale neighborhood with high ceilings, wood floors, and a lot of character. Unfortunately part of that character comes from the homeless guy who lives under the bridge next to the office.

Doug's not really a problem -- he's quiet, keeps to himself, only talks about getting a gun when he's really drunk... When we meet in the parking area, or as I walk past the garbage and recycling on my way to the coffee shop, he always says, "Good morning, neighbor." But any time I've tried to engage him in any real conversation, it becomes pretty clear why he's homeless -- the man just isn't all there.

He rambles in a way that almost seems coherent, but just doesn't fit together. His topics might be frightening, but he's just so damn folksy as he talks about how the city has no right to throw him out and the kids keep messing with his stuff, and he was somewhere once when this thing happened but there isn't quite enough detail to understand where he was or what it was that happened.

Mind you, he's functional in the sense that he works hard collecting cans and bottles, keeps himself safe (his bivouac is tidy and secure and kept dry by the old Capitol Highway bridge). He scores food and cooks over a small open fire that he keeps just small enough to keep the cops from shutting him down. The cops know him, and he knows when to clear out his stuff before the cops do it for him, and when to come back after they clean up the camp.

But this blog isn't about Doug, it's about the people I find dropping things off in the parking area for him. These people aren't your "help the homeless at Christmas" crowd; they have some personal attachment to Doug.

I had a long conversation with a man wearing driving gloves and a suit who pulled a bag of cans out of his Mercedes. He spoke about Doug almost reverently, mentioning that at one point Doug was training to be a priest, and what an amazing person he is, finding his own way in life and making it on the streets.

Other people around the neighborhood know about Doug and talk about him in the same, almost proud way a parent talks about their child graduating from Harvard. They see Doug as a rugged individual who has made life choices and is living the simple life in the midst of our urban jungle. Sort of Grizzly Adams in the city.

Most of these folks have never talked with Doug, and the impression I get from those who have talked with him is that they edited the conversation into something that makes sense for them. He's almost a living I-Ching where the answers that you seek are reflected in the lack of answers he provides.

I don't think there's really anything wrong with this either. One homeless guy next to the office is quirky, and Conquent's quirky enough that I'm not really worried about what our clients will think. And his presence gives something to the community that they need.

Ironic as it may be, the perception of Doug provides a spiritual touch point for the American Dream -- the rugged individual living by his own rules outside the corporate/political structure.

It's just too bad that he's a crazy homeless guy...

Who really uses Twitter? 60% of Twitter's traffic isn't on Twitter

Conquent — Mon, 8 Feb 2010 10:08:50 -0800

There are two ways to post and read stuff on Twitter -- you can fire up your web browser and go to www.twitter.com or you can or you can use the API. Well, not really "use the API" but rather, use a program that some geek wrote that uses the API.

And there are LOTS of Twitter programs out there. I'm running a report right now that grabs what program people use to post comments on Twitter and in less than 24 hours I've seen over 350 unique apps. Sure, most of them are hardly used at all, but that's kind of my point -- people don't use Twitter, they use Twitter's database.

Let me see if some numbers help... From a sampling of 12,760 postings, we saw 351 unique programs posting to Twitter. People posted to Twitter using Twitter's web interface less than 40% of the time. That means that 60% of the traffic on Twitter never sees Twitter.com.

This is completely backwards from every web application out there. The idea has always been to build traffic. I remember a conversation I had with the folks at MSN who kept talking about "eyeballs" -- they wanted as many people to show up as possible, and then get those people to spend as much time on MSN websites as possible so they could deliver as many ads as possible.

MSN is one of the biggest properties on the Internet and their revenue model is the same one we had with tiny sites back in the 90's. Getting people to your site means controlling what they see and creating inventory that you can sell.

But Twitter is literally giving away inventory. It's like owning a shopping mall only you aren't charging the stores for using your building. You let them put up their own signs, sell products, and be completely autonomous while you provide the space and the infrastructure.

Now, I know Twitter got that $1 Billion valuation last year (New York Times), but I still have no idea why investors think this is such a valuable property -- sure, there are 13 million active users and 75 million accounts, and so many postings I won't even hazard a guess, but, who really sees Twitter?

And how do you leverage your customers if you don't see 60% of them?

Riding the commute route on Saturday

Conquent — Sat, 6 Feb 2010 11:04:41 -0800

I have two options if I want to ride my bike to work -- go straight up a hill through the cemetery or head down the Springwater trail and go through downtown. Seeing as my muscles just don't wake up as quickly as they once did, I usually take the longer route through downtown so my legs don't explode when I get to the hill.

It's a nice ride down the trail in the morning -- some joggers, a few bikes in the other direction and an occasional bike to pass in the same direction. I can look at the wetlands, maybe see the eagles circling, and basically just ride.

Not so when I take the same route on a Saturday morning.

Let's start with the marathon trainers. Apparently the way to train for a marathon is to join a group... a BIG group. I'm talking 20-30 people running in an amoebic mass, chatting with each other, and not really aware that there might be 230 lbs. of man and steel hurtling towards them. Only thing worse than one of these blobs is two blobs going in both directions -- it's like sheep blocking an Irish road, only without the charm.

Then we've got the weekend warrior riders who fall into two categories of danger at the same time -- too fast and too slow. I'm not in any kind of decent riding shape, but I know what my pace is, and while I hate someone being ahead of me who I can't quite catch, if I pass them, they stay passed. But there are these pseudo-hotshots on the trail who push past me, and then slow down. I have to wonder if these are the same guys who do that to me in their cars...

Of course the other too slow category isn't people who just ride slower than me, it's people who meander all over the trail. It's bad enough when I come up behind them and ring my bell a dozen times but then I have to yell "On your left! Um... your right... Never mind, right between the two of you..." But the people coming in the other direction, riding side by side, sort of, and looking everywhere but the direction they're going are just asking for a head-on collision.

I have to say for the record that don't mind the families with the tykes on bykes that much. Sure, it's annoying for me to have slow down, but it's nice to see a family out doing something together. I don't like seeing Dad without a helmet, but I always slow down, ring my bell, pass carefully and say "excuse me" as I go by.

It's not their fault I'm riding like a maniac on a Saturday...

Not everyone is like you

Conquent — Fri, 5 Feb 2010 17:36:40 -0800

This could be a tech blog where I rant about developers who believe everyone has the same awesome computer system they have, with the same browser and the same super fast connection, and that everyone cares about the same shiny objects they do.

But that would limit my rant.

The world is a big place with billions of people. You expect the aboriginal bushman to be different from you and you expect the Chinese factory worker to be different from you. These folks are foreign and somehow removed from your life, so you can keep them separate from your daily routine. Knowing they're different makes it easier to account for their odd behavior.

But there's that guy driving like an idiot, or the person who just can't figure out how to operate the U-Scan at the grocery store -- those subtle differences drive us nuts because we just don't understand how someone who looks like us, talks like us and shops in the same store as us can be such a fucking idiot.

They aren't really idiots, they're just different. They've seen things you haven't and they haven't seen things you have. Those different experiences mean that they interact with the world differently than you do, and that's okay.

The trouble comes in when you try to put someone into your box and they aren't like you. Sure, companies design products for vertical markets and take advantage of the similarities in different groups, but the world is getting more tightly packed and we're forced to use tools that were designed for someone not like us.

Not everyone can change the way they do things, not everyone can upgrade whatever gadget it is that they have that doesn't work with whatever cool thing it is you just released to the wild. Not everyone is going to fall in love with the color, the feel, or even the basic idea of the thing that you think is the coolest piece shit on the face of the planet.

Not everyone is like you.

As you go through life, as you make decisions about things you bring into the world, or promote, or stock in your store, or give as gifts, or show off at the bar... as you try to convince other people that they should change so they can use the thing you think is cool, remember, you aren't like them, and maybe they don't need to be like you.

The Web is a Jerry Rigged Kludge

Conquent — Thu, 4 Feb 2010 09:44:36 -0800

We've all run into the website from hell, and a lot of times it's an important company like a bank or utility company. You can't figure out the navigation, you search the help pages and they talk about things that don't even exist, you get halfway through filling out the required information and suddenly find yourself kicked out of the system or trapped in an endless loop of screens... And you yell at the screen, "Who the hell builds a piece of shit like this?!?"

Everybody builds that piece of shit.

I say "everybody" because it's the programmer, the graphic designer, the marketing guy, the operations manager, the CEO, the hardware vendor, the admin assistant's cousin's daughter's boyfriend... Everybody gets their 2 cents in, and that pile of pennies turns into a pile of crap really fast. And that's just when building the site.

But let's pretend for a moment that the project followed the specification perfectly and a beautiful, functional web application hits the Internet. A couple months later something changes and a programmer is told to add a feature. The system wasn't really designed for this feature, but being a good problem solver, he opens the hood, finds a place he can bolt on the functionality, maybe gets a graphic designer to give it a nice paint job, and everything's good.

Then they do it again. And again. And again. Sometimes it's small additions, sometimes it takes huge modifications. And at the end of the day you end up with The Site From Hell, a Frankenstein's monster of add-ons, changes, and ideas that were really important for about 10 minutes in a board meeting a year ago.

Obviously not all web projects are run like this, but you'd be amazed at the size and sophistication of companies that do run their projects "on the fly." I've been invited into more than one company to tell them what they should do to fix their web issues, and the answer is almost always to throw it away and start over.

But even starting over is tough for these companies. The reason their web application got so screwed up in the first place is because their management is so screwed up. They assign someone, sometimes the head of marketing, sometimes the IT guy (who is often not the head of anything), sometimes a administrator who just got the job of "fixing our web site" but almost never a committee of department heads who are directly affected by the impact of the web.

A primary point of contact is one thing, a "decider" is important... but one person can't know all the ways the web needs to interact with an entire company. So the design specification is often missing something critical, and the process begins again.

I'll say it again -- the web is not your bastard stepchild. It IS your business. It's the first thing your prospects see, and it's the place that your customers want to go to interact with you. I don't care if you work in a broom closet, your website should imply greatness, and it should follow through with that greatness.

Otherwise your whole company is a jerry-rigged kludge.

Portland Bike Plan: Too Expensive or Playing with numbers?

Conquent — Wed, 3 Feb 2010 15:11:00 -0800

The Oregonian today published a front page article that questioned if Portland can afford $613M over 20 years to improve bicycle routes (Portland Bike Plan goes before City Council, but can the city afford it?). They compared this to the cost of the MAX Green Line of $575 or the annual transportation budget of $630 million for all of Portland.

Shocking numbers, and they must have intended to shock because they downplayed some basic math.

First, the big number isn't really that big: $613 million over 20 years is $30.65 million a year or 4.8% of the current budget. They say that 6.4% of Portlanders commute by bike; so we're under serving the bike population with no increase in ridership. Regardless of the fact the plan is intended to greatly increase ridership, that 6.4% also ignores casual cycling and non-commuter trips.

Then there's comparing apples to mushy brussels sprouts. The MAX Green Line is 6.5 miles, as opposed to the 681 miles of bikeways proposed in the plan. And, the development of the MAX line greatly improved the I205 bike lane, getting bikes off the road surface in dangerous places like Foster Road or Powell Blvd. which makes me question how much of that budget would have been defrayed with this plan.

At the very end of the article they quote "Geller" (who's credit was somehow cut from the article but must be Roger Geller, the City Bicycle Coordinator in the Office of the Director, Transportation Planning Division) where he mentions that $630 million would only pay for 12 miles of urban freeway.

12 miles of freeway, 6.5 miles of light rail, or 681 miles of bikeways, but the Oregonian presents it as "too expensive"

What do they teach in these schools these days...

Twitter: Asleep at the Mouse Wheel

Conquent — Tue, 2 Feb 2010 09:11:34 -0800

There's an article on ComputerWorld's website saying "Twitter now has 75M users; most asleep at the mouse." While there are 75 million people on Twitter, only 17% of them actively posted anything to Twitter last month -- that's still almost 13 million people actively posting crap to Twitter.

I always find these articles on metrics amusing, that is amusing in the context of how to lie with statistics, or in this case, how to get all excited about nothing with statistics. You can read a lot of different things into the huge numbers of people not actively using their Twitter accounts but here are a few things to consider.

Placeholder Accounts: Most of the social media folks I know have more than one account -- Conquent naturally has its company account, which pretty much says "Follow @bissell," and then there are the accounts that people get for misspellings just as we've been doing with domain names for years. These are important accounts as brands like Michelin should own their name on Twitter, but they might not have anything to say every day.

Event Accounts: Before there were lists, and even now that there are lists, people set up special accounts for one-off events. Things like @SocialMediaConf where @AdBroad and I spoke in September has been dark since... Well, September. Show's over. Move along.

Fictional Characters: The Mad Men Twitterers all have multiple accounts, and when the curtain falls on the season, so does the chatter on Twitter about Mad Men. There are scores of other seasonal twitter workers out there, and they may fade away completely, but like placeholder accounts, they have a place in the Twitterverse.

Lurkers: The term "lurker" has been around for a long time, referring to people who read but don't write anything in places like chat rooms and (going way back) bulletin boards. Interesting thing about Twitter lurkers is that they aren't necessarily people but accounts set up to siphon links and comments out of the stream of tweets and post the info somewhere else.

That last one, lurkers, is particularly interesting. Twitter is different from any publishing platform we've seen so far because the information is so easy to grab and reuse, making the content that comes out of Twitter ubiquitous nuggets of info flowing all over the Internet.

So what if 13 million people generate the bulk of the content, only 1,400 people supposedly edit Wikipedia (see my blog on that topic) and yet no one seems to have stopped using it, nor do I think Twitter is going away anytime soon.

But, with this qualifier on the stats in hand, you're welcome to resume panicking about the death-knell of Twitter now.

Where regulation is good: Google Voice and Vonage

Conquent — Mon, 1 Feb 2010 14:14:18 -0800

I can't imagine being a government employee trying to keep up on what the government should be regulating and what it shouldn't. Take Google and Vonage, for example. These aren't phone companies, per se, but they sure act like phone companies -- they give you a phone number that can be dialed from any phone, and a service that lets you dial any other phone. Making two phones talk to each other seems like a phone company to me no matter what other services you offer or what technology you're using.

But Google and Vonage don't get regulated like phone companies because they're classed as "information services" which means they don't have to play by the same rules as all the other companies that connect phones to each other. Some of those rules are bunk, based on maintaining the infrastructure built by Ma Bell once upon a time (much of which is superceded by cable and wireless in the Voice over IP world of Google and Vonage).

But some of it is consumer protection. Things like phone number portability, which means that if you use Google Voice for your main business line (which I'm finding increasingly common in the consultant world) and you decide you want to change service, you can't keep your number.

Take the Conquent phone number in Portland, for example. When the company started 11 years ago, it was just me on a cell phone. But it was a regulated phone number owned by Qwest. So when I got sick of Qwest, I flipped it to Verizon. Then I used a little trick they had at the time that let me forward all my calls for a flat fee, so as Conquent grew and moved into different offices, I was able to point the number where I wanted, kind of like Google Voice today.

But one day, Verizon started metering all the calls being forwarded, which meant we were paying cell phone rates for every minute on inbound calls -- they didn't tell us, we just suddenly got a phone bill for over $1,000 where it had been $25. Again, because it was a regulated service, we were able to move the number and contest the bill. We then moved the old cell number to our land-line phone service, where it sits today, just like any other landline.

Enter the unregulated services -- Google and Vonage own those phone numbers, and they're in pools of numbers that aren't necessarily able to be moved to another carrier, even if they wanted to. Without consumer protections we have with the traditional telcos, a story like Conquent's wouldn't have such a simple, happy ending. Instead, all the time, effort, and money invested into a phone number goes away, and there's nothing you can do about it.

How Facebook is (unintentionally) forcing programmers to piss off users

Conquent — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:00:00 -0800

I'm on Facebook, just like just about everyone else on the planet. (I visualize some tribal scene with a feather clad, makeup smeared warrior pulling out his iPhone and typing LOL on some random picture posted to his Wall.) Most of my friends on Facebook are either family or old schoolmates unlike my Twitter where I'm a little less selective, and a little more careful about clicking on links or engaging with people.

I don't engage in a lot of the quizzes and random stuff on FB, but when Alyssa Jenkins "hit me with a pillow" I went ahead and added the app and "hit her back." Over the next few days we hit each other with various pillows -- she'd hit me with the Luxury Pillow, I'd hit her with the Leather Pillow. Each time we hit the other, the Pillow Fight app would post the photo of the pillow being used to our respective walls and send a note to the person getting hit saying "you've got 2 days to hit back or you lose!"

With two days to hit back (an eternity for someone online as much as I am), the game could go on forever, which wouldn't be a problem until I got a roadblock that if I didn't grant them constant access to my account (meaning they could post whatever they wanted whenever they wanted) AND give them my real email address, not the FaceBook proxy, or else I wouldn't be able to hit Alyssa back.

I conceded the fight and deleted the app.

Normally this would be the end of the story, but after rating the app 1 out of 5 stars, one of the Pillow Fight developers sent me a note (because of my comment and previous use of the game, the Facebook app allows him to send a message via the Facebook messaging system) and he gave me some background.

First was the link to the FB Developers blog Communicating Directly with Your Users via Email explaining that Facebook is encouraging developers to communicate directly with users rather than using the FB messaging system. Second was a link to the developers roadmap wiki showing that Facebook will actually be taking away the current notification functionality.

Not only that, but there seems to be a bug in the FB API which creates a loop, that is to say, I can't get out of the "give us your email" messages and play the game, because FB doesn't give the programmers a way to get out of it.

Facebook is a tricky place to write applications -- you have to create most of your programming on your own servers but interact with custom code that Facebook keeps changing. The Pillow Fight guys seem sincere in trying to provide a fun game, and while they have the aesthetics of programmers (which means their interface isn't exactly a work of art), I know the frustration of having to write code and rewrite code based on events outside your control.

Of course, this is one of those themes I keep getting back to -- when your business model is completely dependent on one company, be it Facebook, Apple, or the coal mine, you're going to get screwed. Your interests are not the same as the big corporation you're playing with, and all it takes is a casual flick of a corporate finger somewhere to accidentally kill you.

The Twit Cleaner

Conquent — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:28:02 -0800

I seem to talk a lot about filtering the noise of all the yammering online. I also talk about how silly most of the applications names are, but I figured this one was worth mentioning as it really helps you understand your Twitter followers.

The Twit Cleaner (which is not a cheap prostitute for the Upper Class Twit of the Year) will run the most detailed analysis of who you're following that I've seen so far.

If you're not someone who uses twitter a lot you may ask, "why do I need to look at who I'm following? Shouldn't I know these people?" The answer is, yes, you SHOULD know these people, but following people on Twitter is often a lot like exchanging business cards at a mixer. You think you understand who that person is, and you want to return the favor because they gave you their card, but now they have direct access to you.

I'm mainly concerned with people who don't follow me back -- I follow people to have a conversation, or at least to have some mutual exchange of ideas. But there are accounts like the @MarsPhoenix or @stephenfry whom I 'm interested in, but I don't honestly expect them to be interested in me -- I don't want to use a tool that just automatically unfollows everyone who isn't following me, but I need a way to categorize the activity of the people I'm following.

The Twit Cleaner has three main categories which they then break down into subsections. It takes a few minutes to run, and they actually send you a message when it's done rather than waiting on your browser like friendorfollow.com. I assume if you're one of those twitterers following 50,000 people that it would take much more than a few minutes. But the report you get back is pretty interesting.

For completeness, here's the list I got back when I ran my report (knowing they're Aussies explains the terms and spelling).

Dodgy Behaviour

Try To Sell You Crap
Uses common spam phrases

Nothing but Links
Posts nothing but links

Tweeting the same links all the time
Duplicates the same link more than 25% of the time

Tweeting Identical Tweets All The Time
Posts the same tweet too many times

Other Dodgy Behaviour, Now Absent
Any dodgy behaviour, plus haven't posted in ages

No Activity in Over a Month

No Activity In Over A Month
No tweets in a very long time

Accounts that Ignore You

Not Active Yet (Fewer Than 10 Tweets)
Fewer than 10 tweets

Don't Interact With Anyone
Never interacts with any of their followers

Hardly Follow Anyone
People that follow back less than 10% of the people who follow them

Not Following You
Have no followers at all

The page made it pretty easy to find out what accounts I wanted to toss immediately, and then take my time as I get through less and less critical categories. It also offers a tool to let you unfollow everyone on the list, with the option to exclude the accounts you want to keep (like the Mars rover and Sir Stephen Fry for example).

I did a quick paranoia test on myself by running the Twit Cleaner from the Conquent account (which is just a company placeholder and just follows @bissell) and I was happy to see that my daily Twitter account didn't show up in any of the garbage categories.

But, at the end of the day, while the automatic filters are getting better, I still think there's nothing like a little human oversight on these sorts of things...

Perfect Secretary's pitch for @Adbroad (and the Youtube API)

Conquent — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:40:28 -0800

@AdBroad is in the running for a Shorty Award in #advertising. It's a community effort, getting a Shorty Award, and the very lovely, somewhat provocative, Perfect Sectretary has added her own short video pitch for @Adbroad.

Click to view

It made great sense to post it to the BrandFictionFactory.com website. I really like the work Conquent did building the site so naturally we wanted to make it a little kitschier than a simple "here's my YouTube video". Now, we could have mastered a second copy of the video and uploaded it to the server, but keeping it all on YouTube lets @PerfectSec keep track of how many people watch the video whether it's on YouTube or BrandFictionFactory.com and we don't have to worry about peak loads or any of the other headaches hosting your own streaming video causes.

So the team dug in and found out that Youtube actually has an API (Application Programming Interface). Turns out you can control just about everything that happens in a YouTube video with JavaScript.

All we really needed to do was dress up the video a little -- it's still YouTube, but we put a TV over the top of it. The problem with that is that the image of the TV covers up all the controls for Youtube, which means you couldn't play or pause the damn thing.

With a little magic from the YouTube API, we were able to create controls so all you have to do is click on the video to toggle play and pause (just like a regular YouTube video) and the real cool factor is that at the end of the video, we can swap out the video and put in a screen to direct people to go vote.

Pretty damn cool...

The Emotions of Text

Conquent — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:31:31 -0800

Probably one of the most interesting developments of the 21st Century is how many people communicate via text. I don't mean just text messaging (which Purnima referred to as the return to the telegraph message), I mean things like, well, this text.

Blogs, status updates, notes on Facebook walls... There's a lot of typing going on, and a lot of amateur writers flexing their meta-carpals all over the Internet.

The problem is that we just don't quite get the emotional nuance in text that we do face to face. Part of that is the lack of real-time interaction. If I post something to you and it takes hours for you to get back to me, I might start forming opinions about your thoughts about my message. I can't see if I offended you and quickly correct my meaning -- and if I did, that offense can fester and your reply can be equally offensive, then we get a good old fashioned flame war going on.

People often use smileys and other emoticons to try to add that emotional nuance. I hate emoticons, and I generally refuse to use them. They're the equivalent of Cindi-with-an-I dotting that "i" with a heart. Or like the comedian who tells a joke and then says, "Get it? Get it? It was the rabbi!" I prefer the satisfaction of getting the joke on my own.

I like to think of myself as a skilled enough writer that I can imbue some level of emotional certainty into my writing, but let's be honest -- if I use phrases like "imbue emotional certainty" I'm going to come off as a pompous Ivory Tower asshole more often than not, which is just as bad as coming off as some twittering tween with smileys.

It was interesting to see the emotional content in response to my blog yesterday (The Shorty Awards Scandal -- Manual Spam is still Spam). It was one of my general examinations of how social media is changing, but it got a lot more response than normal. Sure, I used the word "scandal" but I meant it as a tongue and cheek commentary because how can you really have "scandal" with something as unstructured, and honestly unimportant, as a fan-based award for who's the best Twitterer in a range of categories?

If you read the comments, you'll see there are a lot of pretty strong opinions in there. And despite my premise that we should be able to tell the intended mood of the author, I honestly can't say how many of these folks are genuinely pissed. I know I wasn't, but I think @jonacoca thought I was pissed at him for trying to help out @iwearyourshirt (I think he even called me a "hater" on Twitter...)

Maybe I should have used a few emoticons...

The Shorty Awards Scandal -- Manual Spam is still Spam

Conquent — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:52:07 -0800

In the quest for winning the not-really-so-coveted "Shorty Award", our favorite fictional ad man, @FrankAdMan, found himself losing to a T-Shirt. No big deal, after all, Frank, himself, is fictional, so why shouldn't he be beaten by a T-Shirt?

But then he came across a 16 year old who's entire Twitter stream seemed to consist of "@twittername Do you want to be the best person ever? Vote for@iwearyourshirt to win a shorty http://bit.ly/Shortaaay" and Frank found himself thinking about fish and Denmark...

My first impression was that someone wrote a script that worked the way Twitter whores spam people (see my blog "Twitter Followers Don't Matter, ask the porn sites"). But I was a little curious why all the postings came from "Echofone" which is a legitimate Twitter client. I figured he could have spoofed the name to make it look more legit, but why not do "from web" at the point?

Then I got a message from the spammy account. @jonacoca describes himself as "I'm a fun, Energetic, and intelligent sixteen year old who loves Social Media, sports, and the business world!" and he assures me he is not a bot.

I did some quick research and he posted very similar messages about 125 times. Not as much as a bot would probably do, but way more than a 40 year old man would do. The behavior of 16 year old boys often seems unlikely to their older and slower counterparts, but my guess is that he's copying and pasting and soliciting strangers -- which isn't much different than sending a 16 year old down to the mall to hand out fliers (which I did when I was 16-ish).

Except this is the Social Media frontier and while it's still the unruly frontier with sex, profanity, and a sense of "whatever I can get away with is okay," there are some things we consider improper. One of which is soliciting strangers without their permission, consent or warning.

I don't know what the Shorty's are going to do with this situation -- a little forensics could probably toss out all the votes that were solicited this way, but part of the problem is that this IS the frontier. The fact that there aren't any hard cast rules of engagement makes it harder to separate aggressive campaigning from improper, ne, disqualifying tactics.

But I gotta love the silliness of it all in the midst of the moral quandary...

Clarification on January 28
My intent with this blog posting was to cover the issue of what constitutes spam, but the discussion below has evolved into a discussion about what makes a good Shorty submission. Now, the Shorty Awards has a fairly complex set of rules, and they did their initial audit of the votes to see how they comply with these rules.

Lee Semel (@semel) a co-founder of the Shorty Awards, posted this today:

@rafael_jornal can explain further over info[at]shortyawards.com email, but 'because...' votes, repeats and retweets weighted less

Which might help to explain how FrankAdMan with 346 votes is currently in first place while iwearyourshirt is in 6th with 361 votes. I'm pretty sure that iwearyourshirt wasn't docked heavily by jonacoca's enthusiasm, as the number of votes that iwearyourshirt got from the campaign was (at his estimate) very limited.

Food for thought, though...

Google Analytics, the cloud and missing numbers #fail

Conquent — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:19:38 -0800

We ran the backend for a sweepstakes project for ABC/Lost this month -- it was one of those projects you simultaneously love and dread because a company like ABC/Disney can push a LOT of people to the microsite all at once. So, we set up the site on Rackspace's cloud (you can read the details about setting up the project here) and it all worked great.

As a bit of an experiment, we hooked up Google Analytics to the site to track visitors. Now, keep in mind, server stats are always a little tricky, what with bots and other automatic processes hitting your site all the time, but for something as tightly controlled as this sweepstakes site, this was a pretty good test of the technology.

And Google failed.

This conclusion wasn't from an arduous comparison of server logs and weighting what might be a real visit and what might be a bot -- that would be one of those vague, subjective conversations. The fact is that Google reported fewer page views than registrations -- which is impossible as a visitor would have to look at two pages minimum to register. One page to answer the questions, and the thank you page saying "You got the right!"

Google Analytics is run on the client browser with JavaScript; I know visitors had to have JavaScript turned on to register for the sweepstakes because they couldn't have gotten into the site from ABC without JavaScript turned on. So, either Google is overwhelmed and not picking up the visits as we flood the server, or people are blocking Google's scripts.

No matter what the reason, that kind of discrepancy can't be ignored. We usually create special tracking scripts (on the server side) to filter out all the noise in the server logs, which is kind of the thought behind Google Analytics. But our tests so far show that a client side, JavaScript driven tracker, even by the geniuses at Google, just doesn't work...

Helen Klein Ross & Michael Bissell Interview at Adweek's Social Media Strategies Conference

Conquent — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:00:00 -0800

The sound track gets off a little from the video, but it's a nice little interview with me and Helen KleinRoss when we spoke at the Adweek Social Media Strategies Conference in September of '09.

The topic is how we managed to tweet in character for Roger Sterling and Betty Draper

The Internet is the New 60's

Conquent — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:41:02 -0800

I got into an online conversation today with @Gennefer on the topic that the 60's social movement makes a great metaphor for the way we use the Internet today. It's not just the easy access to sex, drugs and illegal music, but also the way social networks are creating awareness of social issues and promoting art and culture outside the establishment.

As we tossed our 140 character comments back and forth, it occurred to me that the it's not the Internet that needs a metaphor, but the way communication and information changes society.

There have been a few really great communications revolutions that have been followed by huge sociological shifts. Sea travel, which brought not only goods from far away, but new ways of thinking and doing things (including the recipe for gunpowder) is often overlooked as a communications revolution, but it was the knowledge traders brought back that started the Renaissance much more than the goods themselves.

Not overlooked is movable type -- without the printing press to get his message out, Martin Luther would have just been another priest strung up to a wall somewhere and the Catholic Church would still be the only church for Christians, and a hugely corrupt power, at that.

We still romanticize the Pony Express, but it was really the telegraph that cemented so much of the North American continent as a future world power. And, of course, the telegraph was quickly followed by radio and then television rapidly making the world smaller, creating a more homogeneous culture with national advertising and even changing the way we talk by smoothing out regional accents and dialects.

What really made the 60's such a watershed time was a huge population of people all about the same age spawned from a post-war baby boom. Ironically, these kids were the first to be raised by TV and shared a lot of the same ideas and ideals and culture not from their families but from TV and the toys and commercial products they grew up with.

And they could find each other more easily than ever before. TV news was maturing and spreading the word about things like Woodstock or marches in Washington. It's not just that they could get their message out more easily (this was the dawn of self-publishing with cheap mimeographs and copiers coming on the scene), it's that they all spoke the same message and learned that message faster than their elders.

All of which is true with the Internet. The Internet is quickly helping to homogenize culture on a global scale, although it's not as if the "Internet" is a single medium -- television, movies, blogs, advertising, casual interactions online, and the fact we all use the same basic stuff every day give us common ground to start a conversation. And all these little interactions take us a step closer to a global culture, which is definitely one of the biggest revolutions we've seen.

Just as the stuffed shirts in the 60s tried to mimic or co-opt the "youth culture" stuffed shirts (and not so stuffed) are trying to do the same today. It's too big even with our multi-national global companies supplying so much of this revolutionary culture, it's not the things or even the individuals driving this revolution, it's just the unchecked speed of communication.

Getting back in the saddle (bicycle saddle, that is)

Conquent — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:58:33 -0800

I'm about 15 pounds overweight; 25 if you take the strict BMI calculations, but people who meet their height/weight ratio always look a little skeletal to me. Coupled with the stomach acid problems I've been having (which can be aggravated by that layer of fat) it seemed it was about time I got back on my bicycle.

Mind you, I'm probably in the worst shape I've ever been in. When you've done rides like the Davis Double Century or the Ride Around Mount Rainer In One Day, finding yourself struggling though a 12 mile ride is more than a little frustrating. Granted, "the worst shape I've ever been" still seems to be better than the best shape of the average American, but then that's not saying much...

So, I'm trying to force myself into some hard riding. like taking the long route from Sellwood to my office (15 miles through the zoo and Council Crest giving me more than 1,000 feet of vertical elevation gain, and then going back that way, too, rather than the 4 mile drop straight down hill) and, yesterday, I decided it would be better to ride from Sellwood to Camas to see my nephew in a soccer game rather than drive.

Of course that ride turned out to be 27 miles each way, so it ended up being a 54 mile day, which is almost the same distance I did in three days of broken riding last week, but it was fairly flat...

I started out the Springwater Trail, which is an old railway right of way the city paved about 15 years ago. Unfortunately, they haven't repaved it, so it's a little worse than chip-seal. Even when my butt is used to the saddle, bouncing over washboard isn't a lot of fun. On the way out the trail was mainly filled with serious faced joggers and a few Lycra clad cyclists, which made me self-conscious in my poor form. Coming back it was filled with ambling groups of families with strollers and kids on training wheels -- not conducive to a 17mph pace.

The Springwater Trail connects to the I-205 trail; as good as I am with traffic, it is really nice that Portland is creating these interconnected trails. They also greatly improved the I-205 trail when they put in the Clackamas light rail line by putting bridges over Foster and Powell, two streets that were particularly annoying to cross, letting you simply cruise overhead without stopping.

They haven't made such improvements on Division, Stark, and Glisan -- there's something really wrong about being routed onto the sidewalk by the Taco Bell with the seemingly omnipresent Medicare funded folks in their electric wheelchairs. At every intersection in this part of town there is someone holding a cardboard sign with a request for money and "god bless" scrawled on the bottom, and the bike route almost guarantees you're going to plow into these people.

When the makeshift sidewalk-trail ended and the actual trial resumed, the tent pitched over one lane of the trail told me that the Gateway transit area hasn't been gentrified yet. It would be a hell of a way to wake up, having a bike plow into your tent at 20 mph, but then this person obviously hadn't been lucky with life choices to date anyhow...

The path snakes under I-205 just before the Columbia River and then slips between the North and South bound lanes of the freeway, crossing the river in a narrow, noisy track over the freeway bridges. You get the same "kaphump kaphump kaphump" of the wheels on the seams of the bridge as you do in the car, it just goes right through your butt and up your spine...

Finally, getting to Camas is nice on the old Evergreen Highway, although the last climb up to Camas High and climbing back up to the 205 bridge added a little too much climbing to keep this a flat ride.

Recovery time is definitely longer when you're 43 versus 29, and I'll have to watch that extreme hunger that being in the saddle for three and half hours creates if I actually want to drop that layer of fat, but overall, I'm pleased, if even a little surprised, that I was able to get back in the saddle being in this bad of shape...

Ranting about Portland Drivers

Conquent — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:21:32 -0800

Everyone complains about traffic, but I've discovered that Portland has a particular problem -- too many drivers from too many places.

It's that "too many places" thing that really causes the problem. I learned when I lived in Cincinnati that signaling a lane change just told people you were going to cut them off, so they'd speed up rather than letting you in. But in LA, you signal, bumper to bumper at 80 miles an hour, and they'll let you in.

Now mix these two very different styles of driving in one melting pot. And mix in the people who feel 10 miles over the speed limit is the way to drive on the freeway (I do), and the people who feel they need to police speeders and park themselves in the fast lane going 5 miles under the speed limit. Chaos reigns.

The thing that's really been bugging me lately are the two extremes of aggressive and overly polite drivers. They're both unpredictable and they both break the law. Really, even if you think it's nice to wave me through the intersection while I have a stop sign and you don't, you're not following the rules of the road.

I find this "nice driver" thing particularly annoying if I'm on my bicycle. I'm cleated into my pedals, and I don't do track stands really well. So if I'm coming to a stop, I can either take my foot out of the pedal and really stop, or time it so I know the intersection is clear. Predicting what that traffic is going to do is impossible when some people blast through and others slow down to "let the bicyclist go."

Of course, the other problem with the melting pot of drivers in Portland is when the weather changes. There are the people who have never seen snow who put the chains on and drive 10 miles an hour just because there's a prediction of snow. But on the other hand, there are people who have driven in snow all their lives, and don't realize that Portland gets soupy, untreated snow that gives you no traction whatsoever. I swear this is what happened a few weeks back when a half an inch of snow paralyzed the city for a night.

What to do about it? Complain in my blog, that's about all I can do as long as the government keeps assuming everyone should be able to operate 3,000 pounds of steel. I long for the days of science-fiction where automated pods take you everywhere you go, but then I'd probably bitch about people screwing that up too...

Cougars from New Zealand (and I don't mean big cats)

Conquent — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:11:23 -0800

Seems to me that as the world gets smaller, what we find controversial gets less relevant. Take this video for example (posted by @Ryan_Drumwright on his Facebook page). The comment on the video says:

"The ad from air New Zealand, to advertise their grabaseat deals, that had to be banned from the air due to people's complaints about the use of the term cougar.... "

Naturally, I found the thing amusing, as it was intended. Of course, I like women of that age, but then I'm not a Cub -- yeah, they had to come up with a name for the young men that Cougars apparently prey on. Not that I've actually heard of a man in his 20s complaining that he got picked up by a woman who only had sex on her mind, other than maybe she wasn't the hot 20-something he was hoping to take home that night...

Anyhow, I figured the office would enjoy the clip, so I pulled it up on the big screen in the front room and, surprise, no offense, but there was one question: "What's a P Addict?"

Apparently it's a Kiwi term for a meth addict, which is interesting because people are more upset about the use of the word Cougar than they are about using "P Addicts" to "cull their numbers." I mean, outrage is warranted for an ad that trivializes a debilitating addiction, but not because older, single women, are interested in casual encounters with younger, also single, adult men.

But, with the Internet, anything can become controversy really fast, and be forgotten equally fast.

Also in tonight's news, Haiti, economic crisis in the US continues, I need to scoop the cat box and a whole bunch of stuff more important than women who want to have sex.

Adding facts together, or why you can't charge your cell phone from wifi

Conquent — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:44:08 -0800

Got this random bit of tech news from Nabil Maynard (@Nadreck) from the twitter stream the other day... The article was about a device that can recharge your cellphone by converting ambient wi-fi radio frequencies into electricity. (RCA's Airenergy charger converts WiFi energy to electricity)

Before getting into the physics of this, I had one of those cynical "That can't be right" moments. My first thought was that there should be a lot of OTHER ambient radio frequency bouncing around that should be a lot stronger than wi-fi. I mean, why wi-fi? Other than saying "why, oh why, wi-fi?" is so much fun...

Then the math kicks in (thanks to the comments in the article). The output from a wireless router is around 100 milliwatts, or .01 watts -- it would take about 250 hours to charge a device using that kind of output. Now, the idea is that the device collects and stores a charge in its own battery all the time, so you can get a quick hit, but the reality is you'd still have to wait a week to get that charge back on this device...

My point in posting this here is basic critical thinking. Well, I say basic, but it's not that basic when it's so rarely used. The article in question didn't do the extra math or try to prove or disprove the idea that this device works, it took readers to do the math and disprove it, and very few of those readers at that. Most people just said, coool...

While one school of thought says "just post the facts" we need people to report more than the facts they were given. Do a little research and add a little more to the world than just forwarding stuff along and maybe the world will be a slightly better place...

Social Media and the Destruction of the World

Conquent — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:21:09 -0800

We're always looking for patterns in things -- the rise and fall of the markets, the increase in global temperatures, what color will be the new black this season, whether that cute girl always takes the 7:32 bus... We're pattern obsessed to the point that it gets us in trouble with games of chance (our brains are trying to figure out when that 777 will come up on the slot machine, so we keep spending).

The reason for this obsession with patterns is simple biology -- if you can't figure out what berries are good for you and which will kill you, you're dead, and your genes don't move on to the next generation. If you can track more complicated patterns, like the seasons and what plants you can grow, or what animals you can herd, you can build the kind of civilization that supports over six billion people.

So patterns are naturally really important to us. We judge intelligence on the use of patterns -- SETI is looking for repetitious patterns in the radio noise of space under the assumption that if an intelligent species was going to try to contact us, they'd use mathematical progressions, or at least a steady beat.

I'd like to argue that visible patterns are getting harder to find as the Internet evolves. The way we interact with each other and the incomprehensible amount of information flying around is changing civilization in ways we don't understand. It's not just the random noise drowning out intelligent discourse, it's that the random noise is becoming intelligent discourse.

I have always been a generalist, and often answer questions correctly without knowing how I know the answer. I have a pretty good foundation in rational thought (having been called a Saganist because I subscribe to the philosophies of Carl Sagan), so I'm pretty good at filtering the random noise, rating it, and learning from it. But most of my peers are linear thinkers and base their answers on education and experience that is becoming less relevant.

Just as toddlers are able to pick up a mouse and keyboard and surf the Internet, I'm seeing a generation that doesn't find the idea of random information disturbing, and I'm seeing an older generation that is perplexed by it.

We are seeing the dark side of this Information Revolution -- as one school of thought (the search for ordered patterns in the world) is augmented by another (the acceptance of randomness and chaos), we see information based crises like the mortgage crisis where the patterns went from manageable to complex to uncontrollable to disaster.

I think we're also just starting to see the tip of the obsolesce of a lot of professions based in the information world. I'm talking the top of our economy -- lawyers, bankers, managers and even politicians who not only can't keep up with the rate of change, but whose livelihood was based on being one step ahead by watching patterns that no longer exist.

So, maybe the lawyers are the first with their backs against the wall now that the revolution is here.

Rabid Fans vs Passive Viewers -- The Coco vs Leno saga

Conquent — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:09:26 -0800

There's been a lot of buzz around who's going to get the Tonight Show, and while I don't even watch late night TV, I found a concept on one of Time's Blogs interesting. They say that one of the reasons the debate exists is because Conan O'Brien's fan base is younger, online, and tweeting like crazy, whereas Leno's fans are older, and far less rabid.

Obviously, how we place value on a vocal minority has a lot more social implications than just who gets the Tonight show. And for this posting I'm going leave aside the rabid right, and the wacky left in politics -- but keep the 2008 election in mind with Obama in the Conan role and McCain in the Leno...

What we're seeing is the evolution of fandom: you don't have to wait for the Neilsen's to tabulate numbers, and even when you do, they're often way out of whack from the buzz being generated online, keeping in mind that that buzz might be controlled by a handful of rabid fans and that the actual audience may have a very different opinion.

But the question that still remains in my mind is if that vocal minority is a better target for advertisers than the lackadaisical "I'll watch what's on" crowd -- active fans can be active consumers, but passive viewers may be better targets for traditional advertising.

We probably won't know how traditional broadcast advertising fits with mobilized social media fans until TV as we know it goes away entirely -- which judging by this battle, may be happening really soon.

How to tell someone to retweet (without using up your 140 characters)

Conquent — Thu, 7 Jan 2010 13:34:48 -0800

Twitter is like a giant gossip engine, and gossip can be a good thing when you want everyone to learn about something really juicy. The problem is explaining in 140 characters why someone should pass along a message.

Say I post a comment like this:

I nominate @adbroad for a Shorty Award in #advertising because she knows how to blend old and new school media

Because it's a contest, the posting has to be formatted a certain way, and even though there is room to add "Please Retweet" to the end of the posting, you don't really have enough room to explain WHY you want them to retweet.

So, we came up with a clever way to ask people to tweet something without having to give them all the text. First, you create a link to twitter that automatically fills in someone's status. You construct a status link like this:

twitter.com/?status=Words+separated+by+plus+signs

The trick is you have to escape URL, which means converting some characters to wacky %XX codes. If you're web savvy you'll know what I'm talking about (like changing the # to a %23), if you're not... maybe I'll get one of the guys to write a script to do this automatically...

So once you you escape your status update it reads like this:

http://twitter.com/?status=I+nominate+@adbroad+for+a+Shorty+Award+in+
%23advertising+because+she+knows+how+to+blend+old+and+new+school+media

Now you shorten the URL with a tinyurl generator (see my blog about tinyurls). So that big long link becomes

http://t.conquent.com/p700

Which means you can now write a more detailed message like:

Help @Adbroad win the Shorty Award in #advertising by posting your vote for her on Twitter: http://t.conquent.com/p700

That still leaves room for a RT @somehandle AND your whole, unedited message can still get posted.

I know, it's a little convoluted, and the reasons for embedding the longer message in a status link vary, but it seemed like a cool idea to me. If it catches on, I want a gold star.

You can't buy social media

Conquent — Wed, 6 Jan 2010 10:36:13 -0800

While watching stats for the LOST project, I noticed a huge spike in registrations. As we did our research, it seems to have been from a twitter posting by @Agent_M, the Editor of Marvel.com. He has around 1.4 million followers, so you have to figure a lot of people see his postings even when you take into account the transitory nature of Twitter postings.

In a moment of blatant self-promotion, I posted "Looks like @Agent_M tweeted the LOST Sweepstakes and created a traffic surge to the microsite. I love it when Social Media works." CarriBugbee responded "That's surprising to hear from a social media curmudgeon" which got me into a little online discussion with her about the fact that I'm NOT a Social Media curmudgeon, I'm a sales curmudgeon.

I think what's happening with communication tools is amazing, but it's not a product, and it's not something you can create out of nothing. Words like "authenticity" are tossed about by inauthentic speakers (see my blog about wayward words with baggage). Social Media "experts" talk about being able to manipulate people's passions to commercial ends -- and that may be true some of the time, but you have to start and end with something that people love.

The reason Agent_M has 1.4 million followers is because he's got an inside line on comic books and movies -- it's a broad audience, and it's something he does every day, not just a part time promotional gig. When he mentioned LOST, there was a core group of people who were right in the sweet spot for our promotion. It was relevant, but more importantly, it was spontaneous and something that the guy felt was relevant. We didn't buy his time, he just passed along a message he thought people would like.

And, even aside from the spike from this one, popular, twitterer, it's the fact that the fans of LOST were excited to have a chance to win something relevant to the show they love.

Bottom line -- organic traffic is honest traffic, and honest traffic can't be bought.

A book unopened is but a block of paper

Conquent — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:21:27 -0800

I'm a big believer in open communication and information. You can't make informed decisions, learn new things and grow if you don't have easy access to facts, and it's amazing to me how often we don't have access to facts. Political censorship actively clouds what we can learn -- and I don't just mean government politics; corporate, scholarly, and individual politics shape a lot of what we know.

But information that disappears into bowels of academia also puts a huge hole in what's been known and can be learned. The classic example is the Roman Library of Alexandria in Egypt. We know some of what was in that library before it burned, things like the circumference of the Earth and its location in the solar system. Things that hundreds of years later the Church was burning people for heresy... knowledge that we think of as part of the modern world but was very much a part of the ancient world.

But we don't know what was lost. There were too few copies of the books that were stored in Alexandria. There were no backups, no copies stored at some other library -- that was it. And when it burned, that was that, it was gone.

Granted, much of the written word of the 20th century is crap, and a lot more of the 21st century's writings are turning out the same way. But this is where search comes in. At the moment the king of search is Google, but there are lots of ways to find what you want to learn about, if it's digitized.

The problem is that most of our knowledge isn't searchable -- it's on paper in books. Books are a great archival resource, but as the old Chinese proverb goes, "A book unopened is but a block of paper." A book that's been scanned, indexed and placed online, on the other hand, is a searchable resource, which means even if you know nothing of some obscure work, you may find it and get a Eureka moment without having to fly to Stanford University and toil in the stacks.

So, Google's initiative to scan millions of books and put them online is core to my philosophy that knowledge should be easily available. I was troubled by the news that they'll end up holding de facto copyright on some books because, in my opinion, copyright ties up knowledge. But, on watching the PBS News Hour segment (embedded below), it seems that the only books in question are books that actually are copyrighted but where the copyright holder is difficult to locate.

In one sense, this props up what I feel is the biggest impediment to the free distribution of knowledge -- extended copyright laws. In another sense, this brings millions of books into the light of day (or the glow of monitors) that may otherwise be sitting on a stack in one or two libraries.

Think of it like that rare plant in the jungle that unlocks the cure for cancer. I don't honestly think there is a single book out there with all the answers, but if what we're doing is making knowledge available, albeit within the framework of existing copyright restrictions, then maybe that cure for cancer is one step closer.

Building the LOST: The Final Season Sweepstakes

Conquent — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:36:03 -0800

We were contracted to build a sweepstakes site for Disney/ABC for the final season of the TV show LOST (or as they put it LOST: The Final Season, which sounds more ominous). It was a pretty straightforward database project, with two major wrinkles.

First off, they needed it in a week. I was thinking two weeks when we agreed to do it, but when you consider we had Christmas right in the middle of the project, we pretty much had to get it done in a week.

Purnima did a great job of creating custom graphics for the site based on the imagery we were provided, and Eric got the programming and server set up done in short order. Even the HTML came together, which is remarkable when you consider how short-handed we are in that department at the moment.

But the real thing that had me worried about this project is that this is LOST; this is a show with a fan base that put fanatical back in the word "fan". There are over a million fans on the LOST Facebook page which could pummel a web application. Then there's the fact ABC will be advertising the sweepstakes on TV, which can get thousands of people to hit the site at the same moment.

Fortunately Conquent has faced this before and we were able to get a site set up on Rackspace's cloud -- we looked at Amazon and Google (even considered Microsoft's), but what made Rackspace work for me was that I had a couple business cards from meeting tech and sales guys in Vegas at the CLIO awards. Yep, I made the business decision from hanging out in the cabanas by the pool at the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas.

It's not that they had plied me with booze and wifi, it's that I was able to pick up the phone and talk to someone who was able to help my team set up the right solution. No matter how hard you try, you just can't automate real customer service. Even with over a decade of doing exactly these kinds of projects, cloud computing is new, and I honestly didn't know enough about how the technology works to understand how the pricing works or how we might get in trouble with one package versus another.

We're in Day 2 of the sweepstakes as I write this, and it's running so smoothly it's almost disturbing. I mean, I don't want to break the site, but I'd like to see the thing strain a little. But so far, it's just another ho-hum miracle.

Here's a link to the sweepstakes site, which probably will be pulled down a week before the February 2nd season premiere:

http://abc.go.com/shows/lost/final-season-sweepstakes

Holiday SPAM (or the lack thereof)

Conquent — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 11:54:52 -0800

Our social patterns are echoed in the Internet in strange ways. For example, my joke website gets a lot more traffic on Fridays than other days (I guess there's lot more goofing off Friday afternoon).

But a particularly interesting echo is that there's less SPAM on holiday weekends than normal. The reason? People are more likely to shut down their computers for a long weekend than for a normal weekend.

You see, most SPAM comes from individual personal computers that have a virus. Not a crippling virus, just one that quietly sends out emails about drug offers, fake luxury products, and letters from Nigerian princes. They go out at a steady pace, not too much to raise an alarm or slow your machine down too much, but still hundreds every hour.

The fact that we see a noticeable drop in SPAM over Christmas shows just how many computers are working for someone other than their owners. These computers aren't just sending SPAM -- they also infect other computers, steal personal information from servers, and gang together to take down websites in extortion rackets.

This is where I'm supposed to put the obligatory virus software pitch, but I have this sneaking suspicion that even if everyone installed all their updates and ran all the virus/spyware programs we'd still have this stuff slipping through. Most of this stuff comes from smart, underemployed Russians and Chinese who have far more time to figure out how to hijack your computer than you have time to block them.

No matter what, it's nice to have a holiday from Spam...

Archiving Twitter

Conquent — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:15:38 -0800

Twitter is aptly named what with people just twittering about nothing. Although sometimes there's a conversation you want to keep track of. The problem is that with so much idle chatter on Twitter, you can't find that conversation or event after a couple weeks.

The reason is the simple fact that Twitter can only store so much data for so long, and even if they do keep the data, it gets so voluminous that real-time searches are next to impossible.

Conquent has created a tool to help out with this -- we can grab and store, ahem, "tweets" for future posterity. Most recently we did this for @FrankAdman's #Twittertini Christmas party, set in the mid 1960s in San Francisco. You can see the archive by visiting tweet.conquent.com/Twittertini

We've used the same concept to create the dynamic soccer ball at the United Nations Foundation's Malaria awareness website at www.unitedagainstmalria.org:

With this, we also pull Facebook at little videos from 12seconds.tv.

At the end of the day, I feel that if you want to keep track of your words, or what people are saying about you, you gotta grab 'em and hold them tight. Get them someplace where you know you can keep them safe so that if Twitter goes away, you can still reference that strange little idea that came from the stream of consciousness we call the Internet.

Too Many Toolbars

Conquent — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:01:08 -0800

As a web development company we're always dealing with the fact that no one's machine is exactly the same. Not just the fact that displays go from 640x480 through 1600xwhatever, but then people install toolbars that take up space.

Here's an extreme example:

I like to believe that this doesn't really happen, but I gotta say, I've had plenty of clients tell me "Hey! I can't see the content without scrolling" and it turns out they're running low-res with a BUNCH of toolbars...

Random Censorship with Google Adwords

Conquent — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:07:44 -0800

Back in the dawn of time (1998) I created a little website called Jokeindex.com. It started because it was fashionable at the time to forward jokes to everyone in your address book -- I created a folder in Outlook called "Humor" and dragged them in there as I got them.

One day I looked and noticed I had a couple thousand jokes in that email folder. Yeah, a couple thousand... I wanted to learn about database programming on the web, so I dumped the folder to a file, created a little database to categorize and rate them, and, here it is, almost 12 years later and it's still up and running.

I still use the site for the same purpose -- a place to learn about new technologies. I rarely censor anything, just rate it X if I think it's really offensive, although I do have a tendency to exclude things that I just don't think count as jokes (racial jokes usually fall into this category).

Because of this, I get something like 750 unique visitors and 4,000 page views a day mainly from search engine traffic. Pretty much type in anything into Google and Jokeindex.com is going to be somewhere in the results -- maybe on page 50, but somewhere. And a lot of joke searches (like haunaka jokes) come up on the top of the list.

I figured I should try out Google's Adsense -- that's the "Ads by Google" thing you see all over the web. Not being in it for the money, I made a subtle link at the bottom of the page and get a whopping 25 cents or so a day off the thing.

But it's been interesting seeing how the Google words work -- the JavaScript looks at the content on the page and then decides what adwords to show. So, if I've got a joke about Christmas, you get things like "Work Christmas Party" or "Christmas Cookie."

Now, about the censorship -- and bear in mind, I'm not censoring this blog, so be prepared for naughty words.

From time to time I look at a joke and there's no Google ad. At first I thought I had done something wrong, but then I realized it was usually on jokes with the word "fucking." What's odd is that it's not consistent; sometimes "fuck" is okay, sometimes it needs "fuck" AND "fucking" to not get an ad. Certainly the joke about the little boy on the nude beach (with the phrase "little nude boy") got caught as something Google didn't want to be associated with (it's dirty, but not pedophilia).

Some dirty jokes seem to be just fine, and the very disturbing picture of Bin Laden and Bush having sex just gets links for "Funny Pics" and "Freelance Editor," which makes me wonder what Google's programmers think a Freelance Editor does with their time...

I don't know what it all means, other than Google's policy of non-censorship doesn't apply to their ads, which is probably fine. I don't necessarily want my clients' ads showing up on a porn site, but I wish I really understood the cut-off for what's too dirty and what's just dirty enough.

Come to think of it, I'd like to learn that rule for conversation, too, but so far my own censorship isn't working out to well...

Accessibility and Shopping Online

Conquent — Tue, 1 Dec 2009 10:17:48 -0800

Every Christmas you hear about how much more people are buying online -- it's not just because it's easier than fighting the malls and the traffic only to find you couldn't get what you wanted. As our population ages it's becoming the ONLY option for shopping -- as the Boomers get older, there are more people with vision problems, mobility issues, and a whole slew of disabilities that make it nearly impossible for these folks to shop on their own, and even worse during the Christmas rush.

The problem is that most of the web isn't accessible for people with disabilities. A lot of our clients want shiny objects, with more and more JavaScript and Flash and cool new things that don't work at all for people with screen readers.

About a year ago, I was approached by Michael Dorety who has been working for a long time addressing these issues. He's no stranger to complicated technical projects having built hardware platforms for the deaf, worked with Microsoft and their vendors to create accessibility tools that actually work, and a lot of other projects that boggle the mind.

But, creating an easy way to let shoppers find products in an accessible environment turned out to be a lot tougher than he had thought. For starters, there's the whole set of 508 Accessibility regulations -- you know it's going to be complicated pretty much any time you reference a body of Federal law, and when mix in a bunch of technology... well let's just say it isn't easy making things easy.

Then, add the fact that just because you're 508 compliant doesn't mean you're actually "screen reader friendly" -- you can follow all the rules and still have a confusing site that's just plain frustrating for someone who can't see all the little clues you think are so obvious.

It's been a bumpy road, but we all came together and got the site up and running at EmpowerEveryone.com. The site lets visitors search for products in a quick, easy to use format -- it's not perfect as the retailers still take your money, and their sites aren't necessarily up to snuff, but we can lead folks to the products they're looking for and ease the frustration.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens over the next few months as the site starts to get some attention. We've been very careful to include a lot of beta testers with real-world tools, but this is a big, tricky world out there with different people -- so, if you get a chance, check out EmpowerEveryone.com and let me know what you think.

"Upgrading" my flight

Conquent — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:10:34 -0800

I'm in LA today for meetings with clients -- from a logistical standpoint flying down to LA from Portland and back in one day isn't really much worse than driving up to Seattle and back. It's exhausting, and time consuming but doable. The main difference is the damn airline system.

I wouldn't want the financial nightmare it must be to keep planes in the air and make money -- I can only assume how much it costs to fuel, load, staff, and maintain all the planes in the air. Just getting everyone on a plane, in a seat is tough enough, the logic involved in routing people through multiple flights must be mind-boggling.

But I still hate the system.

For example, I generally use the machines at the airport to get my ticket -- they're a miracle of convenience if you're not checking any luggage. But, if you are checking luggage they're a useless step as you still have to have a person at the ticket counter tag your bag, only they don't actually TAKE your bag, you still have to roll it over to the TSA to X-ray it.

There had to be fewer queues in London during the Blitz. Stand in line to get your ticket, stand in line to get your bags tagged, stand in line to get through security, stand in line for coffee (not optional for me), stand in line to get on the plane, stand in line to get off the plane, mass around the baggage area (sort of a line without borders), and then one last line for a taxi or shuttle.

I usually add a line at the counter by the gate to get a better seat; to the credit of people trying to automate customer service they let you pick your seat on the check-in computer, but today I discovered that system doesn't work.

The thing is kind of a "you want fries with that?" program. As you check in it keeps offering you options like "more legroom" (up to FIVE inches more!), prohibitively expensive upgrades to First Class, and, a new one today, for 50 bucks, go through the first class security line and board early. 50 bucks to save 10 minutes, so if you make $300 an hour, you break even, and still fly out at the same time, sit in your coach seat and get off the plane at the same time.

But, today I took the "more legroom" offer for 20 bucks -- I got up at 4:30 this morning so I figured a little legroom might give me a chance to rest up before a crazy day. The computer showed me a seat map (the flight was half full) and I picked an aisle with noone next to me.

I figured 17B should be about halfway up the plane, but this is a CRJ which only seats about 65 people. My "upgraded" seat was in the VERY back of the plane, with a seat that didn't recline, next to the bathroom (where people and smells crowd your seat) AND there was someone sitting next to me. Not only that, but there was no one in the exit rows where there is substantially more legroom.

The flight attendant was nice enough to let me move, but had the flight been any fuller I would have paid 20 bucks to "upgrade" to the worst seat on the plane.

We'll see what I get on my flight back tonight, but I can assure you I won't be buying anything from the kiosk again.

Twisted path to customer service

Conquent — Sun, 8 Nov 2009 09:30:41 -0800

I was looking at the logs for my Blog on Conquent yesterday and I found that my posting We've got an app for that, it's called the web was getting traffic from Microsoft's search engine (called Bing this week). I checked it out, and it turns out it's the third listing when you search on the phrase "Yeah, we've got an app for that" or the fourth when you type in "We've got an app for that."

It's particularly amusing when you consider A) I really hate Apple�s campaign, and B) I�m not a big believer in SEO, yet here I am getting traffic to my blog under their catchy advertising phrase.

Being a good self-promoter, I quickly posted it to my various status updates on the social media sites. I use a service called Ping.fm which lets me post it to a dozen sites all at once. Here's what I posted:

Fun with Search Engine Optimization. Conquent's #3 on Bing with "yeah, we've got an app for that" http://www.t.conquent.com/S700

The trouble is that different sites interpret text differently. For example Twitter takes @whatever and turns it into a link to twitter.com/whatever and rewrites hashtags to take you to search results for the tag (a hashtag is just a keyword with a # symbol in front of it, so if you want to watch what people are saying about tonight's episode of Mad Men, you would search on #madmen -- provided people are using that tag, that is).

About an hour after I posted it, I got a cryptic email from a business associate who said, "same to you!" and a bunch of Japanese characters. I was worried that something went horribly wrong and that my t.conquent.com url was taking him to the wrong place, but it turned out that LinkedIn is now using hashtags like Twitter does -- only #3 took him to some page with a Japanese discussion.

I found this amusing so I posted a comment to Twitter and ended up with a quick exchange with Taylor, a Conquent Alum who now works for LinkedIn:

bissell: Using one tool to update all Social Media gets trickier: LinkedIn now has a local version of hashtags in their status updates

episod @bissell pointing to one of the apps I'm product manager for even, Company Buzz. ;)

bissell: @episod FYI When I mentioned being #3 on bing, LinkedIn made it a link to some Japanese page. Twitter didn't bother making it clickable

episod @bissell I'll suggest we link on hashtags >1 ch

This dull exchange is one of the most fascinating aspects of how we communicate today. Let's go through that process again:

I review random traffic to my blog on Conquent

I learn a random fact about Conquent on Bing.com

I post a random comment to the universe

I get a cryptic response

I learn something new about LinkedIn

I randomly share that new knowledge on Twitter

LinkedIn ends up making a change based on this convoluted path

All in about an hour.

With our almost telepathic level of communication, we can learn important information about our own products or services, even when the topic has nothing to do with us. Forget customer comment cards, it's unrelated tidbits like these that gives us the real human experience -- if you're paying attention that is.

Flash: Shiny objects blinding your audience

Conquent — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 09:38:12 -0800

Okay, this is another one of those geeky rants based on years of ranting about this very topic and still not believing people don't agree with my vast understanding of how the world works.

Let me say for the record, I think Flash is a great plug-in. Lighter than Java applets, more secure than anything Microsoft tried to do, and so easy to install it ended up on over 95% of desktop computers. The development tools make it really easy to do cool animation and program logic, and I've seen some amazing stuff done using Flash.

But don't build your whole website around it.

The biggest problem I have with an entire site being built in Flash is that you can't bookmark pages, and in this age of link sharing through social media, that can be a site killer. ("Okay, go to www.bigassflashsite.com, click on the news link, look for the recent videos link, and scroll down to the one posted three months ago, then click..." as opposed to "go to http://tinyurl.com/xxxx.")

But this is an implementation issue, like so many problems I have with Flash driven websites. Flash sites are more likely to have that annoying intro, so annoying that it's become standard to put "Skip Intro" on the home page -- why, oh dear lord, why, would you make the FIRST thing someone sees something that you KNOW they are going to want to skip? Get me to the meat right off the bat, and tease me with your dancing robots after I'm hooked.

This goes for the long, complex transitions from one screen to another. If I have to watch a "Loading......" animation just to click on your Contact Us page, precious moments are slipping away where I might give up, get a phone call from your competitor, or decide I have to go to the bathroom.

The Web is an amazing tool for distributing information. Don't let the shiny objects blind your audience.

Twollow and other gold rush scripts

Conquent — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:44:22 -0800

[Appologies in advance -- this is just a poorly structured rant after spending time playing with code. One of the reasons I hate programming is that it just makes me cranky.]

I wanted to test a theory about autofollowing on Twitter, so I went to Google to find a script or a service that would follow people for my account automatically based on keywords and I was amazed at not only the fact most of the charged for the service, but how much they charged.

Twollow charges $15 a month to follow people based on 5 keywords. Five. You want 10? It'll cost you 20 bucks a month.

I find this shocking because the Twitter API is free and I wrote an auto follow script of my own in about an hour. Granted, I bill my time at well over 20 bucks a month, but it wouldn't take long for me to get ten customers to pay me 20 bucks each to cover my time.

I call it a gold rush because it's still new and clients don't know that there are easy ways to incorporate this kind of stuff into their own web tools -- I'm not saying that dropping 40 bucks for a couple months isn't worth it; it's certainly cheaper than home rolling your own script, but this is the kind of stuff that the geeks are usually giving away for free, which maybe I'll do...

But at the end of the day, it always bugs me when I see short sighted business models (Twollow has an annual plan, but who's to say Twitter won't change their API in the next 12 months?) taking advantage of businesses who aren't planning ahead, have no strategy and are just rushing into the hills hoping to strike some gold.

Arthur Miller's All My Sons

Conquent — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:25:58 -0800

Markie got tickets to Arthur Miller's All My Sons from her friend Jon Kretzu, who directed the Portland Artists Repertory Theatre's production this fall. If you're intersted in seeing it, the last show starts in about two hours from the time I'm typing this, so my guess is you're going to have to move faster than light to get there (and therefore reverse the flow of time, which means you might want to fix your stock portfolio before checking out a play).

We started with drinks at the Hotel Deluxe (the old Mallory Hotel) which has this kind of mid-century modernity that's perfect for setting the mood before going to the theater. Washing down oysters and a Caesar salad with a martini with a twist made from the Rougue Pink Vodka, I completely lost track of time, but we made it to the theater just before the locked the doors (my phone was actually 10 minutes slow -- damn you AT&T!).

They're remodeling the ART, which considering they took over the Portland Opera offices and turned them into a mini-plex of live theater (okay, two stages), the remodel was a long time coming. It will be equally retro-modern when they're done, and I'm looking forward to the unveiling.

As for the show itself, the cast did an amazing job. I have yet to be disappointed with the ART -- this was the second Arthur Miller play I've seen at the there (the other being The Crucible, I still have yet to see Death of a Salesman anywhere) and I think the fifth show I've seen there in total.

Amy Newman gave a performance that felt like I was looking back in time to 1947, and I'd love to have a guy on staff with the sales skills Michael Fisher-Welsh showed in his Joe Keller (not that you want Joe Keller working for you).

Excellent costumes, staging, and set design (was it minimal? or was it just the back yard of a suburban home?). The only flaw was summed up by our friend Nancy thought it took a while to get to the center of things -- which isn't a flaw, it's part of the character of the play.

Now, don't get me wrong, the journey is a big part of Miller's work, and honestly a big part of most good theater. But there's something about these plays in that were so groundbreaking in their day; they did such a good job of breaking the ground that the ground is so broken up they've lost some of their impact.

We've seen McCarthyism worked over so much that The Crucible is almost a textbook attack on the idea. And we've seen so many stories of hidden secrets that destroy otherwise idyllic lives that we've almost come to expect it, rather than being shocked when the good guys turn out to be not quite as good as everyone thought.

But, even though the impact is different than it would have been in 1947, before the gross neglect of our soldiers in places like Vietnam or the Gulf War, or before so many TV hacks wrote their 30 minute less commercial break versions of Miller's plays, the works are still relevant, if only to force us to look at the source, and that source is usually ourselves.

GPS in a Laptop computer

Conquent — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 08:26:25 -0800

I found myself on a random blog on notebooks.com which was questioning if there is an actual use that justifies GPS in notebooks. There seems to be an idea that GPS is only used in those consoles in your dashboard and the only time you would want to know where you are is if you're in a car.

I use Google Maps on my Windows Mobile phone all the time to find businesses nearby. That "nearby" bit is important because when I'm traveling I often have no idea where I am (the cab driver knows where the hotel is, I don't have to).

I usually work around the lack of GPS in my laptop by typing in the name of the hotel or the office that I'm at, and Google finds it. But there are the times I don't have enough info to really figure out where I am, right now, on Google, and asking someone "Where am I?" doesn't exactly give that executive air of confidence I like to exude at business meetings.

Not only that, but if you read my blog Socializing is more than Social Media you'll know that I believe real-world connections are important, and social media is still too random -- if you're in the coffee shop and want to connect with your, ahem, Tweeple, a GPS tool in your laptop can make it easier to find them and announce your location.

So, having GPS on my laptop would give me a lot more geographically relevant info with a better interface than my phone -- and damn straight that's an actual use that justifies GPS in a notebook.

Thinking outside the box... There was a box?

Conquent — Thu, 8 Oct 2009 18:49:53 -0800

Every now and then I hear the phrase "think outside the box." You'd think it would be worn out and people wouldn't be using the tired cliche, but there it is, just as the box is there. I remember hearing a voice in the back of my head asking, "There was a box?"

Looking over my shoulder at all the companies that deliver easy to understand products or services, I saw a galaxy of boxes. I had to ask myself, "What is are these boxes, and why do we need them?" After all, my job isn't just outside the box, but, to be honest, it's all about building new boxes.

Boxes keep everything from scattering on the floor, whether stuff in your basement, the thoughts in your head or the structure of your company -- and it can be rewarding exploring the compartments of a box, finding relevant ideas or brilliant products. In the structure and order of having things organized, there is the opportunity to do much more than in the chaos of things jumbled and lost.

Boxes are good, but they're only good if you can get things out of them. A box taped shut, on the bottom of a shelf, hidden behind other boxes may be safe, but there's no use for that box until it is opened and the contents are enjoyed and shared.

To me, the phrase, "Think outside the box" is redundant. "Thinking" requires you to be outside the structure, otherwise it's simply being. But, simply being is just as valuable -- once you've thought outside the box, you need to put those thoughts in order if you ever want to find them again.

Twitter was designed for Text Messaging

Conquent — Wed, 7 Oct 2009 15:25:51 -0800

I find it ironic that people forget that Twitter was originally designed as a way to create groups for text messaging. After all, where did you think that 140 character limit came from? SMS has a 160 limit, and they reserved 20 characters for Twitter to add instructions or labels to the message.

So, rather than texting a whole bunch of your friends individually, you send a text message, then twitter relays it to their phones, and they can decide whether or not to get those text messages.

You send your updates to Twitter by texting to 40404 (in the US). The updates show up online just like a posting from any other Twitter client. This is handy if you have an old phone without a Twitter client or you just don't want to run, log in, and deal with a Twitter client or web on your phone.

The feature is still there, and you can choose to turn it on with a few simple steps:

1) Log into Twitter on the web

2) Click on Settings (just like if you were going to change your profile settings)

3) Click on Devices, add your phone number.

4) Got to notices and you can turn on DMs to your phone.

5) To get updates from individuals texted to you, go to their profile and click that little mobile icon. (This would get really annoying if you turned on updates for everyone you follow if you follow thousands of people).

You'll be given instructions for how to verify your phone number before you start receiving texts from Twitter, but it's pretty simple.

Of course, there are other text message services like Twitpic or Facebook Mobile, both of which I've been known to use, but not many of them actually text YOU when something happens on your account, and that's one way Twitter is different.

It's not the corporations, damnit

Conquent — Mon, 5 Oct 2009 08:30:46 -0800

@karlong mentioned on Twitter last night: "social media is probably the key to changing unsustainable corporate practices, corporations should work for us :)" which @kram followed up with "If we could end corporate personhood... everything would change."

There seems to be an idea that floats around that corporations should have some sort of social responsibility built in. While I agree with the idea that we should all have social responsibility, whether as individuals or working together in a corporation, there's a not so subtle problem that I see with this: corporations aren't people, they are a tax entity used to control assets.

Sure, corporations have rights and responsibilities, and they provide a layer of protection for the people who are running (and profiting) from the corporation. But corporations do what they do because of the decisions of people including management, investors, employees and customers.

Investors, employees and customers are three very different groups of people with different needs. Metaphors for managing these needs slide quickly to herding cats and designing by committee.

Then there are laws in place to represent the interests of these three groups -- securities and exchange laws for investors, labor laws for employees and consumer protection laws for the customers. This is a complex minefield that gets worse the bigger your company gets.

I'm not suggesting that criminals like Ken Lay or executive bonuses in the banking industry are okay -- these guys are individuals taking advantage of a very complex system of safeguards for personal profit. But so are union guys who take advantage of the system, or customers who sue for millions because they misused a product and got a bruise.

This gets down to individual accountability -- if we live in a culture of "I'd better take advantage of the other guy before he screws me" then it doesn't matter if we're talking about corporate thievery or personal integrity because at the end of the day, it's the same thing.

Entrepreneur or Dreamer?

Conquent — Sun, 4 Oct 2009 10:52:32 -0800

Over the years, Conquent has worked with a lot of entrepreneurs. It's a good thing we also have worked with boring, established companies, or Conquent would never have made it ten years, or ten months for that matter.

I get pulled into these things because I have that ability to translate business ideas into things you can actually hire someone to do. It's a rare skill to actually talk about business in terms of problem solving and a skill that most entrepreneurs lack.

They have a vision, but a vision is often hard to separate from a dream, and if you've ever had someone try to describe their dream over breakfast, you know there isn't a lot of logic to hang onto. ("Christine Brinkley, David Brinkley, I don't know, I just know there was a Brinkley..." I gotta know which one as I have two very different ideas of what I'd do with Christine vs. David...)

I would like to believe that people start businesses for solid reasons -- they want to bring something into the world that no one else can do, that they have some unique talent or idea that will really make a splash, and hopefully some money.

But most people just hate their jobs. What they don't understand is that 99% of the time, people who start their own businesses are simply making a job for themselves, and usually the same job they just came from. Only now, they have to not only do the job they they hated (cook, draft, sell widgets, whatever) but they also have to become an accountant, learn law, make sure they toilets are clean, maintain supplies, collect payments, and corral people who hate their jobs.

And so the dream of being the master of your own domain crashes and burns. Part of it is being alone (which is part of the dream), and part of it is not being able to let go of the fuzzy parts of the dream, or understanding when your vision is lacking.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't chase your dreams, but you shouldn't do it alone. You need partners who think differently than you to clear out the fuzzy parts. Most importantly, and probably most rarely, you need to respect those differences just as they need to respect your way of thinking.

One of my favorite phrases is "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts" but this is only true if you get the right partners. I've been involved in far too many projects where the whole is substantially less than the sum of the parts; the partners aren't letting each other do their jobs, the process is broken and dragging everyone down.

We're working on a business model to help address a lot of these problems -- giving people the ability to do what they're good at but the security of a broader organization. The model will help, but at the end of the day, it's the relationships we're building as we're taking our own fuzzy vision and turning it into something understandable that can be delivered.

Adweek Social Media Twitter for Brands Presentation

Conquent — Sat, 3 Oct 2009 14:48:38 -0800

Helen Ross and I spoke together at the Adweek Social Media Strategies Conference in San Francisco a couple weeks back. Here's a copy of the slide deck that we presented, although I think our conversational style of presenting made it a bit more interesting than the deck alone -- if you'd like to hear our presenation and watch the back of some guy's head, you can find a copy by clicking here.

Twitter for Brands

Socializing is more than Social Media

Conquent — Fri, 2 Oct 2009 09:34:03 -0800

After work last night I went down to Mark's gallery showing in the Pearl. I wouldn't have been aware of it if he hadn't sent me a direct message on Twitter telling me about it, and I probably would have been less likely to go execept for the fact that we've met at a number of Beer and Blog events.

I also wandered over to Eve's pastel exhibit a few blocks away. Although Eve and Michael are good friends whom we see frequently, I knew about the event because of being on her email list. Again, I get lots of these kinds of invites, but when your friends invite you to their art opening, you go.

After hooking up with some friends for drinks, we ended up at Whiffies. Whiffies is in a food cart corral in SE Portland; they fry small pies while you wait -- amazingly good street food at part of what makes Portland great. And a place I would never have darkened had I not met the owner, followed him on Twitter, and was subtly reminded to visit as I saw his postings slide by my screen along with others talking about how much they love Whiffies.

Great thing about that food corral is that I always seem to run into people I know online, but don't see very often in person. Heck, last night I ran into a woman who was incredulous that I was even on Twitter, and it turned out we were already following each other. Now we know.

Which brings me to the title of this posting -- social media, or social promotion, works a hell of a lot better if you actually have some kind of social connection with your online connections. It doesn't have to be close friends like Eve and Michael, but it helps if you meet your potential fans or promoters like Mark.

Sure, there are other ways to build those connections (hey, it's one of the reasons I blog), but I think the piece marketers are missing is that if you really want social promotion to work, you can't just exepect mindless compliance with your message -- you have to add a bit of humanity and a little socializing into the mix.

Generational Marketing is a Myth (or Who's your Daddy?)

Conquent — Thu, 1 Oct 2009 12:08:50 -0800

In that Social Media Video I blogged about yesterday, there was a stat that John pointed out to me: "By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers."

John responded with:

The sociological studies put the baby boomers as 1945 � 1963-65 (depending on researcher), gen x as mid �60�s to mid 70�s or �80�s (depending on researcher) and generation y later.

Here�s the rub: baby boomers are the kids of WWII people. Gen X are boomer�s babies. And gen Y are also boomer�s babies or others that came along later and the sociologists don�t know what to do with. This is not reasonable social science and I suppose I take particular issue because there is no place for anyone who didn�t fight in WWI or WWII, and there is no place for anyone who is not a baby or the grandchild of the WWII people.

I think this whole thing of targeting a generation based on who you parents are probably made sense when women were done having babies at 25, but even then, I don't think it mattered, because men were still making babies at 50. Maybe generations mattered more when wealth was based more on succession (even if we're the same age, if I'm your Uncle, I inherit when your Dad inherits, but you gotta wait until your dad dies). Who's your daddy doesn't matter in an egalitarian society.

Age-based marketing, however, does matter. My youngest sister and my niece are about the same age, and they hang out together. The share culture not based on their parents, but on the media they have consumed and the technologies that have learned when they were young (as opposed to my history of the computer).

I would market to both of them exactly the same way, and it doesn't matter than one of them is the daughter of a depression kid and the other is the grand daughter of the depression kid (Gen Z?).

So, to sum up my rather vague point with a really esoteric statement: it's not generational marketing, its temporal culture -- not where you're from, but WHEN you're from.

Social Media is Just the Way We Use the Internet

Conquent — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:41:38 -0800

I'm an expert on Internet technology and culture. I've been told I'm an expert on Social Media, but I keep getting back to the question, what the hell is Social Media?

There are some obvious things that go in this box, Twitter, facebook, mySpace, and a tools like digg. But way too many things are being thrown into the box with websites that are driven by users interacting with each other.

Part of it is hype. If you have a few minutes to feel like something really exciting is happening, watch this video that pretty much makes any successful website part of "Social Media."

The numbers these people bandy about are amazing, but why not talk about how many billions of people make phone calls, or write letters, or attend community meetings? When you start talking about the millions of people doing things online as if the Internet created communication, you miss the entire point.

It's not Social Media, it's people being social using the most ubiquitous medium -- the Internet. The Internet is an amazing communication tool. It combines audio, visual, text and a way of referencing information that's never existed before. But, this idea that everything you never did online before 2008 is somehow "Social Media" completely misinterprets what the revolution is.

Reading a book on your Kindle is NOT social media -- telling a friend about a book on Facebook is social media. Watching a video online is NOT social media -- I don't care if you found the link to the latest episode of The Daily Show from a friend, the site that shows the program is a traditional content publisher.

All of this is just accelerated communication and faster access to information. The fact that people are involved in creating that information and communicating with each other means the Internet is going to be filled with that kind of activity.

But let's be clear -- Twitter and Facebook are just how we use the Internet today. The revolution is far from over.

Twitter Followers Don't Matter (ask the porn sites)

Conquent — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:41:18 -0800

Twitter is a popularity contest, but it doesn't really matter if you're popular -- you can still go to the party. And partying there is the brand of twitters I like to call Twitter Whores.

Some of them really are whores -- porn sites trying to get you to dig into your trousers and open your wallet to see a little boobage (and more, obviously). Some are just people who want lots of followers to try to sell those followers other products and services. And while you would never talk to these people if they tried to cold call you, they have been successful getting followers simply by following, because everyone wants to be more popular on Twitter.

These aren't your friends or your colleagues, and as we get better filters, they aren't being as successful in getting followers. I'll let them follow me (unless I really hate their avatar image) but I'm not going to follow them back.

But they are finally figuring out that they don't need you to follow them to reach you on Twitter -- instead, they just randomly mention you. I'll always look for mentions of my name, so I'll see their posting. And, they can be vague enough to get you to click through to their websites with a "@bissell: did you see this? http://somelink/xyz"

It's completely automated (just scan for Twitter handles and post your tweet), easy to scale (you can set up new accounts faster than Twitter can shut you down) and you don't need anyone to follow you. And with shortened URLs, it's hard to know where you're going until you land -- nearly guaranteed traffic generation.

Regardless of whether anyone buys the Viagra or porn membership on the other end of these links isn't really even the point. It's the theme I keep getting back to -- as our social lives change and use more tools to broaden who we consider friends, our filters don't keep up, and there will always be clever people out there figuring out ways to get past your defenses and into your pants.

The Internet is Gooder than Books

Conquent — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:34:12 -0800

I've been taking some crap lately because I seem to have stopped reading books, and more directly that I'm not a reader of novels. This isn't to say that I don't read -- I actually read a lot, but I tend to read articles and and non-fiction.

I get a lot of my information from the web. This shouldn't be terribly surprising when you consider I spend most of my working hours online, although one might find it surprising I spend so many of my non-working hours online. But I think there is a misconception that a novel has implied value because someone wrote a whole book and got it printed.

The big flaw is in that fact that publishers aren't in it for the greater good, but the lowest common denominator. A great novel comes rarely, but a New York Times Best Seller comes along weekly. It is true that there is a level of filtering and editing that gives the publishing business a better product the way a good restaurant produces a better product than grandma's home cooking, but the emphasis is on the word product, not on good.

There is also the belief that if you can sit still and read an entire novel you have bettered your synapses in your brain -- simply by being forced to keep a story straight in your head and visualize the characters and settings, you exercise creative parts of your brain.

My first argument against synaptic calisthenics can be summed up in two words: Harlequin Romances. I would argue that a lot of the pap on the NYT Best Sellers list isn't much more complex than a good bodice ripper. Maybe written at an 8th grade level rather than a 5th but probably at a 5th rather than a 3rd.

My second argument is that I spend a great deal of time exercising my brain, and the Internet is a big part of that. Not just as part of my job translating complex business objectives into technical deliverables (which, as boring as it sounds, take a bit of mental agility), but I would argue that the era of what we're calling social media has a huge give and take.

Obviously most of what goes by in a twitter stream or on a Facebook page is garbage -- but that's true of all human creation. The weekly best sellers are filled with gems but there are thousands of books that didn't make the list because they are mind-numbing crap. Our blogs, Facebook updates and, ahem, "tweets" are all hit or miss because we haven't built really good filters yet like a Twitter reviewer for the Times.

But these unfiltered social media streams are forcing a whole generation to become more articulate using the written word, sometimes in long form emails and blogs, sometimes in the limitations of text messaging, or what I like to call the Sonnet of the Internet.

And about that written word thing, let me jump to the defense of video. Granted, reading versus watching leaves you with better understanding and retention, but we've confused the mechanism of that retention. The written words allows you to back up and re-read a sentence, or stop for a moment and look up a word.

I'll argue that most people don't actually look up words they don't understand, and most people I know who argue strongly for reading novels, seem to skim rather than really read the words in front of them -- it's just too much volume, and honestly, not important enough for them to really invest themselves into the literary nuances, but rather they're getting the gist of the story.

Which is to say that watching a news snippet posted by a friend on Facebook might actually give you more depth than reading the paper. You can pause, you can look up things you don't understand, and you have access to all that reference right there on your computer. No longer do you need a smoking jacket and a dark wood paneled library in your house to be the Professor who can find the answer.

With new media come the arguments that we are becoming more attention deficit; I argue we are becoming more discerning. If we aren't learning or getting what we want out of a medium, we move onto another until we find what we are looking for. When we find it, we hold hugely complex ideas and concepts in our heads.

Take TV in the 70s compared to today, for example. In the 70s the intellectual programs were things like Mary Tyler Moore or M*A*S*H -- quick, 30 minute sitcoms with a little message and no continuity. Now our trash is Battlestar Gallactica or Mad Men -- complex, far reaching story arcs with a message that is so ingrained in the story telling that you don't fell like there's a message at all, but it gives you pause for thought and interesting conversations (perhaps online) later.

The Internet is revolutionary, just as the printing press was. With revolution comes confusion and distrust -- but while we know this is the end of the an age, we can't know where this New Information Age is really taking us. But I can tell you, it's going to be far more different than novels versus movies versus video games.

It's going to change our synaptic connections beyond recognition, so hang on, it might get a little bumpy.

Sometimes you don't want your campaign to go viral

Conquent — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:30:12 -0800

I just don�t know when Microsoft is going to learn they aren't cool. I�ll defend Microsoft on a lot of territory -- their open platform (not as open as Linux, but WAY more open than Apple), the customization the OS allows with a wide range of hardware, and a lot of great software from the dull but very functional office suite through their gaming platform and even their mobile software (now that WM 6.1 is out).

But they have to stop trying to be cool.

In particularly, there's this lame video trying to get people to host a Windows 7 Launch Party. Sure, people have parties for all sorts of commercial things like season premiers and new books or debates and elections. But this? I think not

Of course, there's the problem with trying to get your message out there in a cool hip way when you're obviously not cool or hip. People will make fun of you, and it's usually going to be a LOT more amusing to watch. Like this censored version of the same video -- not only more entertaining, but a lot shorter too:

Maybe that idea to tap into social networks needed a little thought first...

Best Twitter Branding Campaign

Conquent — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:05:05 -0800

If you've ever looked at Conquent's branding, you'll notice we keep a pretty low profile. It kind of gets into my philosophy of "it's complicated enough, let's not make it any more complicated." But every now and then, something happens that's pretty cool and I feel like I really have to toot the horn.

As you may know, I post for Roger Sterling on Twitter; it's a side gig, but I've learned a lot, and the Conquent team has gotten to play with technologies we wouldn't otherwise be looking at. There are lots of people involved, some are agency folks, some are fans who do it purely for the love of the characters, and some, well, I have no idea who tweets for the dog or the toilet.

It's really an amazing facet of the Internet. AMC has nothing to do with what is one of the more remarkable outreach campaigns online. Not that everyone involved agrees that it's a campaign at all, but we've seen people get into the TV show because they got into the banter from the Twitter characters, there's been mainstream press about the twittering and now, the Mad Men Twitterers have done another first -- the fans got an award for a campaign.

The project made it to the final three, up against the green M&M and a travel site. The judges said they were overwhelmed with submissions, and I know there's a lot of great stuff going on out there in the world of branding on Twitter. To have this ad hoc group beat out major agencies for a seat with the Finalists is a great honor, and a great insight into how Social Media changes the rules, or maybe just doesn't know what the rules are.

A Good Explosive Recipe and other found knowledge online

Conquent — Mon, 7 Sep 2009 13:13:08 -0800

I was reading the news online today and came across an article about the three men charged with conspiring to blow up airlines using liquid explosives. It took over 200 police to bring them in and threw airports into chaos at the height of the vacation season. It also resulted in the liquids restriction that's so annoying for frequent travelers (I haven't used a zip lock bag as a toiletries bag since I was in college, and now I'm forced to abandon my fancy Eddie Bauer bag).

I've always been curious about what liquids they're after -- I mean, they think I could take down a plain with 4 ounces of hair gel? There are some really cheap colognes that can incapacitate, but I don't think that's what they were worried about.

So, I was interested to find out that they had found hydrogen peroxide in the would-be terrorists possession. Then I did a quick search on hydrogen peroxide explosives on google, and the first result was "A Good Explosive Recipe" which gives step by step instructions on how this guy made an explosive in yogurt containers with hydrogen peroxide.

Whether that's the explosive these guys were going to use or not, this is the dark side of my industry -- well, dark side because knowledge is power, and when you have dark people looking to do dark things, it's easy to find out what you want to know on line.

I worry not about the fact that it was so easy for me to find the recipe, I worry that people will jump to the conclusion we should censure the Internet.

It gets back to one of my basic philosophies -- it's not the technology that's the problem.

Think about the fact that the Russians got the plans for the Bomb from people working at Los Alamos, one of the most secure facilities in the world in an era of paranoia and censorship. Heck, Europeans figured out how to use Chinese explosives for gunpowder and next thing you know everyone's got guns before we even had the printing press.

People are clever and will keep figuring things out -- fighting to keep people from knowledge will just slow down the less motivated, and bad guys are generally more motivated than high school students...

Like flies to crap, Spammy Twitter Followers don't really go away

Conquent — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:56:30 -0800

Twitter is filling up with the kind of annoying people who you avoid at parties like the guy with the stack of business cards whose only small-talk is lifted from a textbook on how to "engage the prospect." When I asked on Twitter what we should call these people in Twitter parlance (Spamters? Spweeters? Twammers?), @Lelonopo responded simply, "We call them lame asses."

So after some sake and ouzo last night, I started blocking a few of the more obvious advertising followers. What was interesting was that as I started to complain on Twitter about the idiot Twitter-spammers, more started following me. Like swatting flies, or maybe blood in the water to sharks (but I hate to elevate these people to shark status), as I got rid of some, others would show up.

Of course, the reason for this is bots following key words, so if I start talking about idiots selling weight loss products, their programs will see "weight loss" and automatically follow me. What surprises me is how many people follow these annoying bots; but then, Twitter rewards getting followers by letting you follow even more people (you can only follow 2,000 people, unless you get 2,000 people to follow you, then you have to maintain some kind of ratio to keep following more).

So people let the bots follow them, and maybe even encourage them. It's a weird world where people encourage spammy advertisers to talk to them...

Video Projectors for your phone

Conquent — Tue, 4 Aug 2009 09:15:06 -0800

Smart phones are basically mobile computers. We watch video on them, review PowerPoint presentations, pull up the news and art. Heck, with the iPhone pushing the limits, people are watching full length movies and companies like Netflix are looking at ways to make their entire catalog of movies available on the phone.

The real drawback is the size of the display. I mean, how many times have you wanted to share something you have on your screen with a friend or colleague and you have to hand them your phone? I don't know about you, but I hate handing people my phone...

The obvious solution is a built in projector using laser pointer technology.

Televisions (the CRT type, not our new panels), work by taking three colors beams (Red Green Blue, hence RGB colors) and focusing them on a single point to create a spot of color. So, get yourself a Red, a Green, and a Blue laser pointer and bind all three to move in sync with each other.

This could be done using a diffuser (a LCD lens could do the trick or a flexible lens that modulates at just the right frequency). Focal distance would probably be limited, but you'd get a viewing area much bigger than the 3.5" screen, and for movies the 480x320 screen resolution would still be just fine.

Unfortunately, it doesn't exist yet, but one can dream...

iPhone SMS Security Hole

Conquent — Mon, 3 Aug 2009 14:30:02 -0800

This isn't really an iPhone rant -- lots of smartphones have had security holes which could be exploited with the right kind of attack, and honestly this problem isn't limited to the iPhone (Google's Android platform is apparently affected, too).

Apple describes it like this:

A memory corruption issue exists in the decoding of SMS messages. Receiving a maliciously crafted SMS message may lead to an unexpected service interruption or arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue through improved error handling.

In plain English, a hacker could basically get root access (super user) by sending a series of text messages that would cause the phone to almost crash, and then the hacker can run programs while the phone is dazed.

Of course I find it ironic that the iPhone is vulnerable to a text messaging attack while it doesn't even support Multimedia Messaging.

If you want a little ranting, when I went to update the iPhone (which Markie never synchronizes) it didn't just install a quick security patch, but instead wanted to install around 150MB of updates for Quicktime, Safari, and some kind of My Mobile platform.

The Android update, by comparison, was small and painless. We actually had to go check that it had happened it was so quick and easy.

And, perhaps surprisingly, my Windows Mobile 6 phone wasn't affected at all.

How Flipmytweet works

Conquent — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:41:58 -0800

I'm like the cynic at a magic show when I see the little web tricks people get excited about. I generally look and say, "dear lord, we did that eons ago an you're getting excited now?"

But, I saw this tweet today with upside down text and could not figure out how it was done.

http://www.flipmytweet.com/ ʞuıl sıɥʇ ʍolloɟ sıɥʇ op oʇ ʍoɥ

It's not that I don't know of tricks to fiddle with text using JavaScript or other tools, but this is in the 140 character, plain text world of Twitter, not exactly a place you're going to embed stylesheets or code.

Turns out to be an interesting trick, and really esoteric. They wrote a script that first reverses your text (abc becomes cba) and the substitutes each character with something that LOOKS like the upside down version of the letter.

So, the "h" for example, is substituted with the latin mu (wait, that's not mu.. damn, can't remember my Greek alphabet...). Some are easier, like d becomes p and visa versa.

Of course, in this era of search engine optimization and text messaging, I wouldn't want to rely on a mix of Unicode and ascii text, but then again, I doubt whoever figured this out was really interested in conforming to standards.

Cell Phones as Microscopes

Conquent — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:41:46 -0800

I've been preaching for years that with the right bandwidth, you don't need a lot of computer to do massively complex work in the field. Cell phones are now becoming that ultra-slim portal to the vast computing power and data storage system we call the Internet, and I gotta say, this little doodad really steps the idea up a notch.

It's a microscope attached to a cell phone.

Granted, it's not designed for really detailed microscopic viewing, but it takes an image using fluorescence to highlight certain biological features, such as finding Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria in humans, or sickle-shaped red blood cells.

So, you're in rural Africa trying to figure out what's wrong with a patient. You take a sample, zap it with your cell phone, it goes back to the lab and you get a call shortly telling you they've got malaria. You don't have to ship the sample over impassible roads to a lab someplace far away, you could literally get results from the lab while you wait, and that lab could be on the other side of the planet.

I think the really cool part of this system is that you can do this from just about any phone, you don't need a fancy iPhone or Blackberry, just a phone with a camera that can transmit the image.

It's all about being connected.

Markie's Birthday

Conquent — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:42:56 -0800

I'm taking today off to spend the day with Markie on her birthday. We're having a big party on Saturday, so today is just lazy, quiet around the house kind of day. It's funny how rarely we seem to get to do that in our busy lives. The normal thing is to DO something, and it's gotten to the point that just relaxing at home is a treat.

I took advantage of the morning and made brunch. We were out of milk so I walked up to New Seasons and while I was there I checked the fish case and found fresh trout. So, here's what I made:

Pan fried trout (I dreged it lightly in flour and cornmeal with a little salt and pepper and fried it in good old fashioned butter), red potatoes (steamed first then fried in a little oil to brown them up) poached eggs and to drink a couple of lattes (loving that espresso machine) and, of course, a bottle of Veuve Clicuot.

Don't know why we don't do this every day...

Digg is not the Hijacker -- You Are

Conquent — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:11:14 -0800

Digg is a service that lets you easily rate articles as you wander around the 'net. It's a great idea, the sort of "digestive reporting" that we need for finding relevant content in a world full of irrelevant information flowing like the New York sewers during halftime on the Super Bowl.

Publishers can include a little snippet of code to let people with Digg accounts rate the article; you just click a "digg-it" button, and your vote is counted without you ever leaving the page.

Now when people come look at your page, they can see a rating (how many people liked the article) and it's added to Digg's database so people might find you through Digg's website under popular topics.

They also provide a service that lets you grab a "tiny url" that lets you share the article with a friend -- so rather than following http://conquent.com/bissellator/index.cqs?blogid=f8cfdef2eee3e4c33e71e68ea9aa6406 you can have a short URL like http://digg.com/d1xYTX

And here's where people are getting pissed.

There are lots of TinyUrl redirects out there (I referenced Conquent's own with the links above), and the expected behavior is that they'll just send you along to your link. Only now, Digg is stopping you on their site, showing you an advertisement, and offering other, similar content.

Honestly, I don't see any problem with this -- after all you're using Digg's service, server, and bandwidth, even if you are just bouncing off their server and moving along to the link. And this underscores what I had realized a long time ago: if you rely on a free, third party service to link to your website, you're handing those people the keys to your traffic. You're not building a bunch of links to YOUR site out there when you use tinyurl, or digg -- you're building links to them and trusting that they'll stay in business and keep sending your traffic along.

Digg provides a great, relevant service, and I think the folks getting upset about the "link hijacking" are just surprised -- remember Digg isn't hijacking a damn thing, you're hijacking THEIR bandwidth, and it's only reasonable to give a little something back to them and build a better, richer service.

Otherwise, install your own url redirect software. And if you don't know how, let me know and we'll get you hooked up.

Can you digg it?

Steve Ballmer -- the walking dead?

Conquent — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:31:09 -0800

I posted this image yesterday on Facebook and Twitpic posing the question, is it just me, or does Steve Ballmer look more and more like the Monster in Young Frankenstein?

Aside from the obvious separated at birth similarities, it got me thinking of the fact we might actually be seeing the walking dead -- not Ballmer himself, but Microsoft.

Microsoft is a stitched together carcass of bits and pieces of technology, and those bits and pieces are beginning to smell funny. They lost the browser war to Firefox, they lost the music player war to the iPod and iTunes, they're not doing so hot in the mobile market with the iPhone and Blackberry fighting for first, and the games market... well, I suppose the Xbox does okay, but it's no PS3 or Wii. (Should never named it "Ex" as in the ex-box...)

I think of the photo of the Monster with his finger on fire as an artistic metaphor for Ballmer discovering that Google has an operating system...

Twitter as an open mic poetry reading

Conquent — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:42:55 -0800

I took my friend Bruce down to Beerandblog. It's a great slice of Portland with creative geeks drinking high proof beer at the Green Dragon Brewpub. This week it was in the outdoor patio by the quanza hut (which causes a slowdown in the drinking as you can't just wander up to the bar and order -- taking it out, onto the sidewalk and into the garden violates some sort of OLCC rule).

It's an interesting mix of creative extroverts and not-so-creative extroverts with a number of folks who would really like to be extroverts but just haven't had enough beer yet. Tech jokes go over well, word play is normal communication, and the mismatched socks aren't by accident.

Tonight's main event was the #whattheshit readings of favorite tweets. Think open mic poetry reading with the found poems of the 140 character postings one finds on twitter. When asked if I would read favorite tweets in a theatrical, poetic style I said, "Sure!" not realizing that most of the dozen or so participants had been researching for weeks to find a perfect blend of tweets to recite.

I quickly got on my phone's web browser and started searching for crowd pleasing tidbits. I started with "Michael Jackson" thinking that being topical might be good, but, really, I have to think in retrospect, that was dumb... So I moved on to "fuck twitter" which got some interesting tweets, but I decided I didn't want EVERY thing I said to have a FUCK in the middle of it. I finally searched on "twitter sucks" which definitely gave me some tweets perfect for the cynical, beer quaffing, blogging crowd.

Here's what I came up with:

Looooooooooooooooool

@kladkins: twitter sucks twitter sucks twitter sucks twitter sucks!

@thomas_x: playing on twitter, checking out my sister's twitter page, wondering why scifi became syfy, I know why, but god it sucks

@amuldoon: Nevermind; Twitter sucks. I really don't get why people use this, haha. Facebook ftwwwwwwwwww.

@frankshyong: excellent twitter account activity. I like that you only follow me and shaq. ILL sucks pretty hard @Ian_Graves

@ryansentz: Life sucks and so does twitter

@mollydotcom: I will never understand / s/he who follows in twitter land / that which offends and makes one shout / haven't you heard? / OPT THE FUCK OUT.

The poem I placed at the end was golden. Who would have thought that 5-10 minutes on a cell phone would garner such a perfect #whattheshit tweet.

Automatic Social [un]Awareness

Conquent — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:02:10 -0800

Taking on a political issue in a business setting is usually a bad idea -- but I'll take a whack at it anyhow.

There is a Twitter App called "Support #IranElection" which lets you turn your twitter avatar green to show your support of the protesters in Iran. All you have to do is log into Twitter using their special link, and BAM, your avatar turns green.

I can't say I know a lot about what's going on in Iran -- I know there are two groups of people, one slightly less conservative than the other, but that both groups are really conservative. I heard the alternatives described as either North Korea (totalitarian with no Western access) or China (totalitarian with some Western access).

There are questions about the validity of the election, but it's hard to say if it was rigged or not. There are questions about how the protesters have been treated, but it's hard to say who's causing the disruptions.

There are a lot of questions, and not a lot of answers, but there is this App that lets you show support for the less totalitarian crowd with one click.

As I cruise around the Internet I'm seeing a lot of green pictures, but I have to wonder if the people supporting the Iran Election protests are doing so because they have a deep belief that the protesters are right and the government is wrong, or if it's a fashionable thing to do.

I think expressing your opinions and beliefs is a good idea (otherwise I wouldn't have posted this), but I think they should be YOUR opinions and beliefs. My fear about these kinds of quick "me-too" apps is that it dilutes the message and can derail a campaign, and ultimately distract people from really learning about an issue because they've already "joined the cause" in one click.

Of course, when we run campaigns at Conquent, we want to see the numbers swell, and remove as many obstacles between a person and their ability to show support. I think the trick in the long run is to find ways to engage those people beyond just a ribbon or a color -- engage, teach, and spread a message with a credible, educated following.

New York, New York

Conquent — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:32:20 -0800

I've heard there are three kinds of travelers: the Tourist (everybody hates a tourist), the Infiltrator (it's fun to pretend, but watch out when it all falls apart), and the Business traveler, which seems to be the only kind of travel I do.

I actually think I prefer business travel best -- it's somewhere between tourism and infiltrating, which means I get to play tourist and see the "boring" bits of a city. I put "boring" in quotes because I think the day-to-day stuff is what life is all about; if you just see all the big sights, you miss the real city.

I'm the guy who finds the interesting underbelly of Orlando; this was my first trip to New York City which is a city that's interesting from any angle, and it didn't disappoint.

I got into JFK at about 5 in the afternoon. They were so busy there wasn't a gate available so we deboarded right onto the tarmac -- this must happen a lot as they had busses waiting, but I have to say the only other time I've gone directly outside from a jet was in the Arcata airport; I don't expect it from one of the biggest cities in the world.

Getting from JFK to @adbroad's place in the upper west side at that time of day sort of requires taking the subway, unless you want to sit in traffic for three hours. Unlike most cities, a lot of New York can be seen in the subway, and I don't mean outside the cars.

My first vision of New York was of two girls in colorful Indian garb on the drab subway. No one gives you a second look in New York, no matter what. I love the contrast of the color and joy of the two girls with the bored New Yorker dozing next to them. I took the photo surreptitiously with my phone on my knee, and ifyou look carefully over the shoulder of the girl in yellow, you can just make out my reflection in the window.

Near Columbia University there is a Mexican restaurant with a rooftop bar. I personally think it's a mean trick to put a bar at the top of a four story building with long flights of stairs, but they told me people rarely get drunk and fall down them. Rarely...

I wasn't expecting much from East Coast Mexican fare, but I was surprised with a Portobello Fajita Quesadilla and a passable margarita made with some tequila I had never heard of.

I went to New York for meetings with Hill and Knowlton and the UN Foundation to discuss the United Against Malaria website. The H&K offices are in midtown, so I took the subway down to 59th and walked the five or six blocks across town.

Everyone says there's nothing going on in midtown, and they're pretty much right. I mean, if you like non-descript 1970s architecture, you'll have a great sightseeing trip -- it sort of looks like they took one building out of every city in America and dropped it into the middle of Manhattan for filler.

After meetings were done, Helen suggested a play; I know nothing about what to see in New York, so we met at the tckts building in Times Square.

The heat and the rain were a remarkable combination, keeping some of the throngs of tourists away. They seem to have taken every Disney film ever made and turned it into a Broadway musical (although I didn't see Herbie Rides Again, I wouldn't have been surprised).

We chose Our Town, which everyone has seen so many times it seems amazing that I somehow haven't. The show was in a couple hours, so Helen suggested a "quirky New York thing" -- Chinese massage.

Onto the subway up to 76th street, through a small, poorly marked door, into a room divided by curtains. I knew my muscles were a mess from stress and injury, but, wow, that woman found knots I didn't know existed. She didn't speak English beyond "okay" and "too hard?"

Then back on the subway, down to the West Village, where the play was amazing. Minimalistic, until the very end, when they relive a day in life with amazing detail. Words won't do it, you'll just have to go to New York and get a ticket.

After the play, we went to a Japanese/Peruvian restuarant and were served by Korean hipster girl in the sidewalk cafe seating. Dinner consisted of duck comfit gyoza, an amazing roll of lobster and tuna, and a dessert that was layered with a whipped milk meringue, chopped mango, caramel ice cream and sake jelly. I'm not sure I want to know how they jellify sake, but it was amaing.

I had to get up and head back to the airport the next morning, wishing I had gotten photos of the Australian bride, in a short white dress on the curb, using her bouquet to hail a cab, reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty or of the Mariachi band in their Mexican cowboy outfits playing on the subway, but I guess these are the images you see all the time in New York.

My final hour in New York was frantic as I had written the time down wrong for my flight, and only had half an hour when I got there. People are surprisingly accommodating when you're obviously pressed to get to your flight, and I managed to get to the head of the line at the ticket counter, get my boarding pass, get through security and walk onto the plane.

As much as I enjoyed New York, I really didn't want to spend an extra 8 hours there until the next flight back to Portland...

First splash for United Against Malaria

Conquent — Thu, 28 May 2009 08:11:22 -0800

Conquent is developing a website for Hill and Knowlton's client, the UN Foundation's United Against Malaria project. Not only is it always great to work with such high profile projects, but it's an amazingly important cause and I'm personally glad to be a part of it.

The campaign is centered around the 2010 World Cup in Africa next year. So, the placeholder page went live today for the match between Tunisia and Sudan this afternoon (2PM Eastern).

The whole thing underscores to me how the web makes the world a little smaller, yet shows us how big it is. I mean, as an American, I have to admit I didn't even know there was a team in Tunisia called "The Carthage Eagles"; and the fact that Sudan faces Benin June 7 forced me to go to Wikipedia and look up Benin (squeezed between Nigeria and Togo, Benin was known as Dahomey until 1975 -- not that I knew where or what Dahomey was...).

I'm looking forward to tracking the matches over the next year and, in the process, I expect I'll learn more about soccer, Africa, and of course, malaria on the continent.

(You can read the article in the Tunisia Online News about the match today by clicking here.)

New Media/Old Media and the CLIO Awards

Conquent — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:03:20 -0800

I'll be heading to the 2009 Clio Awards tomorrow. No, I'm not getting an award, other than the honor of having been invited and getting a full pass to all the events. The invite was for the work that Carri, Helen and I did on the Mad Men Twitter campaign and they'd like us to live, ahem, tweet¹

It's exciting, sure, but...

Look, I've been pushing this envelope for so long you could put a small country in it. I started online advertising in '95 when the only ad model was a 468x60 banner and the only option was to buy or sell on a cost per thousand impression model.

We invented ways to track clicks and then buy and sell clicks, then we had to invent ways to track purchases or form fill outs so we could buy and sell on actions. Then we shattered the banner ad and got into all sorts of stuff.

I had a Palm Pilot with a cell modem on it back in 97 and we started developing mobile apps for sales people who needed mobile sales and inventory tracking (there was an App for that a LONG time ago, Apple). And, don't get me started on Social Media widgets, which I was working on back in '98 when Social Media was called "viral".

The thing that has slowed me down over the years has been being too far ahead of the curve. When I was selling web development back in '95, I had to sell dial-up to get people online and THEN get them interested in a website. Fairly long sales cycle.

When I was pitching mobile apps in 2000, most people were still just getting the hang of text messaging. Heck, when I was selling computers in the late '80s there were bulletin boards, but no Internet...

Over the past couple years things have come together. Not only has the market matured, but Conquent has the portfolio and the experience to bridge a wide range of industries and the equally wide range of media you can push your message through (web, social platforms, mobile, and don't screw traditional in the process). Getting the multimedia world of broadband right across all these properties is a trick, but nothing new to the team.

What's exciting is taking these tested ideas (mobile, social media and just plain old fashioned web) and hooking them up in new ways to new campaigns. Our recent work with Hill and Knowlton has shown me that the traditional world is hungry for these tools. It's hard to find a group that can talk plain english about these complex topics, and that's where Conquent comes in. It's not buzzwords, it's not jumping on the latest band wagon, it's just plain old business and marketing sense using the tools to get the job done.

I'm really looking forward to talking with folks at the CLIOs to see what they're looking for next, and maybe show them a few things they haven't thought of...

Note 1: I really hate that term "tweet"; I mean "posting" is fine. But as we don't search, we "Google", the branding of activities continues to grow.

Interview at SXSW: Mad Men Twitter And Tracking

Conquent — Sat, 9 May 2009 14:35:15 -0800

This interview was taken right after the panel discussion at SXSW Interactive conference.

Saturday Yard Work

Conquent — Sat, 9 May 2009 14:32:13 -0800

It started simply enough. Saturday morning going over to Markie's and mowing the lawn. Ironic, as I had bought a row house specifically because I hate yard work. I mean, I always strove for the "neglected" look as the "abandoned" look that was easier to maintain was some sort of hazard; at least that's what the fire marshal seemed to think.

Needless to say, mowing the lawn was an extreme gesture of affection. Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but a man who mows the lawn is priceless. It only took about half an hour, so it was a pretty good investment on my part. The fact I prefer to compost the clippings added a little time, but it's fascinating watching the debris turn to mulch with just a few turns of a pitchfork an a little time.

Then I noticed the roses on the side yard falling into neglect. I figured it would be a shame to let them die, and they were getting in my way mowing, so I started pruning them. That added a few more minutes, but it really made the side yard look a lot better.

Of course, mowing on its own isn't enough; turns out that edging isn't just for anal retentive types. We didn't have sidewalks in my old house, and the HOA takes care of them at the row house. Who knew that if you don't edge, the grass starts to eat into the concrete? Now that adds another half hour or so.

Edging on its own is only half the battle. It kicks up a lot of dirt that needs to cleaned up. Out comes the leaf blower, and while it's out, I might as well clean up the street a little. It's amazing how much dirt and outright garbage you end up with as you run the leaf blower along the gutter, and with a house on the corner, that's twice as much crap to sweep up.

So, in the end, my little gesture has turned into at least two to three hours of edging, mowing, pruning, turning compost and cleanup. Now I've got a nice little organized area in the basement with tools and yard stuff. Downright suburban, it is...

It's a slippery slope into domesticity... but covered in an immaculate, carpet of lawn.

We've got an App for that -- it's called the Web

Conquent — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:03:11 -0800

We've got an App for that -- it's called the Web

There's an ad running for the iPhone which I will paraphrase:

Say you're a small business owner and you need to run a credit card. We've got an app for that. Now say you need to print a shipping label. We've got an app for that. Now say you want to make sure it got there. We've got an app for that, too.

Yeah. It's called the web.

Look, you can run your customer's credit card through any number of payment portals through a simple web page, through a LOT of browsers installed on a LOT of phones. You can pull up printable labels, but if you're on a phone you have to switch to a local wifi connection to print it and how often do you do that? Finally, FedEx has had lots of ways to track packages remotely since pagers. Yeah, I said "pagers" as in "the iPhone is as good as a crack dealer's pager."

I know I rant on Apple, but I think what I really rant about is the fact that they're taking credit for a whole lot of stuff that already exists. I can do all that they talk about in that ad on my Windows Mobile phone.

But, more importantly, I could do most of what they're talking about in 1997 on my Palm Pilot. It's not new, it's just packaged well.

Let's not even go into the absurdity of printing a shipping label from your phone. Instead, let's consider the exclusivity Apple is breeding with their campaign. Their advertising implies the ONLY mobile computing is on the iPhone. It's an us and them mentality that stifles true innovation and the sharing of information, and if you want to be honest about it, it's a campaign that fosters bigotry.

If you think the word "bigotry" is too strong, think about the "I'm a Mac, you're a pathetic idiot" campaign.

Am I overreacting? Maybe. But let's really think different for a moment. If your company is built on the concept that you're cooler than everyone else, why do you have to take petty shots at people who work for a living ("I'm a PC, I have poor fashion sense and work hard" "I'm a Mac; I'm a slacker who can't even dress himself")? Why do you pretend that you're the only one on the block who thought about accessing FedEx through a cell phone?

Apple is not the counter culture revolution. Apple IS the man. Just a Man who dresses casually, but also a man who hasn't got a creative bone in his body.

Made it to SXSW in Austin

Conquent — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 06:10:00 -0800

I've always said that the trip begins as soon as you leave the house, not when you get to your destination. Business travel is a little different, but the theory still goes -- you're on the road, enjoy it.

I might actually extend that to including the morning of the trip. It's the way traveling colors everything you do -- all the little domestic things you do before you leave have more significance and an almost a surreal quality. Open the cat door, make some tea, dig through the clean laundry for another pair of socks... These are all things I do pretty much every day, but I won't be doing for the rest of the week.

I'm in Austin, TX for SXSW (pronounced South by Southwest, for the uninitiated). My flight was, well, a flight, except for the fact that my cold was worse than ever. I'm not a guy who gets nosebleeds, but sneezing at 35,000 feet while doped up on antihistamines seemed to change that rule. I won't go into the details, but let's just say it was a good thing I made it to the restroom and that stainless steel in a plane doesn't seem to be entirely stainless.

I've never been to Austin, and in a sense I still haven't been there. I got in around 9 last night, wiped out from my trip, grabbed the shuttle to my hotel, and that's all I've seen. Holiday Inns are pretty much the same where ever you go, which is why I don't usually stay at them

The view out my window isn't terribly promising -- flat and hazy with a freeway running right next door. But again, don't judge a city by it's Holiday Inn.

I'm off to grab some breakfast and be interviewed by WIRED, and I'll probably see a lot of the convention center... I might actually never see Austin at this rate.

What is Conquent?

Conquent — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:34:43 -0800

We're often asked, "Why the name Conquent?" The answer is simple: we didn't want a name that would limit the company, our employees, or our clients.

Innovation isn't about doing things the way you were taught in school, it's about testing the limits, finding new ways to do things, and understanding that you probably don't have all the answers.

Conquent is more than a company. It's the old adage, "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts" that drives us. Our clients are one part, the senior managers who specialize in a field of knowledge are another part, our employees, contractors and vendors are even more parts.

When our Web Development division has a project that needs someone who understands real estate or land use planning, they have the people they need -- people who share the passion and can jump into what would, otherwise, be uncharted waters. When our Land Use division needs to solve the legal minefield of 508 Accessibility compliance, they have the people they need.

At the end of the day, we're successful because all these different parts work together to solve problems. Maybe you only need a guy to code a web page for you. Great -- we have that guy. But if an unseen challenge comes up, and you need more, we have the experience, the resources, and the vision to get past that wall and get you back in business.

The trouble with Wordpress and other templates

Conquent — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 10:52:39 -0800

We just completed a project which included the installation of Wordpress; while Conquent doesn't usually use Wordpress, the client has a volunteer team working on content and they all have familiarity with the system, which made Wordpress the right choice to get the content up and running.

The project helped me to articulate why Conquent, philosophically, doesn't embrace any single platform or tool to get projects done. The problem isn't necessarily from the programming or the tool itself but stems from the very fact that tools are designed to simplify problems.

To simplify the management of content you have to create rules. To create those rules, you have to make assumptions. Those assumptions will ultimately sacrifice flexibility.

That's fine when you have a straightforward need. But systems like Wordpress try to be "all things to all people." As soon as you start adding things, you start to conflict with the idea of simplifying the system.

Instead of a basic content system, you end up with plug-ins, special pages, and a bunch of add-ons that make sense in their own context, but create a mess for people who don't need or use those functions, and even a bigger mess when you start combining these unrelated tools.

At the same time, you're still limited by the constraints of the system. So, now you have an environment with its own set of rules getting in the way of making things look and work the way you want at the same time you're dealing with a complex framework.

Keeping this in mind at the beginning of a project is really important. Don't start with the rules of the content management system, instead start with the rules of your business strategy and marketing. Technology, by the very definition of the word, is to apply science to solving problems.

Too often we apply technology without really understanding the problem we're trying to solve. Then people spend all their effort solving problems that wouldn't have existed if they had just picked the right tool at the beginning of the project.

In this case, Wordpress was the right tool, and having a team that's able to "get under the hood" helped us make that decision and advise future clients when they have a problem seeking a solution.

Wayward Words with Baggage

Conquent — Wed, 4 Mar 2009 15:24:07 -0800

While trying to explain what Conquent does, I'm constantly running into words with baggage. These were good words once, but bad people got a hold of them and abused them, either by twisting the word into something it never was, or making the poor word work so hard it loses any meaning it had.

Topping the list is the word "Synergy." Honestly, it's the best word to describe how we put the right people and the right resources together to get a project done, but the word was used by sales people who would say it phonetically and never actually consider what it meant. This led the word into a life of shame and ridicule, to the point that if you try to introduce it into polite society, you'll be laughed at, and never invited back.

John hates the word "robust." "Robust" would have been a fine word, but it strayed from its roots in coffee and wine. "Robust management team" might mean that they've been roasted to get a full, rich flavor, but in the context of describing Conquent's approach to management, we want to say that the team has strength and vigor. "Robust" just doesn't mean anything anymore.

We can't use words like "innovative" or "solutions" (and certainly not "innovative solutions") because most people who use those words are neither innovative nor do they actually solve anything. It's not that the words are wrong, it's that we've been lied to too many times with these words and we've lost trust in them because of who they hang around with.

Tech people have started using the word "ecosystem" to describe the interrelation of hardware, software, data, people, and, well... the "ecosystem" of technology. It's probably exactly the right word, but I'm afraid that we're about to kill another good word.

We have to find other words or phrases rather than dealing with the baggage these abused words carry. In a sense, I feel that marketers and sales people who are over using good words are crippling the language. Rather like a life in pornography, the words are so pretty when they start out, but they get dirty in a dirty industry, and are never the same.

Maybe we should start a home for wayward words to help rehabilitate words and help keep other words from falling in with the wrong crowd. But, what we really need to do is get the abusers in for some therapy before they kill again.

Marketers and Sales People -- you're on notice.

Speaking at SXSW March 17th

Conquent — Tue, 3 Mar 2009 14:37:40 -0800

I have been asked to speak at SXSW on March 17th, along with Carri Bugbee and Helen Ross, for our work with what we've been calling the Mad Men experiment.

We started twittering as characters from the AMC show Mad Men back in August for plain old fun. It's kind of a form of performance art, with a huge need for improvisational talent. Not only do we create scenarios for what our characters might be doing (as Twitter asks), but we have to keep them within the constraints of 1962 AND not violate the story on the series -- tricky to do when you're not privy to the writers notes.

I was originally going to write for Don Draper, but the character was already taken -- no problem, turns out Roger Sterling is a lot more fun. After all, he's done what I've always wanted to do with my company, that is, get to the point where he really has little to do all day. He drinks, smokes, and chases women (catching them from time to time). It turned out to be disturbingly easy to channel him.

As it progressed we started learning a lot about how Twitter works and, more importantly, how Twitter culture works. Talking off-line helped us get a better feel for what was going on with each other's characters, and it let us organize events like the #Madparty, our Twitter-only Christmas party. A little prep offline can go a long ways online.

We also started developing more sophisticated tracking tools -- knowing how a specific event helped build interest, or lose followers, helps keep the message on track. While there's a lot you can do by hand, it gets hard to manage communications from thousands or tens of thousands of followers.

And then there's all the buzz from people who AREN'T following you. Tracking the blogs, the news articles, and the general chit chat outside your immediate world takes time -- any tool we can use to minimize that time means more time to interact with fans and hecklers.

In the end, we got press in The Wall Street Journal, and Business Week among others, which has led to speaking at SXSW.

All in all, it was a great learning experience, and shows that it's something you need to be constantly learning about and adapting to -- "Social media" is still a buzzword, but if you happen to be in Austin March 17th and want to get past the buzz, be sure to come to our panel discussion. I'll be hitting town on the 15th if anyone wants martini drinking lessons.

The fleeting Memory of the Internet

Conquent — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:56:20 -0800

The Internet is an amazing compendium of random thought, and like thoughts, a lot of this information is fleeting. Some of it is fleeting because who really wants to hear the Dancing Hamster song again, and some of it is fleeting because the place the information was stored, like dying nerves in the brain, is gone. Unless your bit of information was important enough to be copied to another place on the Internet, it's probably gone for ever.

Aside from the technical reasons we lose information online, I think the main reason is that we simply don't care about the information. If it's important, or particularly memorable, it probably will stick around. But so much of the content we see online is just a written version of what we talk about at the water cooler -- important in context, but as time goes by, less necessary to keep around.

We have backups of data at Conquent, but who would really mourn the lost data from some guy's random blog? Unless something happens and I attain celebrity status, it's unlikely that people will be digging through my past ramblings. The problem is that those ramblings will be gone without conscious effort to retain them.

Of course, there's lots of random stuff stuck in the corners of the Internet, and I wonder what kind of picture would emerge of me if some forensic anthropologist tried to piece the bits together later. There are lots of random photos of Anna Frank, for example, where she was in the background of a photo and only because we cared later, did those photos surface. But what we really know about the girl is limited to what she wrote in her famous journal.

The memory of the Internet is fleeting, malleable, and constantly susceptible to sensory overload. The way we store data online is less like the great archives of a library and more like a gossip tree -- things get distorted as they pass from person to person and get re-interpreted or get processed through Photoshop.

You can't believe everything you see online because it's not the truth, it's just the bit of information we remember right now, and it's going to change again tomorrow...

It's okay to say 'I don't know'

Conquent — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:17:18 -0800

Being a professional consultant means coming in and saving the day. People are relying on you to answer questions, and there's definitely a sense of pride as you come into a situation and knock things off one by one.

But there's a danger in being too cocky. It's easy to believe that you have the situation in hand and that you don't need to look any further than your brain. It's disturbingly easy for a technical consultant to dismiss the client when they tell you "I think it's my hard drive," when you believe it's the power supply. After all, what does the client know? They hired you for your expertise, you obviously know better.

I don't know how many times I've had an employee who doesn't know the answer, but doesn't want to be bothered with explaining that he needs to figure it out, so he makes something up. Everyone does it sometime or another, we're busy people and sometimes it's easier to hide behind jargon and technical babble, but it's better for everyone just to say you don't know.

For one thing, admitting that this stuff is complicated and that you need to do a little research proves to your client that you're dealing honestly with them. You're building rapport with your client, and in the long run that means you're going to have a friend and a loyal customer.

And, if you lie, you're going to get caught.

My favorite story came from a client of mine who was interviewing tech companies for a fairly large project.

Every question he asked the tech was answered with, "No problem, we've got that covered." So, my client asks the guy, "What about the new X-32 protocols?" to which the tech replied, "We've looked at it and we're sure it's not going to be a problem."

Then my client asks, "what about the fact I just made up the X-32 protocols?"

Obviously there wasn't much the tech could do at that point to salvage the account. Anything he said would be suspect, because he proved that he would say anything, including bald faced lies, to get the business.

Being a professional means it's okay to be a little vulnerable. Your clients want to know you're going to take care of them, and they need to know that what you say is what you mean. There are so many geeks in every line of work who will try to dazzle their customers and prospects with big words, complicated descriptions and outright deception that our clients find it refreshing when we say, "I don't know... But, I'll find out."

Good Morning America, now Go Fight Traffic

Conquent — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:26:23 -0800

I have a three mile commute with no freeways and little traffic. That's by design as much as anything else; I have to get to the office at least five days a week, so I figure I should live near where I work. Apparently not everyone shares this philosophy.

Yesterday was a day of a lot of driving in other people's commutes. I had meetings in both Olympia and Seattle, which means about 150 miles each way. I've got no problem with driving long distances, and I know how to fight traffic, but, man... do you people really do that every day?

Getting out of Portland wasn't too bad as we were heading against the flow. It was pretty much bumper to bumper in the other direction, and while it was heavy going North, it was flowing. I had to deal with the normal I-5 idiots (why, why, why do people sit in the left lane doing exactly the same speed as the person next to them for MILES?)

The trip back was a different story. My meeting in Seattle was done around 4. I hung around until 6 to let the traffic thin out a little, at least until the online traffic graphic showed no more black sections of highway (stop and go).

I was able to sail through Seattle fairly quickly, but only with my aggressive driver hat on. That involves the close cut into the hole in the lane next to me, passing on the right, maybe a little tailgating, and a lot of swearing. I probably shaved 20 minutes of the drive driving that way but, it's not a pretty sight, me driving in rush hour traffic. Not pretty at all.

And it's exhausting keeping that adrenaline pumping while just feathering a little gas pedal and dealing with anonymous idiots.

As I drove in this morning I found I hadn't shaken the city, rush hour mode of driving. It was safe, but probably pretty rude to cut off that landscaping truck, and I probably didn't need to follow that sedan's bumper through the questionably colored traffic light.

I'm writing this because I probably should avoid chatting with clients or staff for a bit until that stagnant adrenaline subsides a little. I'm just left with a grumpy, frustrated feeling from that short drive -- what's scary to me is that's what most people do every day, which means America starts its day pissed off at nothing.

More surreality in Portland

Conquent — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:05:46 -0800

I've mentioned the random nature of Portland before, and just to follow up, here's a quick recap of Thursday through Saturday.

Thursday night I got a call from the location scout for the Weiden+Kennedy Nike ad shoot -- they apparently wanted access to Conquent's office to add some "lighting effects." As much as I'd love to claim "Nike video" on the Conquent portfolio, it really had nothing to do with us -- they just liked the area and the office makes a centerpiece for their shot. Ironic that Conquent ends up in Nike advertising just by the fact the company exists...

I also found out that the Mad Men Twitterers have been asked to speak at SXSW -- this is a really big deal, and I was happy to accept. I got my travel plans together on Friday and figured this was a good opportunity to go down to Beer and Blog; if I haven't mentioned it or you're not familiar with it, Beer and Blog is a kind of geekfest for people who post blogs regularly, and some folks who have nothing to do with blogging, but like the opportunity to talk tech with Internet geeks. It happens every Friday at the Green Dragon just off Belmont on SE 9th.

As I walked in, I ran into Greg Zimmerman, a friend who doesn't really keep up with any of the Internet stuff who just happened to be at the Green Dragon meeting up with his girlfriend. I hooked up with them shortly after being part of the crowd scene for KGW's news coverage of Beer and Blog (some guy set up his laptop with a web cam, and I guess the thing was streamed live over the Internet to the local news channel).

Turns out they were going to a party at Polara Studios, a really great commercial photography studio. Every year Polara has a big party with a different theme, this year it was Americana, with beer, hot dogs, a juggler (who kept dropping things, delighting the children and scaring the mothers), some odd performance dance and a gypsy swing band which others got up and danced to. I wasn't invited, and rather than going through a complicated story to crash the party, I just introduced myself as I walked in the door, which seemed to be enough (not that they knew anything about me, it's just that confident audaciousness that gets you past most checkpoints).

Great party, great drinks, and I fortunately got out of there early enough that I didn't do anything stupid... that I know of, that is. I mean, there was the woman I was dancing with at one point and we ended up under a spotlight, which fortunately someone killed at some point, but I don't know if that was because we were terrible or just distracting, or completely coincidental.

As a potentially completely separate posting, but to demonstrate the surreality of Portland, I got up Saturday morning and after getting Markie off on her day, and doing some laundry and other mundane Saturday tasks, I took advantage of the weather and got out for a flat 25 mile bike ride. Bear in mind, I am NOT in any kind of shape to be riding, but I figured, flat bike trail, I'll be fine. I didn't count on the headwind which made the ride about as difficult as climbing the West Hills.

So, I really needed to take a break after 13 miles and grab a bite to eat when I got to Gresham; I was going to grab something at the gas station, but I found a bagel shop right across the street -- Jazzy Bagels. I figured it was just a catchy name, although I did find it kind of odd that there was a baby grand piano in the middle of the place.

As I was sitting there eating my veggie bagel, I started to hear piano music, and sure enough, there was a guy playing, no joke, "I left my heart in San Francisco." Note the soda dispenser in the photo, and maybe you'll get an impression of the surreal nature of the place.

Of course it seems that Portland is always surreal -- just keep your eyes and ears open and you'll see we don't even need those "Keep Portland Weird" bumper stickers.

Nike Takes Over Conquent

Conquent — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:57:05 -0800

One of the nice things about having a cool space for an office is the fact that Nike wants it in their advertising. I mean, I'm sure they have their own cool spaces, but a 1940s bungalow set against an early 1900's bridge, nestled between a restaurant and row houses... Let's just say that sometimes the Knight has to come to the castle.

We were visited by a Weiden+Kennedy subcontractor a week or so ago who had apparently been scouting the area for an urban mix of old architecture in the city. They're putting together a viral campaign with some video footage -- they didn't tell me much, beyond offering to compensate Conquent for the time they would be on the property and to get some release forms.

Somehow I had gotten the impression they would be setting up a long shot for some kind of time lapse photo. But instead, at 6:00 this afternoon, three unmarked white vans and a large rental panel truck all showed up in front of the office.

People jumped out and started setting up cones to close off the street while others hauling equipment all over the place with lots of handheld radio chatter and stressed movement. It's the kind of scene that, in the movies, is usually followed up with either a large explosion or an alien running for the cover of the bushes.

Of course, six o'clock is about the time we usually get out of the office. I was in the unusual position of having gone home for lunch and ridden my bicycle back to the office, somehow forgetting my shoes. This left me walking barefoot and without a jacket around all the hubbub as filming started. Fortunately I did pack my panniers with street clothes, otherwise I might have been mistaken for the alien heading for the bushes.

Five or six athletic looking guys kept running back and forth in front of the office, with some director on the bridge on the other side of our parking area running direction through the radios. We were able to sneak out in between the athletic guys just as the athletic women showed up, which is as much a testament to bad timing as to just how hard it was to work around having your property turned into a film set (you don't exactly say, "Oh, wait, babes... We'll go later," after you've brought the entire filming to a halt so you can get your car out...)

Ah well, just another day at Conquent.

Facebook owns this title

Conquent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:52:09 -0800

I have heard some snide comments from time to time regarding the fact I don't like to use canned applications, and I like hosted services (like Livejournal) even less. There are great advantages to letting someone else do all your programming, but when you run a company that specializes in applicaiton development, it seems silly to be tied to some, unknown technology.

Of course I have accounts all over the place. I'm on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Wordpress.com, Twitter, Plaxo, Blogsot, and a few more I can't really even recall off the top of my head. And every time I sign up for one of those service I blithely accept the terms of service.

Now Facebook seems to have pushed the envelope in what they feel they get to do with what I create on their service. In an article in Business Week, I learned that simply by posting someting, be it a photo, a comment, a note, or any other content, Facebook has "an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license" to use, retain, and display content posted to the site." Even after you cancel your account.

This gives me one more reason to maintain a blog on Conquent.com and simply post links to that blog on these other services. I know where the data is and, as my company owns the server, I know that I haven't just given away my content for life.

Not that pictures of me dressed as Santa or playing the Boudrahn are going to be big intellectual property rights later, but it's nice to know I can choose to remove a photo later, or edit a blog to my choosing. It's also nice to know that if anyone is going to make money off my efforts it's going to be me or the people I choose, not some face(book)less company because I happened to click on a checkbox saying I understood their terms of service.

Update 2009-18-10:16
CNN Reports that Facebook backs down, reverses on user information policy.

"As Mark expressed in his blog post on Monday, it was never our intention to confuse people or make them uneasy about sharing on Facebook," company spokesman Barry Schnitt said in a blog post. "I also want to be very clear that Facebook does not, nor have we ever, claimed ownership over people's content. Your content belongs to you."

Of course, it's all fiction -- if Facebook can change their terms of services at anytime, and so easily apparently, then is there really a standard set of terms?

Excuses, excuses

Conquent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:52:55 -0800

I don't want to imply that there is nothing wrong with the economy, but I'm increasingly getting the impression that some companies are using the economic problems as an excuse to do the dirty things they've wanted to do for a long time.

For example, Boeing has dropped it's employee wellness program citing costs. In reality, the wellness program is a good thing for the employees, but a pain in the ass for the company. With everyone fearing layoffs, Boeing can kill the program, and not worry about an exodus of skilled labor -- where would employees go in this market?

Then there's Microsoft's recent layoff of around 5,000 people. By far, the bulk of those layoffs hit the H1B employees -- foreigners here on a work visa. Microsoft has been using H1B employees for a long time, but it doesn't change the fact that there's a certain level of overhead involved, and the fact the Justice Department keeps tagging the Evil Empire for improper hiring procedures. Again, no problem getting domestic workers in this market, so dump the annoyance and blame the economy.

I've talked about the slow pay issue, that is, companies that are using the economy as an excuse to treat Net30 like Net-when-we-get-around-to-it. And now, I'm seeing organizations change their internal rules for how money is allocated, spent, and protected. Banks are sitting on huge piles of cash -- cash we gave them in the bailout -- but rather than putting it towards business growth, they're keeping it in reserve for when things get really bad.

That's telling it itself. It means the banks don't really believe it's really bad yet. Bad, sure, but no, oh shit bad. Not, "I'm going to throw myself out the window" bad.

In the meantime, the folks on the bottom are being raped by those who still have it good. Not because Boeing can't afford a wellness program, not because Microsoft is losing money and has to lay people off, not even because companies and banks don't have money to pay bills with. They're doing it because they have the perfect excuse to continue to be shortsighted and greedy.

A little on Social Media

Conquent — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:38:58 -0800

Because @PeggyOlson won the Shorty Award last night, we outed all our Mad Men Characters to the Wall Street Journal which they posted in an article called Behind the Twitter Mad-ness.

We learned a lot about social media in the Mad Men experiement. One of the problems that I've seen in the "industry" is that there are a lot of folks out there who present themselves as experts in something that is rapidly evolving and difficult to define.

This makes it difficult to explain exactly what an agency can do for you if you're looking for a Social Media "expert."

In our exploration of the Twitterverse, I think we've defined a few constants that might help if you're considering getting into social marketing.

Monitoring
Although there are a lot of tools out there to keep an eye on Twitter and other streams, it's the experienced human being who knows what to do and when to act that's important. Catching negative comments and forwarding them to the appropriate department or agency is different than engaging discussion and turning a negative into a positive.

For example, the decision to shut down the Mad Men accounts became a positive for us and we can prove it through the blogs and mainstream press it generated -- they missed the boat and inadvertently created more buzz by doing something stupid.

Engagement
This is, of course, what people expect Social Media to be all about -- you can go out and make friends. But making them, keeping them, and keeping them interested, are all different things. This takes creative writing skills and an understanding of the message and letting that message change as the medium changes.

Honestly it got harder for me to tweet as Roger Sterling after he became so smitten with Jane -- an aloof, skirt-chasing drunkard gives lots of opportunity to engage people with quick comments. But using that relationship in the Mad Party was brilliant -- it gave not only all our characters something to talk about, but it also gave our friends something juicy to dish on.

Redirecting/Harnessing
The Mad Men experiment doesn't really give us an opportunity to do anything beyond engaging people -- we are not involved with the show, and it would be inappropriate to co-opt the brand. But the agency could have done some really cool promotions through the brand by creating a Sterling Cooper company website, with links to promotional items, teasers and fun stuff.

Star Trek has been doing this for years with "fan" sites which are often driven by Paramount. Even more "in your face" goals like the Bissell Pet Photo contest use the engagement on the web to bring visitors to the site and build basic brand awareness.

This, naturally, requires a nimble team that can create these destinations AND be flexible enough to keep up with the fast pace of the social scene.

Tracking
Finally, if you're going to do any kind of campaign, you have to have tracking to see how your efforts are panning out. This is different than monitoring in that it's more like tagging your efforts to separate them from the general buzz. For me, this has been similar to existing advertising tracking; pretty much track IP address and referring pages so I know when something really goes viral (like my Songsmith blog).

The data sources keep changing, and I've found my needs keep evolving as I learn more about where data comes from (and goes) and what sources there are to monitor that data. Turns out my blog gets steady traffic from Google Reader, which I only saw when I started including remote images in my blog, so I modified my tracking to system to accommodate RSS readers and found people reading my blog using Firefox's embedded reader, Google Reader, and a couple unidentified sources which may be bots; I don't know yet -- but with tools in place, I can learn.

In the end, it's all about being aware and learning more as you go. Social media lets you do it faster and with a lot more random energy and therefore a lot more opportunity for random creative ways of interacting with people.

Feeding on Content

Conquent — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 08:28:13 -0800

There are lots of people out there peddling the concept of social media and search engine optimization. Before you say, "WTF?" believe me, I don't think they're connected either. Except in one small way -- it takes fresh content to be found by, and indexed by, the search engines.

One trick to keep fresh content on your website is to grab a feed from another website (you can grab all the content from this blog by going to bissellator.conquent.com/feed for example). The problem with that is you end up with just a copy of someone else's content, so the search engine sees no value in your site.

Which leads to the next trick where you grab content from a number of sources with a query. An herein lies the problem -- it's not your content, so you don't really know what the other guy is writing about.

My long standing search string example is the client I had back in 1999 who wanted to show up on search engines under the word "card." Of course "card" can refer to playing cards, computer parts, the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, greeting cards, visa/mastercard/bloomingdales charge cards...

It doesn't really matter what you're searching for, if you automate it, you're going to get some "unanticipated results." And as people become more sophisticated, they notice the irregularities more, and deduct points.

Remember, the point of any communication is to deliver relevant information. Throwing shit on the wall might get you a Jackson Pollock masterpiece, but only if you're Jackson Pollock. Most of the time you just get a big mess to clean up.

Attack of the Bots

Conquent — Mon, 9 Feb 2009 08:18:54 -0800

I'm noticing a huge increase in traffic to my blog, and I don't think it's because I'm a scintillating writer. The logs we keep for blogs are pretty specific, so it's not hard to see what's going on.

The bots are taking over.

By "bots" I mean a range of automatic systems including search engines, feed readers, and more nefarious systems like tools designed to post bogus comments on your blog or worse yet, find a security weakness to hack or crack the server.

Some bots are better behaved than others -- Google drops by every now and then and grabs a copy of the site for their search engine. MSN seems to be indexing the information constantly. I'd say the bulk of the search engine traffic, and a big part of the overall blog traffic, is from MSN.

Then there are the dozen or so Twitter addons which are constantly watching when people post links on Twitter -- guaranteed I'll get a few dozen hits on the server every time a post a link. And these seem to have spawned a new generation of blog search engines which are constantly grabbing the RSS feed and also indexing the HTML version of the page, giving a double hit to the server.

Of course, the structure of the site causes a little extra traffic simply because I present my blog in three categories, Professional, Personal, and Combined. If it gets posted in either Professional or Personal, it shows up automatically in Combined, giving the bots a little more to chew on.

More disturbing are the bots trying to hijack the site in one way or another. There are bots which try to post their own content to the site via the comment system. Over the past few days the traffic has really picked up on that one, and it looks like it's coming from personal computers with viruses -- no rhyme or reason, the postings come from all over the world and all times of day.

We've stooped the spamming with a simple CAPTCHA (which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."); that's why you have to enter that word when you post a comment. The traffic is still there, they just aren't getting their postings through.

Then there are the bots trying to find security weaknesses -- it's amusing to see Windows exploits being tested on our LINUX environment, but it's annoying to know that the barbarians are constantly at the gate trying to get in.

The real problem with this is tracking the effectiveness of marketing Conquent. The blog is one way people find the site, and knowing what kind of traffic we have coming to the blog helps us to understand who's visiting and how we might want to get some traction with those people. But we're constantly spending time filtering out things like "internetserviceteam.com" from real people who appreciate the information and insights they get from this blog.

At the end of the day it probably doesn't matter. Real interactions with real human beings are what make a company like Conquent succeed, and if someone likes what they when they visit the site, the next step is usually an email or phone call.

And that's the best result to track.

Irish Music in Oregon City

Conquent — Sun, 8 Feb 2009 11:34:46 -0800

Debbie and Bruce invited us out last night to hear an Irish folk band that was playing in a pub in Oregon City. I never really think of Oregon City as having much of a nightlife; although there is a downtown with a number of bars that always seems intriguing, Markie and I have never found anyplace we've wanted to stop at (although the McMennemans has always worked out for us).

Looking up the Living Room Pub online we saw a couple really terrible reviews; Just goes to show you can't believe everything you read online.

The draft beer is what you expect in a Portland area pub with decent microbrews but the big surprise is the huge cooler of bottled beer. I had a couple Irish beers to go with the music, and my lovely date started with a Vietnamese beer ('33) and settled on a good scotch ale towards the end of the evening.

All Oregon bars are non-smoking now, and I assume the place was thick with smoke before the law, but it's a clean, well lit, neighborhood spot with a couple pool tables up by the bar, and a huge seating area (they have apparently been steadily expanding the place since last April).

I chatted with one of those locals and was surprised to learn he was a vulcanologist with the State of Oregon. We also talked with the owner about the two reviews we saw on Google, and she was friendly, chatty and not at all what the reviews suggested.

The Widdershins, the band we went to see, played in the new section of the bar, and there was room to dance and carouse without interfering with the regulars at the bar. We got there a little late, and ended up sitting at a table to the side of the band, which ended up feeling like sitting at the High Table, with all eyes on the band, and occasionally on us.

The fact that Debbie is a belly dancer and has trained on the finger cymbals AND got up and joined the band at one point meant that we ended up even more in the focus, but I'm not exactly shy about that. Markie and I were able to take a turn or two around the floor to a couple really wonderful waltzes, and I joined in with the drummers on the Boudhran during one of the breaks, something I haven't done for a long time.

That's what a night out in the pub should be, good music with good friends and spontaneity.

Landing on an Aircraft Carrier

Conquent — Sat, 7 Feb 2009 17:09:11 -0800

No, I didn't get to do this one, but after the flight simulator experience, Bill forwarded me this home video of an actual landing on an aircraft carrier.

If I thought turning and hitting the runway was hard, this is absolutely impossible looking, yet they do it every day...

Got Curry? And some bizarre art?

Conquent — Sat, 7 Feb 2009 11:57:29 -0800

There's this little Indian restaurant in Milwaukie, Oregon called Got Curry?; it's a family owned place where they live upstairs, mom cooks (and she's a great cook) dad hosts and tends bar and the teenage boy does his best to wait tables.

The food is southern Indian style, and very tasty. There's not a huge selection, but it hardly matters as whatever you order seems to be great. As I mentioned the owner is also the bartender, but that's recent. He made fine drinks, but I've never had to explain what goes in a gin and tonic before (that would be, well, gin and... um... tonic?) His wife muttered with a bit of a chuckle "What are we going to do on Valentine's day?"

The decor is a little odd as the place was apparently a Mexican restaurant before and they haven't invested much in changing it over to Indian. There are a few elephants and traditional artwork, but the beer comes in glasses proclaiming the "Rael Experience" and Casa Rael, and there's still a lot of Mexican artwork hanging on the walls.

This one, in particular, caught my eye:

The frame has the title "Visions of Yesteryear" and it hangs, not so proudly, in the men's room. This is definitely artwork of a different kind of Indian all together. (You can click on the image to see the full size photo.)

I'm still not entirely sure what the painting is all about. The man behind the plow is definitely crushed and broken and very old. I assume the skull is buffalo, not a steer, so he's probably seeing the dead remains of the life he once knew. It's a morbidly depressing painting, which may be why it's been relegated to the men's restroom.

To me it's one of those bizarre moments where going to the bathroom in an Indian restaurant makes the artwork is so completely out of context with the moment, and somehow makes it more interesting and more noteworthy.

Not that it's where any artist probably wants their work hanging, but, it does make you stop and look, and then wash your hands and go back to dinner.

Web 1.0

Conquent — Wed, 4 Feb 2009 22:08:37 -0800

This may seem like a snitty little tirade, but it's something that bothers me a lot. People use the term "web 2.0" to describe new, web based businesses, and I think it's just so much jargon.

I've suggested that Twitter is just the Internet equivalent of Sherlock Holmes' London Times, that Facebook is the bulletin board in the campus commons, that RSS is a throwback to flat files of the 80's.

Web 2.0 is an Edsel with fins.

This pretty much falls under my "there's nothing really new" cynical tirade. The more optimistic side of me knows that there really are new and innovative ideas, but let's face it, those ideas involve things like Velcro, magnetic levitation trains, or the backbone of the Internet itself.

But "Web 2.0" doesn't hit the world of dreams and wonder, unless you count "I wonder about that dream..." Just because you say you're doing something earth shatteringly innovative doesn't make it so.

Part of the problem is in the definition. The current wiki entry doesn't seem to give a solid explanation of what "Web 2.0" means. It seems to mean social networking or perhaps cool AJAX tricks (which is just JavaScript and XML tricks, kind of cool but not Velcro).

It gets back to my argument about tool users versus the folks who create the tools. The things we do on the Internet are amazing, but they are amazing because of the amazing invention of the Internet itself, or "Web negative 1."

I think that's what really offends me about the idea of Web 2.0 -- whatever the kids in the coffee shops are doing with JavaScript and social media, no matter how interesting and new it may seem, the web sites people are building today under the banner of "Web 2.0" don't come close to the true invention and impact of the web that was there 10 or 15 years ago, and is still there, albeit a little faster with a few more bells and whistles.

But bells and whistles do not make a fundamental shift in the universe.

Random Music and Random Life in Portland

Conquent — Sun, 1 Feb 2009 15:01:48 -0800

I got together with Josh, a Conquent alumnus who's working at Powell's in their ecommerce division. We met at the Muddy Rudder, which happens to be on the same block Markie and I live on, and underscores one of the things I love about living in Portland.

Right in our residential neighborhood is a pub with live music most nights, a dozen taps or so of really good beer, and a roaring fire (a chair broke at the table next to us, and the owner promptly added it to the woodpile -- it's that kind of place). While they have wireless, you see more people playing cards or games than folks on laptops, and I like to refer to it as a "biker bar" because of the large number of cyclists who drop in because of its proximity to the Springwater Trail.

The music last night was the Rose City Hot Club, which usually has more than the two guys we heard, but two guys filled the room with a 30's revival jazz sound (think Django Reinhardt) -- one with a stand up bass and the other switching between guitar and fiddle. This picture, by the way, is of the band's "vintage" microphone, made from tuna cans and old springs -- it looks great and really works, too (although he turns down the bass all the way so it sound tiny like an old-timey microphone would).

And then there was the woman who they invited up to sing a few songs; not the warbley, off key singing you'd expect in a local pub, but a great voice, and a good pace, hitting complex changes. It's the kind of thing you expect to see promoted for weeks beforehand and pay a hefty cover, not something you just drop into when meeting a friend for a beer.

And that's the soul of Portland -- stuff happens. There's always something going on, and it's not orchestrated by a big corporate sponsor or exclusive to some club or organization. Life just happens here, and the fact that it's so noticeable makes me wonder if life is happening elsewhere...

To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump

Conquent — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 18:42:43 -0800

There's something about going to the dump that take me back to my childhood. Well, that's probably because my step-dad liked to take Saturday mornings and hit the junk seller at the dump, and the swap meet at the Denios Farmer's Market and Auction. I'm not sure why the Chinese food always tasted so good, it should have been revolting after looking at garbage, but, hey, I was a starving teenager, so anything would have tasted great.

But the dump isn't what it was. When we would go to the dump, it was really the dump. You know, the big landfill like the crying Indian stood in front of in those public service announcements. There were bulldozers chugging away and seagulls everywhere, and the stench... There's a very distinct smell of rotting garbage, but in the open air it was bearable.

The Metro Transfer Station up in Northwest Portland is a warehouse. You drive into a building, empty your vehicle of garbage while under cover, and get back in your car and drive out. It could be raining, sleeting, hailing, or a beautiful day, and your garbage will be protected from the elements.

Of course, garbage has changed too. You can take your old CRT monitors to the transfer station, up to seven a day (an interesting yet arbitrary number). They have a hazardous waste section (the guys in the hazmat suits looked like they were doing calisthenics, and I never learned what that was all about) and a yard debris area. And, of course, huge bins for your recyclable materials.

All in all, waste management reminds me how lucky we are to be removed from so much of the, well, crap, that our even recent ancestors, and many people still, deal with every day.

Don't get me started on how cool I think sewers are...

Flight Simulator

Conquent — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:19:28 -0800

I had the opportunity to see Bill Lewis' flight simulator out at the Troutdale Airport today. If you want to talk about amazing technology, then you want to see this thing.

The simulator itself runs off a simple Windows box, but it feeds data to three huge machines which process the graphics as you "fly" the plane. There are three projectors overhead the cockpit, with some very clever placement of shades to keep the images from overlapping.

Those projectors are aimed at a big, wrap around screen, which completely immerses the cockpit in the virtual reality. Bill's system uses a generic airport and surrounding area, but apparently you can get a Google Maps plug-in (for about $50K more) which would let you see the actual surrounding area.

The cockpit itself is a faithful reproduction of the kind of Cessna Bill teaches people to fly with; there were three parked outside the building, but we kept the demonstration in the simulator rather than actually risking life and limb in the air. The dash can be swapped out for different models, although he pointed out the basic features of the "six pack" dials with altimeter, speed, a couple different compass settings, that thing that tells you if you're level... Let's just say you should look for a real pilot if you're in trouble in the air...

All those controls and indicators act like they would in a real plane. Heck, even the physical compass and GPS system show your bearing and map as if you were over Troutdale, or where ever you set your coordinates (or fly, for that matter).

Taking off was surprisingly simple. Get it up to about 60 knots, pull back on the stick, and you're in the air. There was that little issue about steering with the foot pedals when you're on the ground, and the plane did seem to lean a little to the left, but, hey, I didn't run into anything as we took off.

The controls actually behave as they would if there was wind pushing over the plane; I had to constantly adjust the trim and keep an eye on my bearing. It's amazingly easy to start drifting around. I found myself focused on the instruments rather than looking out the window, which is the whole point of the wrap around screen.

Other than the intentional nosedive, or running it into a building for kicks (and finding out that the trees weren't "real" and I could fly right through them), I actually managed to land the thing. Sure, it stalled just as I touched down, but Bill said some folks consider that a perfect landing.

Bill played with the weather, the time of day, and even changed my altitude with a push of a button. The "freeze" button was very reminiscent of "Computer, pause programme" from Star Trek, and overall it was a disturbingly realistic sensation, which made the sudden virtual changes even more surreal.

The motion sickness wasn't as bad as I expected, either. I get sick playing DOOM, which I always blamed on bad rendering -- apparently the same happens to some folks on this thing, but I think that the full wrap around screen and the tactile sensation of actually turning the wheel and pulling on the stick made it more comfortable than a mouse and a 17" monitor.

I didn't get the flying bug from the experience, but I would like to get out sometime in one of the Cessnas and see the area from the air -- low air, that is, rather than out the window of a 737. We have Mt St. Helens, the Gorge, Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood all right out our back door. Bill said it's about $300 for him to take you through the paces and get you in the air, so maybe... well, I suppose paying some bills first, but it's a idea nevertheless.

Cold night, hot fire, happy cat

Conquent — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:51:03 -0800

Now THIS is a comfortable cat:

I think cats have been hanging out with humans long enough that fire is hardwired as "good." Nothing like a cold night outside and a warm fire inside, 'cept a warm fire with a cat curled up on the hearth.

Net Neutrality

Conquent — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:14:45 -0800

The question of Net Neutrality seems to be coming up more often lately, although that question seems to vary from person to person. Usually the question is, "What the heck is Net Neutrality?"

The Internet works because different providers cooperate with each other. Conquent uses Sprint for its hosting facility, Sprint in turn connects to other networks, so if you want to look at www.conquent.com, the data will flow out our Sprint connection, across a couple other providers and eventually through the connection you pay for through your local provider.

We all connect to the Internet using different local providers; it may be a cable company like Comcast or Brighthouse, or it may be a phone company like Qwest or Verizon. And with faster wireless, it may be through the air on the cell network or WiMax.

It's this "last leg," or rather your personal connection, that all the fuss is about. Companies like Google pay a lot of money to the big boys like Sprint or AT&T to handle the huge amount of data they are sending out. The problem is that Comcast has no control over whether Google starts streaming video -- suddenly your connection could get slow because everyone else in the neighborhood is watching John Stewart throw a pie.

Now, that video may compete with Comcast's television service. So, Comcast might block Google's video service in order to promote their own service. Or they might charge Google to get priority, which means that Hulu would suck, but Google would be great.

And there's the rub. The innovation of the Internet hasn't come about because of back-room deals, it's because any service gets the same priority as any other service. Don't forget the cooperation part of the Internet -- private networks like AOL and CompuServe are gone because they couldn't be innovative enough to keep up with the "greater good" policy of Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality means that Google can start as a small potatoes search engine, and as it grows, it keeps building up its own infrastructure, with no graft to some cable company in Idaho or Florida. Google has created new tools, and new revenue models, and helped keep an entire industry healthy and happy.

Google may go away someday because someone else comes along with a more innovative idea than search, just as Google has knocked AltaVista off the map. But without the ability for anyone to float an idea out there and see how it plays, the Internet will calcify into a few big players. And THAT is why we need Net Neutrality.

If you're interested in whether your provider is choking your bandwidth (and not living up to what you're paying them for), you can check up on them with these tools developed by a coalition of universities and private industry (yes, Google was a big part): http://measurementlab.net/.

Walking to work in the snow

Conquent — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:17:02 -0800

I live about three miles from work, which means I can walk to work in about an hour. It beats a gym membership, lets me get my thoughts together before the day and, because Portland is such an outdoorsy kind of town, it's a really pleasant walk along the river and up a wooded trail.

I decided to walk in this morning despite the light dusting of snow, or maybe because of it. While I don't like going out up to the mountain in the winter, I like getting out in the snow when it comes to visit here in town. And, as you might see from the pictures I took along the way, the walk becomes really picturesque in the snow.

There was still some ice under the snow from the dusting we got Sunday, but the snow itself was powdery and easy enough to walk on, although I admit to walking on a couple lawns rather than risking the potentially slick sidewalk.

The most uncomfortable part of the walk wasn't the cold or even the wet, but being bundled against the elements and hiking up the hill between Johns Landing (which is about sea level) and Hillsdale (about 500 feet). Unbundling meant getting wet from snow, staying bundled meant getting wet from sweat. I chose snow.

This part of my walk is always kind of surreal. In the middle of Portland it feels like a hike in the Cascades, except for the sound of the traffic up on Capitol Highway or walking under the huge bridges for the freeway and Barbur Blvd. With the snow the sound of traffic was muted, and the trail had an even more surreal, mountain hike feel to it.

I probably did well to walk -- even though the streets are not bad (maybe a little slick, but passable), the drivers in Portland are. I counted at least four cars driving with chains, two school busses with chains on the inside of the dualies, and a bunch of people with studs, and the roads, while slick, are pretty much bare pavement.

Of course, I don't know which is worse, the idiots with the chains, or the maniacs with four or all wheel drive who think they're immune to slick pavement. Walking up Capitol Highway where there is no sidewalk I had a moment of terror where a Volvo almost smashed into the back of the car in front of him by slamming on his brakes and skidding to a stop.

But, all in all, it was a nice walk, a nice day in the snow, and it will be nice when it turns to rain and washes all away...

A window into Moreland of the Past

Conquent — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:48:46 -0800

The little neighborhood we live in is adjacent to an old hub of activity. West Moreland still has a theater, shops and even a hardware store.

I dropped my phone a bit back, and it seems it's taking pictures a little out of sync with time now. Here's a shot of West Moreland a little before I arrived on the scene:

The hardware store is up the street now, Claudette Colbert hasn't played at the theater is years and I would have to wonder what Jacqueline would think of Stickers Asian Cafe being in her store -- even I find the chai with rum a little cosmopolitain for Portland of 2009. I'm also curious if the clock kept time or if it was as inaccurate as it is today.

Even with being able to take picutres of the past, I still need a new phone...

Getting clever with data feeds

Conquent — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:07:49 -0800

There is a lot of data available out there on the Internet these days, and more and more of this data is being made available in various forms of feeds or APIs (Application Programming Interface). For kicks, we wrote a feed from Twitter to Conquent so you can see live results scroll by at http://conquent.com/scroller/ and I also display my recent blog postings and Twitter postings through RSS on various portal pages.

But let's talk about the value for business.

Our accessible shopping comparison engine at http://empower.conquent.com/ pulls the literally millions of records from Shopzilla and other data sources and formats the results in a way that's easy for screen readers like JAWS or Window-Eyes to read as well as making it easier for mobility impaired, or vision impaired visitors without readers, to view the results.

The problem is with querying millions of items "on the fly." You can't do it efficiently -- even with solid bandwidth and good servers, pulling down millions of records takes time to process. And hitting the source data every time someone wants to see vacuum cleaners makes the user experience crawl and eventually lay down and die.

We worked around this problem with an "on-demand caching" of results. Shopzilla updates their system every 24 hours, so there's no reason to grab a set of data if we've seen it in the last 24 hours. The first time someone hits a category that hasn't been viewed in 24 hours, we fire up the process to grab the data, process it and cache it -- it's a little slower for that one person, but for the rest of the day it's lightning fast.

At the same time, we don't have to store unused categories -- if no one ever browses "tires" on empower.conquent.com, we haven't ever wasted bandwidth and processor time by grabbing something no one cares about. Granted, every time Google or MSN comes by they'll trip the category, but that works to our advantage creating a slow, background cache copy in the event someone DOES come by -- but if we don't already have it, the visitor will always get the most recent copy, regardless of whether we already grabbed it or not.

Building in these simple efficiencies makes the site a lot more scalable, faster, and keeps our content provider happier as we're not crowding them with unnecessary requests.

Big and Little Beirut

Conquent — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 21:20:50 -0800

Getting gelato tonight at the neighborhood and heard some great music from a performer named Beirut. I don't usually hear waltz time in public places, and certainly not with the odd mix of organic instrumentation and haunting vocals that Zach Condon has assembled.

He's young(ish) for this kind of music scene, and oddly enough a Santa Fe native who lives in Brooklyn now. The music blends Western and Eastern European styles with traditional and electronic. It's hard to describe, so if you want to hear some of it, check out their Myspace Page.

I didn't have my phone, so I wasn't able to text myself the name of the band. The woman behind the counter said I should be able to remember the name of the band as Portland is known as "Little Beirut" a fact I somehow completely missed in the 15 years I've lived here.

Portland apparently got the nickname back in the early '90s from George H. Bush's staff because of the violent protests he got during his visits. And the name stuck -- in 2003 when George W. came to visit there were demonstrations and protests, and an overzealous police force responding to the protesters. Although most of the large gatherings I've seen in Portland involve brew fests or Santa suits...

The odd thing is how rarely we seem to protest in America, even though this is a country based on dissidence and the power of the people. So rare is our taking to the streets that when you get a particularly vocal group in a town, it's suddenly compared to a war torn city in the Middle East, when in reality, it's a pretty quiet town that just likes to play a little odd music and be heard on important issues.

The Other Credit Crisis

Conquent — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0800

We've heard a lot about the problems with the credit market -- banks aren't lending or, worse yet, they're pulling lines of credit back from good customers. I'm of the mind to play the drinking game "Do a shot every time you hear the phrase economic crisis," except for that kidney stone a couple months back...

There's another credit market we haven't been talking about, a huge slush fund of credit that's impossible to track, and one that's growing daily.

Net Terms.

Well, implied net terms. If we send out an invoice to a client, it says "Due on Receipt" unless we've made other arrangements with the client. Traditionally, however, our clients have treated that as "I'll pay in the next payment cycle, or in 30 days... or so." As long as we all expect it, it's okay; everyone knows when the money will show up, and they can manage their cash flow accordingly.

Only now clients and vendors are playing long-term credit games. For some reason not paying vendors is different than taking out a loan from a bank and not paying it. Sitting on a payable for 30, 60 or even 90 days is just fine for many business people, and the reality is the only ones who get paid on time are companies with big sticks like the banks.

As a business owner I obviously have problems with people not paying the company. We're pretty good about managing our debt, but most established companies carry a line of credit or credit card debt. If we have to tap that line of credit to make payroll or other expenses our clients are using our line of credit indirectly.

Even with the interest charges built into every contract, it's hard to recoup that cost of carrying the debt. As a business owner, you want to maintain a good relationship with your clients, especially the ones that spend (and therefore borrow) a lot of money. So, you use the interest charges as a last resort to get them to pay attention, and then waive them as part of the "thank you" for getting paid.

In the process, you discount the work or product you've already sold. It would be like knocking 20% off the invoice just because your client didn't meet the terms of your agreement. In other words, you punish your own company for the mistakes of others.

Now we're seeing a ripple effect where people aren't getting paid at all. If we have a client who slow pays us for an invoice, it causes us to slow pay the vendor we used for the project, which causes him to slow pay HIS vendors... You could be 6 degrees from the guy who didn't pay in the first place and still get screwed.

The game only works if the chain remains unbroken and everyone pays; as we get further and further out of sync from products delivered or services rendered, the chain is gets weaker.

The best solution is to have your clients secure credit directly before going into the project or delivering the product. The downside is that offering direct terms is often a deciding factor in choosing otherwise equal vendors.

Rather than making the obvious statement, maybe I'll just skip ahead to doing a shot.

The Broadband Inauguration

Conquent — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0800

Millions of people watched the Inauguration online -- one content provider said that they had a peak of 7.7 million viewers of streaming content alone during the Big Day. Making it hard to get a real count is the fact that video from the inauguration ceremony and surrounding events was streamed all over the Web. Sites such as Hulu and Ustream were busy along with the sites of major news outlets.

And it was far from perfect.

CNN.com, one of the most popular viewing destinations, had to cut off viewers and establish a wait list. It's like queuing up to peer in the peephole for the old kinescope.

I'm personally really surprised that CNN, of all the news outlets, had to resort to rationing bandwidth. We're in the era of huge data pipes and cloud computing. We certainly have learned a lot over the years about distributed processing from tools like the SETI desktop (search for intelligent life while not using your computer) to better file sharing systems like BitTorrent (I've been known to download movies in a fraction of the time it takes to view them).

But, even with the hitches, I believe the future of television is broadcast over broadband. It's just too damn convenient and ubiquitous -- I have more computer screens than I have televisions screens both at home and work, and the TV screens double as computer screens. On my recent trip to DC, I watched streaming movies from Netflix over my AT&T Air Card (cell modem) on my laptop and I never turned on the TV itself.

We need to get better tools for pausing and rewinding in the stream; information, even live information, needs to be digested. The moment is never "gone" in the era of constant recording, and computer broadcasting offers us a lot more ways to interact with the information.

I wonder, though, if January 20th, 2009 will be remembered for being the day the first black president took office, or for the day online broadcasting really came to life.

T-Mobile owns Magenta and Other Patent Stories

Conquent — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0800

We had a discussion in the office yesterday about patent infringement, and a T-Mobile case from 2007 came up. Apparently they own magenta.

Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile to the USA) has used magenta (No. 395 52 630 "magenta" or RAL 4010) for designating its services and in its advertising since September 12, 2000 when it registered it on the basis of a proven secondary meaning for goods and services in the field of telecommunications.

Now, my feeling is that a patent is only as good as the money you have to burn defending it -- getting L'eggs to remove all their magenta packaging for their hosiery, or Taco Bell to change the color of the Bell is going to be a bit of a trick. But it does mean that they can create a nuisance, just as when McDonalds sued a member of clan McDonald for their tea shop in Scotland.

I've seen a lot of dumb patents awarded over the years. The "pop-under" which is basically two lines of JavaScript, was patented by a couple guys who didn't have anything to do with the development of JavaScript. It would be one thing if you created the JavaScript engine, but to write two lines of code and patent it?

After years of discussion and worry that it will have a chilling effect on the Internet they got the patents last June (7,386,555 & 7,353,229). It should be interesting to see them sue news agencies like CNN and entertainment portals like the Internet Movie Database which is owned by "One click" patent holder Amazon.

The "One Click" patent, by the way, is where you click on a link from an external website that takes you right to the checkout process on Amazon's website. Somehow they patented the simple HTML link from what I gather... I know it's more complicated than that... I really hope it's more complicated than that.

Then there's the whole world of genetic patents. When I went in for my CAT scan last month, I had to sign a release form allowing the docs to use any samples they got from me for medical experiments, and if they created some wonder drug based on my DNA, they would own my DNA.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, there's no way I could create a wonder drug from my colon, but on the other hand, if some competing pharmaceutical wants to pay me a million for a piece of my ass so they can try to make their own wonder drug, I should be able to do that, but now I can't.

I've been seriously considering applying for a process patent for the process by which an individual or group uses muscular pressure to exchange air in an organic chamber.

I get a nickel every time you take a breath or I'll sue.

The Risk-takers, Doers and Makers of Things

Conquent — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:47:03 -0800

Having seen a bit of this country, I know that not everyone was thrilled today with Obama taking office. But even his opponents have said what an incredible speaker he is, and, for me, it's a relief to have a President who actually sounds like a President.

But more than his oratory style, I find substance in what he says. In particular:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

This is sums up so much of my frustration with my industry and business culture. When I talk about tools, or doing things half-way, it's not the tools, or even that I feel we should be working all the time -- it's that valuable work is hard. If you're truly creating value, you're taking the risks, you're fighting for something, and you're not taking the easy path just because it is there.

The brilliant work Conquent alumni have produced over the years may not be glamorous, and it may not have the eye of the media, but the work we have done has saved lives, created wealth, and has been rewarding it its own way simply for creating something never seen before, and knowing that the work couldn't have been done without the teamwork that made it happen.

I have seen too much effort wasted over the years by the soloist, whether the rogue programmer or independent business owner. The idea that "I know better" and that the easy path will work has led to failure time after time.

Conquent is celebrating it's 10th anniversary this year. It hasn't been easy, it hasn't been handed to anyone, and the work continues to change and grow as the company does. It is our own small team of risk-takers, doers and makers of things that has shared the dream, learned new things, and prospered because of it.

The noise of 20,000+ Twitter Followers

Conquent — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:34:23 -0800

I got a number of new followers on Twitter over the weekend. What was odd about them was the large number of people a lot of them were following and, to a lesser extent, the number of followers they have.

I'm talking about people following 5,000, 10,000 or even more than 20,000 people. That's a good sized town; imagine if you could hear everyone's conversations in town at once. It would be deafening.

The cacophony of 20,000 tweets scrolling by is equally deafening. You might catch a snippet here and there, but if you're following that many people, it's probably pretty indiscriminate content. You might as watch every tweet with the letter "e" in it.

I think that the future of twitter is going to be people dipping into the stream with more sophisticated search tools. And I think that means that followers won't matter as much. I posted a link to my Microsoft Songmsith and while my followers showed up, I also got a lot of Twitter traffic from search results, both on search.twitter.com and Google.

There are a lot of tools out there to help you manage larger groups of followers on Twitter, but the reality is that as your base of people you follow grows, the less they are YOUR people. I keep a couple scroller search tabs open for Bissell and Conquent to keep tabs on what people are saying to and about me on Twitter. I've replied to them, and they've replied to me, all without either of us following each other.

The only advantage you have to following someone is to allow them to Direct Message you. Personally, I try to let people contact me in other ways than a DM on Twitter -- use the Contact form on Conquent, leave a note on my blog, send email to the company. A DM is as personal as an email, and I don't hand out my email to everyone.

I plan to watch the Inauguration on Twitter using Conquent's scroller at http://conquent.com/scroller/?q=Inauguration, and with the millions of people in DC, and everyone else online, it's nice to know I can watch the flow, but I don't have to know them all personally.

Reflections on my DC Trip

Conquent — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:11:19 -0800

I figure I should jot down a few more thoughts and recollections about my trip to DC of this past week before I run out of time and forget...

I'm nobody's stranger (or nobody's stranger than me, I sometimes forget), so I had a lot of great conversations. There was the couple (Scott and Michelle) at the bar; Scott went to Lewis and Clark in Portland and felt it was more important to discuss microbrews with me than pay attention to Michelle, which I can excuse because, hell, I've done the same if not worse...

I sat up for hours at the U Street Bed and Breakfast with two nice women from Holland talking about how America isn't really as bad as it looks from the outside. When I asked them what they thought of Sarah Palin they laughed and said, "We just thought she was funny." I told her we can laugh now that she didn't make it to office. They corrected my pronunciation of Ikea, and I gave a lengthy lecture on how Madoff was able to embezzle 50 billion dollars right under everyone's noses.

Although I had solid meetings two of the four full days I was there, I did get some sightseeing in. The day I went to the National Archives, I also wandered up the street to the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery. It was probably the most interesting gallery I've seen, with photographs, paintings, and sculpture spanning the ages from before the US was formed through today.

I went in part because I had seen an article in the Washington Post that they had changed the caption on George W. Bush's portrait to reflect the fact that 9/11 wasn't the direct cause of the war in Iraq. For the record, I saw the new caption, and can confirm the change was made.

Probably the most stunning work I saw there was by Martin Schoeller, a native of Germany who now lives and works in New York and "honed his skills by working with Annie Leibovitz." The oversized closeup shots of unknowns and celebrities are amazing, including side by side portraits of Obama and McCain, which this image doesn't do justice:

On Thursday, while walking to the Metro station after meetings in the Rayburn Building, I stopped into the original Smithsonian building (the "Castle") on the Mall -- I was just freezing in the wind, not really looking for another museum. But, visiting from Oregon, I couldn't resist snapping a picture of Phil Knight's old license place:

Of course, the city is gearing up big time for the Inauguration. There is everything Obama -- vendors everywhere selling everything Obama, of course, but corporate cashing in with big banners saying "Yes We Can!" stretched across building and all the Metro tickets have an image of Obama with the January 20th below.

Most interesting to me was the Pepsi advertising in the Metro stations proclaiming "hope" with a big Pepsi logo replacing the O in Hope:

And the preparations for the Inauguration are everywhere. I've already mentioned the portable toilets (or "Dixies" as the ladies from Holland referred to them), but the Capitol itself is under siege by electricians and audio/video people.

Even small spaces where Obama will just be walking through, are covered in extension cords and A/V cabling. Every step, every scratch of the nose, will be videoed as he makes his way to and from the ceremony.

I didn't take of pictures of the law enforcement as I kind of like my camera phone, but suffice to say the place is crawling with them. They're on every corner, every stairway, every sidewalk, and, of course, every rooftop. They seemed nice enough on Friday when I was at the Capitol, but they seemed strained already, I can only wonder how their spirits will be by Tuesday.

Finally, a note on getting out of town on Saturday -- National was quiet, but not as quiet as I expected. The TSA guy checking my boarding pass said the Friday was a zoo, understandably. Friday's normally a busy day with business folks heading home, but federal workers in DC have both Monday (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) AND Tuesday off for the Inauguration. Take Friday off and you've got a five day weekend.

Who needs to stay in an overrun town when you could spend five days in Mazatlan?

Born Again American

Conquent — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 16:07:35 -0800

A friend sent me this with his only comment being "I think you might enjoy taking a few minutes to watch and listen to this." It was a little longer than I expected, although the performance concept is interesting it's... well, if you have a moment hit play.

I dunno, I just couldn't get past the religion thing. Phrases like "My Bible and the Bill of Rights, my creed�s equality" are slippery slopes. Nice that they got the token Muslim and Jew in there, but if your Bible is part of your sense of equality, people with other beliefs will always be in the shadows. Tolerated perhaps, but not an American like you.

I've gotten a little stronger on this issue since seeing Religulous. Although I think Bill Mahr is a jerk, and the humor and attacking were both poorly conceived in that movie, it made me think a lot more about this Christian America thing. It sparks so much hatred and marginalizes so many people that it's nothing about rights. I seriously doubt we would have Guantanamo Bay if our adversaries were extremist, fundamentalist Christians, instead of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims.

As for what they're trying to say about jobs and fat cats in Washington, I agree, but they've so clouded the message with religion that it makes it about being a good born again, ahem, American, rather than being a good American. Period.

What do you think?

30,000 feet, 500 MPH Suburban Strip Mall

Conquent — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:28:33 -0800

It's not the suburbs I hate, or even McDonald's, per se, it's the overwhelming noise of mediocre homogeneity that is thrust upon you anywhere, anytime. I'm sitting on a Frontier flight between DC and Denver; every seat has a TV in the back -- a TV which I have no way to turn off. And on this TV runs constant advertising for new shows on TNT, FOX or some other international cable station.

If I have to see that American Idol ad one more time... Well, I can't say because Homeland Security would probably be on my ass.

It's not even the content; I'm not anti-TV, there are shows I absolutely go out of my way to watch. But it's not my choosing, just as the fact that I'm fine with burgers and cheap chinese food doesn't mean I want to be forced to smell the mall food court all day or have someone constantly walking by with samples of chicken on a stick.

Let me drop you in a mall in DC or Denver or Portland for that matter, and you'll have no clue where you are. Just some mall in America. Now, you're transported to a house in a residential development. Go ahead, step outside, and you still won't know where you are.

Now, let's put you on a plane and put a TV in front of you; you're not even at 30,000 feet going 500 miles an hour, you're just in a noisy room in the the 'burbs.

To me it's that "been-there-done-that" familiarity that is so wearing about TVs, fast food and generic architecture. Heck, generic design in general. You're not learning anything new in these familiar places, and you're not saying anything of interest when you design them.

The web has this problem, and as with many things on line, it has the problem the way a crack addict has a "dependency issue." Internet communications are all about creating something accessible by as many people as possible, so your message has to make sense in Brooklyn and Bangor.

I always push for creative design, but it's not easy. Not only do we fight the limitations of the boxy display, but with the limitations of web technology in general; it's not just the broad audience that waters down the message, it's the tools you use.

My rants against tools like Dreamweaver or Microsoft Songsmith aren't rants against the tools, they are rants against settling for what the tool can do and, worse yet, accepting the results of an unskilled tool user because the results are functional or near enough so.

You can't live on a diet of McDonald's despite what the company says (Supersize Me proved that one pretty well). Just as your body fails on a diet of poorly conceived food, you spirit fails on a diet of poorly conceived creations. We need more to thrive, and we should demand more.

Cellphones, toilets and the Inauguration

Conquent — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:57:37 -0800

It's Friday, just a few days before the Inauguration and it's quiet in DC. Well, as quiet as the town gets. My guess is that the locals have fled and the visitors haven't shown up yet. But the visitors are coming -- I've heard they're expecting up to 5 million people are going to try to get down to the festivities on Tuesday. That means that if you got everyone in the entire state of Oregon, and then made a stop and picked up everyone in Idaho, you'd still be short a few hundred thousand bodies to make up the difference.

This is the modern age, and preparations for 5 million people include a new wrinkle: mobile communications. Think of it, 5 million people texting their friends with photos of 5 million people. I've seen estimates of more than 1.4 billion mobile messages are expected to be delivered nationwide on Inauguration Day...

This doesn't count all the people trying to call each other to figure out where they are in the crush of humanity. Tons of emergency calls are a given for the statistical certainty of injury or illness.

Which brings us mobile, mobile communications. The main providers have set up an encampment on the east end of the mall with temporary cell towers:

I don't know how they tie back into the rest of the network, whether they tapped into a trunk or if they have a satellited dish hidden behind the fence, but the fact that such a resource can be deployed on a temporary basis is pretty damn cool.

Another note on Inaugural Infrastructure comes from the "Everybody poops" department. The Great Wall of Portapotties has been built from the Capitol for as far down the Mall as I could see. Photos don't do it justice, the sheer volume of plastic boxes is almost overwhelming. Sure, they're building huge scaffolding to hold up huge TVs, the news centers are being built, but the line up of crappers, that's how you know you live in a modern age.

The wall of pissing

Conquent — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:01:20 -0800

Rough day on the Hill trying to get politicians to understand my reality while trying to understand thier reality. After feeling beat up, I stopped in for some sushi and sake on the way back to my room, still feeling like killing something for fun, I stopped in at the Cafe 1612 for some dessert.

Turns out they don't have dessert, and they couldn't make an espresso martini, but they faked it really well with some Van Gogh espresso vodka. Then the peppered vodka lemon drop, so I'm feeling a little more mellow now (yes, I'm typing this at the bar).

So, with sake, vodka, more vodka and a couple pints of water, I really had to use the restroom, and wow, what a restroom. I admit, it's small, but it makes up for it with a wall of water for a urinal. Take a peek:

I suppose the ladies won't understand, but every guy on the planet has to say, "Cool." I mean, think of it, no aiming, just a wall. We all think of it, really, whether we want to admit it or not. Throwing a whizz on the wall is so much more natural than those little porcelne catures, even the nipples to floor pissoir so many bars sport give you so limited latteral movment that the wall of pissing is just... freeing.

National Treasure/National Archives

Conquent — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:47:26 -0800

I'm sitting a couple blocks from the National Archives sipping a particularly peppery chai at a place called Teaism. I seem to end up Starbucks often enough on trips, it's nice to be someplace a little different, even if they don't seem to have wireless (fortunately I'm packing my own).

The National Archives were interesting. Maybe not as amazing and awe inspiring as the first time I walked out onto the Capitol Mall and touched the Washington Monument, but still and amazing place to be. They have a corny exhibit with some authentic documents and audio/video presentations (I think Teddy Roosevelt was hyper active, and I had no idea he had such a high voice); it was nice, but reminded me of the ride that has replaced touring the Hershey's plant in Pennsylvania.

But the rotunda is history. Dark, reverent, kind of like going to church. They have a range of documents which form the basis of our free society (with the Magna Carta out in the foyer). The original Declaration of Independence is nearly illegible, which apparently started almost immediately. Any image of the Declaration you've seen is a copy of the print made from a hand carved copper plate in 1824. But that muddy bit of parchment under glass in the rotunda is still the real deal.

I was also surprised that the Constitution is four, large sheets of paper, also fading. I don't know why it surprised me, I've seen pictures in books, but it did. I suppose I get it confused with the Declaration, like any good American would.

I didn't ask the bored (yet somehow irritated) looking guards if the movie National Treasure was accurate in that when the close the documents slide into a vault below, but it looked like it might actually be true -- looked like they had lasers and everything inside those dark glass cabinets.

Terrible that I think of such an awful movie in such an incredible place.

My trip to DC so far

Conquent — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:10:26 -0800

Being in Washington DC the week before the inauguration doesn't seem to be much different than being in Washington DC any other time. There do seem to be a few more police escorted caravans of limos and vans, and conversations overheard seem to be about what a mess it's going to be next week, but this week is just another week in DC.

I got in Monday night, being delayed only an hour because of snow in Minneapolis. What the heck were they thinking putting such a huge airport, and a hub for so many airlines, in a place that's always snowing? I gotta admit, the deicing was remarkably quick, and when we got clearance to take off, we were in the air almost immediately, but it still doesn't make sense to regularly transfer people through the blizzard...

My big fear was that they would lose my luggage in the delay. Knowing it was a full flight out of Portland, I took my coat off and put it in my garment bag before checking it. Gloves, scarf, coat... They say don't check anything you can't afford to be without, and while I did keep my briefcase, with my laptop and documents for Tuesday and could have done meetings, it would have been damn cold getting there.

One of the things I like about DC is that I don't need a car when I'm here. It's funny how I always feel trapped in places like LA or Orlando even if I do have a car -- you go from one place to another, struggling with traffic and directions in an unfamiliar city, never really seeing anything in between.

But DC is a walkable town. You have to be confident when walking through some parts of town -- I'm staying in the "U Street Corridor" which is kind of a tendril of low-class cool stretching east of the Dupont Circle neighborhood. As with most tendrils, it gets a thinner the further you get from the source, until it fades out entirely at the Metro station around 10th Street.

I've never had much trouble beyond some fairly polite panhandling (I accidentally found that if you give them a confused look and they just assume you don't speak English). Naturally the Metro gets you around further than walking, but even so, it's not that bad to walk from U Street to K Street.

After meetings yesterday we went to a free concert at the Kennedy Center. They apparently do them every night, with a really wide range of music. Last night was the L&O from Paris ("not Texas" as the singer informed us). They were described as "a hot new band from Paris whose sound ranges from soft and romantic to energetic swing that shows their Gypsy influences." Amazingly good, and hard for me to stay seated -- how audiences sit so still with great dance music is a mystery to me.

You gotta listen to these guys, and through the miracle of the Internet, you can watch the performance I saw last night by visiting the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage Broadcast Archive.

I have meetings on the Hill tomorrow, and some work today, but I expect to get down to the museums sometime on this trip. Regardless, there's always something to do in this town.

Everyone is insane

Conquent — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:00:47 -0800

I've pretty much come to the conclusion that to be a functional human being you have to be insane. If you follow a true path of logic and reason, there isn't much reason to get out of bed in the morning beyond some bodily functions and securing another 50lb. bag of beans and rice to keep on functioning.

You should be schizophrenic at the very least; different situation require different aspects of your personality.

I think we're all Obsessive Compulsive to one degree or another. Maybe our compulsions aren't about keeping every line straight, maybe they're just about getting laid or drunk. But we do obsess about things. Otherwise things like Twitter, Facebook or MySpace wouldn't exist and we wouldn't have blogs.

The line between autism and genius is often so blurry as to be indistinguishable from one another. And where is creativity and invention without going manic every now and then. And a good bout of depression can help you look at things in a different light and keep moving.

The ideal is laid out in science fiction with the cold, hyper-intelligent aliens who can solve every problem faster than our fastest computers. And yet they're insane too. Pure logic ignores compassion, which is both the roadblock and the reward for being crazy humans.

Love is insane, but wonderful. Family... heck, everyone's family is insane, but without them we wouldn't be here. Art, what the hell is that all about? And yet, art is part of human culture and without it life is hollow and empty.

The very spark of creation is buried in our insanity. I'm a firm believer in scientific practice, but the point of scientific method is to try something and replicate the results. Most of science is just redoing experiments to make sure you got it right the first time.

But, where does logic and reason tell us to try in the first place? If the odds are it's not possible, why even bother? Because we're insane, that's why. Which is why we have the Internet, Wikipedia, and, well, this place.

My logical argument here is insane in itself. I think one of the things that puts me into a mental block about getting things done is, well, looking at everything that needs to get done. If we truly examine our motivations and our abilities, we'll probably drive ourselves to a state of dysfunction.

So, embrace your insanity, so long as you keep getting up in the morning and explore new things and new ideas and don't stick to beans and rice.

Getting ready for DC

Conquent — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 11:27:14 -0800

I have to go to Washington DC next week for business; there's a conference where I'm supposed to present the Reservation Road Planner, and the lobbyist has arranged some meetings on the hill with the Washington delegation.

DC is probably the one town that I actually like travelling to for business. I fly into National, which is right on the Metro (as it should be). I can get off the plane, get on the train, and walk to my lodging, which is usually a bed and breakfast or boutique hotel.

There's never any question about attire in DC, unlike Florida or California -- I know if I'm going up on the hill I'll need a suit and tie; maybe it's the uniform, but it's easier to decipher than mix that qualifies as "business casual" in the tech sectors.

And when I'm not working, there's plenty to do. Great choices of restaurants, museums and I can usually find someone to talk to about something other than sports.

The worst part is the plane trip itself. Although I got a really great deal on my ticket, and only one transfer and layover, it's still almost 8 hours of travel. I'm not looking forward to it. The only consolation is that most people are flying in the following week for the inauguration, so I might actually get a seat with no one next to me...

As for the inauguration, I can't believe I'm going to be that close and not go. But everyone's jacked their rates for that week, and air travel is insanely expensive for the return trip. I think it'll be cool enough just to go the week before and see what they're doing to prepare.

The End of Days (of song): Microsoft Songsmith Example

Conquent — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:11:39 -0800

@ericgerhardt posted a link to a Microsoft SongSmith song in response to my blog, the Death of your Soul... and it's exactly what I feared... Actually, it might be worse...

I grabbed a copy for posterity, and for when the revolution comes so I have a torture device close at hand. Be prepared, it isn't pretty, but it is probably a perfect example of a Microsoft Songsmith "song" with a, um, "SongSmith cover" of Running with the Devil.

As a side note, I publish this blog in the hobbyist vein -- I don't expect to generate much of a stir, but I am surprised at the amount of traffic this topic has generated to the site. I think there are a lot of folks showing up here because they are looking for more information on how to use it and actually want to use the tool.

If you're one of those folks, leave a comment, or send a private note using our contact form. I really hope I don't hear a radio jingle using Songsmith, but I'd like to see how people can make something good from this soulless thing...

The Very Model of a Modern Major General

Conquent — Fri, 9 Jan 2009 13:35:56 -0800

This is, unfortunately, how my brain works... I'm working on a project called Health Management System, but it naturally gets shortened to HMS, which makes me think Her Majesty's Ship, which in turn makes me think Gilbert and Sullivan, and then I get The Very Model of a Modern Major General stuck in my head...

Enjoy sticking it into yours, as well:

Browser Bigotry

Conquent — Fri, 9 Jan 2009 10:04:37 -0800

My usual routine in the morning is to get up, check my email, delete my spam, take a shower, read the news online, and check on some web stats. This morning I followed a link to tweatweather.com on the old box at home, and it immediately redirected me to the Firefox download page.

Now, my first thought was that something had gone wrong with the reporting software I was using. There was no explanation, I was just on the Firefox page. My second thought was that they had done something almost clever -- build up traffic then force all traffic to a revenue share deal to make a couple bucks.

But, no, it was just that they didn't code for Internet Explorer 6. They didn't bother telling me that I needed a new browser for their site by giving me an alert or a pop-up page, instead they just forced me to use their browser.

W3C stats shows IE6 still at 19.6% of the market as of December 2008 (just last month). If we assume there are 1.5 billion people online, that means they are ignoring 294 million people. Granted, they aren't all going to be interested in what people are saying on Twitter about the weather, but, talk about limiting your audience right out the gate -- 20% BAM, gone.

It's like saying, "No darkies allowed at the bar." And forcing me away without explanation is just that, shoving me off into a corner.

There are legitimate reasons people may have older browsers, including they aren't allowed to install anything else but more importantly, personal choice. If I choose one browser over another, and certain functions don't work, then that's my call.

Your website should work for any major browser. That's the beauty of the web, I don't have to install anything; I just open a browser, click on links, and see the stuff I want to see. Sure, you might have to install plug-ins like Flash, but it's already installed in over 90% of the browsers, so writing for Flash is pretty safe.

I understand not liking the mess the browser manufacturers have made of CSS and JavaScript, but if you're a coder, learn to code within the limitations of the environment. We push a lot of functions onto the server, and we use HTML that may be "deprecated" by W3C standards, but works on all the major browsers.

It's a matter of respecting other people and the choices they make, or are forced into for reasons beyond their, and your, control. Anytime you insist they do something that's not part of the core goals of your website, is a time that you're forcing them away from you.

The Death of your Soul: Microsoft Songsmith

Conquent — Thu, 8 Jan 2009 11:08:30 -0800

Now THIS is what I'm talking about when I try to explain the difference between using a tool and creating something.

Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer�s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC�s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos.

Create really, really, crappy background music for you.

You may have a song in your head, something beautiful and wonderful to share, and this monstrosity will make it sound like show tunes on the Love Boat. Rather than creating something new, this thing destroys your creativity and replaces it with soulless pap.

This is the same problem with desktop publishing, the camcorder, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver. The tools give you the appearance of having a talent, but it doesn't actually give you that talent.

Socrates said about writing (because he apparently didn't write), "To your students you give an appearance of wisdom, not the reality of it." Now, I'm not saying that the written word is bad, but we've had literally (pun intended) thousands of years to learn how to use the tool.

It's creative when you're the first one to use a tool a new way. Some of the early Internet phenomena were total crap, like the dancing hamster site. People went to these things in droves because no one had done it before, but the talent it took to create a few animated gifs and speed up a wave file was simple. Then the thousands of knock-offs made the Internet a terrible place.

I feel that it's our destiny in life to raise the bar, to constantly find new things, and deeper understanding of old things. Finding a simpler way to do something like adding chord progressions to a vocal track is great, but when you put it into a package like Songsmith, you create a superficial distraction.

Nothing new will come from Songsmith users, and they will be so self impressed, and so distracted by their little creations that they will never evolve, they will never learn new things about themselves or learn how to create real music. And, most likely, they will never learn what real music is.

Turn off the chord generator, and just sing.

Creative Development or Developing Creatively?

Conquent — Wed, 7 Jan 2009 09:45:33 -0800

I don't know, but "Creative Development" sounds like one of those undergrad courses you take to fill out your schedule, not a career, yet here I sit, at the head of a growing empire of which the divisions share the thread of "Creative Development."

I think the problem I have with the phrase is the same problem I have with describing what it is Conquent does -- "creative" is almost diametrically opposed to "development." When you think of a developer you think of a guy who builds houses, when you think of a creative, you think of someone with nerdy glasses doing applique.

Of course, when you think Internet developer, you think of a guy with nerdy glasses in a coffee house building applications...

It takes a special mindset to be able to apply creative solutions to dull problems, and still care that the dull problems are important. Following strict process and procedure doesn't solve problems, but ignoring it entirely can unravel an entire project.

Trying to explain this mindset to clients who "just want it built" is the challenge. People have come to Conquent over the years looking for a construction company, without an architect, without plans, and a fairly blurry vision of what they're trying to build.

We generally solve this by writing specifications, which I metaphorically refer to as "road maps." The nice thing about a road map is that you can take side trips and see other things along the way, but get back on course. Those side trips are the new ideas that come along as you develop something from nothing, and they are what make a project richer and more successful.

The problem with side trips is that it takes time and money, and you can't say "Well, you should have thought of that before." Creativity is an exploration, and discoveries aren't always pleasant...

Race to Witch Mountain

Conquent — Sun, 4 Jan 2009 12:38:26 -0800

We went to see a really great film last night -- Australia. Stylized, well written, a little over the top, good movie making. And as we left the theater, I saw a big cardboard display for... the much anticipated Race to Witch Mountain.

I remember Escape to Witch Mountain, heck I remember Return from Witch Mountain, and I remember watching them because I was a kid and I would watch anything.

I'm sure it's going to be all the buzz in Hollywood and online, after all we have Dewayne "The Rock" Johnson in the Eddie Albert's role, and I always equate those two in the same roles. I can't wait to see the Rock's version of Green Acres.

I find it odd how the Rock has gone from wresting to the Scorpion King to being in heartwarming kids films. But, then Hollywood isn't exactly predicable that way. My guess is that he had a couple kids of his own -- Eddie Murphy suddenly started doing Doctor Dolittle and Nutty Professor once he had a couple kids.

I'm sure Hollywood will do just fine with this, look for the X-Box game where you get to make the Winnebago fly (although I'm guessing it will be a Hummer in this version). And I'm sure the DVD sales will mean a new generation of kids saying, "Wow, that really sucked... wanna watch it again?"

The Myth of Wikipedia (or the Wiki-1400)

Conquent — Sat, 3 Jan 2009 12:20:11 -0800

Okay, let's talk about the myth of Wikipedia... The story goes that the Wiki is comprised of millions of tiny bits of data coming in from millions of people, and that the gestalt is an accurate document created by the hive mind of humanity.

The reality seems to be a little different. "...in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits" according to Jimbo Wales, the face of Wikipedia in Raw Thought: Who Writes Wikipedia?.

Now, some argue that this number is based on the corrections made constant monitoring of vandalism and change backs, but in reality, it means that this "gestalt" is really crafted in the image of these prolific watchdogs, just as the PTA can ban Alice in Wonderland, so can the Wiki-1400.

At the same time, these 1,400 people can't possibly know everything, and a lot of the articles are started by the other 98% of the wiki population. Filtering is part of what makes the process work, and, honestly, most of us don't have time to sit online looking at recent changes on Wiki.

The Wiki is as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica (which oddly enough is based in Chicago). But knowing what we know about the Wiki-1400, maybe it's not a fair comparison. Wiki-zealots are always talking about the accuracy of the wiki, and comparing it to traditional encyclopedias for validation. If the Wiki-1400 are constantly striving towards that goal, then the first thing they would do is check the Britannica, and roll back the entry if it doesn't agree.

I think the real bottom line is that the Wiki-1400 share a philosophy, and philosophy more than anything else, filters what we believe to be true and what we believe to be false. You can cross reference and document evolution all you want, but a creationist won't agree.

I'm not suggesting that the Wiki-1400 have that overt of blinders, but blinders they must have, and knowing this, we need to check other sources of information than the Wiki when expanding our own knowledge.

Online/Offline Sales -- is it really that bad?

Conquent — Fri, 2 Jan 2009 15:31:16 -0800

I read that holiday sales this year were the worst in nearly 40 years (MSNBC), and I figured, heck, it's just like the blacksmith losing sales as horses went away, I'm sure they made up for it online. Unfortunately, online holiday sales were also the lowest since 2001 (Bizjournals).

But let's take a look at the real statistics here. Online sales, while lower, were still $25.5 billion between Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's a drop of about a billion, nothing to sneeze at, but certainly not a complete dead-in-the-water scenario. And while the dire words of this being the worst shopping year in 40 years, we're talking around 1% in sales drop.

The problem is that we're still tied to the idea of growth economics. If you don't make more and more money every year, you're failing. The market gets jittery if you're making the same 25 billion a month, and drops you like a stone -- regardless of the fact that there was 25 BILLION in sales.

Growing a company is important, but making a reasonable profit, consistently, is more important than constant growth. Sure, some of these retailers are going to hurt big time, a lot of stores are going to close. However, I would argue that having a Best Buy, a Circuit City and a Fry's all on the same block isn't offering market differentiation, just unnecessary growth providing unnecessary waste of consumer spending on another box with crappy service.

Is PayPal Tacky?

Conquent — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:15:59 -0800

I posted this question on Linked In yesterday:

I have a client who wants to use PayPal rather than traditional credit card processing on his site. I think it's tacky, am I wrong?
Maybe I'm old school, but I've been online since 1994, and my feeling is that it cheapens the site.

I got a lot of answers, mainly from people who supported the idea of using PayPal. Most folks who responded seemed to lean on the side that PayPal is known, that it's secure and that they offer great customer service. It's apparently more expensive than traditional credit card processing, but it gives a known quantity, where your small company brand may not.

One of the things I find interesting is the assumption that I was talking about a small business, which pretty much underscores my belief that if you use PayPal, your customers will perceive you as a small company. It's also interesting to see that most of the people who really like it are the merchants themselves -- I'm still not sure what the perception of the average consumer is when they see a PayPal logo and get diverted from the site.

I try to filter the grandstanding people like to do while answering LinkedIn questions, but it's difficult to ignore the "I KNOW better than Thou" tone people put into their responses, while not providing a lot of foundation or credibility. For example:

Tacky? This is the 21st century. I've been online since before most people knew what a modem was, and hackers were judged on how well they could whistle at 300 baud. The only form of online payment I take for any transaction is via PayPal. I only make exceptions in rare situations, such as when using a service like Escrow.Com.

Which is great, except his title lists him as "ITIL Evangelist and Professional Cat Herder" and his resume is engineering and instructing at Learning Tree. It's not that the answer isn't valid, but this question is about brand perception, not the functionality of PayPal (or herding cats) and his assertion that the "only form of online payment" he takes is PayPal actually supports my assertion that PayPal is small business because the impression I get from his resume is that he doing small business.

The site in question is www.gmsparts.com, which, honestly, I think is some of the better work Conquent has done over the years. We took a really bad site (I mean REALLY bad: take a peek at the archived original site) and brought these guys into the 21st century. They now run neck and neck with their main competitor, who they used to whollop in traditional space, and now have regained their place with a great online presence.

I think the best answer came from Mark Lowe, who lists himself as a CTO, Strategic Advantage Technology Solutions - Specialists in e-Business and e-Commerce. He summed up his answer with a very basic, common sense suggestion:

The ideal situation is not to accept either or, but both - the first rule of successful ecommerce is to make it as easy as possible for the customer to transact with the merchant. The customer is king and this should override any personal preference of the merchant.

So, what I need to go back to my customer with is the basic, common sense question: why do you want to take PayPal? Is it for the customer, or is it because you like it yourself?

Ultimately I believe that there is a place for PayPal and Google Checkout, but at the end of the day, I think that these services solve problems for a limited audience, and the question is always going to be, is it YOUR audience.

Quick follow-up prompted by the guy I derided for his Cat Herder title.

Apparently most of the major retails DO take PayPal, although they seem to minimize its visibility, anyone using the Amazon store technology (like Barnes and Nobel) will see the PayPal link.

So, the bottom line seems to be do both. Leave options open, and don't bring your own prejudices to the table.

Old School Web Design Still Works

Conquent — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:17:24 -0800

I might just be getting old, but I don't understand these kids these days... Oh, crap, it's sentences like that where you know you're getting old.

But my point is this -- web design is getting unnecessarily complex. Part of the problem is the need for innovation, this constant push to create something cool and new, which is great. But as you do that, you abandon the people who aren't keeping up.

@brampitoyo wrote "With JavaScript engine getting faster and faster, it is possible to put more complex AJAX feature on a site." This assumes that everyone is keeping their JavaScript engine up to date, which is a bad assumption.

Not only are there lots of old systems out there (which I find run new browsers really slowly) but there are new, mobile browsers that don't support all the bells and whistles of the most current JavaScript engine.

Then there's the fact that not all implementations of JavaScript are the same. Microsoft seems to always do things differently from the rest of the world, but Opera, Safari and Firefox all seem to treat style sheet/JavaScript combinations very differently. And I won't go into Chrome...

We did a site back in 2001 for the Portland Opera company using tables. Check it out on the archive at conquent.com/portlandopera/2002/. Everything still works in every browser I've checked, and it's all tables and GIF images. When you click into an individual show you'll see up to four images layered on top of each other in table cells -- the code may be deprecated by the W3C standards, but not by the real-world.

Albert Einstein wrote "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." So much of what we do in code is theory, otherwise you wouldn't hear technical people say, "It shouldn't do that" so often. It's still a matter of knowing who's going to see what you're working on, and guessing how they're going to break it.

Cutting edge is cool, but that sharp edge can cut your nose off if you're not careful.

Domain Squatting

Conquent — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 07:00:00 -0800

I read an article today about Verizon winning a $33 million lawsuit over a company that has been using domains like myverizonwireless.com and verizononline.com to grab traffic and spoof users (Verizon awarded $33.15m against cybersquatter).

People have been fighting over domain names since the beginning. In the early days it was free to register domain names, so folks were getting domain names for their dog, or refrigerator, or grabbing up brand names with the idea that they could sell them to the companies who owned the brand.

Free went out the window (and with a monopoly and at $75 a year Network Solutions was making serious bank) and ICANN made a very simple rule -- if you own the trademark, or if you have demonstrable prior use, you can take the domain name away from someone.

Under this rule, Sting was able to get his domain name from a fan, but Madonna apparently had some trouble with the Catholic Church and prior use. Of course Sting, Madonna and the Catholic Church all have a lot of money to put together their cases before ICANN.

Free has come back in a fashion -- OnlineNIC got all those domain names by being a registrar -- they could register them for a week without paying their ICANN fees, drop them and then re-register them. Of course, with $7 registration from GoDaddy, squatting (some say "speculating") is a pretty cheap game. We have a client who paid $26,000 for a domain name, just because he thought it sounded good, not for trademark reasons.

What made the Verizon lawsuit interesting was that they got a judgment for $50,000 for each of the 633 domains Verizon claims were created specifically to be confused with legitimate Verizon brands, totaling up to that $33.15 million. That is, the got a judgment against OnlineNIC, but they can't actually find anyone who works for the company.

Ironically, Verizon got what they could have with a simple ICANN complaint, that is, they got control of the domain names. I say "ironically" because they've parked all those domains with Network Solutions, who runs advertising on parked domains, which is exactly the complaint Verizon had with OnlineNIC. The end game is the same, only it's a friendly company getting the ad revenue instead of the obscure company Verizon sued.

Christmas Fire

Conquent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 21:12:33 -0800

We woke up to the sound of the smoke alarm. My first thought was, "Damn it, why does that thing have to go off in the middle of the night?" I got up, staggered to the top of the stairs where the smoke detector is, and smelled smoke. Not nice, wood smoke from the fireplace, mind you, but a nasty plastic smoke.

Rushing downstairs I saw flames erupting from the top of the stereo cabinet. It wasn't burning electronics, however, but a pillar candle we missed blowing out after Christmas night. Some Christmas beads had wound their way into the glass vase that the candle was in, and thick black smoke was billowing above some really impressive flames.

Fortunately the vase was intact, and I was able to rush to the kitchen, grab a dinner plate and put it on top of the opening, effectively snuffing the flames. This left me just having to deal with a living room full of thick, toxic smoke; opening the front door and a side window reminded me that it was about 30 degrees Fahrenheit out.

I kept reminding myself, while shivering and spinning a towel like a fan to move the smoke, that this could have been a lot worse. Had the glass cracked, the flames would have engulfed the wood furniture it was on, or the flames could have ignited the lampshade that was just a few inches away, and that in turn could have caught the painting on fire above that, and then the whole house could have been burning by the time I got down there.

When we got up this morning it was like pure evil had settled in the living room. There was this pitch black soot on most of the surfaces, and it had formed black webs on the ceiling and light fixtures. You had to be careful to lightly dust it away with a dry paper towel so it wouldn't smear all over the place. Markie and I both had black under our noses, and I wonder what kind of nasty cancer we're both going to die of from inhaling this stuff.

With a combination of dry wiping, vacuuming and wet wiping, it seems to be pretty much cleaned up. There's still a sent of melted plastic in the air, but I'm hoping that the smell will be overwhelmed when I roast the goose tomorrow for a belated Christmas dinner.

I don't have to belabor the moral of the story, but it's nice to know 2008 is almost over -- it's been a bumpy ride.

Green Chri$tma$

Conquent — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 11:00:39 -0800

Stan Freberg pretty much got kicked out of the advertising inustry for this one. Remember that this was 1958, even pre-Mad Men era.

Ignore the video, but enjoy the audio (it's what I could find this morning).

QA 101

Conquent — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:13:40 -0800

Websites are becoming increasingly complex with the addition of AJAX controls, cloud computing, and a growing list of data sources to drive a single page. There is a lot to keep track of when creating these sites, but some of the basics still apply.

Check your work.

It seems to be a stupidly simple piece of advice, yet it's amazing how often I run into problems from a simple lack of looking. This is QA 101, and as with a lot of basics we learned earlier in life, we've forgotten them as we get more sophisticated.

I don't know how often people assume that they wrote their code correctly, so things should work and they don't bother looking at the page in a browser. I just ran into this with one of my programmers who moved a site, and forgot to include the file that told the server what to do with the code. The whole site was printing source code, not pretty HTML.

Then there was a more subtle problem I saw with incompatible browsers. We had a programmer who wrote some nasty things about the client in the code thinking it will never show up. Except it was in the source frameset, and the client visited the site with a browser that didn't support frames (they still exist).

And this isn't just a technical issue -- turn on your spell check before sending an email but be sure to READ the email before hitting send. We wrote a proposal for a warehouse system, and the guy accepted the spelling correction blindly. Apparently we ended up bidding on a whorehouse system instead.

Fortunately we generally check each other's work at Conquent. It's better to find these things out before the client does, but it's even better to find it or for yourself before publishing it.

Portland Snow

Conquent — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 14:01:57 -0800

It doesn't snow very often in Portland, and while I try to keep this blog on topic for business, I thought I'd post a couple quick images here as I'm snowed in today...

Get some return on that web traffic

Conquent — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:47:31 -0800

3 click or 3 minutes
We're busy people; we don't have time to figure things out. If we can't find what we're looking for in a few easy clicks, or a few quick minutes, we'll move on and try to find it someplace else.

Remember, if your visitor doesn't figure it out, you've wasted an opportunity, and if you paid good money to drive that person to your site, you wasted your money. Just because they showed up means nothing unless you're making money.

Sites that make it really clear what you're supposed to do are the most effective. A big "Start Here" and a simple 1, 2, 3 series of forms that don't confuse and don't frustrate are obviously preferable to a website that some programmer said, "They'll figure it out..."

And that's because most people won't figure it out.

A quick primer on web ad models
There are three basic advertising models on the web:

Cost Per Impression: You pay every time someone sees your ad

Cost Per Click: You pay when someone clicks on your ad

Cost Per Action: You pay when someone completes an action on your website

You are ultimately looking at your final cost per action which means you need to know what that action is. If your website makes money from selling a product or service, that action is a purchase. If you're selling advertising on your site, then you need to get that visitor to look at as many pages as possible and, preferably, click on those ads.

The trick is to balance the model you're paying for traffic against your acceptable cost. So, if one advertising source has a really high conversion rate (everyone who clicks buys) you might want to pay on a per click model. Alternatively, if you get really high click through, maybe pay on an impression model.

But you have to watch and learn and adapt as you implement your plan. You need to modify your advertising to drive more qualified traffic and you need to modify your site to maximize the return on that traffic.

I think they have a backup...

Conquent — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:44:08 -0800

You bought One's and Zeros -- Don't Let it Become a Big Zero
Your entire investment is electronic when it's on the web. If you pay $30,000 for a spiffy, cool, fantastic web based program, you don't want to lose it just because someone accidentally wiped a hard drive.

Getting a copy of the site on a CD usually doesn't do you a lot of good. Don't forget, web applications aren't static. Much of what you see on a day to day basis comes out of a database. Beyond that, much of what makes your website work depends on other programs that may or may not be available when your web developer disappears off the face of the earth.

Your best bet is to have a live backup that synchronizes a couple times a day to a server you can check up on. It's even better if you can have that backup server sit in your office so that, in an absolute worst case scenario, you can pick up the box, go to a new ISP and be up and running again.

Get the passwords
I don't care if you have no idea what an SSH shell is, or an FTP server, for that matter, make sure you get all the passwords for all the services you're paying for. If something goes horribly wrong with your developer, you can hand the cryptic list to another developer and get out of trouble.

Remember: letting your web developer control everything means your web developer controls YOU as well.

I'd love to have that problem

Conquent — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:30:42 -0800

It's still a problem
I hate it when people "I'd love to have that problem" when I ask "What will you do when 1,000 people all show up on the site at once?"

When business picks up it doesn't mean the money will be there to solve the problems you don't want to deal with now. The truth is that it's easier to deal with problems when you don't have 1,000 people banging on the door demanding products or services, or worse yet, their money back because you can't deliver.

You need experienced partners
Just because someone knows more than you do, it doesn't mean they know anything important. In the web world the classic mistake is assuming that some kid who can bang out a website should be put in charge of your entire web enterprise because he can ramble on for hours about AJAX controls and because he got a snippet of his code posted on Slashdot.

Your cousin's sister's kid might be a whiz at building cool looking sites, but you need someone who knows what works in the market, not in DIV layer. You need an architect with business experience AND technical experience to bridge the vision of the company with the realities of creating a deliverable product.

You can avoid having to rebuild your web site if you start out right and address the problems before they arise. The right partners will help you do that, just as the right legal staff will keep you out of jail and the right accountant will keep the IRS off your back.

Completely rebuilding the site may not cost much in dollars, but it's going to cost a lot in time and credibility. You're going to lose potential customers and business partners before you ever get to the redesign if the site doesn't live up to expectations.

The [un]importance of statistics

Conquent — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:36:17 -0800

The (un)importance of statistics

@CarriBugbee took a look at my note about creating a Conquent branded url shortener and mentioned a service she uses that gives her tracking. Which is great -- the Conquent version has tracking, too, but only for internal use.

But this brought up a point that I've been unable to make for years -- people don't care about statistics. They'll say they do, they'll demand statistics, they'll pour over the details, but at the end of the day, they won't make a single, substantive change in their plans based on statistics.

Much of what we do in the entrepreneurial world is based on faith. Faith that we know something other people don't know and that facts are deceiving. Faith that even though everything seems to be pointing in the other direction, we're headed the right way.

I've found that when my clients are faced with cold hard facts, be they statistics or surveys or focus groups or whatever, they tend to rationalize why the numbers are wrong. Sure, they may authorize some minor tweaks to a media plan, but overall business direction usually remains the same no matter what.

I'm not saying that statistics aren't relevant; to the contrary, you can't make a firm decision without the facts. What I'm saying is that these statistics are usually irrelevant to most business people. Unless a client is willing to let go of the emotional or political investment they have in their project, statistics will just be a point of argument, not a change in direction.

Don't be a tool of viral marketing

Conquent — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:53:53 -0800

There are a lot of brands that have taken over the meaning of the product. We've had Jell-o and Band-Aids instead of gelatin and bandages for years. We now have Google instead of searching (it was Yahoo, but these things change).

Now there are a lot of people trying to grab hold of simple web activities and make their brand synonymous with simple technology. Just as AOL was once email, Wordpress is now blogging, and my favorite snippet of technology that's become a brand is the TinyUrl concept.

Every time I post something on at bissellator.wordpress.com and announce it to the world, I promote Wordpress. Every time I shorten an URL using TinyUrl from something like http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/mac/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212500783&subSection=News to http://tinyurl.com/5aobpk I'm promoting TinyUrl.

Much better for my brand is to use conquent.com/bissellator/ or shorten my URL to http://t.conquent.com/N000.

You may argue that developing such technology locally is expensive and "why reinvent the wheel?" First off, most of this technology isn't that tough to build. We're talking web tools we could have built back in 1997. And we did build them in 1997.

Secondly, you nick the skin of your brand slightly each time you send some of your audience through tinyurl or to wordpress.com. Like the matador and the bull, you slowly lose your own brand integrity and people see more value in the tools you don't own than in the things you're trying to promote.

Install tools on your server when you can. And look at the technology you're "micro-promoting" to see how valuable that tool is, and how easy it would be to have your own version or copy. It may not be for everyone, but if you're serious about building your brand, don't tear it apart with a million tinyurl cuts along the way.

I've been asked by a couple people how hard it was to set up t.conquent.com, and the answer was, kind of, but not impossible. Which led to the obvious question, can we do it for others?

Absoultely.

Pretty much anything you see us do at Conquent is something we're able and willing to do for others. With our Quickieweb Technology, Quickelist Email Service, and a wide range of complex programming projects (e.g. GMS Products, Tech Hero and American Dream Planner), we've got the tools, you just need to let us know what you're looking for.

CAT Scan!

Conquent — Wed, 3 Dec 2008 15:31:42 -0800

I went in for a CAT scan today so the doc can figure out how bad the fracture is in my shoulder. I had visions of a claustrophobic coffin with lots of noise and lights. Turns out it was easier than an X-ray.

It went down like this: lay down, put your other arm over your head, kick back, and they move the table back and forth a few times. You hear this prerecorded baritone voice say, "hold your breath" and then a few seconds later, "breathe." Then you're done.

As opposed to the X-ray tech who keeps saying, "Turn a little further to the right, okay now left, now up, stand really still... I'll be back in a few..." then repeat three times in three different positions. I swear they should just put big spots of color on the wall and spin the dial, "right hand, red!"

I should hear back tomorrow about what they want to do. The only thing I'm really disappointed about is that I didn't get to see the results of the scan. I'm hoping they let me peek before the surgery...

Follow up to the shoulder injury

Conquent — Tue, 2 Dec 2008 15:32:59 -0800

The surgeon's office is very nice, disturbingly nice. I suppose that sports injuries not only pay better than rheumatoid arthritis, but it's probably easier to deal with people with very specific injuries than a GP deals with. A happy workplace is a productive workplace...

Anyhow, no prodding this time, and no "move your arm this way" exercises. Just a quick chat, then into the X-ray room and then a discussion about the injury with nice crisp X-Rays on the computer screen (so much for the sound of the fluorescent light and the unfurling of plastic slides).

Turns out that I didn't tear it. And it probably wasn't dislocating the way I felt it was -- although it probably was dislocated when I fell, and the other two times. But, it turns out I broke the damn thing.

X-rays all pretty much look alike to me, so I'm not entirely sure what I broke. I think it's the scapula. No matter what, there's a nice crack in it that opens up to a big crack at the bottom. They want to do a CAT scan (not MRI) to see exactly how extensive the crack is before going in, but they are going in.

As I understand it, they'll either pin it or suture some tissue up around it to make sure the bone comes back into place and heals properly. They want to do it soon (it's been three weeks already) to get it in place as soon as possible.

Should be a great Christmas...

Emails, discussions, blogs, wiki and web content

Conquent — Tue, 2 Dec 2008 12:06:27 -0800

My HR person, Kristen, asked me for a blog the other day. This brought up the question of "What IS a blog, really, and why do we all need them?" I know, old question to a lot of people. But it spurred an interesting conversation about different kinds of online communication. Let's review quickly:

Email
We do a LOT of communication via email. We often use our email as document storage systems ("Let's see... I know I sent that word doc to Bob back in May... of '06..."). With open copies sent on the cc line, email acts as a discussion board, helping bring people together to work out ideas.

Email is selective -- you decide who you're sharing information with, and it's one of the few Internet based systems that doesn't get spidered by Google. It still lets your ideas out "in the wild" if someone decides to forward your note, but it's like having a conversation in the office, not standing on the stage with a microphone.

Discussion Groups
At one time the Internet was filled with chat rooms which in turn evolved into threaded discussion groups. I'm not entirely sure why these seem to have fallen out of favor, but I still see them when I'm looking up technical answers.

The nice thing about threaded discussions is that you can come in late to the game and see replies directly below previous comments. Sometimes you get a back and forth going -- this conversation can wander off into its own corner and you can read the direct responses to the original comment.

I'd like to see Wiki's discussions become threaded, and maybe that's out there somewhere...

Blogs
Teagan in my office pointed out that Blogs are linear; that is to say, blogs are a good place to record things as they happen. This goes well with my idea that blogs are like open journals -- be careful what you put in your journal if EVEYONE can read it.

I think of blogs as a great place to sum up ideas or things you're working on. Nothing is ever really a finished work, but the thing about blogs is that you can go back over time and look at the evolution of an idea and see how it's changed.

Wikis
If blogs are linear and provide history, wiki's are "what's true now." I like the fact that wiki's have a history component, but the change history for a document is very different than a series of different documents on the same idea.

Wiki's are a great place for clearly thought out documentation that's constantly changing. We have our project management system hooked up to a wiki so projects and clients can have a back story -- who is this client, why are we doing this project and what are some of the things we need to know to stay out of trouble? It's a great way to keep documents in a semi-public place (that wiki isn't available outside the company).

We're also looking at setting up a wiki to let our experts within the company document important aspects of their area of expertise. For example, Kristen wants to be able to provide documentation about the importance of staffing and Human Resources, and this may tie into our accessibility division where they co-edit documents on accessibility and staffing.

Web Content
But let's not forget good old fashioned web content. Your website will always have information that changes, but there are things that aren't open for everyone to edit and aren't always changing.

On the other extreme, your website should include "machine generated content" or data driven content. We still need a new word... there's all that data that gets processed, like order information and shipping status. This is content, and shouldn't be ignored, and in a sense, it closes the loop as it can generate new questions, new discussions, a blog or two, and update to the wiki, and a change to the company content.

Ironic Injury

Conquent — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:33:35 -0800

We have a nice little back porch covered in hydrangeas. As the wet season started a couple weeks ago, the wood has gotten kind of slippery and was covered in leaves. Taking the good Man role, I grabbed the leaf blower and cleared it off.

This left that green slime that forms on everything in the Northwest. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it's fairly frictionless, so naturally, as I started down the steps to finish up I found myself in the air and bouncing down the stairs. The cracking sound in my shoulder was only drowned out by the extremely profane screams of pain.

I really thought I had broken it. I could feel myself starting to go into shock, and it hurt like... let's just say it hurt a lot as no colorful metaphor is going to cover it. I managed to turn off the leaf blower, stagger inside through the haze of nearly passing out, got my breathing and racing heart under control and checked it out.

Not broken, not even dislocated. Not good, but could have been worse. So I spent the rest of the day on the couch with ice, ibuprofen and a couple movies. Seeing Will Smith falling out a window, landing on his back and getting up just fine was a little harder to suspend disbelief for when a simple fall down the stairs had me laid up all day.

The pain slowly subsided over the next week and I figured it was healing up fine. I was chatting with someone on the phone on Tuesday, lounging on the chaise, and as I put my arm behind my head the shoulder popped out of the socket. Dislocation on a quiet afternoon... Then it happened again yesterday when closing the car door.

I managed to get into the doctor yesterday and he took all of three minutes to say, "torn labrum." So the rotator cuff is torn and because the shoulder is popping out, it's probably going to need surgery.

It's amazing how pain is so exhausting, and knowing that it's really injured, surgery requiring really injured, makes it even more overwhelming. I don't know if my lack of coordination and concentration is physical or mental, but man it's annoying.

While I know it's the cost of being over 40, I remember that when Mozart was my age he had completed his entire life's work of 600 compositions and secured his place in history. Oh, and he'd been dead for seven years.

On the Santa Monica Pier

Conquent — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:00:00 -0800

I'm sitting a stones throw from the Santa Monica Pier waiting for a 9:00 breakfast meeting. Although I'm originally from California, I'm a Northern Californian, and while this is the Pacific Ocean, it's not the part I know. Kind of like you can know someone's face but not the back of their head.

Probably the oddest thing about the beach is the fact they're grooming it like a snowfield. There's a John Deere tractor with what looks like discs roaming around the beach, scraping away the footprints and tire tracks which otherwise litter the beach. I don't know if that's because the sand gets packed down from 11 million people in LA or if it's just cosmetic.

I chose my lodging in this semi-exotic locale because it was fairly cheap -- hotels in Santa Monica seem to average around $250-300 a night, mine was $169. While it's a little funky, it's comfortable enough and a nice view of the water plus a window into the courtyard. A short walk brings me to the Casa del Mar, a swanky hotel, where I'm meeting a couple people about a project.

This trip does get marks for doing the stupidest thing ever on travel. I booked my hotel over the phone and gave them all my contact info. In this digital age I just expect to get a confirmation email. It wasn't until the night before that I realized that not only did I not get a confirmation, but I didn't write down the name of the hotel.

I figured that I could just search Google the same way and find the place, but none of them were looking familiar online. So I had my colleague drive me up and down the main drag and I still didn't spot it. So I finally got a connection, logged back into my machine at the office, went through my Internet history on that computer, and found it. I think this tops my missing my flight in DC because I was two hours early...

As usual, I'm traveling because of business -- a series of meetings in conference rooms and over meals in LA with prospects and money people. It's a productive trip, and less surreal than these trips usually feel. While I'm not a native southern Californian, I'm amazed at how familiar this place is -- I've had no problem navigating, people respond my odd humor the way I expect, and while the beach is different and the air feels as if it's been breathed, it's still California.

It's kind of like visiting your cousins -- they do a lot of things the way I expect, but then there are the odd things that throw you (like the time they fed me peanut butter and banana sandwiches). Familiar, but not home.

You Designed for Print First

Conquent — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:00:00 -0800

The web is cheaper to change
Entrepreneurs often miss a great opportunity when starting out. They usually start by getting business cards and 5,000 flyers printed up which talk about their product or service, but they created the text in a vacuum.

After they start handing out the flyers, they realize they need to change some key copy or images, only they still have 4,500 flyers left that they're going to have to throw away.

A better approach is to build your website first. You have an opportunity to have as many people as you can grab proof your work and making changes only costs the labor. Once the copy and supporting images have been tested online, the print collateral follows.

Print and Web are different
The web is limited in what it can show. Print can use gold foil, the web can do animation, but not visa versa. Make sure your basic elements, like your logo and product imagery, will work in both places.

Be sure to keep in mind that web graphics are lower resolution than print graphics. If you want to use something from the web in print, your designer will need to create images for the website at print resolution, and then scale them down to the web.

You let someone else register your domain name

Conquent — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:00:00 -0800

Your domain is more important than your phone number
Your domain name is extremely valuable and irreplaceable. You can lose it forever if you're not careful, along with all that money you've put into marketing and printing. And you won't get a friendly "The Domain Name has changed" message like you do when your phone number changes.

YOU need to register your domain name, not your web developer or your consultant. You can have them walk you through the process, but you need to do it yourself, because if you don't, then you may well be developing a brand around a domain that your consultant owns, not you.

Your developer has a big stick if you have a dispute and they control your domain name. They control your email, your web presence, and your ability to be in business, all because of a $10 a year domain name.

Keep your old email address
You need to make sure that you keep the email address you used to set up the domain, so that as it comes up for expiration, you'll get notified. There's nothing worse than finding your site, and your business, are down because someone forgot to tell you to pay the registrar.

Of course they can't send you information for how to renew your domain if the only email address they have for you is you@yourexpireddomain.com.

Buy it for a long time
Getting a domain name for 10 years is cheap in the grand scheme of things. Heck, you can get 100 year registrations. If you buy it now, and tie it down for virtually forever, you'll never run the risk of it expiring when you aren't watching.

You figured .biz, .info, .us would work fine

Conquent — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:02:24 -0800

[This is part of a series I'm putting together for a talk at the OTBC about classic web blunders.]

Whose business are you promoting?
You've decided it's time to start that new company. You've got a name all picked out, let's call it Widget Co. Unfortunately, widget.com is taken. So are widgetco.com and widget-co.com. But, widgetco.biz is available.

So you buy the name, invest in business cards, letterhead and advertising. You get out and start networking, leaving voicemails, and talking to anyone who will listen about your company.

You don't know why that VP of Biz Dev you met at that chamber meeting never sent you that email he said he would send. You know the email with his product requirements so you could give him a proposal for his next big purchase.

Unfortunately, the guys who own widgetco.com are in pretty much the same work you are, and they start getting random hits on their website, and random phone calls for work they can do. And they get the email to sales@widgetco.com from that VP of Biz Dev, and THEY bid the work.

Make it easy
You're better off changing the name of your company than having a similar domain name to a competitor.

You don't want to use tricky misspellings that could become someone else's domain or overly long domain names. Real words are best, but go ahead and invent a word if you need to. It worked out pretty well for Verizon and Comcast.

What's after the Integrated Circuit?

Conquent — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:59:41 -0800

I was having this discussion on the plane with the guy in the seat next to me the other day. He "provides information to the intelligence community" and he had pretty sophisticated sounding set up to allow his people to work remotely. Of course, I've had the ability to use my machine at work from just about any computer I sit down at for years, but we'll let that slide.

His point was that computers have stagnated. His argument is that we went from tubes, to transistors, to integrated circuits and stopped there. And, perhaps that's true, although what they're doing with integrated circuits now is amazing compared to what we had in the 80's.

But, my point was the innovation is happening in other areas. Look at screen technology with high definition, or the stuff coming down the pipe like flexible LCDs. Or storage capacity...

The main place I think things are exciting is in how much information is zipping around and how you can have your main systems sitting someplace other than on your desktop. Web pages are something we almost take for granted, and forget that that page has to sit on a server someplace and that you need to be able to grab that information quickly through countless wires and switches.

I'm literally transferring gigabytes of data in the background today as I write this. I decided to sync up my music library at the office with the one on my home machine and found dozens of albums not in both places, so I just copy it over the Internet, probably about four gigs. Remember that 20 megabyte hard drive that would hold more information than you would ever need?

But then there's the fact that I can log into my machine at home from my phone, queue up some music and listen to it on my cell phone. Look how tiny that thing is that I hold in my hand, but where the technology that makes it all work is spread out all over the place.

Heck, just think about cell phones for a second. I've got a bluetooth device, which if I hit the button on the side of my ear, it will let me say a name, which is transmitted to my phone, which in turn dials a number to a big switching center someplace out over the airwaves. The amount of computing going on isn't limited to a single device, but the collection of devices that all act as a single unit.

Then there are Massive Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). That's a thing you could never do without the combined power of all the thousands of machines tied into a single game where everyone is sharing their processing, memory, and other local resources to tie into a big server that sends the game around the world in realtime.

I'm just surprised at how he could think that advances are slowing...

Intelligent life is out there (but it's bugger all down here on earth)

Conquent — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:04:30 -0800

I was skimming through the headlines on Google News and came across Paul Allen's latest spending exercise: the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) designed to look for signals from other stars. www.space.com/spacewatch/071011-seti-ata-inauguration.html.

Now, I'm a big sci-fi fan. I've run the SETI desktop application to help see if there are signals coming in from other stars, and I truly believe that life is not unique to our rock. What I'm beginning to believe, however, is that our definition of Intelligent Life is not out there.

Hell, I'm not sure we have even defined what Intelligence is down here.

I've found that so many of our assumptions and motivations are hardwired to our evolution, and that most of the things we strive for are based on keeping the species moving forward. Not just the species, but our little genetic niche of the species.

We're amazingly xenophobic, despite the desire to swim with dolphins, we're more likely to squish a spider or shoot a cougar. Anthropomorphism is a way to cope with our disdain for things that are different, and as soon as Sparky pulls his lips back and menaces our children, it's time to put him down; he's not the cuddly creature we thought he was.

Oh, and then there's that whole Catholic/Protestant/Moslem/Jew thing. If you've got the wrong skin or wrong belief system, you aren't even really human. We can justify indiscriminate killing for variations on the same foundation of faith.

I think one of the phrases I hear most often is, "I just don't understand..." If you don't understand your neighbor (and I can argue both sides of "can't" and "won't" on that topic), then how the hell are you going to understand the signals from a planet around another star with something that doesn't have anything in common with us?

Oh, and I'm not trying to say I'm somehow exempt from this understanding thing. There are plenty of people who, for the life of me, make NO SENSE whatsoever. I have to assume, on some logical plane, that they have a semblance of intelligence, but it doesn't reflect what I consider to be intelligence...

Then again, I'd rather see Paul Allen spending money on radio telescopes than the Blazers...

Subject Matter Experts Talking Other Subject Matter

Conquent — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:06:04 -0800

One of the titles I've given myself over the years is "Geek Translator." I'm pretty good at talking about the technology we develop at Conquent in business and marketing terms. Perhaps being the metaphor king helps. Even so, once you remove all the tech jargon, and maybe substitute a little business jargon, it's still tough to be able to get non-technical people to understand issues with technical delivery.

I do a lot of other kinds of translation, too. The print world talks entirely differently than the web world, the web world talks differently than the video world, the video world talks differently from the motion-animation world. All are visual media, but they all have their own jargon and ways of doing things.

A great project is one where everyone understands and respects each other's skills and challenges. If you have a web developer who speaks a smattering of print design, but he knows he's NOT a designer, your designer and web developer will get along great.

Traditionally the project manager has to be the translator. Then the project manager translates to the account manager, who in turn translates to the client. Things get lost in translation and work has to be redone, but if the creative person can't translate clearly directly to the client, there isn't much you can do about it.

Unless...

I envision a world where we cross pollinate language and skills more. The graphic designer needs a programmer "trail buddy" to bounce things off of, just as the programmer needs a designer to talk about stuff with. Think of a revolutionary cell network, where a programmer knows a web developer and a designer, and they're all constantly learning each other's language.

I've had this basic model at Conquent since the beginning. It makes everyone better at dealing with the different aspects of the project, and it makes everyone better at dealing directly with the client.

Ultimately I still believe that you need a person to be simultaneous project and account manager. Project management is it's own service, and coupled directly with the client, it can become much more of a communications focal point, and less of a top-down management model.

The Totalitarian Regime of Apple

Conquent — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:31:28 -0800

There's an article on CNET at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10011338-37.html entitled Apple boots $1,000 app from App Store. The gist of it is that Apple is being inconsistent and uncommunicative about removing programs from the store.

If you're not familiar with it, the App Store is where third party developers can sell their iPhone applications. The programs must first be approved by Apple and apple keeps 30% of the sale.

Obviously, they hold all the cards -- they own the hardware, the operating system, the development tools, and the distribution network. This is great from an old-school, IBM business model, but Apple doesn't sell to Lockheed Martin suits, Apple sells to the avant-guard, open source, artistic world.

Apple controls 70% of all digital music sold online and could control a quarter of all music sold in the world by 2012 (see http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2008/04/itunes_birthday). In a creative world where content and copyright philosophies are changing, it's appalling to see so much of the world's creativity locked up in one box.

It's a weird psychological twist. Here's the anti-establishment community saying "We want to build new ways of living and doing business -- where's my iPhone?" I can guarantee you that there would be a mob with torches and a battering ram if anyone other than Apple tried to pull Apple's crap.

Microsoft created a great, open platform. I can buy programs straight from the company that wrote them and I can use my own music software (and organize my files the way I want). The Windows environment created the PC revolution by encouraging innovation, which is why Mac is still only 5% of the desktop market.

Hell, Apple's very success with the iPod is because they were able to develop an interface on Windows. Microsoft doesn't make a dime off music sales through iTunes on Windows -- I seriously doubt Apple would have allowed that to be reversed.

My point is this: Apple is evil. And like anything completely evil, it's seductive. But get past the clean lines, the pretty interface and the "At least it isn't Microsoft" and fight the totalitarian regime.

To get further input on this idea, I also posted the question to my Linked in account as follows:

Why do creative, anti-establishment thinkers choose Mac?
Apple runs a totalitarian monoculture. It's more like IBM than Google. Hell, Microsoft is more like Google than Apple is like Google. And yet, with the App Store showing how they will at a whim remove software (for which developers paid to develop) and the meglomaniac control of music via iTunes, they continue to prove to be an anti-creative, anti-free thinking, anti-open development platform.

So why do open source, social networkers choose to be duped by the Corporation?

Some of those answers are included below.

Oversimplifying how people work

Conquent — Sat, 9 Aug 2008 08:29:02 -0800

I'm not a big fan of describing things in extremes, but, heck, I'll do it anyway.

There are two extremes in how people work. On one end you have the people who want very specific tasks which fit well within their skill set. No surprises, do the job, and you're done. On the other extreme, you have people who believe they can do ANYTHING and are constantly outside their existing skill set trying to learn new things.

I don't want to work with people in either of these extremes. Doing the assigned task is dull work and you while you don't get any bad surprises, you don't get any pleasant ones, either. You have to push your limits to learn and grow and make discoveries.

But, I hate working with the guy who thinks he can do anything because he constantly fails. You're always getting bad surprises with this person, and rarely pleasant surprises. Getting the job done sometimes requires finding someone who can actually do it. And one of the things this person never seems to learn is that there are some things you just aren't going to be good at.

Delivering creative services is a balance between being creative and actually delivering a product at the end of the day. I think the over confident, over creative type forgets about the day-to-day work involved in delivering, and the plodder forgets about pushing the boundaries and being creative.

crowdSPRING

Conquent — Fri, 8 Aug 2008 15:30:52 -0800

Carri got a note from @crowdSPRING in response to a posting on Twitter about needing a designer. She then forwarded the link to me -- www.crowdspring.com.

I took a peek at it, and posted to twitter that crowdSPRING wasn't going to do it for me as an employer. I was then pretty impressed that Angeline of crowdSPRING was trolling twitter well enough to not only find leads (Carri) but to see me talking about her company and followed up with me.

So I wrote her a nice email explaining what I didn't like about the service, which I'll elaborate on here.

The quick answer to what I didn't like is that "the kind of project you want to start" didn't have my kind of project. If I want web, I'm going to need more than a pretty picture, I need HTML (and actually, in my case, I need a Flash person).

The cateogries are extremely limited to

Graphic design
- Logo
- Logo AND Stationery
- Stationery (letterhead, business card, envelope)
- Illustration
- Print design
- PowerPoint

Web design
- Website (uncoded)
- Icons and Buttons
- Ad banner

Photography
- Custom photography
- Photo retouching

I believe it's commodity service as opposed to, say, Guru.com which is for much more custom development. But because it's so limited I'm going to be much more likely to use other services and not revisit crowdSPRING.

But then, there are lots of people out there who just need a logo and your service will probably work great for them. The caveat I posted was "as an employer" but for someone just starting their SoHo company, it's probably just fine.

Angeline
2008-08-08 16:23
Hi Michael!
I was going to reach out to your input via email, but as you've posted your thoughts in the Blog, I thought it'd be nice to comment here.

First off - I really hope they call you "The Bissellator." That's pretty amazing. My big bad wolf name at work is "Angelineasaurus Rex."

Okay, now that I've gotten that out of the way, here goes..

Thank you, thank you, thank you times a hundred for your input. Just so you (and the whole internet) know, we are an infant company. Our staff of 8 is very proud to have over 4,000+ creatives participating on our site's projects.

We call ourselves the creative marketplace because we have plans - big ones.

Eventually, we want crowdSPRING to be a place where you can get your entire web site (including Flash and coding), a commercial, music, basically anything creative. But - given our small staff, there are only so many hours in a day, and we want to work on making everything super stellar in the design area before branching out.

So, long story short - Thanks for mentioning us and checking us out! It's one more person that knows about us, and that makes me smile. Hopefully we'll be on our way to comprehensive creative service greatness.

Best of luck with your design search!

Traditional agencies vs. the 'new model'

Conquent — Thu, 7 Aug 2008 12:45:46 -0800

As we've been talking about the "new model" we keep talking about how the big, traditional agencies get all the big work. Here's a crude attempt at comparing my, personal view of traditional agencies with what I think we're heading towards.

First, traditional agencies:

In my little graphic I'm trying to illustrate the rigidity of the traditional agency model. The agency is a hierarchical model of staff through management.

Agencies are always chasing larger accounts. I've found it interesting that the value of a client often is based on the volume of money, not the quality of work or even the profitability of that client. ($3 million ad budget, $2.99 million in outside expenses. A hell of a good client!)

Once the client has been brought in, they are separated from the service providers by layers of management. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's rare for a competent, articulate graphic designer to have direct contact with the client they're working for -- that's the account manager's job and it's guarded closely.

Staff is hired for specific tasks, if the agency doesn't have the skills within, they contract it out -- internal staff is rarely given the chance to work on tasks other than what they were hired for.

Which brings me to the fluid, new agency model:

First off, clients should be measured on their needs and resources -- if you want to do meaningful, award winning work, you need to look at the WHOLE client.

Good "Management" is simply good communication. If the prepress guy is competent enough to explain why the posters aren't going to print right, let him through the gate and explain it. Good communication still needs to be managed, and the client is going to have to have a point of contact, but that point of contact doesn't have to guard the client like a eunuch in the palace harem, they just need to keep the information flowing clearly.

Finally, the ability to do a job shouldn't be determined by a title, it should be determined by your competency and ability to deliver. This works both ways -- if you're a topnotch provider, but you want to, say, go live in India for three months, that's okay, you can do less critical work.

This could either be an ad-hoc contractor model or an employee model. The advantage of an ad-hoc model is rapid scalability and flexibility; consider again the ability to downgrade your involvement (hard to do that once you're a manager in an agency).

I'm thinking we're heading for a hybrid, but this is very much an idea in evolution, and I'm being public with my process in an attempt to be innovative and get to the right answer. Any help in fleshing it out is more than welcome...

Creative Services for the New World

Conquent — Tue, 5 Aug 2008 14:31:15 -0800

As I keep exploring what I want to do with my next steps, I'm thinking a lot about how to bring together all the random, and not so random, creative energy that I see flowing around on the Internet, and the evolution of an ad hoc agency is forming in my mind.

There are two extremes for how people offer their services. The first is the JWT model of corporate agencies. Even the 10-15 person companies follow this model to some degree. You get cubbied into a box, and your workflow and process are at the whims of management. And there's a LOT of management -- creative directors, account managers, partners.

The large agency model attracts work, but it churns through people like the meat grinder that the Agency world is.

Then there is the independent contractor, otherwise known as the feast or famine model. As annoying as a creative director is, you get direction in an agency model, and you get cross fertilization from other disciplines.

Working alone tends to stagnate your skills, and you're so busy taking care of billing and getting new business, you don't have much time for anything other than the task at hand.

As for building new business, the only people who know you are people you already know -- you get work from word of mouth, repeat business or cold calling. The odds are slim to none that a decision maker will wake up one morning and say, "Hey! I need to hire so-and-so to do a project today!" And while social networking is changing this to some degree, the cacophony of voices gets in the way of your success.

Corporate decision makers know Wieden+Kennedy, JWT, and cmd. If they're an Intel or an HP, they're going to try branded agencies before some independent contractor.

I recently wrote a blog entitled It's the Brand, Baby. What I'm thinking now is that we need to create an umbrella brand -- if we can get 50-100 independent creative under the same brand, we can start generating some serious traction.

The problem is account management. If you have a bunch of independent contractors bringing together work, they all want to manage the client. But as a client evolves and needs more services (graphic design to web to photography to video to viral marketing), the initial contractor may not be the best person to manage the account.

In the independent world everyone is an account manager, but no one is. It's always the part time job of the designer, the writer, or whoever got the client. I want to find a way to provide account and project management services without causing a lot of agency friction with a group of independent, free thinking, individuals.

Account management is based on relationships, which means keeping involved with the client. Project management is resource management and requires a boss to make final decision and keep things on track, which is good for the client, good for the project, but can be painful for the creative-type.

There are lots of ways this model could be implemented. It could be completely virtual or it could have one big office space. Even if everyone signs off on using the brand, the question is to what extent, and how much variation are they allowed?

So, options may include

License the brand
Coop agency space
Social network style membership website
Project by project contracts

And there I stop... I need to talk with independent creative types to get an idea of what they want and what they can stomach. Again, ownership of the client, the tug of war of money... That's going to be tough.

Thoughts?

Reverse Anthropomorphism

Conquent — Mon, 4 Aug 2008 19:41:32 -0800

I came up with the term "reverse anthropomorphism" yesterday while writing about Time (click here to see that blog). The idea is that while we often put human traits on non human things, we also tend to adopt non-human traits.

I ended up asking the LinkedIn crowd what they thought and I got a number of great answers. D.L. Kirby responded with "Dehumanization" which, while good, it had a negative stigma that I was trying to avoid. I don't think that saying "the brain is like clockwork" or saying it works like a computer necessarily dehumanizes us.

I got a few responses for Objectify, or Objectification. On its own, the word works, but, again, I think that we have a lot of baggage with the word Objectification.

John Riutta suggested "antikemophism" which is a great word, with no baggage, but it kind of slides off the front of the brain. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much about the over intellectualization of the response -- you're not going to generate conversations with people about anthropomorphism at the truck stop.

Toby Younis suggested "anthromechanization" which in turn led me to Mechomorphism. I liked the psychology student's concept of "ratomorphism", but I think it only applies to people who emulate rats or machines. Now that's a hell of a a big topic to explore in our post modernist world....

Top honors go to Matthew Vaughn for "Emulation" which is by far the most appropriate word. It's exactly the right word, already exists with no other baggage. We emulate the Internet in our social networking structures.

After so many interesting twists and turns, "Emulation" is almost a letdown -- I mean, I wanted something NEW, something shiny this big, new world we're creating everyday. Isn't that what we do online? Create new words?

Ultimately I have to say it's a good thing to know that the English language still works for us, and we didn't have to make up a word to describe the changing (or maybe not so changing) world.

Update as of August 5
I just got the suggestion Xenopromorphization from Jeff Ello. Wow. Great word. Not nearly as boring as Emulation, no baggage, and worth a HUGE number of points in Scrabble.

I might have to revise the winner of the word!

The End of Time

Conquent — Mon, 4 Aug 2008 12:58:23 -0800

If I recall correctly, it was between 1500 and 1510 that Peter Henlein of Nuremberg, Germany, invented the spring-powered clock. This was an amazing invention, and allowed us to know the answer to "what time is it?" wherever we may be.

Its main benefit was to revolutionize navigation -- with reliable time and the sun or stars, you always know where you are, and a new era of exploration and trade began.

But as we entered the mid 1800's, we became obsessed with time. "Efficiency experts" were born, train schedules were invented, and soon after, we started punching the clock, figuratively and sometimes literally.

By mastering time, men (and I do mean men) became masters of the masses, making hundreds, then thousands, and eventually billions of people conform to the idea of "Getting to work on time", "Lunch Hours" and "Coffee Breaks."

Our lives are wound around the springs in Henlein's clocks, or, more likely synchronized to the timed pulses of electricity through quartz or silicon. Even our children have to keep detailed schedules, because we can't imagine a world that isn't structured by the hours in the day.

The Internet is built on these principles of time; it's all about latency measured in milliseconds and packets moving in mathematical harmony. But what's so ironic is that the effect of the Internet is to break down the very notion that things have to happen on a schedule, or have a purpose.

Email was first, and it's wonderful trans-temporal medium. We can now have conversations the way that Victorian gentry played chess by the mail. I can consider, and reconsider your point, write a response, retract it, and then write it again, all without you knowing. I might respond as soon as I get your message, I might wait a few hours, and it's all the same to you.

We have broken time.

I think humans have a tendency to practice "reverse anthropromorphization" that is, when humans take on the traits of objects or systems around us. We used to say the human mind worked like clockwork, now we say it works like a computer.

And now we're beginning to reflect the randomness of the Internet in our social models. Nothing happens to all of us at once, but it happens as the packets propagate through the network.

I've been online long enough to remember the dancing hamster site. And it came back to haunt me in the form of a singing greeting card. It's like an echo from the past. Ideas, photos, pleas for help, all continue like ghosts long after the initial "yop."

But this echo effect, this lack of temporal moorage, has opened up new ways of thinking for human beings. We expect instant access to information where before we had to wait on the library hours. At the same time, we expect that there will be a delay in responses from friends or social networks as we post things; we can put things out there, like this blog, and wait to see what happens, as opposed to being tied to the Monday issue of the paper.

There is no Monday issue, there is no construct of Time.

We now find ourselves in a point in time with events that have no agenda (such as http://www.barcamp.org), which brings us so close to events with no set time. Things happen when it's right, as they did before we measured time. And it's the Internet, based on the springs and gears of 16th century German science that is bringing us bring us back to the basic, tribal nature of living.

Oil prices and birdsong

Conquent — Sun, 3 Aug 2008 15:37:19 -0800

Markie and I spent a few days at her friends' farm in Raymond, Washington. They have 152 acres of timber (it would have been 160 except for the road) so it's extremely quiet; just the birds, the wind in the leaves and the sound four people and a dog make while reading on the porch.

I don't think we realize how we've destroyed birdsong with our urban development. Silence, sure, we all want more peace and quiet, but when you get out here you're overwhelmed by the birdsong. I had forgotten how much it was part of walking at the Sea Ranch when I was growing up (there are white crown sparrows here, I haven't seen any, but I remember their call).

All the cars growl in a low roar in the city. It's amazing how it drones even at 4 am, after the drunks have passed out but before the early risers have headed to the gym.

If we do actually transition from internal combustion to electric vehicles, we may get some of that birdsong back. Cities are getting more forested as they mature, so the canopy is back, even if the meadows aren't.

Of course there will be leaf blowers, exhaust fans, and booming music. Heck the amount of noise that four adults makes isn't negligible. Chit chat, clanking of pots and pans, yelling at the dog... Multiply that by a million people in a greater metro area and there's still a low roar.

But maybe it will be a roar that doesn't carry as far and we'll be able to hear the birds again in the city...

Watching Starship Troopers AGAIN!

Conquent — Sat, 2 Aug 2008 23:10:00 -0800

Surfing around the OnDemand choices, I came across Starship Troopers, and I just couldn't help myself. I've lost track of how many times I've watched the thing, but there I sat, watching it again (now in HD!)

What is it about Starship Troopers that I like so much? I hate the restriction of chain of command, I'm inherently opposed to violence as political tool, and the movie makes it clear that the "good guys" we're rooting for are actually the invaders.

But it's so campy. Lines like "They sucked his brains out" while someone sticks their fingers into an empty cranium. And the cinematography -- the allusion to the Zulus in the desert fort is great film.

But, you know, what I really think I like... It's that sense of purpose, the ability to rise to the challenge, even if you don't know the whole story, you still have to survive. The poor mobile infantry doesn't need to know what's right or wrong on the big picture, they just need to stay alive, and the platoon does what it can to keep everyone alive.

And the effects are STILL cool.

Better Living Through Twitter

Conquent — Fri, 1 Aug 2008 13:19:26 -0800

I've been playing around on Twitter, which is a tough thing to explain to people who don't play around on Twitter. It kind of reminds me of "prairie dogging" in corporate cubicle land -- that's where you stand up, head above the cube line, and throw a couple comments back and forth with another standing coworker.

Everyone sees your comments, but you don't necessarily know what everyone else's comments are about. Some things are interesting and pertinent to your world, but others are just random tidbits of someone's life (mmm... hot dogs...).

I've been asked "what's the point?" by people who don't live online, and honestly, I don't know that there is a point, any more than socializing with coworkers or business associates ever has a point. It's part of the human experience and it doesn't have to have a point.

It brings to light how much random energy is flowing. I was going to say "flowing through the Internet" but the Internet is just a communications medium for society as a whole. I think the Internet may amplify the energy, or at least give it a sense of focus. Note that I say "a sense of focus" -- really, there isn't much focus in our lives online, no matter what you want to think.

Not to sound to philosophical, but focus must come from within, and I'm in a generation, in a long line of generations, who are accustomed to being given focus from the outside. The idea that you need to find your own meaning in random bits of information is as old as the I Ching, but adapting the western mind to finding meaning is tough.

Of course, there's plenty that's meaningless -- well meaningless to you. Or maybe, meaningless to everyone. It's part of the human experience to simply exist and share with others, and that can be enough meaning.

The greatest part of the new model of social networking is that it's breaking down some of those barriers we built up in our post-modern world. We don't have to save it all up and remember we saw a man carrying a raccoon, we can shout it out, and everyone gets to know us a little better because of the weird shit we talk about all day.

I learned about the earthquake in Los Angeles via Twitter, and about the changes to the surface of Mars. I went to the community wireless event at the Lucky Lab last night because I saw it mentioned on Twitter.

I think the "point" is to enrich your experience as you go through life. It might be business, it might be social, it might just be vicarious living. No matter what, it's about doing more than getting up, going to work, and going home -- however you find that is up to you, but I think the tools are getting better to help us all do that.

Lessons Learned From Apple

Conquent — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:22:33 -0800

I was forwarded this story: How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong

Interesting story... There are really two stories in there, one which talks about Jobs' management style, and the other that talks about the idea of how much you keep secret and how much you share as you go.

On a management side, I agree that, ultimately, any project needs to have a boss, a "decider", a deus ex machina, or some person with ultimate power to say, "Okay, you've all had your say, and we're going to do it this way." Design by committee shows, and decisions by committee are always diluted and rarely let the true visionary shine. But you don't have to be an asshole to do that, and anyone who thinks he has all the answers is usually wrong.

What makes Jobs different is that he seems to actually have the answers, and his vision works. But what's going to happen to Apple after Jobs moves on is what I think I see happening to Microsoft now that Bill has settled down with Melinda and started doing charity work. The vision will be lost, and the R&D infrastructure won't survive without a visionary tyrant.

But the other story about Apple is the secrecy outside the company, and I feel that's their marketing genius. They've built an elitist culture that makes people want to get in and keeping secrets is a great way to create buzz (my example of the Ginger cum Segway hype). As long as you're turning out a great product to fulfill the promise, then, great. But then then Segway hasn't exactly lived up to its original hype...

Secrecy also let's you hide your failures. Microsoft might have done better if they hadn't touted Vista so loudly, then missed release after release, only to give us the bloated beast they did finally bring to market. I have to wonder how many of those kinds of projects have been smothered in the crib at Apple, saving face and making Jobs look more infallible than he probably is.

So, the lessons to learn from this?

If you have a visionary, let him lead and live with his eccentricities.
Marketing is always hype, and secrecy is a tool for that hype.
Anything can backfire, but arrogance backfires bigger if you fail.

Or, at least that's what I believe... I don't exactly make the richest people list in Forbes...

It's the Brand, Baby

Conquent — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:38:00 -0800

I really believe that we can build a sexy brand that people love, evangelize, and want to be part of. I don't even care what the product is, but I've attracted a lot of amazing talent over the years with a mediocre business model, hardly any pay, and an unfocused brand.

It's my belief in the "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" and that the human experience is a hell of a lot more than sitting in a cube and doing linear work that attracts people to Conquent. I've got a hip work ethic, and a boring business model supporting bunch of dull clients.

So, let's take the kernel of what gets me up in the middle of the night to hammer on my keyboard and dissect the problems.

Old School and New Media
There are basically two kinds of companies online. There are the new media companies like Google and Facebook. Heck, throw in Yahoo and MSN while we're at it.

These companies succeed as maverick, explosive growth, edgy companies. While traditional business looks at the Facebook model, they look at it the way you look at a concept car at an auto show -- it's cool as hell, but you won't ever drive the thing.

The credible companies online are credible because of their offline presence. I'm talking traditional news outlets like CNN and The New York Times. They lean heavily on their old school practices and existing infrastructure.

Merging old school and new media hasn't worked very well for companies like Time Warner (and they're partly a tech company), although it's hard to say what's what in the corporate ownership game these days.

I have always tried to bring new media to old school companies. And it doesn't work. Old School companies have to be ready to change, and as soon as you shine the brilliant light of the internet into the mausoleum that is traditional business, the skeletons start to get ugly and you get dragged down into the pit.

Okay, maybe a bit too colorful of a metaphor, but the reality is that I've allowed my clients to set the standard of work for my company, and that has got to change. Yet, I still have to make money. So, I need to attract clients who are really ready to make the jump into the new world.

It's the brand, baby
We've talked about Apple with their amazing strategy of perfection and secrecy to create an elite brand. We know Nike (anyone who succeeds in getting people to get a tattoo of their logo is doing a hell of a job), and then there are cult things like PBR (be prepared to watch it disappear now that Miller owns them) and the fashion/music/Hollywood world where the brand is all there is.

I think what's got me inspired right now is Barack Obama. This man is succeeding because he's built a brand that's hip and encourages hip people to play. It's simultaneously the most old-school, grey suited product (federal politics) and the sexiest power position on the planet.

Anyone can understand the outcome, but you can play in so many ways. Bumper stickers and yard signs be damned, we're talking ring tones, social networks, micro donations, and easy access to the process.

Moving forward
We need that ONE thing people understand. Something sexy, but easy to understand. Something cool, which can be used by anyone. We need to use it as the evangelical point. We need a follow up.

We need a way to get people involved beyond using the thing. We need them to buy into the collaborative, mobile, mentality. We're living in the future right now, and we need to open up as many of those mausoleums as we can and clean some dust out of the brains of our peers.

New media tools aren't making us dumb, they're making us think differently. We have instant access to the sum of human knowledge. Well, some of us do.

So my core philosophy is to get everyone in the mix, find a way to organize their blogs, their communities, their business propositions, and learn what we have at the end of the today, and then see what we have when we wake up in the morning.

Business Architecture vs. Web Construction

Conquent — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:15:00 -0800

Conquent's prospects are looking for someone to build complex websites. Unfortunately, that means we compete with tool users for construction jobs, when what we really do is more architectural.

The process is completely backwards in this business. People come to me looking for a technological solution before they figure out the details of what they want to say. Let alone a core business philosophy to drive the company.

Think of it this way -- you hire someone to build a great restaurant for you in a bucolic setting. You know you don't have sewer or water, but you figure once the restaurant is up and running you'll be able to pay to have it hooked up. Oh, and you don't know how to cook.

If I'm just the builder, I don't have the opportunity to review your credentials, business plan, or, really, check out your story. Now, I'm stuck telling you that there's no way I can finish the job because we can't hook up the plumbing, which you assured me would be there.

Not only that, as I work with you, I slowly lose faith that you can even make a restaurant work as I learn how little of your plan actually exists. This makes it harder to get the crew excited enough to come up with innovative ideas to work around the problems, and the project is likely to wither.

Oh, and then there's the expectation that the painter will be able to fix your plumbing problem, but let's leave that aside...

The flaw with the entrepreneurial market is that inexperience and seat of the pants development is the norm, to the point that a 23 year old kid is offered millions for an untested technology. The bank wouldn't loan someone with no restaurant experience money, but the VC and Angel world still hands money out to techies with no business experience and little resume.

What's worse is how people invest their own money, and their relatives' money, into tech companies with no tech people. That's where Conquent has come in many times -- we get hired to actually build the vague idea that the non-technical, non-business person has talked other non-technical, non-business friends and family out of money.

So, the unanswered question sits on my desk: how do I position my company on the front end of the process, helping people design their businesses before they go down technical dead ends?

On Truth

Conquent — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:35:32 -0800

Seeing as I'm starting this thing out, I figured I should dredge up this old posting from my Myspace page http://www.myspace.com/bissellator as a statement of the fact that anything I may post here may or may not be true...

The problem with human communication is that it's fluid, not absolute.

What I say today may feel absolutely true at this moment, but what I say tomorrow may contradict today's statement. I don't care if this is emotional communication (like between friends or lovers) or if it's business communication.

Granted, if you keep track, try to look at some sort of drift check, then maybe you can discern from your own statements what you believe. Or rather, what you profess to believe.

But the problem rests in that very word. Belief. Beliefs, despite what we'd like to, er, believe, are transitory. Sometimes beliefs take time to morph; obviously what I believe about what the world is has changed since I was five -- new information has come along.

Aside from facts, we end up with emotional content. What I believe about the integrity of a person may morph over time simply from repetitive experience. Or it might be augmented by something baser like they smell bad. Stupid, theoretically dismissible, but that wad of dog crap wedged in their shoe may woo my opinion from Good to Bad.

Unfortunately, these influences are often subtler than that (Because, said Scrooge, a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!) You don't always know why you form an opinion or take an action, but more often than not, it's not a logical decision.

And I don't think that's all that bad. We have to be human, after all, and part of the human condition is being wooed by our organic nature. I believe it's that randomness that adds a sense of mystery and wonder to the world, but at the same time, it can't be the only thing that runs our lives...

No answers, just a ramble...

You can't build life

Conquent — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:00:00 -0800

I was watching a program on video games, of all things, where they said that Japanese kids go out in a way that kids never go out in the US because their homes are so small that they HAVE to go out.

We've had so much space in the US for so long that it's hard not to think bigger. Look at the homes in suburbia now. 5,000 square feet for a family of four is getting to be normal. We don't need public squares or centers anymore, because our houses are all the space we need.

Community was built, or is built in other places, by chance encounters. You're forced into being with people -- college dorms, the ration queue during the Blitz, and summer camp are all places people have been forced together and talk about simultaneously as painful and the most wonderful places they have been.

We don't NEED the companionship the way we did in the rough places that shoved us together. And while I'm not a fan of bashing entertainment, television and interactive entertainment give us a substitute for human contact.

Our public spaces today are bars, which are fleeting places. Coffee houses don't count, because we've learned how to insulate ourselves and sit quietly. Churches might count, except for the fact they are constructed to mold a mindset, control belief and homogenize the congregation.

This is where we get to the basis of my philosophy on life. Life is not staged; it isn't a safe, insular place. Life is what happens along the way. We learn from experiences, and if all our spaces and experiences are constructed and scripted, we never learn.

I truly believe the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. But that's because the parts behave in ways we don't expect. We gain new insights into ourselves and our world by being surprised, not by getting exactly what we want.

What ails American culture, and has for so long, is that desire to be safe, to live in a world of our own creation. And with the wealth and power so many of us enjoy, it's not only possible to live in a fantasy world but it's happening. We're safe, we're comfortable, and we're stagnating.

Accidentally Drunk in Portland

Conquent — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:00:00 -0800

I hate it when I find myself accidentally drunk. I know the formula, but I usually look back the next day and say, "Oh, that's what happened."

It seems to happen most often when I have a series of social events, and too little food. So, for example, Saturday night... There was this little shin-dig downtown in, well, not the Pearl, but not Chinatown... 6th and Flanders, you decide. Seeing as you never know what parking is going to be like, we got there early, and went over to Gilt for drinks before hand. One drink, really, but man, that was a hell of a Bloody Mary.

So, then, on to this private swing dance party in a vacant storefront where they're serving lemon drops and cosmos. Two more drinks. Not bad over the course of a few hours. But, this does take my total up to three for the night, and I can't say for sure how much liquor they were pouring as that was not an OLCC bartender.

Back to Gilt for a little post party socializing, and two more drinks. Although the evening started about five hours earlier, I'm now up to five drinks for the night. Average of one an hour, and the pear brandy is particularly strong, but I'm still okay.

Still feeing fine, and not really wanting to go home just yet, we stop at a little dive I know of on the east side (no, there weren't any strippers). One shot of Pendleton and I'm fine. One more, just to be social, and BAM! It all caught up.

I think what's eeriest about that kind of drunk is that my body was drunk but I was still very cognizant. I mean, I had that, "Oh, fuck... I'm unable to enunciate" moment. No denial about being drunk, more of like when you hit the ice while driving. You're fully aware of the situation, but there isn't a whole hell of a lot you can do about it.

Fortunately we weren't downtown, so, after sitting on hold for awhile, the wait for the cab was only like ten minutes. I remember sending myself an email from my phone, in part to test my dexterity (it sucked) and in part to remember a great scam if you were so inclined to be an amoral son of a bitch.

Think about it -- two in the morning, really drunk people are scattered around the city, just sitting out on a curb waiting for a cab which may or may not come. Listen in on radio chatter, and you know exactly where the poor fools are.

It was that kind of drunk; the one where you're so aware of it, that paranoia strikes. But it's Portland, near Ladd's Addition, not exactly a frightening place, and the cab did show up in short order and everyone got home safe.

Al Gore the Winner

Conquent — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 12:00:00 -0800

Al Gore wins the Nobel Prize for Peace. Well, actually, he won a Nobel for creating a PowerPoint presentation based on UN data and filming it, which is why he had to share the 1.5 million dollar prize with four other people. (When you're worth over 100 million, it's easy to donate that $375K to charity, by the way.)

I think losing the 2000 election was the best thing that could have happened to that man. He wins an Oscar, and then the Nobel prize. He also went from a moderately rich guy to a fabulously rich guy who is famous in his own right and gets to hang out with celebrities and push political policy from the sidelines, unfettered with the rules and spotlight of politics.

Now people are saying, "Why isn't he running for President?" My question is, why would he? First off, he'd have to run against the Clintons, which wouldn't be cool (and the new Al Gore is the epitome of cool). Then, if he won, he'd have to actually hunker down and run the country and deal with the global issues of international politics.

Who the hell would want that when he has free reign to do what he wants, and successfully tackle the issues he's most interested in. Take on getting us out of Iraq? That's an impossible job and whoever gets stuck with it isn't going to have much time for rock concerts.

Oh, and a quick aside about the Nobel Prize... Other past winners of the Peace Prize include Henry Kissinger and (bum bum BUM) Yasser Arafat, the god father of the Middle East... Actually, Kissinger is pretty cool, and he got it for negotiating a peace settlement with Viet Nam (which didn't stick, but who's counting).

But I kind of think that if you're going to award such a big award, it ought to have a few years to make sure it's a good idea. I'm not Catholic, but they wait for people to die to canonize them. Heck, you have to be dead to get on a US stamp (unless you're a cartoon character, which while not a living being, they do have careers that continue to change our perception of them).

Of course, peace is such a subjective idea that we couldn't really wait. After all, Nixon gets all the crap for Viet Nam these days, even though his administration got us out, and Kennedy is the golden boy of the 20th Century, even though he got us into Viet Nam.

So, congrats Mr. Gore, and to the physicists who made all this electronic storage possible (oh, maybe you missed the Nobel prize for Physics -- some kind of electromagnetic signature that makes terabyte drives possible... But that's just fundamental changes in the way the world works, not a rock star politician, so we'll ignore it for now...)

Intelligent life is out there (but it�s bugger all down here on earth)

Conquent — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:00:00 -0800

I was skimming through the headlines on Google News and came across Paul Allen's latest spending exercise: the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) designed to look for signals from other stars. www.space.com/spacewatch/071011-seti-ata-inauguration.html

Now, I'm a big sci-fi fan. I've run the SETI desktop application to help see if there are signals coming in from other stars, and I truly believe that life is not unique to our rock. What I'm beginning to believe, however, is that our definition of Intelligent Life is not out there.

Hell, I'm not sure we have even defined what Intelligence is down here.

I've found that so many of our assumptions and motivations are hardwired to our evolution, and that most of the things we strive for are based on keeping the species moving forward. Not just the species, but our little genetic niche of the species.

We're amazingly xenophobic, despite the desire to swim with dolphins, we're more likely to squish a spider or shoot a cougar. Anthropomorphism is a way to cope with our disdain for things that are different, and as soon as Sparky pulls his lips back and menaces our children, it's time to put him down; he's not the cuddly creature we thought he was.

Oh, and then there's that whole Catholic/Protestant/Moslem/Jew thing. If you've got the wrong skin or wrong belief system, you aren't even really human. We can justify indiscriminate killing for variations on the same foundation of faith.

I think one of the phrases I hear most often is, "I just don't understand..." If you don't understand your neighbor (and I can argue both sides of "can't" and "won't" on that topic), then how the hell are you going to understand the signals from a planet around another star with something that doesn't have anything in common with us?

Oh, and I'm not trying to say I'm somehow exempt from this understanding thing. There are plenty of people who, for the life of me, make NO SENSE whatsoever. I have to assume, on some logical plane, that they have a semblance of intelligence, but it doesn't reflect what I consider to be intelligence...

Then again, I'd rather see Paul Allen spending money on radio telescopes than the Blazers...

Aussie Rules Football

Conquent — Mon, 1 Oct 2007 12:00:00 -0800

We went to the Australian Rules Football World Final at a sports bar downtown Friday night. Geelong wholloped Port Adelaide 24.19 (163) to 6.8 (44). That's 24 six point kicks plus 19 one point kicks totaling 163 points versus 6 six pointers plus 8 one pointers.

I know nothing about the game, really, other than what I learned and saw Friday night (Saturday morning in Geelong, just to make it more confusing). But what a game -- 185 meter field, 18 players to a team, no helmets, no pads and (according to a T Shirt I saw Friday night), no worries.

You see guys kicking a ball 50 meters down field to score, or literally climbing the shoulders of an opponent to snatch the ball away. There are no time stoppages for an incomplete kick (no throwing, just kicking or punching the ball kind of like in Volleyball). If the ball misses the guy it was headed to, then you see a pile up of guys trying to scoop up the ball. Even an injury has to be pretty severe to stop the game.

The score was disappointing to the folks at the bar who knew the game. Normally the tide turns back and forth throughout, but something went wrong for Port Adelaide... They couldn't seem to keep control of the ball, and their scoring was terrible. The 119 point spread is a new record for a Grand Final, the last being something like 92, and both these teams got to the Final on a one or two point spread.

But to the uninitiated, it was fast moving, constant grappling for the ball, and a lot of fun. Part of it might just be the surreal nature of the game. I mean, here it is, Friday night in Portland, Oregon. But it's Saturday morning in New South Wales. There are things that are familiar, but just a little different... Like that enormous oval field and the four goal posts at either end (get between the middle two, you get six points, between an outer and inner, you get one). Looks familiar, but subtly different from football or soccer.

Of course, the person floating around on a balloon who carried the Cup down to the field in the pregame was pretty surreal for everyone... I guess that as tradition bound as Aussies are, Melbourne has its share of artsy folks who have to push the boundaries a bit.

I understand that the town of Geelong went absolutely wild for a day or two. Having the Final on a Saturday morning means the partying can go well into the next day; not that that usually happens, but Geelong hadn't won in over 40 years, that's a lot of pent up excitement, and then to win so thoroughly, it must have been quite a weekend.

Trip to Nostalgia Land

Conquent — Sat, 19 May 2007 06:00:00 -0800

This trip isn't entirely compulsory (most family trips are, you know, things like Christmas or Thanksgiving where the repercussions for not going are worse than going), but I hadn't really thought much about what I'd be doing other than getting my brother to the ride, and off on his fourth Davis Double.

Last night we poked around Davis a little. It was weird when we got to a park we played in as kids, and the place was WAY smaller than I remember. Everyone says that, but it doesn't change how it feels when you go back.

Some things feel exactly the same. In the park, the trees are bigger and the park is smaller, but you get out of town a little ways into the farmland and, oddly, the trees aren't bigger and seem to be pretty much where I left them.

I'm sitting in the Sacramento spillway. It's so early I can't find coffee, let alone decent breakfast, so I figured I'd go see if there is any remnant of the old bike path that used to be down here. I didn't expect it to be accessible (they have since created a path on the causeway to avoid the floods), but I didn't expect it to be completely GONE.

You expect things to change, for a building to be torn down and replaced, or for your memory to be a little off (was that a huge swimming pool, or was I half my size?) But, it's strange when they simply erase something.

The bike path was something like a five mile long strip of asphalt. It would have had to have been ground up and hauled away, and maybe there are still some bits of it in the middle of the spillway, but I'm thinking the farmer who uses this land probably had it all taken out. Not a bad thing, but a lot of work to remove something that I remember from my childhood.

Even though things have changed, sometimes to the point of being completely unrecognizable (the entire highway between Woodland and Davis has moved over a half mile, for example), there are things that I recognize without seeing. The air smells the same, or at least whiffs of the past waft through every now and then. The hills of the coast range are the same shape, and not covered in Borg like constructs like the valley seems to have.

Then there's that odd turn in the road that I remember, but I don't, or that building that looks like someplace I should know, but I don't. It's a feeling of deep familiarity you get sometimes, but can't place it at all, only instead of random deja-vous, I actually HAVE been here before, but not really here, and not really me.

Mind you, I'm not really one to wallow in nostalgia, but I can't help being hit by those "I remember..." moments. I'm next to the levy where I made out with my girlfriend one night until the cops tapped on the window. I'm sitting on a patch of dirt near where I crashed my bike into another rider. There's just a lot of stuff around...

I suppose if you stay somewhere, the nostalgia doesn't hit you as much because you add new memories over the old ones, and the places that slowly changed are more familiar than the place you once knew. So, this showing up thirty years later is kind of like time travel. You get that disorientation, the sense that "that's not right" and a view from an entirely different seat than the people around you...

I am such an idiot

Conquent — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 05:20:00 -0800

I can't believe it, I had it so perfectly dialed in, and I missed my flight. I got to the airport early, got involved in phone calls and email, and suddenly it was 5:45 and my flight was GONE.

It's one of those incredible sinking feelings like being the last kid on the playground, or getting on the wrong school bus. If I had been a girl, I would have cried; hell, I almost did anyway.

The guy at the counter was nice enough about it, although he didn't have a lot of pity for me. After all, they had called my name twice, and I was too stupid to hear. He booked me onto the 6 AM fight, at no extra charge, gave me a number to call which got me a room for 70 bucks, and told me where to find the free shuttle.

After sitting outside for 20 minutes in the DC cold, the shuttle finally showed up. The Old Town Raddisson shares a shuttle with the Holiday Inn down the street, and it was definitely a different class of people than at the Catalina in South Beach. Sort of a rough, prison crowd (no offense to Delta mechanics, but it's those guys I'm thinking of).

The classical music choice that the driver picked didn't help any. Movie makers use that kind of heavy, choral music as the hero descends into hell. Sitting in a dark minibus, heading to an unknown destination, not at my choosing but from my own stupidity, a perfect room in hell.

I got to the Raddision, checked in, found myself on the top floor with an incredible view of the city laid out below, in a nice, basic, hotel room (although it was a smoking room). So it wasn't too bad, but I had no idea what I was going to do with myself for the next 10 hours.

I wasn't hungry, but I was definitely too revved up to go to bed at 7 (even having gotten up at 4). The front desk had given me a map of the area with some restaurants; picking almost at random I headed out towards an Irish Pub.

The streets of Alexendria are surprisingly nice. I remember something about this being where the DC cops herded all the hookers one night. Turns out it's kind of touristy, with a number of nice restaurants dotting the side streets.

As I was walking along, I saw a group of people milling around in what looked like a dance studio. It turned out to be a drop in ballroom class, to which I dropped in. Dancing for a couple hours was much better than drinking for a couple hours.

I left plenty of time this morning to catch THIS flight, which turned out to be a good thing. They have these selective security screenings (or SSS, as it actually read on the bottom of my boarding pass). Because my itinerary deviated from the norm, I got flagged.

It wasn't really a big deal; if you've ever been searched by a cop, this is WAY less invasive. A little pat down and a quck wanding of my carry-on bag, and I was on my way. I still had time to grab a latte and a muffin before boarding.

And, yes, I successfully boarded and got on my way to Portland. So far so good.

Long day of travel

Conquent — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 06:00:00 -0800

I'm sitting in the Orlando airport waiting to get on a plane to DC. This is going to be a long day... I got up around 4AM Eastern and I won't get to bed before midnight Pacific, making it a 23 hour day, easily.

Here's the plan: I fly to DC and get in around 9, leave my bags at the carousel (and hope they don't wander off) and take the Metro into town. I meet with the folks on my team at Union Station, then go to a meeting with Senator Murray's staff at 12:30.

I'll have to eat in there somewhere but my next leg leaves National at 5:45, so I'll want to get back there by 4 so I can get my bags out of hock, check them in on my next flight, and then fly to Chicago where I have a one hour layover.

But, if this works out, we'll get a contract to take care of a roads inventory for reservations, which is sorely needed as the current system is filled with errors, lies, and is keeping tribes from fixing roads. Which means people are dying because of bad data.

The meeting was sort of a surprise for me. I bought my ticket Thursday (just before going to Miami), and went to the mall Sunday to get a dress shirt and a tie. While I packed a suit, I didn't bother to pack a tie or a business shirt. I just don't think that deep, plumb shirt I wore to the clubs in Miami would work well in the Senatorial halls in DC.

Surprisingly, it's cheaper to cram in all my travel and the meeting on the same day. First off, I think it's next to impossible to get a room in DC on short notice; then there's the fact that I was only paying 150 a night in Miami, which would be hard to match in DC.

But, it's going to be a long day.

7:17 AM

The flight is only about half full, so I have a whole row to myself. Of course, the guy in front of me has pushed his seat ALL the way back, which wouldn't be so bad except, for some bizarre reason, he has his hand on the top of his seat. So, I moved over one, which gives me enough room to type this note.

3:08 PM Eastern

My flight leaves in an hour and a half, so I found a little sushi place in the terminal and I'm taking a moment to write this up.

Meetings went well, but in DC who really knows what "well" means. No one ever says you have an ugly baby, and no one in DC is going to tell you that your visit has no merit.

But, as for the trip itself, it's really an amazing world we live in when you can wake up, get on a plane, and then ride into town with the commuters almost 1,000 miles away. I know that some people do this all the time, but I don't know if the jarring sense of dislocation really ever goes away.

I mean, when I got up, it was warm and muggy. I sat outside on a bench listening to the lapping splashing of the courtyard fountain while waiting for my cab, feeling over dressed and warm in my suit and long jacket.

When I got off the plane in DC, I simply walked out of the terminal, pulled out the Metro ticket that has been knocking around my wallet since last spring, and got on a train. The transition from Orlando to DC, from warm to cold, from casual vacation attire to business suits, seemed more sudden than the couple hours in the air allowed.

Miami -- as far from Portland as you can go in the US

Conquent — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 12:30:00 -0800

I'm in Miami Beach, and it definitely counts as one of the more interesting trips I've found myself on. First off, the town itself (once you get to South Beach, not Miami proper) is opulant, expensive, and filled with beautiful people. As I paid for my vodka mojito and found I was spending 14 bucks, with gratuity included, it suddenly felt very foreign, perhaps even European...

But let me back up a bit. I'm here on business, which makes it extra surreal. My client wanted to go to a trade show and invited me along, which is good because the room is something like 300 a night (and I'm here two nights). He paid, and it was his car from Orlando, so I drove.

The highway is boring as can be. There isn't much to see except mangroves and what look like sugar pines. Other than the stretches of swampy bits, it actually reminded me a lot of Eastern Oregon's scrubland, only without the mountains in the distance.

On the way into town we stopped at a muscle car shop, where they charged 10 bucks to let you puruse the lot. Quick, not very interesting, but I got a hat out of the deal (I hate baseball caps, especially with some corporate logo on it...). It was a poor, black neighborhood; but then I think I kind of expectd that in Miami.

But, then we crossed the water into South Beach where we're staying at the Catalina Hotel, which is just as the literature made it look, although a little run down. But Miami... wow... the women are almost universally busty, low cut, leggy and sexy. There aren't a lot of dumpy guys, either, which doesn't help me much. Not that I'd go there, but it's nice to be able to entertain fantasies about being able to snag pretty girls.

There's this long stretch of street where it's just one restaurant after another, and they all fill the sidewalks with tables. It's almost like a dream where you're walking through a place and it never ends. Block after block of tables of diners, all with pretty girls trying to entice you to eat at their place.

We stopped at one place which was very loud, making it hard to talk, but the music was great. As we sat down a street peformer did a great show with cards at the table (which got him a nice tip), while in the background, I swear, the guitarist was playing Pink Floyd in a flemenco style. Later it was Zorba the Greek (which ended up with him selling me a copy of his CD).

We tried to go to a club but were turned away because the guy I was with was in shorts. A dress code! My god, do you know how unlikely that is in the nicest of places in Portland? Well, after we had a beer elsewhere, I went back on my own (being the dapper guy that I am).

It was the most amazing place I've ever been. I wish I could remember the name, but it's probably in the land of Faerie anyhow. It starts with a room as deep as the building with 25' ceilings (at least) and probaly about 20' wide making it feel kind of tunel like but still spacious. The space was lit mainly by candlelight, and it was divided up somewhat by these huge, gauzy, curtains.

There were people dancing in the middle to a DJ who was in a perfect little alcove on the side. Across the "hall" and by the full size billiards table (and I mean full size) was another alcove with a good sized bar, the surface of which was marble, lit from below, so the efect was a glowing bar and drinks.

The crowd was a mix of young and old, couples and groups and stray singles (like myself), straight and gay, black, white, every shade in between. All well dressed and well behaved.

But that wasn't the end of the bar. As I headed out the back there was a huge, covered patio. There were couches, tables with low lamps, people eating and drinking and talking and some light making out in darkened corners. The staff was all dressed in white from head to tow and were quietly and efficiently scurrying around taking care of everyone to the beat of the DJ's music pumped out through a sound system that I never quite found.

Going deeper took me into the grassy garden where there were more couches with lamps and indoor furniture in the outdoor setting. A big hammock in the middle of the lawn was swaying gently and obviously occupied, but I didn't look too deeply to see by whom.

Then the poolside party. The pool was longer than an olympic pool, and surrounded by couches that looked the size of kingsized beds or larger, all filled with the same people as the rest of the place. Across the walkway from the lounging groups was a series of bungaloes, where people were sitting around tables, playing games, talking about who know what, and I saw more than one ice bucket with the neck of a champagne bottle poking through.

And it still went deeper. There was another bar in the back, some sort of bungalow with a covered area, and finally a gate to the beach where I wandered out to the low surf and looked at the skyline from the low tide line.

I think this as as far as you can get from Portland in so many ways...

Inverse Peter Principle

Conquent — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 12:00:00 -0800

We're dealing with a problem vendor at work. He's an old hand at what he does, and at one time probably did know more than anyone else in the business. But the industry continues to change and he is dead certain that he's still right, even without checking. Steve and I were talking about this, and it seems that this is a variation on an old business theme.

The "Peter Principle" refers to someone who is promoted JUST outside of their ability. The theory is that if you do a good job in a big company, then you get promoted. If you do a good job in your new position, you get promoted again. Until you finally get promoted to a point where you can't really do a very good job, so you stop getting promoted AND you're doing a crappy job.

So, you have someone who did a fantastic job for the company promoted until they're not only not doing the job they were good at, but doing a bad job in your new position, doubling your liability and killing your company because you wanted to reward a good worker.

But, this is something different. This guy was on top of his game, and then the game changed. It's sort of the inverse Peter Principle. If you're really good at something, eventually things will change around you and (if you don't change) you won't be good at it anymore.

Or maybe it's more of task obsolescence. Not the whole job, like a blacksmith or a steamship captain or Fortran Programmer. It's that pieces of your job aren't applicable anymore. So your job is still there, but your skills don't apply. Which means you're no longer suited for the job that you were once the king of.

And that has got to hurt. Deeply. I never want to end up in that place, and I think as the Boomers age, we're going to see a lot of people ending up there. They still gotta work, they built careers on being whiz kids, but they just aren't anymore.

So the question in my mind is, is it a choice? I think it is, but I don't know what choices lead to this. Some of it is life choices (I'd rather live my life than grind at my job and learn more), some of it is simple arrogance (I've explained this so many times that I'm not even going to discuss it anymore, and therefore not learn when I'm suddenly wrong).

But some of it is biology. I'm slowing down a little, and I'm just 40. How do you avoid that? Once the ulcer kicks in the coffee doesn't make it as a top choice... diet and exercise while living the good life (or meeting with clients all the time) gets to be a tricky tightrope walk (but that's choices again).

Well, damnit, at least I know I'm right about this. (I hope)

Random Knowledge

Conquent — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 12:00:00 -0800

I'm a knowledge junkie, or maybe just and information junkie. Well, probably not just information. I hate sitting around watching the news, current events are usually too fleeting to really catch my attention for long.

But I love to learn new things. It's one of the reasons I'm in the profession I am. Sure, there's the aspect of the ever changing face of technology, but I also get to learn about other people's businesses and therefore whole new areas of knowledge I never knew existed.

In the last eight years running Conquent, I've had the challenge/opportunity to pitch to such enormous entities as Microsoft and the US Department of Transportation (really when you get the politics in it and I'm talking with senatorial staffers, it's kinda like pitching to the US Government in general). DOT got me to DC which was amazing, Microsoft got me to the Microsoft campus, which is also amazing, but in a very different, and more disturbing way.

I've worked with Allergan to track Botox insurance policies (not for the face, for the spasms and migraines, mind you). I've worked through a client to work with Herbalife as they changed hands from a family company to a ex-Disney executive team (THAT was a lesson in corporate management).

I've learned about the world of manufacturer's reps, electrical engineering, artistic rubber stamps, the production of fine wine, auto shops, franchising in general, customer service software, land use planning, clean room manufacturing, copier repair, railroad crossing materials, opera, multi level marketing, dentistry, surrogates and egg donors, tractors, naval swell predictions, and... the list keeps going.

Then there's my personal time online. I surf to the strangest places, finding things like a spoof of Pulp's "Common People", a popular description of the formation of black holes in the center of galaxies, pictures from the mars rovers, tech news, regular news, satellite photos... Because of watching Torchwood, I pulled up Cardiff on Google Maps and explored the city a little from 1,500 feet. It's funny when you start recognizing places you've never been.

What I do with this odd collection of business, personal and pop knowledge is beyond me. It does mean that I can hold my own in just about any conversational situation. I can talk about hair products or astrophysics, and I find either topic to be interesting, depending on the give and take of the conversationalist.

What I have learned for certain is that no one knows all the bits and pieces I know. But, as it turns out, no one knows all the bits and pieces you know either. We're all picking up random bits of knowledge as we go. Some people go broad, others go deep, some of us go deep and wide.

And it's that randomness that makes us what we are. As a culture we keep trying to define what people need to learn, and by omission, what they don't need to know. It's that omission that's so dangerous. It often seems that that odd, cross fertilization (pasta from China, the number zero from Arabia) is what ends up making life worth living or gives everyone a huge boost to new areas they never dreamed of.

No conclusions, just a random bit...

I'm fascinated with modern plumbing

Conquent — Tue, 7 Nov 2006 12:00:00 -0800

Modern plumbing is the most amazing thing on the face of the Earth.

Now that might seem like an overstatement, but follow for a moment... You have two parallel systems, one clean and one dirty. There's the input, be it a well, reservoir, river, or whatever. It feeds into some big pipes which slowly split into countless smaller pipes. Then there's the output, combining into a big outflow somewhere down the line.

You might think of water mains and sewers as major arteries and veins, becoming capillaries in the smaller pipes of our houses. Clean water is pumped into the system with force, rather like blood is under greater pressure in the arteries. Dirty water, flushing away our waste, tends to be under low pressure and flows from the simple pressure of expulsion after being used.

I think what amazes me is the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of the system. Think about it -- all those pipes are directly connected, except for the brief moment where the water reaches daylight in our sinks, showers and toilets. Heck, a lot of water doesn't even see daylight at this point. It comes into a dishwasher or washing machine, gets all dirty, and then flushes out to the system.

There are pumping stations, and if you look at the purification systems on either end, there's a lot of technology involved, but the basic system is just a bunch of pipes which we all agreed will work a certain way. To me, this shows the remarkable way that humans work together without even knowing it.

You pay your water bill, and it's "your" water once it moves past your meter, just as it's your waste leaving the organ you call your home. But we all share in the system without any more thought about it than you give your own digestive system. Heck, probably less. You turn a knob, and you have a glass of water. You flush your toilet, and your waste is gone to be someone else's problem.

Perhaps it's the sign that we are all just part of a greater organism. Perhaps we model our systems off our own biology. I don't know. But I don't take it for granted. Our cities, our culture, and our civilization wouldn't be able to exist with this elegant system.

And maybe I'm a little overawed by something that's such a simple part of life. But, to me, it's these things that we miss every day and, silly as it sounds, if we're all just a little more aware of the complex, amazing systems that keeps us alive, maybe we can be a little more aware of life in general.

Or maybe I just spend too much time on the can...

Leaving Seattle (or why you should keep your ticket close)

Conquent — Mon, 9 Oct 2006 17:45:00 -0800

I'm heading back from Seattle today after a good meeting with a client (it was good because they A) understand it's going to be a lot more work than we thought and they're okay with it and B) I put most of the next steps on them).

One inconvenience of traveling by rail is the scheduling. Granted, I'm leaving at 5:25 PM, which is a very comfortable time of day to be heading back, but I had to get to downtown Seattle at a pretty inconvenient time. Still, it's better than trying to get to Seatac at 5 in the evening, but my brother had to kill half his day getting me from Everett to Seattle.

We got downtown around 2:30, plenty of time, and found a place to park. We wandered into a bookstore with a coffee shop, chatted for awhile, gave a couple some ideas on what to do on their upcoming trip, and came out with about 40 minutes to spare.

Unfortunately, as we went to get my suitcase from his car, we found a little trick the city of Seattle has put in place -- it was clearly a 2 hour zone, the little computer took his money and gave him a sticker good through 4:45, but the parking zone apparently became a bus zone at 3 so they towed his car.

This was in very small text, in black (not the traditional red) at the bottom of the sign. It may just be me, but that seems like bait and switch. He called the city, found his car was about 2 miles away, and that it would cost $140 to get it out of hock.

Fortunately for me I had my train ticket (and my laptop) with me. I'll have to figure out someway to get my suitcase before my next trip, but as the grand scheme goes, I think I did a lot better on the deal then he did...

On the Rails

Conquent — Sun, 8 Oct 2006 08:00:00 -0800

I'm sitting on the Amtrak Cascades train on my way to Seattle. After all the flying I've been doing this year, it's really a night and day experience.

First off, I decided this morning that I'd rather take the train than drive up the freeway, again. It's a couple hundred miles each way and my patience for stupid drivers is steadily wearing thinner. Add the fact it's about two tanks of gas at 40 bucks a tank, plus wear and tear, and it just makes sense to take the train.

Choosing Sunday morning to book my travel would have been impossible with the airlines. But, I was able to get online, buy my ticket for a 3:00 train at 10 this morning.

Hell, with a plane, I'd practically have to be leaving for the airport at 10. Not so with the train; I got to the station with about 10 minutes to spare (which, really was cutting it close even for the train). I checked in, got my ticket in hand and walked on board.

The train is pretty full, but I've got a decent seat, a place to plug in my laptop, and I can drink my own beer (I had a couple beers in the car from a potluck last night). Granted, I still have to pack in my own Internet using the cell modem in my laptop, but I can use my cell modem! Hell, I can use my cell phone!

And, compared to the plane, it's quiet. The train tracks make a little rumbling noise, but nothing like the engines or the air whipping around a jet. And the view is really amazing -- serene, bucolic views of forests and pastureland, and (coming up in a bit) the Puget Sound. It's practically a spa day.

Oh, and the bathroom is HUGE. Well, at least the one in my car is. It's a handicap bathroom, but it's amazingly large. I had forgotten that I've actually changed my clothes in one of those (bike ride to the train, get out of spandex in the handicap toilet...). That's where they could set up the massage table if they wanted to complete the spa experience...

So, why, oh, why, do we not have more rail?

The Hive

Conquent — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0800

[this is a repost of a blog I put on Myspace back in 2006]

There's this great article in this month's Atlantic Monthly about Wikipedia.

I bring it up here because a big part of my being on MySpace is exploring how the Internet is changing the way humans think. Or at least how we learn.

For example, before Google, you needed tons of books to do the kind of work I do. You'd get the book on progamming language "A", the "Tips and Tricks" book for some quick examples, the 500 page book you got because there was this one section, maybe two pages long, that explained EXACTLY how to do something you wanted to do.

But now you just Google it. And, if you're any good at putting your keywords together, you get an answer almost intantly.

Wiki is more abstract, but still amazing. I was out in Redmond, Oregon, a couple weeks back for a wedding. At the little resort community, in the middle of nowhere, there was a mini-auto show for Pierce-Arrow autos. Well, I'm looking at this 1904 bicycle that the company made, and there's a schrader valve sticking out of the rim.

"Schrader valve?" I ask the guy. "Weren't those introduced later?"

He didn't know. So, I pull out my Palm Treo, pop online (I had digital signal in the desert), look up "schrader valve" on Wiki, get the page for Shreader Valve, follow the link for the whole background August Schrader and find that the valve was invented in 1891 and in wide use by the time the bike I was looking at was around.

The fact that I can get that level of information in the middle of butt-nowhere, and give an accurate, relevant detail to someone who, in theory, is an expert, is absolutely amazing to me.

So, this MySpace thing... within a couple days of setting up a MySpace page, a friend finds me out of the blue. BAM, she was bored, and she set up a page and then started searching for all her friends. Within days of me... No corrolation, just the way it worked out.

Where Wiki is for the collection of interesting information, MySpace is the random gut of the Internet. We'll see what happens with it next...