Take the ™ out of the real.
Recently I asked two people about the time they spend on the internet. They used the brand name of each activity but essentially they e-mail (Yahoo), chat (MSN), blog (read/write)Â (no brand) and search (google). It is interesting to see how blogging had come such a long way to become a key activity in most people internet’s time.
I had done quite a number of marketing and fund-raising presentations. In these presentations, the idea is to sell the idea to the audience in the hope of getting some money (eventually).
Often, we like to raise some points for people to remember, which people have little incentive to remember. This post is not about creating that incentive. This post is on how to make them remember once they are interested enough to remember (and to obviously preach on your behalf). Usually, at the very end of the presentation, if it was impressively built up, you would have a single shot of the “rule of 3″ slide.Three is the most effective number (of points) for people to remember and spread the word. Sure, we have the magic seven rule (but I have not remembered all the effective habits of successful people and I have not remembered very well on the five forces). One is too simplistic and two reminds of correlation or causality which in turn reduces to one. Four is useful for testing sorting algorithms and writing interesting acronyms for study notes like ACID, RAID, etc but otherwise, it is deemed as too technical. Three has this unique characteristic of sounding professional (important for the person who is taking over from you to preach) without looking too simplistic.
The negative effect of this rule of 3 is that over time, seasoned pros would see through it. If one rule is redundant or an important rule is missed out, these people can tell and can infer you are trying to pull a fast one over them. Fortunately, these people could also tell if the preceding slides have substance.
In my experience, the rule of 3 is a good tool and for those who could see through it, they usually have formed their opinion halfway through your presentation.
A lot of product design is driven from requirements camp of people on how to elicit accurate requirements from customer but sometimes, product design could be driven from the implementation camp.
The time-to-market pressures forces product to be scalable, configurable and customizable in internet time (even not for internet-related products).
To meet the yin-and-yang of satisfying customer requirements and shorten implementation time, I have derived two basic principles.
1) Each feature of the design must be as simple as possible and the feature must remain as simple as possible over time.
2) One or more features must truly change the world. (Reminds me of those ads that had the tagline of after xxxx, life was never the same again.)
Someone came up to talk to me recently because I was holding on to the Freakonomics book. According to his reading circle, the book was highly recommended.
As for me, I think the book is good (not bad and not very good either). I have a soft spot for books that present facts in a controversial way. These facts are semi-facts because though the reasoning is eloquent and backed with good supporting evidences, the truth is that there are always hidden assumptions not revealed or perhaps even not known to the authors. It is not a very good book because I am familiar with causality, correlation and data sampling, having read them from other sources.
Freakonomics brought out correlation and causality very often throughout the book. The problem with us is that we always like to seek reason and for that reason (pardon the pun), we always see things with a causality perspective. There is a lot of times “may” is used in the book but I think, for the average reader, it is often overlooked. The reader tend to read through the anecdotes and form their causality chains unknowingly and wrongly. The worst part of this matter is that as people like controversial facts, these controversial facts get propagated quite quickly over lunches and drinks.
One thing that I have not seen it mentioned in Freakonomics is sampling. We are using sampling to derive information about the population (and remember in Freakonomics, the population is at best Amercian citizens and not all human beings). There may be flaws in selecting a certain sample (which may only be realized much later).
Of course, this post is meta-prophetic. I am trying to bring in controversial ideas about a controversial fact book being not as good as it seems.
This reminds me of a posting I read somewhere (too lazy to find out where) on VCs meeting potential startups. If they are hearing 3 times of a particular startup from 3 different clique of people, they will call the startup to meet.
I recall I saw Freakonomics at a bookstore some time back and was quite sold in by its tag line - “A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything”. Then, I started bumping into some blogs where people are reading Freakonomics and I think not too long ago, someone told me about Freakonomics again. Finally, I bought the book today.
Has anybody ever wondered if Google returns different results based on different localities (of course, we discount China in this instance)?
Now according to Phil, “mashup” “web 2.0″ returns 301,000 in Google UK (posting on Jan 13th). I keyed in the same search key-phrases (keyphrases or key-phrases?) in Google Singapore today, it returns 261,000. I tried going to Google UK, which strangely did not redirect me back to its Singapore site, it returns 260,000. First question: what happened to the 40,000 odd sites?
But assuming it did drop to 260,000, which 1000 sites is Google not showing for UK but is showing for Singapore?
My wife sold some of our baby stuff through our baby blog today.
This is interesting in two different perspectives. First, there is no need to advertise to any auction-site or classified forums. Second, the readership is relatively small (maybe 60-70 readers at best and mostly parents with baby about the same age) and the things are sold one day after posting.
The first clearly show that blogging is going to disrupt the way the internet works because now everyone can be a content provider to a small social community. The second clearly show the title of this post, the importance of being relevant.
The web is incomplete as a knowledge repository because it does not store every known knowledge to humans. The problem that this situation exists is that we do not know what we know. We are able to derive knowledge from first principles.
The search is incomplete because we sometimes search with an approximate idea of what we want. We carry out such search using the following method. First, we key in our approximate keywords. Next, we scan the search results to see what can be relevant and from some of those sites, we derive ideas on how we can narrow down our search with new keywords. But, unfortunately, sometimes our approximate search is so bad that it does not narrow down and we give up.
The telephone is a relatively new invention but we have see how far and how deeply it has impacted our lives. One anecdote I can quote as a parent is that we are teaching our girl, barely 1 year old, on how to use (or pretend to use the phone).
I wonder how long it would take before my descendants would be taught how to blog or how to email when they are one year old.
When my best friend first showed me her blog, I was unimpressed by the technology. That must have been 4 years or so ago, circa 2001. In Singapore, blogging was definitely not mainstream. Nothing was written on the papers about it. We still did not know famous bloggers in this region.
Now 4 years later, blogging is a mainstream word. You are starting to hear the word blogging from older people (but no, my parents still do not know much about blogging. Note that my dad uses the internet but it is really for pure utility rather than social interaction. He visits youtube for example to see my baby daughter latest achievement. My mom, who is totally internet unsavvy, knows about yahoo, and no, she does not know google). Any case, blogging has definitely hit mainstream.
I had the opportunity to talk to her again this morning over breakfast. I asked her if she heard of RSS and she said no. I did not bother to probe too much about her knowledge of Web 2.0. Interestingly, she also does not know what a wiki is (but yes, she heard of wikipedia). She bought an IPod Video and had convinced her colleague at the office to buy an IPod too.
What does all this tell me? Pyra started blogspot in 1999, and I first heard of it two years late. I started writing a journal in a .plan file in my then-unix account in 1998 and for that reason, I was unimpressed. It was exactly what I could have done with an unix account and I had a symbolic link set up on my web pages directory. In other words, what I write could be viewed by the internet and if the geeks wrote the right script, they could even subscribe to my plan.html. The one thing I did not understand then was that without hyperlink, my text was “flat”. My page is lengthy (ten of thousands of lines) and because my entries were sorted in chronological order, from past to future, you had to scroll down to read the new entries. I reasoned that people would want to read it that way to get the flow. I was very wrong. Later, when comment links were added to her blog site, my public viewable text file became even more “off”. Also, no images could be added to the text file. What started out as almost the same is not the same anymore. I could not understand this well enough. I even wanted to make my blogspot site look like my text file. I did not understand that my old method was being disrupted and now looking back, I am blinded by the faith in old school technology. When a new technology arrives at the scene, you think it is the same as the old and the old is even better in some ways than the new. It is no surprise that people in sustaining technology tend to miss the boat when it comes to exciting new technology. Logically, I could have been an early embracer but I end up adopting blogging 4 years late.
That was the first point. Now, for the second point, despite the success of wikipedia, wiki, on its own, is still relatively new and has not hit mainstream, or even early adopters, at least in Asia. Nobody wants to host a wiki yet. Based on my first point, I certainly do not want to make the same mistake again of thinking everything was the same as before. Wiki promises social editing and self-moderating. Now, you ask, wouldn’t a joint account blog be the same? Yes, it looks the same but the subtleties are important. And most often the subtleties lies in usability and convenience. Wiki may not necessary disrupt blogs though. We should watch what its disrupts and hopefully this time round, I can be wiser.