Outside a major book event in NYC last week.
Joi Ito began defacing his laptop several years ago. I finally got the nerve up last week. Here’s one I saw at a conference last week.
This is an important breakthrough, because it finalizes the transition of computer from heavy iron into personal (disposable) fashion statement.
Well, telling the truth is a good thing, but I’m not sure it’s working, at least not in this case…
Thanks! Link: Fresh Glue: Good enough…or remarkable?.
Everyone’s an Expert (about something).
How do you get more people to visit your site?
or buy your product?
or donate to your charity online?
How do you get your ideas to spread?
If you work on the web, this is one of the biggest questions you wrestle with. It has led to SEO and to AdWords, to banners and to online copywriting, to blogs and to tags…
This is an ebook about getting more by presenting less.
Here’s my short take on what you’ll find in the ebook:
“For
a long time, the web has been about more. More links, more traffic,
more hits, more choices. In the face of all that more, many sites (and
most surfers) are not getting what they want. This free ebook proposes a
different way of achieving your goals: less.”
The ebook
outlines a technique that will increase PageRank, user satisfaction,
clickthrough and the spread of your ideas, whatever those ideas are.
I’m excited enough about this idea that I’ve spent the last 5 months assembling a team that is building a platform called Squidoo. My goals? To raise a lot of money for the charities of your choice (or for you) at the same time we make it easier for you to spread your ideas. And to do both of those things while making it easier for people to find what they’re looking for online.
It
doesn’t matter if you use Squidoo or not… the idea of a lens makes
sense whether you post it yourself or let us host it for you.
Squidoo isn’t ready yet. Our very limited size beta test starts on October 17th, and we’ll be adding people a few hundred at a time after that. So, if you decide to sign up, please be patient. And if you’re in a hurry, go build your own lens! Less, this time anyway, really is more.
as promised.
Link: The Big Moo (Reviewed at WorkHappy.net).
I
think I’d describe this book as a collection of the very best blog
posts from the very best authors on business. Pithy, inspiring and fun.
If you’ve got a pretty good job (and I assume you do) that probably means that you get to do a fair amount of self-management. If you’re installing eyelets at a Nike factory, they measure your output to the tenth of a second. I’m not talking about that. I’m writing this for people who are given the freedom to solve problems or create opportunities at work.
Like most things, there’s a spectrum of approaches. In this case, I think the two ends of the spectrum are an approach of Abundance and an approach I call Technically Beyond Reproach (TBR).
Abundance means that you look at every problem spec and figure out how to make it bigger.
TBR tries to make it smaller.
Abundance means that you spend a lot of time imagining how you will overdeliver.
TBR means you start from the beginning making sure that the work you do will either meet spec or you’ll have a really good excuse.
Entrepeneurs have a hard time with the TBR approach, because it has never ever worked for them. VCs and customers and competitors give few bonus points for excuses, even really good ones, so the only approach that wins is the abundance one.
An abundant-approach employee shows up early so she won’t need the "train was late" excuse on the day of the presentation. The TBR employee gets a note from the Metro. (true story).
An abundant-approach minister grows his church from 200 families to 3,000 by constantly reinventing what he does all day. A TBR minister does a very good job of consoling the sick and writing sermons.
Is there something wrong with the TBR approach? It depends what you want. If you want to grow, TBR won’t get you there. (The Purple Cow was not about being garish or outlandish. It was, I know realize, about thinking abundantly). Yes, I probably want my airline pilot to be TBR, at least most of the time. But no, not the chef at the restaurant.
There are whole industries built around TBR thinking. The wedding business for example, charges extra so the bride and her mom will be blameless. The "top" colleges offer an expensive degree that is also beyond reproach, "Hey, it’s not my fault… I paid my dues, went to a great school…"
The fascinating thing about the transparency of the Net is that it makes it easy to measure the differences between the two approaches. There are a bazillion blogs, and technorati makes it easy to see which ones have popped. And those are? Those are the ones that didn’t follow the blogging manual, that didn’t diligently do what they were supposed to do, but instead, they were run with an abundance mindset. The blogger chose to answer a bigger question, in a bigger way.
I think what it comes down to is the first question you ask yourself when you see an opportunity or a challenge.
Is it, "How can I make this bigger, do it faster and change the outcome for all of us?"
or is it
"If this doesn’t work, will I get in trouble or will I be okay?"
Link: OnlyOnce: Book Shorts
It has some great reminders about how easy and inexpensive it can be to be remarkable in business. Wisdom like "Criticism? Internalize it," and "Get great ideas about your business from new employees," and "How would you run your business if you relied on donations from your customers in order to survive?" are all insightful and thought provoking.
Well, the slide has been viewed more than 18,000 times so far, but here are some highlights in text:
Tim O’Reilly, in summarizing a brainstorming session at Foo, lists the following attributes of a classic Web 2.0 company:
Attitude, not technology
The Long Tail
Data is the "intel inside"
Hackability
Perpetual Beta
Right to Remix (some rights reserved)
Software that gets better the more people use it
Emergent user behavior not predetermined
Play
Granular addressability of content
Rich user experience
Small pieces loosely joined (web as components)
Trust your users
This is by no means a complete list, but it represents a way to think about what you build online (and, imho, offline as well.) And it reminds me of big thinkers like David Weinberger and Lisa Gansky. Web 2.0 isn’t new, but it’s now.
Worth a look: Collaborative writing software online with Writeboard. Write, share, revise, compare..
Another review of The Big Moo. Blogcritics.org: Review: The Big Moo. (second in a series.)
The book does what it sets out to do: motivate the reader to get out there to put ideas to work to develop a remarkable organization that gets everyone buzzing.
Aaron points us to Amazon.com: Music: Ocean’s 12 [SOUNDTRACK].
Notice that the soundtrack has 71 reviews… and that the best loved review has 588 positive votes.
And that almost all the reviews are about a song that isn’t even on the album!
