Business

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Changes

March 31, 2005

Dan Gillmor says esentailly the same thing Adam Curry told the BBC a few days ago. Curry was talking about podcasting, the online radio equivalent of weblogs, when he said podcasting will kill the business model of radio. Gillmor's article suggests a similar shift will happen in the newspaper realm.

I agree that podcasting and weblogs will have powerful influences in toppling the traditional media business model. All too often, however, this is taken as an excuse for producing a poor quality product. Podcasts-a-plenty are full of folksy poorly produced blots of sound. Of the many podcasts that have at one time or another crossed my iPod the only ones that have stayed are IT Conversations, Career Opportunities and New York Public Radio's On the Media. All three share several things in common. Among them high production values and they are the right length. What is the right length? Long enough to cover the subject and short enough to keep it interesting.

I suspect I am not alone in that after the first "wow" factor wears off listening to someone who is not good at radio will loose its allure quickly. There is a reason Rush Limbaugh has a radio show. It is not his politics. There are conservatives behind every corner these days. The reason his show is on the air is he knows how to put together a good radio program. The same will be true of weblogs and podcasts. The good among them, those that find a stride and figure out how to put a professional polish on the product will likely replace many of the mainstays of the media machine.

Places to avoid

March 15, 2005

Perhaps I should start a list of places to avoid. These are businesses that don't understand customers. For several months I'd regularly shopped at an ARCO station at the corner of Paradise Road and Tropicana Avenue. Tonight there was a new sign on the pump saying credit cards had to go inside to pay. If I'll pay the ATM-tax imposed by the station owners I can pay at the pump, if not I have to go inside.

It seems this is probably to get more customers to use the ATM instead of the credit card function of the pump and to shift the costs from the profitable company to the individual consumer. With a little good luck the plan will fail, however. In my case at least, they have gone from a customer spending a few hundred dollars a month at their store to a non-customer. I'll gladly stop a block away and not have the hassle of going inside to pay.

The decline and fall of the Google empire

March 12, 2005

Dave Winer says "the thing that made Google different is that you treated us decently while the earlier search engines forgot who we were, and were treating us like eyeballs, not people."

The comment is part of a discussion on the way Apple is treating some of it's supporters in suing them for releasing trade secrets. I had a conversation earlier with a librarian blogger about the decline and fall of Google. I didn't start using Google because they treated anyone decently. I started googling things for the same reason I imagine most of their other users did - consistently better search results.

Concerned about online identity theft?

February 13, 2005

The Better Business Bureau recently released a report that indicates identity theft is more frequently committed offline than online. The report found that in spite of rising fears about identity theft and online fraud that old-fashioned physical loss or theft of wallet, checkbooks or credit cards accounts for nearly a third of all identity theft. Thefts stemming from online sources including computer spyware, online transactions, computer viruses & hackers, and phishing scams combined accounted for less than fifteen percent of all identity crimes.

Another important finding of the study is that people who use online methods to keep track of their accounts are likely to find out about identity crimes much sooner than those who rely on paper statements. The average loss for those monitoring online was $551 compared to $4,543 for those who rely on paper statements.

Respect

January 11, 2005

Earlier this evening was my first meeting on the Sandy Valley Citizen's Advisory Council. It was a well attended meeting (read there was something contentious on the agenda). The young people who run Sandy Valley Motocross were at the meeting to present information about their pending application for new terms in their business permit.

For some background look at this story. The letter says a lot. So while I don't know it will be heeded, here is my advice to businesses who get off on the wrong foot.

The most critical thing is don't issue hollow apologies. I'm not saying that they aren't heartfelt, but they are hollow. It is very difficult to eat crow gracefully. It is impossible if you want to maintain you are right and have been wronged by those who you are apologizing to. It is impossible to apologize and say in the next breath somebody else is wrong if you want them to believe you. The proper thing to do is to say you are sorry. And to continue apologizing. If one were to say I'm sorry and we won't make those mistakes again, and keep saying it, they might be believed. When the message is I'm sorry, but you're just as wrong, you're not building credibility.

This "negative" could become a very positive outcome if handled properly. It would take Kit Stokes sitting down with members of the community. If Stokes would take it upon himself to meet regularly with the community and to do it in a way that respects other's opinions a lot could be accomplished. It is not as simple as some in the forum suggest.

Communications is key

January 10, 2005

A positive meeting this meeting with our Vice-Provost for Information Technology reminds me about my basic philosophy of business. Communications is key. First off, my bias, I have a degree in communications and have worked in several professional roles doing communications. That said, there is little that can't be accomplished if you learn to communicate well. Sometimes the most critical piece of communicating is learning when to say nothing at all and learning how to say something succinctly and clearly.

Communicating to the audience is also key. In an instance this weekend I sent a broadcast communication without thinking enough about the audience. There was at least one person, Sam, who got the message and was concerned about what I had to say. The issue did not affect Sam, but my message was ambiguous, putting it kindly, to the point of implying that Sam would be impacted. A better choice of words and clearer communication with more forethought about the entire audience would have prevented the confusion and prevented Sam from being converted.

Thoughts for a new year

January 3, 2005

Marty Nemko offers some good career resolutions for 2005. He circles around a theme but never quite lands on the most important idea. Think of your career like a business. You're CEO of your career and the one-person company that is your career is the most likely vehicle you have to succeed. Just like a Fortune 500 company you need to plan, budget, prioritize, increase education and understand the competitive marketplace. Although your annual report may look more like a holiday letter than a 50 or 100 page glossy, it is the process that is important. What is on your strategic plan for 2005-2010?

The day after

November 29, 2004

Trying to catch up after the holiday.

Dave Winer is working on eliminating referer spam. I'm not sure how his system works, and undoubtedly it's better than I would have thought of but it seems to me I sometimes see as "referrer" the last page someone visited even if they didn't click on a link. So if I go to www.scripting.com after visiting a page with no link to Scripting News will it get blacklisted.

I mention this because I was looking at Scripting News on my new Treo650 this morning. What RSS readers are available for Palm/Treo devices. Most of my blogging could rapidly become mBlogging. The best part is never sitting somewhere and wishing I had something to read. For the podcasting crowd we need a aggregator that can be run in the PalmOS and uses the built in networking to catch podcasts.

How dumb do they think we are?

October 31, 2004

In the just how dumb do you think we are category comes this factoid from xxxchurch.com. "The primary pornography consumer group is boys between ages 12-17." What?

Let's pretend for a moment this has the least bit of credibility. About half of the sources on the page of factoids are credited to a source, this one is not. So a product that is not available for sale to minors has it's primary audience in the 12-17 year old range? Huh?

Perhaps it's all the 12 year-olds in the local adult video store who drive this statistic. Oh, you say they aren't allowed. Then perhaps they have been ordering it via mailorder. Given the billions spent on this material each year then they must be ordering at least half a million dollars. It is most likely just delivered to their houses and their parents hand it to them... No wait all of these are stupid arguments. It's amazing that with all the problems in the world a group of religious fanatics is so focused on making sure others can't do as they wish. But the same fanatics will continue to support a culture that promotes violence.

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