#empotuulwey In which Chris Brogan, Jesse Stay, and I use the "B" word

WARNING: While I will try to redact a particular offensive word that begins with the letter B, there is a chance that I may slip up and forget to redact it on one or two occasions. Sensitive people should avoid this post.

Not too long ago, I made a change to my LinkedIn profile. My profile lists my Empoprises work in addition to my day job, but the profile does not describe me as a Freelance [REDACTED]ger. Instead, it describes me as a Freelance Writer/[REDACTED]ger.

Why is writing listed before [REDACTED]ging?

Well, duh!

I was reminded of the [REDACTED]ging controversy earlier this month when I saw this item (note that I saw it on Facebook). It's something shared by Chris Brogan.

Brogan's original written product, found at chrisbrogan.com, makes the point that content is still being created. It's just that people aren't going to the [REDACTED]s directly, but getting there via avenues other than direct visits or Google Reader.

Going back to the Facebook share of Brogan's written content, Jesse Stay offered the following comment:

It's not what it used to be though

This reminded me of something - namely, the fact that the [REDACTED]ging is dead debate has been going on for years - possibly even BEFORE Google Reader starting pining for the fjords. In fact, I wrote about it back in 2012, back when Chris Brogan was writing "Never Fall in Love With the Medium" and Jesse Stay was writing"My Official (and Obligatory) 'Traditional [REDACTED]ging is Dead' Post."

It's important to note that Brogan and Stay are NOT disagreeing with one another. This excerpt from Stay's 2012 written product illustrates a point that Brogan would heartily agree with:

Does that mean that personal opinion and citizen journalism is dead? Does that mean that sharing is dead? Does that mean engagement is dead? In fact, it’s even greater than ever.

The one change, as Brogan notes:

Gone are the days of “Just write something because we were told to have a blog by some ‘guru.'” Instead, you have to have created something of value.

What is value? Is this particular post one that I'm going to immediately rush and share on LinkedIn, Instagram, terrestrial radio, and fake scientific journals? Probably not. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of people don't even realize what word I'm consistently redacting throughout this written product, and therefore would be confused by the content.

But perhaps it's something that I can refer to later. After all, when you have a [REDACTED] of sequential written products (this [REDACTED] alone has over 2,600 of them), it's a resource that I - and you - can dive into at will as needed.

P.S. It has occurred to me that by redacting the offensive word, I have shot myself in the foot regarding search engine optimization. So if you are a sensitive individual, stop reading now. Because I am going to use the offensive word.

Like a true so-called "SEO expert."

blog blogs blogger blogging blog blogs blogger blogging

(empo-tuulwey) There are many possible solutions to the India Ministry of Information and Broadcasting attendance problem

(DISCLOSURE: THERE WILL BE A DISCLOSURE LATER IN THIS POST.)

In the nation of India, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting does all sorts of important things. Unfortunately, one thing the Ministry doesn't do is provide a brief description of its activities on its About page. Instead, we find a resume of the minister, and learn about very important things, such as the fact that the minister's son is a dentist, poet, singer, and music composer.

However, I'm certain that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting does all sorts of important things, since the website has a number of pages devoted to broadcasting, information, films, and other topics. All of this work obviously requires employees, and the minister - one Prakash Javadekar - obviously wants to make sure that his staff is working on these important things, and not composing odes to teeth or whatever.

So Javadekar stopped by the office one day:

On July 1, the minister had made a surprise check where he found that several employees of the ministry came late to work.

Javadekar had expressed his displeasure over the lack of punctuality among officials, and directed all staff to be present in office during working hours.

So how will he make sure that officials in their offices on time? He will adopt a solution that is being adopted - and debated - throughout India.

(DISCLOSURE: I WORK IN THE BIOMETRICS INDUSTRY.)

His solution was announced on the Ministry website:

Installation of biometric device for Attendance System (through finger print/face detection/ smart card) with in-built time and attendance software in office of the Ministry of Infonnation and Broadcasting (MS), Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi- regarding.

Yup, the employees of the Ministry are going to have to clock in, possibly with a fingerprint or facial image. So if Ian places his finger on a biometric reader at 10:17, and he was supposed to be in the office by 9, his tardiness will be recorded.

Does the wonderful world of biometrics provide a solution to the Ministry's attendance problem?

No.

Biometrics provides a TOOL that may help to provide a solution to the attendance problem. Biometrics itself is not the solution.

To actually solve the problem, you need to explore the reasons behind tardiness. Perhaps traffic is terrible. Perhaps the employees are culturally obligated to listen to their children recite poems about teeth, and are therefore late to work. Biometrics does not solve these problems, and in fact the employees could even be sufficiently motivated to defeat the biometric system.

There are other ways to solve the attendance problem. For example, if people are supposed to be at work between 9:00 am and 4:00 pm, you could simply lock the building doors between 9 and 4, preventing anyone from going into or coming out of the building. You could have a Human Resources person stand at the door of the building, and if someone walks up at 9:05 in the morning, the HR person can hand out a notice of termination.

In fact, Minister Javadekar himself has come up with an alternative solution:

When asked by Karan Thapar whether India could move towards a future where the I&B ministry “ceases to exist”, Javadekar said “Philosophically or ideologically I’d be willing to do that.”

Frankly, this is the perfect solution to the Ministry's attendance problem. If there is no Ministry, the attendance problem simply goes away.

(empo-tuulwey) Technology is NOT the "Superman" that the education sector has been waiting for

Ken Yeung has written a piece entitled Is technology the ‘Superman’ that the education sector has been waiting for? The answer is a qualified "no," but I'm even uncomfortable with Yeung's qualification, found at the end of the post.

Now, some of you might be reading this thinking that I’m claiming that technology is the end all be all cure for all that ails the education world. This is not what I’m saying — it is part of the solution.

I'm fine with that, but I'm not fine with Yeung's final sentence:

So while the physical classroom may be going through some seemingly never-ending turmoil, perhaps technology can offer a helping hand and be that one party that actually thinks about the children.

Why am I not fine with Yeung's concluding statement? I left a comment on Larry Rosenthal's share of the original post. Here's what I wrote in that comment (with the Google+ link to the Reed College page converted to a hyperlink).






A tool is not a way of life.

The failure of all of these endeavors is that they conceive of technology as the solution. Even with the author's caveats, the author still looks at technology as "that one party that actually thinks about the children."

Technology does not think.

One of the biggest lessons that I derived from my undergraduate education at +Reed College was a devotion to original sources. In its introductory Humanities courses, the college makes a point of having students read the original works of Greek and medieval authors. (I'll grant the point that we read them in translation, not in the original languages.)

Something like that - an approach to educating oneself - is much more important in the long run than figuring out an education delivery mechanism, or a testing mechanism, or proclaiming that learning is student-directed. It's one thing to have a high-resolution tablet that lets you read the latest tech publication - it's another thing entirely to know what to do when the latest tech publication appears on your screen.

(One example: when "Monday Matters" mentioned the Paul Graham accent issue, it was something that I hadn't heard of before. Now I could have just ended my inquiry by seeing what "Monday Matters" said about it, or I could have used wonderful search tools to see what CNET and Mashable and the Huffington Post said about it. However, I figured that the best thing to do would be to see what Paul Graham himself said about it. That took a bit more effort, since "technology" is designed to provide the source with the highest SEO, rather than the original source.)






And that ends the original comment.

Incidentally, if you haven't seen my comments on Paul Graham, they can be found here.

(empo-tuulwey) Why Useless PLASTICBOX 1.2 wasn't a...best buy

Well, this tweet from @plasticjesusart is getting a lot of attention.

The Daily Mail explains what happened:

Best Buy stores have been targeted by a prankster who has placed worthless plastic boxes on the shelves complete with authentic labels.

The black boxes have product tags in the style of the American discount electrical giant that read 'Useless PLASTICBOX 1.2' for $99.99.

The labels read: 'Another gadget you don't really need.

'Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of use.'

The prank is attributed to the person who originally shared the picture, Plastic Jesus. P.J. was quoted in Melrose and Fairfax:

We are sold these gadgets in a way that makes us think that THIS new gadget is THE one. The piece of kit that will transform our lives. How often do we pay out hundreds or thousands of dollars and in-fact the product will not do much of what it is claimed. The frustration these things actually create in out lives is far greater than any possible benefits. It's only once you've purchased the item and you try to set it up and use it, often faced with long phone calls to overseas call centres, speaking to 'help desk' staff who read from scripts and leave us more frustrated.

We all need to make a strong statement to gadget manufacturers and demand products that work and customer support that actually support the customer and not the profit of the companies...

The Melrose and Fairfax writer wondered if any of these sold.

I'd be willing to bet that they didn't - not because everyone immediately realized that it was a prank, but because the Useless PLASTICBOX 1.2 wasn't attractive enough.

Oh, Plastic Jesus tried. These types of devices can only come in two colors - pure black, or pure white. While perhaps a little more drool would come from a tech-weenie's mouth with a white device, black is perfectly acceptable.

But the big problem is the $99.99 price.

It's way too low.

Ideally, to be lusted after, such a device would need a price closer to $1,000 than $100. Perhaps $899 would be good, with a $999 price for the future white PLASTICBOX 1.3.

Certainly for a true luxury good, the price would have to be much higher - in the tens of thousands of dollars, or maybe even in the hundreds of thousands. But you have to remember that the product was placed in Best Buy, and apparently was placed in the GPS aisle at Best Buy. Maybe Plastic Jesus could have commanded a higher price - $5,000 or above - if the product had been placed in the high-end audio equipment section.

But $100 is just too low for the trendies to take notice.

Thanks for Jack C. Crawford for the original share of the Daily Mail article.

(empo-tuulwey) An additional observation about proposal physical war rooms #apmp

See my previous post here.

I only have one thing to add to it.

Even the best corkboard in a proposal war room is useless if you don't have any push pins to attach the paper to the corkboard.

(empo-tuulwey) No, the Obama "Democrat app" is not an invasion of privacy

People are jumping up and down over the latest supposed invasion of privacy. Here's how the Inquisitr reports the story:

The new app unveiled by the Obama campaign rubs elbows with Google maps, displaying a map with blue flags on it, each representing the closest registered Democrat households to your standing location....

At first glance it sounds creepy. Stand on a street corner, take out your iPhone...and FIND THE DEMOCRATS. You'd almost think that the Republicans, rather than the Obama campaign, were behind the app.

But I have news for everyone. I have been able to FIND THE DEMOCRATS for years - long before the iPhone was even invented.

And now I will tell you how to find the Democrats...and the Republicans...and the Greens - at least in California. Or at least one way to do it - there are probably others.

First, go to your local precinct - or someone else's local precinct - on Election Day.

Second, find the printed list of registered voters that is (at least in California) publicly posted at the precinct.

Third, read it. It has names and addresses, and is sorted in both name order and street order.

It's that simple.

Don't blame Barack Obama or Tim Cook for this. If you think that this information should be private, then you have to make the information non-public.

(empo-tuulwey) Social Strategy Part 4 - Do You Like Your Customers?

Go to Part 3

I hope you see what I did. First I talked about the word "You." Then I talked about the word "Do." Next, I talked about the word "Like." Finally, I've put them all together and added two more words.

So, do you like your customers?

That is a critical question when working on a social media strategy.

If you like your customers, then you will be more inclined to interact with them and listen to them and engage with them and do all those wonderful things that social media experts tell you that you're supposed to do. More importantly, they'll be believable, and you'll have a community that likes you as much as you like them, and will be loyal to your brand.

If you don't like your customers, then any effort at engagement is doomed to failure, because you won't want to engage with your customers, and you won't want to build a vibrant community.

Does that mean that you shouldn't use social media if you hate your customers? No, it means that you may use social media in a different way - specifically, as a one-way avenue to push stuff out to your customers without expecting, or acknowledging, anything in return.

Um, excuse me - it looks like I just received an urgent tweet from an SEO guru. Let me share this tweet with you.

ur doing it wrong

If you ask any self-appointed SEO expert, he or she will tell you that using Twitter or Facebook to push out information without listening to the customer is very, very bad. You, the expert will state, are locked in twentieth century business models that are inappropriate for the new age of wonderment and magic, when loyal communities form around brands and their Twitter feeds and Facebook pages and Foursquare checkins.

With all due respect, anyone who loudly proclaims "You're doing it wrong" is...well, they're doing it wrong.

While I happen to believe that two-way engagement is better than one-way pushing of data, I am not you. There is no Federal law that mandates that you have to respond to every tweet that mentions your organization, nor will any religious organization disfellowship with someone who turns off comments on their blogs.

If you want to use Twitter as a one-way method of communication, then by all means do so.

If you want to delete every negative Facebook comment after a scandal, then by all means do so.

You need to choose a communication style that is comfortable for you. If you do not like your customers, then it's worthless to pretend that you do.

Hmm...I'm half tempted to close comments on this post. But I won't.

(empo-tuulwey) Social Strategy Part 3 - Like

Go to Part 2, Part 4

While the ultimate goal of a social media strategy should be an increase in revenue, there are various subsidiary goals that contribute to this overall goal. One of those goals is the establishment of an identifiable presence - either via your name, your brand, or your name for someone else (hear that, Rita Moreno of Arte)?

Because social media is (supposed to be) social, it is preferable that social media practitioners engage in a dialogue with their customers. While I'll speak more on that later, I'll note right now that it's hard to create a truly meaningful and deep dialogue on the philosophical merits of a particular toothpaste or word processing application.

But there's an easier way to promote interaction. This interaction method, pioneered by FriendFeed, was adopted by Facebook (several months before Facebook acquired FriendFeed itself) - the like. Back in February 2009, Adam Ostrow wrote:

Facebook seems to get more similar to FriendFeed every day. The latest, the addition of an “I like this” link on News Feed items, is one of the more significant challenges to the lifestreaming service yet, as it essentially duplicates a major component of what makes FriendFeed tick – a simple, one-click display of indicating your liking of a specific item in a stream of activities and a view of all of the other people that have also liked it.

From Facebook, the feature spread all over the place, sometimes under different names (Google calls its similar feature "+1").

In addition to being simple, the like feature is a powerful one to demonstrate (or fake) devotion to your persona or brand or whatever. If I can con a few hundred people into liking this post on Google+ or Facebook or Twitter (via number of retweets) or wherever, then I'll have a pretty powerful set of statistics that will attract attention.

And when likes are combined with a friend list, they become even more powerful. It's one thing to know that a hundred people like a particular dishwashing detergent, but it's another thing altogether to know that my friend Peter, my friend Susie, and 98 other people like that detergent. Peter's and Susie's recommendations are more powerful than the recommendations of hundreds of people that I don't know.

In social media sales, as in all other sales, the goal is to be liked.

(empo-tuulwey) Social Strategy Part 2 - Do

Go to Part 1, Part 3

I've already talked about the word "you." Now I'm going to talk about the word "do." (This will all fit together in the end - trust me.)

Not too long ago, Jonathan Hardesty shared this:

Tips and tricks to being a better writer:

Write.

The end. Don't EVER pay money for that kind of advice.

He's correct.

I have literally written thousands of blog posts over the last nine years - over 3,000 posts in the five Empoprises blogs, and thousands more in other blogs. Is this blog post better than my very first blog post? Perhaps, perhaps not. But I've certainly learned a lot along the way. A lot.

And if someone is going to be involved in social media they...well, they need to be involved in social media. Don't be like the person with the Twitter name seoexpert who has a Klout score that is below 20. Regardless of the criticisms of Klout, a score below 20 certainly compares poorly with a score above 50.

Are you out there in the virtual world?

(empo-tuulwey) Social Strategy Part 1 - You

Go to Part 0, Part 2

When your organization mounts a social media campaign or launches a social media strategy, who should care about it?

It depends.

Think of the terms "important," "very important," and "extremely important." You could say that something is "important" to you, but at the end of the day, that something becomes meaningless. Perhaps a CEO says that "social media is important to our company," and then five minutes later the CEO is on a conference call about something else.

"Very important" things obviously take more of your time; when I was a product manager, I ignored all of the "important" feature requests and tried to see how many "very important" feature requests could be accommodated.

Unless you are absolutely without a life, the term "extremely important" never enters into a discussion of social media, or any business endeavor. One day I was in a meeting at work - I think it was a "very important" one. During the meeting, I received a phone call and immediately left the meeting and left the office. My brother in law had just died. That's "extremely important."

If you are charged with day-to-day responsibilities for a social media campaign or strategy, then it's very important to you. This is true even if your CEO has declared the importance of social media to the company; the CEO's not going to spend 3, or 6, or 10 hours a day working in social media. This is true even if your organization has a seven-step approval process before something can be tweeted; again, the approvers aren't going to invest the time in it.

You are.

(empo-tuulwey) Social Strategy Part 0

Go to Part 1

I recently had occasion to re-read something that I wrote back in September 2008, which said (in part):

[O]ne of [my co-workers] suggested to me, "Hey, while we're at the IAI [conference], why don't you Twitter it?" The idea was that this would be a good way to get some publicity out of our efforts there.

Unfortunately, this would only make sense if anyone were listening. I performed a search of both Twitter and FriendFeed, and I was unable to discover anyone other than myself who even had a passing interest in the IAI. If an IAI tweet lands in the Twitter forest, it won't make a sound.

Several years later, there's still a perception that the tools of social media (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) have magical properties that will automatically increase your sales. Or that you can hire a "social media expert" to work the magic with no effort on your part.

Bull.

Having been around online communications for over thirty years - yes, I was communicating online in the early 1980s - I've acquired a few thoughts on the philosophy behind online communications. Over the next few days, I'm going to share those thoughts here.

Comments, criticisms, and alternative thoughts are welcome.

(empo-tuulwey) Tools aren't easy. Why use them?

The New CRM blog recently posted something about tools. Since I (still) talk about tools on this blog, it defintely interested me.

The post talked about several things - tools needs vs. tool "nice to haves," why CRM should instead be called "Customer Experience," and how cool cell phones can be. But I want to concentrate on one point that was raised - shoes.

Here's a bit about what was said about shoes:

Think about your closet. You have thirty pairs of shoes tossed in haphazardly. It is faster getting them in there then if you were to neatly organize them. What about when you want your black boots? You start digging, pushing shoes out of your way, and you’ve found one! It’s a start. So you go back to digging out the second. By the time you have both boots in your hand (or on your feet) all of your shoes have made their way out of your closet and you have to get them back in. The time you save by tossing them in instead of organizing is lost by digging through sixty shoes and re-shoving them every which way but where they belong.

The moral of the story is: it’s a lot easy to find things when they are put away. It might be harder but in the end, it’s worth it.

And the post concludes by saying:

There is a difference between what is easy and what is going to make your life easy.

A tool is often not easy to use. If you have some type of shoe sorter, you have to organize it and remember to put your shoes in the right place every time - and that's BOTH of your shoes. If you have a hammer, you have to make sure that you don't smash your fingers. If you have Twitter, you have to login every once in a while, and you have to restrain yourself from tweeting every little thing that pops into your head. (Well, you SHOULD restrain yourself.) If you have a Capability Maturity Model-based process, you have to read the process and follow it.

The benefit, as The New CRM notes, occurs AFTER you've invested time in using the tool. That's when you see the payoff.

(empo-tuulwey) A BC/BCE example of rapid communication (Twitter by foot)

The term "sneakernet" has been used to describe the act of carrying a floppy disk from one computer to another in order to transmit data between the two computers.

Nowadays, no one has floppy disks any more.

But the original "sneakernet" predates the existence of floppy disks, or even computers. In a recent post in my tymshft blog, I referenced an episode that appears in 2 Samuel 18:19-33. Even secularists can appreciate the nature of the story.

In summary, Joab was an army commander who defeated Absalom in battle. Joab was under the employ of David. Two messengers were sent to bring David the news of the battle. Because Twitter did not exist at the time, and because floppy disks (or sneakers) did not exist at the time, the messengers ran with the news.

Ordinarily this would be a routine task, except for one complicating factor - Absalom happened to be the son of David, and Absalom was killed in the battle (by Joab and men under his command).

One of the messengers, Ahimaaz, was an Israeli who understood the sensitivity of the news. The other messenger was an unidentified foreigner (a Cushite) who may or may not have understood the implications. Even if you ignore the fact that Absalom was intentionally killed by the army, there remains the possibility that David might be sensitive to news that his son was killed (despite the fact that the son rebelled against him).

Despite the fact that the Cushite messenger left first, Ahimaaz overtook him and reached David before the Cushite did. Ahimaaz immediately announces the victory in the battle, and then is asked by David, "Is it well with the young man Absalom?" Ahimaaz dodged the question:

When Joab sent the king's servant, your servant, I saw a great commotion, but I do not know what it was.

Then the Cushite arrived, also announcing victory in battle. David asked about Absalom, and the Cushite answered:

May the enemies of my lord the king and all who rise up against you for evil be like that young man.

I don't know if the Cushite was simply telling the unvarnished truth, or if he was delivering the message that he thought King David wanted to hear. But regardless of the Cushite's intent, the outcome was painful for all. David mourned the death of his son, and the victorious people "stole into the city that day as people steal in who are ashamed when they flee in battle." Joab ended up rebuking David. The record does not record whether David ever learned that Joab had killed Absalom, but David told his successor Solomon to deal with Joab because of other faults.

QUESTION: Who was the better messenger - the faster messenger who withheld distressing information, or the slower messenger who revealed everything?

(empo-tuulwey) Chris Brogan, "Never Fall In Love With the Medium"

If you've read my previous "empo-tuulwey" posts, then you've probably run across my saying: "A tool is not a way of life."

Chris Brogan puts it another way: Never Fall In Love With the Medium. Excerpt:

We seek to connect with people. We want to reach them for whatever our goal might be. It’s our effort to connect with them in a meaningful way that benefits our mutual needs that should be the goal. It’s never about the delivery mechanism.

Read the rest here.

And while you're at it, read Jesse Stay's My Official (and Obligatory) "Traditional Blogging is Dead" Post - and be sure to read his conclusions.

You might say that these posts were...um...timely. (More later.)

(empo-tuulwey) (empo-tymshft) Tomorrow's advance is the day after tomorrow's trash - On Linotype

Take a moment and think about the most futuristic prototype that you've seen recently.

Now think about the day when that miraculous item is a dusty relic.

On July 3, 2011, we celebrated the 150th anniversary of something that no longer exists:

On this date in 1886, the German clockmaker, Ottmar Mergenthaler demonstrated the first Linotype Type Casting Machine at the New York Tribune in New York City, USA. In front of a gathering of printers, newspaper men and reporters, the machine was first put in to production, casting lines of printable type for the Tribune.

At this demonstration, Mergenthaler sat at the machine and cast the first line of type. It is alleged that Whitelaw Reid, the owner of the Tribune, exclaimed "Ottmar! You've done it! A line of type!" A reporter asked what the new machine was called and Reid replied, "Why yes, we do have a name. We are going to call it the Linotype."

This ability to set type one line at a time revolutionized the information industry, enabling blazingly quick responses to events. This was symbolized by the boy standing on a streetcorner shouting "Extra!" to alert passersby that a new newspaper edition was available. This newspaper would recount something that happened mere hours ago!

Such a revolutionary tool had far-reaching effects.

Due to the speed and low cost of printing, literacy dramatically increased as more and more books and newspapers were published.

But a mere hundred years later:

Although these machines were revolutionary, technology began to supersede the Linotype and they were scrapped and melted-down by the thousands. Today, very few machines are still in existence.

And what of the fathers in the 1890s, or the 1920s, or the 1950s, telling their kids to become Linotype operators? Well, those jobs went away, and the knowledge is going away also.

The highly-skilled operators of the Linotype are in a battle against time. If their skills are not passed along to a new generation of operators, the machine will die completely. There is a small group of former operators that want to save the Linotype from the scrap yard, but some see this as a fruitless endeavor.

H/T Laughing Squid, which discussed the documentary Linotype: The Film.

"Linotype: The Film" Official Trailer from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo.

(empo-tuulwey) Testing tools in an amiable way

Online services are constantly adding new features, and when they are added, there is a subset of new people who like to try them out.

Perhaps you've seen a number of people taking generic Google searches and subsequently asking their Google+ friends about the topic used in their generic Google search. I first heard about the "Ask on Google+" feature via Danny Sullivan. To use the feature, (1) make sure you're logged into Google, and (2) be sure to scroll all the way down to the bottom of your Google search results. For some reason (Aunty Trust?), Google has chosen not to blatantly emphasize this capability.

And of course, I had to try it.

Hi there! I have a question about so why did this ask on google+ tip that danny sullivan talked about appear on the bottom of the page?...

I continued to experiment.

Hi there! I have a question about buying organic remote controls...

And it wasn't too long until this showed up:

Hi there! I have a question about enrage my ocelot...

The phrase, sort of an antagonist to Joker, the Amiable Ocelot, is one that I've been using for some time, in various forms. It may have first been used in this May 12, 2011 tweet:

Well enrage my ocelot! Boards of Canada ain't Canadian. They're like Scots and stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boards_of_Canada

A couple of months later, I was using the phrase on Google+ to see how long it took a Google+ phrase to propagate to Google's main search results. (This was before the tighter integration of Google+ and Google.)

Enrage my ocelot Captain Smirk! This is a test. I want to see how long it takes for a public post on Google+ to show up in Google's realtime search results.

I've used the phrase on occasion since. as this FriendFeed search indicates. Once, in a private FriendFeed comment, I even managed to work the word "vibrant" into the phrase (you'll recall that "vibrant" is one of the favorite words of movie/cigarette marketer Ludo Cremers).

But I hadn't used the phrase lately - that is, until I found myself reading up on Bill Griffith, most famous as the creator of Zippy the Pinhead. Apparently that reading session triggered the "enrage my ocelot" portion of my brain.

Now I can use various tools to find instances of this phrase. In addition to the aforementioned FriendFeed search http://friendfeed.com/search?q=enrage+my+ocelot, I can also search Google+ via https://plus.google.com/s/enrage%20my%20ocelot, and Google's regular search via https://www.google.com/search?&q=enrage+my+ocelot. I can also search Twitter via https://twitter.com/#!/search/enrage%20my%20ocelot, but that search (at least presently) has limited historical data and is therefore pretty much useless.

As time passes, my "standard" version of the phrase evolves. As of this morning, my current version of the phrase reads

Well enrage my amiable ocelot, Captain Smirk! A tool is not a way of life.

If I keep on expanding it, perhaps it will eventually become a NaNoWriMo project.

But then Disney may find the link between the phrase and its 1960s "Joker" character, and would probably sue me for copyright infringement.

(empo-tuulwey) One person's "texture" is another person's "leash"

My daughter introduced me to the blog Craft Fail, which documents some true failures (such as the person who attached chocolate malted milk balls to an Easter wreath with a hot glue gun) as well as failures of other kinds.

Many of us build things and intend them to be used for a particular purpose. But toddlers often ignore the purposes for which the tools were intended. Why? One reason is because the toddlers don't know any better - something that makes perfect sense to an adult mind is outside of the comprehension of a toddler. Another reason is that the toddlers are often right.

Carissa shared the story of a book box that she made for her toddler, intending that the box be used as a receptacle in which his books could be placed. As she created the box, Carissa used her creativity:

To decorate the book box, I wrapped some leftover black yarn around the top to give it some texture.

A minor little cosmetic detail, but at the end of the day this became an important feature to the toddler.

Apparently what I saw as decoration, my son saw as “leash.”

More details at Craft Fail and at Creative Carissa. Check the embedded video on the latter.

(empo-tuulwey) (empo-tymshft) When retro doesn't make sense (Image3D)

Yes, we should have a sense of history. But we should also have a sense of perspective.

My older readers probably remember View-Master. It was a device that looked like a pair of binoculars, with two eyepieces. You would insert a circular disk into the device which contained pictures; you would click on the device to advance the pictures. Because there were two pictures per view, and because there were separate, slightly different pictures for each eye, you would get a 3-D effect.

Well, Rich Dubnow, the lead photographer for View-Master, started a new company in 1997 called Image3D. The company is now allowing people to provide their own pictures. which can be loaded onto a disk and viewed via a View-Master like device. (I don't know if the device is technically a View-Master or not.)

The cost? $24.95 for a viewing device and a disk with seven pictures on it. You can order extra copies for a slightly lower price.

Now this MAY be worth it if the pictures were rendered as 3-D images, but...

Unfortunately, your two-dimensional images will still read as two dimensional through the eyepiece....

Now Image3D can add text or other effects that will appear as 3-D, but what's the point?

Sorry, but this retro idea sounds like a waste of money.

(empo-tuulwey) Verizon Wireless demonstrates why I launched the "empo-tuulwey" series on this blog

My blog platform, Blogger, includes a facility called "labels" which functions similarly to the tags used in other applications. Blogger labels allow me to create series of posts that address a particular subject.

One of the first labels that I began using was a label with the name "empo-tuulwey." (Other posts in the Empoprise-BI business blog in the "empo-tuulwey" category can be found here.) The "empo-tuulwey" category can be summed up in the simple statement

A tool is not a way of life.

I've recently run across an example of the opposing view - the view that a tool IS a way of life. Verizon Wireless is running an ad campaign (example here) which uses the slogan

The Business with the Best Technology Rules

Now I'm not going to discount great technology entirely, but anyone with half a brain realizes that great technology is only a small part of business success. And I can provide an example from...well, from Verizon Wireless. Courtesy an August 10 Reuters story:

Verizon Communications' (VZ.N) new high-speed fiber optic network will never make as much money as its old copper network, an executive said on Wednesday.

[CIO Fran] Shammo cited fierce competition in the TV market as well as high-fees for digital content as reasons why FiOS will not be as profitable as its legacy service.

Another example is the competition between Sony and JVC in the videotape market. Sony was first in the market, with its Betamax technology. JVC followed a year later with its technology, called VHS. Many argue that Betamax was the better technology; thus, if you follow the wisdom of Verizon Wireless, Betamax should have won.

As some of you older folks know, Betamax lost that war. Dave Owen lists a number of reasons why VHS won:

VHS machines were initially much simpler and cheaper to manufacture, which would obviously be an attraction to companies deciding which standard to back....

For consumers, the most immediately obvious difference between the two formats was the recording length. Standard Betamax tapes lasted 60 minutes — not long enough to record a movie. Conversely, the 3-hour VHS tapes were perfect for recording television programmes and movies. Sony did adapt and offer various solutions for longer recording, but it was too late. The issue of recording time is often cited as the most defining factor in the war.

And some (but not all) people claim that there was another differentiator:

There is a claim that adult content was not available on Betamax (possibly because Sony would not allow it) while it was becoming readily available on VHS. Whether or not this was really a factor is a contentious topic.

But Owen did find agreement on another item:

At some point and for some reason the choice of rental movies on VHS became better than Betamax. It is arguable how this situation came to be, but once it happened, there was no turning back. Bitter Betamax owners cringed in their ever-decreasing corner of the video store while VHS owners gloated.

Betamax is often cited as the prime example of why technology doesn't always rule. And it certainly serves to demonstrate that success is usually dependent upon a number of different factors, including chance.

(empo-tuulwey) @stevedenning on Clayton Christensen, Ratios, and Absolutes

When I was taking my MBA classes at Cal State Fullerton, we spent a lot of time analyzing companies and looking at various ratios.

According to a Forbes article by Steve Denning (H/T Bill Gross via a Google+ share), Clayton Christensen believes that our concentration on these ratios is stifling innovation in the United States.

Christensen cites the story of an American company, Dell, who pursued higher profitability ratios and ended up creating a competitor:

Christensen retells the story of how Dell [DELL] progressively lopped off low-value segments of its PC operation to the Taiwan-based firm ASUSTek [LSE: ASKD]—the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and finally the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because in each case its profitability improved: its costs declined and its revenues stayed the same. At the end of the process, however, Dell was little more than a brand, while ASUSTeK can—and does—now offer a cheaper, better computer to Best Buy at lower cost.

Dell isn't the only company who has outsourced huge chunks of operations to Asia. Morris Chang, whose company TSMC is one of the beneficiaries of American outsourcing, thinks that we're crazy:

You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.

Read the rest of the Forbes article here.

In the spirit of what Christensen has said, it's interesting to read the press release which accompanied Dell's latest quarterly statement. Here are some excerpts:

Dell's continued strategic focus on higher-value opportunities, combined with an increased mix of enterprise solutions and services sales, resulted in increased profitability on revenue of $15.4 billion in its third quarter, flat compared with revenue a year ago....

Revenue for Dell's enterprise solutions and services business -- including sales of servers, storage, networking, and services -- increased 8 percent over the same quarter last year to $4.7 billion, an all-time high. As the revenue mix steadily shifts more to the higher-value enterprise portfolio, Dell is delivering on its commitment to improve profitability, with operating income up 12 percent for the quarter and at 7.6 percent of revenue for the fiscal year to date.

So Dell is moving into "higher-value" businesses - something that many people, including myself, would praise. I've been in the software industry for over two decades - sometimes in software-only situations, and sometimes in situations in which fairly unique software is bundled with mostly-commodity hardware. With this mix of hardware and software, software is obviously better from a margin standpoint.

So what has this targeted strategy done for Dell?

Revenue in the quarter was $15.4 billion, flat compared with the same quarter last year.

Remember what Morris Chang said. From Chang's perspective, are this year's dollars better than last year's dollars? And when you look at Dell division by division, you can see some cracks in the story.

Consumer revenue was $2.8 billion, a 6 percent decline. Operating income was $76 million or 2.7 percent of revenue. The migration to higher-value products has proven to be effective, with overall company revenue for the high-end XPS consumer laptop growing 207 percent. XPS revenue now accounts for nearly 20 percent of Dell's total consumer laptop business.

An outstanding success story - and it's probably the reason why I'm not typing this post on a Dell (or Hewlett-Packard) computer. In fact, I happen to be using an Asus netbook.

Of course, we all know that schlock companies like Asus are no competition for a strong American company like Dell.

And of course, thirty years ago we all knew that schlock companies like Dell and Compaq (at the moment, part of Hewlett-Packard) were no competition for a strong American computer manufacturer like IBM.