One difference between the enterprise and consumer markets

My act of commenting on an Oracle AppsLab post reminded me of an unrelated topic that I wanted to address.

As I previously shared, my corporate phone was recently turned off, which meant that I had to go out and buy my own phone. In the process, I realized some huge differences between enterprise purchases and consumer purchases, even for the same item.

Over the last couple of days, I've received several FREE messages from my phone service provider, telling me of AMAZING FEATURES that I can get if I just sign up RIGHT NOW. For only a few dollars a month, I can play all sorts of games, install all sorts of wonderful apps, and surf the Web to my heart's content.

Funny - I didn't get those messages while I was on my corporate phone.

There's a reason. For the last several years, my phones were bought by Motorola (and no, they didn't buy me Nokia phones), and they also paid the service charges. And when a large company like Motorola deals with the wireless service providers, they get to demand certain restrictions. Like "we don't want you bombarding our employees with special offers from our stores, because we're paying the bill and we're not going to pay for that." So I've been in a protective cocoon for the last few years, spared all of the advertising junk that consumer wireless phone users get every day.

And it's not just phones that have different configurations for enterprise vs. consumer customers. If you go to your local computer store and buy a computer, you'll probably get an operating system that is loaded with trial offers and links and other stuff for Microsoft Office, high-tier Norton/Symantec products, and even the AOL subscription offer. When big companies buy computers for their employees, all of that stuff magically disappears from the distributed computer.

The key word, of course, is "big." Small companies have to buy the same computers that consumers get, and very very rich consumers can probably tell HP or Verizon or whoever exactly how they want their computer or phone to be configured (of course, they'll have to pay the price). If you pay Verizon a million dollars, perhaps they'll consent to remove their app store from your phone.

(Perhaps.)

Yes, we're open, but we don't want you to be

I've never authored a political blog, and I'm not currently authoring a religious blog, but this story was so outstanding that I had to find a way to work a business angle into it.

Through a circuitous route that began with a share by Steven Perez (which also led me to a Philip Coupland comment on a Jonah Goldberg book which cited an H.G. Wells statement, I ended up at this account of a 1923 interview of Adolf Hitler by George Sylvester Viereck. And this statement caught my eye:

"Why," [Viereck] asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"

"Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.

"Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.

"We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."

Basically, Hitler was saying that socialists were not socialists - in effect, redefining the common meaning of the term to a meaning that he preferred.

Now I don't want to go down the Godwin's Law route, but basically ANYONE can take a term and cause it to mean something else. And this isn't a Nazi thing, but just a way in which people (including myself) use words in...um...creative ways to put our best foot forward.

And even if you do use particular words with their proper meaning, just the fact that you use the words in question doesn't necessarily mean that the word is in line with your own goals.

Take the phrase "open standards." Obviously people who happen to be on standards committees happen to be huge champions of the term. But at the same time, there are large companies that also champion the term. Take Oracle, for example. Even before Oracle acquired Sun (thus acquiring Java and MySQL), Oracle strongly emphasized that their products conformed to open standards, thus allowing someone to use an Oracle product in concert with a product from another company that conformed to the same standard.

But just because Oracle talks about open standards doesn't necessarily mean that they necessarily want you to use them. Because for every time that Oracle talks about how it can interact with products from other companies, Oracle also makes the point that it has its own products that can do the same thing (or better things) than the competing products. During my years in product management, Oracle representatives, while talking about how Oracle Database could operate with third party application servers, were always trying to get me to adopt the Oracle Application Server...well, at least until they bought WebLogic; then the reps worked on getting me to use WebLogic.

Now another company that has been associated with open standards is Google. Google is not Microsoft, people would commonly say. Yet Google, either via their own development or via Oracle-like acquisitions, is also madly trying to get you to stay within the Google silo and to stay out of the Facebook silo or another silo. Google Buzz is just the latest example of Google's strategy - every hour you spend in Google Buzz is an hour that you're NOT in Facebook or Twitter or whatever.

When I started the Empoprises series of blogs, I purposely chose to use Google technologies for almost everything associated with the blogs. The blogs themselves were hosted on Blogger. Much of the information in the blogs came from items I found in Google Reader. I used Google Analytics to analyze traffic, Google Adsense to provide the ads, FeedBurner for the feeds, and I wrote some super-secret business plan documents in Google Docs. Until my account was permanently disabled, YouTube was part of my strategy. In fact, when I originally started, the major non-Google items in use were Flickr (a Yahoo property) and the independent services Twitter and FriendFeed.

Today, while Google products are still a prominent part of the Empoprises offering, I'm also doing a lot of stuff in the Facebook silo. The originally independent FriendFeed is now part of Facebook, and Facebook itself has become part of my strategy.

There is some interaction between the Google silo, the Facebook silo, and the properties outside of those silos (most notably Twitter). I can tweet something in Twitter, which then sends it to FriendFeed, which then sends it to both Facebook and Google Buzz, plus (if I choose) to Google Reader. Yet there are some critical barriers between the silos:

• As of today, things that go into Google Buzz usually can't get out. Sure, you can manually link to a Google Buzz item, but (unless I'm missing something) you can't have things flow out of Google Buzz in the same way that they can flow into Google Buzz. Thus, if you want to join in my Google Buzz conversation, you have to go to Google Buzz itself. Oh, wait, there's one other way - via Gmail (another Google service).


• In addition to Google Buzz, a lot of conversations get trapped in the individual silos. Facebook conversations stay in Facebook. FriendFeed conversations stay in FriendFeed. This sometimes happens even between services in the same silo. When I post a video link to Facebook and then talk about it, the only thing that reaches FriendFeed is the video link itself.


• In addition, there's the whole matter of WHEN things will transfer from one silo to another. For example, when I post this item, there may be a lag of a few minutes before it goes to FriendFeed. From there, it will go fairly quickly to Twitter and to my main feed in Facebook. However, I also have an Empoprise-BI room in Facebook - and sometimes it will take hours for the post to show up there. In addition, it often takes hours to get over to Google Buzz. The solution, according to the silo vendors, is to do your stuff right in the silo so that there is no lag.

Now I don't blame Google or Facebook for trying to keep us in their individual silos. After all, you make more money if you keep people in your silo than if you send them off to someone else's silo.

But this just illustrates that just because people use a particular word a lot, that doesn't mean that they particularly MEAN it.

Vertical sitefinding - can Captain Kirk help John Gaiser? Can John Gaiser help Captain Kirk?

Inasmuch as I have structured the Empoprises series of blogs by various vertical categories (e.g. the Empoprise-BI blog for business), it stands to reason that I have a vested interest in proclaiming that vertical markets are wonderful and the wave of the future. Therefore, because of my biases, I am going to heartily endorse something that I learned about in Urlesque - namely, the myouterspace.com sci-fi social network.

This network is not for everyone. Case in point - my character name of "Tony Spock Yoda" on Starfleet Commander is a bit of an inside joke. You see, I work with a guy named Tony who absolutely detests both Star Trek and Star Wars. However, he's softened his stance a bit, probably because Tony's job requires him to work closely with Michael Senna (who, in his spare time, entertains sick kids and others with a working R2D2 - see the blog).

Now I don't know if Michael Senna would enjoy myouterspace.com either, because the website prominently features a movie star on its web page - not Harrison Ford, however, but William Shatner. So we're not talking about the Force here, but about planets and captains and things like that.

Oh, and there's a mission of sorts:

Whether you are an actor, writer, animator or gamer MyOuterSpace.com has a home for you. Creative Talent, be sure to register on the planet that hosts your specialty, and you may be selected by a Captain to join his/her Starship Crew.

So I started to check some of the captains that had been selected. I first checked the Captain of Aurora:


Captain of Aurora

Member since
Tuesday, 13 October 2009 15:45
Last online
123 days ago
Profile views
330 views

Hmm...he's dead, Jim.

But then I checked the Captain of Endeavor and got the same message. It appears that the captains are in some kind of suspended animation.

But the site's not completely empty. I found the profile for TrekkieTweet, the self-proclaimed 29th citizen of Zara. TrekkieTweet likes (don't be surprised) William Shatner, but also has an appreciation for Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine, and Elvis Presley.

I also found an unhappy customer, johncgaiser .

I can't keep loged in // Can't change my avatar with a standard jpg // What kind of outfit is this place?

But Gaiser apparently was able to link to his YouTube channel, so that once the captains come out of suspended animation, they can see his work. Here's a sample:



If you poke around, you can also find Gaiser's professional website.

It's an interesting story - Gaiser is obviously looking for ways to promote his work, and he thought that Captain Kirk could help him do it. And perhaps there is a project for Gaiser - TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld links to this video, which Schonfeld says needs help desperately.

Unfortunately, the video stars William Shatner, and is a promotional video for myouterspace.com itself.

(empo-tuulwey) The last part of the corporate transition - I leave the rotary club

If you saw my post from last Wednesday (the first post about my cubicle move), you may have seen this statement at the end:

There's one more part of the transition that needs to take place, however. I'll probably share that with you when it happens. And when I do, Louis Gray will make a brief appearance. Stay tuned.

And I didn't even tell anyone, even Louis Gray, what I was talking about. But now it can be told.

Motorola, my former employer, just turned off service on my first-generation Motorola Q cell phone.

Inasmuch as I haven't worked for Motorola in almost a year, they certainly had the right to do so. As part of the transition when my division was sold, Motorola continued to pay certain cell phone bills until they could be transitioned to the new company. However, for a variety of reasons, I am not eligible for a corporate cell phone at this time, so this phone was scheduled for shutoff. It took a while to actually get it shut off, but that has now happened.

I originally obtained this cell phone in October 2006 - yes, this was truly a first generation Motorola Q cell phone. At the time, it was a very good solution for corporate productivity, allowing one to synchronize with the corporate e-mail system, view documents, and the like.

Just a month after receiving the phone, I made a valuable contribution to the wider cellphone community. At the time I was writing a technical blog (the Ontario Technoblog), and I wrote a post that solved a problem that I was having with the sound on my Motorola Q phone. The problem:

[T]oday I wanted to listen to the sound from my MIDIs and my mp3, but no sound came out.

I tried playing the video that I made at work, but no sound came out from there, either.

Figuring that this might just be a Windows Media Player problem, I tried turning on the sound in Bubble Breaker. No sound there.

As a fourth test, I retested the alarm feature. Got sounds on the alarm, so it sounded more and more like some type of OS issue.

After finding this tip at pdaphonehome.com, I discovered that this was a hardware setting - namely, the earpiece volume setting on the jog dial button, which I had inadvertently turned down to 0. I turned it back up, and everything was fine. So I wrote the blog post about it, and last I checked, I had received about three dozen "thank you" messages for posting this tip. (There may be more, but posts to that blog are now moderated via an old Ontario Emperor e-mail account, and I may have some moderation requests sitting in that account which I haven't read yet.)

So I continued to use my Motorola Q phone, not only for email, but for a limited amount of web access via services such as Slandr, fftogo, and the mobile version of Foursquare. This admittedly worked, but it wasn't all that sexy. Fast-forward to December 2008, when Daniel Pritchett wrote a guest post on Louis Gray's blog to which I responded:

Daniel, you have some good points, but they don't go far enough.

Don't assume that everyone has an iPhone or equivalent. My mobile surfing is done on a first generation Motorola Q running the equivalent of Internet Explorer 4.

If I were on my phone right now, I wouldn't be able to add a Disqus comment to this post. In fact, I couldn't even surf to FriendFeed and leave a comment there - Benjamin Golub had to create a special site called fftogo to allow me to comment in FriendFeed.

Now some of this will be taken care of in the next couple of years as the older phones break down and are replaced, but it's still something to keep in mind.

Gray, who is well-known as an early adopter, eventually joined in on the conversation:

Ontario, given this is an early adopter blog speaking to a tech-savvy audience, we have high expectations for our readers. That you surf with the equivalent of IE 4 is something I don't want you telling anybody else, as it reflects badly on the site and my fellow writers. Promise you won't reveal this again.

Subsequent to this (although I can't find the link), Gray made a reference to my "8 bit rotary phone."

And he was right. Even in late 2008, Motorola had already come out with a new generation of the Q, and Windows Mobile phones in general were becoming more and more passe. Today, even Motorola puts its emphasis on Android rather than Windows Mobile.

Now, under ordinary circumstances, I would have upgraded my corporate phone in October 2008, and Motorola would have provided me with a new phone. However, as it turns out, October 2008 was the very month that Motorola announced its intent to sell our division. Therefore, all things such as phone upgrades were put on hold, awaiting either government approval of the sale, in which case the new owner would deal with my phone request, or government rejection of the sale, in which case it would be Motorola's concern.

So now it's March 2010, and my corporate Motorola Q phone service was just turned off, effectively serving as the end of my Motorola decade. (I guess that means that I have to put my batwings into a cave or something.) But as I advance to a 2010 phone (note: I won't be getting an iPhone, and probably won't even be getting a top-level smartphone at all), I can certainly look upon the 3 1/2 years of service that I got out of this phone. Most of the photographs that have appeared in my blogs over the last 3 1/2 years were taken on this phone, and all of the Foursquare checkins and fftogo posts were posted from this phone. (Not all of the Slandr posts came from this phone; sometimes I'd use Slandr from my laptop simply for its retweet capability.) Add Google Maps and a few other applications, in addition to the Motorola applications that were on the phone, and it was a pretty useful device.

As of now, it's just an alarm clock. But it's good at that.

Skinput - why does a touchscreen need a screen?

Initially this was classified as "weird news," but by the time I followed the link, it had been reclassified as "innovation." Smart move. The link goes to an MSNBC article about a joint effort by Microsoft (Desny Tan, Dan Morris) and Carnegie Mellon University (Chris Harrison) on a new input device.

[A]n innovation called Skinput suggests the true interface of the future might be us.

Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University unveiled Skinput recently, showing how it can turn your own body into a touchscreen interface.

The idea of sensing your body's movements is nothing new in and of itself, but Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon are now using vibrations to do this. Chris Harrison has posted a video to explain.



The chief examples that are shown in the video involve playing Tetris and controlling an iPod. As far as some in the geek universe are concerned, that is the sum total of the functionality that is needed.

However, Kenn (a commenter at warrenellis.com) has already recognized a potential problem:

I image people with lot’s of little bruises all up and down their arms from incessant tapping.

Should you use a traditional press release to announce a social media presence?

Adena Schutzberg shared a Friday, March 5 post that talked about the benefits of using a traditional press release to announce a social media presence. Here's part of Schutzberg's post:

If learning via a press release that the organization behind the GIS software you use at work or school is now on Facebook, it might just encourage you to check out Facebook. While press releases may seem "old fashioned" to some, that area of our website continues to be one of the most read parts of Directions Magazine in 2010.

As it turns out, Glenn Letham (coincidentally, also involved in the GIS community) recently stated the exact opposite view:

Recently I’ve received “news releases” from companies because they have started on Twitter and on facebook… I’m sorry, but come on! The fact that your company is using a social tool like facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or ??? is NOT news. The best way to promote the fact that you’re trying to go social is to actually use social outlets to share this information. Penning a proper press release to announce yet another social bookmark is only adding to the noise and in my mind could back-fire.

So is a traditional press release to announce a social media service news, or is it noise? Let's take a look at the first press release that Schutzberg cited in her post:

ASPRS Is Now on Twitter
February 24, 2010

Company: American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
Industry: Non-profit Organizations
Location: Bethesda, MD, United States of America

ASPRS is now on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ASPRSorg. Members and those interested in the activities of the Society are invited to follow the account to access the latest information with regard to Society news, conferences, publications and much more. Tweets will include reminders of conference deadlines, notices of upcoming ASPRS webinars and new book releases, and headlines of Society press releases.

ASPRS will use #ASPRS10 as the official hashtag for tweets about the ASPRS Annual Meeting in San Diego in late April, and invites everyone to use it as they tweet about their plans.

“Our use of social media is a natural part of our effort to be more connected with our members and others who follow the geospatial information sciences and technologies,” said ASPRS Executive Director James Plasker.

“Our use of social media is a natural part of our effort to be more connected with our members and others who follow the geospatial information sciences and technologies,” said ASPRS Executive Director James Plasker.

For more information on Twitter, visit http://twitter.com/.

Now in my view, this particular press release is solely of interest to the ASPRS membership. I highly doubt that even the members of the competing NAARSP (North American Association for Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry) would be interested in this. This could have been handled via electronic mail directly to the membership, rather than creating a press release. (By the way, don't look for NAARSP; I just made it up; in reality, the acronym belongs to the National Association of Amusement Ride Safety Officials.)

But if the information had been emailed to the members, it certainly provided beneficial information to them - or at least to the Twitter-using segment of the membership.

But what about the Twitter account itself (@asprsorg), and the advertised hashtag (#ASPRS10)? The Twitter account seems to pump out information a few times a month, but it's interesting to note that @ASPRSorg doesn't follow anybody. Among some Twitter users, a failure to follow anyone is seen as a cardinal sin, indicating that you do not wish to communicate with anyone on Twitter, but just to push information out. Now to be fair, ASPRS never promised that they'd interact with anyone, so I can't really fault them for not doing so.

As for the #ASPRS10 hashtag, I did find one tweet (from @ASPRSorg itself) that used the hashtag. However, the conference won't take place for a while, so presumably use of the hashtag will pick up over the next few weeks.

OK, let's look at the second press release that Schutzberg cited:

Clark Labs Joins Facebook
March 04, 2010

Company: Clark Labs
Location: Worcester, MA, United States of America

Clark Labs is pleased to announce that their official Fan Page is now available on Facebook, the popular social networking site. Facebook helps you stay in touch with friends/colleagues, make new contacts and explore/join communities of shared interests.

The Clark Labs’ page will act as a platform for communication with its fans and provide an online community for networking and discussion. The Facebook page will host news updates, project stories, links to articles, pictures and exclusive content. Fans are encouraged to post comments, upload photos, contribute to discussions, and invite others to join.

The Clark Labs’ Facebook page is accessible for viewing to anyone, but if you wish to receive updates, post or interact with other users, you must have a Facebook account. Facebook is free to join. The Clark Labs’ Facebook page address is: www.facebook.com/pages/Clark-Labs/464095610192.

Recent Facebook content includes discussion boards for REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) and Earth Trends Modeler, conference activities and information on current research.

Clark Labs is based within the world-renowned Graduate School of Geography at Clark University and is the developer of the IDRISI Taiga GIS and Image Processing software and the Land Change Modeler software extension to ArcGIS.

Laurie Canavan (lcanavan@clarku.edu)
Phone: 508-793-7526

Now in this particular case, the people who would be interested in thie particular fan page may NOT be reachable via a known email account. Almost by definition, you don't necessarily know who your fans are. So it's essential that you have an avenue to reach your potential fans so that they know of the service you are providing.

Think about it. Somewhere in Gresham, Oregon, there's a couple of dudes who are sitting around saying, "Man, Clark Labs is kewl! How can we communicate with them?"

Now if these dudes happen to subscribe to Directions Magazine or visit the magazine's online site, they will see the press release cited above. This press release is also accessible to the readers of V1 Magazine (see here) and GeoConnexion (see here).

Now I'll admit that I don't know the geo world all that well, but it appears that the press release got to the right people who could take advantage of it. But there's another question - take advantage of what? Can the material in the press release be of benefit to the readers?

If you're a fan of Clark Labs, yes it can. Let's re-examine the second paragraph of the press release:

The Clark Labs’ page will act as a platform for communication with its fans and provide an online community for networking and discussion. The Facebook page will host news updates, project stories, links to articles, pictures and exclusive content. Fans are encouraged to post comments, upload photos, contribute to discussions, and invite others to join.

Hey, that sounds good. Not only can you read information, but you can also discuss the information that's available (via Facebook features such as comments and likes; sound familiar?).

But there's one more test that we need to apply to the press release. Does the social media presence live up to the hype in the press release? The only way to tell is to visit the Facebook page itself. So I went to www.facebook.com/pages/Clark-Labs/464095610192. At the time of my visit, there were 327 fans of the page - and yes, there was interaction:



So let's review the two press releases. The first one (about the ASPRS Twitter account and a conference hashtag) was NOT the best way to reach interested people (an email to the membership would have been better). For those members, however, it did provide beneficial information. While I personally question whether the social media outlet is being used effectively (e.g., @ASPRSorg isn't following anyone), at least the account is pumping out the information that they said they would pump out.

However, the second press release (about the Clark Labs fan page on Facebook) was (in my view) the best way to reach interested people. The press release itself did provide beneficial information. And once you got to the Facebook page, it delivered what it promised, including the ability to interact with all those really cool dudes and dudettes at Clark Labs. Perhaps if I were more involved in geo stuff, I'd be a fan of Clark Labs also - put pictures of the Labs up on my bedroom wall, wait in the rain for hours and hours just to catch a brief glimpse of a Clark Labber - you know, the usual stuff that fans do.

Yes, this post conveniently agrees (and disagrees) with both Adena Schutzberg and Glenn Letham. Sometimes a press release about your social media presence is beneficial, and sometimes it's non-beneficial noise. This just goes to show that there are no hard and fast rules.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to write the press release for the Empoprise-BI Facebook fan page. Maybe the New York Times will carry it.

There's more irony than you can find in a steel mill in the reaction to Al Weisel's death

I have just learned of the death of Al Weisel via a post by Tom Watson. (H/T Sadly, No!.)

Now I never knew Al Weisel, but it turns out that I did. You see, Weisel blogged under the alter ego Jon Swift.

I first heard of Swift several years ago, and this November 2007 post, written back when I was myself blogging under a pseudonym, is somewhat ironic. After noting that Facebook had temporarily removed Jon Swift's Facebook account because Jon Swift wasn't his real name, I proceeded to express my opinion.

Can I let you in on a little secret? "Emperor" is not my real last name, and my parents didn't name me "Ontario" when I was born.

(OK, you can catch your breath now.)

Yet "Ontario Emperor" has been my primary online persona since 1998.

I'm not going to sacrifice nine years of my online identity to meet Facebook's rules - especially if they don't believe in social networking.

Well, less than two years later I did join Facebook, under my real name. So much for my consistency.

But to compound the irony, Tom Watson's post included a link to a Facebook group. But let me back up a bit before talking about the Facebook group.

Al was on the way to his father's funeral in Virginia when he suffered a sudden aortic aneurysm and underwent several surgeries in an attempt to save his life. Sadly, they did not succeed.

The Facebook group appears to have been created before Weisel passed away.

I need to dig back into my old posts and comments - I'm pretty sure that "Swift" and I interacted on at least one occasion.

But let me go to a March 2009 post in Jon Swift's blog, in which he talked about suffering a terrible loss (the death of Chuck Butcher's son). As you scroll down through the March 2009 comments, you find a number of expressions of sadness. The expressions continued for several months, but then all of a sudden this comment appeared:

I don't know how else to tell you all who love this blog. I am Jon Swift's Mom and I guess I'm going to OUT him. He was Al Weisel, my beloved son. Al was on his way to his father's funeral in VA when he suffered 2 aortic aneurysms, a leaky aortic valve and an aortic artery dissection from his heart to his pelvis. He had 3 major surgeries within 24 hours and sometime during those surgeries also suffered a severe stroke. We, his 2 sisters, his brother, his partner and his best friend since he was 9 years old were with him as he took his last breath. We have all lost a shining start who warmed our hearts, tormented us and made us laugh as he giggled at our pulling something over on us. He passed away on February 27, 2010. My beloved child will live on in so many hearts. I miss him more than I can say. If you are on Facebook, go to organizations and join "Friends of Al Weisel, Unite!" It will give you just a taste of how special he was. Farewell, Jon (Al)

Just one more thing (3)...

As you can imagine, moving from one cubicle to another when you've been in the same cubicle for nearly a decade can be an involved undertaking. Granted that it wasn't a long-distance move (I just moved across the hall), but it still provided me with an opportunity to get rid of some stuff.

My cousin and I were discussing this on Facebook, and she briefly noted that "cubicle purging is therapeutic." I'm a bit of a packrat, but I think that I've gotten less packratty over the years as I've moved to a more electronic lifestyle. Now some of the clutter can be found online rather than in the physical world. (No comments on my writing style.)

But I still managed to acquire a lot of stuff over the years, so I've been working on reducing it over the last couple of weeks. Some stuff I threw away, some I gave to our in-house IT organization (for example, they're now the proud owners of an external floppy disk drive with a parallel cable), and some were taken care of via other means. But there were still six items that were left over. As I left the marketing room, I sent an e-mail to the remaining cubicle-dwellers of that room. Here's part of that message:

ACT NOW! DON'T DELAY! ONLY AVAILABLE FOR A LIMITED TIME!

After several years in a cubicle in the marketing room, I have relocated to the Proposals area. However, my departure can benefit YOU....

[Someone] is unable to offer the items that I am available to offer to you right now, as the result of the cubicle move.

So, WHILE SUPPLIES LAST, feel free to go to my old cubicle and obtain these VALUABLE ITEMS:

(1) One (1) Columbo jacket, as worn at the 2008 Motorola Biometrics Users' Conference. (Sorry, the cigar is no longer available.)

At this part of the message, I inserted the picture that I previously shared in this blog post. (Look at that picture carefully, by the way. I'll explain why in a future post.)

Back to excerpts from my email:

(2) One (1) Escape poster. This poster was originally owned by [a retired employee], who escaped. It was then passed to [another retired employee], who escaped. If you'd like to save this for your retirement, feel free.

I gave away a couple of other Motorola-related items, then got to the final item:

(6) One (1) Compaq NonStop mug. Compaq used to be a computer company who offered "NonStop" equipment, originally based on the Tandem high-availability computer product line....

And if you think those items are old, I had previously gotten rid of items from the last millennium - namely, 15-year old computer software manuals.

When I was talking with my cousin, she noted that she moves cubicles much more frequently than once per decade. Perhaps she's on the right track.

(empo-tymshft) Old-school social networking via cubigeographical proximity

I've previously written about my move from the product management organization of my employer to the proposals organization. At the time, I noted that the transition from product management to proposals took a few weeks, because of some unfinished business (for example, Oracle OpenWorld 2009) that I had to complete.

In reality, the transition didn't complete at 10:00 pm on Thursday, October 22, 2009. In fact, the transition is still in progress. I've had to learn new things and renew old acquaintances.

But this morning, I completed an important part of the transition.

I moved from a cubicle in one room to a cubicle in another room.

Now in my October 22 post, I confined myself to speaking about the effects of the reorganization on me. I still don't want to speak about the reorganization in detail, but suffice it to say that the proposals group ended up getting new members from three other groups in the organization (product management being one of them). So we were scattered in four different locations in the building. I was just across the hall from proposals, but one person was on the other side of the building, and another person was on the other side of the building AND on another floor.

Now I know that this is the age of social media, in which we are "friends" with people from all over the world. But there's something to be said for locational proximity.

At the moment there's a lot of buzz (sorry, couldn't think of a better term) about software that allows you to share your location with others, and detect nearby businesses and people that might be of interest to you. But while that can be valuable, there's nothing like enjoying geographical proximity with a group of people on a long-term basis, day-in and day-out. Of course, this could also turn out to be a very bad thing, but fortunately for me, I like my co-workers.

So now I am in the same room with the other people on the proposals team, which should help us when we happen to be working together on proposals, and will also help us to function better as a group.

So that part of the transition is over.

There's one more part of the transition that needs to take place, however. I'll probably share that with you when it happens. And when I do, Louis Gray will make a brief appearance. Stay tuned.

[12:35 - MORE ON THE MECHANICS OF A CUBICLE MOVE.]

A little on Locamoda

When I first heard the story about the Foursquare display at Las Vegas' Miracle Mile shops, my first inclination was to scale the display down to the level of a smaller venue.

Presumably, with a little bit of programming, this concept could be scaled down to smaller levels. Imagine if there were a pre-compiled application that could integrated with a small display at, for example, a donut shop that showed the same information (tips and mayors).

If Foursquare doesn't want to provide the app, I'm sure that Gowalla or Yelp would be more than happy to provide apps for their services. Since even small locations are setting up electronic displays these days, it seems like a natural.

Well, it turns out that Locamoda (who provided the Las Vegas display) does not solely work on the huge and gaudy level, as gstellato noted.

LocaModa already provides this. Check out our App Store. Locamoda.com/apps

So I went to Locamoda's app store and found a number of applications.



Let's start with their FourSquare app.

Add Check-ins to your Wiffiti screen and encourage patrons to come to your venue and be crowned the Mayor. The FourSquare integration will add your venue to the map and allow other Foursquare users to discover your venue.

And they have a number of other applications that can put content on a screen. The Locamode project is the result of several years of work:

In London, England, 2001, Stephen Randall, was working at Symbian, the global mobile operating system company he helped found. Stephen struggled with one question in those days: Why was the mobile phone having such a major impact on life in Europe and Asia but not in the US, where mobile technology was 4-5 years behind the rest of the world? In Boston, MA, at exactly the same time, Steve An was pondering the same question.

“The Two Steves,” as they became known, met in 2002 through a Symbian-led joint venture. They were excited to discover that they had developed a similar and, at the time, pioneering vision – that the mobile phone will connect to the web and become a universal remote control to help broadcast life. And all screens (TV, Web, Phone, and what would later be dubbed Digital Out of Home) would be connected. They named this vision “The Web Outside”.

They built a prototype that connected websites, mobile phones and venue screens. They placed their first screen in the renowned Someday Café in Somerville. As soon as that screen went up, customers were eager to interact using it to promote local politics, chat and send messages.

The venues liked the fact that their customers were engaged, customers started to write about that experience, and advertisers asked if they could sponsor the experience. Today, LocaModa enables real-time user generated content from all over the world, and brands can sponsor and be part of those experiences as well.

For more information, check the Twitter account @TheWebOutside or LocaModa's Facebook page. Or check out this sample page about Afghanistan:



Last night I was about to create a vanity screen of my own, but I literally ran into a fail whale. As Devo said, some things never change.

(empo-tymshft) (empo-tuulwey) Loren Hodson? Steven Feldman? You've got similarities.

When I read this Steven Hodson post about this Loren Feldman post, I was struck by some similarities between the two. Let's compare:

• First, they both are married men who love their wives dearly. In the end, that matters more to both of them than the other points.


• Second, neither of them could make it as a Care Bear or as a diplomat. Both have been known to speak their mind, rather than playing nice.


• Third, both are well-known within sectors of the social media community. Feldman, of course, is known for 1938media. Hodson, probably best known as a writer for the Inquisitr, also has his own empire of blogs, including Shooting at Bubbles and WinExtra.


• Fourth, Feldman and Hodson do not solely rely on being social media mavens. Feldman is expert in video production, and Hodson is expert in the Windows operating system and other computer-related areas.

And it should also be noted that the fourth point is more important than the third point. And that is key.

Both Feldman and Hodson reacted to the Steve Rubel post "AP is Visionary: They See a 'Siteless Web'." Now I have my own take on the truth of Rubel's post, but let me share what Hodson and Feldman said first.

For Hodson's take, let me cut to the chase:

So let me get this straight. The future of the web, and all its incredible richness, is going to be places like Facebook, Twitter, Buzz and Foursquare.

If this is what the future of the web is going to be like then we will lose more than we gain.

Feldman also talked the loss of a company's brand identity in his video, "Social Media Will Kill Your Brand":



Now, I personally see no harm in having a presence on Facebook. (For the record, this blog has a Facebook presence, although I'm under-utilizing it.) In some ways, Facebook is the AOL of the 21st century. For some people, Facebook is THE destination, just like AOL was back in the day when every company had its own AOL keyword. If people are going to Facebook, and you want to attract those people, then it would certainly help to have a presence on Facebook.

But there's a world of difference between making a Facebook presence part of your overall strategy, and making a Facebook presence your ENTIRE strategy. Again, AOL is instructive. In his video, Feldman asked what would happen if Facebook were to disappear. In a sense, that's what happened with AOL. Not that AOL became a "ghost town," but certainly the online landscape changed enough that the importance of having an AOL keyword decreased dramatically over the years.

Now I'm probably not the best person to talk about effective brand creation - while I've certainly marketed the "Empoprises" brand to some extent, I haven't locked in the domain name. And we all know what can happen when you don't protect domain names.

But Hodson and especially Feldman have created excellent brand identity, and while they appear on other forums (this particular 1938media video was hosted on YouTube), they're both smart enough to not only maintain their brand identity, but to drive traffic back to their own sites.

Siteless? No.

But will Steven Hodson start playing with puppets?

Guess which airport I'm at!

OK, it could be ANY airport...

BNSF Tacoma

605 Puyallup Avenue, Tacoma. This continues to be a transportation hub, with Greyhound, light rail, and buses just steps away.

(empo-tuulwey) Hey #friendfeed50 - @parislemon was (mostly) right about FriendFeed

Sometimes TechCrunch can't win.

Because TechCrunch is sometimes perceived to be a secret power player aligned with the Bohemian Club and the Illuminati, it sometimes seems that EVERYTHING that TechCrunch writes is suspect.

On Thursday, MG Siegler of TechCrunch wrote a post entitled FriendFeed Goes Down Hard. Both Remaining Users Pissed. The post opened as follows:

FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time, but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore. Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users).

Before I explore the reaction to Siegler's post, let me quote one other excerpt:

It’s sad, really. FriendFeed was easily one of my favorite services (so much so that I’m still waiting for another service to replace it). But since the acquisition by Facebook, it has been a ghost town. And now, with its 500 Internal Server Error, it’s really a ghost town. The impressive team behind FriendFeed (most are still with Facebook now) have indicated they wouldn’t let the service wither, but that seems to be exactly what is happening.

The reaction to the post? This must be some machination of TechCrunch! @mitchelmckenna:

Techcrunch decides to kick #Friendfeed while it's down: http://tcrn.ch/dnUoNW

@worldofhiglet:

50 people notice Friendfeed down? Techcrunch miss the mark again #37moreFriendfeedsearchesontwittersinceIstartedthistweet

@jworthington:

Once again @techcrunch and @parisLemon show pure class about FriendFeed being down. Way to be the Perez Hilton of tech journalism... again

And @thevixy also reacted, but she subsequently deleted her tweet about the matter. And even if she didn't, this is a family blog. Let's just say that she doesn't hold TechCrunch in the highest regard.

Now I have to admit that I was not part of the #friendfeed50, but I have a good excuse. I'm on a business trip at the moment, and to catch my 6:30 am flight Thursday morning, I had to wake up at 3:30 am. On Thursday evening I was waiting for NBC's tape-delayed coverage of Laura Lepisto's free skate program, but I fell asleep some time after NBC showed a featurette about logging. So I slept through the first couple of hours of the FriendFeed outage, and Siegler had already written the notorious p.o.s.t. by the time I woke up.

Yet, with all due respect to Johnny, Caroline, et al...Siegler was mostly right about the reaction to FriendFeed's outage.

While FriendFeed undoubtedly has a passionate following - and I number myself among that following - the fact is that FriendFeed's userbase is just a speck compared to the user base of, say, Facebook. In my personal case, I wouldn't describe my stream as a "ghost town," since my stream happens to be populated by people like Johnny Worthington who have stuck with the service. However, FriendFeed usage is down significantly from August 2009.



Now compare FriendFeed's usage to that of myspace.com, another service that everyone says is dead:



Yes, that's right - MySpace has ONE HUNDRED TIMES as many users as FriendFeed.

So if everyone agrees that FriendFeed is a vibrant and meaningful community, then it only follows that MySpace's community must be the greatest thing since Kim Yu-Na.

Yet I have a sneaking suspicion that some people don't see if that way. MG Siegler's post on Friendfeed, last I checked, had about 30 responses, many negative. Does that mean that if MG Siegler were to write a so-called "nasty" post about MySpace, the post would wind up with 3,000 responses, many negative?

Somehow I don't think so.

In the end, however, the utility of a service does not depend upon the number of people using the service, but the benefits that you receive from it. On Wednesday afternoon, one of my Facebook friends (one who is familiar with FriendFeed) made that very point, which prompted me to respond:

And I do not leave services simply because they are bought by a larger company.

However, my Facebook friend replied that if the smaller service loses its effectiveness because of the acquisition, then perhaps it is time to leave.

In my view, two outages in the last few days does not mean that FriendFeed is dead - if that were the criterion, then Twitter would have died years ago - and Bret Taylor's prompt responses in both instances indicate that Facebook does continue to see FriendFeed as a viable service. Just in case Twitter goes down (again), allow me to reproduce Bret's tweets about both outages. Here's the first:

Network failure in FriendFeed data center. We are working on it, should be back up soon.

9:23 AM Feb 20th via web
Retweeted by 44 people

Only 44 people used Twitter's so-called retweet to spread the word? Where were the other six members of the #friendfeed50 that day?

And here's the most recent:

FriendFeed majorly down due to major power outage for multiple racks. Embarassing; we apologize, and we are working on it.

about 3 hours ago via web \
Retweeted by 45 people

More #nbcfail - How connected users avoid NBC Olympic features and advertisers

You may already know how I feel about NBC's Olympic coverage, but allow me to recap.

For viewers in the Pacific time zone, NBC is tape-delaying its coverage of marquee Olympic events so that the events are televised in prime time. Therefore, I will not see any live coverage of the ladies figure skating events.

And because I do not rely on NBC for all of my Olympic coverage, I won't see a lot of tape-delayed coverage either.

In the real world, the ladies figure skating short program began at 4:30 pm Pacific time on Tuesday, February 23. NBC's Los Angeles affiliate did not begin its Olympic coverage until 3 1/2 hours later, at 8:00 pm. And based upon past performance, I knew that NBC was not going to show all thirty competitors in the short program. If I solely relied on NBC, I could watch four hours of Olympic coverage and not see anything of interest.

My primary interest was to see Laura Lepisto's performance, should NBC decide to televise it. Unfortunately for me, Laura Lepisto is not an American, so it was doubtful whether NBC would show it. But I could do some research.

The first thing I needed to find out was when Lepisto would be skating. Thanks to @Sakura0302, I was able to find out.

Group 5 to start at 19:47:30 21 LEPISTO Laura - 22 19:54:00 ASADA Mao - 23 20:00:30 KIM Yu-Na - 24 20:07:00 SUZUKI Akiko - 25 LEONOVA A

So if NBC were to show Lepisto, it would not appear on my Los Angeles TV set until after 10:45 pm.

By 8:00 pm, Lepisto had already skated, I already knew the result (61.36), and now the only question was whether NBC would show her performance. Obviously there were a ton of tweets about Lepisto at the time, but I was searching for tweets (from people on the East Coast) that specifically indicated that Lepisto was televised. And I found two tweets that specifically mentioned NBC analyst Scott Hamilton. One was from @JohannaAP25:

Scott Hamilton thanks for pointing out Laura Lepisto's tucked chin, now that's all I can look at. #OYlmpics

The other was from @shadesoftrue:

I really like Lepisto. She did well. Way to tear her down, Scott.

So, armed with this information, as well as all of the other results of the event, what did I do? I waited to turn the TV on until 10:45 pm, then proceeded to watch Laura Lepisto's routine. Personally, I didn't think that Hamilton was super-critical; critical, yes, but remember who came next. And if you didn't know who came next, right when Lepisto's routine finished, NBC interjected its Asada-Kim featurette, even before Lepisto's scores were televised. I kept the TV on to watch Mao Asada and Kim Yu-Na's performances, then turned the TV off. No offense to Joannie Rochette, but it was getting late.

So all of those companies that paid good money to NBC so that I'd see their ads? I didn't see any of them. Sorry, advertisers, whoever you are, but when you already know the results, why stay around for the ads?

Applying location technology to social issues

In the past, this blog has discussed one aspect of location-based technologies - namely, the ability for businesses to offer services to people who are in close geographical proximity to them. (One example often cited is Foursquare's ability to show special offers for participating locations if you happen to be close to those locations.)

But location - specifically, the ability to assign anything and everything in sight a geographical coordinate - can be used for more than food discount offers, as Physorg notes. (H/T All Points Blog.)

Physorg published a post that describes how professors William Alex Pridemore Tony Grubesic analyzed two layers of data - the locations of licensed alcohol outlets in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the locations of crimes in the same city - and detected a correlation between the two.

"A higher density of alcohol sales outlets in an area means closer proximity and easier availability to an intoxicating substance for residents," Pridemore said. "Perhaps just as importantly, alcohol outlets provide a greater number of potentially deviant places. Convenience stores licensed to sell alcohol may be especially troublesome in this regard, as they often serve not only as sources of alcohol but also as local gathering places with little formal social control."

They used the data to extrapolate some predictions:

Using different suites of spatial regression models, the researchers found that adding one off-premise alcohol sales site per square mile would create 2.3 more simple assaults and 0.6 more aggravated assaults per square mile. Increases in violence associated with restaurants and bars were smaller but still statistically significant, with 1.15 more simple assaults created when adding one restaurant per square mile, and 1.35 more simple assaults per square mile by adding one bar.

But does the data justify the conclusion?

"We could expect a reduction of about one-quarter in simple assaults and nearly one-third in aggravated assaults in our sample of Cincinnati block groups were alcohol outlets removed entirely," Grubesic noted. "These represent substantial reductions and clearly reveal the impact of alcohol outlet density on assault density in our sample."...

"Alcohol outlet density, on the other hand, is much more amenable to policy changes," Grubesic pointed out. "Unlike other negative neighborhood characteristics that often seem intractable, regulating the density of outlets, and to some extent their management, can be readily addressed with a mixture of policies by liquor licensing boards, the police and government agencies that regulate land use."

Perhaps, but if someone concludes from the data that the best policy change would be to outlaw alcohol in Cincinnati entirely, the economic laws of supply and demand need to be considered. Would such an action result in an increase in traffic-related deaths on the roads connecting Cincinnati with Kentucky? Would such a...um...prohibition in alcohol sales result in alternative unregulated alcohol suppliers entering the Cincinnati market, either as a unified syndicate or as competing entities (or gangs) of liquor providers.

That's the danger with analysis - people may analyze one set of data points and reach a conclusion, but ignore how that conclusion could itself affect the data in which they are interested.

Although it would be interesting to compare crime statistics before and after the beginning of Prohibition, and before and after the end of Prohibition, to see if the popular perception of Prohibition as a field day for illegal crime is in fact true. A discussion of crime and Prohibition can be found here.

Ari-Pekka Nurmenkari, the Olympic story that NBC won't cover

By Sunday morning, I had finally had it.

If you've been reading my writings for the last several years, you know that I am not a fan of the way in which NBC covers the Olympics. By the time the main NBC network is done with its Olympic coverage, the resulting broadcast bears little relation to the Olympics itself. This is especially compounded this year, when people in southern California, which is in the same time zone as Vancouver, have to wait three hours to see any of the major Olympic events.

This year, I had already started the FriendFeed room nbcsucks, which tracks Twitter coverage of NBC's version of the Olympics. I did this after joining the Facebook group NBC Olympics Coverage Sucks.

But to be fair, I'm looking at the other side of things. One of the feeds in the nbcsucks FriendFeed room is NBC's own Twitter feed, and I have also joined NBC's official Facebook group for Olympics coverage.

Which is where I saw this item:

Here's a recap of all of yesterday's events at the Vancouver Games. http://www.nbcolympics.com/crystal-clear-recaps/index.html

This West Coaster ended up venting a wee bit:

Actually, if I wanted to see a recap, I would have seen the recap that NBC showed on TV last night of all of the events that occurred 3+ hours previously. The one event that truly interests me is women's figure skating, but NBC will not be showing that event live, and frankly I'm not sure how many of the figure skaters will be shown by NBC, even on three hour tape delay.

Later in the thread, in response to several of us, Nick Stoops posted the following:

There are LIVE & FULL REPLAYS available @
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/index.html
NBC should do more self promotion about this capability during the countless commercial breaks in a hour; what's 10-20 more seconds gonna harm?

As I noted later in the thread, here's the problem:

Danielle/Nick, regarding NBC's replay capability - great idea in concept, not fully achieved in practice. Let's say, for example, that I want to watch the male Finnish figure skater. So I go to http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/live-full-replays.html and choose "Figure Skating" as my sport. I then scan the available videos to find the men's figure ... See Moreskating short program. Unfortunately, as of 12:10 pm PST Sunday February 21, there are NO event replays for ANY of the figure skating events - not even NBC's coverage of the events, much less the "full-event replays" that are being discussed. Perhaps it's not NBC's fault, but it's disappointing.

So, because NBC probably isn't going to bother to tell you the story of Ari-Pekka Nurmenkari, I will do it myself.

For the record, Finland has sent three figure skaters to the Olympics. I have mentioned both Kiira Korpi and Laura Lepisto several times in my empire of blogs. Both skaters benefit from the highly-ranked competition between female Finnish figure skaters, a competition that started several years ago when Susanna Poykio was the first Finnish female figure skater to medal in a European event.

I'm not sure how many top-ranked Finnish figure skaters are on the men's side, but the fact that Finland could only send one male figure skater to Vancouver indicates that the competition isn't as fierce. Ari-Pekka Nurmenkari was the designated competitor for the men's competition. His ISU biography indicates that he is has been the Finnish national champion several times, and that he has placed as high as 14th in the European championships - something that does not sound impressive until you realize that the 14th place European figure skater is better than nearly all of the male figure skaters in Europe. So perhaps he wasn't going to get the gold in Vancouver, but he was no slouch.

While Bob Costas has probably never heard of the guy, the New York Times has, and the Times actually live-blogged the men's short program. Figure skating is sort of like golf - they start with a bunch of competitors, but only some of them make the cut for the final championship round. So Nurmenkari's first task was to make the cut by performing well enough in the short program to advance to the long program. Here's what the Times had to say:

8:17 p.m. |Finnish Hope

Ari-Pekka Nurmenkari of Finland is up. He was 22nd at the recent European Championships and has won his won national championship every year but one since he started competing in 2003. He is married to a former professional tennis player, Annina Ahti and has a son, Axel, who was born last August. Nurmenkari fell on his opening triple axel and has had a few more mistakes, but the crowd is clapping to the music to support him.

One more skater left until Plushenko graces the crowd with his presence. – Juliet Macur

Needless to say, Canada wasn't going to let the New York Times hog the whole story. Macleans also live-blogged the event:

8:15 p.m.
Finland’s Ari-Pekka Nurmenkari just totally bailed. And then fumbled his second jump…a salchow (yeah, that’s right, I just wanted to use the word).

8:17 p.m.
(Disclaimer: That jump might not have actually been a salchow.)

Nurmenkari got a little more coverage in the Finnish press. Here's a sample:

Vancouver. Ari-Pekka Nurmenkari haparoi pahasti olympialaisten taitoluistelun miesten lyhytohjelmassa. Hän kaatui heti ensimmäisen hyppynsä, kolmoisakselin, ja horjahti kahdessa myöhemmässäkin hypyssä.

"Kauden surkein", Nurmenkari kuvaili suoritustaan, josta irtosi 44,62 pistettä.

"Onhan se v-käyrä aika suuri tällä hetkellä."

Now I'll admit that Google Translate's capabilities have vastly improved since I was reading Kiira Korpi articles four years ago, but you don't need Google Translate to know that 44.62 is not a good number for the short program, as a later paragraph in the article makes clear:

Odotetun kovatasoinen lyhytohjelma oli äärimmäisen tasainen. Sen voitti Venäjän Jevgeni Pljuštšenko pisteillä 90,85. Aivan kannassa ovat Yhdysvaltojen Evan Lysacek 90,30 pisteellä ja Japanin Daisuke Takahashi pisteillä 90,25.

For clarification, the skater who scored 90.85 is known in the English-speaking world as Evgeni Plushenko. Plushenko and Lysacek advanced to the medal round. Nurmenkari didn't. vancouver2010.com listed the final standings for the short program; Nurmenkari's 44.62 placed him 30th in the list of 30 competitors; only the top 24 advanced.

But does that make Ari-Pekka Nurmenkari a failure? Not at all. For one, he was one of only thirty men in the world who were even entitled to compete in the Olympics, so by definition he is at the highest echelon of his sport. In addition, did you note the description in the Times live-blog of the event? While he made some mistakes early on, the crowd was clapping along with his performance and apparently enjoyed the opportunity to see him perform.

So how did NBC cover Nurmenkari? He has a page on the NBC website, but a statement at the beginning of his bio shows how much NBC invested in reporting on this athlete:

The biographical information was provided by the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games.

NBC spent a little more time on some of the other athlete pages, such as the page for figure skater Jeremy Abbott, who happens to be an American.

So now we move on to women's figure skating, and we in the Pacific time zone will be wonderfully blessed, as I noted before. According to vancouver2010.com, the ladies short program begins at 4:30 pm Vancouver (and Los Angeles) time on Tuesday, February 23. As with the men, there will be 30 competitors. NBC's Los Angeles coverage begins 3 1/2 hours later, at 8:00 pm, and they probably will not show 30 competitors.

Another story about ignorant computers - and now they're a security risk

You'll recall that I previously wrote two posts after the ReadWriteWeb/Facebook "login" fiasco. Here's part of what I said in the second post:

Computers are supposed to perform routine tasks for us so that we can get to the important stuff, like playing Starfleet Commander. But...computers are NOT performing these routine tasks for us.

Why not? Because they're ignorant. You can't talk to a computer in the same way that you can talk to a human being.

But I'm not the only one thinking of such things. My posts were inspired by an Oracle AppsLab post by Jake Kuramoto, and now Dave Winer has weighed in on the topic. He wasn't speaking about logging in to Facebook, but about computer usability in general.

Imagine you knew nothing about computers and somehone handed you a Macintosh and told you to figure it out.

How long would it take you to figure out what each of the applications did, or even what an application is, and how they differ and how they're similar.

Winer continues to flesh out his example, pointing out some of the bewildering computer behaviors that a new user would encounter. And this is on a Macintosh, a computer well-known for its relative ease of use. Put the new user on my Windows computer and tell him/her that you have to stop the computer by clicking the Start button - even if the new user could figure out what I meant when I talked about "clicking," the sheer lack of logic required to stop by starting would be baffling.

And, as commenter jeremyw noted, the incomphensibility of computers can have serious consequences:

Computer jargon, a “tick box” culture and unimaginative advertising are discouraging Internet users from learning how to protect themselves online.

Faced with such gobbledegook, many of the world’s nearly 2 billion Internet users conclude that security is for “experts“ and fail to take responsibility for the security of their own patch of cyberspace -- a potentially costly mistake.

Part of the problem comes from a natural human tendency, not limited to the computer technology realm, to gravitate toward using our own private, incomprehensible language. Michael Chertoff (yeah, him):

“If you don’t demystify security, people become anxious about it and don’t want to do it,” former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Reuters on the sidelines of the EastWest Institute security meeting in Brussels.

“There are some people in the profession who to some degree enjoy the mystification of what they do, that it’s not penetrable. It’s almost a sense of superiority,” he said.

Doctors and lawyers used to enjoy “a sense of mystified special knowledge,” Chertoff said. “But ... once you empower people to understand what’s going on, doctors do a better job. So with cybersecurity the task is to make the architecture more user-friendly -- and to teach people better.”

And again, as I have argued before, computers are supposed to make our lives easier. Why don't they?

(empo-tymshft) Guilty by association (APMP)

I saw the tweet on Friday afternoon:

I just ousted @empoprises as the mayor of Hilton Hotel on @foursquare!

That led me to look back at some blog posts that I wrote last October, back when I became the mayor of the Hilton Hotel in Costa Mesa. And, naturally, I ended up looking at my Thursday 10:00 pm post, (empo-tymshft) On post-acquisition reorganizations. This post started off in a generic way, but eventually became personal, as I talked about my own job change that resulted from a post-acquisition reorganization.

To catch most of you up, I was a proposal writer for several years before I became a product manager. After my division was acquired, combined with another division, and reorganized, I ended up back in proposals after a nearly ten-year absence.

Two items merit comment at this time. First, you may remember that I said the following back in October:

And frankly, this is a VERY interesting time to be in proposals again...

This is still true, but not for the reasons that I was thinking of back in October. Without giving away any corporate secrets, let's just say that my presence in the proposals department has given me a number of opportunities that I wouldn't have had otherwise.

And I've also resurrected an old association. Back in 1999, at the encouragement of my then-Proposal Manager, I joined the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP), and attended its annual conference down in San Diego. By the next year, however, when I had become a product manager, I let my APMP membership lapse. So now that I was back in proposals, I sent an e-mail to the APMP with the following subject line:

Can you reinstate an APMP membership from the last millennium?

Guess what? They could. They had retained all of my membership information from ten years ago, and I just had to update a few things (and, of course, pay the membership fee), but I am now again a member of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals.

Here's what they say about themselves - an executive summary, if you will:

About APMP
Our mission is to advance the arts, sciences, and technology of new business acquisition and to promote the professionalism of those engaged in those pursuits.

Through association and education, we provide our members access to tools, methods, processes, innovations, talent and specialized expertise that can directly improve the ability to acquire new business and to sustain growth and competitiveness in a dynamic and demanding marketplace.

Our membership is growing rapidly into an internationally recognized association with membership and corporate sponsors from a diverse range of disciplines and industries. Our members are committed to the pursuit of proposal excellence. Our journey has been one of promoting the professionalism of our members and shaping the future of the proposal profession in the United States and throughout the world.

Now this doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to Orlando - I probably won't - but it's good to be back in the APMP.

But Gordon W., your mayorship at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort is safe - at least from me.

More on advertisers - there are too few commercials

After I wrote the previous post, I was sitting in a Starbucks in Claremont and thinking about the post that I had written, and I realized another problem with advertising.

There are too few commercials.

Allow me to explain.

Let's say that you're watching a popular syndicated show such as M*A*S*H on TV. Popular shows like this are shown on TV every day, on multiple channels. In fact, for a show such as M*A*S*H, it is quite possible that you can see the same episode several times in the same year. No matter how much you like a particular episode of M*A*S*H, you get tired of it after a while...even if Klinger happens to be wearing a very pretty dress in the episode.

But the frequency with which you see a popular syndicated show is nothing compared to the frequency with which you see or hear a particular commercial. If you spend any amount of time watching TV or listening to the radio, you may hear the same commercial several times in the same DAY. And you'll hear that same commercial, over and over, for weeks.

The problem is that advertisers are convinced that the only way to get their message across is to hammer the same message into your brain over and over and over and over again. Unfortunately, there are probably a lot of people like me who will switch the station if a commercial comes on that I've already heard too many times. The fatigue factor not only causes me to stop listening to the message, but actually causes me to dislike the product being advertised.

Frankly, I wish that advertisers would create a hundred commercials at the same time, instead of the few commercials - or the single commercial - that they create for an ad campaign. They don't have to be radically different - maybe in one commercial, Paris Hilton could be eating her burger while lounging on a Corvette, while in another commercial Paris Hilton could be eating a different burger while lounging on a Mercedes. Just enough variety so that when the commercial comes on, I might actually want to watch it or listen to it just to see what will happen next.

Perhaps Apple did it right when they only officially showed the "1984" commercial a limited number of times. Imagine if they had aired that commercial every hour on every network, like some advertisers do today. If I had been subjected to that commercial over and over again, I eventually would have wanted to throw the RUNNER into the Big Brother screen, just to put an end to the misery.

Again, make commercials that we want to watch, and guess what? We'll watch them.

Why advertisers have it all wrong

Rich Manalang is becoming a twentieth-century Luddite, or a Communist, or something like that. In short, he's doing something that just should not be done.

What is Rich's crime? He's taking a break from most social media:

In an IM conversation I had with Paul this morning, I decided to embark on an experiment. I’ve decided to drop out of all things social (online) for a few weeks. This includes Twitter, Buzz, Facebook, blogging, etc.

Basically, Rich wants to pare down his social media inputs for a period of time, in order to decide which ones are essential and which are not.

Rich is only allowing himself three exceptions: email and instant messaging, which he describes as "essential," and Google Reader, because it provides clear benefits to him. Unlike Google Buzz:

Anyway, the big reason I’m doing this is that since last Tuesday, I’ve sunk a lot of time into futzing with Google Buzz. That’s time I’ll never get back. Meanwhile, I have yet to see the real value of Google Buzz.

So Rich is dealing with the time-sink problem, one that many of us have encountered. In a comment, I noted that Rich's needs are the opposite of the needs of the content providers themselves (the reference to gas stations relates to the television screens that have been installed at some pumps):

We have a need to get useful information as quickly as possible, while Facebook, Google, the gas station, and other content providers have a need to give us useful information, but keep us at their sites as long as possible (so that we view as many ads as possible).

What it boils down to is this - advertising is so bad that we don't want to watch it, and have to be bribed to do so. Let's face it - when television equipment providers built features into their equipment that allow you to skip over ads, you know that the situation is pretty bad. And if you don't have such equipment, then the appearance of a commercial often signals that it's time for a bathroom break, a trip to the fridge - anything to get away from the advertisements until the real show begins again.

And it's not just a television issue - you can find it in radio also. I'm driving my daughter to school this semester, and one morning she consented to let me listen to "Handel on the News" on KFI. We switched to that station, and it was in the middle of its "shortened" ad block that still occupies several minutes. So we switched back to her favorite radio station (to protect her privacy I won't reveal the call letters of the station, but the morning show host tends to talk about "American Idol" a lot)...and her station was in the middle of its own block of ads.

It seems that for 364 days out of the year, American advertisers create ads that people do not want to hear. But, at least in this country, there's one exception - the Super Bowl. On that day, all of the advertisers (or, to be more accurate, the advertising agencies) all compete to have ads that people will watch, like, and talk about the next day. Expectations are raised high - and, at least personally, the results are always less than stellar.

For me, the solution to this is simple.

If you are an actor, actress, writer, or someone else who wants to advance in the television industry (I'll skip radio for the moment), you may get your start on local TV, then move on to network TV, and then move on to the movies. By the time you reach the movie-making level, studios are paying millions of dollars to get the best actors, actresses, and scriptwriters to make mega-hits. At the same time, the smaller outfits are trying to compete on quality and good storytelling. Regardless, for many people, movies are the ultimate goal.

What if the ultimate goal was to get into a thirty-second advertisement?

What if writers were competing to write the perfect ad? What if actors and actresses were clamoring to get into one of those ads? What if producers and directors were competing to get rights to the next Folger's ad? Maybe it wouldn't pay $20 million, but you wouldn't have to make a huge time commitment.

Eventually, if such a system were implemented, people would WANT to watch the ads. They'd even put up with Bob Costas in the hope that maybe that hot Folger's ad might appear after Bob's latest Tribute To A Wonderful American Athlete's Younger Brother.

And, of course, this could move beyond television. Radio ads could get better. Those ads that are served up by Google et al could get better - things that you'd want to read, rather than things that require software to block you from reading them.

What does it take to get to a world where people WANT to view and read ads?

(empo-tuulwey) Change

A couple of recent posts tangentially touched upon change, so I thought I'd bring it to the forefront.

One of the underlying themes in this post was the assumption that younger people are more willing to change than older people. However, as this BusinessWeek post noted:

[A] PEW Center study showed last year that people in their 20s and 30s were actually more averse to trying new brands and products than were people in their 50s.

Then there's the whole ReadWriteWeb "Facebook login" controversy that I talked about here. One of my references, The Last Podcast post, noted that when people ended up at ReadWriteWeb rather than Facebook,

These people actually thought that somebody had either bought or redesigned their precious Facebook and now Facebook got so hard to use that they couldn’t get to Farmville.

I subsequently noted:

And before one assumes that such a negative reaction is confined to the technically illiterate, remember the negative reaction when FriendFeed introduced real-time and other changes? And THAT negative reaction came from people who are considered to be technologically savvy. No one likes change...

Indeed. Whether you're young or old, technically savvy or less so, you probably don't like change all that much. I'd venture to say that people who like change are in the minority, and even those people might like change in one arena, but hate it in another. Take the people who were absolutely thrilled when their Gmail accounts were filled with Google Buzz entries - what if you told them that as a next step, the ONLY way to access your Gmail would be to type "buzz" in a Google search box? I bet you there would be some really angry folks clamoring for "the way it used to be."

Change is necessary to progress, and sometimes far-sighted people will adopt change despite the initial backlash that they will receive. What if the original Apple Macintosh computers had gone with convention and retained 5 1/4" floppies? What if Ray Kroc had looked at the McDonald brothers' operation and decided NOT to expand it? What if we had elected Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton as President in 2008?

At the same time, sometimes change can go too far. The Edsel. New Coke.

It's impossible to know in advance whether a proposed change will be warmly embraced in the long term. So how do you decide whether or not to pursue a potential change?