Monthly Archives: September 2010

When A Tweet Falls in the Forest and No-one Hears It …

Guess what? Nobody’s reading your Words of Wisdom on Twitter.

Actually, it’s possible that many people are reading what you write, but if research from Sysomos is to be believed, 71% of the time people Tweet, absolutely nobody responds.

This dovetails with a couple of things I’ve written about before: your follower count on Twitter is pretty much meaningless, and unless you have a reason to tweet, you shouldn’t bother.

The question, though, remains: how should your business use social networking?

First, have the accounts. Brand them if you can; we use Virtual VIP for our Twitter account, and you can find me on Facebook under my surname. Follow (err . . . make friends . . . umm . . . networking socially with. . .) people in your business, as well as people you’d like to be doing business with.

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Comment On This Post. I Dare You!

Solve a problem: let’s make what shows up in CAPTCHA forms easy to read. And while we’re at it, let’s make some money by turning the space CAPTCHAs take up into advertising.

Just how much do you hate those little password forms you need to fill out all over the Internet? CAPTCHA is important and annoying all at once, and forget the interruption; more often than not, you can hardly read the squiggly little passwords.

CAPTCHA is important because without it people who run web sites would be so overwhelmed with SPAM they’d have no time to do anything else. Seriously, the problem is that bad; software robots are out prowling the Internet looking for places to drop off-topic comments all the time, and even at a site like this one—where we get “just” a few thousand visitors a month—we’d need to contend with tens of thousands of bogus messages if we didn’t put up some kind of roadblock to stop them.

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Posted in business change

SmartPhone Paralysis: You Won’t Buy a New One!

By now you’re using a SmartPhone. Or not, you big hold-out, but everyone around you is clutching either an  iPhone, a Blackberry, or an Android SmartPhone.

The sales figures say that these devices are being adapted at unprecedented rates. Everybody has decided to Tweet on the go, babble about where they are via Foursquare, and buy stuff on eBay while driving to Aunt Sadie’s house.

Unexpected side effect: we’re actually buying new phones less frequently. This from a study by J.D. Power.

Since, like most things based on statistics this study can be interpreted many ways, let’s try to uncover the real-world reason for the change.

Before SmartPhones it was rare that the new phones actually added very much functionally, and I’ll bet you never heard someone say “I just love the software interface of LG’s phones on Verizon“. Nevertheless, when new phones hit the scene, people wanted them. Why? phones got smaller and lighter, prettier, or something else style-based that people would be attracted to. We upgraded as fast as our budgets or contracts allowed. It was all about sexy.

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Your Résumé is Meaningless; The Internet Knows Better

I have this ongoing disagreement with my best friend: she believes that a degree from a prestigious (read: Ivy League) college means something, and I say it doesn’t. We’re both wrong.

Actually, it isn’t as simple as that. The real story is that we both believe a degree from a well-known school with lots of well-connected alumni can be really useful, but her position preceding that statement is that a bachelor’s degree has an intrinsic value that I believe stopped meaning very much around twenty years ago.

The résumé is what’s becoming all but meaningless. In the Internet age, education means something different than it used to. So does experience. Or as a writer at GigaOm stated recently, The Future of Work Won’t Contain Résumés.

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Where Should You Publish Your Pearls of Wisdom? (Blogging)

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Are you listening?

Well, sure you are. in fact, I know exactly how many people read what I write here, where they come from (both in terms of geography and who sent them) and lots more about the “circulation” of these pearls of wisdom. And I know those things because of the choices I’ve made in how I publish this little journal of my thoughts on business change.

The key word there is “choices”.

Very little about the Answer Guy Central site is random. The words I write here, as I’ve explained a few times before, are carefully chosen. I want you to learn things and I want you to get lots of value from what you read here but I also want search engines to find what I write.

So why are so many people throwing so much garbage against so many walls?

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Facebook, Twitter Show All. Is It Time for FILTERED Search?

Drowning in information? Feel like Google’s search results are too hard to wade through? And never mind the fire hose that is Twitter. Or Facebook.

Maybe it’s time for filtered search.

Actually, this isn’t a new idea; it’s just one that we mostly ignore. Your browser has some sort of “safe searching” mechanism built into it, but most people don’t give it a thought. And there’s no good reason to; if you ask what is being filtered by your browser you’re not going to get a real answer.

But what if there was a filtering mechanism for your searches that you had specifically asked for?

Not surprisingly, there are several. Also not surprisingly, they’re religion-based. Want a sanitized version of the Internet that complies with your Christian, Muslim, or Jewish beliefs? You’re good.

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Who Owns Your (Copy)Rights?

On the Internet, no one can hear you scream. Or at least no one cares if you scream about your copyright being violated.

A few months ago I told you about a blogger who’d broken a big story. And then watched in dismay as major news outlets copied his story and failed to give him any credit. It’s becoming harder every day to track what belongs to whom, and while the Internet has done some great things for us it’s largely responsible for that problem.

Do you sense the irony in that statement? It’s not really the Internet that’s responsible for this problem, it’s users. But it’s easier to blame the system than the people who misuse it.

I was having a conversation with a young man the other day. I was going to pretend he was just a random stranger, but since you’ll see his name when I show you the work he’s promoting I can’t really do that; this very smart, very ambitious young man happens to be my son, Mike.

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Old or Young, SmartPhone or No, Forget Stats: It’s The Apps!

It’s all about managing change. Let’s wrap my two most recent posts together: older people don’t “get” SmartPhones, and iPads are cannibalizing laptop computer sales.

One statement is anecdotal, the other driven by anecdotal statistics. In the end, though, managing business change successfully is a mix; you need to find and understand statistics and anecdotal information.

So forget for a moment the 54-year-old who had such a hard time understanding her SmartPhone, and forget the statistics about how many iPads BestBuy is selling as their laptop computer sales go into the tank. For clues on business change and technology look at how people actually use their SmartPhones.

According to Appolicious, age, income level and professional aspirations are all factors when it comes to picking a SmartPhone. OK, makes sense. I’ll go farther and say something that can’t be tracked at all: intelligence matters, too. In fact, it matters more.

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Are Older People Too Set In Their Ways To Use SmartPhones?

I’ve written a couple of times about the problems that markets in general and the specific type of service market that computers and the Internet have created in particular create in deciding between the skills of younger and older workers.

I’ve also been effusive in my praise of the Droid ever since I started using one last November. Really I’m praising the Android operating system; I believe that between its features, distribution, and Google’s amazingly successful play getting others to market it for them that Android is the Smartphone OS. Period.

Last week I ran into something that shocked me. And I wonder if it’s an age thing or a more generalized problem that those of us who are technically inclined encounter when we work with people who aren’t.

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Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and The iPad at Best Buy

I love statistics.

No, I’m not a big math geek. And by “love” I actually mean “hate”. As much fun as statistics can be to play with and as useful as they can be when viewed objectively, they’re incredibly easy to manipulate so they say something different once you’ve twisted them.

Or as Mark Twain once put it: “There are three kinds of lies. Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics“.

The CEO of BestBuy has been quoted, or perhaps misquoted, as saying that the iPad has cannibalized 50% of laptop sales. And nobody is better qualified to make a judgment like that than the man who runs the USA’s largest electronics chain, right?

Maybe not.

Until September 26, when it becomes available in all BestBuy stores, Best Buy has been selling iPads online for in-store pickup and in only some of its stores. And their supplies have been limited so far; Apple literally hasn’t been able to keep up with demand for the iPad.

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Where Are You, Craig Newmark? The Surrender of Craigslist.

It’s official. Adult Services (Or Erotic Services as they were once known in the USA and continued to be named elsewhere) are gone from Craigslist.

This makes me sad.

I don’t use those services and never have. I don’t know people who do use them. And I don’t want this to be a too-far-to-the-left political rant where I scream about free speech. I’m disappointed that in an era where communication itself is the world’s largest growth business someone as smart and well intentioned as Craig Newmark has caved in.

If you read my piece on the subject of Craigslist Adult Services last week you know that when a bunch of State Attorneys General asked Craigslist to stop allowing ads to what was often prostitution they responded by removing access to that section of their site in their USA-based locations. They didn’t stop US-based users from accessing foreign Adult Services posts, nor did they take those sections down. And that’s where this should have stayed.

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Is Biggest The Same As Best? Not in Search, Social Networks

Google is amazing. It knows everything, and each day its definition of everything expands. I use it continuously, in more and more ways. So do you. But is it any good?

If your definition of good is having almost any piece of information you could ask for at your fingertips, then clearly the answer is “yes”. But if you need something specific that isn’t easily adapted to encyclopedic knowledge, or you want to compare a couple of things, or you need expertise, Google may not get the job done for you.

When does information become knowledge?

Now think about the way Facebook and Twitter work. Twitter is a raw data dump. Sure, there are ways to search and group the information you see there, but that’s not how it’s designed. Twitter feels like a fire hose, and unless you know how to tweak the information it throws at you or use some third-party tools it’s all but useless.

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Solving Illegal Software License Terms: More May Be Better

Every time I write an article I worry about whether you’ll enjoy it. Is it informative? Does it make you think and ask questions? Will you gain something that you can add to your business change repertoire?

Yesterday’s piece on the now-illegal practice of selling used software was a bit longer than my usual posts. So today, I have . . . MORE! The good news? If you ever find yourself in an intellectual property dispute  you may be able to balance this story against yesterday’s.

A couple of weeks ago, a man in Hawaii scored a legal victory when a US District Court allowed him to sue the maker of a piece of software to which he has become “addicted”. I don’t like when people blame their problems on others in this way, and I have no idea what will happen when the actual lawsuit comes to trial. But something very good came of this: the software maker is not being allowed to hide behind the “license agreement” that accompanies the software.

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Want to Sell Your Old Software? That May Now Be Illegal.

When I was in the publishing business, I received an amazing amount of software from companies that wanted me to write about their stuff in IYM Software Review. The pile got huge; it literally lined the walls of a small room in my home, stacked five boxes high all the way around the room.

A time came when I needed to get rid of all those boxes, and I approached a local library about them taking the software off my hands. My idea was that they could create an archive of software development, and be one of the few places in the world where people could come to research that topic.

Cool, right?

If I was having that conversation today, I might be trying to do something illegal.

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Google Instant: Cool For You, a Game Changer for Them

Google just keeps impressing me. But this time “impressed” and “happy” have diverged.

I think.

Everybody’s favorite search engine has started doing something new. If you use Google’s standard home-page search tool, you no longer need to hit <Enter> to get results from your search. Search results are displayed A-S Y-O-U T-Y-P-E. It’s really pretty amazing to watch, and I’ll cop to one of the things Google is saying in talking about “Google Instant”: you really might get a chance to discover a few things that you’ll miss when typing an entire search term and telling Google to execute your search is necessary.

But wow is this ever a business change that benefits Google more than it does you.

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