Apr 21
If you have ever been in a foreign country you have probably had a conversation similar to this:
“You are from California? I have a friend in California, maybe you know him!”
We always laugh when this happens because California has roughly 30 million residence and is larger in size than many countries (it is about the same size as Japan).
But if you had a conversation where you told someone you belonged to a particular church, graduated a specific high school in a given year, or had worked at a small company you would not be surprised to have the same conversation. What is the difference? The difference I would suggest is that a high school class is a community but California is not.
The point my seem obvious but I am surprised that this point of view does not always carry over to the internet. I was listening to the latest live call-in show for the excellent podcast For Immediate Release when I heard a caller express a comment that people should get involved in a community like Facebook. I am not trying to pick on Shel and Neville for their excellent show, but this comment mirrors an understanding of Facebook and similar sites that I have heard expressed on many occasions.
Facebook states in their press area that they currently have 70 million active users which is more than twice the population of California. Facebook and the other social networking sites host a great number of communities but are not communities. My daughter is a member of numerous communities on facebook like her college classmates and high school classmates. My son has many of the same high school friends but is attending a college all the way across the country. Their college communities don’t overlap. They are a similar demographic of course but demographics do not a community make. I also belong to facebook but my facebook friends tend to be podcasters and Amateur Traveler podcast listeners. I could try and befriend all my daughters classmates (creepy) but I would be treated as what I am, an outsider.
The distinction here is important. Many people confuse a community with a website or with a set of features. But communities are people. They are people who share something other than bandwidth. They share values, or experiences or interests. I have seen a number of people find no value in facebook or other social networking sites until they realize that they can use it to reconnect to their high school girlfriend or college roommate. They don’t find any value in it until they find community.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Apr 09
So many people who I follow on the Internet had mentioned Tim Ferris’s “The 4-Hour Workweek” that I thought it was finally time for me to read it. Ferris’s book proposes working with a goal in mind, working less and spending more time on whatever it is that would be fulfilling for you, travel for instance. He proposes a plan to get there by creating a largely self running business using the Internet and relying heavily on outsourcing. It was an interesting book and I am glad I read it but I was left with a more mixed impression of the book.
What I liked
I thought the book was for me a fresh and different perspective. I do like to read things that challenge me and my perceptions, at least from time to time. I am still hard pressed to come up with a product that I could sell as Ferris has (fitness supplements) that would be the good basis for a business. He give some suggestions for how to find or create such a product and a large list of useful links for companies that can partner in manufacturing, fulfillment, sales and support of such a product. I found the list of links to be one of the most valuable parts of the book.
What I did not like
Ferris actually has very little work experience in corporate America and takes pride in the number of jobs he was fired from or deserved to be fired from. His personal experience centers mostly around sales where he found ways to be more productive and spend less time doing it by changing when he made his sales calls and by eliminating clients that were not worth his time. I find that his experience in the working world bears little resemblance to mine. His picture of the working world is a soul sucking machine. No doubt others will relate to that description but I did not. I work as the EVP of Engineering and Operations at a small Internet company focused on creating communities. Before that I have held a variety of positions in software engineering in Silicon Valley. Work has often been for me a part of my creative expression. Most of the time I have derived joy from the people I worked with. There are also fewer shortcuts (at least that I have found) in software engineering than he found in sales.
As Ferris describes the kind of business he is trying to create it is clear that money is the bottom line. What kind of product can I create so I won’t have to work as much? From my Silicon Valley background this seems a passionless exercise. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have the time to travel all the time as Ferris does. But I am not sure that the unconnected untethered lifestyle that is his personal goal would be a good match for me. The process of product and company creation that Ferris describes seemed to me to be passionless and even a bit cynical.
But the biggest problem I had with Ferris’s book was the number of times he expressed an approach to life that I find unethical. I did not count the number of times that he suggested lying to your employer but it was definitely a running theme. His just “Call in sick…” approach to work probably means that it is a good thing for all involved that Ferris is now an entrepreneur. Certainly, I am glad I was not in a position as his boss, but I would probably also not choose to be his partner.
Conclusion
I would repeat that I did find this book interesting. I think that reevaluating “a work hard play later” philosophy could be beneficial to any number of people, myself included. I found the homework that Ferris assigned in the book to be thought provoking if not yet for me life changing. I can recommend the book, even with some serious misgivings about the author’s philosophy.
Popularity: 30% [?]
Mar 28
If you have not heard of BzzAgent it is a company that gets paid by companies to create word of mouth advertising or buzz. I have been a BzzAgent for some time now but had not participated in any campaigns. But recently they had a campaign advertising a new burger (the Smokehouse Bacon Burger) at Chili’s restaurants. Well, I happen to like bacon and burgers and Chili’s is where I took my family for my birthday dinner (the tradition is that the person whose birthday it is gets to choose the restaurant). So this seemed like the time for me to activate from my sleeper agent role and create some buzz.
BzzAgent sent me a kit which included a brochure about the new burgers and 4 coupons to try a burger for free. My wife and I each used one of the coupons and then gave two of the coupons away. The idea then is that I tell people about my experience. BzzAgent is very clear that the agents should tell the truth which left a good taste in my mouth (and hey so did that burger if the truth is to be told).
I then need to report to BzzAgent on at least 3 times that I told some one about the new Smokehouse Bacon Burger (subtle right?). As part of the report I need to attest that:
YES, every person I Bzzed in this BzzReport knows that I’m an Agent and that I received a way to experience the product or service, even if it’s not specifically mentioned in the report itself.
It was an interesting experience. I still find the business model strange for BzzAgent but I found the experience to be more positive that I expected. I understand now why one of my co-workers raves about being a BzzAgent. Besides, I really did enjoy the thick tasty (marinated?) bacon on the Smokehouse Bacon Burger.
Popularity: 29% [?]
Mar 27
I have been trying to figure out what the video setup of the living room of the future is (or at least of my future) and a new discovery on ABC.com makes me wonder if it is time to ditch my television completely.
But let’s back up a bit first. My current setup did not used to seem quite so dated. I have a big screen tube style TV (the largest tube from back when my company went public) connected to the DirecTV box with (their brain dead version of) TiVo. Flat screen Tvs have now come down in price to the point that I am willing to buy one, but if I get an HD TV then I need to get a new DirecTV and this is where things get complicated.
- I love the TiVo but because I have the DirecTV (brain dead) version of TiVo I can’t copy shows off to put on my laptop or iPod to use when I workout. I could buy the expensive HD version but it still does not have all the TV functionality I want. And frankly DirecTV is fine but I am more loyal to the TiVo than to them.
- I could switch to cable (ComCast) and that would even allow me to change my DSL line to cable. Given how my DSL line with AT&T is less reliable than my old DSL line and also screws up with our phone line (the old line was a separate line) that is a plus. But ComCast’s own TiVo box is still not in my area and it sounds like they also have screwed up a good solution.
- I could switch to cable and get a new TiVo box that would work with cable cards to connect to the cable network. This would be a more acceptable solution but also is the most costly per month.
All of those options are more expensive than doing nothing and not appealing enough that I have made the switch yet.
Getting back to last night, I was catching up on Lost because I had only watched the first episode of the season and my TiVo was getting full. I watched a couple episodes on my TV and I watched a couple of episodes on ABC.com. I have previously used ABC.com and find it more than adequate for the task. I can’t fast forward through the commercials but they only give me two and a half minutes or so for a show instead of 20 minutes on broadcast. That seems to me to be a fare trade. I would not be surprised if this was also more valuable for them as I can recall (unaided brand recognition) that I was watching ads for Toyotas Tacoma (do they know that they named a car after the city in the U.S. with the highest suicide rates?) and for Starwood resorts.
What I did not realize until last night is that Lost has two different versions of Lost on ABC.com. About a week after they release a show they release an enhanced version of the show which is annotated like a show from Popup Video. As the show goes along they explain that the color light Desmond is seeing is like the color of the light from back in season 2 when the hatch blew up. Sure it was distracting, but it was also cool and it was something that ABC could do because this show was being distributed on the Internet. Having a second version of the show that some people will love and some will hate would just split their audience on network TV so they would never do it. It would use up another precious time slot on the schedule (of course they could air it late it night when TiVo could find it but the cost they would have to pay the studio and the fact that they don’t control the affiliates would get in the way). On the Internet that show is additive for them.
So what if my next “Television” is a computer. Are we there yet? I don’t think I can get all of the shows I watch through any one legal method and legal is a requirement for me. Shows I watch on BBC America don’t seem to be on the web yet. I could buy shows on iTunes although the crossover for when the shows are more expensive than a $50 cable bill would be 25 shows and I think I watch more than that.
My todo list:
- Are all my shows on line somewhere
- Is my cable (satellite) bill really only $50? (Always marry an smart woman with an MBA if you can so you don’t have to pay the bills.)
Is MLB Baseball the only thing keeping me attached to broadcast television?
Popularity: 32% [?]
Mar 03
I have blogged about my experiences with Twitter before. I realized recently that these posts document my journey from a twitter skeptic to a twitter addict.
There are a number of different ways that people use the microblogging service that is Twitter.com and there is some contention about what is the “correct” way to use it. Merlin Mann (who made my list of favorite twitter posters in: My Favorite Quotes - Confessions of a Twitter Lurker) has argued that twitter is poetry. The 140 character updates that one is limited to in twitter are a form of haiku.
But I find more and more form me personally twitter is more like digg.com. It is a place where I learn interesting stories from interesting people. I notice that I gravitate to some of the people I follow who have an interesting story to tell me. I still use RSS feeds to track interesting blogs but I find that I only check my RSS reader every other day or so now, because I have already read the best stories via twitter.
Follow Chris Christensen at http://twitter.com/chris2x
Popularity: 38% [?]
