I’ve heard it said that jazz = blues + improvisation. It’s the same with a career (well, almost: no guitars).
While a few people are lucky enough to have a single job that lasts for life, the rest of us can enjoy the adventure of a changing career: shifting from job to job, adjusting skills and focus depending on the changing demands of our position current position. Which can be fun (I mean it!). (more…)
Amy Mahon asks:
Why do clients ask for “clean and modern” when really they mean “cluttered and busy”?
The trouble with website design or development clients is that they lack the perspective of an ordinary website user. Clients will usually forget that users have looked at several website before the client’s site: they make the mistake of looking at their website in isolation, much as you might look at a book or a magazine (or a piece of art).
If websites were viewed in isolation, more information would be great. Users could sit there for hours and browse these massive, detailed, complex websites to their hearts content, and come away thinking, “wow: that was so useful! So much information, everything I could ever want”.
(Actually, that’s exactly how most website design clients do use their own website! Because it’s their own, they sit and fawn over it for much, much longer than the ordinary user would; noticing every imperfection, every missing answer to every tiny possible question that a user might possibly ask… and so on. Whereas most users don’t care about this stuff: they just want something simple.)
Websites do not exist in isolation. Clients have to realise that their website is one of many that people will look at in a short period of time, and this means that the client’s impressions as a website ‘user’ will not actually match a real user’s requirements. Clients want to shout from the rooftops about their business, and they love to go on and on — it’s the job of a designer to convince the client that less really is more.
The best way to do this is to encourage the client to see things from their users’ perspective. Ask them to imagine visiting their website after an hours’ browsing. Ask them to consider favourite websites (which don’t relate to their area of business): what makes those websites fun, easy to use, useful? Chances are “simplicity” will come high on the list, and then maybe the client will start to appreciate that when it comes to the web, less is really much, much more.
Facebook has recently broken even, and Twitter is on record as having some interesting plans for making money from their service. I don’t know what those plans are, but I think Twitter is in a really good position to make money from their service.
Twitter has become very popular, pretty fast, because they offer a simple service for free. Social networking is all about communication, and Twitter pares communication back down to its essence (sending people messages) and lets people do it without paying. Add to that the undeniable ego boost that comes from getting a significant number of followers, and Twitter is a great offering for the savvy online networker.
The most obvious way for Twitter to make money from this service would be to charge for it — but that’s not a good idea. Twitter should not start charging ordinary users for its service, because being free is one of its main attractions. If Twitter started charging ordinary users, I think we’d see the same response as we would if Facebook or MySpace did the same thing: outrage.
So, if you can’t get money from your users, how else to profit from the service you’re providing? Advertising is a popular option: Facebook likes to serve ‘relevant’ ads to its users, from advertisers who are attracted by the mountain of data Facebook has on its users’ interests and the real possibility for highly targeted advertising based on this data.
But everyone finds adverts annoying, and Twitter users would find them even more annoying because they’d be so much more apparent than they are on a site like Facebook. Inserting adverts straight into our tweet feeds would be horrible, because it would break up the flow of information: cool link, new photo, friend’s news, BUY MCDONALDS!, new blog post. Irritating.
Twitter could instead place adverts alongside our tweets feeds, instead of in them: this would be less intrusive, but would have the disadvantage of only serving ads to those who visited the Twitter website, not to those who use Twitter via its API. In any case, I think Twitter’s main aim should be to keep the experience of its ordinary users as clean and uninterrupted as possible, so as to keep those users coming back for more. Here’s why.
Twitter already has a bunch of users who advertise: businesses. Loads of businesses use Twitter to keep in touch with customers, post updates, promote their website or blog, provide discounts and special offers, etc. Twitter is a great place for businesses to reach their customers, and this is where the money lies.
Twitter should develop a suite of business tools and collect a subscription fee from those who want to use these tools. Off the top of my head, I can think of some stuff which I’d be happy to pay for (if I were a business):
On the assumption that it would cost more to provide these tools to businesses with more followers, Twitter could charge according to follower numbers: say $10/month for up to 1000 followers, $15/month for up to 5000, etc.
In short, their are really two kinds of users on Twitter: ordinary folk who just want to tweet their latest news, and businesses who want to promote themselves to those ordinary folk. Keep Twitter free for the ordinaries, and charge the businesses for cool tools that make promotion more effective.
I think this would be a great way to make money from Twitter, and if they don’t implement something like this, I might! :)
“Django is better than Rails”
What do you think (and why)? Leave a comment!
Estate agents seem to have a deep desire to bullshit about everything. Here’s the description for a property that I picked at random:
A two bedroom semi-detached cottage superbly refurbished throughout.
Old, but with new paint. Property was, until recently, a barn.
The property offers attractive and comfortable openplan living
The property is small. There is a TV in the kitchen, because the TV room is the kitchen.
Set within private parkland with views over the surrounding countryside.
No private garden (check out the photo).
Excellent access to M4
Warning! Road noise. Bring ear plugs.
The Beatles started off very simple: two guitars, one bass, drums (sound familiar?). And yet they managed to hit the zeitgeist square on the nose — even, maybe, to define it. They also worked very, very hard to polish their craft with very little in the way of modern studio technology.
The band’s early live performances on TV sound almost as good as the singles they put out: polished and clear, very few missed notes and no missing overdubs. Compare to some modern bands who sound different (worse) when they play live.
I think this is a great proof that the “keep things simple and work really hard” approach pays off. Complexity is overrated; simplicity creates results.
Linda Carty is a fifty-year-old lady with British citizenship who’s on death row in the US. This from the BBC:
Carty, 50, was sentenced to death in 2002 for her part in abducting and killing a 25-year-old woman, but claims she was framed.
Regardless of whether she’s guilty or not, capital punishment is one of the most barbaric and contradictory forms of ‘justice’ that we have in the world today, and it needs to be stopped. There are appeals for Linda going on at the moment (see the Reprieve website) and of course efforts to stamp out capital punishment completely (for all the death row prisoners who don’t have a news story written about them).
Do what you can to support Linda.
That I should even be writing this is a mark of the way email can take over one’s life. But it does, and not just because people are emailing us all the time, but because we love the little buzz of attention and (sometimes) accomplishment that answering emails gives us (and, I think, we have a weird subconscious sense of obligation to reply to messages as soon as they’re received. Applicable to telegrams, post cards, and letters, maybe, but completely unnecessary for email).
Anyway: this is how I avoid spending the entire day in my inbox.
The number-one rule of having a sensible relationship with your email is not to leave your email app open. Close it now! That little ‘ping’, or ‘click’, or red badge, or whatever announces a new email, is a distraction from what you should be doing: working. And answering emails is not working, it’s a supplement to working: something you do so you can get on with doing what’s really important (making money, saving the world, writing a book).
I open Mail once at about 10 in the morning, once again at about 2pm, and maybe once more at 4pm if I think something really important might be coming in. Most of the people I work with take around twenty-four hours to reply to an email anyway, so it doesn’t really matter how I time things.
(Regardless of what my old managers used to think, email is not suitable for urgent messages. If something is urgent [i.e. needs to be dealt with now urgent], then use the phone. This takes the pressure off the whole send email, receive email, read email, reply cycle and avoids giving clients/friends the impression that it’s OK to send you very urgent messages by email at eight in the morning (setting sensible expectations around email is important, you see, but that’s another blog post).
I have a smart mailbox that only shows unread messages: this is my ‘inbox’. The mailbox doesn’t hide messages as soon as I’ve read them; instead, it updates when I switch to another mailbox or restart the app. So I can open Mail, read my latest messages, read some again if I want, then close the app. When I come back, my smart ‘inbox’ is empty and I’m not distracted by the display of a hundred messages from the past few days. Clear screen == clear mind.
When you get a message, do something with it! Don’t leave it sitting there, because you’ll mount up an awful debt of work that you’ll have to repay later, and you’ll have to dedicate a small portion of your brain power to remembering to answer those messages.
You really have three choices when it comes to a new email:
Very occasionally — if I’m stupidly busy — I’ll read a message and then mark it as unread as a ‘deal with this later’ flag. That way the message will still appear in my smart inbox when I come back next time (I don’t use flags for this, because it adds another level of complexity which I’d much rather avoid).
So that’s it: read occasionally, filter your messages, reply immediately, and be ruthless about deleting and filing your messages. This works for me — if it works for you too, email me ;)
(Further reading: Inbox Zero).