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Site Seeing: Brian O’Leary/Magellan Media

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Every moment in time is an intersection. People come and go, events transpire, all in a murky context. Sit though enough moments and you may be able to deduce that the steady stream of ore-laden trucks passing by reveals a distant mine, a factory, or both. Stick around a while longer, and when the stream turns to a trickle you may conclude that the mine is empty, or that demand has dried up.

Paying attention is not rocket science, but it still requires concentrated thought. In a world full of shiny objects and huckster begging for mindshare, paying attention is both difficult and critical. One way to short circuit the requirement is to find people who are good at paying attention and pay attention to them. Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media Partners is one such person.

Here’s a recent example:

If devices truly are important to a business model, the people leading content companies need to embrace the technologies, not just sign off on them.

A shallow understanding presents the real threat: that we’ll keep taking our eyes off the ball to pursue the latest and greatest development.

Pointing at (even championing) shiny objects is not enough. You need to understand how devices intersect with context, demand and consumer need. I don’t have a clue about any of that, but Brian does — which is why I pay attention to him.

Stop by the site and read a few posts and you’ll see what I mean. He’s throwing down some serious clarity about publishing in an environment teeming with shiny objects and deceptive pitch-people who really are trying to make a buck off their ability to distract you.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Chuck Wendig/TerribleMinds

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Lots of people say what they think. Chuck Wendig says it the way he thinks it:

I ride you people pretty hard. I’m like an old man on the lawn, shaking his walker at you interlopers. “Get the hell offa my property! Quit screwin’ around!” Next thing you know, I’m thumbing two homemade rock-salt shells into the breach of a double barrel. Ch-chak. “Old Man Wendig’s gonna make Swiss cheese out of our backsides again! He’s lettin’ the taco terrier out of her hermetically-sealed cage, too! It’s like Jurassic Park, and we’re the goats in the T-Rex paddock!”

I deft you to find anything similar outside of a state-run institution.

But that’s Chuck. He’s got attitude to burn, and the writing skill to weld that attitude to a web page. If you want a little entertainment with your subject matter, you’ll get a feature-film’s worth at TerribleMinds.

(I can’t tell you if Chuck’s site is safe for work or not, because for all I know you run the Hell’s Angels Deli. Still, it’s a question you might want to consider.)

But here’s the thing. Chuck isn’t just entertaining. He also knows what he’s talking about craft-wise. He knows about writing, he knows how he writes, and he knows the difference. And that puts him in a pretty small camp.

So pick yourself out a pretty one of these, and one of these, and maybe $500,000 worth of this, and head on over to Chuck’s site. He’ll welcome you with open arms, as long as you’re cool with the pulled pin.

— Mark Barrett

The Facebook Backlash

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A little over two weeks ago I decided I’d had enough of Facebook playing me for a punk. I deleted my small Facebook account and Ditchwalk page, and as noted earlier I felt (and still feel) no loss in doing so.

This was a personal decision. It was not a business decision. Then again one of my failings as a businessman is that I don’t have one set of morals for my customers and clients*, and another set for the people I have emotional relationships with. For that reason, if I think you’re a liar or a cheat, I’m not doing business with you even if that (potentially) hurts me more than it hurts you.

What’s been interesting to me in the aftermath of that decision is that Facebook has clearly lost control of its image. In previous instances where Facebook reneged on promises or otherwise sold out its own users, everyone (included the abused users) was eager to help Facebook recover its cachet. Now, however, I don’t see anyone coming to Facebook’s defense. In fact, there seems to be a growing trend toward stating the obvious:

Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially “out,” as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are – simply put – not trustworthy.

That’s a fairly calm paragraph from a rant by Jason Calcanis, which may be part of a growing pop-culture reassessment of Facebook as a company and as a phenomenon. When you’re at the top, there’s often nowhere to go but down — and plenty of people who would like to see you head that way.  [ Read more ]

The Missing iPad Review

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I get the utility of hype. If you can work people into a frenzy about a given brand in a crowded marketplace, you sell more of that product. Fair enough.

But after you’ve got that spanking new Ferrari parked in the garage you’ve still got to take your three kids to school, including their sports equipment. After you’ve had that delicious pedicure or manicure, you still need to plant your garden or rake your leaves. And of course there’s all that gizmo-driven exercise equipment in your basement, which you used exactly twice.

Point being: it’s one thing to buy yourself something cool and another thing to use it in your day-to-day existence. Products that require a lot of care and maintenance generally get neither, meaning we tend to avoid those products or destroy them in short order.

Now that all of those how-the-iPad-will-change-the-fabric-of-the-universe-twice posts have faded into the coffers of Steve Jobs, I find myself confronted with a deafening silence on more banal points like utility and usability. If you’ve had an iPad for a while, and you’re using it regularly — or, alternatively, not using it regularly — I think you could corner the market on iPad news by answering any or all of the following:

  • What’s it like to lug an iPad around?

    It weighs 1.5 pounds. You can talk all you want about how that’s super-light for a laptop, but it’s still 1.5 pounds. The average person is not built to carry a weight like that, let alone manipulate it in one or both hands. (If you think I’m kidding, grab yourself a much-easier-to-carry 1.5 pound barbell and lug it around for a day.)

    • [ Read more ]

Happy Happy

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In the previous post I talked about celebrity and credibility, and referenced Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project. While I was working on that post I happened to go to the local library, and there on the new-books shelf I happened to find a book by Barbara Ehrenreich called Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. (To whatever degree you find this coincidence suspicious, I can only agree. Pulling her book off the shelf was one of those weird movie moments that seemed completely contrived even as I lived it.)

I finished reading the book this weekend, and I want to take a moment to say that this is a book I think everyone should read. And by everyone I mean not only Americans, but people outside the United States who are interested in understanding what makes America tick (and tic). It’s not often that a work successfully weaves various disparate cultural threads together, let alone places them in historical context, but Bright-Sided does that in spades.  [ Read more ]

Celebrity, Character and Credibility

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There are a number of hardened memes each independent author must confront at some point in the publishing process. One of these is the platform meme, which says you have to be willing to create your own audience. As regular readers know, I equate an author’s platform with their celebrity.

Celebrity
A related publishing meme dictates that you can’t successfully leverage your platform and celebrity unless you actively engage your audience. No matter how clever your marketing is, it’s not enough to say, “Here I am!” — you also need to say, “How are you?” and “What do you think?”

There are two reasons why this engagement is deemed important. First, you must differentiate yourself from the torrent of information available to (and being broadcast at) consumers, because consumers have become experts at tuning out. Second, engagement builds the strongest possible relationship you can have with the consumer, short of asking them to move in with you. While your engagement will mean nothing to the majority of consumers, to those who are interested it may mean the difference between passing interest and brand-grade commitment.

It’s not all good news, of course. To the extent that the internet facilitates such engagement it also drives the need. While it’s literally true that the internet requires a person to opt in, as a social matter it’s assumed that everyone will do so — and this is particularly true for people who aspire to build any kind of brand awareness. Because celebrity is simply brand awareness for a person, and because celebrity brands now have the potential for direct human interaction, there is both an additional level of opportunity and obligation in engaging celebrity-interested consumers.  [ Read more ]

The Information-Age Myth

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I went into a large, nationally-known chain store last night to buy a few things. When I what I wanted I went to the check-out lines. Because the store had too few employees handling too many customers I elected to take my five items to the twelve-items-or-less line, on the assumption that fewer items would mean a faster checkout.

Confirming the wisdom of my choice, the customer two places ahead of me breezed through checkout. Because the three women ahead of me were only buying two items as a group, I felt confident that I would be on my way in short order. (In the fable business, this is known as counting your chickens before they hatch.)  [ Read more ]

A Generational Definition of Insanity

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You’ve undoubtedly heard this before:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing
over and over and expecting different results.

I’m old enough now that I can attest to the truth of that saying from both observation and personal experience. The antidote, of course, is to recognize behavior patterns and interrupt them — provided you have the clarity of mind to do so. It’s not easy, and it runs against the human tendency to resist change and protect the ego, but it can be done. As is also often said, admitting you have a problem is the first step.

A related but much more insidious problem involves the repetition of behaviors over the course of generations. These generations may be literal, coming along every twenty years or so, or they may be developmental and occur with greater frequency. In each case, however, new generations are predisposed to repeat experiences precisely because they arrive on the scene oblivious to what has gone before.

There are two main reasons for the perpetuation of such generational blindness. The first is the failing of previous generations to pass along useful knowledge, or to make knowledge available and digestible in ways that are accessible and relevant. The second is the failing of new generations to recognize that a distinction must be made between what is new to them (as a group or as individuals), and what is actually new.

For example, at some point most people becomes fascinated with their own sexuality, often to the point of distraction. Yet no one would argue that this process for any individual sheds new light on the human condition, or represents a break from the past. Coming to terms with one’s own desires and biological essence is exciting, intoxicating, and so utterly commonplace as to be mundane. That such newness can feel transcendent to the individual or group is clear, even as it is demonstrably not new. (Without ‘going there’, try conceptualizing your parents or grandparents as the sexual being you believe yourself to be. Because they are/were.)  [ Read more ]

Weekend Reads

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It’s an interesting time. Spring is busting out. Oil is washing ashore.

I’ve been in a low gear for quite a while now, partly for reasons of my own and partly due to circumstance. I feel like an upshift is coming, and that I’m personally ready to pick up speed, but the corners are still blind.

Do I need to keep my foot on the brake, against the straining engine, or can I drop the pedal and go? An interesting question, which I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to answer in advance.

It’s an interesting time.

  • The Big Picture: April 30, 2010

    I would give the first image a Pulitzer on the spot. The last image — if the hurricane-shaped sprawl is indeed oil — is rife with irony.

    If you’re wondering how hard it’s going to be to clean up this oil spill, imagine that a crude-oil bomb has exploded in your closet and your job is to clean your clothes. The immediate response you just had — that you would simply throw away your clothes and start over — is not available to flora and fauna. They have to wear it.

  • Shakespeare: The Question of Authorship

    A book review about a smart book that takes apart all those entertaining claims that Shakespeare could not have been Shakespeare.

    Every mystery is not a secret. Every silence is not a lie. The play’s the thing.

    • [ Read more ]

The Print-On-Demand Molehill

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One of the best things about being part of a community is that the whole has the potential for being self-correcting. It’s not a sure thing, as any example of mob rule or cultural intolerance can attest, but there is at least the potential for a group to help individuals overcome blind spots or obstacles. Individuals who do not belong to a group, or who do not have access to collective wisdom, may be doomed to reinvent the wheel or to repeatedly fail because of their own tendencies and shortcomings.

I’m not a big joiner. I just threw Facebook in the junk pile because the price of belonging to that group is self-deception, and like Sam Spade I’m not willing to be somebody’s sap.* More than wearing a team blazer or adopting a popular philosophy or expressing loyalty to a particular trendy brand, I value belonging to a community of ideas. This has always led to involvement with smaller groups of people who share my interests, but the benefit to me is that these more issue-oriented groups can both augment and check my own thoughts.

In order to derive such benefits, however, it’s not simply enough to belong to a group. Approaching someone to suggest that they may be incorrect about something is fraught with risk, and presumes that the individual is open to such communications. As we all learn at a very young age, this is usually not the case. Most people would rather feel right than be right, even at the expense of their own well being. There is also a tendency for people to be more interested in telling others how wrong than they are in hearing the same thing themselves, and this tendency is often (if not commonly) greater in people who are ignorant or uninformed than it is in people who are knowledgeable. As a result, even if we are open to hearing about our mistakes, the number of reliable advisers that anyone might hope to hear from is usually small.  [ Read more ]