Writelife

Justine Henin announced her retirement from tennis today. She’s 25 years old. I’m not a big tennis fan so, in the normal course of things, this probably wouldn’t register high for me. But, perhaps because of her age, I read the entire article and found this comment from her coach, Carlos Rodriguez:

“Because of her,” Rodriguez said, “I am somebody.”

You don’t get better compliments than that. (And if you’re a writer, notice the brevity.)

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You can spend all the money you want, run all the ads you can, do all the community work that needs doing … and then? This happens:

Tim Hortons rehires fired woman

As you can see by this update on the story (which was originally about an employee being fired for giving away a 16 cent timbit to a child), Tim Hortons is doing some triage to minimize the damage.

One incident, in one of their hundreds of locations in Canada, quickly became a national story. I was amazed that the one linked above, on globeandmail.com, already had 553 comments at the time I’m posting this (usually, I think they might get between 20 and 30 comments, if that).

It’s a good example of how your brand can go sideways - real fast. I think with branding, your most important asset is your product. Next biggest asset is your employees. Third would be the image you try to put out their through ads, community involvement and so on. Yet for many companies, their biggest focus, sometimes their only focus, is that third one. (I’m not saying that’s the case with Tim Hortons. Sometimes s*** just happens.)

I guess all I’m saying is, after your product, your biggest asset is your people. (But even great people will have a hard time selling, and keeping morale up, when the product is crap.)

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There are all kinds of writing. The autograph, for instance. Today I found something I had forgotten I had, Louis Armstrong’s autograph. My father loved jazz and went to all kinds of clubs etc., and saw all kinds musicians. Armstrong, who he saw many times, was one of his favourites. One day, he got Pops to sign an autograph for me. (I didn’t appreciate it back then because I was about 6 or so.)

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I like this post by Doc Searls. I particularly like, “… Advertising itself is a bubble in the long run, because it’s guesswork even at its best, and making it better and better only improves a system that has been flawed fundamentally from the start, because it proceeds only from the sell side, and still involves enormous waste …”

Yes, I tend to have a bee up my bum on the subject of advertising and marketing in general. But I think it’s because so much of it is crud and waste (not that there’s a difference between crud and waste). I love it when they work. But as Searls says, so much of it is guesswork. And a lot of it is done because there’s an absence of ideas and, “We gotta do something.”

(Oh, and on the subject of Microsoft and Yahoo … I don’t care much either. From a user perspective, both are examples of making the user secondary.)

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I just posted a notion on Twitter. I don’t know what you call that. Twitting? Doesn’t matter …

The notion was this: Twitter is a like a new form of haiku. I rarely understand what I’m reading.

Not that you necessarily need to say something that requires more than 140 characters. Or that it won’t be long before there are more than 140 characters available for posts. Eventually, I imagine, you’ll be able to post a novel’s worth of … well, stuff.

But quite often, in order to say something worth hearing/reading, you need a bit more than 140 characters. Unless you’re a movie, in which case images are conveying a great deal of your meaning.

I’ve only recently started using Twitter and, honestly, I don’t really use it. I go on to it about once a week, look at some posts, sometimes write something myself, but I’ve yet to see anything in there that’s actually worth reading. Mainly, it just kills some time.

Maybe I just haven’t gotten use to Twitter. Not that it has to be functional (meaning practical). Some things are worthwhile simply because they’re fun. But so far I haven’t found Twitter either useful or fun.

Mostly it seems like a lot of gibberish with the potential for becoming really annoying. But opinions can change.

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A while ago I posted about the Web getting increasingly annoying. Not surprisingly, in a brief post called Signal to noise, Seth does a much better job of articulating much the same thing. He also has the perfect metaphor: signal to noise.

Even if it was all good, there’s just too much stuff coming through. Making it even more difficult is the fact that it isn’t all good stuff. There’s a amazing amount of noise. Email, blogs, RSS, Facebook notifications … it goes on and on.

What’s the answer? As far as I’m aware, currently there is none. But identifying a problem is the first step in finding a solution.

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Seth’s post Silly Traffic is worth a read. To use a cliche, it’s a reminder to not sweat the small stuff, in this case as it relates to web sites. Your site may get a lot of traffic, and you may be working your behind off to get that traffic, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into worthwhile traffic. Quality trumps quantity.

Ideally, you would have both: loads of visitors who are engaged.

It reminds me of when I worked in radio years ago. A station might be “No. 1!” in the ratings. Another, number 3 or 4. Yet the latter station made more money. Why? Because the numbers the station at the top of the heap where made up of very young people, a lot in the teen range or early twenties. And their disposable income was limited and when they did spend, what they spent on was also limited.

The other station, with smaller total numbers, made more money because the demographic was older, often women, and they not only spent more, what they spent on meant more money (like shoes, cars, houses, furniture etc.). In this case, while women made less than men (and still do), they were decision makers in households. And it all boiled down to greater advertising dollars because the station provided a more lucrative audience.

They point is, a lot of traffic (or big audience) doesn’t mean it has a lot of value. It might all just be “silly traffic.”

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As I read Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch I wonder, as I have before, are we making ourselves redundant? By “we,” I mean us. Human beings. As computerization does so many wonderful things for us, one of those wonderful things is the elimination of loads of work. And that’s not quite so wonderful since it means eliminating jobs. When jobs are eliminated, the economy goes in the crapper. When that happens, no one is left to use (meaning “buy”) all those wonderful things … yada yada, blah blah blah.

You’ve heard all that before. But to continue …

While I don’t expect to see it tomorrow, I think we’ll sooner or later develop software that can pretty much replicate human creativity. When that happens, we really will be in the crapper. We’ll have eliminated the last remaining reason for keeping humans around.

You take away creativity and we, as a species, are a pain in the ass. Should they ever get together, perhaps for a three day brainstorming conference, machines and nature are sure to come to the conclusion that everything, and I mean everything, would be better served if humans weren’t around to screw up the works. (Who but a human would drive a Hummer? Would own five houses? Would kill an elephant for the tusk? It’s not like you can eat it.)

Well, that’s the dark view of where we may be headed with our brilliance.

What would the sunny view be?

I should add …

I’ve got loads of technology. I love technology. So the musing above … I’m just wonderin’.

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Let’s talk about software updates: Could they be more frequent? It seems every second day I’m getting a new Firefox or iTunes update. Yes, I know you get the little window that asks if you want to install now or later, but I’m getting a little tired of working on my computer and getting these requests, “Download now?” or “Install now?” and so on.

They may seem more frequent to me because I use two laptops – a Mac and a PC, and while I mainly use the Mac (fewer headaches), I jump to the PC often enough that both are running through the day. The point is, if I get an update on the Mac, I can expect one on the PC pretty soon, and vice versa.

Of course, these are updates are nothing like the Windows and security updates I get on the PC, which is running Vista. I love being in the middle of working on something and have everything shut down, no warnings, work lost, as the laptop implodes so it can eventually restart. Or, actually shutting down the PC myself and realizing it’s not shutting down, it’s grabbing updates, it’s configuring them etc.

After the last update on the PC, either a Vista or a Firefox update (or were they working in tandem?), every second time I go to a new page in the browser (Firefox) I get a “Server not found” page and I have to “try again.” Could it get more annoying? Yes. It could be every page I try to go to. Maybe that will come with the next update.

With everything that gets downloaded and updated, it’s hard to know who or what is to blame for all this, but that’s the nature of technology. Stuff happens, you have no idea how or why, but if you’re willing to spend a great deal of time getting an extensive, expert background in computer programming, maybe you’ll be able to understand it one day. You’ll need an MBA too because you’ll also want to understand the convoluted thinking that went behind the business decision for some of the changes.

As I compose and post this I see that Wordpress also has a new update - version 2.5, I think. And they’d like me to update my blogs to it. Well, at least they are asking in a not too intrusive manner. But it seems to me I just updated recently and now they want me to update again.

Updates seem to have become the new Internet obsession. Perhaps someone could find an update for me, something that would revive my interest in the Web, because I am suffering from update fatigue.

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Very briefly: I’m learning to dislike them. A lot.

Actually, I’ve never cared for them a great deal. But what use to be ambivalence is now increasingly weighted to the negative side of things.

More about this spine-tingling issue later, when there is more time for ranting. (Can you say Windows?)

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