Being Mark Cohen

I had a discussion today about how many blogs that have been established have fallen into ruin.  We were also talking specifically about late-comer blogs launched by companies who wanted a dialogue with their customers, who discovered it was a tougher job than they had anticipated.  Some blogs go dry within a few weeks of launch.

Stagnation, and the proliferation of social media and social sites like Facebook and Twitter have apparently dealt the blogosphere a fatal blow.  This is evident in my Google Reader, where i used to have close to a thousand items every couple of nights I now have more like two to three hundred - and they are more concentrated in a few busy blogs.

I personally hope that blogging makes a comeback.  I miss the eloquently penned words of the many bloggers who are so much smarter than me, and I think the world’s a poorer place for their silence.  Some thoughts just don’t fit into 140 characters or less.  The depth of understanding and the colour that can be given through the craft of copywriting is not to be underestimated.

I for one will be waiting patiently and with a welcoming smile and an eager eye when you, the small-audience bloggers who took the citizen-journalism battle to the streets, decide to return.

Domain.com.au. the real estate portal owned and operated by Fairfax Media has released an iphone app today.  The app is really nicely put together and offers most of the same functionality as the website does.  It feels really quick to use and given their wealth of content it was fairly comprehensive in terms of listings in the areas I searched.

They’ve judiciously used iphone transitions and effects, they’ve used animations to make the app feel faster, all in all it’s a very handy app for those of us who are house-hunting.

Congrats to the guys at Domain, for yet again being the first to leverage a new technology amongst the major property portals.

Grab it here (itunes link).

I’m looking forward to subsequent releases when the app should gain maping and location functionality, and I’d love to see what they can do with APM’s data

I was in the market for a home theatre system, and since I’ve started working in the online retail space I’ve been way more willing to shop online.  I wasn’t looking for a spectacular setup given that my hearing is not exactly the best in the world and whatever I buy will be subjected to kids until it dies.  I discovered a reasonably priced LG setup that has wireless rear speakers, for sale on Big Brown Box - which is in a way a competitor to the business I work for.  I thought I’d post my experiences here in the hope of digesting them myself and maybe gaining some insight into the pros and cons of buying high commitment goods online.

My initial purchase was about two weeks ago.  Everything went through really smoothly, and I received a follow-up call from Big Brown Box the next day to verify the purchase and to advise that the goods would ship with a courier company who would be in touch shortly to arrange a delivery date.  When the courier company called, they couldn’t advise a time and so I had to make sure someone was home for a whole day to receive the delivery. 

The delivery arrived late last Friday and I immediately jumped in and set up the system.  I soon discovered that the unit was defective and the DVD and CD player did not work. I immediately jumped online to log a support ticket on their website and was very disappointed to find that the unit I had just received broken was now on sale for less than I paid.  Grrrr…

I was too late to get in touch with anyone that day and so was resigned to waiting for Tuesday morning to see if I was stuck with a dud.  Quite the contrary.  Early Tuesday morning I was contacted by someone from Customer Care at Big Brown Box, to advise me that they had arranged for a replacement unit to be sent out and for the couriers to collect the faulty unit.  I organised a pickup today, and this time was smart enough to organise with the couriers to pick up and deliver to my office location.  I got home, set up the unit and it’s all working perfectly.  Sounds great, and there are no wires running across my floors.

My afterthoughts are that the main negative points against buying online are

• The most intimidating part of buying online is not meeting the person or people I am dealing with.  
• There is a total absence of connection with the supplier, which means that I was left feeling fear when the unit was defective.  The only thing that an online business can do to counter that fear is convince me that they have excellent customer care, and then to follow through swiftly and completely should the need arise.  Kudos to Big Brown Box, and to their customer care in particular for doing just that.
• The couriers who do the deliveries for online retailers generally cannot advise a delivery time, making the logistics around deliveries and work commitments frustrating
• Not actually getting to touch and see the goods I was buying made me nervous.  I placed a heavy reliance on people’s reviews online and did a fair amount of googling looking into the product before committing to buy.  A known brand name really helped sway me even on a mid-range setup.  I was happier to pay slightly more for a name I trusted would have a valid warrantee. 

At the end of all this the question that needs answering: Would I buy from Big Brown Box again? Undoubtedly. Would I buy a product like this blindly, online again?  Logically I should say no.  But knowing myself, I’d say probably

There’s an old analogy about how to cook a frog that I first heard (as far as I can recall, only maybe correctly) when a mate of mine mentioned it at my previous work, quite a while ago.  It became a highly recycled story in it’s own right.  I’m going to breathe a little more life into it yet once more with a slightly different angle (with apologies in advance )

The story goes that if you put a frog in hot water, he’lll jump straight out.  But if you put him in warm water, he’ll relax and stay put.  Then you gradually apply more and more heat until the water is scalding hot.  Because the temperature increase is gradual the frog doesn’t jump out and before he knows it he’s cooked.

This analogy can be applied to change management with regard to the people it affects, and I recently had a couple of conversations which reminded me of this.  If one’s environment gradually moves away from where one would like it, it can often happen slowly enough to not cause any immediate alarm.  Until one day a person wakes up and discovers they are living with unmanageable stress that can take it’s toll in worse ways than just the day job component of life.

It’s worth asking yourself if the heat is pleasant or if it’s cooking you, and to reassess often.  If it’s cooking you (we’l take that as bad in this case), you have a few options.  You can try cool things down.  You can shout out for help.  You can get out the water for a break or forever.  Or you can cook.  

Ultimately each of us is responsible for looking after ourselves. And in my humble opinion if you plan on being useful for a long time, “cooking” is probably not the best of the options.

There’s a great story Stephen Covey used in Seven Habits, to explain paradigm shifts.  A US battleship (according to most legend and internet folklore it was the USS Missouri) was at sea, when the man on watch sighted lights ahead on a collision course.  The signal converation apparently went something like this:

U.S. Ship: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid collision. CDN reply: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision. 

U.S. Ship: This is the Captain of a U.S. Navy ship.  I say again, divert YOUR course. 

CDN reply: No.  I say again, you divert YOUR course. 

U.S. Ship: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS MISSOURI.  WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF 

THE US NAVY.  DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW! 

CDN reply: This is a lighthouse.  Your call. 

That instantaneous elucidation is a classic paradigm shift.  Sometimes it’s tough to see the shift though, especially if the sailor is too bogged down in trying to stay on the chosen course.  In those cases a change in perspective usually helps.  Step away.  Look from the other side.  stand on your head if you have to.  One thing I do believe - the smaller thinkers will refuse to see the paradigm shifts, and fail to see the potential that is revealed.  Small thinkers will obsess about trivial details and not see the big picture.  This is one of situations in which I would agree with Simon Baker when he suggests in a recent blog post that when someone resigns - accept it.  People who miss the proverbial boat (excuse me overstretching the analogy) deserve every chance to go find another one somewhere else.

All of three days old. And he already has more hair than me. He’s got
that real old-man look about him and I’m already impressed by his
burping skills. There’s something reinvigorating and revitalizing
about the arrival of a new family member.

So, I’ve been very quiet on the blog-front for a while.  This has been due to a lot of stuff happening, not nothing happening.  Also due to my prolific tweeting which has shown me that half the things I used to blog about could be said in 140 characters or less (How sad is that).  The “stuff” that’s been happening has seen me changing jobs and moving into a CIO role with a small tech team in one of the larger Australian online retail operations.  

It’s a fundamental paradigm shift for me.  Moving from an enterprise to a startup is an education in its own right.  Beyond that though, everything we do is on the LAMP stack, and unlike most of my more recent experience the website is not the whole business, it’s a gateway into a massive operation.  And I mean physically massive.  My eyes strain to make out the far side of the warehouse, that massive.  

The most dangerous thing at my old job used to be Ollie when he borrowed Brent’s scooter.  Now we have an OH&S policy that says we have to wear glow vests if we’re going downstairs into the warehouse, and the HR lady would prefer us to always wear steel tipped boots in case we get run over by a forklift.  This makes things exciting, gives things a salt-of-the-earth edge which I enjoy.  And seeing a real-world effect of website traffic is fulfilling in its own right.  Those clicks on web pages and fallout charts ultimately end with people in glow vests packing pink shrink-wrapped parcels into crates on palettes, which disappear on the backs of trucks and make their way to people’s homes.  Real-world stuff.

So here’s me, making a promise to myself that I will try and blog more, already half-suspecting I might let myself down.  But the half that might pay off is the dull nagging thought that Twitter is not my Twitter anymore, it’s been busy growing into something else.  But those thoughts I used to blog about - they’re still mine.

I’ve had a whole bunch of accounts with a few different shared hosting providers.  On a mate’s recommendation I headed over to Dreamhost and happened to do so on a day when they had a 92% discount promotion.  $15 AUD for a year of hosting seemed a reasonable gamble for a year’s hosting so I signed up.  Dreamhost really do rock.  Their signup is easy, their setup is easy, and so far the sites I have there are reliably up-and-running non-stop.  They offer multi-domain hosting on the one account, and I can see the speed difference on this blog when doing a full-refresh compared to the old host in terms of image load speed - and best of all the wierd characters I used to get in posts look like they’ve vanished.  So after a few months using Dreamhost I highly recommend them for wordpress (that’s really all my php) or rails hosting (I’m using Passenger).

I also upgraded my Wordpress installation because I was running a really old version.  While I was at it I added in a few new plugins.  Specifically, I want to mention WP Hashcash, the spam trapping plugin.  I had a half-dozen spam comments coming in every hour before, which were getting trapped by Akismet.  With WP Hashcash I’ve had three spam comments in a whole month, and they were trapped and queued in “Spam”.   I can’t stress the benefit enough, to site owners, hosts, and probably even for Akismet.  Pure Gold

@renailemay interviewed @stephenconroy and most poignantly pointed out the calamity of Fake Stephen Conroy being out of beer.  Oh, and out of a job too.  Funny how the fake Stephen Conroy, even when full of beer, makes so much more sense than the allegedly real one

Here’s the video:

 

Seems to me that the general lifecycle of a social media site goes “niche site -> organic growth -> critical mass -> boom growth -> marketers arrive -> metamorphosis -> maturity or fragmentation”

Twitter seems to be  arriving at the “metamorphosis” point.  Our favourite child of a social media site is growing up.  Every day I get a few followers who are marketers or some other form of people with something to sell.  I will admit to having been sucked into the “it’s not polite to NOT follow back” idea, and so my twitterstream is now quite polluted with a lot of crap.  But I’m unsubscribing a heap of them now.

My basic rules of thumb which I use to determine whether I’ll follow someone back are:

• The person is a person or a spectacularly interesting feed
• The person converses with their followers
• The person has at least half as many followers as they follow
• The person on average posts less than five things in an hour