“From my cold, dead hands…” It’s something that came to mind as I was thinking about writing this post. The part that doesn’t make sense about the Internet, today and perhaps since ever, is that American concept of “Freedom,” of independence and lack of governance.

In my post on piracy, my point was not complete. YES, historically, there has been a trend in every industry towards eliminating inefficiencies and yes, in some ways making things digital is just another step down that line, but NO, as @ksilvennoinen pointed out in the comments, digital goods do have a value greater than zero, the question is how to find a way to recuperate that value from customers.

To me value equals investment, but that is not the way pricing works. Unfortunately, I managed to misplace my pricing bible some months ago and can’t seem to recall most of the rules of pricing, but there is a strong psychological component to it. And the psychological part is what I am confused about. To get another book in here, it’s just like “Positioning: the battle for the mind,” if online goods are ‘positioned’ against a never-ending slew of free content, how do you position yourself to be priced at a value greater than zero?

On the one hand, it’s not so hard. You position yourself in such a way that a comparison does not make sense. Let’s take digital books, an area I actually don’t consider as threatened as publishers and media-outlets would like you to believe. The reason is that as soon as you download a digital book and view it on a PC, it immediately becomes an inferior product. Unlike a TV-show or movie, which I can frankly watch on a post-stamp (no matter what David Lynch says), reading and eyes work best together on either paper or e-paper (haven’t tried reading on the iPad, though I really like doing it on the iPhone). Of course the real threat to e-books in a PC environment is websites, but that’s a story for another day.

To get back to it, e-books work best in a dedicated reading environment, which immediately creates opportunities for platforms and putting walls around those. Platforms ensure that there is a network effect of content, walls ensure that there is no inter-leakage between the quality-controlled inside and the dark-waters-of-piracy outside. And that mechanism allows digital goods to be priced to recuperate investment and more. But…

Where it gets confusing again is how very open the Internet is. This openness allows you to create an app in a day, it also allows you to jailbreak an iPhone (now with US-gov. support), and it allows for me to get a movie that Chinese kid 107-xg46-*** released 5 minutes ago on the torrentZ. Amazon was built on this openness, as was OS X, as was pretty much anything that was stolen out of the Xerox labs 35 years ago. While there is a trend of eliminating barriers in general, it is even more prevalent on the Internet.

So, what I am asking myself here is the following questions:

• Is this 1969 again, where hippies roamed free, sex was consequence-less, and there is an Aids-epidemic on the horizon, which will make us go back to the 50s in terms of promiscuity?
• Are platforms doomed? I’m just talking platforms, not walls around them. Twitter is an example of an open platform.
• Are the walls around platforms doomed? So: iTunes & iOS-devices, Amazon & Kindles, Facebook & human relationships, every online retailer in the world…
• Is pricing digital goods a logical thing when taking into consideration how it is positioned against other digital goods?
• Should digital goods be free and prices be set for things that cannot be spread digitally: iOS devices, Kindles, Disk-media, other consumption-devices…
• And many more questions…

Getting back to value equals investment in my third paragraph. In any chain that leads from idea to the user, there are value points, which come from some kind of investment. In the embroidery example, a strong value point appears to be the creator. Without that person, there would be no creation. And, of course, there are plenty of examples on that. In the case of iPhone, strong value points are both the conceptualisation (R&D expenditure) and the production costs. In the case of Amazon, the website (presentation, distribution, etc.) is a strong value point. The end-product can still be digital, as it is in the case of the embroiderer’s designs, the iPhone apps, and the Kinde-ebooks, but the investment in certain parts of the chain is very much real.

And the value to consumers, which the crux of the matter, is equally real. If I compare 2010 to 1995, we live in the era of digital convenience. From e-banking, to restaurant-reviews, to TV-shows, to software, we undeniably live in a better world, but one where, ironically, we are less willing to spend as much on it. But there is another side to this as well. Let’s say, everything that exists is walled off. You’d have to pay to get access to every blog-post, to every youtube-video, to everything else that is already being charged for. I would sincerely start to question whether it was all worth it.

The Internet continues to be confusing to me, part shopping bonanza, part free-for-all utopia. Writing this has brought a little clarity, but if you have stuff to add that clears it up even more, please feel free to share it in a comment.

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I’m bearish on blogging and have been so publicly since the publication of the Techmeme 100. The “problem” (more of a natural phenomenon really) is as follows: in order to compete in today’s ‘blogosphere,’ you need a high volume of news being published. What this means for a blog: you need to do a lot of writing, which means a ton of research (sometimes), a ton of time, and a ton of output.

You’ll need to have multiple people on the team to hit the magic timeframe of where people in your market (usually the US one) read news. You need to pay these people somehow. This already represents a barrier to blogging on a professional level, as to pay people you need traffic and to get traffic you sometimes need to do things that are out of your ethical sphere. Gizmodo’s questionable appropriation of the next iPhone comes to mind.

It comes down to being newsworthy. Gizmodo’s actions are nothing new to media, as news usually comes from 3 sources:

• good research, leading to original IP
• copy-pasting other stories (hopefully combined with some value-adding research)
• wallet-based reporting—you pay sources for original IP.

As mentioned, this is nothing new and what the Techmeme leader-board made clear was that the leading blogs are actually no longer “blogs,” they are digital newspapers. And, I assume, because blogging still has this cool ring of independent news reporting to it, those sites decided to keep the title.

So what does that mean for an up-and-coming website? Take TheNextWeb, which I’ve been aware of since the days of Friendfeed—Zee, the editorial director of the site, had a very high-profile presence on FriendFeed (incidentally, it makes for an interesting case study of how early adopters on social networks can rise to the top and use that to leverage their relevance in other areas) and it was interesting to see how they went about making their site a significant news source. And, sadly (but perhaps realistically), their strategy at the beginning appears to have been to simply report the same news that others have been reporting. This year, there was of course the TheNextWeb conference, which made some headlines and which perhaps means that there will be a shift in strategy of news reporting by the site.

I think that, bearing the economics of news reporting in mind, which largely depend on producing large quantities of timely news, copy-pasting news is a realistic approach towards growing a blog to professionalism. On the other hand, it represents a big problem. Back when my Twitter-feed followed Techcrunch, TheNextWeb, and some other tech-blogs, I was bombarded by the SAME news coming from different sites within 20 tweets. It got so annoying that I complained to e.g. Zee at TNW, and I finally ended up unsubscribing from any newsblog on Twitter, instead subscribing to their newsfeed via RSS, which is more manageable.

It sounds like a cliche, but we live in a highly transparent real-time web. Every online news source is trying to profile itself as the most relevant and they do so by trying to be quickest, loudest, but not necessarily by being the most unique. It’s easy to copy news, because there are no pay-walls to prevent this from happening. The problem is how this affects people, and as a consequence other blogs (I’m a firm believer in survival of the fittest, so in principle blogs that do not make it simply do so because the nature of the blogosphere is pushing them out).

I think that people react to the bombardment of news in a way that they prefer to stick to a few sites that give them enough news to be informed (this is ignoring aggregators like Digg and YCombinator, which adds another layer of complexity). Ultimately there will only be a few professional blogs serving news for a given industry (arguably, there already are just a few relevant ones with many, many irrelevant ones), and they will benefit from network effects for both access to news, access to advertisers, and access to other factors.

To answer my question of “Is “Great artists steal” still a good mantra for Blogging?”, it is a great startup strategy, which leads to more visitors, more advertising revenue, better research/writing, and ultimately (HOPEFULLY!) a better blog. But it requires a shifting of ethics that usually comes with running a business. Instead of serving your own interest as a writer / creator, you serve business interests of generating traffic which ultimately leads to a better quality blog (again hopefully), but not without its compromises.

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A part in the series of just writing out an idea and rambling on it on this blog.

One of the core architectural big ideas of the web is that each resource, or web page has an URL or a link, and other pages can link to them. However, in the “social media” reiteration, these links are called “permalinks” in a strange doublespeak way as the ordinary Web 0.1 links were meant to be permanent as well and, instead, “link rot” seems to be more prevalent as ever with short-url services and other strange URL schemes.

I am of the opinion that we make a great injustice to discussion on the web by calling those things that hang on the bottom of web pages (and hence do have URLs) “comments” and, as non-entities of the web, only rarely have URLs of their own (even of the hash-variety). This is the second injustice. It is often that in these “comments” there are real gems, but you can’t refer to them with any direct link.

The worst offender, unsurprisingly, is Facebook, which from a cultural-historical viewpoint is going to be a huge black hole. It is in a stark constrat to Twitter, where each tweet has an URL. There are many social “objects” on Facebook that are completely inactionable and this is completely against the very nature of the Web. Technically, with stuff like Activity Streams, it’s possible to “like” a “like” and so on, but this isn’t possible from most social network tools’ user interface.

From the Web point of view, having URL for each tweet might be one reason why Twitter is gaining more steam and Facebook is struggling. Twitter is actively becoming a part of the Web, while Facebook is actively trying to turn the Web into Facebook (see Open Graph and Wikipedia-entry Pages) – this walled garden -strategy has always failed on the web, but it hasn’t stopped businesses from trying.

My thinking might be biased because I’m a firm believer in the open web and the idea that the web promotes openness and sharing of ideas, but not in the way Facebook has recently tried to open its users’ identities and “life streams” to the world. I believe the web is a great platform for collaboration and it’s a shame that while (as Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out) there is no shortage of URLs, we don’t give them out to all objects that live on the web.

However, the one exception that I’m willing to make are YouTube comments, which in number exceed the amount of information (with a loose definition of “information) in the library of Alexandria, but loss of which absolutely no-one would cry over.

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I think a value should always be weighed against the value of not having it, particularly when it’s hard to put a numerical value on something. This something is clearly Facebook and even more clearly Twitter, which still doesn’t compute for 100%. Why I love Twitter would be like saying why I love my dog or my Bengalese tiger, it’s hard to place a value on love. Not to say that I love Twitter, but there are few things that bother me about it. I tolerate it and it has nestled in a comfortable (but small) place in my life.

There are again ramblings against the status quo, or rather the status pecunia—the status of wealth. A few years ago, it was Twitter which seemed to show the Fail Whale more often then the “what are you doing now?” page. It lead to Friendfeed and various other me-too services that were dropped as soon as Twitter got its act together. There are again ramblings about evicting Facebook from people’s lives, though I’m here to tell you that if you want to have any kind of social life online, you’re probably better of keeping that account, though perhaps with less naked pictures or whatever you are worried about losing.

The value of Facebook is that it allows for richer connections between people that do not see each other every day. I care for my high-school friends that live in the UK, France, or Brazil, but since I can’t see them everyday, it adds value to my life to know that they are getting a kid or getting married. It does not add value to my life if people choose to leave Facebook, like some of my friends did at first when they were overwhelmed by all this publicity (something blogging prepares you for). And I’m really glad Facebook doesn’t delete accounts permanently as when people change their mind (they usually do), their friends are again there waiting for them (life is too exhausting to be-/de-/re-friend friends like most of the internet forces you to do).

The value of Twitter is like that morning coffee that adds a little (but not everything) to the quality of the moment you’re experiencing. No, NO, let’s not equate the value like that. The biggest value of Twitter to me is actually pretty much the same one as Facebook’s. I met up with a friend in Denmark a few weeks ago, who is also on Twitter, and I was able to finish his sentences because I read about his experiences ON Twitter. To me Twitter is more like a Second Life than Secondlife(tm) is. It allows for quick streams about people you care about or you “follow” because you respect them. If I had intelligent displays running Twitter on my sunglasses, I would wear them all the time while walking through life, that is how second life Twitter has become to (some of) my relationships. My business partner is going to China this week and I would love for him to update his Twitter-account while there to keep me informed of the cool stuff he’s researching for us (mobile operators better start catching up to this dynamic).

So, what, WHAT, could possibly be the value of Neither? Such a leading way to pose that question, as I’m clearly not on that side of the fence. I’m sorry that many of my friends decide against Twitter accounts because they don’t see the value of it. Those are usually the people that I see once every 6 months and our conversations are less deep because, well, we still have to get through the superficiality of “how was your day? What are you up to?” Questions that Twitter & Facebook both ask. And I’m sorry if my friends decide not to use Facebook as it not only allows them to post their thoughts, but pictures of their Bengalese tigers or their latest trip to hell, and even status updates about Farmville, which I previously stated, was an imperfect way of showing of your virtual garden to your friends.

The value of Neither is a type of emptiness that may be good for meditation, but it is no longer how the world works. It’s like seeing my parents struggle with emails or internet banking when no one sends snailmail or goes to a physical bank anymore. The world without Facebook or Twitter no longer exists. I don’t care about privacy issue 1 or 0, because it’s really your business what you put on the internet and what you don’t and you should never put stuff on there that you don’t want people to know about. I care about connections and about the empowerment that they bring to interpersonal relationships.

I have met 80 people on Facebook that I never expected to see again after graduating from high school, from university, or from leaving the coolest job I had as a tween. I am so grateful to the site for that that if Zuck were here, I could kiss him. Facebook isn’t perfect, and we should protest against these imperfections until they are fixed. Whether we should leave social networks and abandon all the possibilities they have brought us, that is like starving yourself in protest against war: Nobody cares!

This post was brought to you by TigersInPoolsHellYES. Donate via the paypal button on the right.

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I was attending a LAN gaming session (aka. real “social gaming”) with a group of friends a while ago. Last time, we spent a lot of time installing (and updating) games and trying to get computers to find each other and I had to borrow someone else’s computer. This time, we were quickly up and running and I could proudly play on my MacBook Pro.

Sure, I had installed Windows 7 using Bootcamp on my Mac, because while VMware Fusion was okay for Tales of Monkey Island and even Torchlight, it just doesn’t cut it for hardcore gaming. The only game that I had any problems running over Bootcamp was, oddly enough, Postal 2. Otherwise, I was equal among my PC using peers. I had dreamed about this day.

But what really made things easy for all of us was Valve’s Steam, a gaming portal/service.

The iTunes model strikes again.

Steam ...for the rest of us

We have passed a long time the point where new games are automatically better than older just due to technological improvements. We were still playing games we played over 3 years ago, and some of them were “old” even by then, like Unreal Tournament 2004. The reasons for this are Windows XP and DirectX. These two technologies have enabled a decade of games that are still playable almost without any emulation. The biggest change is happening right now with multicore and 64bit CPUs.

What Steam has done is basically something that other forms of entertainment could learn a lot about, if they could get over their stone age business logic and hunting down their customers. PC game piracy has always been a problem and one reason why PC gaming today seems to be an afterthought to console gaming. Steam (and other similar services, like Impulse) mostly eliminates the piracy problem with a central authorization structure, but yet provides added value to the customer. You only need to install Steam on any computer and log in and you have access to all your games (provided that you have the bandwidth to download the over 2 GB that most games today use). This is something that isn’t possible with iTunes and only recently was possible with Spotify.

What really sets Steam apart here from other entertainment industry offerings is actual value for users. What Steam has done, is really catch the long tail of ecommerce, even though the concept of long tail has long since gone out of fashion. By being able to sell couple of years old games that are virtually impossible to find anywhere (legally) and for a fraction of the price is just amazing. I was able to buy Psychonauts, the most amazing game ever, for just 2 euros and even at the normal price of 9,99 euros it’s 1/4th of what it did cost on the shelves (and it still costs around 15 euros on Amazon). After the Steam’s holiday sales during Christmas, I found out that I had bought many games, mostly because the price was right.

Other benefits from using Steam is that all your games are automatically updated and even for some games, your progress and settings are saved in the “Steam Cloud” – allowing you to play seamlessly on multiple computers.

But there aren’t any games for Mac

The year 2010 turned to be a pleasant surprise for gamers, especially for those, like me, who have switched to Mac. First, Telltale Games announced that their games would be available for Mac as well. This was excellent news for all Sam & Max and Monkey Island fans who would no longer need to boot up VMware Fusion.

And, sure, there have always been Civilization IV and The Sims 3 for Mac, but having new, native games for Mac was excellent news. Clearly a certain threshold has been breached and the amount of gamers living in self-denial on Mac is now large enough that the market is suddenly viable.

Nothing could have prepared us, the people who still reflexively keep our left fingers on WASD and use multi-button mice, for the announcement from Valve that both Steam and Valve’s game engine Source would be available for Mac.

Now, I don’t see that this will mean that soon Mac OS X would be equal gaming platform with Windows, but it does warm my heart. I know that I still need to boot to Windows to really enjoy gaming. The reason Telltale and Valve have been able to pull this out is based on their choices to use cross-platform frameworks (like OpenGL) instead of Windows-only technologies like DirectX. You also need to keep in mind that both Telltale and Valve seem to have target audiences that use Macs and have both targeted certain niches, the former makes high quality “casual” adventure games and the latter high quality first person shooters for more “hardcore” crowd. It is unlikely that other game developers or publishers will follow suit. For a true revolution, Microsoft would need to not only port DirectX to Mac OS X but also develop it at same pace with Windows. Looking at Microsoft’s track record with Mac software, this is even less likely than playing Left 4 Dead natively on Mac looked a couple of months ago. The more likely scenario is that as hardware gets faster and emulating a graphics card gets more efficient, running even the most recent 3D games in VMware Fusion starts to be feasible. A possible scenario is also that through technologies like OpenCL, PC games aren’t as dependent on GPUs and DirectX as they are today.

On the other hand, this shows how Apple’s decision to invest in cross-platform frameworks like OpenGL, OpenCL and WebKit can really pay off in the long term. It also shows that being nice and having something like Bootcamp can be an advantage. I was really surprised how easily I could install Windows 7 on my Mac and how Apple had provided drivers for everything.

What Steam proves is that to succeed on the internet, you really need to be familiar with your customers and understand their needs and truly deliver superior experience and added value to them. This is nothing new, but somehow the rest of the entertainment industry seems to think that they can still get away with last century tactics.

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Dear everyone,

I am extremely happy to start off this new year by introducing a fresh face on Tech IT Easy, Anand Kishore Raju, who will be blogging with us in 2010. His main areas of focus as a blogger will be greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0.

Anand is currently working as a Research Engineer at Telecom ParisTech (ENST). His area of research focuses on the Energy aspects of the Internet, what the scientific community calls “Green Networking”. His efforts are directed towards making Computer Network Science aware that processing, moving and storing bits has a cost in terms of energy and in terms of the Carbon Emission Footprint.

In the past, Anand had also worked at Collaborative Systems Group (ColSys) at Bilkent University, Turkey, where he developed a taxonomy for user properties, influence factors for feedback quality in web 2.0, existing and novel models for deviation types and their detection. He also holds a degree in Computer Science and Engineering and aspires to join HEC in near future.

Anand joins a smart team of collaborators, some of which also work in green computing and many of which share an interest in this important topic for sure. As such, please join us in welcoming Anand to the team and I hope you enjoy reading his words on Tech IT Easy!

Happy New Year,

The Tech IT Easy team

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Recently another round of discussion has started on the web about how RSS  is riding to the sunset. I think there is some irony that most of us were alerted to these posts either from our feed reader or other aggregation site like Techmeme.

Your newspaper doesn't show unread count, so why does your feed reader?

This time the debate originate from a blog post at ZDNet. And I think that as long as the title of the post was that RSS readers are becoming meaningless, the post makes some sense. And it’s true, there’s not much innovation in RSS readers these days and some of the design mistakes were listed here. The idea that a user imports a RSS document and reads just it, that’s dead. We’re still far from what’s possible when computers work on feeds.

Another thing this means is that as feeds become more and more part of the web’s infrastructure (see for example Google’s GData), it’s not really interesting for end-users. This in turn means that there just isn’t any money in it. For certain websites, this of course equals to that tech being dead.

One of the blunders in feeds was the dichotomy between RSS and Atom standards. While the former is used today as an umbrella term for feeds in general, it’s really, really inferior to the latter. The problem with Atom is that it came late to the game and while it can be as simple as RSS, but it can also be used for many other things than just blog posts and most RSS readers couldn’t be bothered. This is why the RSS format is dead in the water. The Atom format is much more flexible and is used in many other ways than just one-way polling (see above-mentioned GData for example).

Feeds are here to stay, they are not Web 1.0 stuff, but an integral part of Web 3.0. They just can be so much more than “seeing what’s new”. A site like Techmeme could not exist without feeds. It’s just that we haven’t unlocked the potential. It’s not sexy and it might negatively affect web ad revenues. This is why I think Techmeme shines, just like Friendfeed; they follow the “River of news” approach to new items that was proposed early on. Other readers, like most desktop apps and Google Reader, put new items into an inbox, pretending that each new item has an equal value to us.

Feeds are really immature technology, we’re still unsure about formats and how to consume feeds. And, on top of it all, how could we use this technology the improve the experience of having a discussion on the web. I propose we take a look to ancient computer history.

Before the Internet, on the dial-up BBS services it was a common due to the call costs to download all the new discussions on that box’s forums to your “offline reader” and disconnect. One could then peacefully go through and answer to any threads that were interesting and upload these back to the BBS. But it wasn’t limited to just one board, an offline reader was one inbox for all your discussion on all your BBS boxes. The Usenet newsgroups could be “consumed” using a similar logic. But, today, as Diaz says, our “sources of for reading material are scattered across the Web” and this approach doesn’t work right now. But it could in the future.

I’m not sure that we can stop and concentrate on discussion anymore, because Facebook and Twitter have made “discussions” move so quickly that concentrating on just one is impossible. But if we could go back to those more peaceful times, I’d like to have these “offline readers” back. Of course, they wouldn’t need to be offline today, but real-time.

Discussion on the web is not in good health. It’s scattered and disjointed. I’m not calling for a centralized solution, I’m looking for a standardized solution – something that’s already possible with Atom. We subscribe to blog posts, but we don’t subscribe to the comments. It’s a hassle even if the blog you read happens to use WordPress’ e-mail subscriptions or Disqus, Intense Debate or some other solution.

There are some major obstacles, one of them being that the income of sites are tied to ad impressions. The other huge problem is that we need to lay down the infrastructure first. Pretty much all sites support the one-way RSS today, but only a handful support Atom Publishing Protocol (which is a different thing from the simple feed itself). Also, none of the forum software, as far as I know, support anything like this. Instead of using the web interface, it would be possible to access the discussions using another, more suitable interface. Most of blogging tools are APP aware, though.

We don’t listen to music by going to individual bands’ websites, we have collected our music to a single source (be it iTunes, Spotify, Winamp or something else). I don’t know about Google Reader’s long term roadmap, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something like participating to comments is there. Yes, you can “like”, “share” and “comment” the posts there, just like in Friendfeed et al., but you can’t participate to the discussion on the original site.

We can rebuild discussions on the web. We have the technology.

Image by FastIcon.com

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We’re all stupid busy and it sucks. Tech IT Easy was started under the guise of studenthood which does not in any real way reflect “professionalhood.” 10-hour days are not uncommon in my line of work and it doesn’t leave much space for reflection–the real currency of writing.

So here’s what I propose.

1. form a group of tech/business enthousiasts (aka regular readers)
2. find a platform (e.g. mail, but I also favour the private wiki where texts can be shared privately and easily edited)
3. share ideas for blog posts and drafts and discuss those internally
4. release, not often, but qualitatively good pieces on technology / business / etc.

Why do I call this the Paul Graham model. Take a look at his essays. Under some of them (e.g. the Ramen profitasble essay), there’s a thank you to people that helped him edit the piece.

I’d like to hear your thoughts. If you’re interested in collaborating, either publicly or anonymously, and/or happen to know a good platform to do this on, leave a comment or send us a mail.

Thanks,
Vincent

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NY Times writes that teens don’t dominate the Twitter-sphere, thus proving that kids don’t always drive innovation.

I’m not going to go into what sad individuals do like Twitter (small gulp), but I am pretty certain that teens are major drivers in terms of Facebook or Myspace (as, from personal experience, I don’t really see teens stopping being teens until their 21, I classify most undergraduate university students as teens also).

The major driver in teen-life is not exposure. It is in fact privacy. For every teen version of Paris Hilton in highschool, ca. 20 students in fact feel uncomfortable about all this exposure. It’s a hormonal thing and I don’t think technology change can change biological factors, at least not for a very long time.

Just my 2 cents, derived mostly from growing up in a large family. Feel free to disagree, but I think privacy is a much better marketing strategy for teens than “let’s expose everything.”

Vincent

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This is a message just regarding the state of affairs for Vincent van Wylick and no one else.

On my last blog, on food & retail, I ended with a conclusion as I don’t like long silences and having people guess what’s going on.

The short answer to that is that I will be taking an extended leave of writing for Tech IT Easy as I currently have other professional and private matters to focus on. My definition of extended leave is not that I will no longer write, just that I will write when there’s time and inspiration, but no longer on a daily schedule.

I still very much love to put my thoughts to paper, so expect a post whenever the mood hits me. For the rest, I don’t speak for anyone else on Tech IT Easy, all of whom are busy as well, and I sincerely hope that they too will find it within themselves to keep you (and me) updated on their thought progression when they find the time.

Vincent out

I’d say, thanks for all the fish, but instead I’ll leave you with the most amazing video of fish I’ve ever seen.

Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world – (song is Please don’t go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

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I hate breaks in anything I do, blogging, work, sports, love, etc., because it’s always harder to return back into the zone. Similarly, I already knew subconsciously that it would be hard to return back to blogging after the proposed hiatus. Routines are good and when they are moved aside, they get replaced by something else.

The human body is a machine and everything, from hours in the day, to food and exercise, to making money, to relationships, are all pieces in the machine of life. There’s only so many hours in the day is a well-familiar phrase to most of us and reflects the difficulty in balancing different activities and responsibilities, with some just falling off the map.

I am not saying that I plan to stop blogging, but I do think that we all need to make choices in our lives which will affect other, previous ones, like domino blocks.

Dynamics…

I just bookmarked a blog post on delicious on forming sales teams in a startup. It’s a good one and you should all read it. As I tagged and bookmarked however, I immediately thought, hey, I’m pretty sure no one on my company will read it. Why? Maybe because we already figured it out… Maybe because we figure stuff out as we are doing it… Your choice.

Blogging or any kind of writing for public purposes brings several complications to business people:

• it is public knowledge, meaning that the competitive advantages are slim: I don’t think this is a major factor, as most innovations are combinations of different ingredients that may or may not be public knowledge. Great artists steal, as they say.
• Writing is processed explicit knowledge from something that was previously implicit and needs to be made implicit again by the reader for it to be useful in a practical context: I’ve written about the knowledge-generating company and the knowledge spiral twice before. Another phrase, “You can’t help yourself, because your *self* sucks!” also comes to mind.

It’s the latter that represents the greatest challenge to authors and consumers of their work. I’ve also previously written about the benefit of formal education, which, I think, tries to recreate the knowledge spiral, turning explicit knowledge into the implicit kind, to be used by students in their work later on.

The dynamics of business is that there are expenses—YOU, the team, the office, etc.—which need to be recuperated by your work—the work you do for customers, after which they pay you. It leaves very little time for reflection, e.g. through blogging, etc., and for making things explicit, e.g. through blogging, etc.

I’m still a big fan of Michael Gerber’s E-myth revisited, which is really about writing that franchise manual for your business, so you can both understand the processes happening in your company, and expand on those, by more easily passing on knowledge. It’s Taylorism, of course, or Scientific Management, or any of the other management methodologies that followed in the past century.

But these activities require time, time which people inside organisations usually do not have, and hence prefer to outsource to outside consultants, who then need to make their knowledge explicit and again implicit in the minds and methods of their clients’ organisation.

It’s a real nightmare for people (like me) who think to much and always aim for something higher. And who want to blog. And who want to do good business…

Thoughts?
Vincent

(Picture courtesy of Fisica & Psychica)

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Comments on this blog? No, not many, and I know I’m not alone either. Another blogger thought that the main casualty of Twitter isn’t blogging, but actually commenting. We alluded to something similar a few years ago, when Kari and me both wrote blog posts on where the conversation was going. Ironically, back then, we did get comments, but my conclusion was that comments were moving towards more specialised platforms, like Digg, Slashdot, and now Friendfeed, and maybe Twitter.

Back when I followed 300 people on Twitter you couldn’t pay me enough to read my Twitter-stream. I called it trying to drink from a waterfall several times and you all know what happens when you drink from a waterfall: you fall in!

No, the only way I read Twitter content and pretty much the best way to catch my attention these days is to @vincentvw me, just because I have an rss-feed just for that.

The traditional, “writing for success” way? Write a compelling title. But that has back-fired on me as a reader more than once. You can also write posts to p*ss off people, which is pretty effective, but leads to stuff like death threats.

I like the idea of pinging someone personally, à la the Twitter reply, much more. What I would like is something as follows:

A system that gives people the option to register with their names, contact-details, and interests (in the form of tags, maybe). And when, and only when, that particular interest is being written about, then you get pinged.

I guess you could already do this with some fancy Google tracking or just by subscribing to a tag-based rss-feed (Delicious allows for this, not sure about other platforms). But I see this as a great way for blogs to become relevant once more. It would also force bloggers to connect more with their readers’ interests and perhaps lead to a stronger community feel.

What do you think?

Vincent
(Picture, called “Emptiness is form,” is courtesy of Scott Snibbe.)

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I once asked a friend how one of my clients should improve their sales technique for a technical product, knowing that his company is very successful at what it does. He, himself a “sales engineer” (i.e. a technical sales guy), found the question very difficult to answer.

I had to reshape the question to “so, how do you guys sell your technical products?” And then he was able, with full vigour, to tell me how they do it. It should be mentioned that market plays a strong role here; my friend works in a very niche business, while my client suffers from powerful competition.

I’m starting to loose my naiveté, as far as crowd-sourcing is concerned. This easy-to-communicate world we live in, sometimes makes me forget that, just because we can ask, doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. Technology may have changed, but people’s brains, psychology, and business principles have not, at least not at that rate.

My general stance these days is that, no matter what context you talk in with people, you should always assume a complete lack of imagination. Instead, by either spelling it out, or better, by asking the best interview-question in the world “tell me about YOU!,” and then extracting what you need from that, is much more effective.

It’s as Jeremy advised me to blog when I started here, Keep It Simple & Stupid (K.I.S.S.). Even though I have ignored that lesson at times, it’s a good one to follow in this all-too-unsimple world.

Apart from crowd-sourcing, the same, incidentally, applies to:

• selling people stuff: spell them out exactly how your product/service benefits them!
• applying for a job: spell them out exactly how you will make them money!
• and everything else.

Want to make the world a better place? K.I.S.S. it!

Vincent

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I don’t know if anyone of you caught the CNN+Facebook stunt two days ago, where the, I guess burial (?) of Micheal Jackson was shown live on CNN.com, next to a stream of Facebook status updates on the same screen. If I say “Micheal, we LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went. The CNN-part was beautiful, don’t get me wrong, Stevie Wonder was singing and he rocked. But somehow those two, Social Media with Old Media, didn’t seem to mix at all.

In the Netherlands, when I grew up, we had a TV-station, called The Box (later bought up by MTV, which now has a Music-TV-monopoly in the Netherlands), which allowed people to sms in and request songs. That later evolved to a system, that still exists, I think, of sending messages via sms to the channel, which would play while a song was playing. If I say “Dutch boy or girl, I LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went.

I can see the attraction. It must be incredibly addictive to try and get your message on the air, to get your 140 characters of fame. And it felt exactly the same with the Facebook+CNN thing, where it seemed more like Facebookers were competing for air-time with themselves and with the unforgiving flow of the live-video station.

As a TV-sceptic—I’ve stopped owning a TV as an adult, and switched to the more geeky (I know…) XBMCs and the internet—I would be more than happy to see this medium go, but I also understand that this 79 year old tradition of sitting absolutely still with a TV-dinner will not go without a fight. The Micheal Jackson + TMZ scoop aside, Big Media still has a higher budget to be quicker and (maybe!) more relevant than small & new Media alternatives are.

Is the Internet the direction to take, however? I think I just made a case that the, still addictive quality of a few seconds of fame (Twitter is the perfect example that we haven’t evolved passed that yet), makes for a somewhat effective marketing strategy for Big Media.

I think that TV is also relentless and monotonous. It does not allow you to switch contexts, it’s a non-stop flow of information, and it doesn’t care about making you waste 15 min. of each hour with senseless advertising. In that sense, it is the complete anti-thesis of the Internet, which has already delivered on the promise of complete user-control (compared to the Old status quo, at least). TV doesn’t care about you, except for your continued presence in front of the tube, and while Internet companies really want the same, we at least have found ways to get around that.

In that sense, I think that anyone with some sense of wanting to keep control over their own life, will continue to turn away from TV. I like watching it, don’t get me wrong, but on my own time and without commercials. The future of Television will either to stay unchanged, reserved for the traditional folk too tired to want to think / interact, or it will be a mash-up of video (e.g. I have 3 min. to waste, I want Stevie Wonder only, without the MJ burial thanks, and on my watch television.)

End musing.
Vincent (can’t stop signing my name, sorry, (my) blogging feels more like writing a letter than anything else.)

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Like some of you might know or notice, we recently moved from WordPress.com’s blog hosting to our self-hosted version (for hardcore fans, this is the second time this blog has moved). As good web citizens, we here at Tech IT Easy believe in sharing information, so here’s how we did our migration.

Moving over the WordPress content

There are couple of issues we hit during the migration, and might be good to know for anyone who plans to do the same. Many Google searches were used and multiple blog posts were read in order for our migration to happen, so hopefully this summary makes it easier for future generations…

Preparing for the migration

Our blog had its own domain name already on WP, so one thing to keep in mind is that you need to update the nameserver records from wordpress’s to whoever you’re planning to host your site. However, this is the last thing you will do. Just make sure you have access (or you know how to contact the right guy) to change the  nameservers.

Install WordPress

Next, install WordPress on your new host. For example, we initially installed it at techiteasy.webfactional.com. Many hosts allow you to do 1-click style of installs with takes much of the pain away.

Copy the settings over from your wordpress.com blog as well as you can to your new. Make sure you keep the same permalink structure. Do set your blog URLs to your temporary URL instead (in our case, techiteasy.webfactional.com).

Don’t get fancy just yet, but just go with the admin account. We’ll get to user accounts later.

Install plug-ins and themes

Another thing to note when hosting your own blog is that you’re now responsible for security issues in your blog. This means that there are couple of plug-ins you’ll need to install. If you allow user-registrations, you really need the WP-reCAPTCHA -plugin. Also remember to set-up the Akismet-plugin with your WordPress.com user account API code.

On some hosts WordPress’s normal way of sending e-mail doesn’t work (like at our webhost, Webfaction) and you need to install Configure SMTP-plugin instead. Also, if you want to keep your experience similar to what you had at WP.com, be sure to install WordPress.com Stats and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Some other plugins you might want to consider are Google Analyticator (If you’re into Google Analytics), Google XML Sitemaps and WP Super Cache.

Back-up WordPress.com

First of all, do a backup of your blog at wordpress.com. Don’t worry about images or other content, they’ll join your post texts when you’ll import the backup to your new blog later.

It probably goes without saying that all content that arrives to your blog after this point isn’t in the backup, so you might want to do this when it’s quiet in your blog and afterwards remember to manually add all the “missed” content.

Import backup

Our back-up file was about 12 megs in size, which turned out to be a problem because you need to upload the backup using WordPress’s web admin panel. Some web hosts will allow you to override PHP’s maximum file upload and script execution times (default is 2 MB), but some don’t (In WordPress’s Restore page you’ll see what is the effective limit). Even though we did increase both limits, uploading the 12 MB backup didn’t work. At this point I did wonder what use is a back-up you can’t restore.

Your best (and almost only) way to work-around this is to split the XML file into smaller chunks. You need to retain the headers and footers in each chunk, but otherwise it’s quite straight-forward.

You probably want to change to the new site pretty quickly after importing, so you might want to do some of the tune-ups mentioned here only later. What you really should do now is  to now check that the URLs you care about look the same in your new site as they do in the old one (fe. www.techiteasy.org/2008/09/01/random-post and techiteasy.webfactional.com/2008/09/01/random-post).

Fix user accounts

At least for us, user accounts did not transfer smoothly over. First of all, the usernames are wrong and you probably can’t login with them. On top of that, your author links are probably screwed on the new blog. To fix these, you need to do some SQL to fix the entries in database. This isn’t a clean solution, but so far seems to have worked for us.

The easiest way is to create a new account with the same username you have at WP.com and then transfer all the “old” account’s posts to you (and then delete that old account). This takes care of the author URL’s to remain same as previously.You can transfer the posts to your new account by noting your new and old account IDs in the wp_users table and then doing UPDATE wp_posts SET post_author = <your new account ID> WHERE post_author = <your old account ID>. You can check from WP’s admin panel that your new account should have all your posts and the old account should have zero. You can now delete the old account.

If you want to have another username, you need to change the user_nicename field in wp_users table to your WP.com username, if you want to keep your author URLs.

We also had some problems with duplicate and non-working categories, but for most part those are easy to fix using the WP admin panel (except for the categories that show up as numbers, no idea where they came from).

Change nameservers

Image search gave this for "nameservers", but changing them isn't as hardcore or cool. Beards are recommended, though.

Once you change your domain’s nameservers to your new host, it can take some hours before DNS caches around the intertubes get updated. In the meantime strange things can happen and people might end up at different places or your blog might be unreachable. Also, if you take advantage of WordPress.com’s Gmail integration, remember to copy over those DNS entries too. (We didn’t, so no idea how that is done.)

Now is the time to go to your new blog’s settings and change the blog URLs to the “real” ones (in our case, from techiteasy.webfactional.com to www.techiteasy.org).

You might want to use something like IntoDNS to check the status of your DNS entries and that they’re working.

Once this is all clear, you might want to use Google’s webmaster tools to see if there are any problems with your site. You can do this earlier, but you need to verify the domain to access all the stuff (and you can’t verify it while on WP.com).

This is also a good point to send e-mails to other authors of your blog of all the changes you’ve done (Sorry, guys) and that they might need to create new accounts.

One nice side effect is that people who access your blog’s ancient address (yourblog.wordpress.com) are redirected to your new place as long as you’ve subscribed to WP’s own domain thing. This also goes for RSS feeds. However, it’s a bit troublesome trying to access your old blog’s admin panel anymore at WP.com, because even that tries to redirect to the new one. Once you get there, though, you might want to write an entry explaining that the site has moved for the time when your domain add-on runs out at WP.com.

Conclusion

And that’s pretty much that. Now what you need to do is to keep on cranking out blog posts.

Maintaining your blog on your own does add a bunch of overhead. You need to make sure your setup is up-to-date and secure. On the other hand, you have complete freedom to tweak every aspect of your blog. For us, the benefits of latter were big enough to do the change. If this had been my personal blog, I wouldn’t have bothered.

The migration is far from simple and there are lots of things that can go wrong, so do set a good amount of time to do the migration (fe. a weekend). Basically as long as you don’t update nameservers, you have a nice test environment where to test out different aspects of your new and shiny blog. The only problem is syncing the content (including comments) between your “live” and test sites.

So far, I’ve been very pleased by the set-up Webfaction has and do recommend them. Full SSH and their custom domain/app/site panel are excellent. It beats hands down many of the other hosts that I’ve used so far. Even though with the latest WordPress that doesn’t mean so much because you don’t have any reason to dig into the system with FTP or SSH because everything is available from the web interface.

Photos by Bethany L King (CC BY-ND 2.0) and rangerdawson.

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