Keep 'em Happy.

I just received an email from my internet provider, Exetel;

"From January 1st 2007 the 12 midnight to 12 noon period allowance will increase from 32 gb to 36 gb.

No current or applying user has to do anything to benefit from this increase."

Are they simply passing on a saving? I'm sure. Could they have charged extra for this? You betcha. And I've received more than a few of these emails over the past year.

What was more important; the quick buck from charging for downloads, or the ongoing goodwill from telling your customers "Yep, we see you, we value you, and we're going to keep on trying to give you the best value service we can. We don't care if we've already got your money, we're going to try as hard to keep you as we did to get you in the first place."

At last, a company that understands the second part of "Customer Relationship".

(But don't get me started on Optus.)

WWF vs WWF.

When faced with instances of copyright infringement, do professional wrestlers issue a smackdown notice?

Best Man's Friend.

I've come to the conclusion that the purpose of the best man's speech is solely to make the groom's speech look good.

I've been both a best man and a groom, and my theory holds in both cases.

How Not To Demonstrate A Broad Knowledge Of All Things Historical.

Step 1: Don't take an interview on the radio and say things like this;

"The church of England, in how it tells us to live our lives today, is very different to how they would have told us to live our lives in AD 33."

A Matter Of Timing.

I was recently given directions to a difficult-to-find doctor's surgery. Did I listen? No. I wasn't yet in right frame of mind to plan the trip. Once I hopped in the car and tried to find the place I started thinking "Gee, I could do with some directions..."

It's no use trying to talk to someone until they're ready to listen. Then you've got to hit them with everything you've got, because that moment is when they need you the most.

Sigh.

I really need to clear out my junk mail.

I'm constantly amazed at the ability of Google's spam filter to shield me from the incessant barrage of "BE&A*&B!!GGER M@N!!", normally by some descendant of Nigerian royalty.

The success of any new medium can be measured by the rapidity with which it attracts charlatans; The postal system had mail fraud, the telephone attracted con-men, television created late-night TV shopping, and email has brought spam to the world. These are all variations on a similar mindset, with only slight variations in scale and methodology.

There have been attempts to fix the inherently broken messaging system that is email, however it was created at a naive time by a naive community. Filtering provides a certain level of relief, but there always exists the risk of a false positive or negative. Other suggestions require a complete replacement of existing infrastructure - far too expensive, if you ask me.

Spam owes it success to the success of email itself; a medium in which there is zero cost to send a message to any other person. There is no weighting or priority associated with the messages; they are all treated equally, with no higher level notion of "trust" or "friendship" built into the system. Conversely, a posted letter from a close friend will almost certainly be opened and accepted at face value, but a generic mailer to "The Householder" is likely to be treated with caution.

There are a number of proposed solutions that incorporate some level of trust, however they all leave the underlying messaging system intact. I personally don't believe that email can exist without spam, and thus both must be abandoned.

I think we need to look to a different mode of communication for a solution. Blogs are currently being used to hold public conversations, so why not extend this further? Why can't my blog hold a private conversation with your blog? We could invite other blogs if we wished, and there would be a significant barrier to entry to prevent insincere participants.

Chat rooms are also an excellent forum for trusted communication; participants can be removed if their motives are not genuine, and irrelevant material is usually ignored.

Instant messaging, as an extension of the chat room, is also an excellent option. Unfortunately the lack of a broadly adopted instant messaging standard has segregated the community into silos (MSN users cannot talk to Yahoo users, etc.), limiting it's usefulness. The "Jabber" standard allows such interaction and is a step in the right direction, but it will take most of the major players to make it a success (it is already in use by Google Talk).

Another possibility arises out of the current success of RSS feeds - a simple system for bookmarking and receiving regular updates to your favourite Internet content. What if you simply checked my RSS feed regularly for messages to you? Or, perhaps, what if I published a separate feed for everyone I wish to keep in contact with? This reverse the current email system from "push" to "pull", where the user now actively seeks the messages they want. Ten years ago I subscribed to a whole host of email newsletters, however these days I simply subscribe to their RSS feeds. I receive updates when *I* want them, and I only receive content that I actively seek. The same principle could be applied to personal messaging; you would only receive messages from people you actively wish to contact.

These are just a few ideas, obviously with their own set of problems. I hope it at least provides some food for thought.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have 1008 messages to sort through.

I Fell For It.

Yep, I did. I didn't think I'd fall for it again so easily (and so soon!), but it happened.

I made a critical lapse in judgement.

My previous post on childhood development and television has one major, serious flaw; I wrote what I believe. Why is this a flaw? Quite simply, what we "believe" - our "world view", if you will - has a vetoing effect on what we say and do.

This may seem obvious, but bear with me.

Over the course of writing this blog I have attempt to look past my own personal beliefs, and try to understand the motivations and thought processes behind certain courses of action. Some have mistaken this for complaining; this is not the case.

In the previous post I allowed my own world view ("TV has a devastating effect on early childhood development") to interfere with my judgement. I allowed my own personal bias against TV as a shaping force in writing the piece.

I'd like to maintain that I never once supposed that the study was correct, however it led me down a train of investigation that may have implied I did.

Looking back, I can see I fell for what almost seems the (perhaps even unintentional) point of the study; To provide people like me with material to support their worldview.

So, let's start again;

• Does TV in early childhood affect development?
• How would we be able to tell?
• What was the motivation of the people writing the study?
• Were there any preconceived hypotheses?
• Given that the report will either be wholeheartedly agreed with, or wholeheartedly dismissed, what use does it have, aside from propping up existing worldviews?
• What effect would the report have if read by the uninformed or uninterested?
  

This last point is an important one, as reports such as these only ever make it to popular conversation through a headline. Leaving aside issues of whether these reports are designed solely to produce an eye-catching headline, we now have two ways for people to interact with the report;
1) Through a headline, sound bite, or hearsay
2) Through reading the report directly
It is an obvious, yet important point that interaction through the first method will far outweigh the second, such that the number of people that actually read the report is proportionally insignificant. Taking the next logical step, what then is the point of writing the report in the first place? Surely we can just publish a headline, as this is all most people read?

Unfortunately, no. Even though our "actual report readers" are a small minority, they are the gatekeepers and filters of information for the rest of us. We trust a doctor to filter information from the drug companies, we trust sites like webjet.com to filter prices from airlines, and we trust academics to filter information from research papers.

So if you're writing for publication, bear two things in mind;

1. It will most likely first have to pass inspection by someone fairly intelligent before it is trusted, and
2. It needs a good headline.

Bad Advice.

I recently stumbled across a page entitled "12 Tips for Creating Better Presentations," composed by a "Document Production Expert" at Microsoft.

What amazes me is not the banality of some of the tips, but how they focus on almost entirely the wrong things. Autolayouts? Autocorrect options? Not only do their "before" and "after" shots look almost identical, they are all terrible slides filled with paragraphs of 8-point writing.

And the worst part? My manager will read this page and think that this is what is meant by "Good Powerpoint".

Is bad advice better than no advice?

Autism, TV, and Early Childhood Development.

A research paper has just been published by Cornell University entitled "Does Television Cause Autism?".

The results of scientific research often bear out our intuitive understanding of a situation. Unfortunately, many people often need a giant slap in the face to realise it.

For years few people would have argued with the effect of reduced socialisation in the development of children, an effect which is exacerbated in those susceptible to autism. Any time spent in front of the TV takes away from opportunities to socialise, and promotes non-interactive behaviour. This may be unhealthy for a normal child, but it is devastating for the autistic.

The plural of anecdote may not be data, but I have watched my autistic nephew raised in front of the TV from day one. I'm not talking about the occasional time out, I'm talking about all day, every day, spent in front of the TV. Instead of going to the park. Instead of playing with other kids. Instead of going to daycare. Instead of reading. Instead of playing with toys. Instead of drawing. At least eight to ten hours in front of the TV, every day.

Though they are a welfare family, they refused to aknowledge their son's autism until far too late. The child is now nine years old, and has shown marked improvement since he started attending a special needs school - he can now speak some words, socialises far more enthusiastically, and makes ever more confident attempts to communicate through body language, sounds and actions. Needless to say, his transformation began as soon as he started attending school, and stopped watching so much TV. Though his improvement continues, I harbor great concern that the early damage was permanent.

I tell this story not to draw sympathy, but to illustrate a simple point; Intelligent people know that television has an adverse effect on development, unfortunately too many people wait until "scientists" say so before they believe it. One may assert that we have evolved to identify and react to immediate dangers, and long-term dangers tend to elude us. I respectfully disagree.

I don't care whether or not there is a "statistically significant causal link". Call me irrational, but I sincerely believe that most people can recognise unhealthy behaviour. Whether or not they choose to believe their instincts - or act on them - is another question entirely.

I have noted a disturbing tendency to take a lack of "scientific proof" for any specific behaviour as implicit endorsement of the behaviour as "not unhealthy". Not exercising is bad? where's the proof? Smoking? Fast food? Fossil fuels? Does anybody honestly believe these things are good? We justify instinctively unhealthy behaviour with a "lack of scientific evidence".

We have the opportunity now to be healthier than at any other point in history. It's a shame we don't take it.

[ADDENDUM:]

To clarify, my point is this: Socialisation is a key part of early childhood development.

I do not suppose that television itself causes any specific "damage", rather that TV time takes away from socialisation time. In extreme cases - such as the one I describe - it takes away from it entirely. Watching TV is almost entirely a passive experience. This is not a good thing for a child's development, autistic or otherwise.

The "damage" I refer to is the lack of opportunity for early development. Part of reaching your potential is being given the right opportunities at an early enough age. As an example, a great deal of research has shown that if a child is not given the opportunity to learn to speak (grammatically) by around the age of seven, then they will never learn at all. Too much time in front of the TV takes away from the opportunity for this development.

[ADDENDUM 2]:

We have done an excellent job of extending our livespan, though we have come close to picking all of the low hanging fruit. (On a side note, a great deal of past statistics regarding average lifespan were skewed by high infant mortality rates.)

I'm talking about taking advantage of the opportunity to be healthier, not just healthy. Look around; There are those that get by - the healthy - and there are those that exercise, eat right, exercise their minds, and do all they can to ensure their physical and mental health. We have a greater opportunity for this than at any other point in history, why are so few people taking advantage of it?

Bad Form.

I just received a fairly obvious form letter from a site that managed to acquire some of my personal information;

Dear Sean,

I notice your birthday is coming up on 1 October 2006.

How's that for destroying a sentence? Read it out loud just to accentuate the absurdity. Imagine calling up a friend and saying "Hey Bob, I just remembered that your birthday is coming up next 2 JULY 2007." You'd probably get some odd looks.

Being casual can be a great way of initiating a conversation with a prospect - if it's sincere. If there's a pitch, then make it honestly. If you're going to wish someone a happy birthday, then make it seem genuine. It doesn't help when the email ends with;

P.S. If 1 October 1980 is not your birthday, please change this information in your profile.

If you have so little faith in the information in my profile then why bother using it at all? The information obviously came from me, so if I gave you false details then I probably had a good reason for doing so.

All you need to do is remember that there's an actual person on the other end of the line, and treat them appropriately. Easy, no?

Roll Models.

Why are we constantly bombarded with idealised images of success? We have it driven into us that success means being Richard Branson, or Donald Trump, or Bill Gates. We are taught to feel an obligation to make the most of what we have, to the point where abject guilt sets in as soon as we begin to relax into daily life.

But why should we all be like Bill Gates? Surely the best person to be Bill Gates would, in fact, be Bill Gates? After all, he's proven very good at it so far. Isn't the simple fact that none of us are Bill Gates evidence enough that none of us are supposed to be him?

Linguistics aside, an unfortunate effect of this is that we miss the real successes in our lives; our friends, our family, our children, our community. When our parents are eighty years old and still independent, when our children are born, or when they grow into mature, well-rounded adults; these are the things that matter, these are the real successes in our lives.

It just a shame that we're so preoccupied with some ephemeral "big break" that we tend to miss them.

"I know you're in a lot of pain..."

"...but we need to fill out this form."

This is a line that should never be heard at a hospital admissions desk. Who is insisting on having this conversation? Surely there's a better way.

Perhaps the right people have never been admitted to hospital.

(For the record, I was told this line when I was admitted to hospital - in extreme abdominal pain - a little over two years ago. I live in Sydney, Australia.)

Relative Positioning.

The taxi driver, cruising next to me on the freeway, had an uncanny habit of matching every small variation in speed I made. Perhaps it was a mild effort to prevent me from changing lanes, though more likely it was just a general focus on maintaining their position relative to the car next to them, rather than where they are overall.

Often this attitude works in your favour; You need to keep up with the other cars, and make sure someone isn't wildly veering in the wrong direction. They might cause an accident for all of you.

There are some drawbacks, however. Your focus should be on *your* destination, and how you're going to get there. The car next to you probably doesn't have the same destination, or the same time frame. It stands to reason that you can't get to where you need to be by following everyone around you.

Perhaps, though, some of them *are* heading the same way. So why not ask for a lift? Or car pool? Who knows, that might even save time and energy for everyone.

Staying Visible?

This is a photo taken of a slide at a very, *very* important presentation in my workplace. It concerns the rollout of a certain software infrastructure that will change the way our organisation works. It has the potential to completely revolutionise our work practices. It's great stuff.

Except the slide is illegible. Though taken from a camera phone, the quality of the slide is actually quite well represented. I couldn't read it at all in person, and I was sitting in the front row, around four metres from the screen.

If you want people to buy in to your revolutionary idea, make sure they can understand what you're saying.

Two Taps.

This sort of thing really bugs me, even though it happens all too often. Walk in to most public bathrooms and you'll see, on the sink, two taps; "hot" and "cold".

Tell me, without thinking about it too hard, under what circumstances would a person want to wash their hands under *either* scalding hot or freezing cold water, but not some combination of the two?

Someone, somewhere, didn't take the twelve seconds to think about the experience. This says a great deal about who they are, what their priorities are, and the kind of place they work in.

On Promotions.

I recently saw an advert featuring a fairly common promotion; The "free" gift.

The "freebie" is normally of little relative value, but is a simple way for a sales manager to ignore that they're cutting into profits to attract shallow customers.

This particular promotion involved the purchase of a mobile phone (a commodity item). The promotional bonus was available with the purchase of many phones and contracts:

It was An X-Box 360.

Lets do the math;

Xbox 360 wholesale: $550
Revenue from phone contract : $30 per month over 24 months: $720

The phone company is willing to invest over 75% of the potential income from a customer, simply in order to gain that customer.

What does an advert like this tell the customer about the company?

I'll tell you.

The average person simply thinks "That company is making too much money.."

"..from me."

Yes, the average person - on being shown a fantastic, too-good-to-be-true deal, thinks they're being ripped off, and takes their business elsewhere.

Such give-aways are a giant flashing neon sign to customers that you - as a company - are making a disproportionate profit on the deal.

A customer is looking for one of two things; The best quality, or the best price. Focus on one of those two experiences, not on freebies.

What Are You Buying?

If you're one of the lucky few people that have actually spoken to me in person, then you've probably heard my "story" daitribe (badly paraphrased from Seth Godin, I'm afraid).

It goes fairly simply; Every product, every construction, every experience is a part of a story. This story can be incidental ("Hey, I'm a kid on a bike. I'm having fun!") or it can be entirely manufactured ("Chanel smells good, and will make you attractive."). The "Eureka!" moment comes when you realise just how many products in our lives are a part of a manufactured story. How many? All of them.

There's the obvious ones, of course, like "Coke adds life!", and "BMW means you pay more in tax than most people earn." However, there's also the more insidious ones, like the two dollar shop, or ipods (Stories about value for money, and image, respectively.)

Unfortunately, what most people don't realise is that often there isn't much more than the story in what you're buying. Coke doesn't actually add life, it just provides a sense of comfort and familiarity. Driving a BMW isn't about impressing your neighbours, it's about impressing yourself. You want to make yourself feel special, feel part of a particular story, you buy the product.

I recently shopped at ALDI, a discount supermarket. Although many products were actually quite similarly priced to a regular supermarket, the design and experience of shopping there makes you feel like you're getting a bargain. Products are stacked on pallets, there are no plastic shopping bags, and many classes of product are actually unavailable. The story? Shop here to save money. Whether or not you save anything is immaterial, you already feel a sense of satisfaction at being a part of a story.

You're buying the story.

To most people, it doesn't matter what's in the can, just that "coke" is on the label.

And, as Seth said long before me, The path to success is in telling a story that's compelling and honest.

Generic Branding.

There are a few people in my office with a handheld computer similar to the one pictured, and the vast majority refer to it as their "Palm Pilot". The only problem is that it's not a palm pilot. It's a "Pocket PC". In fact, there hasn't been a "Palm Pilot" on the market for several years.

This device is not just a little different to a Palm Pilot, it is remarkably different. It runs different software, it operates in a different way, it's manufactured by a different company. It is an entirely different product.

Of course, this is all quite academic. Hoover, Xerox, Elevator, Refrigerator, and Google were once entirely different products, but have all since been subsumed into the English language as placeholders for the concepts they represent. Corporations mostly love this sort of thing, as it gives their particular brand de-facto product placement every time the product is mentioned. Lucky them.

There are dangers here, of course, for both the consumer and the brand. For the consumer, there is a danger of product confusion. If one of my colleagues goes out to buy some "Palm Pilot" software, they'd be particularly disappointed when they discover that it won't run on their Pocket PC handheld.

The second (less obvious) danger is to the brand. If it becomes too generic, too commonly used, then it is no longer a brand, it's a noun. And no-one can sell a noun. When was the last time you shopped around for a couch made by "Couch Inc."?

Does this seem ridiculous? Sure. But remember, owning a Westinghouse Refrigerator would once have sounded as ridiculous as Googling on Yahoo.

In With The Old, And In With The New.

Whenever a new technology comes along, it has a tendency to be tacked on to to anything existing in the field, regardless of whether or not it is vastly superior and revolutionary. There's always a part of the population that prefers things "The old Way". The big question, then, is whether or not you'll accommodate for these traditionalists, or force your new, revolutionary worldview on them.

Digital projectors may be far more versatile and effective, but how much effort does it take to leave an old overhead projector at the front of the class to keep a few old lecturers happy? Is it worthwhile? How amenable will these lecturers be to being told to do things a different way?

Planning The Experience.

The kettle in the photo was taken in a room in a fairly expensive, exclusive hotel in Sydney. The hotel provides each room with a gourmet selection of complementary teas, replenished daily. So what's the problem?

Firstly, the kettle and cable were wrapped up and packed away in an unmarked cupboard on the opposite side of the room to the tea. Second, there were no spare power points available in a convenient place in the room to actually plug in the kettle (I ended up unplugging a lamp). And finally, the power cable for the kettle was precisely long enough so that - once plugged in - you couldn't actually lift it up off the table to pour a cup of tea, you had to unplug it first.

I didn't have a major problem working any of this out, except it wasn't my room (I'm not the target audience for the hotel) - it was for my 76-year old grandmother. How was she supposed to crawl under a table to make a cup of tea?

I can think of two possible options; Either little or no thought has actually been put into the guest experience at this hotel (where the nightly rate is more than many people earn in a week), or there has been a concious effort to discourage guests from entertaining themselves as an alternative to room service or the restaurant.

I'm not sure which is worse.

Why Are Lecturers Bad Presenters?

If the image to the left doesn't strike fear into you, then you've either spent far too much time at university or you've never seen a decent presentation.

54 words on a single slide, 32-point font, no images, and just leaving the slide open in the application rather than actually displaying it full-screen. For 20 minutes.

This is a typical example of what happens when poor skills are combined with poor tools. Excellent skills can often compensate for poor tools (or vice versa), but the lack of both is disastrous. In this case, Powerpoint (the application used) has not provided the presenter with any clues that the slide may be just a *tad* poorly conceived.

If you're slide is just a copy of the handout notes, then what's the point of displaying it? Why not just talk? Or why not take advantage of the medium and show something that engages the audience in the topic?

(For the record, this lecturer was very well spoken, intelligent, verbally engaging, and had been teaching for over 20 years.)

If you still can't spot the problem then I'd hazard a guess that you've never actually seen a good presentation, and I urge you to go watch just what presentations are capable of (that's one of my favourites). When you're done there, go poke around a few of the excellent presentations that can be found on the web sites of people that know more about these things than I do.

Don't fall into the same trap that many academic types do, and assume that a "teaching" presentation is so far removed from a "normal" presentation. Whether you're in a boardroom or a classroom, you're still expecting to learn.

It's a shame that presentations skills aren't required learning for university lecturers. I've had dozens of lecturers over the course of my academic career, most of them intelligent, well spoken, enthusiastic, and many were even quite witty.

But none of them knew how to give a decent presentation.

What Good Is A Big Ad....

...if no-one can read it?

You may have spent a fortune on a giant banner in front of a great deal of traffic, but it won't do much good if it's illegible and easily ignored.

R U 4 It, Or Not?

I've waited some time to weight in on the "RU486" debacle, mostly because I've had far too much real life to get on with. But it came up in the news again yesterday, so it stirred up a few thoughts I had a while ago.

My opinion isn't really what I'm here to talk about; what was striking around the time of the debate was how rapidly people opposed to the drug moved to reframe the argument in their own terms. Change the playing field, so to speak. You didn't have to listen very carefully to notice that those in opposition to the drug quickly moved the argument from whether or not a particular drug for a legal procedure (abortion) should be allowed, into whether or not abortion was "right".

Let's get this straight out in the open. I'm going to admit all editorial bias; I'm in favour of the blanket veto being removed, and the drug being assessed by a suitable medical committee.

There are two points to remember;
1) Abortion is legal.
2) This drug provides a way for making abortion less physically and emotionally traumatic for women.

Given these points, it is difficult to argue against. However, if we reframe the argument, we are left with;

1) Should abortion be legal?
2) Will this drug make abortion "too easy"?

The reframed argument removes or questions the assumptions made previously, as if there is little or no truth to them. Presented as questions they engage the audience, whereas statements (earlier) often feel like orders. If you can reframe the argument in your own terms then you can significantly skew the playing field, which goes a long way to explaining how a seemingly obvious resolution took so long to acheive.

Who is The Target Audience?

You know, the whole "Netflix for books" idea got me thinking. Who would be you target audience? Readers?

No. Not even close.

Notice, lately, how Netflix has started clamping down on "heavy users"? Obviously, these people are costing them more money than they are worth in subscription fees. From the appropriate point of view, it seems only fair that heavy users of a system be "throttled back" to allow for everyone else to have a fair go.

But wasn't that the whole point of the Netflix service? That one customer would no longer block another? Wouldn't Netflix be able to warehouse hundreds of copies of each movie, and just post them out on demand?

Notice that nowhere does Netflix mention whether their customers would be throttled based on the type of movies they order. If their press release said "We'll be de-prioritising anyone who only orders new releases," then I'd be more inclined to believe their story. But no, they're simply concerned about the cost of postage. They could easily set up a system to pack and ship three movies a day to every customer, but their postage costs would go through the roof.

Cheap postage is one reason why the netflix system works; when I looked into a similar system for books here in Sydney the comparative cost of postage nearly gave me a heart attack. A single netflix-books subscriber, in Sydney, would effectively eat their subscription fee in postage just by ordering one single book (we may be the clever country, but if it weren't for email we'd also be the out-of-touch country).

This just highlights Netflix's main problem; to stay profitable they need to keep subscription fees higher than postage costs. You can do this by choosing your pricing structure, but you can also do this by choosing your customers.

People look at netflix and think "Wow, that's a fantastic service for movie lovers," and - technically - they'd be right. But Netflix doesn't want movie lovers as it's customers, they want people who like the idea of watching movies. These people would really order that many movies, but they like the idea that they could, if they wanted to. Many service-based products are like this; designed to promise you the world ("unlimited movie rentals every month!") but hoping that you'll slowly forget that you're even subscribed. Mobile phone companies took a long time to come around to the idea of actually encouraging people to make calls, since - for many years - the monthly line rental was reasonable but calls were prohibitively expensive. They didn't really want you to make calls, but they were happy to take your service fee.

Insurance companies don't want you to make a claim, internet companies don't want you to download, Dell customer support never wants to be called, even the Road Transport Authority doesn't actually want all those dirty, noisy cars on it's roads. Most of these organisations feel far better off when their customers never actually using their services, or use them only minimally. Many even bet their business model on it.

As to our Netflix-books service? The target audience is, of course, people who like the idea of books, and reading. People without the time, but with plenty of disposable income. The target audience is the most profitable one, and it's mostly made of people that never use the services they're sold.

Think about this next time you're shopping around for a service. If you're in the target audience, you probably don't need it.