Musings on the business and craft of writing, technology and whatever else passes through.

I’ve been following Seth Godin’s blog for years. I’ve been reading his books for years. (I think I started with Permission Marketing.) However, as he himself describes in a different context, we often experience a dip and so, as with anything that goes on over a long period of time, it waxes and wanes. Thus I read his blog almost daily for a while then other things get my attention or I get too busy and I go through a period of not following his posts, or seeing them only occasionally.

And then my interest renews and I start following daily again. I get past my “dip.”

Why do I read I him? I asked myself this question today while drinking coffee and freezing my butt off as I paced around my deck. (The pacing was about keeping warm; being outside was about waking myself up.)

I think I know the answer. Although often referred to as a “marketing guru,” and strictly speaking I suppose that is what he is, I don’t think that is what he is or does. What he does is observe and describe human behaviour – and that’s why I find him interesting.

You could probably say all marketing is about this, as well as using what we learn from it to create interest in products or services and ultimately stimulate sales. But it’s often at a distance, as if we’re speaking of something that is “other,” of which we aren’t a part.

From what I’ve seen, when the various aspects of marketing are discussed there is a degree of detachment. Maybe it’s the way we speak of it, maybe it’s because there is a heavy focus on numbers and charts. It’s a cerebral way of seeing it.

With Seth Godin, I sense the visceral. While the head may agree or disagree, it is the agreement or disagreement in the gut that is strongest. I’ll read something that he is describing, such as The Dip, and I know it’s true because I’ve experienced it or seen it in others. Often, he’ll describe something we’re already aware of, if only intuitively, but we’ve yet to formulate or articulate it. But there is an element of recognition we experience in what he says.

I came across one of his posts today, Random rules for ideas worth spreading, and it was the same thing. There is a list and much of it might be called common sense, even obvious in some cases, but each item resonates in one way or another with what we observe either in ourselves, in others or both. My favourite was this one: “Are you a serial idea-starting person? If so, what can you change to end that cycle? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.” Yes, I know that one.

In his books Seth speaks of being remarkable, of tribes and now, in his latest book, of being a linchpin (Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?). Regardless of the words used, each term (and the ideas contained in the books in which they’re found) are born out of the observation and understanding of human behaviour, something we recognize as true in our guts.

I think that is the key to his success and, while I don’t know this to be true, I’d suggest at the core of what he does is a love of and fascination with people. I suppose someone could achieve success without this but I can’t help feeling that to do so would require so much more effort.

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It’s good to repeat yourself. By default I think we believe to repeat ourselves is a bad thing. However, if we’re trying to communicate it’s through repetition that it gets across. The trick is to do this without becoming redundant  — in other words, knowing when enough is enough.

The other trick is to repeat ourselves but not in exactly the same way. While this post’s headline may not be the best example, it is an example of sorts. Put a better, more lengthy way, we might answer a question with, “Repetition is good. When we say something once only, it is easy for its essence to be lost in all the other communication that goes on between people. Thus, to say it two or three times helps to break through the clutter and make it more memorable. The lesson, then, is that it is good to repeat ourselves.”

Okay. That may be a bit too long, too wordy and too tedious but I think you get the idea.

Repetition is one of the ways we remember. Why do football teams in practice run the same play over and over? It’s to work out the weaknesses, get everyone on the same page and also to ensure every knows it, learns it and understands what to do almost without thinking when the play is called in a game situation.

I went off on this topic after reading Why Twitter was inevitable? over on Julien Smith’s blog. He begins by talking about recalling things he had forgotten about radio culture, such as the necessity to, “… constantly repeat the thing we’re talking about …”

I worked in radio as well, years ago. It was in commercial radio. I remember coming up with my own rule about ads which was, if you’re forced to choose between creativity and frequency, always go with frequency.

Ideally, you wouldn’t have to make this choice. You could have a creative ad plus frequency – meaning it got played a lot, hopefully throughout the day, particularly at the high listening periods (morning and drive). One of the reasons you hear and remember those awful local car dealership ads is because they forego creativity (well, maybe they think their ads are creative) and go with frequency – ads that are run a lot, often concentrated toward the end of the week and weekends when it was assumed anyone buying a car might be out shopping for one.

The theory was simple and, I think, true: an ad heard once would not be remembered, no matter how good it was. There is simply too much noise to break through. Our minds recall the things we hear, see and do frequently.

Repetition is how we learn and that is because it is how we remember. That is what makes repetition a good thing. It requires some skill to avoid becoming obvious and annoying but the bottom line remains: it’s good to repeat yourself.

Roll credits …

I went off on this topic by reading an interview with Julien Smith over on Mark Dykeman’s blog (Broadcasting Brain). That lead me to Julien’s blog and the post I referred to above.

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Two related post subjects caught my attention last week and I’m trying to distill them here. The subjects are ideas (coming up with them) and mind-mapping. I began the post, How to find an idea (since abandoned) and also scattered a few comments on a number of blogs providing my own less than profound insight.

The more I trailed these subjects the more clear their relationship was and, despite my initial denials of having a particular process or an ability to mind-map, the more clear it was I did have a process and it was a kind of mind-mapping, albeit a chaotic one.

So this is me trying to distill and explain.

Finding ideas

I don’t find ideas, they find me. I don’t recall ever having consciously made an effort to find an idea. I have certainly been flat broke as far as ideas went and I’ve stared at either blank paper or a blank screen. But I don’t think I’ve ever gone out looking for an idea. It’s not because I have a rule about that or some distaste for it. It just never occurred to me.

To say, “I don’t find ideas, they find me,” is a cutesy little sentence and many people may have a vague sense for the accuracy of it, but it really doesn’t say anything. As with many clever sentences, it’s all style, little or no substance. So here is the substantive part that is missing. In a comment on Remarkablogger I wrote:

I think coming up with ideas has a good deal to do with state of mind, probably related to brain wave activity, and “getting away from my computer” is really about a mental reset.

I come up with ideas by walking the dog or buying groceries. Every so often I’ll write an idea down to work on later but the reality is that I rarely go back [to] it. I appear to be reactive to my environment so I’ll start scribbling about something that has been sparked by what I’ve seen online or in the news. Just as often, however, for reasons I can’t fathom, I’ll find myself thinking about something that apparently hasn’t been sparked by anything — at least not that I’m aware of.

This is why I say “ideas find me.” In some sense, it is a quest for ideas since when I do something like walk the dog it will be partly because I want a mental reset so an idea might find me. (Mind you, it’s largely because the dog is threatening to destroy the house.)

Something I did not say in the quoted comment was this: in almost every case I do not know what I really think until I have written it out. It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s another to have something to say.

Mind-mapping and process

This is where I get to the business of mind-mapping and process, process really being what mind-mapping is about. I had stated in another comment that I didn’t use mind-mapping, that whenever I tried it I failed. But as I kept thinking about it, I realized that was not true. I started thinking about process and then understood that is what is at the heart of mind-mapping. Strictly speaking, mind maps are graphical but in their essence they are about taking notes. (And notes themselves, in a way, can be considered graphical even though they are text, the traditional note taking method.)

I had confused technology (mind-mapping programs) and visual depictions like graphs, flow charts and coloured balloons with mind-mapping. They are simply tools people use. They aren’t, however, necessary to mind-mapping because mind-mapping is about process and clarity.

When I understood that, I understood that I had a process that brought me clarity. I mind-mapped without knowing it. My process is a ramshackle, chaotic amalgam of today and yesterday, technology and old school.

Often a post begins physically in a notebook with inked scribbles. Later, I transcribe it either in a Word doc or within Wordpress as a draft and continue writing. Later, I print it (back to the tactile). Printed, I read it and with pen or pencil start changing it: rewriting this, cutting that, moving this thing over there. There are arrows up and arrows down, ballooned comments in the margins. I see something is missing and, turning the paper over to the blank side, I begin scribbling again.

And then I take it back to my laptop, make my corrections and transcribe what I’ve scribbled. As the process goes back and forth, the paper side fades away and it is all done on the laptop.

As tedious as all this may seem it has an element that, for me, recommends it: it works.

For me it works though not necessarily for anyone else. I’m not usually the sort of person who can just sit down and pour out words that make a coherent post without any of that back and forth. It certainly doesn’t happen for something of any length. As an example of what I do and how and why it works, as I type this on my laptop I’m preparing to print it, sit down with it and a pen, read it over and orient myself as well as make some changes.

The word orient is key. Once I’m in the flow of writing I can go off on a related tangent. I need to go back and see what it was I wanted to say and if I’ve said it or if I’ve missed something or if I’ve inserted something unrelated to it. In other words, it helps answer the question, “What the hell have I been writing about?”

Conversations

I’m finished going through that process described above and, surprisingly, I think I’ve managed to maintain some coherence and say what I wanted to. However, I also discovered that, at the heart of all this, I think I really just wanted to state how it is I work. I’m sure other people work the same way. Let me add that while it seems tiresome and time-consuming and certainly not how everyone will work, it has the virtue of ebb and flow, back and forth. It is like a conversation with myself at the end of which I not only say what I want I also know what it is I really think.

If I may toss in one last thing on the subject of ideas, one aspect that really engages me and helps to define and inform an idea (for me) is a bit of online researching, sometimes of a simple word – like “idea.” You may have a topic, you may even know what you think you want to say, but a bit of online window-shopping of articles and blog posts can highlight aspects and details that may have escaped you. It may also show you what line of thought others are taking and that may be something you want to address, pro or con, or it may put the topic in a light you hadn’t seen it before.

In other words, it turns it into a conversation.

We sometimes think “conversation” in this context is about comments and tweets after we’ve posted. This is true, but the post itself is a product of conversation – one with ourselves as well as with the posts, articles and comments we’ve found online prior to writing it.

Note:

This lengthy ramble was prompted by posts on several blogs, including:

• Broadcasting Brain
• Remarkablogger
• Chris Brogan

Many thanks!

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I began thinking today about social media and all the tools we see. There is something of a digital cornucopia of “stuff”: Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, Twitter apps, aggregators and on and on. New ones pop up everyday.

Accompanying all of these is the hype. There is the marketing from the companies that bring them out, the reviews from the various “spheres” and the conversations we carry on about them, online and off. “You can do this with it.” “You can do that.” “You can also do these things too.”

It all sounds marvelous unless you are hearing from the contrarian perspective in which case the tools and apps are frivolous or any number of other negative descriptives.

What I was wondering about, however, was how we actually use them. Are we using them just because everyone else is and they are the distraction of the month? Are we using them to a productive end? How are we using them … or more to the point, I suppose, why? What, if anything, do we get from them?

I’m also thinking less about the business aspect and more about the general population that uses them. There are a number of ways we use them as far as business goes, some effective, some not so much. But how and why do people use them, that big consumer base that gets talked about so much? I’m sure there are a number of answers to this but I also wonder if they all don’t dovetail into one or two general answers, a theme that shows how those different hows and whys all relate.

Despite all the things that can be done with social media tools, from sending messages to playing games and grabbing weather information quickly, I think all the whys can be summed into a single word: people.

There are supportive words that follow from that one word: connection, communication and information.

Regardless of all the flim flam with video, audio, Flash and games, for people to find the Internet (and social media) to be of any relevance for them, those four words need to be considered essential: people, connection, communication and information.

Even a silly video involves those words since it is pointless without connection to other people which, when that occurs, communicates and even passes along information, at least to the extent that it says something about you. (Just as it says something about those who respond to it.)

Everything else, while amusing and entertaining, is just a passing fancy. In the world of social media, I suspect that if you don’t keep those four words paramount in your mind you run the risk of becoming quickly forgettable.

***

I should add that I don’t think I’m saying anything new here or something I haven’t either said or alluded to before. I’m probably repeating myself with this post. But repetition is not a bad thing since it is often through repetition that we best remember.

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What if bits and bytes smelled? And what if they smelled bad? And what if they had the capacity to carry viruses – no, not the email kind but biological n’er-do-wells?

Somewhere out in that vast and ill-defined world we call “digital space,” there’s a lot – and I mean a lot – of refuse. Imagine it having a physical nature, something that took up physical space like old toasters or meat that has gone bad. What if it had rats?

I don’t think I’d care for it.

I call it “The Great Digital Landfill” because that is really what much of the Internet is, just as it is much of what we keep on our computers – used and effectively worthless docs, pics, emails, programs and who knows what all else. There is no pressing need to clear any of it up because there is so much capacity (or so we suppose, if and when we think of it).

But what if it smelled bad? What if digital material had “best before” dates and, once the a date was passed, whatever that item might be it would begin to stink out the joint? I think we would likely put our minds to “cleaning up” with a bit more alacrity.

A very quick Google search reveals that “digital landfill” is not an uncommon term. Some of the material found is about the electronic trash we create and some is … well, a little odd (not unusual on the web). There are actually two aspects to this:

• The trashed hardware (cell phones, laptops etc.)
• The trashed content (emails, docs, pics etc.)

The first of those, hardware, is the serious one because it actually is physical and it is a very real problem. I believe I’ve seen documentaries or news reports of entire islands in Southeast Asia completely buried under technological trash, but hopefully that is just a nightmare I had due to spicy food prior to bed.

The second one, the digital content that has expired and is no longer useful, is just clutter. I sometimes wonder how search engines plough through it all. On our personal computers, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has done a search and been discouraged to find page after page of results.

I’ve even found documents on my laptop that I couldn’t remember if I had written them or someone else had.

Imagine, however, this scene. Arnold, a student, has just been called to a meeting with Professor Axel. It goes like this:

“I’ve been going over your work, Arnold, and I have a question. Did you write this?”

“Umm … yes! Yes, I did.”

“When?”

Arnold’s eyes dart side to side. “The weekend. Saturday night! Yes. And I finished it up Sunday morning.”

Professor Axel frowns. “That’s strange. Your submission has a very distinctive odor. An unpleasant one.”

“I … I … I hadn’t noticed.”

“Really? That’s strange too … since it’s stinking to high heaven! This damn thing is at least three years old!”

Poor Arnold. Caught cheating because digital material goes bad and stinks.

Yes, I think our attitudes toward all those emails in our Gmail accounts, all our stored documents, abandoned blogs, not to mention all that discarded hardware, would definitely alter if technology and the content we produced with it would just smell bad after a certain period of time.

Maybe that’s the challenge? Maybe we need to make technology that stinks.

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When you encounter something for the first time you have no reference point. The thing you encounter establishes itself as the reference point. Anything similar encountered afterward, although “new,” is seen in relation to that first thing, the reference point.

For example, the first dog you see becomes a reference point for “dog.” If it’s a boxer, that’s your idea of dog. If you later encounter a springer spaniel or a wolf or coyote – anything canine – you have that first dog as a reference point.

I thought about this as I read an interview with CBC’s Terry O’Reilly. (It’s an interview done by Mark Dykeman at Broadcasting Brain.) There is a passing reference in it about when he began in advertising: “Edited radio by razor blade …”

I worked in radio too and did a lot of work editing that way. The reason it resonated with me is that it triggered the idea of analog vs. digital. I worked with sound back when everything was analog. That established my reference point. When digital came along, I found it awkward (and still do). However, had I started from the beginning with digital – had that been my reference point – I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t feel awkward to me but just the way to work with sound. What happens when you encounter something where you have a reference point is that you go back to it trying to understand the new thing in terms of the original.

I’m not sure this would be true of anyone else but for me the difference between analog and digital is the difference between thinking of sound as something aural (analog) as opposed to visual (digital). Editing in analog, I was always tuned into the rhythms and the beat and edited based on that. Similar to a DJ in a club using vinyl discs and cuing them to beats, often I would edit that way: cuing the vinyl, hitting “Record” on a beat as I let the disc spin. (It may have been called a slip cue).

With digital, while listening to the music for beats and off beats, it is more about seeing the visual representation – the graph of the audio – and identifying visually where those beats and off beats are. I work with digital audio rarely so it is quite likely I simply don’t know enough about working with it. My point is really this: the analog experience affects my digital experience of audio.

I think this notion of an established reference point as opposed to no reference point is an important one since it can affect a great many things, including products and services. As an example, when word processing programs first started coming out, as a growing number of people started using them, you could do almost anything creating those programs because there were no similar word processing programs that had established themselves as reference points. Now, however, when Microsoft makes changes to a program like Word, they often encounter a hue and cry and it’s because most people aren’t starting from square one. They have experienced word processing and have reference points – expectations of how they work, where functions are and so on.

I think when you are bringing out something new, you have to consider just how “new” it is. Speaking very broadly, you can say everything has some reference point. But some things are more new than others. You have to know what that “new” thing resonates with, whether expectations exist of what it should do and either address those in the development or through  how you communicate with your target audience (or both).

And that is the tangent my mind took after reading the interview. It’s a worthwhile interview to read though my post here is unrelated except to the extent it sparked my rambling.

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I’ve been looking at a few sites offering web design and related services and I find myself puzzled, even a bit alarmed. This is not due to what I found (though in some cases it was) but by what I did not find.

I have seen absolutely no reference to content. Do the sites magically populate themselves? If not, who does it? If the client does, is there no consultative service to advise them on what and how to put the content in or maintaining it? If the client doesn’t handle the content, who does? If the web design company does, who handles the research, the writing, the editing? Have they a background in it? Are they good?

There were no references to social media other than “Follow us on Twitter” and/or something similar for Facebook. If a company is moving to or revamping an online presence, isn’t this a crucial aspect? Where do they get help, direction or advice on this?

I found a few web design/web services companies with URLs that required the www preface. Personally, I never use it anymore. I just type in something like writelife.net. No http. No www. I suspect many people are like me. If so, there are a lot of people going to a “page not found” message when they type in the web company’s address. I can’t believe that builds a lot of confidence in a web design company’s awareness of how the web works.

I also found quite a few companies using dated language. In the world of business, marketing and technology, terminology changes almost daily and if you rely on today’s clichés you become tomorrow’s anachronism. Surely “offering solutions” is at least ten years old. I believe current terminology should be avoided at all costs but I do realize it is often unavoidable. But this puts the onus on you to continually assess your site and see where and how it requires revamping. In the online world, static means death.

None of the above is true of all web design sites. Hopefully, I just stumbled on a few that skewed my perception. It is worrying though. On the other hand, from my perspective, maybe it holds the promise of some work. :-)

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I’ve been looking up information on Haiti. What I find is of two varieties. There is the information I find that makes me wonder, “How did I not know that?” and there is the information I find where I say to myself, “How could I have forgotten that?” The latter is information, often historical or geographic, that I can’t believe I didn’t come across in school somewhere along the way. If I did, and I’m sure I must have, then why would I have forgotten it?

The answer to the last is question is, I think, because when I was “learning” what I was learning had no meaning for me. I would have been very young and if I studied it the purpose for me would have been to pass a test.

For example, Wikipedia says of Haiti, “It was the first independent nation in Latin America, the first post-colonial independent black-led nation in the world, and the only nation whose independence was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion.”

That seems very significant, meaningful, to me now. But when I first came across it — maybe I was 8? 14? I don’t know — Haiti was a place in the blue part of the map of North and Central America, somewhere near the bottom part.

Then there is that first question I asked: How did I not know that? Here, I’m referring to the impoverished state of Haiti’s population, it’s history of repeating disasters, its health issues (like AIDS), the deforested landscape and so on. And how could that be so? It’s smack dab in the middle of the Caribbean — white sand beaches, blue seas, sultry breezes, right? How could a Haiti be there?

And that Haiti we are hearing described in the news now … That can’t be Haiti. Haiti is music and food and colour and warm, laughing people. I know because I’ve seen it in movies. There’s even voodoo stuff that makes it even more exotic. I think I saw that in a James Bond movie.

Put another, the mainstream images and stereotypes many of us grow up with don’t sync well with reality.

I have no brilliant summation here. There’s no grand conclusion. I do, however, wonder how much of our ignorance is by design (our own) and how much of our forgetfulness is, along similar lines, due to a self-centric way of seeing the world.

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I’ve completed my Saturday morning project which was to go through my posts from 2004 and find the ones I most liked. They aren’t necessarily written as well as they should but such are the hazards of blogs.

It was fascinating for a few reasons. First of all, I was interested to see how much more I was focused on writing, presumeably the reason for a blog called Writelife. I think that is why I have fifteen posts there even though I want to try to keep each year to ten or less.

The second thing I noticed is how focused I was on blogging whereas now my focus is social media (blogging being a subset of). But that was six years ago when blogging was really taking off and there was so much discussion about blogs and what they were, as well as the criticisms — more or less the same as now with social media.

Two posts were of particular interest to me. One of them was 12 rules for Web writing which was actually a repost of something I’d written around ten years ago, about 2000 or so. Back then I was a bit anal about the word web and capitalizing it. Now, I don’t care. The rules, by the way, are more or less obvious ones — there are no great insights, I think. What I find interesting, however, is that by and large I think they’re still valid. (Now that I think of it, maybe some of them weren’t so obvious back in 2000.)

The other post is Language as a communication barrier. For a very long time it was my most visited post. What is of interest in that is where that traffic was coming from — outside of North America to a great extent. Africa, Pacific Rim etc.

Finally, many of the posts from back then have character set problems due to the many Wordpress updates and the importing of the blog from another location. (That importing business is also why some of the internal links go nowhere. It is simply too time consuming to go through and fix the URLs.) Although I tried to clean up the fifteen posts here, my posts from back then often show code rather than an apostrophe, quotation mark and so on.

If you’re at all interested, you’ll find the fifteen posts on my Highlights page, just below 2009. Other years will hopefully be coming soon.

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