This is because your clever name doesn’t matter. There is a seemingly strong counter-argument, that goes “…but, brand is crucial – look at how much all those big companies spend to make you remember their all important name!”. This is true, however before the names existed (outside of their inventors heads), they weren’t special because they weren’t attached to something anyone cared about.

The poster site for this is del.iscous.us.com or whatever they’re called (del.icio.us – online bookmarking). Do you think when it launched in 2003, then was venture capitalised (2005), then acquired by Yahoo 6-months later, that it mattered that it was doing all the no-noes in naming: one, it was hard to spell; two, it was unrelated to the site’s purpose; three, it was not the standard .com; and four, it ridiculously used “del” as a subdomain. This liability is of such marginal importance that Yahoo didn’t even get around to buying the delicious.com name (I imagine at some outrageous price from the previous owner or squatter) until mid-2008.

So how did they get away with breaking so many rules?

1. People don’t speak as much anymore, so when someone mentions they found something cool, they send a link via email or Skype or IM twitter.
2. Google is search engines are used by so many people that the url doesn’t even matter – in fact, the first five results of my horrendous name-mangling effort above return people who have spelt their link text wrong – but still have the correct underlying URL.
3. By following rule two (unrelated to purpose) above – URLs like del.icio.us still work even if people did speak to each other (outrageously breaking rule 1), because it is a distinct and real word (despite the domain hack).

To sum up, whilst I’m not arguing that having an ideal (pronounceable, distinct, simply spelt, .com) domain name is useless – I’m saying that it needs to go back to the bottom of your to-do list again, and again – ’til you’re so successful you can trivially buy out or sue the nasty domain squatters – who you first thought “ruined” your grand idea.

Here’s an example

When you’re searching on most sites, you need to type in your search text, click on ‘Search’ and wait for the page to reload. We thought we could improve this with ‘in-place searching’. As this probably doesn’t mean much to anyone (as we just made this phrase up), let me explain:

I want to be able to search the site from any page, at any time – and I don’t want to lose my bearings. So I go to the obligatory search box at the top right hand part of the page and start typing… search results appear magically below, pushing the page’s text down.

For us, this was an improvement – a way to search from anywhere, without losing context. But when I actually tried to use it, it constantly confused me.

I would search for recipes from Joe’s profile page and get not only Joe’s, but everyone’s recipes in my search results. Or I would confuse the search result’s list of recipes with the real list of recipes the page was presenting. Or I just thought it wacky that the contents on the page I was on, jumped down the page.

Some of these could be hacked around, fixed through formatting, but none really removed the confusion – people expect search to be on a separate page. In trying to improve usability, the rule of building what people expected and were used to, was restraining us. But if you don’t build what people expect and are used to, how can you improve usability? We get caught in a vicious UI circle.

Of course there are exceptions

Obvious exceptions to this are situations where the UI was so horribly painful in the first place – take reordering as an example. Until relatively recently, there were no elegant solutions: you could click ‘up’ and ‘down’ arrows until the item in your list was in the right place; you could type in the ‘order’ of the item in the list as a number… but you couldn’t do the most obvious drag-and-drop of the item into its correct place until we got ’standard’ javascript libraries (such as prototype + script.aculo.us, jQuery, Dojo, etcetera – yes I know there were other drag-and-drop ’solutions’ before this).

So what do we do?

We ended up compromising (ok, it is a hack) – when you begin searching, other content on the page disappears, so you don’t get confused. But when you clear your search text, the content reappears. This gives us a faster search, but you lose a little of the context.

Maybe the way to break the vicious UI cycle is to focus on one small, incremental improvement at a time.

Let’s use authors for our hypothetical, specifically me. I just wrote a book titled “How to genetically engineer shorter necks – No giraffe should be an outcast” in .pdf format (I didn’t, but this is my hypothetical). Now there are two people who want to (or ‘have to’) read it: my two hypothetical friends, Ms Fan in Australia and Mr Groupie in the UK. In our new ‘IP free’ world, Mr Groupie can buy the book and would have the complete legal freedom to copy it. So he emails it to Ms Fan and for her, it’s just as if she bought the book herself – no torn covers, dog-eared pages or delays for postage that accompany the ‘old-fashioned’ style book.

So back in the real world (temporarily only – I quite like the idea of at least two devotees), most authors get their books into book stores via their publisher. However, once devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle take over from dead-wood books, physical distribution is replaced by the giant copying machine in the sky (aka the internet). As you saw above, without IP laws, the author is not the only distributor, but every reader of the book is also a potential distributor – very effective indeed.

So what’s left for our book publishers to do? Umm, they could serve as a pool of authors’ resources to protect authors rights – that is, sue individual people who try to get hold of a free copy of the book. They could also do a whole series of innovatively ineffectual DRM schemes, like requiring the handful of die-hard paying customers to send a secret code via SMS every 15 minutes that they want to keep reading the book they just “bought” (I mean licensed in 15 minute blocks)… thus guaranteeing that the free, albeit illegal, copy remains far superior in every aspect.

Clearly, if we have no IP laws, then the traditional role of book publishers ceases to exist. Yes, other services such as editing and promotion are still useful, but they become independent services unbundled from the defunct distribution process that currently ties it all together.

But do I really want everyone to get my book (hard work) for free, I hear you asking? Am I really that foolish a person…? The answer is no, but we’ll tackle that next week…

“It’s the what?”, I asked. “Why are the cats wearing pyjamas?”

At first I thought my friend was crazy. Then I realised that I had been living in under a rock and was the only one who didn’t know this phrase. It turns out that ‘cat’s pyjamas’ is a 1920s phrase for ‘a wonderful or remarkable person or thing’, or in Wikipedia’s more restrained language, something ‘beneficial’.

Later that week, I was reading a book on the train and it talked about a product being the cat’s pyjamas. Immediately, this phrased jumped out at me – not just because I now knew what it meant, but also because I’d heard it recently and it was familiar to me.

Permission marketing

I recently heard Seth Godin speak at the Business of Software conference in Boston. (He’s an absolutely amazing public speaker… you must try and see him speak if you get a chance). He brought ‘permission marketing‘ (the opposite of ‘interruption marketing’) to the world’s attention, which is centred around obtaining customer consent to receive information from a company. I was recently reading Paul Hawken’s ‘Growing a Business‘ when I came across a chapter describing how ‘the customer must give your business permission to sell to him’. The familiarity of Seth’s phrase ‘permission marketing’ made the concept stand out for me, among the many other illuminating thoughts Hawken shares.

So what can we learn from these random stories?

Have a conversation about your product, write a story about your idea, encapsulate your point in a phrase. The next time someone hears the same words, it will stand out in their mind. Keep doing this and it won’t just seep into their consciousness like advertising does, but it will ring a bell in their head. And once it’s familiar, you’ll have the attention you seek.

The wisdom of crowds

While reading about a presentation at Agile 2008, I stumbled upon a theory by James Surowiecki, professing that groups can often make decisions that are better than those made by any single member of the group. Digg and Reddit already make use of this by allowing the collective web audience to highlight and vote up pages they find valuable. But why not extend this to all users and all pages, building it into the way we use the web?

Getting to France

I was recently looking for a cheap way to travel to France for a skiing holiday over Christmas. The obvious choice was a plane, but the numerous connections required, the ridiculous level of security at airports and the idea of getting up at 3am to make the flight, made us consider other options. Surely there must be an overnight bus?

I searched for various combinations of ‘bus’ ‘overnight’ ‘France’ ’ski’ ‘please’ but nothing came up. Then I tried overnight trains and came up with more hits. However as the tickets aren’t released for another month, I found lots of pages with data from 2005… useful if I could time travel back to 2005, but not at all helpful now.

So I’d have to wait another month to get more information about timetables and prices but I wanted to do something now to help others in my situation. I can’t ‘anti-bookmark’ it in Delicious. I can’t ‘unlink’ to it so it comes up lower in Google searches. But wouldn’t it be good if I could vote it down (possibly in the browser) and then this information could be linked in some magical way to my search terms, to help others who futilely tread in my footsteps?

Making it work

I know you’re thinking that others have already addressed this. But I’m envisaging two differences:

1. Voting down as well as voting up: sure, this is not the most positive way of viewing things, but I don’t want others to waste time trawling through something I’ve already been through. Many list-based websites already allow you to do this, but they serve targeted content. Which brings me to the second point…
2. I want this to apply to all web pages: whether it’s built into the browsers, Google… wherever; it needs to apply to all content.

Can cheap voting further enhance search results or does relying on higher cost linking (ala PageRank) have an intrinsic value that supersedes voting? Alternatively, could we just accept that an open wiki approach is the only chance to keep highly rated content up-to-date?

Anyone who puts 10 seconds thought into this will probably note that this is expected. As this conference consisted of primarily software developers, that dramatically reduces the number of females, and as many of the attendees were also start-up owners, this reduces the number even further. But why is software, and particularly the business of software, such a male-dominated environment? From my rough count, men accounted for around 97%, not the 70-90% you’d expect from a software company. Is it really all nurture?

Hotel de Sens

I undertook a Bachelor of Business Systems degree in Australia and at that point, the mix was 50/50. As a course that prepared you for consulting, (and continuing to flog the dead-horse of stereotypes), I guess the geeks did Computer Science or Software Engineering and the more business-inclined females went for a Commerce degree. But even from the seemingly even starting point of my Business Systems course, the guys drifted towards programming roles and the girls towards analysis and business roles.

There have been many, many debates on this topic and I know it comes up frequently on geeky message boards (How can I possibly get a girl? I’ve done the maths and it’s 1,000,000:1!). I suspect that the closest scientific answer goes along the lines that men are better at mathematical problem solving (arguably more similar to software development) and women are better at mathematical calculation (arguably more similar to management). But the ‘nurture’ stance and the fact that still more women than men take on child-rearing responsibilities are also contributing factors.

As for starting up a business, Noam Wasserman touched on gender differences in his talk on Rich vs. King. He found that while male and female entrepreneurs are both after power, influence and autonomy, men are more likely to pursue financial goals, whereas women are more altruistic. Perhaps this also contributes to the number of males in the business of software.

These are not overly persuasive arguments. So ignoring these minor natural differences of each sex, is it simply traditional and institutional habits that need breaking? Or does it go further back to child-rearing? What will it take to bring more women into this field?

[* The speakers were definitely much more wow-worthy (than the toilet queues) and posts on the knowledge they shared will follow...]

There are some advantages to this unilateral approach. Firstly, it’s much quicker to write on your own – no waiting for a glacially slow editor. Secondly, for a contentious topic (or even a seemingly uncontentious topic), a coherent argument makes much better reading than a schizophrenic arguing from every viewpoint. Thirdly, a personal voice can be lost in the noise of differing writing styles when there are too many contributors.

The flip side? In this era of increasingly cheap collaboration, co-writing can help you flesh out and improve your ideas before you release them into the wild. When I’m ranting about “software and process patent insanity” or “why an imperfect wiki is better requirements than a perfect document”, I might notice that my co-author has fallen asleep – in turn saving you from a great deal of pain. Having a peer means the old-fashioned benefits of a newspaper editor, relevance, accuracy and hilarity, are gained. And (not that there are any), but any weaknesses and quirks are identified and ruthlessly squashed.

So this is it, right here – one blog, two writers.

I love ideas that make you think – those classic light bulb moments. Not ideas which slip out the backdoor of your head before you’ve even finished reading. But the the ones that ring a little bell of clarity, that seem so obvious you can’t believe you didn’t say it yourself.

The Internet is a gold mine of these ideas. Information is supposed to be instant, at your fingertips. You don’t need to physically gather a group of like-minded friends together, invest hours in a book or a movie, to feel inspired. But that accessibility is also the problem. Unlike in book publishing and the movie business, the barrier of entry is so minimal, that it’s easy for  people (like me) to put up a post and add to the growing debris mountain. I joined a secret group recently and was so overwhelmed by the amount of activity on the site that I didn’t know where to begin contributing, for fear of repeating thoughts voiced 30 pages (or years) ago.

Power to the people

So how do you wade through all of this? When you’re a child, it’s easy. You absorb everything and rapidly assemble sequences in your mind. But when you’re an adult and those thoughts are set, you tend to simply re-arrange rather than build new sequences. To change your thinking when you find a golden idea requires conscious effort.

The huge, unwieldy ball of mostly horrifically bad ideas used to be funnelled (and maybe censored a little or a lot) by gatekeepers. With the power of traditional leaders diminishing, who or what will take over? You will, and since I’ll be reading it you’d better not be letting garbage through. With the internet, we all become not only the content providers, but also the funnel. Finding valuable content is really now our responsibility.

Tagging

Yet it’s not easy. Digg, delicious, networking groups – these tools all help. But unless you stumble across an amazing idea or have time to spend hours searching for one, it’s more likely you’ll find it through a recommendation. However for recommendations to be effective, they need to come from someone who values similar things and can offer a different perspective.

Pushing the funnel analogy too far – the sizes and numbers of funnels is crucial. If there was one big funnel that let everything through to cater for each individual, the value of the funnel is defeated. Similarly, if every individual had their own funnel, the value of a group of people is lost. So both specialisation and diversity are required, which is no easy task – this is where the simple beauty of tags really lies. Multiple tags on a blog post funnels it to diverse destinations, but the choice of words different people use allows for maximum (limited only by language) specialisation.

What your tags say about you

When you forward a post to someone, you’re saying to them, ‘This is what I think about you – what I think you like’. But you are also saying something about yourself, especially if you qualify your recommendation. ‘This is good, but it rambles a bit’ refines what you value even further.

It’s the same with tagging, voting, inviting and other tools of a community. They are all subtle ways of declaring ‘I’m a fan of…’, of showing others a part of you. In the Web 2.0 world, you are what you tag.

References

How Adults Learn