I’m not the first to say it, and certainly won’t be the last –  Seth Godin is a genius.  His presentation at the Business of Software Conference absolutely blew me away the first time I saw it, and its worth your time to watch it.

“It it doesn’t connect, don’t bother”

Seth argues there are so many things out there that are competing for our attention, and he is right.  It is hard to stand out, especially when there are 30 to 40 products that already to attempt to solve whatever problem we are facing.

People have to find real value in a product if it is to have a fighting chance of long-term survival in the internet era. But perceived value isn’t enough any more – products must also become more valuable to a user as the community around them grows. Facebook, delicious.com, and all the sites that truly deliver in the “social” scene of the internet make this abundantly clear. Godin’s golden rule of software development, “If it doesn’t connect, don’t bother”, is sound advice for us to follow today.

Godin’s talk has helped me develop a series of questions I ask myself whenever building a new product or website.

1. What problem am I trying to solve?
2. How is my solution going to be different from anyone else’s?
3. Does my solution encourage users to become my biggest advocate for success?  If not, why am I proceeding with the project?

The questions may be obvious to many, but I find it amazing how often those questions aren’t answered before embarking on projects.  I have learned the hard way that if I can’t answer these questions profoundly, I’m on the wrong track and need to start over.  Most likely the premise of the project is flawed and needs to be further refined.

                        

Work. Family. Church. Hobbies. Physical fitness. Housekeeping. Socializing. Fitting everything in is a delicate balancing act where something—or someone—is inevitably overlooked. The problem, writes author Andy Stanley, is not a lack of discipline or time management—it’s simply lack of time. With only 24 hours in each day, we sometimes need to “rob Peter to pay Paul.” We have to choose to cheat.

The key is learning when and where to cheat, argues Stanley, and home is never the right choice. When we cheat our family, we say, you are important, but work (or football, or shopping, or whatever occupies your time) is more important. We are, in a sense, devaluing each other. It may mean coming home from work an hour earlier, letting the dishes sit while you play with your child, or missing a round of golf. But your “cheating” will express security and worth to your family.

Stanley is addressing a church crowd, but there is wisdom in his words for those of us trying to cultivate digital communities.  The internet, and the social web in particular, have enabled communities to spring up faster than ever before.  Companies respond to these communities, but too often cut corners or only go half way.

Larry Blumenthal has an excellent write-up on the lessons learned by one company as they launched and closed a community.  To Omidyar Network’s credit, they really invested in the digital community they worked to create. But how often have we seen communities launched only to be abandoned by the very group that worked so hard to get them going?

Just like real life relationships, building digital communities require a lasting commitment. In fact, building and cultivating those communities is much more difficult than developing the systems on which they run. They can be magical when run correctly. If you cut corners, however, watch out.

                        

For those who are not fellow pythonistas, Python was originally created by Guido van Rossum in 1989. He did a lot of the early work on the language by himself, but more people joined in the effort as the popularity of the language increased. Guido is currently employed by Google to develop the language full time, which uses the language for a number of their programming projects.

via code_swarm – Python on Vimeo.

                        

On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.

If one looks closely at what the team at Amazon has built, it’s filled with innovative functionality and clever designs, all of which creates a delightful experience for its users and directly produces regular profits for its shareholders. But not all is perfect. Some design changes in the last few years have not been the success that the team had hoped for. Amazon’s exceptional qualities and imperfections are critical knowledge for any designer that wants to dig deep into what makes the site tick.

via Presentation: Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon » UIE Brain Sparks.

                        

Trust can be a foreign concept to us in IT. We spend a lot of times interacting with computers, which do what we tell them to do (whether we believe it or not). But we don’t work in a vacuum, and have to develop relationships with our teammates, stakeholders, and others. Sometimes that trust needs to be developed quickly, particularly given how teams come together for projects and can disband once the project is over.

I heard about Rodrigo Jordan a couple years ago and was stoked to see this video of him speaking at Google about developing teams for success. He’s led a number of mountain climbing expeditions around the world. He took this opportunity to discuss his experiences and explain why some expeditions succeeded where others failed.

Dr. Jordan is an educator and mountaineer, President of Vertical S.A., and Chairman of the Chilean National Foundation for the Alleviation of Poverty. Dr. Jordan was nominated by Time magazine in 1995 as “one of the 100 young leaders for the new millennium,” and led the first successful South American expedition to Mt. Everest and K2. He has applied the leadership and team-building skills needed to climb the world’s most challenging mountains to business and education.

Dr. Jordan is a civil and industrial engineer, earned a Ph.D. in Organizational Administration from Oxford University, and is a lecturer in Innovation Processes and Management at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. In January 2008, Rodrigo joined a National Geographic team for the Larsen Ice Shelf Expedition which sought to document the impact of climate change on the lesser-known side of the Antarctica Peninsula.

Trust me, the video is worth your time.

                        

Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon who has long accused Google of ripping off content from his newspapers, said this weekend that his sites may soon disappear from the search engine’s listings.

Personally, I believe it was a bad idea then and may be an even worse idea now.  However, a new voice has entered the debate, and it’s one that surprised me. Mark Cuban, the dot-com billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks has echoed Murdoch’s sentiments.

When that newspaper allows itself to be included in Google News it becomes a de facto endorsement of Google News as an acceptable and probably preferable “discovery destination” . The branding message to the consumer is “I dont need to go to the newspaper homepage. Everything the newspaper has  is referenced  here in Google News. So if there is something of interest to me from the local paper, Google News will send me to their site.  I don’t need to go to both sites any longer. I can just go to Google News.

Cuban is right, it’s a bad thing if news coverage becomes a commodity. Google News is a fantastic one-stop shop of news coverage, and it shows how much of an echo chamber media outlets can be by simply picking up stories from wire services like the Associated Press. It’s hard for companies to stand out amongst the masses when presented along side thousands of other outlets that picked up the same story. But that’s not a reason to pull content from the Google search index.

He’s also right that newspaper websites need help.  Generally speaking, they’re hard to navigate and attempt to be a sprawling digital replica of the print brands they digitally represent.  The root “umbrella” pages of news websites can be an intimidating plethora of links and images, and it’s hard to imagine users investing the time to sift through the links to find the depth and breadth of coverage the media outlet is providing.

It’s true that Google employs an overwhelming amount of IT talent, but there’s no need for media companies to match that investment. If an existing media company has a website, the public they serve already knows about them. Strip down the umbrella pages to be more usable and friendly. Invest in article pages to intelligently show related content and highlight the best content for users to discover. Make search engine optimization top of mind for all employees.

And while you are at, make it easy for advertisers to see why they need to be there. Cultivate a local marketplace, and bring classified ads out of the silo in which they are currently housed, but more on that next time.

                        

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

                        

To lock content behind paywalls or, worse, keep it offline altogether, merely casts a newspaper’s destiny into the hands of the remaining few who insist on getting their news delivered on dead trees at the end of their driveway. Unfortunately, they won’t be with us much longer. And I doubt any of them would be willing to pay the full cost of ink, paper, fuel and delivery needed to distribute their product of choice.

Now comes The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, at the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture at London College of Communication, to better articulate the critical point that has eluded me. You can read The Guardian’s piece about the speech here.

“It’s not a ‘digital trend’. It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about resisting the people who want to close down free speech.

“If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it then, never mind business models, we could be sleepwalking into oblivion.

And maybe my favorite quote:

“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.”

Well said.

                        

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