Towards Sustainability

It’s hard to seize the world by the lapels when it’s wearing a t-shirt. But this is usually the only way opportunity can be seized when it presents itself - crudely, with no handles.

Seth Godin tells the same story, in terms of wanting to grapple with the world using the handles you know. He managed at least to come away with the t-shirt.

Assumptions. I assumed that the world would stay pretty much the same while I leveraged my assets and completed my agenda.

So I ended up with a t-shirt.

That’s what happens in markets that move.
- The Billion-Dollar T-Shirt

You can’t afford to hesitate, but remember the other side, that often you can’t afford to make a move either. When my first partners and I started our web development company in 1996, we used to see opportunities that we simply couldn’t play in, because we didn’t have the entry ticket to the game, just couldn’t catch the wave.

So there’s the other side to that opportunity thing: it’s not opportunity if you can’t at least see it at shoulder level.

Sometimes the wave would take you of course, out of the blue, preparation meeting opportunity in joyous union.

Now I find there’s a different paradigm operating. Now I’m deep in collaboration with people, and we find the wave taking us up without any central point of awareness that it’s happening. Somehow opportunities get made just from the collaborating. And you get to chat with people as it happens.

This seems more comfortable than having to crash an opportunity. This is how the long tail feels - more tailored, less estranged, more personally suitable. Odd that it comes from the company of many.

But is Seth right? Of course he is, everything he says makes sense. I just wanted to add the other piece.

Distributed opportunities, that’s what you could call it.

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I just stumbled across this operator, from the great town of Warrington, in the metroplex of Manchester, England. I like his thinking about SEO and I have to agree completely with his article.

SEO never went away. The SEO people expanded into SEM when AdWords became a more viable way to get traffic, and into SMO as the Web 2.0 tools started doing most of the heavy lifting.

But no one gave up existing skills and experience, and no one threw away any advantage that could be had, if it was worth more than the time and labor it took to produce it.

I remember an old hand saying in Threadwatch once that he hadn’t bothered with a meta tag for the last year or so, and everyone was in the same position pretty much. But I remember also within a couple of years later we were seeing value in the tags again. Optimizing a site on simple and non-aggressive SEO principles is still the basic preliminary that I do for any new build that I’m involved with. But there’s so much more than this to be done to bring advantage to the client.

Lee McCoy is right in his observation:

The most interesting of features that I don’t think the majority of search engineers have picked up on is that PR and SEO has almost merged into an amorphous entity. Brand reputation management now goes hand-in-hand with SEO. But you need the SEO skills built up over a number of years to truly fulfill your client’s needs when it comes to SMO. - SEO is Not Dead - Its Been Evolving For Years

There should be a new word for what gets done in the name of promotion. SEO was just one beginning part of the whole, and even in the beginning it vied with business acumen and natural guerrilla marketing for best ROI. These last two are still the most highly prized in my book. They have always seemed to me to form part of the fundamental SEO instinct, and this instinct can prevail in the absence of all tools I think.

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Your weekly shot of Robert X. Cringely:

What I believe is troubling the relationship between AT&T and Apple is the upcoming auction for 700-MHz wireless spectrum and AT&T’s discovery that — as I have predicted for weeks — Apple will be joining Google in bidding. AT&T thought its five-year “exclusive” iPhone agreement with Apple would have precluded such a bid, but that just shows how poorly Randall Stephenson understood Steve Jobs. Steve always hurts his friends to see how much they really love him, so AT&T probably should have expected this kind of corporate body blow.

Now AT&T is going to have to decide whether it is worth $10+ billion to fight Apple, Google, and probable third and fourth partners by bidding, itself, for the spectrum, which it wouldn’t otherwise have done.

A similar decision will have to be made by Verizon Wireless, which this week applied ITS reality distortion field to trying to make us believe the second-largest U.S. mobile operator actually intends to open its wireless network to non-Verizon devices and services.

Yeah, right.

from - AT&T suddenly doesn’t like Apple so much.

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I just caught up with Scott Rosenberg’s feed, and stopped to read his piece on Mitch Kapor, early pioneer of the Internet and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as a long-time software developer (Lotus 1-2-3).

Kapor has been giving talks recently at Berkeley, and his second lecture, Disruptive Innovations I Have Known and Loved - Part 2: The Internet and the World Wide Web, was a retrospective of the early days of scepticism, contrasted with what the Web has become.

Early enthusiasts of the Web, people with good instincts, those who could feel the compelling imperative seeded in the Internet, all had trouble conveying the importance of the Web to those who could only see the primitive present, and not the future contained within it.

Rosenberg recalls:

…much as I rooted for the Internet-style future as a healthier one for our culture, it was awfully hard to see how anyone was likely to make money via such a system. Kapor said he looked at the open network’s advantage in generating innovation and encouraging participation and concluded, “I think this is the one that’s going to win.” He was right.

This has meaning for the present, says Rosenberg:

It’s incredibly useful to keep that era in mind today, I think, because it provides not just a heartening saga of the triumph of free expression and open participation, but also a clear case in which those ideals were more practical, too.

The Internet’s victory over the services we now derisively dismiss as “walled gardens” was an instance, within recent memory, when the idealists weren’t hopelessly outgunned by the cynics — when, in fact, the idealists turned out to be the realists, and the cynics took a bath. - Kapor’s early bet on the Net

Amen. All of this matters, and is supportive to contemplate, because this present, which may already surpass the future many saw back then, is clearly still the very beginning. Sometimes I find this astonishing.

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It was always held by the best marketers to be true that you don’t make your reputation, other people make it for you. Branding is now the same way, but it’s funny how we all cling to the concept that we can portray ourselves a certain way and people will just buy into this.

Vanity, all is vanity - which means “in vain” by the way. In real life people see through our pretenses, but usually kindly. In commerce there’s less mercy. Cherkoff reminds us:

That story telling business is called the branding industry and it has been a great way to paper over little (or big) cracks in product lines. However, these days the growth of networked media means that millions of stories are being told about products - but not by marketeers.

The greatest problem marketeers have these days is that no one really cares what they say. The only opinions people are interested in are those from other people. - Goodbye Branding (It Doesn’t Matter What You Say)

Want more proof?

…the most desired kind of information for consumers when considering a purchase is online user reviews from a site they trust, and there’s not even a close second choice…

• If consumers saw positive user reviews of a show on a site they trusted but saw negative reviews from a major critic, consumers would trust user reviews 30 times as often as they would trust a critic.
• This isn’t only the response from just the Web-happy younger generation, either. In every age cohort, user reviews were deemed more valuable than critics’ opinions, and only in the over-60 cohort was it close.
  - User Reviews: Everybody’s a Critic - or at Least They Should Be

The way for marketers to deal with this demographic sea-change is to engage with it of course: for one example, host the venue where the opinions about you will arise. Get behind the force, rather than stand in its way. This is not so hard for realistic marketers to understand, although getting budget approval may be a different thing.

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Ah, Robert X. Cringely - surely no one envisions bigger than he does when it comes to corporate strategy? He’s at it again, peeling back even more layers of the supposed secret Google plan for world domination liberation, and he reveals a scale of ambition so audacious that it could just be true.

Cringely points out that his description of Google’s true play behind the gambit of implying no interest in the 700-MHz wireless spectrum is now getting picked up by mainstream journalists. So if it’s real he scooped them by months.

But once the spectrum is won and the network is built, say by 2010 or 2011, Google will have a very different relationship with the other mobile operators. That’s because Gphone (its a network service, understand, not a device), like Gmail, will be free.

Think for a moment of the impact a free mobile phone service will have on the mobile phone market. Why would I continue with Verizon or AT&T or Sprint or T-Mobile or Alltel or whomever if I could get the same or better service for free? - Getting to Know You

The first half of Cringely’s article describes the use of ‘borrowed” social security numbers, and the gray-to-illegal economy in the US. From there he makes the connection - and warns us, “Stick with me, because this is good” - to Google.

Google? Yep.

Which brings us back to the credit bureau. It would be very much in Google’s interest to own one of the big three credit reporting agencies, because your mobile phone number is the most practical supplement for the Social Security number as a financial identifier.

Take all the web usage and YouTube video data Google has been acquiring about us all, glue it to our data down at the credit bureau, tie it to our mobile phone number and our mobile activity, then use the resulting product as both an information service and a database for targeting ads and you have Super Google — the most valuable company on Earth and entirely based on metadata.

Give it a read, you deserve the entertainment, and the chance to dream big.

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The Metaversed people hosting another Metanomics look at the underlying structure and governance of Second Life portray some interesting thinking about the Lindens’ view of themselves as service providers rather than a government. As always, Robert Bloomfield’s thinking on the growing SL economy is fascinating.

“Their perspective is that everybody who uses online tools will eventually be in virtual worlds - possibly as many as a billion users. If that’s the case, while there will be many competing services, the market will have grown to the point where that won’t matter so much.

“Explosive growth, in this case, isn’t considered so much a problem as it is an assurance of future business.” - It’s Not an Economy, It’s a Product

Nick Wilson makes a great point about virtual worlds and Second Life: the learning curve can be tough. He’s right that the key to adoption of anything is simplicity.

How soon might those billion users appear in the virtual worlds? Speaking to the future explosive growth Nick supplies the great reminder that the key to adoption is simplicity:

• Flickr tipped photo sharing when they made it simple
• Wordpress and Six Apart tipped blogging when they made it simple
• Google destroyed it’s competition when they made Search simple
• The iPod is the MP3 player, other brands are insignificant
• Twitter tipped mobile life logging when it made it simple
• YouTube tipped video sharing when they made it simple

Simplicity and the Virtual Tipping Point

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When you get to Second Life, there are as many interface tips as etiquette advisories. The Grid helps us out with some good links.

More Second Life Tips and Tricks

Top 5 tips for the newly born This title is a little misleading because it’s a lot more than just 5 tips, this is five tips, with some posting many more than 5, from each user. There are 10 pages in this thread, which I haven’t read all of it yet, heck, I bet there are almost 50 tips or suggestions on the first page alone! Here is a small sample:

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The old days of 3 television networks and a homogeneous media may have been the exception rather than the standard. Take a look at the newpaper lies during the Civil War, for example - the spin was actually worse than today’s.

A globally distributed news media is probably better in potential than one global rag, no matter how scrupulous. How we sort the wheat from the chaff is still evolving, and memeorandum’s one piece of it.

What are memeorandum’s top 100 sources?

The ascent of blogs and other independent publishers has expanded and revitalized political dialogue in the United Status. While the “mainstream” media remains the primary source of factural reporting, they no longer own the agenda.

What exactly are these sources? The memeorandum Leaderboard, launched today, identifies 100 of them, ranking sources simply by how much they’ve appeared on memeorandum in the past month.

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