Win some, lose some…

Harumph. Today went something like this:

am: spend a happy half hour rhapsodising over acquaintance’s brand new Powerbook - another one rescued from the Dark Side…

pm: sulk because the new Google Desktop is Windows-only and only searches M$-format files…

Are webfeeds ready for the mainstream?

Courtesy of Alex Barnett (an Online Customer Experience Manager at Microsoft, whatever one of those might be), here’s a useful matrix comparison of email and RSS for direct marketing purposes, with links to relevant articles.

He makes an interesting point - that the debate needs to move away from RSS-versus-email and towards where RSS can fit into the marketing mix. It’s a pragmatic approach, to be sure, but I think it misses one key point - that customer adoption of RSS is miniscule, compared to email. While it’s good to be prepared, there’s a danger here of preparing prematurely. In our conversations with clients and others, the proportion of those who are aware of weblogs is very small, and the proportion who are aware of RSS (or webfeeds as we should now be calling them) is even smaller.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of activity in providing webfeeds - and if organisations like the BBC are providing feeds, then mass adoption is certainly possible. But currently it’s very much a bleeding-edge activity to be actively subscribing to and reading webfeeds, and our impression is that at least partly due to the lack of reading tools on the average desktop.

If you’re in a corporate environment, then it’s unlikely that you have the ability - either physically or ‘legally’ - to install webfeed-reading software; and the larger the corporate environment, the more conservative IT functions tend to be in rolling out new applications. So unless you’ve installed a webfeed reader personally, it’s likely to be a phenomenon that not yet reached you.

So what’s it going to take to make webfeeds hit the mainstream? Is it the provision of a mass-market webfeed reader (i.e. webfeed capability being included in the next iteration of Outlook?) Or will it be a more gradual process?

Honda ads

I saw the new Honda advert for the first time last night (actually, that wasn’t the only first - Garrison Keillor singing? WTF?) and then this morning came across the Flash game based on the ad. Bizarre doesn’t even come close. But I’ve sent off for a bag…

Why I can’t get any work done after 6pm…

Max waiting to be fed

A subtle reminder to get into the kitchen and open a tin, cat-style. Note the juxtaposition ‘twixt me and keyboard…

The Seven Warning Signs Of Bogus Science

The Seven Warning Signs Of Bogus Science. Now if only someone could devise seven warning signs for political bollocks, life would suddenly get a whole lot simpler…

Current frustrations

1. Having managed to find a PS/2-to-USB converter (no problem the other way around, but there’s obviously few of us out there who need to connect a PS/2 mouse to a USB port) and plugged in my trackball again, it’s now playing up - the pointer speed is fine in everything but Safari, where it’s half the speed.
2. It seemed like a good idea to take a quick look under the horrible lino on the bathroom floor to see if was glued down - as a prelude to ripping it up and tiling the floor. It was glued down - but by mould rather than glue. It turns out that the shower tray has been leaking for a considerable period of time - so the base was rotten and the plasterboard behind the tiling has gone manky. So now we’ve got a large hole where the shower cubicle used to be, and I’m wondering how much of the plasterboard on the two affected walls I’m going to need to pull off so that it’s possible to get the tiling back on and looking half-decent.
3. Authentication on the demo wiki is playing up for no good reason, which is going to make it difficult to demo to a client tomorrow.

So anyone trying to sell me something through a cold call this morning will be in for a shock…

A side effect of Mac ownership that noone mentions…

…is that the idea of going back to working full-time in a Wintel shop is so profoundly depressing that almost anything would be a better alternative.

Theory X and Theory Y of wiki adoption

We had a meeting with a couple of potential clients this week that were quite eye-opening in terms of attitudes to wikis.

In both situations, the conversations had got around to the subject of wikis, and in particular how they could be used inside each organisation to capture some of the project-specific information that they have flying around. What was fascinating was the difference in perception of the freedom to edit that wikis provide - in one organisation the idea that wikis can (if you configure them this way) allow anyone to edit anything was accepted without a murmer. In the other, it was as if we’d suggested that they leave the petty cashbox unlocked out in the street outside with a sign saying “help yourself”. Even when it was demonstrated that it’s possible to provide the same layers of access control that you’d find anywhere else in the network, they were still unsettled by the idea that there’s a ‘free for all’ option.

Which got me to wondering if there are some organisations where it would be culturally impossible to introduce wiki technology, because of their attitudes to their staff. They’re the Theory X employers - the default assumption is that employees are up to no good and have to be policed, with sanctions to enforce performance. Presumably their attitude to wikis would be that things would quickly degenerate into anarchy.

The Theory Y assumptions are the opposite - explicit control and punishment measures aren’t needed because in general staff want to do a high-quality job. You’d assume that if this were the case then the ability to edit ceases to become a risk and is instead a benefit.

I’m going to test this out in future presentations - a quick proxy for employer attitude being how they manage web and email access. My suspicion is that if this is highly-policed, then there’s going to be a negative perception of a wiki’s freedom to edit. Presumably the need to police employee behaviour comes from a belief that there’s deviant behaviour going on, so following that logic through would mean that if you give staff the ability to edit wiki pages it will lead to problems.

Of course, Theory X / Theory Y has often been attacked for being over-simplistic, but perhaps there is scope for a ‘Theory X / Theory Y’ of wiki adoption?

Roll out the writs

Good to see that the British record industry has learnt from the PR disaster taking place over the other side of the Atlantic, and have decided that embracing the possibilities of new technology will be a better option long-term than propping up an aging business model with lawsuits. </sarcasm>

After all, home taping killed music, didn’t it?

Actually, I’m not altogether surprised by this particular development. A couple of months ago I had some interactions with a fairly senior individual in the online division of a major entertainment brand. Nice guy, very professional - but in an incredibly insular kind of way. It was the kind of environment where they thought they were cutting-edge because they used IM in the business - but the sites themselves looked like they’d been designed by a database administrator. There was just no imagination there, no insight into the way that the world is now - and this was a supposedly creative business. It’s not altogether surprising that the writs are now flying…