Mitch Joel's Blog: Six Pixels of Separation, page 337

Marketing Orgasms With Avinash Kaushik (It's Not What You Think)

Episode #286 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

It's a New Year... so what does that mean? Well, if you ask Avinash Kaushik (the Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google and author of the best-selling business books, Web Analytics - An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0), us Digital Marketers are going to be doing more... a whole lot more in the coming year(s). As big and fast as Social Media has changed the way that brands engage with consumers, things are going to evolve all that much more as location, mobile and more converge in this massive evolution. There's no doubt that both Avinash and I are bullish on these new opportunities, so you're going hear a lot of excitement and agreement on this episode, but it's also filled with our passion and desire to see our industry change and evolve at a much quicker pace. Please allow me to take this opportunity to wish you and your family a very healthy and Happy New Year. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #286.

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Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #80

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

DJ Earworm Mashup - United State of Pop 2011 (World Go Boom) . "Missed 2011 in pop music? Fear not. This amazing five minute track shows mash-ups aren't dead. Can you name all the tracks? Derivative or pure genius?" (Alistair for Hugh).

Drunk History Christmas with Ryan Gosling, Jim Carrey and Eva Mendes - Funny or Die . "Give a man a half-bottle of scotch. Ask him to recite a Yuletide poem. Get famous actors to act out what he says. No matter what he says. Genius. Also breaks the fourth wall and some new ones." (Alistair for Mitch).

The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value - Forbes . "I am a convert to religion of Lean Startups . The principle tenet of Lean is: your job as a start-up entrepreneur is get to 'product-market fit'... that is, build a product that your customers love, and are willing to pay for (with some kind of scarce resource, generally, time or money). You can restate this fundamental principal as: customer, customer, customer. Nothing else matters. This story is not about the Lean Startup approach, but rather about big corporate culture, and the primacy of Shareholder Value. That is: most CEOs have as their prime objective to deliver good returns to their shareholders, which leads to short-term thinking, and a focus, according to the author, on the wrong thing. The result has been a hollowing out of value in corporate America. I'm not sure if this is what ails our economy these days. But I do think that any company - big or small - that spends its time thinking about how to maximize customer value is most likely to become more valuable over time." (Hugh for Alistair).

How Doctors Die - Zocalo Public Square . "We spend a lot of time thinking and talking about how we should live, but very little time thinking and talking about how we should die. And when it comes time, many family members insist we do 'everything we can'... which often means, sticking the dying in the ICU, full of tubes and drugs and invasive surgeries in order to eek out a couple more days, weeks, months of life. Is 'everything we can' the same as 'everything we should'?  Apparently, many doctors, who know the discomfort - and futility - of all that medical intervention, chose a simpler way to go. NOTE: I think I've passed on an article like this before in our six links exchange, but... well... these are important questions." (Hugh for Mitch).

China's deserted fake Disneyland - Reuters . "Beyond this being both eerie and creepy, I could not help but wonder: 'would this have worked if it wasn't a fake Disneyland?'" (Mitch for Alistair).

Do the Classics Have a Future? - The New York Review of Books . "You are being warned: before clicking on this link, go to the bathroom first and grab a drink (you may want some alcohol in there). Choose a comfortable and quiet place... now, you can start reading this very long piece that will challenge you to not only define the word 'classics' but to think long and hard about what we learn, how we learn it and - most importantly - how do we integrate the classics into our daily media and literature diet? It's easy to just fend this off as the role of elementary and secondary school English teachers, but it's just not that simple. Personally, I struggle with the classics - both music and literature. I just can't 'get into it'... as the saying goes. As we become more deficient with long-form content from another time (thank you, Twitter and Facebook status updates), should we even care about our consumptions of the classics?" (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it's your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

Drunk History Christmas with Ryan Gosling, Jim Carrey and Eva Mendes from Ryan Gosling

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How To Deal With The Haters

I have no idea how to interact with the haters.

I spent over a decade in the music industry reviewing artists for weekly and monthly magazines and newspapers. In all of that time, I rarely reviewed artists I didn't like or albums I didn't like from artists that I did like. Why? One, with the limited space that print offered, I preferred to use that space to talk about something that I thought the readers might enjoy spending their money on (something positive). Two, if something was so bad (at least, according to me), why even bother giving it any coverage or attention? I realize that some people may want to know why something didn't work for me or why I thought something wasn't worth the time or listen, but I guess I was subscribing to the old adage, "if you have nothing nice to say don't say anything at all."

Big time wuss.

I've been very public about the fact that I have very thin skin (and yes, I realize this isn't a great attribution... I'm working on it). I have one simple and decisive way of dealing with the haters: no public attention or validation. I do not follow them, link to them, help them or anything else. But, here's the biggest trick: they would never know it. I will still follow them in the online spaces, act cordial to them when confronted, but I then filter them out on my end (through the creation of lists or blocking). It's my own, private way, of removing as much negativism as I can in my life without making another human being feel like they are being ignored.

It works for me.

I often Blog about my combatives training with Tony Blauer. Many people still misinterpret this training as being extremely physical. When you begin dissecting the dynamics of a confrontation, you learn that ninety-percent of a confrontation is psychological and you hope that it doesn't lean towards that other ten percent - which is the physical. The training is all about the ninety-percent and being as prepared as one can be for the ten percent. My net learning from the years of training and coaching I took part in was that it's very hard to have a confrontation (pre-physical) unless both parties take part (I am not talking about being attacked or ambushed). Think about the prototypical fight you see in a bar: one person shoves another, the other person postures back, there's finger pointing and words exchanged... and we all know where this leads. The situation can (sometimes) be defused by simply not taking part in the antagonist's "story"... by leading the antagonist to feel that it's simply not worth it or that they have already won the fight. In some instances, this means acting submissive or by creating a pattern interrupt that changes their preconceived notions of how the incident would play out. In other instances, it's about creating a scenario where if the antagonist persists, they will be either feel vindicated, embarrassed or feel the shame of the people around them (we see this a lot in movies). Yes, every instance is different and yes, there are many exceptions to every circumstance, but it's a way of creating a scenario where the antagonist still feels vindicated while you can simply move on with your life.

People who have a bone to pick.

What is important to know about these haters is that is goes well beyond a personal feeling that they have to get their opinions expressed, heard and even have a sense of being "right." In watching a lot of the online discourse, you quickly learn that many of the more passionate haters (also known as trolls or as Christopher S. Penn calls them, "ankle-biters") feel like they are actually attempting to right a wrong in the world. When an individual takes something on like this, it's going to be challenging (actually, nearly impossible) to have true discourse. Many people will tell you that you simply ignore them... it's just not that easy. So, while ignoring is optimal, sometimes you have to let them think that they have your ear, when what you're really doing is acknowledging who and what they are and compartmentalizing them into the back bottom drawer of your life. And, with that, you give it no attention: no links, no love, no comments, no feedback, no input. To them, they still feel heard and important. To you, their activities are acknowledged and put on your black list. Ultimately, it is - somewhat of a compliment - to even be in a position where individuals care enough to have a hate-on for you.

How do you deal with the haters? 

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The Year Of Mobile? Sounds Like The Month Of The Smartphone

Are smartphones now mass?

By the sounds of the MediaPost article, Santa's Surprise: Smartphones Go Mass (published yesterday), it's definitely moving in that direction... rapidly. This is one of those moments when the Marketing industry must give pause. We're not going to see standard adoption here (at least, I don't think we will). It feels more like what Ray Kurzweil defines as exponential growth (more on that here: Spirit of the Time - Ray Kurzweil at Zeitgeist Americas 2011). Mobile phones may even be going away - along with desktop computers and laptops - in favor of  smartphones and tablets. Yes, I'm bullish on this platform (I have been for over a decade), and yes, these devices are not fully there yet (in terms of being ready for real prime time), but you simply can't deny what's happening here: "app analytics firm Flurry says that it saw 6.8 million new iOS and Android devices activated on Christmas Day alone. The spike in newcomers represented a 353% increase over the 1.3 million to 1.8 million daily activations tracked for the period of Dec. 1-20. Compared even to last Christmas Day, when Flurry saw 2.8 million iOS and Android activations, this past Sunday was up 140% from same day last year. This past Sunday, beginning at 8 a.m. and staying level throughout the day, people downloaded about 10 million apps an hour, Flurry estimates."

The one screen world.

To date there has been a lot of research to negate both my personal enthusiasm and the data that Flurry (and others) are enthusiastically bringing forward. One thing is for certain: the tide is beginning to shift dramatically and it won't be (too) long before mobile becomes the primary screen. There are a couple of key leading indicators that are pushing this forward:

Smartphones are becoming more affordable.

Data plans are starting to become more reasonable.

The price of data plans are being built into the family cost structure (according to the MediaPost article).

Apps are a major draw for new consumers.

Media (music, movies, TV, books, etc...) are also pushing this forward.

Smartphones are a symbol of social status.

People are comfortable watching their favorite TV shows, YouTube clips and movies on a 3.5 inch screen.

It's not about voice. It's about data. 

It wasn't too long ago that mobile carriers didn't care about data. Their major concern used to be voice usage and churn. According to the MediaPost article, "Cisco predicted today that mobile data use worldwide is poised to grow 21x by 2015." It would be interesting to see what the prediction is for voice. Something tells me that as we get more and more connected, not only does email, text messaging and chat start chewing into the voice usage, but I'm going to guess that FaceTime (and other soon-to-follow products) are going to make voice calls as relevant as sending a letter in the mail (with all due respect to the pains that the postal industry is currently feeling).

It's happening fast, but it's also kinda slow.

Mobile networks vs. wi-fi. Interoperable devices. Apple vs. Android vs. RIM vs. Microsoft vs. everyone else. HTML5 vs. apps. Open vs. closed. Not all devices are created equal and none of the software, apps, carriers and more play all that nicely together. It's going to require a lot of painful business decisions before everything is much easier and the friction is removed for the consumer. While we're not quite there, we see glimmers of hope and rapid change. That being said, we should all prepare ourselves for much more disruption in the mobile space in the next few years and hope for some stability in the process (historically, this has been challenging).

As always, this doesn't freak me out... it excites me. It feels like more real opportunities are ahead of us. How do you feel about it?

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Two Great Questions

Whether you're about to interview someone for a job or heading out to a networking dinner...

Here are two questions about business that will either take someone completely off guard or engage you - head on - in a deep and fascinating conversation. Personally, I'm not involved in the HR function at Twist Image. I have always struggled with the interview process. Being an entrepreneur, I have always struggled with the minutia of details that come with negotiating an employment package. Also, I'm often let down by how unprepared so many candidates are when they come in for an interview... and don't even get me started on things like writing skills, punctuation, grammar and general social skills.

Two great business questions:

What is the coolest thing that you have seen in the past little while? It actually surprised me to see that Marissa Mayer (Vice President of Location and Local Services) from Google asks a very similar questions during her interviews for Googlers (more on that here: Marissa Mayer, Google's "De Niro," Reveals What She Asks Job Candidates). This question really demonstrates both how closely someone pays attention to what's going on around them, but it can also frame what their true passions are. If you're interviewing someone for a job at a marketing agency and suddenly they're talking about the recent reboot of DC Comics or the new Amazon Price Check app, you are looking at two very different candidates. It's also a great conversation starter at dinner parties. I've actually seen people whip out their smartphones and start taking intense notes as the conversation takes hold.

What do you read to keep up to date on the industry? Education is everything. Reading is everything. I don't expect everyone to write, but you have to - at the very least - be following what's going on in your industry to really understand both your own place in it, and where everything is heading. This is also a leading question because if someone responds with, "I don't really have time to read..." or "I read a lot of newspapers" (without being more specific about which ones or which journalists), it is a major red flag. It's also a great questions because it can take you down a fascinating road of discovery that twists with the types of media they prefer to read (magazines, newspapers, books, websites, Blogs) and turns at how they prefer to read (e-reader, smartphones, paper, etc...) then twists again when asking about who their favorite content creators are (authors, journalists, Bloggers, etc...). It's another one of those questions that will have you looking for something to take notes on.

The truth.

I heard from a recruiter that over seventy percent of resumes and/or the people who go for interviews either embellish or lie. Even if you have decided on a candidate and ask them for some references, who do you think they're going to come back with? Someone who is going to say something negative about them? I prefer the questions above because you can't run and you can't hide from the answers. You also can't really prep for them. You have to be both sharp and ready for a conversation. Plus, if you can't answer them, what does it say about you and your abilities... not the abilities to do the work, but your own, personal development, abilities?

What are some of the best business questions you love to ask... or ones that you have heard?

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The Five Business Books That Shaped 2011

Read. Read. Read.

Blog posts are great. So are Twitter, online newspapers and magazines and the occasional Podcast, but if you really want to deep-dive into a topic and spend more than a grazing moment with it, you have to read a well-written book about the topic that interests you. A few years back, I set a personal goal of reading one book per week. It hasn't been easy, but by doing most of my reading on my iPhone loaded with both the Amazon Kindle app and iBooks, it has become much more feasible. This year, I failed miserably. As of this week, I've clocked in 33 books (and yes, I realize that "failing miserably" is probably a bad choice of words considering that the average person in North America reads between one and three books a year... if that). I'm also a bit of a business book geek, so in the spirit of the Holidays Season, year-end lists and "top 10 of 2011" linkbait posts, the world seems primed for...

The 5 Business Books That Shaped 2011:

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster - October 2011). I can't remember the last time a biography on a business leader got this much attention. Much of the press you will read about the Steve Jobs' biography leans towards his personal disposition (which wasn't the kindest). If you have yet to read this fascinating biography, my recommendation is to do it with a notebook nearby and read it from the perspective of, "what can my business learn from Steve's way of thinking?" A lot of the words used to either describe Jobs or his direct statements are not only inspirational if you're interested in business, but it allows you to see how one of the biggest companies in the world wasn't looking at case studies and market research in an attempt to grow a viable business. This should put a damper on those who only push forward based on "best practices." 

Poke The Box by Seth Godin (The Domino Project - March 2011). This short and easy-to-read manifesto was Godin's first release on his own publishing imprint that he launched (and recently disbanded) along with Amazon. Godin has a way of inspiring new business thinking with real stories and books that are both fun to read and super-smart. Poke The Box doesn't disappoint (and, at $5, you can't go wrong). Having business ideas are great, but it's about starting and doing stuff where the rubber meets the road. That's what Godin wants you to do: poke, poke, poke.

Great By Choice by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen (HarperBusiness - October 2011). During the last recession, our company (Twist Image) was very lucky. We not only maintained our business that year, but we grew it by nearly fifty-percent. My business partners and I would like to think that it's because we're much smarter than our competitors, while some might say that we were lucky. Nearly ten years after Collins' breakthrough book, Good To Great, he's back with another fascinating question: "Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?" With nine years of research to back up the answer to this question, you may be surprised to find out what it takes to thrive and sustain in our current economic throes.

The Lean Startup by Eric Reis (Crown Business - September 2011). Sadly most businesses start with an idea and stick with it until the bitter end. For some, the bitter end means the Fortune 500 list but for most it means either bankruptcy or some very disappointed investors. We live in a new era of entrepreneurship and business ideas can be tested and marketed for success like never before. Ries has been preaching the value of what he has called, the lean startup, and it has become all the rage this year. Much like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point became a saying that every business exec used in 2002, this year every person looking to start a business has been talking about it being a "lean startup" or how they've managed to "pivot" (another big concept in The Lean Startup). 

End Malaria edited by Michael Bungay Stanier (The Domino Project - September 2011). Full disclosure, I was one of the many people who contributed to this collaborative effort. Had I known how amazing the final product was going to be, I probably would have put much more effort into my piece. Usually books that are a culmination of many authors offering a small snippet of content wind up coming out dry, disjointed and unsatisfying for the reader. I found myself constantly going back to the notes I took while reading the End Malaria book and the great contributions from people like Seth Godin, Dan Pink, Chris Brogan, Charlene Li, Jeff Jarvis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Sir Ken Robinson and more. The fact that all of the money raised went to buy malaria nets to save the lives of children in countries less fortunate than ours, made it that much more powerful.

What are you business book picks for 2011?

The above posting is my twice-monthly column for The Huffington Post called, Media Hacker . I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original version online here:

The Huffington Post - The Five Business Books That Shaped 2011 .

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The Paradox Of Leadership

When you're right, you're a hero. When you take a misstep, you're a goat.

There's an often discussed paradox of leadership that attempts to quantify which trait is more important for business: being the first or being the best? The challenge (which seems rather obvious to me) is that everyone would chose to be the best (if given the choice), but it's hard to find any real data to suggest that the majority of those who are considered "the best" are the ones who were not the first (the leaders), but rather those who sat back and waited for the market to mature before swooping in and taking control of it.

It's also easy to be an armchair quarterback.

Chris Brogan just launched his latest business book, Google+ For Business - How Google's Social Network Changes Everything. I'm not sure why, but Brogan is a lightning rod for opposing views (maybe it's one of the reasons we like him so much on the Media Hacks Podcast). When he first announced the book, he took some heat (see: Beware the Google+ Experts) and he's taking more heat as it rolls out into the marketplace (see: Would Chris Brogan Take It Back If He Could?). In that last Blog post, Craig Peters ends his thoughts with, "My advice: Calm down. Let the slightly significant something be absorbed by both the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas. Then step back and take a look and see if it's worth all that and a bag of chips. Takeaway for marketers: Sometimes being the best is better than being the first."

Remember: someone needs to be at the edge.

I don't know if Google+ is the next big thing. Regardless, I don't think Chris is going to have to find another career should this book not sell as much as the New York Times best-selling business book, Trust Agents (which he co-authored with Julien Smith). I also don't think that the success of Google+ is the leading indicator as to whether or not someone should write a book about this new platform and what it could mean to a business. As a platform, we're comparing Google+ to Facebook and Twitter but forgetting that if Google deploys Google+ throughout all of their platforms (Gmail, Android, YouTube, etc...) it could well become a part of our daily connecting with one another - whether we like it or not. Is Google+ a raging success? No. Is it adding new members each and every day? Yes. Is it taking off like Facebook has? It may be a little too early to tell.

Lead or be led.

I don't think that Chris is betting on Google+ so much as he is betting on being a leader in this New Media space. Love Chris Brogan or hate Chris Brogan, his posture and business positioning is all about leadership in these connected channels. It's not about sitting idly by and then - suddenly - when Twitter becomes popular to jump all over it. He's the early settler... the one who is clearing the path for the rest of us. It's easy to call these people crazy or misinformed (imagine what everyone must have thought of Christopher Columbus in the 1400s). No, Chris is no Christopher Columbus, but he does walk the talk. He gets in early, explores, spends the time, pushes to see what it all means to businesses and shares what he's thinking in such a candid way, that those who aren't aligned are quick to pounce. Of course he won't always be right (don't get me started on how wrong I was about Second Life, YouTube and others), but isn't that the point?

Great leaders are rarely lauded for their efforts in the moment.

It's too bad that we're so quick to dismiss and not applaud those who take a leadership position. Do you remember what people said about Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and even Google in the early days? Do you remember what people said about MySpace, Cuil and Friendster in the early days? The discourse was (pretty much) the same: no one could see the business or business model. Do you think we would have had half of the innovations that have changed our lives had leaders sat back and not tried to be first in their market? Maybe we should all wait for market research or a white paper before moving forward? The point is that the majority of people will sit back and wait for something to prove itself before moving forward, but there's also a handful of people who must take the risks and lead for us.

My takeaways for Marketers: It's ok if you're not willing to take the risks. A lot of those risk-takers will be wrong. That being said, our industry needs more innovation and risk-takers.

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How To Be A Marketing And Sales Lion

Episode #285 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

Are you ready for some tough love? I often find that that brands have millions of questions about sales and marketing, but most of them are thinly veiled complaints about how they don't have the time or budget to make a lot of the strategies and tactics come to life. It becomes that much more depressing when you start uncovering that few brands are doing the bare bone basics well (if at all). Marcus Sheridan (known to many as The Sales Lion) brings a dash of motivational content coupled with a healthy helping of reality-based concepts that will make some of the most seasoned Marketers smack their heads with a, "why am I not doing this!" kind of motion. Before we dive into the discussion, please allow me to wish you (and yours) a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday season. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #285.

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Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #79

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

How a collapsing scientific hypothesis led to a lawsuit and arrest - Ars Technica . "Science and hubris are strange bedfellows. I loved this story, which reads like a nerdy Grisham novel, because it gives you a glimpse into what it's like inside the pressure cooker of publishing and research. It's also a strong argument for peer review and transparency in research." (Alistair for Hugh).

Passive Aggressive Notes . "Something lighter for the holidays. My grandfather seldom asked for tea, instead, he'd ask, 'is the kettle broken?' He'd have identified with the authors of this collection of passive-aggressive notes, signs and suggestions. Something to keep in mind when you open a present this year and say, 'were all the regular stores closed?'" (Alistair for Mitch).

How Iceland survived the fire - Financial Times . "I am obsessed with our response to the financial crisis that started in 2008 and has no end in sight. It's refreshing to see what Iceland did: banks who made stupid loans were told to suck it up and suffer the consequences. The Iceland government didn't backstop the shitty financial decisions of big finance companies. The world was shocked! Appalled! Iceland would suffer. Except they haven't. Iceland has done shockingly well, compared to Ireland, which took the opposite path: guaranteeing all manner of shitty financial decisions by their own banks and foreign banks, subjecting the country to years of woe. Of course, Iceland and Ireland are small economies, and small countries, but as laboratories for different kinds of responses to this crisis, they are instructive." (Hugh for Alistair).

You Say You Want a Devolution? - Vanity Fair . "This is something I've been thinking about for a while now, wondering about the reasons behind it: Today is 2011. Imagine 20 years ago, 1991: what was on the radio? How did people dress? Is there that much difference? Picture the same thing, between 1991 and the sideburns and bellbottoms of 1971. And then the sideburns and bellbottoms of 1971 versus the behives and swing jazz of 1951. It seems certain parts of our culture have stopped changing very much: music and fashion. What's going on? I don't quite agree with all of the author's conclusions, but it's fascinating, nonetheless." (Hugh for Mitch).

Can You Learn To Code In One Day? We Sent A Non-Nerd To Find Out - Fast Company . "I've been on a kick lately and it involves me (and my kids) learning another language. The language of code. I'm both fascinated with the idea of taking a stab at it and terrified because I don't know where (or even how) to begin. Moving forward, I do think that 'coders are the new creative,' as Faris Yakob says. When I think about history, I think about all of the architects and designers it took to build our physical society, well the evolution of our society is, clearly, a digital one, so the coders, programmers and architects of our future need to know this one, very important, language... the language of code." (Mitch for Alistair).

Most print newspapers in the States have only a five-year life span - The Guardian . "This isn't the ramblings of a lone Blogger hell-bent on building their own new media empire. This statement comes a soon-to-be-released report titled, Is America at a digital turning point? , by the University of Southern California's Annenberg centre for the digital future . According to the report: 'Circulation of print newspapers continues to plummet, and we believe that the only print newspapers that will survive will be at the extremes of the medium - the largest and the smallest.' That - in and of itself - forces us to stop asking questions about when newspapers will go away and start doing the very hard work of trying to figure out what comes next and what we're going to do about?" (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it's your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

Tags:

alistair croll

ars technica

bitcurrent

centre for the digital future

complete web monitoring

faris yakob

fast company

gigaom

hugh mcguire

human 20

iambik

ink

john grisham

librivox

link exchange

linkbait

managing bandwidth

media hacks

passive aggressive notes

pressbooks

slate

story

the book over

the guardian

university of southern california

vanity fair

year one labs

Simple Tricks

We tend to over-complicate things. Don't we?

For years I have suffered through terrible sinus infections (sexy, I know). It got so bad many years back that a doctor recommended surgery. Well, I had the surgery and it was either botched or didn't work (nobody knows for sure), so I continued to endure the pain and constant colds. My current doctor thinks that I'm in a state of chronic sinus infection with varying levels of seriousness. Normally, this isn't a huge deal. When it's bad, you take some antibiotics and when it's mild, you treat it like a cold. The challenge I had is that I started flying (a lot) several years ago and things went from bad to worse.

Bad to worse.

I started experiencing a pain in my sinus regions when the plane began descending that can only be described as that scene in the Arnold Schwarzenegger flick Total Recall where the probe gets pulled out of his nose (only worse). The sinus pain and pressure would last the full descent and often linger for a few hours after. It got so bad and progressive that I would up taking Advil Cold & Sinus for two days prior to flying and I would use a prescribed nasal spray sinus steroid, long-lasting Dristan, and a saline spray (yes, three types of nasal sprays). On top of that, I even used special ear plugs called, Ear Planes. None of that helped. It kept on happening. And, I was on a schedule that had me on multiple flights every week. I was basically, on all of this medication constantly.

No end in sight.

While the pain was sometimes less, I can look back on this time and admit, that none of those medical treatments helped. One day, I was working out of a hotel room in Chicago and the TV was on in the background. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the screen and it read, "coming up next on The Dr. Oz Show: how to take the pain out of your sinuses" (or something like that). I had never seen the Dr. Oz show and figured that between the surgery, recovery, multiple prescriptions and online searches, I knew more about sinus pain than anybody else. I was wrong. When the show came on Dr. Oz introduced the Neti Pot. I had never heard of a Neti Pot and (between us friends) it looked super weird. It looks like a tea pot that you add a saline mix to with distilled lukewarm warm water. Then, you lean forward and pour it all in through each nostril (here's a demo on YouTube). I know, it sounds both disgusting and painful (thankfully, you don't feel anything but unfortunately, it is pretty gross - so you may not want to crank it out on a first date or anything).

It's magic. Pure magic.

Within a few days, my sinuses were feeling better. Within a week, it felt like I was giving my sinuses a spa. I've been using a Neti Pot regularly for over three years now (every day in the morning) and I have never experienced any sinus problems on a plane since (and I do close to 150,000 miles every year). Even common colds that get exasperated into a sinus infection seem to not last as long and are much less painful. I haven't taken any medicine or sprays for my sinuses when flying. Done.

What's the point of all this?

There are simple tricks that we often dismiss because we think that technology (and yes, I consider modern science to be a part of that bucket) has all of the answers. If a car company wants one thousand people to take their car out for a test drive, instead of building a very complex Social Media platform, why not print up business cards with an offer and put them on the windshield of cars in a shopping mall lot that you think may be willing to try your brand? No, I'm not saying that you should dismiss modern science in lieu of homeopathic options (so don't go all crazy on me in the comments section), but I am saying that you need to explore everything... even the options that, initially, seem too simple to work.

Many great pieces of content have been written about the art of simplicity... and all of them are right.

One last riff on simplicity: My friend, Jon, recently told me that if you add the word "sing" in front of "youtube" in the URL for a video that you like, you get redirected to a site where you can download the audio of that video. He thought he was little late to that party, but I had never heard of this simple trick either. And, when you're watching a music clip that is rare, it's sometimes nice to have the audio and transfer it over to your iPhone or iPod. Good on HD Downloader for hacking this trick together (granted, I'm not sure how legal it is).

Tags:

advil cold and sinus

arnold schwarzenegger

business travel

dr oz

dristan long lasting

ear planes

hd downloader

homeopathy

iphone

ipod

modern science

net pot

saline spray

simple trick

simplicity

sinus infection

sinus pain

sinus pressure

social media

technology

total recall

youtube