Month: March 2008

Stuff You Miss At SXSW

So, SXSWi just ended, and I wasn’t there. I’m heading to NY this Friday for a wedding, and have a few other trips in the pipeline as well — I just didn’t have the cash or the vacation time to fit SXSW in. Maybe next year?

At any rate, this Loren Feldman interview of Chris Brogan is a taste of why I’m bummed about missing the event – two very smart guys talking about social media and where it’s going:

It’s about 8 minutes but definitely worth watching.

I Still Have My Dice

my D&D dice

I haven’t played D&D since I was 15 or so, but I never threw my dice away. There’s a real visceral pleasure you get out of holding a handful of dice. Something to do with the colors, the way they click in your hand, and the sense of endless possibility.

Thanks, Gary. Rest well.

Interesting or Compelling?

Over at Mobile Opportunity today, Michael Mace makes a point that’s true not just for technology products, but for virtually any kind of product development:

Very often tech companies will fall in love with a concept that is compelling to people in the company, but not to non-technologists. They’ll convince themselves that people will want it because, well, they ought to want it.

A related problem: A company will come up with a product that’s nice, but doesn’t really address [a pain point]. You know you have this problem when someone in the company says that need a marketing campaign to explain to people why they should want the product. The really good products need marketing for visibility, not persuasion.

I think this is the underlying problem behind most failed web applications. They do something interesting, as opposed to something compelling.

What makes this whole problem especially tough is that you can’t just ask customers what they need.

Emphasis added.

I’ll add the caveat that the line between visibility and persuasion is not cut-and-dried. Look at the advertising for the iPhone. Most of the spots are product demonstrations. Clearly, you’re raising visibility by showing what the product can do, but isn’t that also a form of persuasion?

And as always, one person’s “eh, interesting” is another person’s “OMG must have now!” But even so, the point is valid.

Sunday Morning Sexism

They say you should never blog while angry, but I am going to make an exception this morning. The Washington Post has an article out today by one Charlotte Allen that’s about the most pathetic excuse for woman-bashing I’ve seen for a long time.

It doesn’t matter that the author is herself a woman. Comments like this:

I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home.

are so thoroughly ignorant and sexist that I’m amazed the Post actually published it. What the hell were they thinking?