Yearly Archives: 2008

2008 Highlights

Today marks the second anniversary of the start of this blog.

To celebrate another year completed, here are three of my favourite posts from the last 12 months:

“Let’s say you’re launching a new website.

How good is it going to be when it first goes live?

Probably pretty crap, truth be told.”

“Do you take photos at the highest resolution your digital camera allows?”

“Do you actually need to categorise every transaction?”

But, based on the posts you chose to read, by far the most popular post from the last year was one I wrote literally 365 days ago:

“Do less.”

I’m pleased to say that through the year I managed to do most of the things listed in that post.

It found its way onto StumbleUpon in January and has been read over 13,700 times since then (over 2,700 times in one day alone in February).  Ironically, a post about “less” got the most attention!

If you find these post interesting, check out a longer list of posts from 2008 that I think are worth re-visiting.

Thank you to all of you who took the time to read what I’ve written this year.  I am still constantly surprised by how many of you there are, and how much I learn from spending some time thinking about what I’m writing and being part of the conversation.

I’m going to continue to evolve this blog over the next 12 months. 

I plan to write less frequently, but (hopefully) more thoughtfully. 

I also have a new Twitter account, which I’ll try using for shorter things, as they come to mind.  My user name is  @rowansimpson if you want to follow me there.

I hope you continue to find it all worth reading.

Science of Sport

One of the best new blogs that I’ve started reading this year is Science of Sport by Jonathan Dugas and Ross Tucker from South Africa.

Over the last few weeks they have published an excellent “Top 8 of 08″ series, covering their top sports science related stories from the year:

The pic above comes from #7, and shows the final lunge for the wall in the men’s 100m butterfly at the Olympics. 

The winner of this race, incredibly, was Michael Phelps, who is on the left.

Enjoy!

Ski Lodge

Here is an example of a beautiful iPhone app and a simple promo website:

Ski Lodge (for iPhone)   

The UI is very easy to look at – little things make it obvious this was designed rather than just developed: like the wood grain background, bold easy to read fonts and navigation elements which have clearly been designed to be touched rather than clicked.  

I especially like the trail map link on the resort page which includes a bar chart showing the percentage of runs that are beginner, intermediate and advanced – a nice way to communicate a lot of information without adding lots of noise.

Their website is great too – a single page with screen shots and an obvious link to the App Store.  

At the moment they only cover the US and Canada, but according to ReadWriteWeb they have plans to add NZ and other countries soon.

Other apps from the same developers, all of which look just as impressive:

Also, something fun… check out Burn Ball by Tim Haines!

PS: If there are any aspiring iPhone developers out there looking for a project to get stuck into in 2009 drop me a note.

Bring Back The Bowl Off

For the second time in as many matches, yesterday’s Twenty-20 cricket international between New Zealand and the West Indies ended in a tied match.  

Last time they used a bowl off to determine the winner, with bowlers from each team bowling at unprotected wickets.  Hit and miss!  It was fantastic.

However, this time around they used a new system.  Once again this was apparently the first time this system has been used, and there seems to be some confusion about what it’s called – either The Eliminator, or The Super Over.  

I would suggest The Shambles.

When you have a tied match there are a couple of possible options which would all make much more sense than this crazy system.

To keep it simple they could come up with some other measure by which to determine a winner immediately – e.g. the team who has lost the fewest wickets, or the team who has hit the most sixes or boundaries during the match, or the team with the highest individual scorer … whatever, there are hundreds of candidates.

If they insist on a tie-breaker then there are three important criteria:

  1. It needs to be quick – Yesterday it took more than 30 minutes from the end of the match to determine a winner.  In proportion to the length of the whole match, that’s too long.
  2. It needs to be decisive – Giving each team another over is not necessarily going to produce a clear winner, so there is a reasonable chance that you go through this whole process and still end up picking a winner by some arbitrary measure (see above).
  3. It needs to be obvious – I don’t know how well they explained what was going on to the crowd at the ground, but I’m assuming that there were lots of people who were totally lost.  The commentator on TV read out the full list of rules, and confused more than he clarified.  

The model here should be the penalty shoot-out in football.  Sure it’s a terrible way to determine the winner, but it’s immediate and dramatic, and at the end one team is the winner and one team is the loser – and the poor bugger who missed the decisive shot is devastated.  Perfect!

Frustratingly, there is an obvious method they could use which would meet all of these criteria. 

Bring back the bowl off, I say!

What do you think?

Lots in the window…

Here is a quote that I saw on the wall of a tea house half way up the Himalayas when I was in Nepal recently

“Lots in the window, nothing in the room”

It’s been bubbling in the back of my mind ever since.

It’s one of those quotes that cuts a little close to the bone and makes me feel like I should be doing more than I am.

Do with it what you will.

Have a great Christmas!

Xero World

Congratulations to the team at Xero, who have released their global version.

The new marketing videos even come with a friendly American accent (or is that Canadian, Sara?)

http://vimeo.com/2571457

With this version they have a product that anybody anywhere in the world can buy directly off the website, use, and tell their friends about.

Let the word of mouth begin…

Disclaimer: I worked at Xero until February ’08 and am a shareholder.

You can run, but you can’t hide

As Steve Williams has shown, you need to be careful about what you say out loud.  It’s one thing to think that somebody is “a prick”, but as soon as you say that in public it changes things.  And, once you’ve said it you can’t un-say it.

The guys at StartUp appear to have made some similar mistakes this week.

Firstly they published a guest post on their blog which contained some pretty poorly considered advice – basically that if you can’t afford to attend a conference then you should just use Photoshop to make a fake ticket and go anyway.  

For reasons that should be very obvious this attracted some critical comments.

Secondly, they decided to respond to this by deleting the post and all of the comments from their site. 

Without doubt this has made things worse for them.  

For a start, you can’t delete something once it’s in the Google cache.  By doing this it seems they are running away from the criticism, rather than making an attempt to deal with it.  

As one of the people who commented on Glen Barnes’ post about this said:

“Pretending it didn’t happen is not the way to reach out or respect your community of users.”

How could they have handled this differently?

  • They could have been a bit more careful about what was published in the first place.
  • They could have engaged in the conversation by responding to the initial critical comments.
  • They could have updated the post, making it clear that they didn’t endorse the advice that was published.
  • They could have offered to publish a response from one of the people who were criticising the advice.
  • They could have (should have!) accepted that it was wrong and apologised for doing something a bit dumb – which is something we all do from time to time, no?
  • They could have said something (anything!) about what they would do to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again.

Could have, should have, whatever.  

It’s very hard to do any of these things from the position they now find themselves, which is regrettable.

Compare that to Tiger Woods’ response to the unfortunate position he found himself in as a result of his employee’s embarrassing public comments:

“Yeah, what ended up happening is I communicated with Phil, and we have discussed it. I talked to Stevie about it, and he feels bad, what happened. It’s something that none of us really wanted to have happen, but it’s over and done with and we put it to bed.”

When you mess up, talk straight.

Simple event logging

Measuring everything doesn’t necessarily have to involve complex analytics tools, or lots of development.

Here is a simple way to quickly log events of interest, for example if you are running an AB test.

Create a single table in your database with the following columns:

event_log

  • user_id
  • other_id
  • event_type (either a string or a foreign key)
  • details
  • timestamp

Then whenever something happens that you want to track, insert a row.  You can use the details field to track whatever data is relevant to the event.

Optimise the table for inserts, so that you can quickly add rows whenever required.  Then export the data when you want to run reports.  You can flush all of the data when you have your answer (or do it automatically every week, or month)

Easy.

AB Testing

Do you AB test?

Lots of people talk about it, but I don’t see many examples of people actually doing it.

Here is one example I saw last week, which sounds like it produced some great results.

The key, I think, is to keep it simple.

For example, find something small you can change easily and run an experiment.  Find an appropriate ID and use a mod2 to split your audience in half.  And, track the results so you know what impact the change has made (more on this shortly).

Then rinse and repeat.

When I say small, I mean small – see this from the Google blog:

Search experiments large and small

If you’ve done AB testing I’d be interested to hear from you.

How did you do it?  What results did you get?

TVCs

In the last couple of weeks I’ve spoken to two different web companies who are considering a TV advertising campaign.

Maybe I’m just tainted by the specific companies I’ve worked with, but I find that to be a frustrating and disappointing approach to marketing, and one which I expect to fail.

Here is the question:

Can anybody give me any example of a web-based business that has achieved long-term benefits from a TV advertising campaign?

Temporary spikes in traffic don’t count, as the evidence suggests that this quickly reverses once the ads stop.

There are lots of companies who have tried over a long period of time now.

I’m open to the possibility. But, all of the companies that I can think of who have burnt cash on TV ads don’t seem to have much to show for it.

Remember the 2000 Superbowl ads like the Monster.com ad above?  Yes, they were creative and in some cases funny, but did they achieve anything apart from exposing the people who foolishly paid millions of dollars and then watched it go up in smoke in 30 seconds?

The most obvious example in NZ is Ferrit – we’ve been bombarded with their terrible ads for the last couple of years, and where has it got them?

To quote Ian Morris (yes, that’s right, Tex Pistol!), who has an entire web site devoted to stupid ads:

“I have no idea who these ads are aimed at. Certainly can’t be me, or my children, or any of my friends, colleagues, acquaintances, relatives, football team members, or any of their children, or their pets. I have yet to find anyone who finds these ads – and Mr Stupid Pants and Tank-top – anything other than awfully, cloyingly annoying.”

On the other hand, there are lots of companies who have taken a more organic approach to growth, who seem much better off for it – for example, Lance posted about Torpedo7 last week.  

So, please, don’t waste your money on TV ads that probably won’t work.

Invest in a website that people love to use, and make sure you give people a reason to keep coming back.

Get those things right and you’ll be able to afford TV ads, but won’t need them!

LCD TVs

I was in Auckland last week and spotted this ad in the business section of the Herald:

tvnz-ad

The small print at the bottom reads:

“People seem to be investing more than ever in TVs.  So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where to invest your advertising dollar.”

Now, I realise that I’m far from the target audience for this ad – given that I’m not the sort of person who’s likely to buy TV advertising.

But, it still made me angry.

Our big LCD TV is hooked up to a MySky box, which means most of the things we watch are available in HD.

But, not the TVNZ channels, which look like rubbish in comparison.

So, instead of expensive ads in the newspaper, I wish that TVNZ would put their energy into sorting out their petty differences with Sky and making their content available in the best possible format however people choose to access it.

Then, ironically, more people might watch their channels.

Which will make it easier for them to sell more ads.

Which will mean they don’t have to spend so much money on newspaper ads.

Everybody wins. Except the newspapers, I suppose.

Network Time Machine

If you have any important files sitting on a single hard drive somewhere, disaster (or at least disappointment) is never far away. 

If you’re an Apple user then you can use Time Machine, a simple backup tool which is included as part of your operating system, to help solve this problem.

However, there are several limitations to Time Machine which make it a bit useless – not the least that you either have to splash out on a Time Capsule or use a USB or Firewire drive which is directly connected to your computer.

To get around this restriction, here is a simple hack that let’s you backup to a network drive:

Setup Time Machine on a NAS in three easy steps

Alternatively, there is a free utility called iTimeMachine which will do the setup for you.

I use this to backup my laptop to a ReadyNAS at home, which is also where we keep all of our photos and music etc.  It would work even better in an office environment where you could backup the whole company to a single server. 

A setup like this doesn’t have to be hugely expensive.  And, anyway, the peace of mind in knowing that I can recover important files if when my hard drive craps itself is worth a lot.

If you’re one of those people who think that putting a good system in place for backing up your important data is something that you can do tomorrow, then keep your fingers crossed that the dreaded blinking question mark doesn’t appear today. :-)

PS The next step beyond this is to setup an offsite backup.  The ReadyNAS supports rsync, which should allow me to do this pretty easily.  If anybody has something like this up and running already, or would be interested in helping me with this get in touch.

Rich & Famous

In the spirit of Maggie from Extras …

If you had to choose, which would you rather be?

  1. Rich, but unknown; or
  2. Famous, but actually poor.

The two words are used together so often, but are not synonyms.  

It seems like an easy choice.  

But, then why do so many people choose option two?

Perhaps they assume that “famous” is a stepping stone.

Although, how easy is it to go from “poor and famous” to “rich and famous”?

Are there many examples of people who have actually made that transition?  I can’t think of any.

And in the meantime, how crappy would it be to be recognised by everybody, but not actually have the income that they will probably assume you have to go with the famous face?

On the other hand, going from “rich and unknown” to “rich and famous” would be much easier, if famous was your ultimate goal.  Most people who want to be rich rather than famous will, I suspect, be quite happy with “rich and unknown”.

Interested in your thoughts…