Monthly Archives: January 2010

01.13.10
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Experimenting with Kachingle

In April last year I wrote about a start-up called Kachingle for The Guardian. I explained Kachingle thusly:

After registering with Kachingle, users decide on a maximum monthly donation, currently set at $5 (£3.50). When they see something they like, they simply click on the Kachingle “medallion” to initiate a donation. Kachingle tracks their reading habits, tots up how many times they visit each favoured site and divvies up the money proportionally at the end of the month.

It’s equally simple for site owners, who just need a PayPal account and a snippet of code to display the Kachingle medallion. The revenue split gives content providers 80% of the donations, with the rest covering Kachingle’s costs and PayPal fees.

I’ve been quietly keeping an eye on Kachingle to see when they would launch and was excited to get an email from Bill Lazar, Kachingle’s Marketing Engineer, last week saying that they were ready for beta testers to come on board. They will be launching properly in early February.

I think Kachingle is a really interesting idea, and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to test it out. That’s the medallion, up there in the top of the right-hand sidebar. All you need to sign up with Kachingle is a PayPal account and a spare $5 a month (although you can spend more if you want to). That works out at £3.07 per month, which even in a recession I think I can spare!

Kachingle sits very nicely with my recent decision to buy as many hand-crafted present for Christmas as I could. In an economic downturn it is more important than ever to support small businesses and I really like the fact that the vast majority of the money I spend on sites like Folksy go to the person who made the item I’ve bought.

But Kachingle is not just a way that I might earn a little spare change, it also gives me a way to support others. I’m hoping that over the course of the next few months, bloggers I enjoy will be able to join up and let me show them my appreciation.

If you want to sign up as a Kachingler or as a Site Owner, get in touch with Kachingle’s beta programme. And, of course, let me know what you think in the comments!

01.13.10
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links for 2010-01-13

  • Nokia tries to reinvent itself: Bears at the door | The Economist
    Kevin: Anyone watching the mobile industry knows that Nokia is facing renewed competition. The comparison's with Apple slightly overlook the computer giant's diversified portfolio. However, it's worth noting that Apple went from zero to 17% in just a few years, and that's after many in the mobile strongholds of Europe dismissed the American upstart out of hand. But the figures are illustrative, even if they need some caveats. "Nokia beats Apple in annual sales ($57 billion versus $37 billion) and market share in smart-phones (39% versus 17%), but it is much less profitable. In fact, Nokia’s share of industry profits fell from 64% in 2007 to 32% in 2009—not much more than Apple’s and less than RIM’s, according to Brian Modoff, an analyst with Deutsche Bank. Small wonder that Nokia’s market capitalisation is barely a quarter of Apple’s."
    (tags: apple nokia mobile)
01.13.10
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Giving ourselves space to create

There are lots of reasons why letting people blog behind (or in front of) the firewall is a good idea, but one of the key benefits to blogging is how easy it makes thoughtfulness and creativity.

In his blog post Stress, creativity and confabulation, Johnnie Moore shares some of the insights he’s gleaned from Keith Sawyer’s book, Group Genius:

Keith’s work also emphasises how we deceive ourselves about leaps of insight, assigning credit for apparently sudden bursts of insight to a variety of causes. Closer examination shows that our minds actually build towards ideas in a process of slow, often unconscious, accretion.

Blogging is one of those ways that we can accrete the little thoughts we need to help us come up with the crucial ideas we need to do our jobs better. It also allows us to share our ideas with our peers who can add their own extensions and refinements, growing our kernel into something bigger and better. Blogging makes explicit the natural idea formation process and through that makes the process itself as valuable as the end product.

It’s not true that we are more creative under pressure, or that big ideas come from flashes of insight, or that the lone genius is only one capable of great invention. Just as its a myth that art requires madness, so it is a myth that creativity needs pinpoint moments of brilliance. Better to provide people with the space and time to participate in an ongoing process of creativity than try to coral it in a brainstorming session.

01.12.10
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Two thoughts

Couple of thoughts from Euan Semple that are really worth considering in the context of social media behind the firewall. Firstly:

Social media relies on people having the temerity to say what they think and others having the decency to listen.

And secondly:

With a blog you have more reason to think. Having an outlet for your ideas makes you take them more seriously. Even if you never publish the posts, taking your ideas seriously and thinking harder about them is a good thing.

If you write a half decent blog post you will make someone else think. You may make them think you are wrong or you may make them think you are right but you will make them think.

These thoughts trigger two key questions:

  • Can your people say what they think?
  • Do they have the time and space to do that thinking?

Just a thought.

01.11.10
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links for 2010-01-11

01.11.10
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Scrobbling business

Via Roo Reynolds I just came across Dale Lane’s TV scrobbling project. For those of you who don’t use the social music site Last.FM, ‘scrobbling‘ is the act of gathering attention data for analysis. Last.FM pioneered the scrobbling of listening data from people’s computers, allowing them to see at a glance what they listened to, what their friends listened to, and discover people with similar taste in music.

Dale has taken this idea a step further and has whipped up a scrobbler for his TV data. This wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the fact that Dale’s TV is also his computer. This gives him access to data that would otherwise be stuck inside a set-top box:

Tv Scrobbling

Similar software exists to track your attention during day-to-day work on your computer. I have RescueTime installed on my laptop. That gives me access to information about which applications I use and how much time I spend using them, and allows me to decide if an app is productive or not. It then scores my overall productivity accordingly. Sometimes the results can be surprising, for example, I spend a lot less time in email than I had thought, often less than half an hour a day, and I never look at email on the weekends. RescueTime also illustrates changing preferences for software. Here’s me experimenting with Google’s Chrome browser (olive green = Firefox; teal green = Chrome):

Rescuetime All Activities By Day

The aim of RescueTime, if you put the effort in to set it up properly, (e.g. choose which applications and websites you find distracting, neutral or productive), is to reveal where you can make productivity gains. If, for example, you discover that you spend a lot of time on Twitter and you find it to be very distracting then you can use RescueTime to track your progress in resisting its lure.

Of course, attention data can just become infoporn, producing endless pretty graphs that don’t help alter behaviour, so scrobbling isn’t a solution by itself. It could, however, form the basis of behavioural analysis and change projects that would not otherwise be possible. Productivity is the holy grail of the knowledge worker, but it’s hard to know how productive one is being as we’re not built to accurately track our actions as we carry them out. My guess for amount of time spent in Twitter, for example, was wildly higher than reality – I generally use it for less than an hour a day, which is not bad given my line of work.

Attention data scrobbling could also, with a clever bit of functionality design, help do away with timesheets, which I loathe to the core of my being. The key there, as with RescueTime, is understanding what constitutes ‘productivity’. Splitting behaviours out by application, or even by website, doesn’t necessarily tell you if you’re being productive. Time in instant messenger, for example, could be productive or it could be a distraction, depending on who you’re talking to and what you’re talking about. Scrobbling won’t solve that bit of the puzzle, but it would make a good starting point.

There is an obvious dark side to attention data scrobbling in business, though: such data could easily be misused by management as a stick to beat employees with. Care would need to be taken as to who could access what data, perhaps with data anonymised when accessed by management to prevent victimisation. There would also need to be an educational component to any scrobbling project to ensure that people knew what the data meant and how to act on it.

There’s such great opportunity here for both knowledge workers and the businesses who employ them. I’d love to hear from anyone using or interested in collecting and using attention data in this way.

01.08.10
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How to ruin your community

Back in August of last year, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress wrote a post entitled 6 Steps to Kill Your Community, although it really should be called 6 Steps to Kill Your Community and Another 7 Step to Make Sure They Stay Dead.

I personally like:

Don’t Moderate. Allow anybody to post anything regardless of whether it contributes to the conversation or not. Stupidity, libel, hate, curse words are all okay because in the comments you have plausible deniability. Make sure people know that whatever they post will live forever, and anything goes. The few smart people you did have in your comments will enjoy responding to these folks. Advertisers love being next to a good fight, too.

And:

Random Crap from Around the Web. Make sure any comments you have are buried by every random piece of “conversation” from around the web, especially retweets, Delicious links, Digg and Slashdot comments, pretty much anything will work here. Bonus points for unmoderated pingbacks, so every scraper spam blog copying the content of the post gets a free link in the comments.

As well as:

Make People Click Click Click. Ideally do 1-comment-per-page CNET-style and your pageviews will go through the roof, but if you can’t stomach that just make comments-per-page setting low or have some sort of complicated nesting scheme.

There’s also great comment from Ryan Hamilton, who hits the nail on the head when he says:

Until recently, I hadn’t realized that by being careless with moderation, readers may become careless as well when commenting. This leads to almost impossible to read comments and discussions that turns off the more intelligent / thoughtful readers from participating in discussion.

My addition to the discussion would be:

Scale your community as quickly as possible. Make sure that incoming newbies overwhelm your early adopters to such an extent that no one gets to know anyone and your earliest supporters feel immediately alienated. Remember, the more the merrier, and a rapidly growing community disintegrates into random crap/vitriol faster than you can fail to intervene in petty bickering.

What are your tips for destroying a community?

01.07.10
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Avatars, faces and the socialisation of enterprise software

I just read a great post by Joshua Porter about the origins of avatars in computing and it made me think about the importance of faces in our online social interactions. It reminded me of a blog post that Kevin Marks wrote in May about faces and trust, which then led me on to posts by Brad Feld and Dave McClure.

Brad talks about the importance of real photos in Twitter, rather than a graphic or cartoon. He then discusses tying photos to people’s contact details on his iPhone and how useful it would be to have the same functionality in email. Dave McClure discusses the importance of faces in a wide range of situations and provides a lot of examples and counter-examples.

Faces are undoubtedly important to us. It’s how we primarily recognise people and those of us who are… let’s say physiognomically challenged find themselves frequently embarrassed at social gatherings because we are expected to be able to recognise people we have met before.

What, then, are the opportunities for enterprise software to become just a touch more social by incorporating avatars? Would email be a less awkward communications mechanism if we were shown a picture of the person we are replying to as we write? Would seeing a photo make us think a little bit harder about how our words might be interpreted by the person on the other end? Or would we end disadvantaging people who aren’t very photogenic? Or encouraging prejudice against those who have characteristics that can be perceived negatively, e.g. white hair triggering ageism.

01.06.10
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The cost of IT failure

The worldwide cost of IT failure is $6.2 trillion, according to Roger Sessions. His numbers are based on a set of assumptions which he outlines in a white paper, but as ZDNet’s Michael Krigsman points out, the details are unimportant. It’s the scale that’s scary. Last year, Krigsman reported that 68% of IT projects fail, another scary statistic.

My own experience is that when it comes to social media, IT departments range from reluctant to obstructive. And some IT decisions defy sense. In one case, £14 million had been earmarked for a Sharepoint installation, whilst a wiki project costing £4,000 was having to ‘prove its worth’. I’ve seen IT departments point blank refuse to install any social media, even when asked by the CEO.

When, I wonder, did IT become the problem?

And yes, I’m fully aware of the fact that some very good people work in IT, and that they have to deal with a lot of problems of their own, and that not all IT departments are short-sighted idiots.

But given that, how is it that, generally speaking, they are busy losing $6.2 trillion and that 66% of their projects fail? IT needs a radical rethink, part of which has to be to answer the question, “What is IT for?” Is it just about maintaining network integrity? Or is it to solve business problems with the appropriate technology, if such technology exists?