via businessinsider.com

Micro-blogging service Tumblr has been seriously beating up on its smaller competitor Posterous. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry postulates on the Business Insider (part of Silicon Alley Insider) that the biggest reason has little to do with features or fundamental support, but rather is due to Tumblr's superior design.

Gobry writes:

"Meanwhile Posterous is typical of the Silicon Valley engineering mindset where everything is measured, ranked, weighted. It’s like Google. And having terrible design like Google is great if you have a technology edge. But if you’re in a market where what matters is design edge, that’s not enough. There needs to be great design, by which I don’t mean looks (though they’re important), but how it works for the end user."

Gobry also makes the point that "design focus" is more typical of New York-based companies than Silicon Valley-based companies, but I'll leave that argument to others. For me, the more important point he makes is that, "for consumer web apps today, design matters more than technology."

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Michael Estrin quoted me extensively in an article for iMedia Connection entitled, "7 Vital Questions to Ask Your Web Designer". Estrin gets into significantly more depth, but the questions he examines include:

1. How would you solve our problems?
2. Who's doing the technical work?
3. What about content?
4. What about the users?
5. Who's in charge?
6. What if we fire you?
7. Should we use free code?

I wish Michael had written "open source code" rather than "free code", but really there is little to disagree with here.

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Josh's message is that long-form journalism does great in a magazine where the reader has made a commitment to tune out the world for at least several minutes to read through an article, but not so well online where attention is in much shorter supply and the majority of readers are trying to squeeze in their news fix during a short lunch break at work. As a result, roughly 95% of all content on Time.com is exclusive to the web.

The lesson for publishers is to realize that the web is a different medium than print, with different opportunities. Perhaps print isn't dead after all - it's just more specialized.

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The money quote from Mr. Ahearn's blog post (which Reuters will not charge me for):

"Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions."

Now, I'm going to quote from an AP article, but only four words... "would bring liberal bias". Whew, I don't owe them any money for that. If I had used just one more word though...

What do you think? Will it work to charge online for content? Is there a way to make it work?

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It appears that Yahoo!, one of the earliest pioneers of search, is getting out of the search business. No, they are not exactly conceding the race to Google. Rather, they decided that they needed to combine with Microsoft in order to become Pepsi to Google's Coke. Basically, Yahoo! is dumping their own search engine and integrating Bing as a substitute.

http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=399702

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Paul Graham is right on the money about the disconnect between the most productive schedules for producers vs. managers. Great managers understand the disconnect and protect their producers.

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via slate.com

Slate publishes a clever way to have a more secure, but still memorable set of passwords for the web. This is important, especially in light of the Twitter - TechCrunch fiasco.

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via nytimes.com

This is currently the 3rd most emailed article on NYTimes.com. Not a ton of depth, but worth a quick read for a few anecdotes about how using Twitter is helping some small businesses.

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Amazon is acquiring Zappos for ~$850 million. I wonder if this will affect their agency review.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-buys-online-shoe-retailer-zappos-for-800-million-2009-7#

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via adage.com

Peter Madden is correct when he posits that agencies (especially small ones) don't do enough to promote themselves - and certainly not at the level of work they do for their clients. We frequently find ourselves in this predicament, but I think the major culprit is simply the old "shoe cobbler's children" syndrome. We always put ourselves last. We always wish we had more time to do great work for our clients, so the last thing we're going to do is steal from our most limited resource - time - to promote ourselves.

That said, at some point it has to be done.

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Publishing 2.0 has listed some best practices for media organizations that want to "create significant value for readers by curating the web." Click on the post, "Best Practices for Journalists Curating the Web" for the details, but their list includes:

1. Make it a collaborative effort
2. Comment to explain why the link is worth clicking
3. Attribute links to individual journalists
4. Share links on Twitter
5. Integrate into existing workflow
6. Complement original reporting

Good advice.

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According to Forbes, magazines are having a really hard time figuring out how to make any money on the iPhone. Any ideas?

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NEW YORK The chance to work with a hot brand like Zappos is too much for many agencies to pass up, even when it means pouring in tons of time, effort and money into a Byzantine review process in which they have little chance of succeeding. Zappos recently got RFP responses from 104 agencies, with 22 then chosen to do 90-minute presentations at Zappos headquarters in Las Vegas this week. In an unusual twist, it required shops to submit storyboards and ad mockups for the initial round, all in a tight two-week turnaround.

Frankly, the sheer amount of time Zappos has spent on this is insane. This is a broken process. I know Zappos is all about openness, but this sort of thing isn't fair to anybody.

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IMG_0204.MOV Watch on Posterous

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via businessinsider.com

Do you use the same, weak password for all of your assorted logins? Don't.

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People who think that all relevant business lessons can only be learned from business books or blogs are sadly mistaken. One can look to the arts for an abundant amount of inspiration and insight into today’s corporate climate. For example, of all the treatises and analyses written about the current economic crisis, no statement places the situation more blunty than Polonius’ quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be …”. Had more consumers thought about the ramifications of borrowing, the economy might not be in such a troubled state.

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This is a great iPhone app!

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I had an amazing conversation this week with an agency that was trying to convince their client to invest in a content strategy and full content marketing program.  Just to give you the quick take, the client's goal was to reach certain consumer segments in the southeastern states.  They had a budget of $2.5 million dollars for marketing spend for the campaign.

The client's VP of Marketing didn't think anything could be done with a marketing budget that small.

 

It really is amazing how far a good content marketing strategy can go relative to a TV ad purchase.

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