I had an interesting experience yesterday when my company laptop bricked up on the way into the office. I went immediately to blackberry not just to scan my email (which I usually do when I’m not at a desk), but also for everything else. And by “everything else” I mean scheduling meetings, viewing and commenting on powerpoints, looking things up on the web,and (now) even writing this blog post.

while I missed the pc for a few things that are more efficient with that form factor (multiwindow activities, typing fast, mousing) and I have a few mail server folders to optimize for getting stuff out of my inbox once processed a la GTD, overall I’m pretty pleased by how well synced up the RIM curve let’s me be.

Create software that supposedly enhances your users’ convenience by enabling them to do web-based things more efficiently and offline. Require them to download extensive software framework that locks their registry files. Make sure said framework is a slow, painful download, disables the cancel button, continues to log all the scary things it’s doing for maximum effect, and then crashes the computer. Give completion messages with dingbat characters and typos, and then format it incorrectly. On restart, make sure your user knows his performance lags by at least 100% now.

Then, make sure your program hangs on startup. Work on 2nd or third try, with bugs and prompts for serial numbers that you don’t know if you have or why you would need, and make him think, WTF? Let your user figure out a way to get past that.

Be completely non-intuitive on first use to a new user trying to use it to blog, and who has invested so much time and pain in trying you that he is desperately hoping there’s some fantastic payoff. Have some cool features, like Flickr integration, that seem really promising, then totally blow one of the easiest API’s to get right.

Thanks, Ecto! This will be the first and last post I’ll write using you, because I’m going to have to log in on the web interface anyway in order to include the photos of your sucktardedness that I’m going to upload to my flickr account.

Then I get to spend another hour uninstalling everything and hoping it doesn’t smoke my machine.

Please get yourself a copy of Getting Real, kthxbai!

N.b. - As is probably obvious from the above, this refers to the Windows version. . . .

An apology to readers who track this site via RSS feed. The way Feedburner has rendered my del.icio.us posts as a daily aggregation (without a good headline) has seemed sub-optimal to me for a long time. So I was pleased with my recent discovery of the FB setting that renders them individually, with specific headlines. (And I do try to be mindful of the fact that pages I tag are effectively being blogged here.)

When I switched it on, though, my RSS readers were treated to a dump of over a month’s worth of del.icio.us posts - sorry about that!

Feedburner friends take note. One of these days I’ll burn a separate feed so that readers can choose whether to include the del. items - though of course that’s another feature FB could easily offer. Guys?

While I’m on the subject, how about letting me splice in my Twitter posts?

I’m here at BarCampLA2, where I’ve just launched my contribution, SixWordSciFi. It was inspired by a Wired magazine article that I think was a neat idea, but executed in a very 1.0 way. 30+ well-known writers were given the assignment to do futuristic six-word stories in the vein of Hemingway’s famous “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn”, including BarCampLA participant Cory Doctorow.
Unfortunately, I can’t reprint any of the Wired contributions here, due to Conde Nast’s restrictive copyright policies, and I think it’s too bad that there’s no way to comment on the stories (or even the article as a whole), subscribe to new entries, or contribute as a reader.

So I’ve open-sourced it onto a WordPress blog. Anyone can comment or vote on the submitted entries, and I’m going to leave it open for anyone to register and post unless it becomes a problem. All submissions are published under a Creative Commons license, so you can reblog them - or create a sci-fi fortune cookie company if you like.

I’m betting we can collectively outdo the success of a very established Conde Nast publication. Please enjoy your power responsibly

Welcome to the blogoshpere Willan Johnson, who has launched a blog along with his foray into the world of venture capital and published it under the intriguing header of Reputation, The Web, and Our Lives! I look forward to seeing what comes up in all three categories.

Bradley Horowitz has a post about Yahoo! Answers that helps me put a finger on some things that I’ve been churning on since I started this blog. As he puts it:

Blogging has been heralded as the poster child for “user-generated content” or “amateur publishing” or whatever buzzword you may prefer. And at a technical and procedural level this is certainly true. The process of becoming “a blogger” has never been easier.

The hard part (now that the barriers to entry have melted away) is having something worthwhile to say. That really hasn’t gotten any easier. Moreover as a newly minted “blogger” there’s an expectation that you’ll have a consistent, steady stream of interesting postings for your readers to enjoy. Nothing sadder than a dead blog or inactive blog.

But what of the more casual “blogger?” Someone who has only the occasional gem of wisdom to share? Someone who may not want to carry the baggage associated with owning and maintaining a blog per se?

Interesting, because I started this blog in order to have a place for the occasional point, rather than as an attempt to keep up with the many folks who are out there trying to be the first to jump on every new meme in order to be authoritative, comprehensive, recognized, or whatever. I just want to participate in the conversation. But I do feel a responsibility to not get stale in a way that’s quite different from the way I’ve felt about Auctions for Change over the two years. And I don’t always have something interesting to contribute and/or time to contribute it.

Bradley’s point (or one of them) is Yahoo! Answers is one way users can participate in generating blog-like content, conveniently and whenever they feel like it. Certainly the ability to contribute is not new, but the ability to derive consensus from these contributions is — and thus the level of authority conveyed by crowdsourced approaches has them emerging alongside prominent bloggers in leading and impacting public opinion.

As an example, think about the number of times you’ve had bad customer experiences at restaurants and then fantasized you had a review column in the NY Times in which you could tell the world about it. Not everyone can personally do what Jeff Jarvis did about his “Dell Hell” experience, but anyone can put their two cents in a place where others - if their opinion strikes a chord - are likely to pick up on it and amplify. In this post, an engadget commenter notes the prominence in amazon reviews of a key design flaw in a pair of headphones. Good luck to Logitech in having savvy buyers not pick up on that.

While some of these systems can still be gamed (e.g., Amazon reviews) on a one-off basis, as they are open to each other and overlap with systems like blogging that depend on reputational relationships and relative authority, they become more valuable to all of us who want to see what others have to say and maybe get a word in edgewise ourselves.

This is fascinating - Mark Cuban has more than 900 responses to the following challenge, which he posted on his blog less than a week ago:

How do you get people out of the house to see your movie without spending a fortune. How can you convince 5 million people to give up their weekend and go to a theater to see a specific movie without spending 60mm dollars.

Interesting question, not a trivial one, and one that leads to some interesting discussions. But what amazes me most is the number and variety of thoughtful (and in some cases not-so-thoughtful) responses in the comments, many of which are replicated elsewhere in the blogosphere — producing yet more exposure for this question and its responses. Turns out you don’t need Digg to “crowdsource” a question like this, if you’ve got enough readers (and the promise of an interesting job to boot).

As for the actual question at hand, taking it at face value (i.e., trying to solve the problem of how to get people into movie theaters, as opposed to suggesting alternate distribution channels for media), the movie theater business is a fat pipe designed, much like bestseller-driven book publishing houses, to shove product of a certain size out with a certain frequency. The problem has become how to stuff the pipe full enough, and how to spend enough on marketing to ensure the attendence is there (even if the quality of the content is not), leading to a downward cycle of more and more marketing for ever-safer movies that need more and more sales to break even.

There are several very obvious approaches to solving this problem, many of which have parallels in other industries.

1. Make it like cable tv. Add more content to the pipe, and break up the business model so it’s not so monolithically focused on delivering such a small number of products. Break your multi-plexes into multiple channels - so there’s always an indy film on, and a new chick flick every week. A savvy operator realizes he can sell off this distribution, or at least rent it (like cable).

2. Make it like “appointment” TV. There’s always a foreign film on thurdays at 8, and a Hitchcock classic at midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Cancel the channels and shows that don’t work after giving them a fair shot.

3. Make it like HBO. Go out and get the very best content, even if you have to bend the medium. Speaking of HBO, why not a weekly showing of the Sopranos, or Entourage, or NFL football?

4. Make it like a stadium / a ski resort / a cable company / a Dell computer. In combination with the above, experiment with the pricing model. Several good suggestions have been made in the comments already, but tying innovative pricing to something beyond “all you can eat” is more interesting. Think luxury boxes, half-share box seats, season passes not good on weekends. Sell channels a la carte or in packages that appeal to market segments. . . let people “build your own pass”.

5. Make it more social. Group discounts and family nights. Neighborhood discounts that rotate by what street you live on. Internet planning outing planning tools, comment publishing tools. Going to the movies is a great American institution. Take a cue from the Celebration, Florida, or the reinvention of classic ballparks, and reinvent this iconic experience around community.

6. Make it like a nightclub. Hire promoters with rolodexes. Encourage private bookings. Have exclusive VIP stuff. Have event-driven nights (think Oscars, Emmys, Superbowl).

7. Make it like Target. Have a celebrity programming host for certain slots and build identity around those personas. “Stephen King presents” has a promising ring to it.

8. Make it like Google’s IPO. Completely reinvent the distribution model — when you have a hot enough hand to do it — by giving the theater a huge incentive to make your film. If a typical model is to spend $10 per butt-in-seat opening weekend, of which the house keeps 50% and for which the average capacity ranges from 60-100%, pay the house $4 a seat (at 100% capacity) to run it free, for opening week only, for as many seats as you want. (You could probably pay even less for late shows given away on a “buy one get one free basis” that helps theater owners sell their other shows and popcorn.) Give the house a bigger (60%? 75%) cut of everything sold thereafter, and make the house commit to: a) significant coop advertising pushing the film for a month; and b) keeping the film open for as many weeks as the theater is at least 50% full (net on the week). If the movie’s any good, there will be word of mouth, and both sides win (less risk for the theater, less marketing cost for you). If it’s a stinker, you just saved half your marketing loss.

9. Mix and match!

Cross-posting my item on the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog regarding today’s launch of publisher quote & news badges.  Pretty nifty.

Two services I use — Feedburner to manage and track my RSS feeds, and Blogbeat to track readership on my blog — just merged. A very interesting development in the analytics space! Congrats to Dick, Rick, and the rest of the teams of both companies.  UPDATE:  Official blog post on Burning Questions.