See "iPhone Reality/Sanity Check – my iWish list" – Shelly sort of doesn’t like it.
And I confess. Yes I bought an iPhone. No, I did *not* port my number and I am still carrying my blackberry. I got burned so bad on a craptacular windows mobile unit from HP a while back that I was wary this time. Apparently that was a good thing. And everyone is enjoying borrowing the iPhone for a few days at a time to test web sites with and such.
The book Primal Branding has influenced my thinking on brands significantly over the years. At the office we even made a collection of digital photos from our own past, our brand story, and loaded them onto rotating digital picture frames. So the new guys can learn a bit about where we came from.
Primal Branding says that a brand has to have 6 elements to succeed:
So being a big fan of Primal Branding, it was nice to see this shared PPT on Primal Branding. Good stuff.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations
now is going to include online numbers in newspaper "read" figures.
File this under "if the math doesn’t add up change the operators."
The Audit Bureau of Circulations said this week that it would begin tallying online readership as well as print-edition circulation in a boost to an industry where advertising sales have suffered from a migration of readers to the Web.
The organization said it would release newspapers’ print, online and
combined readership figures. The numbers are a key factor in
negotiations on newspaper advertising rates between newspapers and
marketers, Reuters reports. (more on newspaper audit figures)
Emphasis
added. Note the focus on "newspaper advertising sales" as the driver.
If this is done realistically then it is a good thing. But
unfortunately with newspaper ad salespeople this is unlikely. As
Disraeli said "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
Specifically when it comes to advertising I have always found the
"readership as a big multiple of subscriptions" to be an insult to a
business man’s intelligence. You have 10 subscribers, and hey, they
leave it on the coffee table so 7 other people read it, so we charge an
advertiser as if that 1 subscription equated to 8 readers. Oh really?
Dave Winer, for those who don’t already know him, comes up with some awesome ideas. Sometimes simple observations and simple solutions. Which I consider to be brilliant. Speak clearly damnit. And he does today with a post on conferences distilling it down to simple objectives.
…what we want when we meet with other people is to explain who we are,
and explore our issues, and learn who other people are, and what their
issues are.
…
One of my table-mates, a psychiatrist, agreed and added an eye-opening
idea. She said that medicine and technology have two things in common,
most of the people you meet never grew up. She explained that in medicine they didn’t have to, because everyone
looks up to them as having godlike insight into the meaning of
existence, and the people in the profession tend to believe the hype.
Emphasis added. And maddeningly the post never answers the question of what the other of the "two things" medicine and tech have in common are. But I digress from the point of this post:
So as a technologist (at times anyway) I wonder how much of the hype I believe myself?
