A local research firm reached out to ask some questions about how I monetize my “other blog”, Colorado Snow (cosnow.com). It turned into what I think is a good Q&A session around what has become, essentially, a part-time hobby.
Read on if you’re interested in why I started (and continue to run) Colorado Snow (hint: it’s not the money).
States should not be allowed to prevent Tesla Motors from selling cars directly to customers. The state legislators are trying to unfairly protect automobile dealers in their states from competition. Tesla is providing competition, which is good for consumers.
I’ve never appreciated the laws and relationships between car manufacturers, dealers, etc. I want to buy my cars directly. The established groups typically require legislation to maintain the status quo and I’d certainly like cars to be ‘disrupted’ by a company like Tesla.
I feel the same is starting to happen in the alcohol industry…
I’m often asked what I’m wearing on my wrist (it’s a Nike FuelBand) and then folks chime in with “ah yes, my friend has a different one” which then leads to a discussion of the pros and cons of the various fitness trackers out there.
I’ve been happy with the FuelBand1 just because its an easy measure. And with any tracking (weight, calories, time spent watching TV) until you measure, you don’t know how to adjust your behavior.
So, to folks who want to learn more, I recommend: reading the article at The Wirecutter comparing the various fitness trackers, start tracking, and then adjust your behavior accordingly.
I’m excited to attend the upcoming Digital PM Summit, produced by the smart guys at Happy Cog (Greg Hoy and Greg Storey) for digital project managers. I’ve seen presentations by and met a number of Happy Cog folks at conferences like SXSW and it’s clear they do great work.
Having taken on a larger project management role at Crowd Favorite, I realize I should try to continue my ‘education’ — this is sometimes more challenging in an industry where there is no shortage of highly technical resources online but not a ton about the nuance of managing clients, setting expectations, and so on. The speaker line-up suggests I will walk away with plenty to think about and am excited to chat with other like-minded folks…
From over a year ago, an article by WIRED I had a started to draft a blog post about, is now extremely relevant:
For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.
My guess: Google, Apple, etc. are not knowingly handing data over, just “named” as sources the NSA is obviously interested in harvesting. As the Wired article describes, the NSA is intercepting data (at the lowest levels possible) and currently or planning to decrypt, decypher, and extract as much as they can…
I really enjoyed this HBR article by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh on “the New Employer-Employee Compact”:
The key to the new employer-employee compact we envision is that although it’s not based on loyalty, it’s not purely transactional, either. It’s an alliance between an organization and an individual that’s aimed at helping both succeed.
These are smart guys and this is a great read for any person working for (or managing) any business in any industry at any level. I especially enjoy the action items…
Horace Deidu at asymco had a question he hoped Tim Cook would answer at D11:
Why is the iPhone not sold as a portfolio product? Meaning, why, after six years, is there no iPhone product range being updated on a regular basis. Having a portfolio strategy is not only followed by every phone vendor but also by Apple for all its other product lines, including the iPad, which came after the iPhone. In other words, please explain why the iPhone is anomalous from a product portfolio point of view.
Which is a good question, Tim spoke to this point:
Think about the evolution of the iPod over time. The shuffle didn’t have the same functionality as other products. It was a really good product, but it played a different role — it was great for some customers it was strikingly different than other iPods. The mini played a different role than the classic did. ..
…and I found Horace’s follow-up interesting:
The comparison to iPod is not entirely appropriate because as a music player, the iPod had a relatively small set of jobs to do. It was hired for exercise, escapism, isolation, etc. It was not hired for apps and services which extend the medium itself. In other words it was not a computer. As a computer, the iPhone has a near infinite set of jobs to be done and it’s the hundreds of thousands of apps which help it perform them.
Though, doesn’t the iPod Touch fill nearly all the same “infinite” jobs in that point? The biggest one missing being cellular communication (messaging, voice calls) in a device one always carries (not a separate phone vs. computer).
It seems through services (iMessage, FaceTime) Apple is starting to pull the mobile world away from the carrier ties allowing (potentially) easier and more market penetration… right? Then they’re just selling devices (like iPods) like they’ve always been doing. Worth noting, it appears the same appears to be happening with Google via Hangouts (messaging, calls).
The same is also happening with the ‘app’-ification of television producers and distributors, right?
The Daily Telegraph weighs in on Alan de Botton’s philosophical “commandments” for atheists:
Politeness he equates with tolerance for the “otherness” of people whose views do not chime with our own. As for self-awareness: “To know oneself is to try not to blame others for one’s troubles and moods; to have a sense of what’s going on inside oneself, and what actually belongs in the world,” he says.
Arguably, these are all great virtues for everyone, not just atheists, to strive for.
I found some confusion an interesting discussion over on WordPress Tavern around Post Formats:
I used post formats for a few months on WPTavern.com and I’ve made a few conclusions. The first is that post formats encourage short form content. Not only is short form content easy to do, it also promotes creating a fire hose of content. The second, the majority of people were reading WPTavern.com via their favorite feedreader. Feedreaders don’t display content the same as a website. Third, some of the formats I selected displayed on the home page without a post title or an ability to comment. I think this had more to do with how my theme was displaying the formats more than anything else. Last but not least, I started treating post formats as categories.
Here are my thoughts and response republished:
As Chip has described, the concept of a “format” really just started as supported taxonomy to allow theme developers to apply consistent treatment across any blog (instead of one theme using post meta, one using a category, etc.).
Jump forward to (the in-progress) version 3.6 of WordPress and everyone has come to the same conclusion and realized there is more nuance and potential. What if this is a video post and my theme wants the video on top of the content and her theme wants it below? Standardized meta1 on that allows for more interesting things and the ability to solve more interesting problems.
To Rob’s point, the initial implementation was confusing, but we (Crowd Favorite) created the FavePersonal theme and the Post Formats UI plugin because if we standardized on meta and fields, we could do fun stuff in the loop views, single views, and feed very easily (eg: put a full width image on the single view of “Image” posts and drop the sidebar, replace the permalink in the feed with the “Link URL” a la Daring Fireball or other linkblogs, etc.).
Hopefully this leads to more interesting uses of WordPress in the near future…
An excellent commencement address “I wish I’d heard” by Chris Schroeder over on Linkedin:1
You will have bosses, mentors, parents, and friends who tell you “how the world works.” They will share how their paths are the only paths to success. You will see classmates who do the same—and might even feel they are “passing you” (whatever that means) in their pursuit of the obvious. Good for them.
Resist.
I keep seeing a number of preconceptions floating around out there and arguments about black vs. white. Only recently I’ve started realizing there’s a lot of “unobvious” being missed…