Nathan Snell’s Blog (Moved to The Technopian)

I noticed I’ve still been picking up some subscribers here. I thought I would make another post saying head on over to blog.thesnell.com where I’ve moved my blog to. Thanks all and have a good night :)

You won’t see signs like that up often. But here’s mine.

I mentioned a week or so back that I had been working on something new and special and exciting. Well, it’s done, and what it was is The Technopian, my new blog.

The Technopian is a complete wipe. Yup, I said wipe. It’s a fresh slate where I have already been creating content for, working on really perfecting my voice and focusing my efforts. I am hoping to make The Technopian a place that is much more personal for the both of us, and that you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing.

I hope that you all will follow me to The Technopian and its new feed.

I just read through the recap of Jaffe’s panel at iMedia Brand Summit.

I only have 2 comments to make.

While many markets applauded when Rick Parkhill, CEO of iMedia Communications, called Second Life one of the most over-hyped platforms of 2007 during his opening remarks, Jaffe challenged the crowd by asking how many in the room had actually spent more than four hours on the site. (Emphasis mine)

Only a handful of attendees met Jaffe’s high standards for experimentation.

Now, these two lines were separated by a line break, so I don’t know whether or not there was more on Jaffe’s standards for experimentation. But if these guys are whining about taking four hours out of their day to tread into new territory then Jaffe is completely right. They completely lack the thirst for creativity and innovation.

Maybe they just don’t have the time? Here’s a thought. Take some baby steps and spread this experimentation thing out across your week. Since you’re probably spending most of your time in those highly productive meetings, get your lunch to go and experiment on your lunch time.

Next up…

One problem the panel could agree on was the issue of media planning, with each member of the group saying that the traditional planning paradigm simply doesn’t cut it anymore because media moves too fast.

“The velocity of change is moving so fast that it’s almost impossible to plan,” Schulman said. “What you need is a planned framework that helps you deal with the technology changes as they come up.”

I think that’s entirely accurate. A thought on the framework? I don’t have all the answers but I know at least one valuable asset to it.

Listen. Listen to the conversations that are happening. But don’t forget to care. I can listen to my girlfriend all day but if I don’t actually care then our relationship won’t progress (Consequently if I didn’t care then we wouldn’t be in a relationship. But I do! So it’s OK). But what does that say about companies?

As I’ve been working on something new here I haven’t been posting. I came across something, though, that triggered something in me. I am one of the 103 co-authors of “The Age of Conversation”. It is a book that to many has marked a great point of collaborative content, of conversation. I recently read Tara Hunt change up the nomenclature slightly to say this is the era of conversation.

I thought about that. There’s more. Something much greater than an era has evolved here. I think we are at the dawn of a new society.

A Technopian society.

This strikes me to be even truer as I consider a recent debate within myself. What am I?

I’m not speaking to the philosophical depth of “Am I a human being,” or “Am I a transformer originally from cybertron?” I am speaking to a more immediate concern as my professional career stares me in the face, less than a year a way. What does the world, with its simplified categorizations of even the most complex things, say that I am? Which one of its titles will it try to force me into?

Am I an entrepreneur? Am I a marketer? Am I a designer? Am I a web developer? Am I a visionary? Am I a technologically obsessed geek?

The internet has blurred the line. What Disney once put out as a naïve theme of hope and dreams and transcending hardships, of believe and you are, has become a reality. This “new” internet has become the master instructor. It has instilled in a great number of us a new set of values. A new set of rules. A new kind of city. A new kind of education system. A new kind of society.

I am not just an entrepreneur. I am not just anything. I am whatever the hell it is I need to be. I am what the master instructor has for me to learn. I am a Technopian.

And I am not the only one.

I know stuff hasn’t been up here in a while. It’s not because I’ve burrowed under ground to  create an evil lair from which I will begin to spawn business zombies to slowly but surely raid and take over corporations. That would be fun, though. I’ve actually been working on something new. Something special and shiny like the things that get a monkey’s hand caught in between two bars because they don’t want to let go. Special like that.

In the mean time, here’s a quick bit of link love (why do they call it that? Do links really love?)

Ryan Karpeles makes a great post. He’s a neat guy. Go read his blog!

I have had my Linksys WRT55AG router for a while now. It’s been a pain in the ass ever since I received it (randomly needing to be hardbooted about once a day or so, etc). One issue that I find especially peculiar, however, was when it stopped working all together. No connection showed up at all! So I began my excursion into fixing it and thankfully succeeded. I thought I would share how in the event someone else has this issue.

Issue 1) Your router is active, shows connections, internet, power, etc. but no actual connection shows up! (note that this for me lead to issue #2).

What to do?
Push in the reset button (with a paper clip) and hold it for 30 seconds. This will reset your firmware to the defaults. Commence resetup as you did the first time.
Issue 2) You have connectivity on your router but cannot access the internet, or, your router, while connected to your cable modem, is randomly rebooting every time your computer establishes a connection to it (ethernet or wireless).

What to do?
Unplug your cable modem from your router and unplug the power from the cable modem. Connect your router physically (via an ethernet cable) to a computer. Access your router’s admin panel by typing in “192.168.1.1″ into the url of either Firefox or Internet Explorer. Type in your username and password (defaults are nothing for the username and “admin” for the password). Then do the following in the admin panel:

• Goto the Setup tab
• Click Mac Address Clone
• Select “Enabled” from the drop down box
• Click “Clone My PC’s MAC”
• Click “Save Settings”

Now once the settings have been saved (you’ll know as you will have been taken back to the admin menu) unplug your router. Now plug your cable modems power back in, and plug the cable modem into your router (which still has no power). Once your cable modem is active again (has all the blinky lighty goodness) plug the power back into your router. Wait for the router to become active and viola. That all should have solved your problem. If not, then I’m not sure what to tell you, it fixed mine.

In almost every business I have worked for, it seems the mentality is always “[the customer/user] can’t know we were wrong.”

Why not?

I mean, maybe I missed something, but why does a company always have to be right? Especially when they’re not.

The kicker for me is that I think admitting you are wrong actually builds the relationship a company has with its customers or users- especially if they already know you’re wrong. It’s OK to admit you made a mistake, just correct it. It’s OK to not anticipate exactly how a feature is used and change it. It’s OK to admit you did something wrong.

We make mistakes. We run companies. Allowing people’s personality and humanness to show isn’t a bad thing.

I realize I haven’t posted anything for quite a few days. I am still here analyzing, thinking, enjoying, conversing, and unfortunately- mourning. My best friends grandfather, a person I was very close to and would nearly consider my own grandfather, fell ill earlier this week and passed on two days ago. Because of this I have been a bit distracted, not really focusing on the usual entrepreneurial, technological, or business type things and instead residing more in the lull of mundane, mournful activities (as these things go).

Bob, my grandfather who passed away was an amazing man. He worked his whole life and put out his best work. He provided and cared for his family as much as any man could. More than that, he was so caring that others like myself could actually feel close enough to call him grandpa. Looking at my peers and the generations to follow, there will be very few future Bob’s in the world. I know I certainly will not live up to the example he has set.

God bless.

We all recall that pithy phrase our parents or other authoritative figures used to rattle off. It always seemed to be used during those times when something didn’t go quite the way we thought it would and turned out bad. Naturally, we used the logical excuse- we didn’t know it would do that. Whether our parents were calling our bluff as to whether we expected a can of hair spray to explode when combined with fire, sending shrapnel flying everywhere including into a friends thumb, or not, they came back at us with “well, you should expect the unexpected.”

That may have been good advice for general living, but for a marketer, that advice isn’t so hot. Instead, it should be to create the unexpected. Let’s face it, customers certainly don’t expect your company to send a new bouquet of flowers to a different address because you were trying to surprise your girlfriend on valentines day but gave them the wrong address. That’s because customers don’t expect the unexpected, and why should they? We don’t deliver the unexpected.

What if we continuously thought of that phrase in reverse. No, not “unexpected the expect,” but instead “deliver the unexpected.” Yes, it was my fault, but had those flowers been resent to ensure a fantastic valentines day, I would have been telling all my friends about this floral shop.

On the internet, short is king. Every site and creative exhibitionist is in a constant battle to grab hold of the viewers attention. With this, two minute webisodes are the optimal length (or close to it). Blog posts that are shorter are often more successful in attracting readers. Short blogging platforms like Twitter and Jaiku have taken off. Webcomics are a great source of entertainment and have exploded, packing in full experience into a small number of frames. Shorter podcasts are often the ones that receive the most listening. Even more, some podcasts provide a transcript that allows listeners to tune in to precisely the area they want to listen to.

Shorter content is where the web continues to progress, but is short content popular because it’s actually short, or because it helps us discover longer, at-length content?

While I don’t have the exact answer, my hypothesis is that while some are using the condensed, shorter content as a means of scanning over a larger portion of aggregated content, the majority of people are looking to more quickly identify what they like and consume that longer for a greater level of at-length enjoyment.

Webcomics, for example, are short-length pieces of content usually created two to three times a week. Webcomics tend to lend themselves to the quick scanning of multiple webcomic artists and “plots”. It’s the webcomics short length, though, that allows potential viewers to quickly identify which comics they enjoyed consuming the most.

It’s at the point where the comics are chosen that the at-length consumption begins. The new viewer now begins scanning the archives of all the strips created. Thus the short length enjoyment consumption turns into a greater level of at-length enjoyment.

I say it’s a greater level because you can ask any person who has taken the time to read a good book, comic, or TV series and they will tell you they were sad when it ended. In the case of webcomics, the viewer feels this remorse when they get to the most recently created strip. Then the short length cycle of finding a new strip as to acquire a new at-length enjoyment repeats.

An example on the other side of the fence, however, is Twitter. Twitter has become the ’short blogging’ platform. It’s a means to receive short and frequent bursts of enjoyment based upon what you can quickly identify as meaningful to you. Realisticly, however, those who are really using Twitter are likely to be habitually consuming in a somewhat different at-length manner as opposed to a more short-length manner.

Even though the pieces of content are shorter than normal, the frequency with which we consume it is such that we end up consuming it more than we would have had it been more at-length content. Thus what is consumed from Twitter is the aggregation of a portion of short length content whose sum we consume actually creates a longer amount of content, not a shorter.